Heaven's Needle Page 27

“What have you done?” Bitharn whispered.

  “You see the world as the ghaole do,” Malentir answered. “They need no light, sense the living, and are able to recognize who is a threat—and who is their master.”

  “How long will it last?” Kelland’s hand came to rest on his sunburst medallion, and by that Bitharn knew he liked this strange vision no better than she did.

  “Until dawn. We have time, but that hardly means we should waste it. We are near the Gate of Despair, if my memories do not mislead me. North and east, the halls will take us back to the Shardfield or to the sentinel towers over Spearbridge. West will take us to the towers that watch over Carden Vale. South are the halls leading to the dungeons.”

  “Where do we need to go?” Bitharn asked.

  It was Kelland who answered, pointing his sword down the hallway. “That way. Down to the heart of the mountain. I can feel it burning.”

  “Yes. The trail of Gethel’s magic leads down.” Malentir strode to the front and turned left when the corridors branched. “Through the Gate of Despair.”

  “Picturesque name,” Bitharn muttered. “Why is it called that?”

  “Because it leads to the dungeons.” Kelland fell in behind the Thornlord, letting Bitharn guard their rear. “Every Baozite fortress has one. Ang’arta’s is aptly named.”

  He would know. Bitharn suppressed a wince and followed.

  The halls loomed black and empty around them. Two men could have ridden abreast down the halls of Ang’duradh, and once there would have been ten thousand soldiers to watch them go. Their trophies hung on the walls: banners from noble houses whose names no loremaster remembered, tapestries depicting nameless battles on forgotten fields. The skulls of a thousand heroes dangled overhead, speared upon their own weapons and worked into grisly chandeliers. Soft black dust covered everything.

  “This will all have to be burned when the Baozites retake it,” Kelland said as they walked, their steps echoing in the stillness. “Maol’s presence permeates it all.”

  “Perhaps.” Malentir did not look back. “Aedhras the Golden has little interest in anyone’s victories but his own, so he might not weep to see all this burned. But if he wants it preserved, it will be … ghastly and tasteless as it is.”

  “You don’t approve?”

  “Whether I approve counts for nothing. My mistress adores the man; anything he desires, she will do, and I obey her commands.”

  “That can’t be easy.”

  “Duty is never easy, knight. Hadn’t you noticed?”

  They went on in gloom and silence. Even if there was no trail Bitharn’s eyes could follow, the Thornlord seemed to know his path. He led them down crooked stairs and pillared halls, stopping at last before an oaken door that towered twice Bitharn’s height. An iron gargoyle snarled at its center. Rust hung a wavering beard from the gargoyle’s chin, but the iron and wood had held strong through the centuries.

  The lock had not. Fragments of it, ruptured by a tightly focused explosion, lay scattered across the floor. Two bodies sprawled among them: men in miners’ clothes, with tool harnesses over their shoulders and water bags at their belts. They looked like they’d been savaged by a beast with a bear’s height and a lion’s claws. Fearsome teeth had torn out one’s throat. Both bodies were desiccated, like those of the drowned children Bitharn had found in Carden Vale, their lips pulled back in yellowed grins.

  Hunger knotted a fist in her belly at the sight of the bodies. Bitharn folded her arms, pressing on her stomach to quell the hunger and the nausea that came with it. It was just a part of whatever enchantment gave her the ghaole-sight, she told herself; it had nothing to do with her passage through the perethil. She wasn’t sure that was much better, but at least that way she could hope the desire to feast on corpses would end when the Thornlord’s spell did.

  She forced herself to study the bodies dispassionately. The dead men had no defensive wounds, yet their tool harnesses were empty. Where had their weapons gone? Had their killer looted them? How, if it was a beast? Bitharn bent closer, trying to make sense of the scene.

  She couldn’t. The ghaole-sight defeated her. The flickering dance of silver light over black made it impossible for her to find the details that could tell the corpses’ story.

  A lantern had fallen near one man’s outflung hand, leaving a greasy stain on the floor. Not all its oil had spilled, however; some gleamed in the dented reservoir. By its light, she’d be able to see what had killed these men, and maybe learn whether it was still in the fortress …

  “Burn nothing here,” Malentir snarled, kicking the lantern away. It clanged against the wall. “I had hoped you were listening the first time I said that, but evidently you’re a slow learner. Much slower and you’ll be a dead one. Did you learn nothing at the pyre? Blackfire spreads its corruption through smoke. That lantern is a trap for curious fools like you.”

  “I only wanted to find out what killed them,” Bitharn said lamely. She waved at her eyes. “I can’t read the tracks like this.”

  “Then you should have asked. In theory we are working together. If you cannot trust me enough to ask something that simple, this alliance is doomed and I might as well slit my wrists now.” Malentir exhaled audibly and ran a hand through his striped hair. “I did not give you ghaole-sight because I had nothing better to do with my time. There are other ways to learn what you wanted to know.”

  Ways that leave me dependent on what you tell me. Bitharn bit her tongue. Instead she said: “Fine. How did they die?”

  He pointed at the gargoyle door with a wire-circleted hand. “This is the Gate of Despair. It was the last seal I left intact. Obviously Gethel found a way to open it.”

  “Celestian magic didn’t kill these men,” Bitharn said.

  “Truly, your perceptiveness never ceases to amaze.”

  Nettled, Bitharn narrowed her eyes. “If sunfire didn’t kill them, what did?”

  “Where else have you seen your goddess’ magic set awry?”

  “Are you suggesting the seal was corrupted the same way the perethil was? Even if that’s so—even if that’s possible—how could it have done this? Why would it have done this? Why tear apart two men and not all of them?”

  “Because these two still were men, and Gethel was not. I don’t know whether he was that far gone before he came to Duradh Mal or if it was the magic lurking in these halls that finally claimed him. For the sake of my pride, I will hope for the latter; it would be altogether too embarrassing to think I overlooked a soul that tainted. Either way, Maol recognized him for what he was and spared him so that he might spread the Mad God’s evil through the world. These two”—he nudged a corpse’s lolling head with his boot—“were ordinary, and easily expendable to lay a trap for whoever might come later.”

  “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. No
w, 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 th
orns 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.