Heaven's Needle (39 page)

She drew her
caractan
and swung, smashing the skull where it lay. The yellowed bones of skull and spine cracked easily, pulverized between Asharre's steel and the sword-scarred wall. The skeleton toppled, and its whispery laughter died.

Evenna gawked at her, dropping the chair leg she'd picked up as a makeshift cudgel. She stooped and picked it up slowly, as if bending to the ground pained her. “Why did you do that?”

“I did not like how it looked at me.” Asharre wiped bone dust from her blade and slid it away. Maybe she'd imagined the laughter; maybe she hadn't. Either way, it was gone.

She walked past the skeleton into a long gallery decorated with portraits on one side and dead trees in stone basins on the other. Tall, slender windows stood between each of the basins, letting in a dusty light. The fighting in Shadefell seemed to have stopped with the fanged defender in the last room, but the violence had not.

Every one of the Rosewayn portraits had been slashed and burned. Dark oils cracked as the canvas curled away from the rents in each painted face. Several had been torn out and trampled; those that remained hung askew, their features masked by dust and damage. Their eyes followed her, though, as the fanged skull's had before. Asharre refused to meet their stares, trying not to show the tension that knotted her shoulders and soured her stomach. The last thing she needed was for Evenna to think she was going mad.
Or to
be
going mad
.

“Oh.” Evenna fingered one of the tattered portraits. “What is this?”

“What?”

“Someone's … fed the portraits. Or tried to.” She turned one of the portraits toward Asharre. A grainy daub of blood smudged the face's lips, dripping thickly down the ripped canvas. It had been done after the picture was torn; both the painted and the bare sides of the canvas were soaked in the sludge.

You will die here
. The portrait's blood-smeared lips did not move—of course they didn't; they couldn't—but Asharre heard the words clearly. She felt its gaze drill into her.
You will die here, and we will feast, we will feed, and we will live again
.

The other portraits took up the chant.
We will feast, we will feed
. Wisps of shadow stretched from the rips in their painted faces and the black blots of their mouths,
reaching toward the living women in their midst.
We will live again
.

Asharre stumbled away, raising her sword defensively. She put her back to the wall, framing herself between two windows so that their weak spills of sunlight kept the hungry dark at bay.

Evenna had not moved. “What's the matter?” she asked, her eyes wide and white with fear. She clutched the cudgel like a talisman. “Why do you look like that?”

Asharre shook her head, unable to force any sound past the knot of terror in her throat. The shadows were taking on greater definition as they reached farther into the gallery. Some had grasping talons; others stretched into mouths, wide and thin and fringed with splintery obsidian teeth. They slithered toward the Illuminer, who stood blind and defenseless in their midst. The portrait in her hands was laughing, its voice a dissonant jangle of glee.

They aren't real
, she told herself.
They
can't
be real. Pictures don't laugh. Shadows don't hunt. This is nothing but madness—some Maolite trap of the mind
. But she could not deny what her eyes were seeing, and she couldn't stand by as the fanged tendrils closed on Evenna. Cursing, Asharre attacked.

To her astonishment, her sword bit in. What it struck was not quite solid—but neither was it empty air.
Something
recoiled from the steel and shrieked, high and shrill as a glazier's saw on glass. More tendrils came at her as the wounded one flinched away. They snaked in from all sides, darting and flickering, trapping her in a vortex of swirling darkness.

Asharre fought desperately, her
caractan
a blur. Her sword cut through the shadows and left them thrashing on the floor. Yet there were always more, far more than she
could stop. They bit at her legs, clawed at her sides, tore at her shoulders. Blood streamed from the wounds, spattering the floor as freely as her sweat.

The sight of it snapped Evenna out of her confusion. Clasping her sunburst medallion, she lifted the golden emblem into a shaft of sunlight and chanted. The incantation was familiar to Asharre—it was the same one she had used to make a dome of light in the
maelgloth
-besieged temple—but its results were not.

Instead of creating light, Evenna's prayer splintered it. The watery sunlight falling through the garden windows intensified to diamond whiteness, steadied, and burst into the shadows like a thicket of glowing lances. The creatures in the darkness shrieked and died as the holy fire stabbed their half-real bodies. And they
were
creatures, not just the claw-tipped tentacles or gnashing mouths that Asharre saw before the light struck them.

