Heaven's Needle (46 page)

“Well, it's a good thing we've got you to rely on,” Bitharn muttered, shouldering her bow. Her lantern had been destroyed when she hit the wall, but Kelland's had survived the fight. She lit it and took the lead.

Past the shattered labyrinth was a small tunnel dug crookedly into the earth. Iron-grated cells gaped along both sides and in pits pocking the floor. Each held sprawled corpses, sometimes two or three to a cell. All wore the rough homespun of farmers or miners. Men and women alike had shaved heads, each one crowned with four blisters over four. Bitharn thought some of them might have been in the party that killed and ate the boy on Devils' Ridge, but the corpses looked so much alike that she couldn't be sure.

None had any wounds she could see, but they were dead just the same. “How?” she wondered aloud.

“Soul-drained,” Malentir answered. He spared barely a glance for the dead, striding past their cells toward the tunnel's end. “For the Mad God to bring so much of his presence into the world, he needed power. He took it by consuming their souls … whatever was left of them. If his need was great enough that he devoured these wretches, this may be easier than I had thought.”

The smell of sulfur grew stronger as Bitharn followed the Thorn. There were other smells too: stale urine, unwashed bodies, rotting food. Something had lived down here. Something other than the miners, she hoped.

The flicker of her lantern light sent phantoms dancing along the tunnel walls. The same phantoms that had haunted the smooth walls of the pit as they descended,
Bitharn thought. They'd banished those, but the apparitions lingered here. A premonition of evil prickled at the back of her neck. She eyed the corpses in their cells, touching the hilt of her knife as she hurried past. It was such a small weapon, so close to useless, and it was all she had left.

Beyond the cells was another open archway, smooth and glossy black, as everything was down here. Runes were carved around it in a ring. They weren't in any language Bitharn knew, and they seemed to swim and shift when she looked at them, so after the first glance she kept her eyes away. Maol's magic might have lost its hosts, but it still lurked in this blood-soaked earth.

The room beyond the archway was dominated by a dais of black-flecked granite. On it sat a great tangled table that looked like a charred bramble bush or some undersea creature petrified in obsidian. Spikes and chains wrapped around the table in chaotic patterns, too unevenly spaced to be restraints. A cloak of dust coated the table and masked the faces of the onyx gargoyles that squatted at its base.

Kelland drew a sun sign over his chest. “The Rosewayns' altar.”

“Once. It served another purpose more recently.” Malentir approached the altar, his black eyes lit with macabre curiosity. The Thorn hooked a finger around the chains, following their course, and bent one of the table's twisted arms up for closer examination. The arms were jointed and eerily flexible; the piece of obsidian moved almost like a human limb. “There is blood on this one, and less dust. Gethel modified it to suit his needs. Here and here. But why—aah. Of course.”

“What?” Bitharn peered at the chains from the doorway, unwilling to set foot in that room.

“The price of his godless magic.” The Thorn raised the
table's arm higher so they could see it. A cuff was crudely affixed to the stone. It was made to bind a human's arm to the table's, and it had a slight backward angle that would force a captive's hand into the shallow cup behind it.

That cup was too small to hold an adult's hand. Bitharn recoiled. “He was sacrificing children?”

“Using. Not sacrificing. It would have done him no good if they died too quickly.” The Thorn moved out of the lantern's reach, vanishing into the darkness on the far side of the altar. “His knives are here. Knives, and the blackfire dust his creatures brought up from Duradh Mal. This is where his shapers bled, awakening the spirit in the dust so that it could be formed into weapons.”

Bitharn glanced at Kelland. When the knight stayed silent, she looked back to the Thorn. “Shapers?”

“Come and see. There is no more danger in the altar than anywhere else in this accursed place.”

Reluctantly she entered the altar chamber, clutching her lantern. Whispery hisses surrounded her as she crossed the threshold. Tiny faces—the hungry, bloodless reflections of creatures not there—swam up from the obsidian table's depths to gape at her. The gargoyles at the altar's feet gurgled quiet laughter, and their breath left a clammy whiff of decay in the air. The sounds, and the sensations, died when Kelland walked in. He'd drawn into his exhausted reserves to call forth a fingerflame of holy light, and its radiance seemed to quell whatever restless phantoms lingered.

