by Tad Williams
“I am dry as the bones on which we sit,” quavered old Hoorooen. “Tears and spittle I have none, nor any other of the body’s waters. All I have left is my blood and even that is dry as dust.” The knife rose and fell a third time, biting into his mangled arm like a white-hot tooth. Barrick could barely think, barely hear. “But the blood of dreamers may be worth something, in the end . . .”
Something fell into his wound, powdery but also coarse and sharp, as though someone had stuffed tiny shards of glass into the bleeding place. The pain was everywhere and unendurable, as though biting ants swarmed over his exposed flesh. Wave after wave of suffering washed through him. Barrick drifted farther and farther away, as if he were flotsam carried on hot dark waves, but at last the hurt became a little less and he realized he was hearing voices again.
“You are stronger now—changed. We have given you all that we have left so that you might have a chance to give our dreams meaning. But now we are fading—we will not be able to speak to you much longer.” For a moment, the hard voice of Hikat became almost gentle. “Listen well and do not fail us, child of two worlds. There is only one way you can reach the House of the People and the blind king before it is too late—you must travel on Crooked’s roads, which will fold your path before you so that you may step between the world’s walls. To do that, you must find the hall in Sleep that bears his name.”
“Most of those roads are closed to you,” said Hau, whose voice was more distant now than it had been. “One only you might find and use in time, because it is close by. It is in the city of Sleep—the home of our own people. But know that the Dreamless who live there hate mortals even more than they hate the lords of Qul-na-Qar.”
“But even if our essences may enable him to survive the cold, dead places that Crooked traveled, still it will be for nothing.” Hikat sounded angry again. “Look at him—how will he cross Crooked’s Hall? How will he open the doorway?”
“That is not ours to know,” said Hau. “We have nothing left to give. Even now I feel the outer winds blowing through me.”
“Then it has all been for nothing.”
“Life is always loss,” murmured the old one. “Especially when you gain something.”
Barrick found a little of his strength again, although the scalding pain still swirled through him like hot metal in a crucible. “What are you talking about?” he demanded. “I don’t understand! Is this all a dream?”
Hau’s voice was little more than a whisper now. “Of course. But true, nevertheless. And if you reach Crooked’s Hall at last, remember this one thing, child—no mortal hand can open the door there. It is written in the Book itself—no mortal hand . . .”
“I don’t understand you!”
“Then you will die, pup,” said fading Hikat. “The world will not wait for you to understand. The world will murder you and all like you. The Eon of Suffering will begin and you will all be punished for having left them outside in the cold so long.”
“Who? Leaving who outside?”
“The gods,” old Hoorooen moaned. “The angry gods.”
“You’re telling me to walk into the city of the Dreamless?” Face certain death there just for a chance to fight against the gods themselves? It was utter madness. “How can I believe any of this?”
“Because we are the Sleepers, the dreamers,” one of them murmured—it might have been Hau. “And we have lived very close to them. Close enough to hear their dreaming thoughts, which roar in our ears like the ocean.”
“Whose thoughts? Do you mean the gods?”
“Look back as you leave.” The voice was so faint he could no longer tell which one spoke. “You will see. You will see them and perhaps you will understand . . . and believe . . .”
And then Barrick’s eyes were open and he was alone in the cave. The whispering shapes who had sat over him were gone. The fire was out, but a little light fell from the single oblong opening in the cavern wall. He looked down at his forearm. Three stripes of blood showed where the skin had been cut, but the wounds seemed largely healed, as if he had been lying there for days instead of hours. Had it all been a dream? Had he cut himself, hit his head, stumbled here, and fancied the rest while he lay in a swoon?
Barrick stood on shaky legs. He might have been dreaming, but he hadn’t been sleeping—that seemed clear just from how weary he felt. He still desperately needed fire, so he limped forward to see if he could find a piece of smoldering wood, but to his amazement and disappointment the ashes were white and cold, as if nothing had burned there for years. He was about to turn away when he saw something half-buried in the ash and dirt beside the circle of stones. Barrick bent, favoring his injured arm, which did not hurt as it usually did. (In fact, it was cold and stiff but painless, as though he had soaked it a long time in a mountain stream until it had gone numb.) He scraped at the dirt and uncovered a ragged, ancient leather pouch, so long in the damp ground that the leather was almost as hard as stone. When he peeled it open a chipped piece of shiny black stone fell out; a little more work and he withdrew a crescent-shaped piece of rusted steel from the remains of the leather. Steel . . . and flint! He had found someone’s fire-making tools! He could hardly wait to try it. Even if all the rest of this interlude had been no more than an exhausted dream, everything would be better now that he had fire.
He folded the remains of the leather sack around his find and tucked it into his belt. Barrick was exhausted and needed sleep, but he was reluctant to stay in this strange place any longer. If he had not dreamed the three strange Sleepers, perhaps they had only left for a while and would be coming back soon. They had not harmed him beyond whatever mysterious thing they had done to his arm, but they had certainly held him prisoner and had talked madness to him about the gods and doorways and folds in the world.
