Heaven's Needle (18 page)

There was no time to mourn. Ahead were their enemies, half hidden by the smoke that blew from the burning ship. Ironlords. Twenty of them, gathered defensively with shieldmen guarding their archers. A woman, dressed in red and crowned in iron, stood chanting in the center of their
knot. Asharre could see the glint of the soldiers' swords through the smoke, smell the rage that came off them like sweat stink. There was no fear in these men, though they were outnumbered and they faced Ingvall's children by the sea. No fear at all.

There was no fear in her either, and the wildbloods could match anyone for fury. She bit her tongue savagely. Hot blood filled her mouth. A red haze descended upon her and she heard herself scream, her own blood spilling across her chin. She wanted to bite these men, tear out their throats, taste their blood mingled with hers. The
caractan
in her hands felt light as a feather, sweet as a lover, an extension of her lust for death.

She barely felt the arrows when they came. She saw them, though. They filled her vision like black rain, and where they fell, men died. One slammed into her chest and another struck her thigh; she felt them dully, and would have kept running, but a third arrow plummeted from the sky and hit her in the face. It cracked through her nose and split her lip, pinning her tongue to her jaw. Blood gurgled out and she couldn't breathe, couldn't see. More arrows fell and she fell with them.

Her last thought, as she died, was regret that she had not been able to match swords with the soldiers, and wonder that ten archers could have filled the sky with so many shafts.

Blink.

Asharre touched her head groggily. It had seemed so vivid, so
real
… but no, she stood on Spearbridge, the wind snapping her cloak around her legs. Heradion stood frozen beside her. The young Celestian's face was white and drops of sweat trickled down his brow. He was not the only one so affected. Ahead of them, as many wagons were
stopped as moving, and the people on foot between them were paralyzed between steps.

The line moved forward, but at a snail's crawl. Asharre did, too, dreading what she might see.

Blink.

Her name was Haruld, and she was fifteen. An important day: it marked the change from boy to man. At last she—
he
—would be allowed to join the raiders, to take a share of plunder and someday pay the bride-price for a wife. He wondered whether Kalle would wait until he could pay hers. Kalle was a pretty girl, her eyes blue as a morning sky; her bride-price would be high. But he was fifteen, and if he fought well, he might have it before he was twenty.

He looked anxiously ahead. They were very far south, almost to Delverness Wood, and he did not like being so far from the clan's lands. Ingris insisted that she could not find the herbs she needed anywhere else, though, and for all her youth she was the best healer in the hold, so he supposed it was worth the journey to get them.

Still, it was not like her to take so long to gather plants. “Ingris?”

There was no answer. He crept forward, quietly now, worried about what he might find. “Ingris?” He pushed past the trailing branches of a willow. The silver-green leaves parted with a shiver. What lay beyond them shattered him.

His sister was sprawled in the dirt among five men. There was blood on her mouth and her thighs. Her dress had been torn to the waist. Three of the men wore leather armor, travel stained and dulled to blend into the forest. A red fist marked their shoulderplates; the device meant nothing to him. The other two were half dressed. They talked casually, passing around a small wineskin.

He saw these things and he charged almost before he understood what they meant. There was no thought, only rage and desperate fear. All he had was a hunting knife, but he kept it sharp and none of them saw him coming. By the time they turned toward him, Haruld was across the clearing. He plunged the knife into the first man's side and jerked it out and punched the blade back into his stomach, shoving it in until his knuckles pressed into skin. The man hit back, battering at Haruld's head with his elbow, but his strength was already failing and the blows felt light as rain. Haruld tore his knife out and kicked the man down and he crumpled to the earth, weeping and cursing the pain.

The rest of them backed away, spreading out to circle him. Haruld didn't look down at his sister. He didn't dare look down. “Ingris, run,” he urged, feinting at the men with his knife to keep them at bay.