Bitharn took small comfort in that. Whether her perceptions were madness or truth, they were brought by the hand of Maol. And there was another doorway on the other side of the chamber, so they still had farther to go.

Three bone knives hung from hooks on the far side of
the altar. Two boxes of coarse black grit rested under them, and a third was filled with lumpy pebbles the size of quail eggs. The pebbles had ridges that reminded Bitharn of her dismal attempts to make piecrusts as a child. She'd never been able to work the dough well; she always squeezed it too hard, breaking it into chunky crumbs that showed the lines of her fingers.

“This was the shapers' work? Pressing blackfire dust into balls with their hands?”

“With their hands and their blood, on the Mad God's altar. Yes.” Malentir looked more haggard than he had in the labyrinth; the veins stood blue on the backs of his hands, and the shadows under his eyes had spread until his face looked like a skull's. But his voice did not quaver. “Bone and blood awaken its magic. That was one of the reasons his creatures used tools of bone in Duradh Mal, and that is what he did here. He cut the children's hands and had them pack the dust between their bleeding palms, and so the stones were made. Gethel might not have understood the power he tapped, but
something
guided him toward the proper rites.”

Kelland had been peering through the archway past the altar while they spoke. “Something's alive in there. Something human,” he said abruptly, striding from the chamber.

Bitharn hurried after him, gripping her knife. A kernel of anger had begun to burn through her fog of fear and fatigue, but that nascent rage froze as she came to the doorway. Sniffling sobs drifted through it, and the woeful familiarity of the sound chilled her bones.

A child's suffering had been used to bait them into a trap once before, outside Tarne Crossing. There would be no rescue if they fell victim to one here. Maol, unlike the Thorns, had no reason to show them mercy.

Cautiously Bitharn crept forward. Kelland's shoulder
blocked some of her view, but she saw a short hall of black stone that ended in another archway. This one, however, was not empty as the previous doorways had been. Obsidian carvings wrapped around its frame in a serpentine tangle. Each of its black tendrils was an arm, and each one ended in a bony hand that reached toward them, its claw-tipped fingers outstretched. No door of wood or stone barred the entrance, but the air crackled with malign power, as palpable as that of the curtain of sunlight that held prisoners in Heaven's Needle.

On the other side, something moved.

“Thorn!” Kelland shouted. “Remove this ward.”

Malentir came down slowly, tapping Aurandane before him like an old, blind man with his cane. He brushed past Bitharn in a swirl of tattered robes and unsettling fragrance; he had reapplied the scent of amber and almonds to ward off Shadefell's stenches.

“Are you certain that is what you want?” he asked. “They are tainted, these creatures. Dangerous.”

“They're
human
. I can save them. Remove the ward.”

The Thornlord did not move at once. “Some of them,” he said, studying the flow of the obsidian carvings around the doorway, “will have to die. I can unravel this spell, if that is what you want. It is crude, and much of its strength died with Gethel. But if I do that, I will not have the strength to take us all from this place. I certainly will not be able to carry all the survivors along my Lady's path. Not without their bloodprice. Are you willing to pay that?”

Kelland's jaw clenched. The tiny flame hovering over his hand flared white. But he nodded.

Malentir drew his ivory stiletto and went to the tangle of hands. “Then move back. I cannot work with you
holding that flame so close.” The Sun Knight retreated, his light dimming with distance, and the Thorn stabbed at the archway's outstretched palms. He pierced each one precisely in the center, striking clean through their hands as if the obsidian were living flesh. The hands clenched into fists, grasping futilely at the ivory blade, and dissolved into black sand.

White cores of bone stood revealed as they crumbled, like the ephemeral skeletons of burning leaves; then those, too, broke apart. Bitharn had a glimpse of the monstrosity that lay around the doorway: a spell-forged creation of dismembered arms, grasping for the last memory of life left to them … but, mercifully, the vision dissipated as its bones did. She closed her eyes to forget.

“It is clear,” the Thornlord said, stepping aside. He closed his eyes, tilting his head back and struggling to breathe. “Go.”

Bitharn did, dreading what she might find. Near the entrance she saw dried human feces and well-gnawed bones. She took another step, pushing the darkness away.

