HEAVEN'S NEEDLE.

Liane Merciel.

This one's for Nathan, who first told me how to fix it, and Peter, who walked the dog while I did the fixing.

PROLOGUE.

SUMMER 1217.

The stench of river mud was suffocating. River mud and coal smoke: the twin perfumes of Carden Vale.

Corban clapped his sleeve over his nose and breathed shallowly through his mouth as he edged away from the waterside and down a crooked alley, following close on his guide's heels. The cloth did little to filter the smell, but that wasn't the point; the purpose of the gesture was not to relieve Corban's nose, but to hide his face. Few knew him here, but there was no call to be careless.

Centuries past, this had been a proud town. The Baozites who'd built the fortress overshadowing Carden Vale had needed a river port to service the barges that carried grain from the farmlands and brought back coal and iron from the mountains. They had designed one unrivaled in its age. Under Ang'duradh's rule, caravans had climbed the high passes and braved the terrors of Spearbridge to buy rare herbs and furs from Carden Vale. Gull-prowed ships and flat-bottomed barges had crowded the sleek white wharves.

That grandeur was long gone. The fortress stood empty, its cavernous halls filled with dust and silence. The port below it had shrunk to a handful of creaking barges that lumbered through the silt-clogged wharves like dying beasts. Mud piled up between the piers, reeking of the town's refuse.

He should have sewn a satchet in his sleeve. The stench was worst at this time of year, after a long summer's stew, and there was no relief in sight. If Gethel had truly done as he'd promised, there would be worse smells before the day's work was done.

The stooped man in front of him seemed oblivious to the filthy-smelling streets. The hem of his robe dragged through a puddle of mud and drunkard's vomit, but he never glanced down. It took more than merely human foulnesses to disturb Gethel these days. The man didn't look well, and it had Corban worried. Human eyes shouldn't stare so blindly; human voices shouldn't sound so dull. Mountain air would do him a world of good, or perhaps a trip east to take the waters at Dragonsblood Spring. A leave to rest.

But not until the work was done. Not until then.

"How much farther?" Corban muttered as Gethel led him down yet another stinking alley. He thought his eyes might actually be watering. A fat, evil-looking rat stared at him from the shadows, its whiskers twitching, and then scurried into the cracked daub at the base of a nearby wall.

"Only in here." Gethel stooped by the door of the house where the rat had gone. No lock or bar secured its weather-warped planks.

Spreading his hands across the dry gray wood, Gethel pushed inward, mumbling slurred syllables that Corban supposed were meant to sound like magic. A blue spark jumped from his fingertips and sizzled as it struck the wood. It might have been impressive if Corban hadn't spotted the man pinching smokepowder from a sleeve pouch as he bent to the door.

Gethel had no real magic. None of the self-proclaimed wizards of the Fourfold House did. What they had were tricks and illusions: smokepowder, sleight of hand, a bit of alchemy. Real magic, of the sort that Celestia's Blessed or the Thorns of Ang'arta commanded, was far beyond such pretenders.

But even a pretender could stumble upon power, and might be mad enough to seize it when a sensible man would have stepped back. Gethel, blinded by his belief that magic could be mastered without bowing to the gods, didn't have the wisdom to be wary. He had no idea what he'd found.

Corban had no such delusions. He knew what it was. In part, at least. And he knew, too, that there was no reason to share the truth with Gethel. Let the man believe what he wanted. It kept him working.

Gathering his cloak, Corban bowed his head to the low-hanging lintel and followed Gethel into the darkness beyond. A stink of stale urine intensified and then receded as he passed the threshold. There were no windows. Once the door closed behind him, Corban could see nothing but the lines of its planks against weak gray light. He could hear Gethel ahead, moving with the ease of a cat in the dark, and faint whimpers from somewhere past that, but he could see neither man nor moaner.

"Give me a light," Corban rasped, and then stopped, surprised by the tension he heard in his own voice. He wasn't afraid. Not of poor half-mad Gethel, the failed wizard who couldn't pinch smokepowder without getting caught. Not of him.

But of what he had found, what he had made a that, if Gethel had truly managed to awaken its power, was something a wiseman would not want to stumble upon in the dark.

Another spark jumped in the gloom. This time it landed on the wick of a misshapen candle in a stained clay dish. A rancid smell drifted from the candle as it burned, reminiscent of soured lard. Corban wrinkled his nose. That wasn't bad tallow; that was a dead man's candle, rendered from the fat of a hanged criminal. Idiots playing at necromancy used them, claiming that their light revealed truths hidden from the sun.

