by Tad Williams
The slope became steeper. Barrick frequently had to use his hands on branches and outcroppings to pull himself up, which made his crippled arm ache even worse than his lungs, throbbing and burning until his eyes filled with tears. The hopelessness of his situation began to weigh him down. He was in a strange land—a deadly, unknown land full of demons and monstrous creatures—and all but alone. How long could he go on this way, without help, without food or weapons or even a map? Any bad fall would leave him helpless and waiting for death . . .
Barrick suddenly tripped and tumbled heavily onto his hands and knees—it hurt so badly he cried out. He sank forward onto his elbows, staring at the ground only a few inches away, eyes blurry with sweat and tears. There was something strange about that ground, he realized after a moment—something very strange indeed.
It had writing on it.
He straightened up. He was kneeling on a slab of the pale ochre stone. Symbols he did not recognize had been scratched deep into its surface, and although they had been polished almost to invisibility by wind and rain, it was unquestionably the work of some intelligent hand. Barrick hastily climbed to his feet. He looked up and saw that the crest of the hill was not as far away as it had seemed—perhaps less than an hour’s climb even at his limping pace. He took a deep breath and looked around for any sign of the silkins—he saw nothing and heard only the wind sighing through the trees—then began to make his way upward once more. Even if he was going to die here on Cursed Hill, he thought, it would be nice to see a high place first. Maybe the gray skies would seem brighter up there—that would be something good. Barrick Eddon was sick at heart with mist and shadowy places.
As he struggled up the last heights he saw that some previous inhabitants or visitors had done more than simply carve symbols into the yellow stones: in some spots curves of outcropping rock had been used as makeshift roofs, with shelters built beneath them, although little was left of these but an occasional wall of loose stones gathered together and carefully stacked. As he neared the summit the yellowish outcroppings became more common, great knobs and curving stretches of stone to which the greenery clung like a rough blanket. The primitive structures also grew more complex, weathered lumps of the hill’s smooth bedrock extended and connected by stacked boulders and even some crude wooden walls and roofs, but all empty and long since deserted, with no sign left of whoever had inhabited them except for the occasional antlike track of carved symbols across their surfaces.
Here in the evergreen highlands the mists were at least as thick and slippery as at the base of the hill, but the place was even quieter, missing even the very occasional bird noises he had heard below. Even though Barrick had not seen any sign of the silkins for what seemed an hour or more, the quiet oppressiveness of the place was beginning to unnerve him, making his plan to stay here seem utter nonsense. It was all he could do to continue climbing toward the highest ridge, only a short distance away now and nothing but pearl-gray twilit sky visible behind it.
He pulled himself up onto a prominence and saw that one last mound of stone, greenery, and muddy earth remained between him and the summit, and that the strangest dwelling of all had been built there, a dome of curving stone protruding at an odd angle from the trees and tangled shrubbery, with a huge oblong window gaping in the undergrowth near it. A stone path wound up the last stretch of hillside from the snag of creepers in which he stood, leading to a dark overhang just below the oblong window. The palisade of broken stones he had seen from so far away, the ones like broken teeth, jutted from the forested peak just above the odd dwelling.
Mist and fog hung over this strange place like one of the asphodel crowns children wore for the feast of Onir Zakkas. The vapors were not only thicker here than at the bottom of the hill, but also seemed a different color and consistency. Barrick stared for long moments before he realized that some of it was not mist at all, but smoke rising from between the trees along the very top of the crest.
Smoke. Chimneys. Someone lived in this godforsaken place. On top of Cursed Hill.
He turned, heart beating even faster now than in the midst of the arduous climb, but before he could take a step back down the slope a voice came to him from nowhere and everywhere, echoing softly in the skirl of wind along the hillside, but also inside his head.
“Come,” it whispered. “We are waiting for you.”
Barrick found he could no longer command his own limbs, at least not to take him farther away from the strange house on the summit, a house that awaited him like an abandoned well into which he might fall and drown.
“Come. Come to us. We are waiting for you.”
To his astonishment, he abruptly found himself a passive observer in his own flesh. His body turned and began to climb the promontory until his feet were on the stony path, then it walked on toward the stone dwelling like a cloud pushed by wind, Barrick watching helplessly from inside it. The oblong window and the shadowed overhang grew closer and closer. The last stretch of the hill’s high peak loomed above him for a moment, then he passed beneath through the opening into darkness.
A moment later the dark gave way to a spreading, reddish light. Barrick recovered a little command of his own limbs, but only enough to pause for a moment, his heart hammering at triple speed, before the unwavering pull of what lay before him exerted itself again.
“Come. We have waited a long time, child of men. We were beginning to fear we had misunderstood what was given to us.”
The stony room rounded upward like a dome on the inside, a strange, pale, cavernous place five or six times Barrick’s height, its uppermost point rife with incomprehensible carvings, scrawls, and swirls just visible through the black residue of smoke. The red light and the smoke both came from a small fire set in a ring of stones on a floor of rubble and dirt. Three hunched figures of about Barrick’s own size sat behind it on a low platform of stone.
