Why is that forbidden?

Was it forbidden?

Bysshelios kept his magic.

What did that mean, though? Had Bysshelios kept the faith, or betrayed it? He'd been a heretic, there was no question of that a but Kelland wasn't sure what the Byssheline Heresy meant for him. If anything.

He could ask the High Solaros when he returned to Cailan. If he lived to return. Here and now, he had more pressing concerns. Survival, and sanity.

Kelland brushed a stray lock of hair from Bitharn's neck and turned his face to the sky. He had to protect her in Shadefell. Against ironclaws, maelgloth, corruption, and madness a whatever was there, he had to keep her safe. That much, he knew to be clear and true.

That much, Kelland hoped as he slid into slumber, he could do.

At dawn they woke, prayed, and went downstairs to find the perethil's stars wheeled into a new formation. A pair of skeletal hands, hacked off at the wrist and bound together by filthy string, dangled from the jeweled handle. The bones were stained with rings of rust: they'd come from a prisoner in Duradh Mal.

"He kept a souvenir," Bitharn observed dryly while making a porridge of oats and apples. "At least this one's small, so it should burn faster. That's thoughtful."

"You're in a grim humor today."

"Yesterday I was in Duradh Mal. Tonight I'll be in Shadefell. I think I'm allowed a little grimness." Yet she remained in a determinedly light mood, avoiding any mention of the perethil or their destination until the westering sun turned the horizon to a lake of flame. Then Bitharn's cheer dimmed, and she stole anxious glances at the painting's stars while she gathered their belongings and counted her arrows.

Kelland spent the time reading and rereading the papers the Illuminers had left behind, trying to retrace the steps of their desperate search. Aurandane. They'd gone in search of the Sword of the Dawn a but how had they intended to find it? And what would have happened if they did? He looked at the poisoned perethil, remembering the gouges its smooth metal had scarred on a skeleton's hand, and shivered.

Malentir returned at sundown. He held the black scrapings from the maelgloth pit gingerly in one hand, disdain etched on every line of his features. He dropped the little bundle onto a table and moved away.

"You could have left it outside," Bitharn said, eyeing the pile.

"That would have been unwise. Better to suffer its presence a little while longer and allow your holy companion to destroy it." The Thornlord dipped a cup into a barrel of clean water and drank. "I have learned all that can be gleaned safely from that. I have no more use for it, and it should be destroyed. It is not safe to keep."

"Why?" Bitharn asked, at the same moment that Kelland said, "What is it?"

"The second question answers the first, so I will speak to that one," Malentir said. He refilled the cup, watching its ripples until they stilled.

"The physicians of the Khamul Rhayat," he said, "believed that a spirit of corruption caused disease, and that it reproduced in various humors depending on the nature of the illness. The bottled breath of a fevered man could carry his ailment to others; the black blood lanced from a plague victim's buboes carried that sickness' spirit; the flooding from a rice-water sufferer's bowels, the same. Every disease had a corruptive spirit, driven to carry its affliction to a new host and dying if it did not find one. Transferring the spirit to a new victim did not cure the old onea"indeed, this theory was of no use in healing anyonea"so the Rhayati physicians eventually turned their attentions elsewhere.

"In the west you have your Blessed, and few know of the Khamul Rhayat. But I found an echo of their teachings here." He gestured at the cloth-wrapped ball. "That is blackfire dust. It is the cause of the madness and misery we have seen; it is what destroyed Ang'duradh. It is much like the Rhayati spirit of corruptiona"except that it does not carry any mortal sickness, but the Mad God's blight on the soul. And it is no mere humor expelled from a sufferer's body, but that body entire, condensed and consumed until all that is left is the essence of madness tied by threads of flesh and bone."

"I don't understand," Bitharn said.

"Think of how charcoal is made. One begins with a great pile of wood under sod. A slow fire burns through the heapa"carefully, without too much air, so that it smolders without being allowed to break into flame. When it is finished, what is left is not truly wood, not anymore, but something closer to the combined essence of wood and fire. It has been transformed: it burns hotter, longer, with little smoke. There is less of it, but it has more power.

"Blackfire dust is like that, except it begins with human bodies and human souls instead of wood. Maol's power consumes them in a controlled burn, never bursting into its full fury. After death, its victims do not rot like the corpses of ordinary men, returning to earth and worms, but wither into the dust we saw in Duradh Mal. That dust is the essence of the Mad God's corruption in human flesh. Every speck of it is capable of spreading that blight. Breathe it as smoke, or let it touch one's blood, and it is more dangerous still.

