by Tad Williams
Pick was pulling strands of river-weed out of his hair. “Can’t swim. Almost died when I fell in, but I found a place where the bottom was shallow, praise the Betweens.”
Barrick looked at him, then turned back to the river. “Anything in that water I should know about? Anything with big teeth, for instance?”
“I got out,” Pick said. “But I thrashed around a long while first.”
Barrick cursed silently under his breath and waded in. Halfway out the muddy bottom fell away beneath his feet and he had to begin swimming. As he neared the slow-moving boat he expected the rower would turn toward him, but instead the man only stayed in his odd, bent-over position like someone who had gone dizzy, but meanwhile his wide back flexed and the thick arm plied the single oar in its lock, over and over.
The rower finally noticed him when Barrick’s fingers closed on the wooden gunwale of the boat and he began to pull himself on board. He had only a moment to note that both the boat and the rower were even larger than he had guessed from the shore, and that a long, pale figure lay underneath a small tent on the deck, then the massive rower turned to look at him, still without raising his head.
That was because he had no head, Barrick saw—only two wide, wet eyes on his chest. With a shriek, Barrick jumped back into the water, almost hitting his head on another oar which was floating there. He dipped under the surface and then came up again. In his sudden fright he swallowed more than a little of the green water.
“Gods in heaven, what kind of demon is that?” he spluttered.
“No demon!” Pick called from the reedy bank. “Just a blemmy! It will not harm you!”
If he had been on dry land it would have taken Barrick a much longer time to work up the courage to approach the boat again, but he could not tread water forever. The creature turned to him as he crawled onto the boat once more, but otherwise did not react. Its broad arms continued plying the single oar, steady as the paddles of a millwheel, and the boat continued to circle the backwater in wide, lazy loops.
When they passed close enough to the other oar, Barrick scooped it out of the water and offered it to the blemmy, trying not to look too hard at the dull, unblinking eyes in its chest or the empty place between its shoulders where a neck and head should be. The creature did not seem to see it, but when Barrick slid the oar back into the lock the blemmy clutched it without hesitation and began plying both oars together. The boat headed out toward the downstream current.
“How do I make it head for land?” he shouted. “Does the cursed thing have ears?”
“Put your hand on it and say, ‘s’yar’!” Pick shouted back. “Loud, so it can feel you!”
Barrick put his hand on the blemmy’s shoulder, which was overlarge but otherwise natural to the touch, and said the word. The monster shipped one oar until the little boat had swung around to face the bank, then began rowing with both oars again. Within moments the boat’s thin black keel ran up onto the muddy reed forest and Barrick leaped out. When the boat would go no farther the blemmy merely stopped rowing, its eyes staring from its chest at Barrick and Pick with no more curiosity than a cow in a field.
The patchwork man scrambled up onto the boat and folded back the tent, then kneeled beside the unmoving figure. His excitement gave way within moments to quiet weeping. “He is worse! He will never live to reach Sleep!”
Barrick tried not to look startled. “Your master is . . . from the city of Sleep?”
“Qu’arus is a great man,” Pick said as if Barrick had suggested otherwise. “All of the Dreamless will mourn him.”
“Kyow-roos.” Barrick tried it on his tongue. “And he is one of them? One of the Dreamless?”
Pick wiped his eyes but it was useless: the tears kept flowing. “Yes—he saved me! I would be dead were it not for his kindness. And he almost never beat me . . .” He collapsed onto the silent figure’s chest, his body heaving, as Barrick climbed back into the boat, stepping gingerly around the silent blemmy to get a look at Pick’s master.
Although he had been half expecting it, it was still a shock to see the silky gray skin and gaunt features so similar to the demigod Jikuyin’s murderous pet wizard, Ueni’ssoh. Pick’s master was in the grip of some delusional fever but too weak to move much. His staring eyes, which rolled from side to side, fixing on nothing, had the same weird hue as Ueni’ssoh’s—bluish-green as Xandian jade, with no trace of white. Faced with this monstrous reminder of Greatdeeps, it was all Barrick could do not to plunge his blade into the creature’s heart, but the tattered servant clearly felt differently: when Pick looked up at Barrick his eyes were red and his face wet with tears.
