Heaven's Needle (36 page)

“That doesn't explain the claw marks. You don't think the ruptured seal did that.”

“No,” Malentir admitted.

“Then what caused those?”

“An ironclaw,” Kelland suggested. “Taller than a man on its hind legs, claws like a lion's but longer. The marks match, and we know the Baozites bred them.”

Bitharn balked. “This place was sealed for six hundred years. Nothing could live in here that long.”

“Nevertheless, he is correct,” Malentir said. “There was an ironclaw here. Hungry, bereft of its masters, it smelled bodies rotting in the dungeon and came down in search of food—or so I believe. For six hundred years it might have been trapped here, driven to madness and death and finally beyond death by Maol's power, and then it escaped.”

“How do you know?” Bitharn asked.

“Because I killed it. I thought that ironclaw escaped because of something
I
had done; I tracked it to Vedurras in order to kill the thing before anyone else encountered it and realized I had opened the seals of Duradh Mal. When your Blessed found me in Vedurras, I assumed it was bad luck, that some villager had seen or been mauled by the beast and survived to seek the Sun Knights' help. Now, however, the pieces of the puzzle are sliding into place, and they show a different picture. I am beginning to think Gethel sent the ironclaw out to distract me, and that he told the Celestians how they could find me in a moment of weakness, after I'd exhausted myself killing the creature. Then—as he hoped, and as happened—the Sun Knights would be able to capture or kill me, removing me as an obstacle to his exploration of Duradh Mal. He played us both as pawns.”

“Are you sure it was the same ironclaw?” Bitharn asked.
“Could it have been a different one that killed these men?”

“No, and yes. We will have to hope there was only the one.” Malentir clasped his hands behind his back, examining the gargoyle door. Satisfied, he took hold of the ring dangling from the creature's teeth and dragged it open, ignoring the rusted screech of its hinges. Black dust fell from the open door in a rolling cloud of ghostly faces and grasping hands. The spectral figures reached for them, their fingers stretching longer than arms, and Kelland raised his shield to meet them. But when the dust settled to the ground, the shapes vanished, leaving the two Celestians to exchange a glance of misgiving.

“You saw them too?” Bitharn asked. She wasn't sure what answer she wanted. It was bad enough if she was imagining things. If they were real …

“I saw them,” Kelland confirmed.

“And you will see worse ahead,” Malentir said. “How long can you sustain your sunfire? As light, not as killing flame.”

“It depends on how many things challenge it.” Kelland lowered his sun-marked shield. “An hour, easily. Two, with some strain.”

“Let us say we have an hour, then. Past this point we must travel within your aura. Maol's presence in this place is too strong for us to enter unprotected … unless you had some burning desire to become
maelgloth
.”

“Thank you, but no.” Kelland touched the wavy-rayed medallion at his chest, murmuring. Golden light unfurled around him, enveloping the three of them. The corpses on the floor steamed like blocks of ice brought up to the summer sun, and the dust that had poured from the opened door evaporated into rills of inky smoke.

Bitharn's
ghaole
-sight flickered violently in the sudden
light, flashing from silver and black to the daylit colors of true vision and back. She put a hand against the nearest wall, dizzied, until the Thornlord's spell finally surrendered to the sunfire and she saw with her own eyes again.

“Come.” Malentir walked through the gargoyle door, taking care not to leave the Sun Knight's illumination. “We are wasting time.”

Duradh Mal was no more welcoming in Kelland's sunlight than it had been in the silver dusk of
ghaole
-sight. The black dust seemed more sinister, rising in sinuous coils and vanishing as the knight walked past. Gaps and holes appeared in the walls. At first Bitharn thought the blocks might somehow have fallen out, but then she saw the corroded ends of bars in one hole's mouth and realized that they were the entrances to tiny, impossibly cramped cells. They were spaced unevenly across the halls so that no man could see any other's face, no matter how crowded the dungeon became.

“Was this where they kept you?” she whispered to Kelland. “Someplace like this in Ang'arta?”

The knight glanced back, his face strained, and said nothing.