He wasn't sure whether she heard him. She didn't move. One of the men—the other half-dressed one—lunged forward and Haruld slashed at him, laying open his right arm above the elbow. Too late he realized that it was a distraction, that the real threat came from behind. The armored men still had their weapons. He caught a blur of motion in his peripheral vision and a morningstar smashed into his hand, crushing his fingers and knocking the knife from his suddenly useless grip. Haruld darted to his left, trying to dodge the next blow, but another man seized his arm and the morningstar came in again, smashing his knee.

He dropped, howling. He saw, too late, that Ingris was already dead. Her eyes stared, sightless, at the sun. A wet brown leaf clung to her cheek. The man he'd slashed on the arm spat on him and stalked away, looking for something to bind his wound. The one he'd gutted was writhing in the grass and screaming louder than Haruld himself.

“Oh, shut up,” the morningstar-wielder said, bringing the weapon down on his companion's head. It crunched and the screams stopped. Blood spattered Haruld's face, warm and sticky. He could taste the sour rust of it. “Bawling like a stuck pig.”

“What about this one?” One of the men jerked a thumb at Haruld. “We could take him. Put him in the pits. He's big. Got the north blood.”

“We could.” The soldier with the morningstar prodded Haruld in the side with a boot. Haruld could only grunt and try to roll away. His crippled knee was an inferno of pain. “He can't walk, though, and I broke his fighting hand. Seems like more trouble than it's worth.”

“What, then?”

They raped him. They raped him and they gelded him and when they finally let him die, answering his broken, begging prayers, they took their time about that too.

Blink.

Asharre came back to herself with bile curdling her tongue. She swallowed with difficulty. Everything she saw had happened long before her grandfather's grandfather was born. These people were long dead; she walked on their skulls and their ruined standards. There was nothing she could do for them … but knowing that did not make it easier.

Heradion had fallen two steps behind her. He trembled as a vision passed; she could only guess at what he saw. After he had recovered, he looked at her and managed a wan smile. “Lovely people, these Baozites.”

“They're dead,” Asharre said. She wasn't sure whether her own words were meant as reassurance or regret. “They're all dead.”

She went on. She was old; she was young. She was a
man, a woman, sometimes a child. Once, she thought, she was a wolf. She died in fire, in water, under a hissing mantle of molten lead, beneath more swords than she could number. She died on sacrificial altars and in the throng of blood-soaked orgies. She died again and again in a cascade of years, but she went on.

Finally, exhausted, she came to the end. The gatehouse passed in a blur. Spearbridge Tower loomed above her, a monolith of black basalt. Lost in her cursed visions, she'd never noticed it. Had she been an enemy—had anyone been left to man that tower—its archers could have riddled her with impunity. If the gatehouse had been locked, she would have had nowhere to flee.

The road forked beyond the gatehouse. Around her, Colison's men changed places on the wagons, letting new drivers take a turn while the old ones stretched their legs. She saw Colison's hand in that. Switching tasks helped them shake free of what they'd seen. In a few hours, Asharre guessed, these men might be able to joke and laugh again. They'd been through it before. She wondered if the Celestians would recover as quickly—or, for that matter, whether she would. The depravities she'd witnessed seemed to cling to her skin like an oily film.

“We'll take the west road from here. Goes down the mountain. East road curves up toward the fortress. No reason we'd want to go that way. This is as close as we come to them.” Colison studied her carefully, an unspoken empathy in his eyes. “You all right?”

Asharre nodded, not trusting herself to speak. He watched her for a moment longer, not quite believing her assurance, then left to get the rest of the caravan in order. Shortly after Colison had vanished into the bustle of wagons and bullocks, Heradion strode off the bridge. The red-haired youth was
swinging his arms in a way she had seen drunk men do when they were shaking off the urge to hit something.

“Why?” Heradion asked, his voice full of angry disbelief. “Why make this thing? Why keep
those
memories trapped in time?”

Asharre glanced up at the battlements of Spearbridge Tower. “The arrows. You'd have been easy prey for the archers.”

“It's more than that,” Falcien said. Asharre had not heard him approach. There was an ashen cast to his light brown skin, and his eyes were reddened by recent tears, but the Illuminer's voice was steady. “It's a sacrament to their god. Each of those deaths was an act of worship—a gift of blood and conquest that pleased the Iron-Crowned enough to be remembered. As for why it's here, instead of in some hidden temple … Spearbridge is a show of force:
see our strength, and tremble.
It would have been a powerful warning to anyone who thought of challenging Ang'duradh's power.”