“You are tired,” the voice told him. Who was speaking? The shapes before him did not move. “You may sit if that will ease you. We regret we have little to offer you in the way of food or drink, but our ways are not like yours.”
“We give him much,” snapped another voice. It was almost identical to the first and equally bodiless, but with an edge to it that told him somehow it was a different speaker. “We give him more than we have given any other.”
“Because that is the purpose to which we were called. And what we give to him will be no kindness,” said the first voice.
Barrick wanted to run, wanted it badly, but he could still barely move. The raven had been right—he had been a fool to come here. He finally made his voice work. “Who . . . who are you?”
“Us?” the sharper, second voice said. “There is no true name we could give ourselves that you would know or understand.”
“Tell him,” spoke up a third, similar to the others but perhaps older and more frail. “Tell him the truth. We are the Sleepers. We are the rejected, the unwanted. We are those who see and cannot help but see.” The voice was like a ghost murmuring at the top of an empty tower. Barrick was shivering hard, but he could not make his limbs work to run away.
“You are frightening the Sunlander child,” the first voice said in mild reproach. “He does not understand you.”
“I am no child.” Barrick did not want these creatures in his head. It was too much like the last moments before the great door of Kernios—the moments in which he had felt Gyir die. “Just let me go.”
“He does not understand us,” said the weakest of the voices. “All is lost, as I feared. The world has turned too far . . .”
“Be silent!” said the harsher second voice. “He is an outsider. He is a Sunlander. Blood means nothing beneath the Daystar.”
“But all blood is the same color under Silvergleam’s light,” said the first. “Child, rest easy. We will not harm you.”
“You speak only for yourself,” said the second voice. “I could burn away his thoughts like dry grass. If he threatens me, I will.”
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br /> “Now it is you who should be silent, Hikat,” said the first voice. “Your anger is unneeded here.”
“We are scorned by all the world,” said the one called Hikat. “We nestle in the very bones of those who would destroy us as they hover at the edge of wakefulness. My anger is unneeded, Hau? It is you who are useless, with your impossible schemes and dreams.”
“When is the child coming?” asked the trembling third voice. “You spoke of a child?”
“The child has already come, Hoorooen,” the first voice answered. “He is here.”
“Ah.” The weak voice let out something that felt like a sigh inside Barrick’s head. “I wondered . . .”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Barrick tried again to turn and leave the domelike cavern but could not make his limbs do his bidding. “Are you all mad? I don’t understand anything you’re saying, not any of it. Who are you?”
“We are brothers,” began Hau, “children of the . . .”
“Brothers?” This was the one called Hikat. “Fool! You are my mother—and he is your father.”
“I had a son, once ...” quavered Hoorooen.
The centermost of the three figures slowly stood. Its robes flapped open, and for a moment Barrick saw a glimpse of withered, sexless gray flesh. His heart stuttered and seemed to go cold in his chest; if he could have scrambled away from the firepit he would have. He had seen skin of that stony color on Jikuyin’s cruel servant, Ueni’ssoh, but this creature seemed as dry and drawn as a mummified corpse.
“But we are not that one, Barrick Eddon,” said Hau as if the boy had spoken these thoughts aloud. “We are not your enemies.”
“How do you know my name?” It seemed more than impossible, here at the ends of the earth when he had almost forgotten it himself, and it terrified him. “Tell me, curse you—how do you know my name!”
“He attacks us!” Hikat cried. “We must destroy him . . . !”
“Who is there?” quailed Hoorooen.
“Peace, brothers. He is only frightened. Sit, Barrick Eddon. Listen to all we have to say.”
The thing that kept him from running now helped him to sit beside the fire. The rippling flames made the three figures seem to float before his eyes like something seen in the last moments of waking.
“All of us were born long ago in the city called Sleep,” Hau began. “It is true that Hoorooen is the eldest, but that is all that can be said for certain. Even Hikat, the youngest, is so old now that we cannot remember when he came into the world.”
“She,” said Hikat, but for the first time some of the edge of anger was gone and the voice sounded almost wistful. “For some reason I feel I was a woman.”
“It matters not,” said Hau kindly. “We are old. We share blood. We were born to the people called the Dreamless, in the city called Sleep, but they cast us out . . .”
Barrick felt a stirring of fear again. “The Dreamless!”
“Hold until you hear all our story. Not all who walk beneath the darklights of Sleep are as cruel as the one you met, but we are different from all of them. We are the Sleepers.”
“They sent us away,” said Hoorooen. “I am the only one who remembers. We slept, and that frightened them. We dreamed . . .”
“Yes,” said Hau. “Among the Dreamless, we alone dreamed, and our dreams were no mere fancies but the true flickering of the fire in the void. In our dreams we saw that the gods would fall, and saw that the Dreamless would turn against their masters in Qul-na-Qar. We saw the coming of the mortals into the land. All this we saw and foretold, but our own people did not heed us. They feared us. They drove us out.”
“I have never seen the darklights,” said Hikat angrily. “My rightful home was stolen from me.”
“You saw them,” Hau declared. “You just do not remember. We have all lost so much, waited so long . . .”
