Heaven's Needle (5 page)

He followed Scar Face up a long crawl of stairs, passing soldiers who chuckled to their companions and jeered at him as they shoved by. Kelland tried to make himself deaf to their words, but he couldn't ignore them completely. They knew who he was: his dark brown skin and the white shells braided in his hair made him as unique
in their world as he'd been at the Dome of the Sun. The Burnt Knight, champion of the Celestians, had become a prisoner paraded for their amusement. Anger and shame twisted around each other, hot in his heart, but he kept his face still as stone.

One of the Baozites drove an elbow into the knight's ribs as he passed. Kelland tried to pivot and thrust an arm out to catch himself, but he was too slow, too weak after so long in the cell. The side of his head cracked against the wall. Pain blinded him; he felt blood running down his cheek. He stumbled to a knee on the steps, defenseless.

Scar Face stepped between them. He swung his torch at Kelland's attacker as if fending off a wolf. “Enough. The Spider wants to see him, and she doesn't want to see him with half his face a pulp.”

“Not pretty enough for her bed that way?” the Baozite sneered, but he backed away.

“She just likes to do it herself,” one of his companions said, to laughter, and they left.

After they had gone Kelland pushed himself back up against the wall. There was a wet smear on the stone where he had struck it. He held a sleeve to his temple, trying to quell the throbbing in his head. Scar Face watched, impassive, and made no move to help. But he set a slower pace until they reached the top of the stairs, and he kept himself between Kelland and the Baozites on the steps.

“Thank you,” Kelland mumbled as they came to the landing.

Scar Face gave him an unreadable look. The shiny welt of his scar flexed as his jaw worked. “She wants you, so she'll have you,” he said, “and I'm not sure you should be thanking me for that.”

Kelland nodded, and regretted it as the torchflame
swam in his vision. For the rest of the way he simply followed the soldier, concentrating on the monumental task of putting one foot before the other. After an eternity of steep gray steps. Scar Face unlocked a massive wooden door and took him down another hall.

The air was cleaner up here. Kelland noticed the change even through his daze. The dungeons stank of excrement and misery; the common halls were thick with the smells of old rushes and unwashed bodies and sour ale. This hall was quieter by far, and the air carried only a whiff of woodsmoke and sweet pine.

The first door they reached was barred by an oak beam, thicker than Kelland's arm and mounted in iron brackets. Spidery marks, inlaid with some lusterless gray metal, were carved along its length. Scar Face lifted the beam, grunting at its weight, and let its butt end slide to the floor. He pulled the door open and propped it with a boot. “You'll wait here.”

“Another cell?”

“A guest room.”

“Your lady's hospitality warms my heart.” Still, he was too weak to fight, and there was no reason to lose his dignity over such a petty struggle. Kelland went in.

The door closed behind him. He heard the scrape of wood on stone, the soldier's muffled curses, and the dual thud, one side after the other, as Scar Face wrestled the beam back into its brackets. But these noises barely registered, for in the room was a pure gift of hope.

It was clean. That in itself was a gift. There was a bed with fresh linens, a platter with cheese and dried plums and new bread. Beside it was a washing bowl with brush, mirror, and razor. The luxury—the
cleanliness
—of it was unimaginable, but all those things paled beside the greatest blessing of all.

Windows. Tiny, high, and barred, but open to the sky.

It was almost dawn. He could see the first tendrils of it beginning to soften the deep blue of the fading night. In an hour, perhaps less, the sun would rise and morning would break and he, who had been so long immured in the dark, might feel his goddess' radiance on his face again.

Kelland bowed at the waist to the dawn. He raised his arms to his chest as he came up, then over his head and back down in the ancient forms. His muscles protested at the stretching—it had been too long since he had observed the full dawn prayer—but the grace of the movements was not lost to him. He had not been broken. He could still pray.

The Sun Knight bowed again, continuing the measured sequence, and wept silently in gratitude as his Lady's light filled his soul.

“I
TRUST YOU ARE WELL RESTED
.”