Down a short flight of steps their surroundings became grimmer still. Dust-cloaked irons glinted in alcoves on every side. Vises and clamps rested on age-warped shelves above hammers and wedges for the precise breaking of bones. Next to those were racks of knives, their blades turned to moths' wings of rust, that had once been used to pry prisoners' fingernails from their hands and flay the living skin from their limbs. Bitharn walked past them quickly, not daring to meet Kelland's eyes.

Another bend in the hall took them to a cavernous chamber ringed by empty hearths. Every one had a pierced
mantel carved with the Baozite crown, and every crown had five gaps bored through it so that the fires could shine through as red jewels when they burned. The room must have been an inferno when all were lit. Darkness filled them now, and not a single spider spun its web across the gaps.

Cylindrical pits, each fifteen feet deep and twenty across, riddled the floor. The bottoms and sides of the nearest pits were caked with some moist black substance, midway between dust and forest mold, that showed irregular gray lines where flat blades had scraped it away.

A susurration resonated through the dungeon as Bitharn came in. It could have been wind—almost—but the sound was too wet, too close to human words, to be the whisper of air through stone. Breathing, or sobbing: that was what she heard.

Bitharn peeked over the lip of the next pit and recoiled.

Blind faces peered back at her. They had no eyes; their sockets were packed with wet black dirt. Their hairless skin glistened, slimy and gray in Kelland's holy aura, more like frogs' skin than that of men. She could see scarred dimples on the tops of their heads, four over four, like the blisters on the miners who had killed that boy on Devils' Ridge. They cringed from the light, whimpering, even as they reached for their visitors with rag-muffled hands. Steel wire stitched each one's mouth shut, rusting around the holes punched into their bloodless lips.

They were packed in the pit like eels in a fishmonger's tub. She couldn't begin to count the bodies crushed against one another, the faces that stared at her in blind, near-mindless adoration. And it
was
adoration, or something very like it; Bitharn couldn't mistake the look on those gray, sightless faces. “What's
wrong
with them?”

“Feed us,” the nearest creatures whispered, straining to speak through the wire that clamped their lips. Their scabrous arms shook; their upturned faces were taut with yearning. “Feed us. I serve—we serve—loyal, so loyal.
Feed us
.” Their moans rose and fell like the rush of phantom waves trapped in a seashell; the intensity changed, but the meaning never did.
“Feed us.”

“This is what the miners became.
Maelgloth
.” Malentir stooped near the pit's edge, his striped hair falling forward. The creatures whined and scrabbled away from him, crawling over one another in their haste to leave the Thornlord's presence.

“Why are they here? Why are they … like this?” Kelland turned to the Thorn. “Can you ask them?”

“Asking is one thing. Receiving an answer worth hearing is quite another. But I can try.” Setting a hand flat on the floor, Malentir vaulted into the pit. The
maelgloth
recoiled, leaving an arm's reach of bare rock all around him. To Bitharn's surprise, the exposed floor was completely clean; there was no smeared dung or filth, nor any sign of the soft black mould that covered the other pits' walls.

Malentir strode toward the
maelgloth
, penning them back against the wall until they could retreat no farther. He drew the ivory knife at his hip and drove it into the nearest creature's chin, stabbing smoothly upward through the bottom of its jaw into its brain. The creature let out a squeal, made half a whistle by the wire stitching its lips, and writhed with the pale knife buried in its skull.

The Thornlord uttered a word, low and sibilant, and the
maelgloth
's head collapsed, crumpling inward like a ball of paper crushed in an unseen fist. The body fell to the ground, and Malentir withdrew his blade. The ivory was clean.

“I didn't bring a rope,” Bitharn called down.

“I wouldn't trust you to hold it,” Malentir said. He sheathed the knife and stepped into the fringe of shadows past the reach of Kelland's light, forcing some of the
maelgloth
into the Celestian's glow. The black dirt packed into their eyes melted away under the sunfire's glare; they wailed shrilly and covered their faces with rag-mittened hands, sucking desperately at the smoke that leaked from their eyes.

Malentir was deaf to their shrieks. He pricked a finger on his knife, whispered an invocation to his cruel goddess, and vanished.

An instant later he stepped out of the shadows cloaking the nearest hearth. He came to the edge of the knight's sunfire and stopped there, drawing the ivory blade again. Pale mist spilled from its tip, forming a ghostly echo of the carved thorns that ringed the knife's hilt.