“I . . . I don’t understand,” said Barrick. “You . . . you are Dreamless? But I thought the Dreamless never slept . . .”
“Let me show you.” The middle figure threw back its hood. As with the gray man in Greatdeeps, skin as fine and thin as silk clung to his gaunt features, but Hau’s skin was also scored with a stitchery of innumerable fine wrinkles, so that he looked as though he were made of cobwebs. The biggest difference, though, was that where Ueni’ssoh’s eyes had been unblinking, silvery-blue orbs, the creature who stood before Barrick had only more wrinkles of flesh beneath his brows, his sockets as empty as desert sands.
“You’re blind!”
“We do not see as others do,” Hau corrected him. “Had we been like our unsleeping brethren we would have been blind indeed. But in our dreams we see more than anyone.”
“I am tired of seeing so much,” said Hoorooen sadly. “It never makes anyone happy.”
“The truth makes no one happy,” snapped Hikat. “Because all truth ends in death and darkness.”
“Quiet, my loves.” Hau lowered himself back to the ground, then reached out to his comrades. After hesitating a moment, they both took the offered hand, so that the Sleepers were joined. Hikat and Hoorooen then extended their own hands on either side of the small fire. Barrick stared at the trio across the flames, not understanding, or not wanting to understand.
“Take our hands,” Hau said. “You have come here for a reason.”
“I came here because I was lost—because those silkin things were trying to kill me . . .”
“You came here because you were born,” said Hikat, impatient again. The extended hands still waited on either side for Barrick to take them. “Perhaps it began even before that. But you are here and that proves you belong. Nobody comes to the Hill of Two Gods without a reason.”
“There is a page for you in the Book of the Fire in the Void, said Hau. Let us read from it.”
“Wait! There is another soul reaching out for you,” said Hoorooen. “A twinned soul that seeks you.”
Briony. That finally decided Barrick—by the gods, how he had missed her! He moved a little closer to the fire so he could reach the two proffered gray hands. The room was not cold but the fire didn’t seem to give off any heat, even when he leaned so close, and its flickering light revealed little more than where the deepest shadows lay. Despite a sudden terror far beyond what the situation seemed to offer, he let his hands close on the dry, slippery fingers of Hikat and Hoorooen. A moment later his eyes slid shut without his willing it, and suddenly he was falling—falling! Plunging downward helplessly into darkness, limbs f lailing . . .
But where were his limbs? Why did he seem to be only a single heavy thought, falling into the void?
He fell. At last, something other than darkness glimmered in the depths below him. For a moment he thought it was some vast, circular sea; a moment later it seemed an ornamental pond of silvery water, with sides of pale stone. Then he saw it for what it was—the mirror he carried for Gyir, but grown to great size. He had only a moment to marvel at this inversion, at the idea that he could fall into something that was even now in his own pocket, and then he plunged through its cold surface and out the other side.
He stopped moving. The mirror, though, still remained, but now it hung before him against a field of utter black, like a picture in the Portrait Hall back in Southmarch, and he could see his own face in it.
No, not his face: the features of the person there had changed somehow without him noticing, sliding like quicksilver into new positions, shifting color like the towers of Southmarch as the morning sun appeared and climbed into the sky. The face that looked back at him was black-haired and dark-skinned, very young but also very worried and pinched with weariness. Despite it all he thought her beautiful. It was her, truly her—he had never seen her so clearly! The face in the mirror was that of the dark-haired girl who had long haunted his dreams.
“You,” she said wonderingly—so she could see him, too. “I feared you were gone forever.”
“Truly, I nearly was.” He could see and understand her better than ever before bu
t their conversation was still much like a dream, with some things not even spoken but still understood and some things incomprehensible even after they had been said. “Who are you? And why . . . why can I see you now?”
“Does it make you unhappy?” she asked with a touch of amusement. She was younger than he’d thought she would be, still with a hint of childhood in her face, but although her gaze was clever and kind, something in her eyes seemed veiled, the effect of wounds survived but not forgotten. She seemed to be standing only inches away, but at the same time she shimmered and almost vanished as his eye moved, like something seen through thick mist, like something seen in a dream.
It’s all a dream. He was suddenly terrified he wouldn’t remember this dear, now-familiar face when he was awake again.
Awake? But he could not even remember where he was, let alone whether he could be dreaming. If he was asleep, where did his body lie? How had he come here?
“Tell me your name, spirit-friend?” she asked him. “I should know it, but I don’t! Are you nafaz—a ghost? You are so pale. Oh, I hope if you are a ghost, you died happily.”
“I’m not dead. I’m . . . I’m certain I’m not!”
“Then that is even better.” She smiled; her teeth gleamed against the darkness of her skin. “And look—all your hair is fiery like my witch streak! How odd dreams are!”
She was right—the streak in her hair was as red as his. It felt like something more than mere kinship. “I don’t think I’m a dream, either. Are you asleep?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know. I think so. And you?”
“I’m not sure.” But as soon as his thoughts began to slide away from the mirror hanging in blackness he began to fear he would never be able to find it again. “Why can we see each other? Why should we?”