Heaven's Needle (51 page)

“In the second vision—if we led the charge against Corban and into Duradh Mal on our own, without the Thorn—the dawn rose red like fire, and those black mountains
burned
. Their bones burst into flame under the sun.
Smoke poured into the valley and the river glowed like a volcano's spew. In time the smoke blew away, and the river turned back to clear water, but the carnage before that …” His left hand lifted, reaching unconsciously across his thigh toward Bitharn. “I took those signs to mean that the Baozites would go to war with us for Ang'duradh, even at the risk of freeing the Maolite magic contained inside. They want it that badly.

“They've been trying to capture a Blessed for a while. For Duradh Mal, I think. Some escaped. Some died. If I help them, I will be the last.

“I might be wrong about that. But even if I am, the vision was clear that the better course was to let Malentir lead the way. He has means and magics that we do not. We can't even
find
Corban. Any prayer that tries to locate him just returns a vision of churning black and cripples its sender with headaches. Evenna said it's the same thing that happened to them in the mountains above Carden Vale. Maol is shielding his servant from us … but Malentir might find a way through.”

“I walked across Spearbridge,” Asharre said. “I have seen what the Baozites are, with or without their pet Thorns.”

A breeze stirred through the lindens and died. In the silence, a squirrel chattered. Then Kelland spoke, his voice quiet and measured. “I'm not blind to that. They held me in that hole for so long … I know what they are. But tell me true,
sigrir
: if an outsider looked on your people, would they seem any kinder?”

Asharre thought of defeated warriors staked out on the ice, of dragonships with their sacrificial tails. Of a solaros with a face of pulped meat. “No.”

“Then you understand the choice we made. The Baozites are men. Perhaps not
good
men, but men all the same.
Even the Thorns are, after a fashion. ‘One cannot be too choosy with allies, if one expects to have any.' Inaglione wrote that.”

“But bad allies are worse than none,'” Bitharn said. “Inaglione wrote that too. We all know the Thorns will be our enemies tomorrow. I just hope we can trust them today.”

“Thierras did not send me unprepared for treachery.” Asharre drew Aurandane, holding the blade out to the sun. The engravings on its hilt were black rivers in the yellow light, repeating prayers in runes she could not read. The spinel on its pommel shone bluer than the sky.

“The Sword of the Dawn.” Kelland raised his gaze from the inscribed steel to the
sigrir
's face. “That is a powerful weapon.”

“It is a sharp one.” Asharre slid the sword back. “If it has any other powers beyond its edge, I do not know how to call them. Do you?”

“No,” Kelland admitted. “Aurandane saved our lives in Shadefell, but it did so in Malentir's hands. As soon as we returned to the Dome, the Illuminers took it to the High Solaros. I was told they purified it, but I was not a part of that ritual. There's nothing I can tell you. I'm sorry.”

Asharre nodded, disappointed but unsurprised. “Then I will hope the legends tell true.”

T
he magic was failing.

Corban didn't know when or how the change had come. But it
had
come. His protections, his wardings, even the ritual that had lifted the creeping curse from him and sunk it into his captured dogs … and other things, in the end; there had been other things too … all of them were failing fast.

Failing, and leaving him to … to
what?

The memories were all in pieces. Shards of colored glass thrown into black water, shapes in fog and shadow. He couldn't tell, anymore, what was real and what imagined. Often he thought that the things he imagined
became
real, as if the dead things floating in the apothecary's jars would see because he thought they could, or the herbs hanging from the rafters would change shape to match his visions.

Maybe none of it was real. Maybe it all was. How was he to know? The memories spun and slipped through his fingers and shattered. Nothing he did could keep them intact.

He'd used dogs, for a while.

Wild barks, wild howls. The grief and rage of dogs. His doing. He'd thrown so many dogs into the fire to keep his own skin from burning. It had worked, in the beginning; he'd been free, blessedly
free
, whole and healthy and strong.

