Heaven's Needle (43 page)

“And you expect to get a sensible answer?”

“Yes.” Malentir drained his second cup. “We are very good at interrogation.”

“No torture,” Kelland said.

“No,” the Thornlord agreed. “Pain would be … inefficient, even if he can still feel it. There are better ways, and faster.”

Unsure what to make of that, Kelland said nothing. He drew his sword, laid it across his lap, and meditated over the naked steel until the last light vanished from the sky. Bitharn busied herself making a kettle of tea no one wanted. As twilight gave way to luminous black, the knight
found his eyes drawn to the
perethil
's shifting, impossible stars.

Anxiety weighed heavy on him. Could any of Carden Vale's people still be alive? How? As
what
? He thought unwillingly of the
maelgloth
in their pit, their bodies decaying into blackfire dust even as they struggled to cram more of it into their mouths. If the townspeople were lucky, they'd be dead. If they weren't …

And the Illuminers? What would become of them if Maol's madness took root in their souls? If they found Aurandane, and it was—as Malentir had suggested—only a conduit of corruption?

Had the Illuminers known what they faced when they went to Shadefell? He didn't think so. If they had realized the danger, they wouldn't have rushed off to face it, undertrained and unprepared as they were. Only ignorance allowed them to be so brave … and ignorance in battle carried a terrible price.

During the Wars of the Five Fortresses, when Baoz's faithful marched against the armies of the rebel Maghredan, both Baozites and Maghredani had captured each other's Blessed and subjected them to unimaginable depravities, transforming them to blood-raged
ansurak
and unleashing them upon their former companions. They did the same to other deities' servants, when they could, and though the Blessed were stronger willed than other men, when they finally broke they became the most terrible monsters of all.

That was well over a thousand years ago. The tales of those wars were almost as fanciful as those about Moranne the Gatekeeper or Auberand and the Winter Queen—but they didn't have to be true to make Kelland worry. If Gethel
believed
they were true, and tried to enact those
rites on the Illuminers, their suffering would be nearly as hellish as if they actually became
ansurak
.

And if they did … No one in living memory had faced
ansurak
, not in this part of the world. They were creatures of a bygone age, mythical as solarions or firebirds; they existed only as skulls on the walls of Ang'arta and drawings pressed between the pages of yellowed books in Craghail's libraries.

In the west, at least. In the east and the south, they had never completely vanished. Could Gethel have brought them back?

Kelland hoped he was wrong. But he couldn't
know
. He couldn't do much of anything besides wait, and brood, until the
perethil
opened.

An hour before midnight, its stars began to fall. As before, they tumbled of their own accord, and as before, each was accompanied by an unearthly peal. The sound was utter discord: some fell fast and erratic, stumbling into the last one's echoes, while others sang dolorous and slow. Each sounded longer and louder than the last, until the final star stood alone on the black, and the
perethil
tore a shivering rift into the world.

The Sun Knight stood. He straightened his surcoat, squared the sun medallion over his chest, and reached out to ensure that Bitharn was beside him.

She was there. He went in. The last thing he saw, as the
perethil
claimed him, was Bitharn raising her own sunburst to the dark and her lips moving in an echo of his prayer.

B
lack mist swathed Kelland as he entered the
perethil
, burying his boots and climbing up his legs. It did not blind him, as it had before. This time a murky, poisoned light filtered through the world, rising from the wet earth and falling from the shapeless heavens.

It illumined a never-world. Narsenghal. Shadows surrounded him, though there was nothing to cast them. They rose and fell like moon-pulled tides, and he was the moon that drew them. The gloom shaped itself into crude imitations of his form: faceless heads, lumpen legs, tenebrous arms that clung to their torsos only briefly and then fell back into the shadows, dissolving.

“What is this place?” Kelland muttered. He was the only solid thing in the world. There was no sign of Bitharn or the Thorn. The ember of his goddess' presence in his heart, constant even when he was not channeling her power, had gone out; he couldn't feel Celestia with him here. Around him the shadow faces mirrored his question with gaping, sagging mouths, fumbling through imitations of speech.

