Heaven's Needle (40 page)

“Take it,” the
sigrir
said to Evenna, holding the sword flat on both hands.

The Illuminer recoiled. “Why me?”

“It is Celestia's creation. You are her servant. You should take it.”
And I do not want it
. Her head ached miserably from whatever small, nameless spell she'd used to find Aurandane; the blisters on her palm throbbed as if filled with liquid fire. If that was the cost of magic, she wanted no more of it.

“It's a sword. You should use it.”

“I have a sword. This one is consecrated to your Bright Lady. It is the weapon we came here to find, the key to banishing Carden Vale's curse. Will you take it or no?”

“I … I suppose I will,” Evenna said. She lifted the sword hesitantly.

As soon as the blessed blade was taken from her grasp, the agony in Asharre's blistered palm subsided. She flexed her hand surreptitiously, trying to hide her relief. “Good. Then we have only to find the missing townspeople so that we can cure them. We know they are not here. Where would they have gone?”

“To pray,” Evenna answered. “To the last, best sanctuary of our faith.” The dark-haired woman gestured through the tiny windows to the shrine in the central courtyard.

There Shadefell's tower rose, its verdigrised spear point sharp above a ring of cloud white cherry trees. Celestian sunbursts glimmered in a gilded band around the tower's peak, bright despite the centuries. Paths of crushed marble, barely visible through the wild weeds, wound through the neglected gardens and converged on the tower like the strands of a ghostly web.

By the time the women reached the tower, dusk stained the cherry blossoms blue. A cool wind sighed through the bracken, raising gooseflesh on Asharre's arms.

The scratches inflicted by the gallery's dust creatures burned and swelled under their bandages, but she ignored
the pain. Evenna had no magic to spare for her. The prayer in the gallery had drained her, and it seemed that carrying Aurandane was doing the same. Her abbreviated sunset prayer—shortened to two chanted lines, as it was for the Sun Knights on the battlefield—had relieved her weariness for a while, but she was visibly flagging as twilight fell. She used the sword like a walking stick, leaning heavily on the weapon.

But it will lend her strength. It must
.

A spill of ash stained the earth on the lee side of the tower. Spring rains had washed the finer dust away, leaving a pebbled hill of charred bone fragments. Blue stalks of
morduk ossain
, half hidden in the gloaming, fringed the ash heap. They did not quite reach the walls, and Asharre let herself be reassured by that; perhaps the fact that Maol's weeds could not touch it meant Celestia still protected her sanctuary.

Whether she did or not, they were committed. Asharre sent a silent prayer to her sister's goddess and another to the old spirits of her clan. She looked back to see that Evenna was near. Then she pulled open the door, streaked with verdigris and rust, and stepped into the tower.

Black silence folded around her. It smelled of sulfur and the sour rust of old blood. Time and massive explosions had made a wreckage of the upper floors; beams and boards tumbled around her, filtering the moonshine into scattered fingers of silver light.

The stairs were a ruin of mangled iron and splintered wood, and the floors were more gaps than whole. A mouse couldn't have balanced on those teetering beams. Below, a pit yawned.

It was a rough thing, a pool of deeper darkness that had been blasted out of the earth rather than dug. She saw bits
of metal embedded in its walls, a spiral of nailed boards leading into its depths, and nothing else: only the endless rift.

“Down,” she told Evenna, moving back to the open door. The night's clean air tasted sweeter than wine. “They went down.”

“It's pitch-black in there,” the Illuminer said dubiously, peering into the ruins.

“Light a torch,” Asharre suggested, though she felt a flicker of unease at her own words. A torch would signal to anyone down there, human or
maelgloth
, that they were coming.

But they could hardly walk blind into the depths, and the noise would ruin any attempt at stealth anyway. She shook away her doubts while Evenna fished out her lantern and struck a spark to it. Juggling the lantern with her awkwardly held sword, she followed Asharre back inside.

The lantern made it even clearer that no shovel had touched the pit. Asharre traced her fingertips over the ridged earth. Metal fragments studded the dirt. Steel was the most common, but she saw brass, melted tin, iron gone orange with rust. Most of the shards looked like shattered chain links, but not all. Some could have come from plate … or pots, or bent knives, or even chunks of statuary.