Kelland opened his eyes. There had been no sound to signal the Spider's arrival; he had not heard the bar lift, nor the door open. It was possible she did not need to lift bars or open doors to move about the fortress. The Thorns could pass directly from shadow to shadow, flitting through darkness and avoiding the light.

If she had hoped to surprise him, though, she would have to be disappointed. Kelland hadn't been sleeping. He had been in light meditation, renewing his atrophied muscles with the blessings of his faith. Months in that tiny hole had crippled him … but one short day after being allowed sunlight, Kelland was almost fully restored. Awake, and immersed in prayer, he had felt her approach like a shadow falling across his soul: the presence of her goddess against his.

The Spider sat in a high-backed chair near the door. She was not what he had expected, but no one could have been.

Avele diar Aurellyn was thin, small breasted, and finely boned, with the pale golden complexion and slightly tilted eyes of her homeland. She was as beautiful as the stories said, though it was a coolly elegant beauty, no more welcoming than a frost-laced mountain pool. Jewels sparkled on her fingers and in the silver lattice of her necklace, bright over a high-necked dress of black velvet. Unlike every other Thorn he had seen, she was not visibly maimed.

“As well as any man can be in his enemies' den,” Kelland said, swinging his feet to the floor. Several paces separated him from the Spider, but the intimacy of this audience still set his teeth on edge. He took refuge in formality, using brittle courtesy to create distance and sanctuary.

A smile touched her lips. “I am not your enemy, sir knight.”

“No? Then I must apologize. No doubt when your minions captured me and locked me in that pit, they did so out of dearest friendship.”

“I do not dispute that things were done in the past. Put them aside. You have more urgent concerns, as do I. Why do you suppose you were brought up here?”

Kelland had been wondering that himself, but he pressed his lips together, mute.

The Spider had been admiring her rings. At his silence she glanced up, then laughed aloud. Her laughter was warm and low, and deeply discomfiting.

“Not for that,” she said. “I can only imagine what the soldiers must have said—but I hope it will not insult your pride to say that, however charming you might be, there is nothing in you to tempt me away from my lord.”

“What, then?”

“You want to be free, yes? That is what I am offering you: liberty.”

Freedom.
Clean air, sweet water, the ability to walk wherever he wanted, as long and as far as he wanted, without the screams of the breaking pits echoing in his ears. The freedom to read a book, tucked away in a sunlit corner of the Dome's library, or to eat meals—to taste real
food
—of his own choosing.

The freedom to find Bitharn. To rejoin her, if the Bright Lady smiled on his search.

And then?

He didn't know. Dangerous even to let his thoughts stray in that direction … but he would have the freedom to make that choice too.

The idea dizzied him. After an eternity in Ang'arta's dungeons, freedom was not just a word. It was bigger than that, and smaller. It was hot bread and cool wind and the shared joy of prayer in a cathedral, smoky incense swirling to the eaves. It was, if he was lucky, a smile and a touch he'd missed for too long. “But with a price.”

“Of course,” the Spider agreed serenely. “There is always a price. That hardly bears noting.”

“What is yours?”

“What do you remember of Duradh Mal? Surely it must have been mentioned when you were in training at the Dome of the Sun.”

It had, although Kelland remembered its history only vaguely. Six hundred years ago, Ang'arta had not been the only seat of Baozite power in the west. The fortress of Ang'duradh, nestled among the peaks of the Irontooth Mountains, was its twin and rival. Had the two strongholds been closer to each other, they might have fought
the other more viciously than any outside foe; their god rewarded strength, and there was no worthier foe than his other dedicants.

But Ang'duradh had not been conquered by its western sibling. No one knew what had befallen it. The last known visitors to the fortress were a small band of pilgrims seeking refuge from an early snowstorm. The Baozites let them in for a handful of silver, as was their custom. After that, they closed their gates … and no more was known.

The Irontooths' passes froze in autumn and thawed in spring; months passed while the fortress lay locked behind walls of snow. That spring, a few desperate travelers knocked on the Baozites' doors for shelter, only to find silence at their gates and rotting corpses behind their walls. Not a single soldier survived. The mystery of their deaths had never been answered.