It is … yours
. The answer came from all around him: it was the shadow faces who answered. They spoke in a varied susurration, each one articulating a word or a syllable before its voice dropped below a whisper or rose into a howl and another took up the thread of their thought.
We are yours. We are
you.
Your future, once you go to Shadefell. Your failure. Your fate
.

The shades' voices, initially as shapeless as their forms, sounded more like Kelland's with each word. Distorted, to be sure, always a half octave higher or lower or possessed of some inflection that the knight himself would never use … but recognizably, unmistakably, his. And although he knew it was part of the
perethil
's snare, he couldn't help being unsettled by listening to a chorus of his own voice hissing at him, or by the constant cacophony of his own sighs and shrieks behind it. That alone was bad enough, but he could hear a hunger in their voices that unnerved him. The shades weren't content to imitate him; they wanted to
be
him, to steal his warm and living reality and wear it as their own.

Kelland didn't know whether that thought had been implanted in his head by some magic of the
perethil
or was recalled from some long-ago lesson at the Dome of the Sun, but he didn't doubt it was so. The desire in the shadow faces' writhing, and their frustration at the flaws in their mimicry, were too raw to be false.

He walked away, although he had nowhere to go in this swamp of shadows. The faceless shades followed, whispering and muttering at the knight's heels like a pack of ghostly dogs. Kelland ignored them. The first time through the
perethil
, the Mad God had assaulted him with raw filth and depraved lust. An obvious attack, and an ineffective one. This time, it seemed, the
perethil
was trying a different trick.

Do you think this only a trick? Wrong, wrong
, the murmuring shadows said, and their cacophony took up the refrain, shrilling and sighing:
wrong, wrong
.

This is your fate. The fruit of your doubts. The Thorns never tested you, not really. They kept you, but they never tried to break you. The Spider wanted you whole. You would have been useless without your power. Yet still you doubted, even then, and that seed has flourished into fatal bloom
.

You stand on the brink of heresy now. You know this to be true. Sleepless nights, doubt-filled days. You took the hand of evil, embraced the Thorn you should have slain. Blind fool, flailing fool—you flounder in love, pushing it away in your clumsiness, and you will fail
her
too. Fail … and fall … and join us here, forgotten
.

I won't
, he wanted to reply, but before he could say the words—before he had even finished forming the thought—he was stumbling out of the
perethil
‘s dreamscape and back into the world he knew. It was just as dark, just as filled with swaying shadows … but here they were cast by real things, and they danced only to the wind.

A tower loomed before him, circled by ruined halls. Its tarnished point thrust into the bellies of low-hanging clouds; its base was garlanded with drifts of snowy petals, silver-blue in the moonlight, that had fallen from the cherry trees behind him. Celestian sunbursts glinted at the tower's tip, but Kelland drew no comfort from them. All that emblem meant, in this place, was that her worshippers had failed before.

Bitharn stood beside him. Her face was bloodless and her hands white knuckled at her sides; she stared at the tower's door as if she read her death written in its rusty stains. Malentir waited a pace away, maddeningly serene.

“How do you stay so calm?” Bitharn asked the Thorn.

“How do you not?” He raked his striped hair behind his ears, looking past her to the tower's door. “We train for this. Don't you? Anything that an enemy might do to us, any torture they might inflict, we have already visited upon ourselves and survived. What men most fear is what they do not know, and there is precious little left unknown to us. Anyone who survives to leave the Tower of Thorns has already endured, or at least seen, every torture my mistress can devise. Anything Maol might attempt, next to that …” Malentir shrugged. “Anyone will break if tortured long enough. But it would take more than two walks through a
perethil
's illusions to accomplish that.”

“Might not for me,” Bitharn muttered. She unhooded her quiver, glancing at Kelland. “Ready?”

He nodded, raising his sword. Holy flame limned the steel. Surrounded in its nimbus, Kelland led the way in.

