by Tad Williams
“Interfere?” Beck laughed, the sound hollow as a rotten log. “You do not understand, my lord. The Lonely Ones are not sentries or reeves like we had back in Helmingsea. They will not ‘interfere’; they will turn the marrow in your bones to ice. They will pluck out your heart and swallow it whole. If you are on the water and you hear their voices calling to you, you will drown yourself to get away from them.”
“Stop talking in puzzles—what are they?”
“I don’t know! Even my master was afraid of them. He told me his people should never have brought them to Sleep. That’s what he said—‘brought them.’ I don’t know if they found them or bred them or summoned them like Xandian demons—even the Dreamless speak of the skrikers only in whispers. I heard one of Qu’arus’ sons tell his brother they were like white rags caught on the wind, but with the voices of women. The Dreamless also call them ‘the Eyes of the Empty Place.’ I don’t know what that means. May the gods help me, I never want to find out.” He was all but weeping again.
“Stop this blubbing. Here, look at your map.” Barrick squatted over the spiral the merchant had drawn. “We don’t dare go straight down the big canal, especially if Repose is ending soon, as you say. You must help me find our way to the center by smaller waterways.”
“The small canals—it’s all darklight,” Beck said. “You can’t see anything. Some of them are blocked with water gates—we’re blind, they’ll still be able to see us ...”
Barrick groaned in frustration. “Still, there must be a way to get there, even if we have to go right down the middle of the biggest canal ...”
“Like a snail shell,” Skurn said suddenly. The bird lifted his head from where he had been pecking through the fractured, sticky remains of just such an object. “Seen that, us has. From above.”
“Yes. We want to get to the center, but Beck says we can’t go down the smallest waterways without being noticed.”
“Us could find a way,” Skurn said. “Island to island, where the dark don’t reach.”
“Then do it,” Barrick told him. “Do it, and I promise I will catch you the biggest, fattest rabbit you ever saw and I won’t take even a bite myself.”
The bird tipped his head sideways to look at him, black eyes alive with reflected firelight. “Done,” he said and spread his wings. “Keep up best as can, then.”
Before getting back into the skiff Barrick stopped to extinguish the fire, but before he kicked the sandy dirt over it he took a pine bough, sticky with sap, and held it in the flames until it caught.
“That’s real fire!” Beck said when he saw it. “Put it out!”
“It’s dark as night out there. I’m not going to feel my way through this cursed city on hands and knees. Besides, if the Dreamless don’t like twilight, maybe they’ll be scared of actual fire.”
“They hate light, but they’re not afraid of it. And they’ll see it from far away. If we carry that, we might as well go shouting at the top of our voices for the skrikers to come and find us.”
Barrick stared at him, trying to sift the man’s sense from his fearfulness. At last he threw the torch into the river; a wisp of smoke drifted after them as they slid away from the island.
Barrick had not liked the gloomy city before, but as they worked their way deeper and deeper into the heart of Sleep he liked it even less. It might be a less forbidding place when Repose had ended and the streets were full again, but it was hard to imagine it ever being cheerful, or even ordinary. The waterways, with their high, leaning sides, docks like crooked teeth, and bridges hanging close overhead, seemed almost intestinal—as though the city were some great, mindless creature like a starfish, absorbing them slowly into itself. The houses, even the largest, seemed cramped and secretive, with small windows like the foggy eyes of blind men. Barrick also saw little in the way of public places, at least that he could recognize as such, only the jagged bridges and occasional barren open spaces which looked less like squares or markets and more as if the buildings that had once stood there had vanished without being replaced. Worst of all, though, was the aura of brooding silence that hung over the dark maze. Its residents might be called Dreamless, but instead of perpetual wakefulness every building Barrick and Raemon Beck passed seemed a sort of nightmare construct, a hard shell hiding a seed of slumbering malice in its depths, as though Sleep were not a city at all but a mausoleum for the uneasy dead.