Then … that strength had gone. He remembered that. He'd sought out other dogs to renew it, so many that he couldn't keep them penned in the secret cellar … but letting them run loose had proved no problem. Not after the ritual.

He'd used them up, one by one. Small dogs and big ones, scrawny curs and soft-footed lapdogs. He'd marked them all with spiraled dirt and sent them to the fire. And they had given him strength … but each dog granted a weaker reprieve, and the pain hurt worse every time it came back.

In the end … Corban ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. What
had
he done in the end?

Men. He'd hunted men. The dogs stopped helping, and the agony had driven him to desperation, and so he had … stolen men, yes, drunks and dreamflower addicts, anyone ale-blind enough to accept his pretense of friendship. Not innocents, but they'd do. Corban had led them to his secret cellar, down to the sighing sea, and he had fed them to the flames.

Three times. The memory hit like a blue bolt of lightning: for an instant everything was illuminated, and then it was gone and he was blind again, dazed with the after image of sight. Corban covered his eyes with his hands, weeping. The tears trickled dark through his fingers, stained by … what? Charcoal? Blood? He shook the dirty tears away.

Three times he'd led drunks back to his cellar. Three,
out of all the drunks he'd accosted in Cailan's alleys … and only two had done him any good.

The first one was rotting somewhere nearby. The stink of him drifted in and out of Corban's awareness, ephemeral as the impish laughter he sometimes heard or the swirling dance of specters at the corners of his eyes. He held his breath when the smell came.

Careless, so careless. Corban hadn't bothered to tie the man before beginning his circles of charcoal and chalk. Hadn't even thought to search for weapons. He'd just assumed, stupidly, that the man's ale stupor would be restraint enough.

It hadn't been, of course.

The dogs gathered in silent, staring circles whenever Corban began a new ritual. They assembled for the drunk as they had gathered for each other. The man woke in a ring of their green-glowing eyes.

Perhaps it was the dogs that unnerved him, or perhaps he saw something in those scribbled runes that told him what lay ahead. Whatever it was, the drunk had an escape hidden in the top of his boot, and he used it.

By the time Corban finished drawing the sigils and went to fetch his guest, the corpse was already cooling. Runnels of blood ran from his wrists to the sea.

Corban left the body there. He thought the dogs would eat it, but they never did. It was still sprawled on the pier, fat with gas, when he brought the next man down.

The second time he made no mistakes.

He remembered it with a hurting kind of bliss, as a starving man might remember the last grand feast of his life. The moments after the end of that ritual had been so sweetly free from pain. It was better than the respite the first dog had given him, if only because his suffering
had been so much worse. For those few hours, Corban believed that he'd broken the curse's hold on him, that having made the ultimate sacrifice of another human being, he was truly, gloriously free.

But it was, again, a lie.

Too soon, the pain crept back, reclaiming his body inch by inch. The old gray scars on his hands throbbed. His teeth ached; his eyes felt swollen, too big for their sockets. Maddening prickles ran up and down his legs, jabbing him out of sleep.

Corban knew then that there would be no escape. Not through dogs, not through men. Not for him. Even the path his first victim had taken was closed to him. He'd tried.

So he had sought a third drunk. One last sacrifice.

And it was working, in a small and limited way. The tide of confusion that smothered his mind was … not gone, but receded. Enough that he could piece together these scattered memories, at least. Enough that he could think, and act. Barely. The fiend that tormented him had relaxed its grip just slightly, allowing him enough sanity to carry out the rite.

Corban no longer doubted that the fiend existed. He didn't know
what
it was—god, curse, or malevolent shade—and he didn't know why it was torturing him, but he knew that it was there, goading him with pain and luring him with promises of relief. Pulling him into perdition.

Gethel was wrong. No saboteur had laid a curse on the blackfire stone, and there was no way to purify it. The blackfire stone
was
the curse.

Gaping holes riddled his memory, yet Corban could still look back and see scattered events, stepping-stones on his path to damnation. The smoke he'd breathed in Carden
Vale, the scratches he'd taken from the packing straw, the rats … each one dragging him a little deeper, each one eroding the foundations of his life until he had nothing left to stand on and was flailing, drowning, spinning into the void …

He'd tried to stop it. He
had
. But Corban was only human, and whatever plagued him was not.