There were pieces of bone among them, too, none larger than her smallest finger. Here and there she saw dented fragments of plate with bits of bone lodged in the dents as if driven in by great explosive force. Gobbets of dried gore crusted over the metal.

Falcien
. The realization made her drop her hand in horror. A death like his—if the victim was wearing plate mail, if he was wrapped in coiled chains—could have made
those layered spatters on the walls. A hundred of them could have dug a gaping pit.

Would a hundred suffice? How many deaths would such an excavation take? Asharre couldn't imagine; she didn't want to. She looked away. Evenna was staring past her down the steps, her face drawn and sweat on her brow.

“This isn't a sanctuary,” the younger woman whispered. “This is the heart of corruption. Bright Lady save me, it is so
strong
.”

“Can you do it?” Asharre asked. “Do we go down?”

“Yes. I must.” Evenna stepped forward. Black smoke hissed away from her lantern, surrounding them in a grainy mist. There was a pattern in its swirling dance … one she had seen before, Asharre thought.

“Wait,” she said. Scraping a handful of dirt from the wall, the
sigrir
picked out the bits of bone and metal until only coarse earth was left. She spat into the dirt and mixed it with a finger to make a paste. The blisters on her bandaged hand broke open, soaking through the cloth and into the mud. Asharre ignored it. However unpleasant the mix, it was only a means to an end.

She dipped a finger in the paste and brought it to Evenna's brow. “Let me ward you.”

The Celestian frowned but did not move away. “Where did you learn wardings?”

“From a friend. It should keep away the smoke—it will protect us against breathing in the poison.” Hoping she remembered the sigils correctly, Asharre daubed the mud into a wavering circle, then added eight lines radiating outward and a dot at the end of each line. Four over four: Celestia's sunburst to keep her children safe. She painted the same onto her own forehead, unable to see the marks but confident that she had followed the shapes Falcien showed
her in the dream. When the last stroke was in place, the mark seemed to melt and ripple, sinking into the Illuminer's skin. The mud turned an ugly shade of purple, then lightened gradually, through mottled green into the yellow of an old bruise and vanished. Evenna winced, but Asharre felt nothing. She rubbed a finger over her own forehead and felt only smooth skin. The dirt paste was gone.

And it worked. The murky smoke drifted away, buffeted by circling winds that never ruffled the ebon locks around Evenna's ears.

“There is no magic without the gods,” Evenna murmured uneasily, eyeing the rippling haze. But she lifted her lantern, and they went down.

The steps were planks wedged into the pit's sides. Asharre picked her way down cautiously, switching her
caractan
from hand to hand as she circled the abyss. It was much deeper than she'd imagined; the vault seemed to bore into the mountain's heart. Soon the wooden webbing of the collapsed upper floors was lost to shadow, and the world shrank to the wavering sphere drawn by Evenna's lantern.

Farther down the creaking steps, the walls became smoother. No blood discolored them this far down; no metal glinted at their sides. Heat rose from the pit's depths, and with it the spoiled-egg reek of sulfur.

The blasted earth gave way to green-black stone, its mortarless pieces fitted so cunningly and the joins polished so smooth that the walls seemed to have been grown organically as a single whole, rather than being put together by mortal hands. It felt
old
, older than Shadefell, and in its way as inhumanly majestic as the soaring glass of Heaven's Needle.

She didn't belong here. No human belonged here. The
Rosewayns had been trespassers in their own day, digging into the nameless depths and putting up their flimsy stairs as if they, or anyone, could pretend to own this place.

They were fools if they'd believed it. This place belonged to an older power, a greater one. In its eyes human bodies were sacks of walking meat, held together by the thinnest puppet shells of skin, and as Asharre moved closer to its lair, she saw herself and Evenna the same way. Prey.
Food
.

But we have teeth. We can fight. This battle was won once
. She prayed it could be again.

A crooked door waited at the end of the stairs. Behind it was a furnace red glow. Asharre knew that glow; she had seen it in her dreams.