One fell at her feet, spasming. A sunbeam had burned a fist-size hole through its chest. The monstrosity had the size and shape of a man, though its head and hands were far too large and the skin over its skull was webbed like a frog's feet. Pustules raddled the spaces between its ribs, and its mouth was a wide, grinning gash that slashed from ear to ear.

Its entire body, and those of all the other shadow creatures that lay dead or dying around it, was made of wet black grit. Even as the women stared at them, the bodies dried out and dissipated into grains of black sand. Moments after Evenna's spell faded, nothing was left of their assailants. Only the scratches and bites on Asharre's body proved the attack had been real.

“You're hurt,” Evenna said.

“Not badly.” Asharre sheathed her sword and wiped
her palms. She tied strips of cloth around the worst of her scratches and banded her wrists so that blood would not spill over her hands. It took several tries; her hands were shaking badly. “These wounds are nothing. Save your spells.”

It would have been better to wash the cuts, but they had no time for that. She wouldn't take blood poisoning in the next few hours. Asharre shouldered her pack again. “What did you do?”

“I don't know.” Evenna fingered her medallion, glancing uneasily at the portraits. “That was how my goddess chose to answer my prayer. It was nothing I willed.”

“Then trust to her wisdom,” Asharre said. “Perhaps it was not oathbreaking.
Ghaole
do not live, and these things of dirt and shadow were deader than
ghaole
. If they were not alive, it was no sin to destroy them.”

“What were they?”

The
sigrir
shrugged, feigning a nonchalance she didn't feel. “Dead.”

“I suppose that's what matters.” Evenna followed as Asharre resumed her exploration. The gallery ended in another debris-strewn room. A staircase spiraled into the musty gloom, its steps worn gray in the middle by decades' use. To the left was an archway of sea green stone carved into flowers and vines around rose-braided wheels.

The stairs seemed less dusty and more recently used, so Asharre went there. Ascending, she found a servants' hall. These rooms were cleaner than those below: their floors were swept, their windows washed, chamber pots and basins scavenged to suit their occupants' needs. But they were just as empty.

The smell of a goodwife's sachets, lavender and lemon balm, lingered in one. Another held a box of toys and a
leash of red-and-blue leather, braided by a childish hand to fit one of the little dogs eviscerated in the kitchen. All were painfully tidy, with only the slight shabbiness of their furnishings to show that anyone had lived inside.

There was nothing in these rooms for her. Asharre knew that even before she opened the doors. They felt wrong: stale, empty, abandoned to dust and fruitless hopes of safety.

But what she sought was nearby. She was certain of it: Aurandane was close. The air was heavy with its presence. Magic crackled along her skin like the tingle of an impending storm on a hot, dry day. The fog that had swamped her thoughts for days was lifting, and in its place was a diamond clarity that Asharre had never felt before. This was the answer to their quest.

The sensation became stronger as she reached the end of the hall. She rested a hand flat on the last door. A faint breath of carrion came from the other side, but Asharre hardly noticed it. The sword was
here
. She felt its power thrumming through the thin gray wood. Trembling with anticipation, she pushed the door open.

The solaros lay rotting on a death-stained bed. His hands were folded atop his chest, the chain of a sun medallion woven through his waxy fingers. Unkempt stubble covered his cheeks; veins spidered green down the side of his neck, vanishing into the collar of his stiff yellow robes. The cold had slowed the body's decay, but his chest was puffed with foulness. Two small bottles of dark glass rested by the foot of his bed, both empty. The lip of one was stained with the final, fatal residue of its contents.

She did not see a sword. A wave of anger, hot and unexpected, rose in her chest and made her clench her blistered hand. Aurandane
was
here. Somewhere. It had to be.

A slip of paper rested under the solaros' medallion. Asharre had overlooked it in her haste and frustration, but Evenna worked it carefully from the man's fingers. The writing was larger and clumsier than that in the solaros' diary, and it stumbled rightward down the page as if his hand had grown heavier with every letter.