And his arm . . . what had he dreamed about his arm? What had they done? He held up his left hand, which was not clenched as it usually was, as it had been for years, but instead was simply closed: with a little effort he could actually open it, something he had not been able to do in a long time. He was so startled by this that he laughed a little.
What happened here?
And there had been more: he had dreamed of the dark-haired girl again, and this time he had dreamed her a name—Qinnitan, and somehow that felt like a true thing. But if that dream had been real, what of the rest . . . ?
No, it was dangerous to think that way, Barrick told himself. Those were the sort of lies priests told people to keep them stupid—that the gods saw everything, that they had a purpose for everyone. Although now that he thought of it, that hadn’t been what the Sleepers had said. Hadn’t they suggested the gods themselves were the enemy? “The Eon of Suffering will begin,” one of them had told him, “and we will all be punished for having left them outside in the cold so long.”
Barrick Eddon walked out of the domelike chamber into gray twilight. His eyes seemed to see subtleties in the dimness he had not noticed before—perhaps, he thought, because he had been so long in the dark cavern. Then, as he made his way down the path and off it and onto the raw stuff of the hillside, he remembered something else one of the Sleepers had said when he had asked whether they were really talking about the gods—the same gods Barrick knew. For most of his life Barrick had scorned his people’s beloved oniri, the oracles and prophets who claimed to know the gods’ will, but the strange Sleepers had said they heard the gods’ very thoughts. How could that be?
“Look back as you leave,” the quavering voice had told him. “You will see. You will see them, and perhaps you will understand.”
Barrick did look back, but at the moment a fold of the hillside blocked the place he had been: all he saw were trees and glimpses of the butter-colored stone that dotted the hill. He shook his head and resumed hunting for a place to make camp.
A little later, when he had all but forgotten, he chanced to look back again, and this time he had descended far enough down the slope that he could see the whole crest o
f the hill.
“You will see them, and perhaps you will understand . . .”
The forms had been too harried to notice on the way up, and had been too close to see or blocked by trees before, but now they suddenly leaped to his eyes. Beneath the earth and greenery of the hillside loomed shapes the color of old ivory, but they were not outcroppings of stones, as he had thought. Rather they were half-buried . . .
Bones . . . ?
He had missed seeing it before because it was not one simple shape but two, wrapped together in a complicated way—two vast skeletons tangled in an embrace of love or death, giant bones which had perhaps once been buried, but which had been lifted up into the air by the living earth, a thin mantling of soil cloaking them like a shroud and providing the nurture of trees and vines. The tooth-shaped rocks on top of the hill were teeth, the immense jaw of a mostly buried skull, broken loose and exposed by wind and rain. The other skull . . . the other skull . . .
That’s where I was, he realized, and a curtain of darkness threatened to fall over his mind and chase him away into the void. With the dreamers . . . inside a god’s skull . . .
Barrick turned and fled down the hill—slipping and sliding, rolling more often than he ran, forced to vault over the branches that threatened to trip him, and which to his fevered thoughts seemed to be the finger-bones of the immortal dead, reaching up through the soil to snatch him and pull him down.
It might have been luck that he did not drop the flint and steel during that stumbling, terrified trip down the hill, or when he collapsed in weariness at the bottom. It might also have been luck that the first thing that found him there was not a silkin but something with a harsh, familiar voice.
“Thought you were dead!” After a moment, when he had not responded, something poked at his ear. “You don’t be dead, do you?”
Barrick groaned and sat up. He ached all over from his numerous falls—except, oddly, his crippled arm, which still retained a stony numbness, although he could flex it now at least as easily as he ever could. “Skurn?” He opened his eyes. The black bird, head tilted to one side, stared at him with its fathomless black eye. “Gods, it is you.” He let himself slump back, then sat up. “A fire! I can make a fire.”
He scrambled to find enough dry leaves and grass to make a pile, then went to work, striking down at the crescent-shaped piece of metal with the flint. Once a few sparks fell onto the grass Barrick blew on them; after a little while he was rewarded with a curl of smoke and then a tiny, near-transparent flame. Relieved, he sat back and warmed his hands in front of the miniature blaze. “We must make camp somewhere nearby so I can build a proper one,” he said.
“Not here.” The raven lowered his harsh voice. “Here at the hill’s bottom, silkins will find us.”
Barrick shook his head. “I don’t care. I have to rest, at least for a little while. I have climbed all the way to that hill’s top today.”
Now the bird tilted its head again, this time to inspect the boy. “Is that what you’ve been at all these last days? Climbing up hill and down hill like a Follower up a tree?”
“Days? One day at most, surely.”
The raven examined his face carefully, as though he might be joking. “Days. But Skurn stayed. Skurn waited!”
Barrick did not have the strength to argue with a mad bird. He shielded the infant blaze with some stones, then went in search of a better place to camp—somewhere on good, natural stone, not the bony, yellowy stuff of the heights. Barrick wanted no more of any gods for a while, whether living or dead.
