The Lonely Ones "In the tome known as Ximander's Book it is written that one family of the Elementals did join forces with the Qar long ago, and that they are called the Emerald Fire. According to Ximander they are a sort of royal guard to the king and queen of the fairies, like the Leopards of the Xixian Autarch." -from "A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand" "THE REPOSE… SKRIKERS?I don't understand."Barrick took up the heavy oars again and began to row. The weird murk of the darklights lined the river like an arbor of old trees, dense along the bank and stretching high on either side until it finally began to thin far above their heads. "It makes no sense," he growled at Raemon Beck, struggling to keep his voice to a whisper. "Why would the Dreamless shut themselves away for hours each day when they do not sleep? And if everyone's inside, why would they have these skriker things guarding the streets? From what?"
Beck had dried his eyes, but he looked as if he might burst into tears again any moment; the man's weak, puffy face made Barrick angry. "The Dreamless are fairies," Beck said quietly, "and except for my master they aren't kind ones. They trust no one-not even their own kind. As for the Repose, it is their law to lock themselves in, and that is what the skrikers see to. My master Qu'arus used to tell me that his people had to shut themselves away because too much wakefulness made their hearts and their thoughts sick. Before the Law of Repose many of them grew so damaged and secretive that they slaughtered their own families or their neighbors. There still are places where you can see the black ruins of estates that burned to the ground centuries ago with the family and all their servants inside, turned into funeral pyres by those who had grown tired of living…"
Barrick felt a disturbing moment of kinship with the Dreamless. How often had he dreamed of his own home in flames? How often had he wished for some disaster to end his pain, little caring who else might be harmed?
He rowed as quietly as he could, but the city was still as a tomb; every splash seemed certain to draw attention. The small waterway they were on came to an end, leaving them no choice but to move into a larger branch of one of the main canals. Three or four other boats were visible on the water, albeit distantly, but Barrick pulled hard on the oars and they managed to slip quickly across the wide waterway and then back onto one of the smaller side streams.
It was tiring to go so fast, though: the boat was twice as big as the sort of two-man skiffs used in Southmarch. Barrick found himself thinking of the headless blemmy that had done the work before-he wished they could have brought one of the horrible things, just to spare himself this backbreaking labor.
Barrick soon discovered that if he kept the skiff away from the darklights along the edge of the canals he could actually see fairly well, but the effect was still disturbing: out in the middle of the larger waterways was something like the shadowland twilight he had grown used to, but the banks seemed swaddled in inky black smoke. To see anything of what they were passing he had to move in close, until they were within the penumbra of the darklights and his eyes became accustomed to the deep shadow. But he had no idea whether they could be seen in turn or who might be looking at them.
"We need a place to hide," he told Beck. "Some place no one will find us while we decide what to do next."
"There is no such place," Beck said bleakly. "Not here. Not in Sleep."
Barrick scowled. "And you do not know where Crooked's Hall is, either. You are as useless as a boar's teats…"
At that moment something dropped on them out of the blackness, as though the darklights themselves had spat out part of their essence. Raemon Beck threw himself down, pressing his face against the deck, but Barrick recognized the clot of shadow and its method of entrance.
"I didn't expect to see you again, bird," he said.
"Us didn't expect to see you, neither… not alive, like." The bird bent to groom its chest feathers. "So, how went your guesting with those kindly blue-eyed folk?"
Barrick almost laughed. "As you can see, we've decided to move on. The problem is, Beck here doesn't know where Crooked's Hall might be. We need somewhere to go where we can be safe from the Night Men. And the others… what did you call them, Beck? Skrikers? "
"Quiet!" The patchwork man looked around in anxious terror. "Do not name them here where the banks are close by! You'll summon them."
Skurn, who had been standing on one leg at the bow of the boat while he picked something out of his toes, shook himself and fluttered a little closer to Barrick. "P'raps us could fly up and try to see somewhat for you," he said offhandedly. "P'raps."