They had just slipped out of the security of one of the midcanal islands and were rowing across an open space toward another skerry of rocks, trees, and twilight when the last bell of Repose rang, a dull reverberation that Barrick felt in his bones more than heard in his ears.
“They will be coming out now,” Beck said quietly, but he was struggling to stay calm. “Someone will see us.”
“If you keep twitching and jumping that way someone will certainly notice. Sit still. Look as though you belong here.” Barrick pulled his own hood farther down over his face. “If you don’t have something to cover your head with, lie down.”
Beck found a piece of patched sailcloth and wrapped it around himself. “It is just that I know these folk. They are cruel, the Dreamless—cruel for no reason! They are like boys pulling the legs off flies.”
“Then we’ll have to make sure they don’t get hold of our legs, won’t we? Now where did that cursed raven get to . . . ?”
Barrick was still looking for Skurn as they passed beneath a place where several ancient bridges seemed to cross over and under each other at different heights, like the thorny branches of a rose bush, connecting a series of crumbling ivied, tile-covered towers on either side of the shadowy canal. A smear of grayish movement along one of the bridges caught Barrick’s eye, as if someone up there was waving a handkerchief at him. He glanced up. Something looked back down at him. He could barely see it through the guttering darklights but he felt its gaze like a claw of ice tightening around his heart.
“What are you doing?” Beck whispered urgently. “You dropped the oar!”
Barrick heard his companion splashing as he dragged the oar back into the boat, but it might have been happening on the far bank. “Where . . . where did it go?” he said at last, barely able to speak the words. “Is it still up there?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Its eyes—they were red. I think it was alive, but . . . but it . . . wasn’t ...” His mouth was dry as sand, dry as dust, but he swallowed anyway. “It looked at me ...”
“Gods help us,” Beck moaned. “Was it a skriker? Oh, Heaven save us, I don’t want to see it . . . !” He pressed his face into his hands like a frightened child.
At last, his heart rabbiting, Barrick worked up the courage to look again. The tangle of bridges was falling away behind them, and although for one chill moment he thought he saw something pale fluttering on the highest bridge, when he blinked and looked again it was gone. Still, he could not push the memory of it from his mind, although he could not say exactly what had frightened him so.
Like white rags caught on the wind . . .
The city seemed to be stirring back into a hushed, morbid sort of wakefulness. Barrick saw shapes moving in the darklit shadows, but they were all so heavily cloaked and wrapped that it was hard to make out anything more than their movement. Most of them were solitary, walking slowly along the sides of the canals or occasionally crossing overhead on one of the curiously high bridges, often bearing darklight torches so that they traveled in a small cloud of moving blackness. Barrick now wanted nothing more dearly than to escape this place as quickly as possible. What kind of unnatural things were these Dreamless? Did they truly hate the light so much, or was there something more to the practice? He was suddenly grateful that Beck had talked him out of carrying real fire.
Following Skurn’s slow-flapping lead, they crossed the widest part of the Fade and slipped into a narrow waterway that curled in on itself like a dead centipede, twisting through a seemingly forgotten section of town that, despite its pro
ximity to the center of Sleep, seemed almost completely empty and abandoned, half the buildings in ruins, several of them nothing but charred rubble. Raemon Beck sat up in the bow of the boat, his face tense with attention and fear. “This is it,” he said. “Master took us here—I remember that tree.” He pointed to a gnarled and ancient alder growing on its own small, stony island, its trunk deformed by wind and time, branches reaching up and spreading over the center of the canal like the hand of a drowning giant. “I think Traitor’s Gate was nearby.”
“I hope so,” Barrick said, squinting. There were fewer darklights in this area, only an occasional brand spreading inky darkness from a canal-side sconce, but they still cast enough shadow to make it hard to see details of what was on the shore. A moment later he sat up and pointed. “Is that it?”
Whatever it had been once, the stone structure was now little more than a ruin, its outer buildings collapsed and the remaining high walls overgrown with trees and creepers. It looked like one of the tombs in the cemetery outside the Throne hall back in Southmarch, except that this tomb would have sufficed for a dead giant.