“Not that powerful,” Heradion said. “Someone challenged them. And won.”

Asharre chuckled bleakly. “And you want to challenge that. Madness.”

Falcien touched the sunburst pendant that hung over his yellow cloak. “Faith. Not madness.”

She shook her head but did not argue. They'd lingered long enough. Gals had turned their wagon so that it faced west on the split road past the gatehouse. Most of the others had already started moving. Asharre climbed onto the driver's bench, waiting for Heradion to join her. “Faith does not mean you'll win.”

“No. It only means I must try.” Falcien brushed his pendant again, reverently, and went to his own wagon.

The afternoon wore on, gray and gloomy. Asharre was startled that it was still the same day; after what she had endured, it felt as if weeks should have passed. Years, maybe. But the world remained indifferent to her turmoil, and although they had lost much of the day on Spearbridge, it was still light enough to travel.

The wagons rolled down the bare stone road. Snow dusted the basalt around them and fluttered in icy plumes whenever the wind turned. There was little to be seen of Ang'duradh, beyond an occasional glimpse of the Shardfield's obsidian glitter between the rocky heights, and Asharre was glad for that. She had seen enough of Baozite work for a lifetime.

Dusk fell swiftly. There was no sunset, no rich blue twilight, only a gradual lowering of the light from grayness into dark. The oxen laboring in their traces became bulky moving shadows, visible only as a curve of horn or the rise of an angled shoulder blade. The wagon drivers lit lanterns and hung them from short poles, throwing spills of yellow light down the mountain.

“We'll stop soon,” Colison told them during one of his caravan checks. “There's another site on this side. Not much farther. We'll be able to set our tents out of the wind there, and Laedys keeps a wayhouse close by. No beds, but she might have hot broth for us, and we'll be able to get the latest news from the town. Laedys loves to gossip.” He slapped one of the oxen affectionately and moved back up the line. “Remember not to drink the water till it's been tested, and don't let your animals browse. Don't know how far the poison's spread.”

They plodded on in silence after he had gone. Then Heradion asked: “What did you see?”

She didn't have to ask what he meant. “Death.” Asharre
had no desire to talk about it, but she knew the youth needed to, so she added the expected question. “You?”

“The same. A hundred different stories, a hundred different lives, but they all ended the same way. Death. Death and desecration. They never just killed when they could break their victims first.” He fell quiet. The clop of the oxen's hooves was soothingly monotonous. “Why does anyone follow a faith like that?”

Asharre shrugged before she remembered he couldn't see it. “I don't know. Ask Evenna or Falcien. They study the soul.”

“I will. I wanted to ask you too. Some say the Baozites aren't far from wildbloods.”

“Maybe.” She thought about the memories of fury that had filled her on Spearbridge—the bloodlust, the glory in violence. It had consumed everything else. She had seen echoes of that rage and terrible joy on the faces of her enemies in those visions. “They are not so different in battle. Who they are when they are not fighting—that is different. Wildbloods share the hearts of beasts, but they are Ingvall's children in their bones. That tension makes them what they are. Baozites do not have that. They are men always, and they are trained like beaten dogs. Beat a dog long enough, and the strong ones become vicious things, while the gentle ones die.”

“How many wildbloods are left?”

“Not many.” She kept her eyes on the road. Beyond the bobbing line of lanterns it was black as the trackless sea. “Few have the strength to live torn between two natures. There were never many, but there are fewer now. Some of those who might have become wildbloods choose to follow summerlander gods instead—more each year, the old ones say. In a generation, perhaps two, some think the wildbloods will be gone completely.”

“Will you mourn them?”

“Others will. Not I.” The lanterns had stopped ahead. Their bullocks chuffed in surprise as they nearly ran into the wagon before them.
Something must be blocking the road.
She passed the reins to Heradion. “Stay here. I'll find out what's happening.”