"That is the curse of Duradh Mal. When Gethel broke the seals, the blackfire dust escaped. It seeped into the water and soaked into the earth, poisoning the valley. It may have spread faster when he brought the townspeople into those blighted halls, turning them into monsters. In Shadefell, I imagine, we will find more of that. The Rosewayns were not said to be numerous, but they held that place for many years, and I cannot imagine they did much to purify it while they were there. I've long thought they were called to that place and held there in thrall to Maol, rather than choosing it for the reasons they claimed."

"How do we shield against it?" Kelland asked.

"We stay within your light." Malentir's smile was grim. "A prospect I do not relish, but better by far than the alternative."

"What about Aurandane?" The knight put aside the last few pages he'd been reading. "The Illuminers believed they could find it, and that it could protect them."

"Then they were fools," the Thorn said indifferently. "The Sword of the Dawn is gone. Someone would have found it long before now otherwisea"some knight of your order, or a scavenger like Renais. And if it is not gone, if it has lain in Shadefell all these years, then it is best left untouched. The curse on Renais' painting is nothing next to what Maol could do with a perethil as powerful as Aurandane."

"Why would thisa"Gethel, you said his name was?a"why would he dig that up?" Bitharn asked, still staring at the little bundle of blackfire dust. "What could he want with it? Surely he didn't set out to unleash a Maolite plague in the world."

"It is unlikely that was his original intention. But we need not speculate. If he is in Shadefell, I will ask him."

"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 a 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 a And the Illuminers? What would become of them if Maol's madness took root in their souls? If they found Aurandane, and it wasa"as Malentir had suggesteda"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 a 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 Queena"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 a 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.

21.

Black 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 a 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 a 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 foola"you flounder in love, pushing it away in your clumsiness, and you will fail her too. Fail a and fall a and join us here, forgotten.

I won't, he wanted to reply, but before he could say the wordsa"before he had even finished forming the thoughta"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 a 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 a" 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 a 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 a Narsenghal, or an echo of it a 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 a," 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 a 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 a oh, great cost a but it is mine."

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

"What cost?" Malentir pressed.

"Devotion. Such devotion. So a 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?"

Gethel turned his blind black eyes onto the knight. His gaze was repellent; meeting it felt like being doused with filth. "Yes. Some few."

"Where are they?"

"In the workshop." He lifted a gnarled, long-nailed hand to the labyrinth of bones behind him. "The safest place. Consecrated. Monsters come here, too a but they can be dealt with when they do."

"What about the Celestians who came here before us?" Kelland asked. "Two women. Did you see them?"

"No. Only monsters came here. Only monsters."

"What are you doing with the blackfire stone?" Malentir broke in impatiently.

"It is a it can be a weapon. An ignoble use of magic, I know. But necessary to repay my patron. Without him I should never have had the opportunity a so I will send him the treasures he wanted, the weapons my shapers made a and when he has enough, when he is finished, I will turn my research to its true ends. Wisdom, and the betterment of the world."

Contempt hardened the Thorn's aristocratic features. "Who is this patron? What weapons did you make, and where did you send them?"

"I cannot tell you," Gethel whispered, shaking his head. Black grains spilled across his shoulders from the hole in his skull. He wet a wrinkled fingertip on his lips and dabbed them up, licking away the grit like a starving man savoring crumbs. "I swore an oath. I cannot give his name."

"Someone fell hard here," Bitharn murmured quietly to Kelland. She tilted one end of her bow unobtrusively toward the floor. "Broken glass. Herbs spilled on the ground. Not long ago."

He refrained from looking down himself, not wanting Gethel to realize what Bitharn had seen, but nodded to acknowledge her words. Locked on each other, neither Gethel nor the Thorn seemed to have heard her.

"I cannot say," the scholar moaned again.

"You can and you will." Malentir twisted one of his bracelets, pressing it viciously into his own flesh. "Who was it? What did you send him?"

Gethel whimpered, stumbling forward as if struck from behind. Murky tears funneled into the creases of his cheeks. "Corban. His name is Corban. I sent him quarrels. Hollow tipped, set with blackfire stone. The dust a becomes stone and reacts a unusually a to blood, once it's had a taste to whet its hunger. It was a what he wanted. Why he paid."