Heaven's Needle (41 page)

“Not mad,” Gethel whispered. “But disappointing, yes. Disappointing. I had hoped … you might help. You have magic. I can sense it. I can taste it. But it seems you are … tainted. I can taste that too.” He made a small movement of his hands. Evenna cried out and collapsed, her head thumping against a curved wall of bone. The sigils on her brow had reappeared, were smoking. Asharre rushed at the old man,
caractan
screaming through the air.

She wasn't fast enough. He repeated the gesture, stepping around a low wall with a speed she would never have believed possible. Pain split through Asharre's head like a shock of red lightning. She heard herself screaming, heard her
caractan
clatter on the floor, heard herself fall beside it.

The runes she'd painted on her forehead were scorching. Agony forked into her skull, hotter than a torturer's iron.
Why? They were to protect us
, she wondered, before a new pulse of pain drove all semblance of thought from her mind.

Gradually the agony abated into lesser beats. Tears dripped from her cheeks. Her hands clutched feebly at the floor's blistering stone.

Footsteps approached and stopped before her nose. It took an enormous effort to roll her eyes up to meet Gethel's blank, black gaze.

“It was a worthy try,” he whispered, kneeling beside her. He took her hand gently. She couldn't resist. She could only stare as he unwrapped the dirt-crusted bandages to show the blisters broken there, four over four, weeping black liquid that turned to smoke as it dripped across her palm. “Brave, yes. Brave. But his touch is in you … and monsters must be controlled.”

T
he last of the
maelgloth
rested its chin on the rim of the pit and died. A final shudder wracked its hairless body. Was it agony, Kelland wondered, or relief? The
maelgloth
wanted to die—had begged for it, once Malentir restored enough of their sanity for them to realize the horror they'd become—but the Thorn had taken his toll in pain before letting them cross the Last Bridge.

He'd forced them to contort their bodies into a ladder, locking arms and legs around the corpses of their fellows to build him a way out of the pit. Where their limbs stuck out at inconvenient angles, the Thornlord lopped them off and threaded them back into the grotesque scaffolding. The
maelgloth
endured that, too, without moving, though some could not help but chew on the nubs of exposed bone—others' and their own.

Kelland had watched as little of it as he could. He would have preferred to give the
maelgloth
a quick, merciful end. They were monsters, but not by choice, and they didn't deserve to suffer through the Thornlord's games.

But they needed his magic, and it was better to let Malentir prey on monsters than innocents. Wasn't it? Kelland fingered the wavy rays of his medallion, wondering if his acquiescence in the Thorn's cruelties was its own subtle corruption.

Would it be virtuous if I suffered a little more?
That was an old heresy. Four hundred years ago the Colchennar had believed that ease itself was a sin, and that the righteous lived in ascetic suffering. Now and again a few fools revived Colchennar practices, wanting to show off their piety. The Blessed discouraged them—forcibly, if necessary—whenever they heard of a renewal, but the Colchennar heresy was a persistent one. People wanted to believe there was some holiness in fasting or mortification. It was easier, in many respects, than making the real choices that virtue required.

Like the choice that faced him now, between one evil and another. Kliasta or Maol? Cruelty or madness? What choice could he make that was not a mortal sin?

Use the tools you have
, the High Solaros had taught them at the Dome.
Be careful of them, be conscious of them, but
use
them. Miracles are hard to work empty-handed
.

The Thornlord climbed from the pit. The ivory streaks in his hair shone gold in the knight's sunlight: the blood on his hands melted into drifting skeins of black vapor. A faint, sated smile lingered on his lips.

Kelland hoped the High Solaros' wisdom was greater than his own. “Is there anything else that must be done here?”

“The wards must be rewoven,” Malentir said, “and it would be wise to slip in new traps for whoever might come to test them. The two of us cannot replace the old seals, but we shouldn't need to. Our wards need hold only long
enough for the Lord Commander's soldiers to reclaim the ruins. Gethel's
maelgloth
are dead; he has no more allies in this place. Even simple wards will prevent him from returning to replenish his stores of blackfire stone. If we strike quickly, we should be able to trap and kill him before he realizes what happened and flees to Cailan.”