The door's planks were baked into rattling unevenness. A wrist-thick chain coiled next to the door; a broken hasp dangled from the stone wall at its side. A sunburst in a spiral of delicate runes stood on the heat-warped wood. Vicious, black-edged scratches defaced the gilded carvings, but enough remained for the emblem to be identifiable.

The sight of it sent a stabbing pain through Asharre's head. Hot tears filled her eyes. She squeezed them shut, shaking her head dumbly. Beside her, the light swung and swam as Evenna's grip faltered on the lantern.

“Open it,” the Celestian whispered, teetering on the sheathed sword. The words were half a sob. “Open it. Oh, Bright Lady, how was this
done
to you?”

Asharre clenched her teeth and took hold of the door's handle. It was like grabbing a fistful of coals. Her hands
burned
, though the pitted iron was no warmer than the hilt of her sword. She felt the sticky heat of fusing flesh, smelled her skin roasting. The pain was maddening but she jerked the door open then ripped her hands away, cursing Shadefell and her own weakness and whatever magic corrupted
Celestia's symbol into something that caused such pain.

Beyond it was a charnel house. Bones, some whole but most burned black and small, piled up into ringed walls higher than the top of her head. The gaps between them glowed red as a setting sun.

An old, old man shuffled among the bones. He was tall but stooped so low that his chin nearly touched his chest, giving him a vulture's aspect. Loose robes hid his hands to the fingertips; loose skin fell in papery white folds around his throat, so voluminous that it seemed he wore a fleshy beard. He looked up slowly as they entered, and Asharre saw that his eyes were completely black. Liquid darkness filled them from corner to corner, trickling out in rivulets that he wiped away as he spoke.

“Visitors …?” His head bobbed slightly. “Yes. Visitors. What brings you here?”

“Who are you?” Asharre edged through the doorway and into a space between the rings of bones, where she had room to use her sword. Ridiculous as she felt menacing such a frail old man, she did not lower her guard. Not against those eyes.

“I could ask the same of you.” His smile was gentle under that empty, empty gaze. When he opened his mouth she saw that it was a glistening hollow. No teeth. A too-thin tongue, like a wet black worm. “I do not have many visitors anymore. Not for … a time.” Puzzlement creased his brow and was gone. He wiped an inky tear from his eye and brought his finger to his lips, licking away the stain without seeming to notice it. “A time. Months? Years, maybe. Time … disappears down here. It flows differently. But I do not wish to be discourteous. Gethel, that was my name. Is my name.”

“From Carden Vale?”

“Carden Vale? I … spent some time there, yes. Not long. My studies called me away.”

“To this place?” Asharre flicked her sword's tip at the blackened bones.

Gethel ran a hand over a ridge of grubby spines. “Yes. It must look … macabre … to you. Terribly macabre. But there was a great mastery of magic here once. A great mastery. I came to learn. And so I did. So I did.” Another black tear seeped down his wrinkled cheek, vanishing into the folds around his mouth. He licked that one away as well.

“And the people of Carden Vale?” Evenna followed Asharre into the sweltering room, her hands moving nervously across Aurandane's engraved hilt. “Why did they come? To learn the same arts?”

“To help.” Gethel's smile widened as he canted his head toward Evenna. Asharre shifted her weight into a fighting stance, wondering if that smile was predatory. “They came to seek sanctuary, and to help me. They did, for a time … but the burden became too heavy for them, and they had to lay it down. Even the faithful. There were a few … there were a few who were not faithful. Monsters. Monsters, yes … but monsters can be hunted down, or held at bay. Controlled.” His black eyes went up to Asharre. “Can they not?”

“Better,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed on the man and willing Evenna to hear the command in her words. “They can be slain.”

“No,” the Illuminer said, slowly and softly, as if she were fighting her way out of a bad dream. “No, that isn't right.”

“Kill him,” Asharre snarled.

“No. That is … that's what he
wants
: to have the sword given to him by mortal hands. ‘Hope baits the snare.' Oh, Bright Lady, it did. It did. And it almost took us.” There
was a clatter of metal against stone as Evenna hurled the sheathed blade away.

“Are you mad?” Asharre demanded. “Kill him!”