Half a hundred eyes stared back at her. Children, gray and gaunt, huddled in the lightless room. Most were bald, and all were naked or near it, clad in rags as filthy as their skin. The whites of their eyes were muddy yellow, their pupils wide and black, their teeth eroded to gray mush … but they were human.

All their hands were scarred. Wounds crisscrossed their palms, raw red lines scored over half-healed ones in a palimpsest of pain. Dark grit was embedded in the cuts, and Bitharn could see the children's bones, black under their pallid flesh.

Some warbled softly to themselves in singsong cant. One scrawny boy cradled his bent head in the crook of his
elbow, swinging it back and forth. A girl had peeled the lips off all around her mouth, leaving her teeth exposed in a monstrous grin. She picked at the remains, but the torn gray flesh didn't bleed. Most of the children just stared at Bitharn, glassy-eyed and apathetic.

At the wavering shore between light and shadow, a woman's boot stuck out. Brass nails glinted in the sole. The heads were worn from long walking, but a sunburst showed on each one. Bitharn's breath stopped. Cobblers in Cailan used those nails, promising the faithful that such boots would help them “walk in the Lady's light” and keep them in good fortune.

“Oh, no,” Bitharn whispered.

She'd found Evenna and Asharre. They were alive. Alive, and not
maelgloth
… but that was the best she could say for them. Biting her cheek to keep from crying, Bitharn raised her lantern over them.

Evenna's beauty was gone. She'd raked the lower half of her face to rags. It looked like a horrid Festelle mask, all curls of twisted leather around a seeping pit of a mouth. Above her cheekbones, her face was untouched except for a sooty smudge on her brow. A mote of blood dotted the tip of her nose.

The Illuminer's hands lay motionless in her lap. Her nails were caked with blood and pink strips of skin. She'd done this to herself … and now she sat serenely uncaring, her attention fixed on empty space. Bitharn turned away, unable to bear the sight.

Asharre wasn't maimed, but there was such a terrible despair in her eyes that it was almost easier to look at Evenna. Although the
sigrir
was head and shoulders taller than the black-haired Illuminer, she slumped so low against the wall that they seemed to be of equal height. Behind its wall of
ritual scars, her face was dully hopeless. Grease and cinders caked her short ice blonde hair. Her brow, too, was stained with dried mud, and there was a ring of wilted blisters under that. Four over four, Bitharn saw with a chill.

“I betrayed them,” Asharre mumbled. The words had the sound of rote repetition, their meanings long worn away. Cottony blackness coated her tongue. More stained the palms of her hands and the pads of her fingers, creeping up her wrists like a fungus. “I failed. I betrayed them.”

“It wasn't your doing,” Bitharn said. “Gethel and his blackfire dust corrupted these people, not you.”

“It was my failure.” Asharre turned her face to the wall and raised a black-stained palm to thrust their intrusions away. “Maol knew I was the weak one. He knew. Leave me to my failure.
Leave me
.”

“We do need deaths,” Malentir said, toying with his ivory knife and looking over the huddled figures with evident amusement. Neither the filth nor the misery of the children in the pit seemed to touch him; if anything, he seemed stronger in the presence of their pain. His own weariness receded as he stood there, watching.

“Not hers,” Kelland said.

“Then whose, knight? Please choose quickly. Gethel is dead, and we have found your so-precious victims, so our work is finished in this place. I have no wish to linger. Maol's presence is still strong here, and the taint I took from Aurandane spreads deeper by the moment. Wait long enough, and we may well rebuild that labyrinth with our own bones, for all our ‘victory' in battle.”

“How many deaths do you need?” Bitharn asked.

“For us? One. For all these poor useless souls …” He gave the room's hollow-eyed occupants a considering look. “There is likely to be some interference with my prayer to
keep us from escaping, and I am weaker than I was. So let us say five. These creatures are dull minded, and their ability to feel pain is lessened, but five should suffice.”

Bitharn nodded. She pointed out four of the unmoving ones and the girl with the torn lips, quickly, before Kelland could do or say anything. The Sun Knight couldn't choose some and condemn others—not without committing a grievous sin—but
she
could. And they had no other way out.