“All it says is ‘Forgive me. Hope baited the snare,'” Evenna said. She put the note down and peered at the dead man's lips, then at the empty bottles by his bed. “He might have wanted to write something else, but the poison caught up with him first. Two bottles of dreamflower extract. I'm surprised he stayed conscious long enough to finish the second one.”

“He had the sword,” Asharre said. She threw open the trunk at the foot of his bed, but all it held was a heap of old clothes—moth eaten and crumbling, not even the priest's—and another handful of clinking, poison-filled bottles.

“Yet he stayed mad, and he died.” Evenna rubbed her temples. Pain wrinkled her forehead. “What does it
mean
? The answer's there, right at my fingertips, but I can't think. He came to Shadefell. He found the sword. Then he … drank enough dreamflower extract to kill an ox, wrote a nonsensical note, and died? Why?”

“Because he was weak.” Asharre gave up on the trunk and went back to the middle of the room. Evenna looked startled by her vehemence, but the
sigrir
pretended not to notice. To have hope, to have a
weapon
, and to choose death instead of a fight … that was pure, contemptible weakness. She would make no such mistake.

But why do we need a weapon when we came here for a cure?

She dismissed the question as soon as it came. Of course they needed a weapon. The attack in the gallery had proved
that. This place was infested with monsters and demons, and Aurandane would defeat them. Then they could find a cure, if the sword itself was not one.

Standing in the center of the room, Asharre held her hands out at her sides and inhaled slowly, centering her thoughts as the dream-Falcien had taught her. It felt ridiculous, but he had sworn that it would work, and she had nothing else to try. The
sigrir
focused on her need, letting her consciousness flow outward, seeking, from that one command.
Find the sword
.

She opened her eyes. Her gaze drifted down from the bed and the corpse, past the clothes she had scattered on the floor, to the floorboards themselves. The cracks between the boards fascinated her. There was a secret significance to them, a purpose to the lattice of crooked black lines between the planks. As she watched, the darkness between them rippled and flowed out of the cracks, spreading into a slow spiral on the floor.

“What are you staring at?” Evenna asked.

Asharre did not answer. Her eyes stung with the strain of keeping them open so long, but she
had
to know what the shape would be, and blinking would ruin it all. She could not blink; she dared not speak. She had to hold the magic.

The wavering lines that had been floor cracks crept up the wall, pulling themselves along like climbing caterpillars. They stretched and dripped into a symbol Asharre knew: the sunburst Falcien had shown her, drawn in wet black shadow. Four over four. Their sign of salvation.

“It is in the wall,” she said. The vision disappeared as soon as she moved, but Asharre had what she needed. She felt along the wall where she'd seen the sunburst, and when one of the boards wiggled loose, she pulled it out.

Aurandane waited in the space between the walls. A net of tattered strings cocooned the sword, and it was wrapped in an old yellow robe, but Asharre recognized the long, slim silhouette. She reached in, brushing aside the strings, and too late froze as the memory of Falcien's death flashed before her. Strings then, too, snapping and loosing black death.

But these were already broken, and they threw no quarrels at her. They had none to throw. As she peered into the hiding hole, Asharre saw that the strings were, indeed, part of a trap … but they were linked to sun medallions on bent-back sticks, not crossbows, and both sticks and strings were broken. Corroded. The sticks were dry and brittle, the strings brown and frayed, though they could only be a few days old if the solaros had set them.
More than time has touched them
.

Why should that surprise her, though? Magic had guided her to Aurandane; magic had cleared her path. She closed her hand around the steel and pulled it out, shaking off its wrappings.

Aurandane was a thing of beauty. It was heavier than she'd expected, more like her own
caractan
than the longswords that the Sun Knights favored. Hilt and scabbard were engraved with winding prayers in a tongue she did not know. The blade was steel edged with some brighter metal, white as new silver, and unmarked save for a thin fuller that ran along two-thirds of its length. A sky blue spinel, tiny as a teardrop, shone on its pommel. Hints of lavender and dusky rose twinkled in its facets, the color of the heavens at the first kiss of dawn.