The ruins were named Duradh Mal: Duradh's Doom. They were reputed to be cursed, or haunted. Wise men and fools alike avoided that place. Since then old kingdoms had fallen, new kingdoms had risen, and six hundred years later, Duradh Mal was still no concern of his.

Kelland shrugged. “A long time ago, a Baozite fortress fell. No one knows why.”

“And the town of Carden Vale sits below its ruins.”

“What of it?”

“A curious coincidence. No more. For now.” She laced her jeweled fingers together and rested them on her knee. “There is one other thing I wish to discuss with you before I go. Faith.”

“I doubt we share much in that regard, lady.”

“More than you might think. You serve your goddess faithfully, as I do mine. Without that devotion to guide it, your life would have no purpose. Yet you are tempted by
love, as I was, and you do not know how to reconcile the two. Do you deny it?”

Behind his calm facade Kelland's temper began to burn. He reined it back firmly. It was no surprise that the Spider knew of his weakness; it was, after all, how her disciple had caught him in the woods. He'd let them manipulate him once. It would not happen again. “No.”

“Good. Then I will tell you, and perhaps you will listen. Now, or when you are ready. I cannot, of course, force you to believe what is true.” Her smile took a wry twist. “But you are crippled until you do. A divided heart is no proper vessel for the gods' power. So.

“We spend our lives in service to our gods, and yet we know so little of what they require. Oh, we know the simplest rules. Sunlight. Pain. But beyond that? Laws and oaths are handed down through the ages, and some of them truly must be observed, while others … others, I think, were invented by mortal men to enhance their own prestige, when the gods care nothing either way. And sometimes the intention is all that matters.

“If I tell a lie,
knowingly,
my magic fails. Honesty is required of us. It is not difficult to understand why: the truth cuts deeper than any lie, and if everyone knows that the Thorns are truthbound, no one can salve his suffering by pretending otherwise. What we say must be true. That is a holy order. But if I say something that is not true, while believing it to be so, nothing happens. Perfection is not required. Intentions matter.”

“Your point?”

“Is very simple. Your oath of chastity is one where intentions make the difference. If the act is not a choice, there is no sin. Celestia does not withdraw her blessings if her servants are raped … to the chagrin of some of my
lord's soldiers, who had hoped we might have found an easy solution there. And if the act is an expression of love, rather than baser desires, there is no impurity of the soul and, again, no loss of your Bright Lady's blessing.”

“Bysshelios believed that,” Kelland said grimly. The Bysshelline Heresy had nearly torn the Celestian faith in two before it was stamped out. The infighting had ended less than a century ago, and the rifts were not yet healed. Some of the villages in the remote reaches of the Cathilcarns still clung to Bysshelline beliefs.

“He was right.”

“He was a heretic.”

“Heresies seldom survive, much less spread, without some truth at their core.”

Kelland shook his head. The cowrie shells braided into his hair clinked. “Pretty promises from a treacherous tongue. You will forgive me, lady, if I choose to believe the High Solaros over you when it comes to the strictures of my faith.”

“As you like,” the Spider murmured. “I cannot force you to believe. But I hope you will come to accept the truth soon, as you are useless until you do.”

“I'm sorry to disappoint you.”

“It is not me you disappoint. It is your faith that needs you, not I. They are the ones in danger.” She bowed her head politely as she rose to depart. “But now it is near sunset, and I will take my leave. I should not wish to interfere with your prayers.”

T
hirteen.

Sweat dripped into Asharre's eyes as she pulled her chin up over her knotted fists and the iron bar between them. She blinked it away, ignoring the sting, and lowered herself with deliberate slowness. Her arms burned, her jaw was clenched so tight it ached, and her feet were going numb from the weights around her ankles, but she wasn't ready to stop. Another set. Another after that, if exhaustion failed to claim her.

She reached the full extension of her arms. Her toes would touch the ground if she let her legs straighten. She didn't. Instead Asharre tensed her wrists and pulled herself up again, forcing herself through the burn until her chin came over the bar once more.