Bitharn was standing at the pit's edge, looking at the ladder of broken bodies with mingled pity and disgust. “How could these wretches have brought Ang'duradh down?”

“They didn't.” Malentir left the cavernous dungeon, ignoring the corpses in the pit, and turned his attention to the runes that glimmered around the shattered door. “
Maelgloth
would have been a minor inconvenience to Ang'duradh in its strength. The power that brought the fortress down was not theirs.”

“Then what was it?” she asked.

Malentir touched the horn that held the dirt he'd scratched from the pit. “I will know soon. After we have left this place.” He moved away, studying the runes farther from the door.

Kelland went to stand beside Bitharn after the Thorn had gone. He raised his sun medallion over the entwined corpses, bearing formal witness to their fate, and began the too-familiar Pyre Prayer to guide their souls across the Last Bridge. They deserved that much, whoever they had been.

Bitharn joined her voice to his. They had spoken this prayer over plague victims in chapels and murdered travelers by weedy roads; they had blessed the bodies of soldiers, servants, children. Never
maelgloth
, though. Never in a place like this.

As if sensing his unease, she reached over and took his hand. He squeezed her fingers, grateful for her strength
and understanding. Grateful for the gift of love. She had been there, always, unfailing; she had braved Ang'arta's iron teeth and the poisoned gloom of Duradh Mal for him. And she was here, now, without his asking, offering solace and support and confidence when his own began to fail.

Bitharn bolstered his faith. She wasn't a threat, never had been. The only threat had been his own refusal to admit the truth. The lie was the sin. Not the love.

Lifting her hand along with his own, Kelland wove the invocation for sunfire into the Pyre Prayer.

Celestia's power suffused him, lighting his veins afire. The magic followed the shape of his words, accepting his guidance—but when it had taken that shape it swelled beyond him, overwhelming his control like a flood bursting from its dike. Golden flame descended upon the
maelgloth
's bodies, devouring their gaunt gray limbs and gushing from their empty mouths. It melted the dirt from their eyes and turned their skulls to bowls of flame, then burned through those as well.

There was a glory in it—but a terror, too. The sunfire didn't stop when the corpses were gone. Kelland couldn't
make
it stop. He had no more control than if he'd been a pebble on a riverbed trying to rein back the waterfall at its end. The torrent of magic drove the knight to his knees. He wasn't praying anymore; he was gasping for air, incapable of thinking, let alone speaking, a word. Each breath felt like it was about to ignite in his lungs.

The pillar of fire soared higher, splitting apart as it leapt from the corpses' pit into the empty ones and scoured those with fiery whirlwinds. It filled the air with billowing sails of flame, white and yellow and red; it enveloped Kelland and Bitharn in a maelstrom of wind and fire, stranding them on an island of bare rock while holy fury roared around them.

The knight had never seen such a spellstorm, had never imagined that he might call one. Magic poured through him, raging through his bones, scorching every fiber of his body with blissful fever. It threatened to consume him. Mortal bodies were not meant to hold so much of the divine; mortal minds could not encompass such glory. Humans were fragile vessels. Filling them with such power was like pouring molten steel into a cut-glass vase: it could not help but destroy them.

But in that brief, incandescent moment between holding that fire and being destroyed by it, there was incomparable beauty. And power. So
much
power.

There was nothing he couldn't do with such magic, Kelland thought dizzily, intoxicated with divinity. Nothing. He looked to the doorway where the Thornlord had retreated to watch them from the shadows with flat black eyes. He could destroy Malentir as he had destroyed the bodies of the dead
maelgloth
. Easily. In this moment, with Celestia's strength coursing through him, he could purify all the foulness in the dungeons of Duradh Mal. Yes, he could destroy the Thorn, and …

… and what? Leave the people of Carden Vale to their fates? Let Maol's influence spread unchecked to Cailan, where thousands—
tens
of thousands, if men carried it like the plague as they fled aboard ships—might succumb? Abandon Bitharn to madness and death?
He
couldn't lead her safely out of Duradh Mal; unable to pass through shadows, he would have to walk through its blighted halls and whatever dangers still dwelled there.