"Are you ready?" Gethel asked, lifting the candle. Under its smoky glow he seemed more demon than human. Gethel had never been plump, but the wizard had become positively cadaverous since the last time Corban had seen him. His skin sagged loose over bone; shadows seamed his face, and his eyes shone unnaturally bright in their sockets. Most of his hair had fallen out, and what was left straggled to his shoulders in colorless clumps. He looked like a walking corpsea"and yet in this place, by the light of that candle, there was a coiled vitality to him that made Corban almost afraid.

Obsession. That was the look Gethel had: of a man in the throes of obsession, readying to return to the mistress who had consumed his soul.

"I'm ready," Corban said, clearing the tightness from his throat.

"This way." The candle bobbed in his hand as the gaunt man led him to the back of the hovel. There were two rooms inside, the second smaller than the first and separated from it by a curtain of stained sackcloth. The floor ended abruptly at that curtain; Corban stumbled as his foot tried to find purchase on air. Gethel had excavated the second room so that its floor was a full arm's length lower than the hard-packed dirt on the other side. Moisture seeped down, leaving wet scars in the walls.

"I needed to keep the smoke from escaping," Gethel said, evidently as explanation, although he never glanced back.

Corban looked up. There was no smoke hole, no chimney. No hearth, either, in the glimpses of wall that the candle gave him. "Smoke rises."

"Blackfire smoke sinks." And, indeed, it seemed that a gritty black glitter clung to the dirt, like a residue of sea foam left on the strand. Corban had little time to puzzle over that, though, for Gethel had reached the hovel's far corner and his light fell on the face of a whimpering man who crouched there.

The man was a beggar. That much was plain from his tattered breeches and sparse, grimy beard. Even under candlelight, his nose was red and webbed with broken veins. A drunk, and likely feebleminded; there was no sense to his moanings, and he clutched his head in trembling hands, as if trying to hold his thoughts together. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but Corban could not place it. Likely he just resembled some other beggar; poverty crushed all of them into the same miserable mold.

Corban's lip curled in disdain. "This is your great success? You told me you'd unlocked the secrets of blackfire, found a way to harness its power at lasta"and you show me a wretched old drunk?"

"What? Oh. No." Gethel set his candle down on a nearby crate and fished through its straw, heedless of how easily it might catch fire. "I've done as I promised. Belbas here is simply going to help me prove it."

"Belbas? Apprentice Belbas? Your sworn servant?"

The beggar groaned weakly, as if Corban's words stirred some fragment of memory from the dark mire of his thoughts, but if that truly was his name, he did not answer to it. Gethel shrugged without lifting his head from the crate. "Oaths mean so little in this day and age. He was going to betray me. But now a now he will be a help. Yes."

"What have you done?" Corban breathed. He'd met Gethel's apprentice only a few times, but he knew the boy was bound to secrecy in exchange for being taught the master's magic. The details of the Fourfold House's workings were fuzzy to Corban, who had never set foot in that eccentric world and had no reason to learn its rules. The wizards hadn't any power beyond rites and oaths and other mystical trappings meant to fool the gullible into believing that they had secrets worth protecting. But the members of the Fourfold House believed their own foolishness wholeheartedly, and Corban could not shake the feeling that he stood witness to a betrayal greater than he could comprehend.

Perhaps he imagined things. Belbas had been a young man, while the wretch before him was old enough to be his grandfather. Inconceivable that they could be one and the same. Yet as Corban looked harder, he could see the remains of that proud youth in the beggar's dissipation. The flesh was sagging or swollen, the mind broken behind those unseeing eyes, but the bones were the same.

Puckered gaps ran down the boy's neck where his ceremonial tattoos had been carved out. His wounded flesh was pale and bloodless as chopped salt pork; the man who wore them might already have been so much meat, though he still drew breath.

Impossible. But there it was, sprawled before his feet.

Gethel straightened from the crate, holding a small crossbow and a pair of quarrels. The weapon glistened with packing grease; flecks of straw clung to the oiled wood and metal. Gethel loaded the weapon and hooked the strap around his foot, grunting as he tugged the crossbow upward. The trigger fell into place with a click, and Gethel offered the spare quarrel to Corban as he mopped the sheen from his brow.

Though the crossbow seemed smaller and lighter than most of its typea"at least in Corban's inexpert judgmenta"the quarrel was heavy and oddly balanced. Its head was swollen big as a cherry; he couldn't see how it was meant to fly. Although the quarrel ended in a sharp iron point, the rest of its tip was filigreed like jewelry. A pebble of gritty black sand glittered between the metal strands. Blackfire.

Corban held a fortune between two fingers a if the crazed charlatan was right. He reined in his rising excitement. He hadn't seen it work.