The mist spread and solidified into the figure of a hunched, sad-faced man. Blisters rose on his stubbled head and his posture was bent in agony, but no wire sealed his lips and his eyes were his own. A knotted vine of thorns, translucent as alabaster, cocooned him from foot to neck. A barbed ring from that vine wrapped around his face, just below the eyes, so that his lashes would brush it if he blinked. Droplets of foggy blood trickled from the shade's face as the thorns bit in.

“Who are you?” Malentir demanded.

“I can't … explain that to you.” The ghost's face contorted. “You aren't ever the same person twice—people just call you that way. It's a useful pretending. But it's been … an age … since anyone called me.” He groaned and rolled back his eyes. “You lose an old toy …”

“Never mind that,” Malentir snapped. “How did you come to be here?”

“This mountain has a sickness. It is … a bodily sickness. You can see it, touch it. So you cut it out.” He formed a blade with his hand and dragged it across his arm beneath the elbow. “Cutting the tumor was our task. A melted tumor makes tallow. Tallow makes a candle. Light the candle … that was the pure light. That would keep us safe.”

“Clearly it didn't. Why?”

“We knew that the sickness … that it could be a trouble to us. You could not cut it the usual way. You could not cut it with metal. It has the same skin as flint—it sparks. So we cut it with bone. It cleaves well with bone—it is familiar, it recognizes its own. But even then …” The shade scratched anxiously at his arm, drawing beads of milky blood that vanished as soon as they fell. “Even then, the skin would flake and crumble into dust. And then you have it in your eyes, your mouth. So we caught the sickness, and once you have the sickness … you don't want anything else. You just want more. The master was wise. He closed our mouths to stop us.”

“Of course.” The Thornlord gave Bitharn and Kelland a flat look. “Is there any other gibberish you want from this wretch?”

“Why are their hands bound?” the knight asked.

Malentir turned to the shade. “Why are your hands bound?”

“He closed our mouths, but we still wanted. The sickness makes you eat. Its skin is sweet—and when you're sick enough you start to taste it in your bones.” He held up his left hand. The tip of his ring finger was eaten away, exposing a worn and scratched nub of bone. The ghost thrust its fingers into its mouth, chewing furiously. The flesh peeled away from its fingers as it did so, leaving black-streaked bones to crunch between its spectral teeth.

“Finger bones
would
fit between those steel laces, wouldn't they. And I'm sure these wretches could tear other things to sufficiently small pieces, if they weren't restrained,” Malentir mused. He glanced back at the Celestians. “Anything else?”

Bitharn shook her head. Kelland grimaced. “No.”

“Good. Talking to Maolites is tiresome.” Malentir gestured contemptuously at the shade. His thorn vine tightened, anchoring its barbs into unreal flesh, then wrenched away in ripping coils, tearing the shade into pieces. Howling, the apparition faded into the dungeon's gloom.

“Now what?” Bitharn asked. “That was useless.”

“To the contrary,” Malentir said. “That explained a great deal. A sample of the dirt they were collecting, I suspect, will explain still more.” He peered into one of the cells wormed into the dungeon's walls. Unlike the others, it was not empty; a mass of coal-stained bones crammed its mouth. The Thorn drew out a human thigh bone, still affixed to half its pelvis by sinew wrapped around the ball of its hip. The pelvis had been chipped into a crude shovel, its edge worn down and coated with black grime.

“Tools to cut the darkness from the mountain.” The Thorn scraped the shovel along a nearby pit, scratching loam onto the bone. “This, I presume, is what they collected for the master and what drove them to feast upon their own bones. The bowels of Duradh Mal are not the best place to study it, however, so with your permission I shall take this and devote more time to it elsewhere.”

“That's it? You want to go now?” Bitharn blinked. “What about the
maelgloth
?”

“We have a sample of what they took from Duradh Mal.” Malentir tapped the shovel's contents onto a small square of cloth, folded it neatly, and tucked the bundle
into a silver-capped horn. “There is nothing more we can or should take from this place. All that remains is for the Sun Knight and myself to seal the ruins—a temporary measure, to be sure, but sufficient to keep Gethel and his pets from reentering until we can erect more permanent barriers—close off his
perethil
, and deal with him at Shadefell, now that we know he is not here.