“The other servants ran away when Master was struck down. I could not tend to him and control the blemmies. Come with me. Help me! Together we can get him back to Sleep.”
“Us don’t want that!” squawked Skurn from the high stern of the boat, flapping his wings in agitation.
“Quiet, bird.” Barrick looked from scrawny servant to dying master. There had been a moment when he was fighting against the silkins and everything seemed clear: he was meant to do this. Like Hiliometes or Caylor he would find solutions to every difficulty. Here was one such solution—a boat to take him into Sleep and an adviser who would help him to pass unnoticed in that alien place. Perhaps the Sleepers had overestimated the dangers—perhaps these days there were many mortals like this Pick living among the Dreamless.
Still, the idea frightened him. It seemed too simple to be safe, like a scrubbed and shiny carrot sitting in the middle of a loop of string near a rabbit den—but perhaps that was what it felt like to be touched by destiny. He took one last look at the blemmy, shuddered a little, then nodded.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll come with you. For a little while anyway.”
The proper number of oars now clutched in its massive fists, the headless blemmy propelled them down the river. The moderate current did much of the job, but the strange creature proved to see better than Barrick would have guessed, guiding the long boat around obstacles with a nimbleness quite different from its helpless circling in the backwater. While Pick tended to the gray man, who had fallen into a more peaceful sleep, Skurn sulked on the tall stern of the boat or flapped along behind.
“You said your master was struck down,” Barrick asked the patchwork man. “What happened?”
“We were attacked by bandits in the Beggar lands.” He dabbed at his master’s gray skin with a wet rag. “Rope Men, they’re called. Looked ordinary enough at first, but they were starveling thin—like eels with legs—and never closed their mouths. Yellow teeth long as house nails.” The man in the colorful, ragged motley shivered. “One of the master’s guards was killed first, then another of them Rope Men sh–shot Master with an arrow. One of the other servants and I . . . w–we pulled it out . . . but then the arrows killed the other guard and the rest of the servants went overboard to get away from them, but they never came up again. It was terrible! The blemmies were rowing fast, though, and the Rope Men were on the bank, so we got away, but the other servant had been shot in the back with an arrow painted like a snake. He died. Master . . . M–Master got worse and worse . . .” Pick had to break off. Embarrassed by the man’s weepiness, Barrick turned away and watched the reedy shoreline sliding past until Pick could resume. “That was three sleeps ago by the master’s hour-box. Then we hit a rock and the other blemmy fell out into the water and drowned. You saw the rest.”
Barrick frowned a little. “How could one of them drown? They’ve got no mouths.”
“They do, down low on their bellies. They even make noises when they’re hurt or frightened—a sort of scratchy whistling . . .”
“Enough.” Barrick didn’t want to think about it—it was too unnatural. “And what will happen when we get to Sleep? Your master’s dying—we both know that. What will happen to you . . . and to me, for that matter? ”
“We will . . . be safe, I’m certain.” The man called Pick said this as though he had
never actually thought of it before this moment. “Master was always good to me. And there are the wimmuai—he has always taken care of them as well. He lets them die of old age!”
“Wimmy-aye? What are those? Some kind of animal?”
Pick ducked his head. “They are . . . they are men like you and I. Bred and raised in Sleep, offspring of folk captured over the years at the Shadowline. Master usually has a dozen of them at one time.”
Slaves, in other words. Human slaves. But that was no real surprise—Barrick had never for an instant supposed that mortals would enjoy the same privileges in Sleep as the Dreamless themselves.
Qu’arus spoke in his sleep, a murmured gabble that had the sound of words in it but was no more intelligible to Barrick than the sighing of the wind.
“However did you come to serve such a creature?” Barrick asked.
Pick looked up, his face tight with suffering. “I was . . . I was lost. He found me. He showed me kindness and took me into his service.”
“Kindness? This . . . thing? I cannot believe that.”