"As I promised," Gethel said. "You hold the proof in your hands."

"It seems an ungainly design." Corban turned the quarrel over and handed it back. He wiped the packing grease off on his cloak. "Does it fly? It surely can't bite very deep when it hits."

"It has no need to strike deep. It suffices to draw blood; the magic does the rest. Watch." Gethel took the candle's dish from the crate and set it down beside his strangely aged apprentice. A hunched creature scuttled away as the light approached: the rat from the alley. Belbas' hand was peppered with raw pink spots where it had gnawed at his unbleeding flesh. Yet the apprentice had never pulled back, never flinched; he seemed as insensible to that as he was to the rest of the world.

Gethel retreated from the candle, beckoning Corban to join him. He pulled back the sackcloth curtain and hoisted himself onto higher ground. "Best to be out of the smoke."

"Why?" Corban asked, following. "What happens?"

"Madness." Gethel leveled the crossbow across the room, sighting it toward the candle and then up. His hands were steadier than Corban would have believed possible; the weight of the weapon didn't seem to strain his bony arms at all.

There was no light beside them, and Corban couldn't see the gaunt man's expression. The end of the crossbow stood against the distant candle, though, and he saw where it aimed.

He folded his arms and said nothing. It wasn't his place. If the boy thought to betray their work, then this was for the best. And if not a it was still safer to be sure. Corban had invested far too much to risk a word breathed into the wrong ear.

Besides, he was curious.

The crossbow twanged. Its bolt took Belbas in the gut. The boy made no attempt to avoid it, and didn't cry as he was struck. He only sighed, almost gently, and folded forward with his chin slumped to his chest. As Corban had expected, the quarrel's clumsy design kept it from piercing deeply. Even at this short range, it hadn't sunk more than half its length into Belbas' stomach.

"Is that all?"

Gethel held up a finger. "Wait."

Perplexed, Corban looked back at the apprentice. Belbas drew two breaths, the second weaker than the first, as a dark wet stain spread through his rags.

On the third breath he exploded.

Fragments of gristle and bone spattered the walls as his rib cage tore itself apart. Hot blood, speckled with stinging grit, sprayed across Corban's face; he squeezed his eyes shut so it wouldn't blind him. When he opened them again, the wreckage of Belbas' corpse was thrown back in the corner, shrouded by foul-looking black smoke. Gore streaked the walls and dripped from the curtain, yet somehow the candle burned in its dish with barely a flicker to its flame. Its light was murky, but there was no doubting its steadiness amidst the devastation of what had once been a man.

Corban stared at the wreckage in disbelief. The possibilities dazed him more than the blast had. The force of it a no armor could withstand that. No man could survive it. And that had been a pebble no larger than his thumbnail. What might a larger chunk do?

What would a king pay to possess it? Gold? Land? Was there any limit to what he might ask? This was, at last, a weapon that ordinary rulers could use to hold back the Thorns of Ang'arta. Magic at their fingertips, with no need to rely on Blessed a and then, as others saw its power and were frightened, they, too, would come to him to beg their own arsenals. At any price.

He'd never dared dream, when he'd first found Gethel laboring in obscurity and had given the man a handful of silver to pursue his obsessions, that the prize would be so rich. Never. But now, it seemed, the world might lie open before him.

If he played his hand well.

"Blackfire stone wreaks great destruction upon our mortal flesh, yet it scarcely seems to touch anything else," Gethel murmured, sounding almost mournful. He hopped down from the earthen bank and waded into the smoke that pooled around the body. "Its properties are a peculiar. I have hardly begun cataloging them."

"I thought you said the smoke was to be avoided."

"It is," Gethel said, but he offered no further explanation. He stooped into the haze to retrieve the candle. Corban imagined that the smoke drifted up to greet the gaunt man as he knelt; he fancied that tendrils of it curled into Gethel's colorless hair, like the fingers of a lady drawing her lover down for a kiss.

A whiff of the smoke drifted toward him. It stank of sulfur and carrion, of dead things rotting in dark places. And yet a there was something almost recognizable within it, something that called to an old, dim memory. He breathed deeper, trying to place it, reaching for remembrance. It seemed important, somehowa"but it was gone.

Corban shook his head and wiped the blood from his face, taking care to use the inside of his cloak so it wouldn't show when he walked away. The reality of what he had seen was astonishing enough. No need to complicate it with figments of fancy.

"How many of these quarrels can you make?"

"The miners have struck a rich lode. There's no telling how much they might bring out. But my shapers a my shapers have become quite exhausted. If I had more of them, I should be able to work faster." Smoke swirled around Gethel's robes as he came back to the edge of the room. Corban stepped back, holding his breath.