Rubble littered the threshold. The ruins of the tower's upper floors, destroyed by some vast explosion, lay in rusting chaos around a gaping pit. Shards of bone and mangled metal studded the pit's walls. Wrinkled black ribbons flapped on them, and after an instant of blank incomprehension, Kelland realized that they were the remains of blood and flesh. Wooden planks hammered into the walls led downward in an uneven spiral.

The sense of evil that permeated the place was overwhelming. It pulsed in the air, suffocating; it wept from the walls like dungeon damp. Kelland's little light was fragile and distorted, and the pitiless deep pressed in from all sides. Kelland clenched his teeth and bowed his head, counting his breaths, until his will and the sacred flame steadied.

To his surprise, the Thornlord seemed even more affected. Malentir's eyes were closed. His throat trembled;
beads of sweat gathered at his temples. It took him longer to overcome the spiritual assault than it did the knight.

“I thought you trained for this,” Kelland said.

“We do.” Malentir laughed hollowly. He wiped his brow with the back of a wrist. The steel thorns of his bracelet left red scratches across his forehead. “Oh, we do. I was … made to remember it, that is all. The moment is past. Let us go.”

Kelland started down the groaning stairs. Bitharn stayed close, her bowstave slung across her shoulders to free her hands. Malentir followed silently at their rear. The pit's walls grew smoother as they descended, shifting from metal-panged earth to glassy green-black stone. Occasionally the knight caught glimpses of pale faces trailing after them inside those stones, as if they were dark windows to some other place … Narsenghal, or an echo of it … but he steadfastly refused to glance their way. Whether he saw them because the
perethil
had planted the idea or because the faces were really there, there was nothing to be gained by staring at them.

The air became hotter and fouler as they descended. Kelland's holy light began to flicker at its periphery; curls of black smoke hissed away from his sword. A smoldering red glow signaled the pit's heart below the last twist of the stairs.

At the bottom of the steps was a crooked door propped open by a coil of chains. Flakes of broiled skin clung to the door's iron handle. Past it lay a labyrinth of bones. Dull crimson light seeped through the labyrinth's rings; it was momentarily obscured as a stooped old man shuffled out.

“Gethel,” Malentir said. The name sounded like a curse. The old man lifted his head, turning slowly toward them. Kelland recoiled. The ancient scholar's eyes were solid
black, like spheres of polished obsidian. Inky liquid dribbled from them.

“Yes,” Gethel replied. His words were faintly slurred. The inside of his mouth glistened as black as his eyes. “Yes, I had that name.”

The Thornlord made a small gesture, so quick that Kelland nearly missed it. His voice became sharper, more imperious, resonant with magic. The knight felt a breath of winter pass by him in the furnace pit. “What have you done here? Tell us everything.”

Gethel flinched. Black tears crept down his cheeks. He licked them away with an ebon tongue, thin and long as a snake's. “Everything …,” he repeated, fixing his empty eyes on the Thorn. “Everything would take a long while to tell.”

“You came here to study blackfire dust, did you not?”

“Yes.”

“What did you learn?”

“It is … powerful. A great power.” Gethel scratched the back of his head. The withered skin parted like wet paper, and a chunk of discolored bone fell from his skull. He brushed it away absently, revealing a bloodless hole filled with crumbling black grit. “Magic without the gods. I have the secret at last. At great cost … oh, great cost … but it is mine.”

“Poor fool,” Bitharn murmured. No one else seemed to hear her.

“What cost?” Malentir pressed.

“Devotion. Such devotion. So …
hard
for the weak-willed to accept. So many who should have helped me turned against me. They were envious. Greedy. Fearful. They were dealt with, yes, I dealt with them. Traitors. Monsters that hounded our heels. Dead things that lurked
in the deeps. Many of my loyal helpers gave themselves to buy me time. But it was not in vain. Not in vain. I found the answers. I found the truth.”

“And what of them?” interrupted Kelland. “What happened to your ‘helpers'? Are any of them still alive?”