The other gaped. “But he was . . . he is . . . !”
Barrick shrugged. “If you say it is so.” His memories of the other Dreamless, Ueni’ssoh, were of a heartless monster. Could this creature really be so different, or might the man named Pick simply be addled by his experiences behind the Shadowline?
“Hungry,” Skurn said suddenly. The raven launched himself from the stern of the boat, then flapped heavily away over the rushes lining the river and toward the forest.
What ails that bird? Barrick wondered. He has not said a word before that since I can’t remember when. On most days I cannot have a moment’s peace from his yammering.
It became clear as Barrick’s time on the river stretched into what must have been days that Skurn was not just being quiet but actively avoiding company: he spent much of his time in the air, but even when he returned from his solitary flights he tended to perch atop the stern, a curving piece of black-stained wood taller than Barrick, and silently watch the river and bank sliding past.
Perhaps it’s the blemmy that he doesn’t like, Barrick thought. The gods can testify it’s ugly enough to frighten anyone.
The blemmy was indeed ugly, but also very strong, accommodating sudden changes in the river current or avoiding rocks with little more than a flick of an oar. Barrick could only imagine the difference when two of the headless things were rowing together—it must be a very swift craft indeed.
In a rough part of the river, as the blemmy steered the boat between two large rocks visible only by the foam they made on the water’s surface, Barrick almost lost Gyir’s mirror. As he leaned with the boat’s sudden change of direction the leather pouch fell out of his shirt and bounced off the bench. His left hand, his once-crippled hand, shot out and snatched it from the air like a hawk taking a sparrow.
For long moments he stared at it, amazed by what his wounded arm could now do, but also chilled by the idea of what had almost happened. He was a fool to be so careless with the mirror—it was his purpose now. He scoured the boat until he found a spare loop of the surprisingly slender anchor cord and sawed off a piece with his broken spear. He poked a hole in the pouch big enough to accommodate the cord, pushed it through and knotted it, then looped it around his neck before hiding it in his shirt again.
Other boats soon began to appear on the river, mostly small fishing skiffs manned by one or two ragged Dreamless. Barrick saw a few houses and even some small settlements begin to appear along the banks, presumably owned by these same gray-skinned folk. But some craft were a good bit bigger than their own, barges with wide, bruise-purple sails or even long galleys rowed by half a dozen blemmies or more.
“Are we close to Sleep?” he asked Pick after one such craft had surged past them, leaving them rolling in its high wake.
“A day away—no, a little more,” the tattered man said distractedly. His master was still alive, but only barely, and Pick almost never left his side.
Later that long, gray afternoon Qu’arus swam up from his slumbers again, but this time once his gleaming eyes opened they stayed that way, watching everything, although his body remained limp.
“Here, Master, have some water,” the patchwork man said, squeezing his cloth over Qu’arus’ mouth.
“Pikkhh,” the gray man rasped, using the sunlander tongue for the first time; his harsh accent made him hard to understand. “I not see you . . . !”
“But I’m here, Master.”
“I feel . . . my home . . .”
“Yes. We are close, Master,” Beck told him. “We will reach your house soon. Stay strong!”
“The end comes soon now, little Pikkhh,” the Dreamless whispered, a fleck of pinkish spittle at each corner of his ashen mouth.
“Don’t fear, Master, you will survive to see your home.”
“Not the end . . . for me,” Qu’arus breathed, so quietly that even Barrick bent down to hear better. “I care . . . little that. The end for all things. I feel it . . . feel it comes closer. Like cold wind.” He sighed and his eyes fluttered shut, but he spoke one last time before sleep took him again. “Like wind from land of dead.”
Qu’arus woke several more times as the day passed, but Pick said his words were almost all nonsense. He did not move much of anything besides his mouth and his eyes: the dying Dreamless seemed to watch them both with a kind of frightened yearning, as though waiting for them to cure or kill him. Barrick could not help thinking of the head of the Trigonate oracle Brennas, which was said to have remained alive and speaking for three years in a box after the Xandians had executed him.