“I . . . I think that’s it,” said Beck, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Oh, Heaven protect us, I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now—what my master said of the curse frightened me.”
“What are you talking about? You might have told me before.” Hills, ruins—was there nothing in these benighted shadowlands that wasn’t cursed?
“I didn’t remember.” Beck’s eyes were wide and staring; his hand, which he held up as if to shield his eyes from the nonexistent sun, shook badly. “Master said that this place was forbidden ground—and that all the people of these lands, Dreamless and Dreaming, were cursed too because of what Crooked did to the gods.” He pawed at his face. “I can’t remember anymore—I was new here then. Everything was so strange ...”
Barrick felt a cold contempt wash over him. Words—words! What use were they to anyone? “I’m going in. You may stay here if you wish.”
Raemon Beck looked around wildly. “Please don’t, my lord! Can’t you see how bad it is? I won’t go in there!”
“That is your choice.” As the boat grounded softly against the rotting wooden dock, Barrick stood up, making the boat pitch so that Beck had to grab the rails. Skurn was nowhere in sight, but he would surely see the boat and know where Barrick had gone.
Beck didn’t say anymore, but when Barrick climbed carefully onto the pier, which quivered but held, Beck got up to follow him, face pinched with misery and fear.
“Be sure to tie up the boat so it doesn’t float away.” Barrick had an ugly feeling they might want to leave suddenly.
When he stepped into the trees, away from the single darklight torch that burned on a post near the edge of the canal, Barrick could see the building better. It was larger than it looked from the canal and the land around it was wider and deeper than it had first appeared. The place seemed measurelessly old, its pale, vine-latticed walls scratched with deep gouges—writing, or mystical incantations perhaps, but as crude as if they had been made by an immense child. Every soft step they took across the leaves and fallen branches seemed to rattle like a drumroll. As Barrick picked his way through the undergrowth toward the great stone ruin, past gigantic blocks of stone that had broken loose and tumbled from the walls, he was coldly satisfied to hear Beck scuffling along behind him, whispering miserably to himself.
A black something came rushing through the trees toward him.
“Run!” shrieked Skurn as he dove past. “Coming!”
Barrick stood for a confused moment after the bird was gone. Then he saw a pair of pale shapes coming toward him from the ruins, sweeping over the uneven ground like windblown leaves.
“Skrikers!” choked Raemon Beck. He turned to run back toward the boat, but tripped and fell face first into a clot of brambles.
The creatures moved with terrible swiftness, loose garments rippling and flowing like mist, faces invisible in the depths of their hoods as they leaped or slithered over obstacles they barely seemed to touch. They crossed a hundred paces of distance so quickly that Barrick only had time to yank Raemon Beck to his feet before the first of the things was upon them. Without thinking, he swung Qu’arus’ sword at the thing’s head, or at least where its head should be. It leaned back, hissing like a startled snake, and he caught a glimpse of a face—red eyes and a cobweb of dull scarlet veins on corpse-white skin. Then the thing laughed. It was a terribly, lonely wheeze of sound, but worst of all was that the inhuman voice was unmistakably female.
Barrick’s legs felt stiff and weak as wax candles, as if any moment they would break beneath his weight. The other pale thing floated to the side, trying to get behind him. Barrick staggered back a step and let go of Raemon Beck, who crumpled to the ground with a whimper of resignation. The boat was several dozen paces behind them but it might as well have been miles. The billowing shapes moved closer, their ragged voices twining in a cracked chant of hunger and triumph.
The skrikers were singing.