He had nothing to fear from it, though. The smoke was the smell of triumph, of wealth coming to him after a life-time's waiting.

Corban let it fill his lungs. "What are their limitations?"

"The shapers'?"

"The quarrels'."

Gethel shrugged, setting his candle on the higher ground before clambering up to join it. Smoke roiled and fell from his clothing like water sliding off a swimmer's back. "I cannot yet say. The work is still very new; what you have seen today is only an early attempt. It wants perfecting. But it will be devastating when we are done. You have seen the power that lies within a tiny pebble. We have much more. Wet it with blood, and the fury of blackfire stone knows no limits."

"I'm glad to hear it. What do you need for shapers?"

"Small hands. Small hands are better for making the pebbles and placing them so deftly." Gethel tapped the unused quarrel's filigree tip. "Big hands cannot do such delicate work."

"You'll have them. What else?"

"Time. Only time."

"Time." Corban sucked the word through his teeth, along with a black skein of smoke. It wasn't rank at all, really. It was perfectly sweet. "Give me what you have, and I will get you time."

1.

SPRING 1218.

Night was falling under Heaven's Needle.

Bitharn rested her elbows on the windowsill and watched the world darken below. She stood near the pinnacle of the crystalline tower. Far beneath her, to the south, she could see the green hills and high walls of Cailan, and past that the rippling gleam of the sea. Above her was nothing but glass and sky.

The tower was a thing of beauty, rising from deep rose and violet at its base to swirl upward through honey and amber, lightening steadily until it reached the white brilliance of pure sunlight at its tip. Save for the sunburst that crowned it, Heaven's Needle was perfectly smooth, translucent as cloudlight through water. No human hands had built such glory; Celestia's Blessed had called it into being with their spells, weaving magic strong enough to turn sunlight to stone. The tower was older than Cailan, older than the kingdom of Calantyr, but younger by far than its purpose.

Heaven's Needle was a prison.

Not, of course, for ordinary prisoners. There were no thieves or murderers in the tower; the dungeons of Whitestone sufficed for those. Heaven's Needle was reserved for enemies of the faith, those too dangerous to be held by chains, too risky for the executioner's block. A few were souls that the Blessed thought not wholly beyond salvation, but most prisoners in the tower were there because they held secrets the Celestians needed, because they were politically sensitive, ora"most rarelya"because their bodies were such vessels of corrupt power that killing them would release the foulness held trapped in their flesh.

Bitharn hoped that the man she needed was one of the first group. She didn't want to think about what might happen if he were one of the last.

A candle burned on the sill before her, smelling of sweet spices: cinnamon and cloves, angel's kiss and nutmeg. As twilight claimed the towns and villages, she saw tiny buds of light blossom across the earth, echoing the faraway glow of her candle. For a short while they shimmered in the dusk, like will-o'-the-wisps glimpsed in blue fog, and then the night came in earnest and Bitharn could see nothing in the shadowed glass except the reflection of her own candle's flame, floating anchorless in the dark.

Across the room Versiel was watching her, though he made some pretense of reading the book in his lap. Concern creased his careworn face. Versiel had never looked young, even when he'd been a fuzz-cheeked boy of sixteen, and life had written a palimpsest of worry on his brow in the decade and a half since.

He'd have more lines before dawn.

Bitharn regretted that, but there was no way around it. One of mine for one of yours, the Spider had said, and Bitharn had taken that bargain.

The memory of that meeting was branded on her soul. It was a moonless night, far colder than this one, with the dregs of winter brittle in the air. She'd spent months scouring the underbellies of every city from Craghail to Cailan to find someone who could take her words to the Spider. Then she'd waited, terrified, to see what answer might come.

It was a summons. To Aluvair, city of towers, capital of Calantyr. Her homeland, as much as she'd ever had one. Long past midnight Bitharn sat alone on a marble bench outside the Temple of Silences, watching moonlight dance across the frost on the reflecting pool and trying to keep her legs from freezing on the chill stone. She'd begun to think the Spider wouldn't come at all. Then, between one breath and the next, the woman was there, wrapped in a fur softer and blacker than the starless sky. She'd stepped out of shadow without a sound, and her eyes had been infinitely dark, infinitely cold. The memory still made Bitharn shiver.

"One of mine for one of yours," the Spider said. "You have one of my students in Heaven's Needle. Bring him to Carden Vale on the second full moon after Greenseed, and you will have your knight returned."

"Unhurt." It was the only word Bitharn had been able to force past her frozen lips.