No. He still needed Malentir. He couldn't kill the man yet. But the possibility was there, the
knowledge
. Before Kelland looked away their eyes met, and he saw that the
Thornlord knew it too. The day of reckoning might be postponed, but it would come.

Not yet
. Kelland turned back to the dungeon, the magic still roaring in him.

The pits were scoured clean. Not a fingerprint of dirt remained in them. Sunfire darted up the walls in curlicues of white-gold flame, searing away the black mold that clung to the crevices between stones. It flashed across the ceiling and spun in the hoops of manacles; it splintered on the blades of ancient knives and danced through the tongues of crumbling whips.

Finally the last scrapings of black dirt were hunted down and burned, the last gasps of ebon smoke consumed. The Bright Lady's magic vanished as suddenly as it had come, stripping him of its strength. Kelland swooned forward. Bitharn grabbed his shoulders to steady him, pulling him back from the edge of the pit where the dead
maelgloth
had burned.

“Showy,” Malentir said, stepping out of the doorway where he'd waited out the inferno. His hands were hidden in his sleeves, his face unrevealing. “But a waste. We have wards to replace and Maolites to kill. Or had you forgotten?”

Bitharn shot the Thorn an acid glare, keeping one hand protectively on the knight's shoulder. “We serve as the Bright Lady wills.”

“Yes. I saw that. It was impressive. Impressively stupid, perhaps. There are other things he could, and should, have done before trying to purify all of Duradh Mal.”

Was there a warning in those words? Kelland looked up at the Thorn and saw the cold certainty behind the man's impassive mask. The assurance was on the other side, now: Malentir could kill both of them as easily as Kelland could have destroyed the Thorn a moment earlier.

But he, too, held back.
Not yet
.

“It wasn't my choice,” Kelland said, getting back to his feet. His throat was raw. Bitharn passed him a skin of tepid water, and he swallowed with some difficulty. It helped, a little. He stoppered the skin and handed it back. “The magic did what it wanted. I was the conduit, but I had no control.”

“None?” The Thornlord raised an eyebrow.

“Very little.”

“Curious. But, as I said, unwise. We must seal this place before we go, or else all we've accomplished here will have been the removal of a few
maelgloth
and one chamber's worth of blackfire dust. I have no doubt that Duradh Mal holds more. As we do not have time to burn it all, we must reweave the wards. If you still have the strength to manage that.”

“I do.”
Bright Lady willing, I do
. Kelland stooped to pick up his shield; he'd dropped it when the prayer surged out of his control. The floor swam under his feet and it took all his concentration not to sway with it, but he managed to hide the daze. From the Thorn, anyway. The crease between Bitharn's brows said he hadn't fooled her in the slightest. “Show me where.”

“Come.” The Thorn turned in a swirl of black-slashed robes, and the Celestians followed him. On the other side of the doorway, Malentir pointed to the walls.

There the runes that anchored the wards of Duradh Mal were faded and defiled, scratched away by the
maelgloth
's hands. They'd attacked the sigils so ferociously that they'd left blood and broken nails smeared across the stone, but they hadn't been able to eradicate the markings altogether.

Pushing past the fog of his exhaustion, Kelland spoke a prayer for godsight so that he could read the magic more
thoroughly. With its aid, he saw the runespells that clung to the walls in threads, flickering like tattered battle flags. Sullied, battered, but still proud.

The complexity of the interlocking wards astonished him. Guardian enchantments were more the domain of the Illuminers than the Sun Knights. True wards required weeks, sometimes years, of painstaking labor, every bit of it as precise as a master jeweler's craft. These were not the simple martial prayers that threw walls of sunfire across a battlefield or kept a campsite guarded overnight; these were designed to baffle and bind other Blessed, equally skilled in their own gods' arts.

He felt like a child who had just learned to whistle a note and was being asked to replace an entire cathedral choir. These spells were doubled into intricate, misleading braids; even with the aid of godsight Kelland wasn't sure what they did, much less how to repair them.