29
Every Reason to Hate
“The fairies’ only remaining city is in the far north of Eion, north even of what was once Vutland. Ximander calls it ‘Qul-na-Qar’ or ‘Fairy Home,’ but whether those are the names the fairies themselves use is unknown.The Vuts called it ‘Alvshemm’ and claimed it was a city with towers as numerous as the trees in a forest.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
THE SUN HAD ALMOST SUNK to the horizon and the lamps were being lit all over Broadhall Palace. Briony was on her way back from visiting Ivvie, who was feeling better, if not quite well—the girl’s hands still shook badly, and she could take nothing into her stomach stronger than clear broth—when she was met in the hall outside her rooms by two armed and helmeted soldiers wearing the royal Syannese crest. The guards’ air of tense expectancy was such that for a moment she feared they meant to kill her. She was relieved, but only a little, when one of them announced, “Princess Briony Eddon, you have been summoned by the king.”
“I would like to go and change my clothes, first,” she said.
The guard shook his head. His expression gave her a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. “I am sorry, Highness, but it is not permitted.”
She ran through all the possibilities as they escorted her toward the throne room. Could it be her meddling with the Kallikans? Or had something about Jenkin Crowel’s injuries been whispered in the king’s ears? That would be easy enough to deny—Dawet was too clever to leave any loose ends.
As she walked across the great throne room between the two tall men she could not help wondering if the covert glances from the courtiers betrayed the same squeamish sort of fascination they might have felt for a famous criminal.
Oh, sweet mistress Zoria, what trouble have I caused now?
King Enander and his advisers were waiting for her in the Perin Chapel, a high-ceilinged room much longer than it was wide. The king sat on a chair with the great altar behind him, at the feet of Perin Skylord’s monstrous marble statue. The god held his great hammer Crackbolt, its massive head resting on the floor just behind the chair occupied by the Lady Ananka, the king’s mistress, who was one of the last people Briony wanted to see. Equally loathsome was the presence of Jenkin Crowel, the Tollys’ envoy at the Syannese court, although it suggested she had guessed right: one of the bully-boys had probably talked. Crowel smirked at her; his giant white neck ruff made him look like a particularly ugly flower. It was all she could do not to go to him and slap his pink, insolent face, but she struggled for calm and found it. She had learned a few lessons since Hendon Tolly had provoked her almost to madness at her own table.
She dropped to her knee in front of King Enander and looked down at the floor. “Your Majesty,” she said. “You summoned me and I have come.”
“Not hastily,” said Ananka. “The king has waited for you here a long time.”
Briony bit her l
ip. “I am sorry,” she said. “I was with Mistress Ivgenia e’Doursos and your messengers only just found me. I came as soon as I heard.” She looked up to the king, trying to gauge his mood, but the expression on Enander’s face was a disinterested mask that could have augured anything at all. “How may I serve you?”
“You claim to serve King Enander?” said Ananka. “That is strange, since none of your actions show anything like it.”
Whatever was happening here, it was obviously bad. If Lady Ananka was to serve as her inquisitor the cause would be lost before Briony even knew what was at stake.
“We welcomed you to our court.” She saw now that Enander’s face was flushed as though he had been drinking heavily for this early hour of the day. “Did we not? Did we not open our arms to you as Olin’s daughter? ”
“Yes, you did, Majesty, and I am most grateful ...”
“And all I asked of you was that you not bring the intrigues of your . . . troubled homeland into our house.” The king frowned, but it seemed as much in puzzlement as anger. Briony felt a moment of hope. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding—something she could explain. She would be contrite, grateful. She would apologize for her youth and headstrong ways, trot out whatever nonsense the king wanted to hear like Feival performing a soliloquy of girlish innocence, and then she could go back to her chambers for some blessed, necessary sleep . . .
A movement at the corner of her eye caught her attention. It was Feival himself, who had come so quietly into the great chapel that Briony had not even heard him. She was relieved to see at least one familiar face.
“You were extremely generous to her, my lord,” said Ananka. Was Briony the only person who could hear the venom dripping from the woman’s tongue? What good was beauty—a mature beauty, but beauty nonetheless—if it cloaked such a viperous soul?
Please, merciful Zoria, Briony prayed, help me to keep my temper. Help me to swallow my pride, which has landed me in trouble so many times.