The heat of the fire was even more heartening than its light—it was wonderful to be warm again for the first time in longer than he could remember. After an hour or so the cold only lingered in his crippled arm, but even that was not a painful chill but a kind of absence, as if the organs of suffering had been somehow removed when he had gained his three parallel scars. They were all covered by scabs now and scarcely discomforting at all. His arm even seemed to have a degree of mobility it had not shown before, although Barrick could not tell whether that was because it could actually bend farther or just because it hurt less. The muscles were still weak, but it seemed a different kind of weakness, as though with more employment it would gain strength, like any ordinary limb long disused.
As a result he was in the best mood he had seen in a long while. Even in those first heady moments after he had escaped Greatdeeps and the monster Jikuyin, his happiness had been undercut by the loss of his two companions, Gyir and Vansen. Barrick knew he was still in great danger, perhaps with even more perilous times to come, but just now being warm and not in pain seemed a blessing as great as any that heaven could grant.
He stretched and yawned. “Tell me what you know about the city of Sleep,” he asked Skurn, who was busy smacking a snail shell on a rock like a tiny blacksmith at his anvil.
The raven dropped the snail and turned toward him, feathers bristling around his neck like a courtier’s ruff. “Pfagh! That be a foul name. Where did you hear such?”
“Spare me the warnings and the gloomy predictions, bird. Just tell me what you know.”
“Us knows what any know and naught more. Night Men live there, who once were high among the Twilight folk until they fell into wicked ways, making foul allies and marrying only ’mongst theyselves and such. Then were they sent away. They made up their own city which they built in the dead lands down Fade River from here. None go there by their own will, it be said.”
The idea that he would go to such a place seemed both frightening and amusing to Barrick—amusing only in that it was so clearly ridiculous. Follow the river Fade! It was like some bard’s poem of fatal heroism. The Sleepers might have said a door in Sleep was his only way to reach the Qar king in his royal city, and it was true he had promised to take Gyir’s mirror there, but that did not seem nearly enough compulsion to force him toward such an obviously murderous spot. What made them so sure he would do it? Why would any person who was not a half-wit go to such a place?
“Is that all you know, bird? How far away is it?”
“Us could fly there on five or six meals, like, but why would us?”
“I don’t mean flying. How far for someone like me to walk?”
The raven dropped the snail shell again and hopped closer, examining Barrick carefully once more as though suddenly concerned that he was sharing the campsite with an imposter. “Just finished running up and down Cursed Hill, you did. Dost young master plan to visit every deathly spot in all the Twilight Lands, like pilgrim?”
Barrick grinned sourly. “What do you know of the gods, Skurn? Of what happened to them? Are they really gone from the world?”
Now the raven appeared truly agitated, hopping and flapping his way around the fire until he had found a stone to jump onto, as though he suddenly wanted to be a little farther off the ground. “Why yon strange questions? Us dasn’t think too much about the ways of the gods, let alone speak on ’em. When they hears they names—even in dreams—they takes notice.”
“Very well. No more talk.” The pull of sleep was getting strong now, the fire like a warm blanket draped across his front, comforting, almost homely. “We can speak more on it tomorrow, when we set out.”
“Set out?” The raven’s voice had an unarguable touch of worry in it. “Set out where, young master?”
“For the city of Sleep, of course.” Barrick almost smiled again. Was this how they had felt, those great heroes of old, Hiliometes or Silas or Massilios Goldenhair? As though they were part of some greater thing, tugged along through no choice of their own, helpless . . . but almost uncaring? It was a strange feeling. All of him, even his thoughts, seemed at this moment to be strengthened, yet as unfeeling as his arm. He looked down at the blackening blood on his skin, the three marks as though he had been clawed by some bird twice Skurn’s size or more. What had the Sleepers given him?
Life is always loss, especially when you gain something, the old one had said. Did that mean they had also
taken something from him? But what had he lost?
“You do not mean it, young master, do you? Not to go to such a place.”
“You need not go, Skurn. This is my journey.”
“But the silkins in the forest—and the Dreamless in that dreadsome city! They will freeze our blood and eat our skin!”
“You need not go.”
“Then I will be lost here and alone.”
Barrick fell silent then, but not out of pity for the bird. After he had slept he would wake. After he had awakened he would set out. He would walk until he reached the city called Sleep, then he would see what happened next—death or something else. He would go on like that until everything was over. It seemed simple, somehow.
But what had the Sleepers taken from him to give him such simplicity? And what had he lost . . . ?
Weariness took him then, pulling him down into darkness, carrying him away from the flickering fire to a place that mortals shared with gods.
PART TWO
CLOAK
15
The Soiled Dove
“Ruohttashemm, home of the Cold Fairies and their warlike queen Jittsammes, was reported to be on the far side of the Stallanvolled, a great, dark forest that covered a large area of Old Vutland.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
FEIVAL, DRESSED IN HIS NEW popinjay finest, was waving his hands behind the prince’s head, urgently trying to signal something to her.
He’s reminding me to get back to work, Briony realized. “Tell me again of how you led your men back from the south,” she asked Prince Eneas.
“Yes, tell us again!” begged her friend Ivgenia.
“Surely you are bored with that story, ladies.” To his credit, the king’s son looked uncomfortable. “I have told it to you each time I have visited. The ending will still be the same if I tell it again.”