Stopping it was beyond him. It had probably been beyond the man he was; it was certainly beyond what he'd become. He could try to slow it, though.

He had to do it now. Before the tide came rushing back. This was the best, perhaps the last chance he'd have; any respite Corban might earn by giving up another damned soul would be feebler and more fleeting than this one. The magic would answer—whatever god or demon had accepted his gifts was bound by the laws of sacrifice, and had to answer his prayers if he paid in blood—but it might come too weak or misshapen to do him any good.

The drunk was mumbling. Confused. He didn't yet realize where he was, or why. Soon enough, he would.

Corban picked up his knife, gathered his worn lumps of charcoal and chalk, and began.

W
HEN IT WAS OVER HE WALKED
toward the ladder, splashing through the foul-smelling effluvium of his long stay in the cellar. The dogs watched him with incurious eyes. They had their own ritual to attend. Surrounding the bloodied drunk in a circle as united in purpose as it was disparate in appearance, the dogs waited for him to stir. At the first sign of his awakening, they closed in, lapping his wounds clean like so many mothers washing birth fluids from a monstrous, two-legged puppy.

Corban hurried past them. He'd seen the dogs' rite once before, and it had disturbed him profoundly—not only for its ugly parody of birth, but because of the animals' unnatural unity. The intelligence that guided them was not their own. A single will shone in their eyes, and it terrified him. He had put it there.

But it was, for the moment, distracted … and that gave Corban his chance.

The gate of bones stood silent behind the cellar's ladder: a hanging pit framed in a wreath of stark white hands. Its very stillness frightened him. No sheet of polished stone was ever so lifeless. Onyx or obsidian misted with the viewer's breath, shifted its reflections as the world around it moved. Even the vastness of a starless night was less implacable than the darkness of that gate, for the sky was graced with clouds and moon and the awareness, however remote, that under it living things walked and sang and bled.

The gate admitted no such possibilities. Corban's mind tottered under the finality of its gaze.

It was from this place that the doom of Duradh Mal had come. He'd been a fool to give it a window from which to escape—but, he thought, that window could be closed.

Corban grabbed one of the fleshless arms. A sucking cold brushed across his fingers: an unreal wind pulling him into the abyss. Quickly, before his sanity and courage could desert him, he yanked the bones off the wall.

The arm came free in a tumble of cracking mortar. The yawning void of the gate vanished like a pricked bubble, leaving a ragged hole in the wall. Dirt on the other side. Just dirt. Before Corban could catch his breath in relief, something struck him from behind, growling furiously as it knocked him to the ground.

Dogs. The dogs were on him. Snapping fangs, heavy
paws, a flurry of rank-smelling fur. A dewclaw gouged his cheek as a mastiff trampled his face. One butterfly-eared lapdog locked its teeth into his foot, ripping through his rotted boot and biting off his toes.

But they were too late. The gate was broken, the arms stripped of whatever magic had let them latch onto the wall. Reduced to inert bone again, they were falling off the bricks like empty cicada shells toppling from tree trunks.

He'd won. The gate was gone. It was gone … and the demon that rode him remained. Corban closed his eyes, laughing and weeping, as the dogs tore into him.

O
n the night that Bitharn came for her, a storm rolled in from the sea, smothering the moon and casting the city into rain-drowned gloom. By midnight it had not lifted. Asharre lay on her pallet and looked out to a city that shivered under a sky cold and wet and grim. Even Heaven's Needle seemed pallid under those leaden clouds.

She hadn't slept. A peculiar alertness had suffused her since sundown. The
sigrir
felt every current in the air, every thread in the rough wool blankets pressed against her skin. It was the same acute awareness, at once attuned to her immediate surroundings and strangely remote from her own body, that came over her before battle. Her heartbeat was a steady drum, calling her to a dance that was about to begin.