After a while Barrick made his way past the giant blemmy, who was grinding away at the oars with his usual silent determination, and clambered up into the front of the boat to look for Skurn. He hung onto the high prow to keep his balance as he scoured the distance for some sign of the raven. Something dark was indeed on the horizon, but it was far bigger than Skurn.
“What is that—a storm?” he asked Pick. It seemed to hang too close to the earth, a great blob of darkness spread across the river, thick and black at the bottom but growing fainter higher up until it blended into the twilight sky like a puddle of ink leaching into a blotter.
Pick shook his head. “That’s Sleep,” he said.
“The city? Truly? But it’s black—like thunderclouds!”
“Ah! Those are the darklights. The people of Sleep do not like the brightness of this twilight world under the Mantle. The darklights make a night for them to live in.”
Barrick stared at the blotch on the horizon, which seemed to wait for him like a spider squatting grimly in its web. “They make more darkness? This gods-cursed forever twilight isn’t gloomy enough for them?”
“The Dreamless love the dark,” Pick told him seriously. “They can never have enough.”
The raven finally returned. He landed on the railing of the small boat and stood silently, grooming his mottled pinfeathers in a disinterested way.
“Do you see that up ahead? ” Barrick asked him. “Pick says it’s Sleep.”
“Aye, us seed it.” The raven picked at something invisible. “Us flew there.”
“Is it a city or just a town? How big?”
“Oh, a city, it be. Fearful big. Fearful dark.” Skurn tipped his head sideways to stare at Barrick. “Didn’t listen to us, did you? Now you and us both goes there.” The raven let out a whistle of disgust, then hopped away down the rail toward the stern. “It be a bad place, that Night Man city,” he called back. “Good thing us has got wings. Too bad some others here hasn’t.”
23
Guild of the Underbridge Kallikans
“Shivering Plain, one of the last great battles of the Theomachy, was also the last time it is known that fairies and mortals fought on the same side, although it is said that far more Qar than men were in the battle, and that far more Qar died there as well.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and
Xand”
“ I HAVE CHOSEN what gifts seemed best.” Dawet still wore his traveling cloak, as though he had only clambered down from his horse a few moments ago. He and Briony had met in the River Garden this time, whose damp air made it one of Broadhall Palace’s less visited spots. “The wars to the north and south mean that many things are in short supply, especially for such unusual folk. I’m afraid it cost more than a few crabs, as the saying goes.”
“I hope I gave you enough.” Briony had now spent almost all the money Eneas had loaned her.
“It sufficed, but I have none left over to give back.”
She sighed. “I cannot thank you enough, Master dan-Faar. So many people owed me allegiance but failed me . . . or were taken from me. Now here I stand with only one friend left.” She smiled. “Who would ever have guessed it would be you?”
He smiled back, but it was not the most cheerful expression she had ever seen him wear. “Friend, yes, Princess—but your only one? I doubt that. You have many friends and allies in Southmarch who would speak for you—aye, and do more than speak—if you were there.”
She frowned. “They must know by now that I live. Word must have spread, at least a little. I have been living here openly for months.”
Dawet nodded. “Yes, Highness, but it is one thing to know your sovereign lives, another to risk your life for her in her absence. How can even your most loyal supporters know whether you are coming back? Distance makes things uncertain. Get yourself safely to Southmarch and I daresay you will find more than a few partisans.”
She nodded, then offered him her gloved hand. “I have no money left to pay you, Master dan-Faar,” she said sadly. “How long can I keep relying on your friendship when I cannot repay it?”
He kissed the back of her hand, but kept his brown eyes fixed on her as he did so. “You may rely on the friendship no matter what, my lady, but do not assume that I am the worse for the current imbalance. Tell yourself that I am simply gambling—something I am well known for—by performing a task here, a small chore there, none at more than slight disadvantage to myself, but each carrying the possibility of great remuneration later on.” He let go of her hand and made a mocking bow. “Yes, I think that would be the best way to look at our admittedly . . . complicated . . . relationship.”