Barrick couldn't help noticing the overture of comradeship. "Yes, that would be good, Skurn. Thank you." He looked at the pitchy clouds of blacklight along the banks. "Find a place where the darkness is not so thick-an island, perhaps. Unused. Maybe wild."
The black bird flapped upward in a spiral and then leveled out, flying toward the nearest bank.
"My stomach is empty," Barrick said as he watched the raven disappear. "If we take a fish from this water will it poison us?"
Beck shook his head. "I don't think so. But there is already food in the boat. I doubt anyone touched it after we brought my master home. With so many lost on our hunting trip and my master wounded we did not eat it all-a good deal of dried meat and road bread should be left." He crawled forward and found a large waterproof sack folded underneath the foremost bench. "Yes, see!"
The food had a strange, musty taste, but Barrick was far too tired and hungy to mind. They shared a handful of dried meat and two pieces of bread as hard as boot-leather that reminded Barrick of the brown maslin loaves back home.
"And you are truly Prince Barrick!" Raemon Beck had recovered his spirits a bit. "I cannot believe I should see you again, my lord-and here of all places!"
"If you say so. I do not remember our first meeting." In truth, Barrick didn't much want to remember. It was nothing to do with the man in the ragged clothes. He had felt such relief at being separated from all that he had left behind-his past, his heritage, his pain-and he was in no hurry to bring any of it back.
Beck haltingly told him of how his caravan had been attacked by the Qar, he the lone survivor, and how after telling his story he had been summoned to a royal council and then had been sent back again to the same place along the Settland Road. The tale took a long while-Beck's memory had been addled by so much time behind the Shadowline, a stay even longer than Barrick's-and every name he recovered was a victory for him but gave Barrick only pain.
"And then your sister told the captain… what was his name? The tall one?"
"Vansen," said Barrick flatly. The guardsman had fallen into blackness defending Barrick's life after Barrick himself had cursed him many times. Was there to be no end to this parade of wretched, useless memories?
"Yes, your sister told him to take me back to where the caravan was attacked. But we never reached it-or I never did. I woke up in the night surrounded by mist. I was lost. I called and called but no one found me. Or at least none of the ones that I traveled with found me…" Raemon Beck broke off, shuddering, and would say no more about what had happened to him between that time and the time he was taken in by Qu'arus of Sleep. "He treated me well, did Master. Fed me. Didn't beat me unless I deserved it. And now he's dead…" Beck's shoulders trembled. "But I do not think your sister, bless her-forgive me, Lord, I should say Princess Briony… I do not think she meant me any harm. She was angry, but I don't think she was angry at me…"
"Enough, man. Leave it." Barrick had heard as much as he could bear.
Beck lapsed into silence. Barrick sat hunched in the robe that had cushioned Qu'arus on his dying journey and took up the oars again, rowing just enough to keep them in the middle of the quiet, backwater stream while they waited for the raven's return. The canal was narrow and the houses rose up on either side, scarcely distinguishable from the rough stony cliffs out of which they had been carved, only recognizable as dwellings by the occasional tiny window and the huge, gatelike doors in the walls above the waterline.
Doors, he thought. More doors in this city than I can count. And all I have to do is find the right one.
Skurn dropped down out of the dim sky and spread his wings to land on the boat's tall stern. It was easy to forget how big the bird was, Barrick thought-its wingspan nearly matched the spread of a man's arms. The raven did not speak at once, but picked and pruned at his feathers. It was clear Skurn wanted to be asked.
"Have you found us anything? A place to go?"
"Mought be. Then again, moughtn't."
Barrick sighed. Was it any wonder he was mostly alone in the world and preferred it that way? "Then please tell me," he said with exaggerated courtesy. "Afterward, I will thank you fulsomely for your kind service."
Pleased, the raven fluffed himself and stood straighter. "Happens that this is what Skurn has found-a skerry off the great canal, midstream. Trees and such, and only ruins. Us didn't see sign of naught on two legs."
"Good," said Barrick. "And I do thank you. Which direction?"
"Follow us." The raven flapped up again.
As Barrick paddled after the slow-flapping shape, Raemon Beck suddenly said, "Not all the animals here talk. And sometimes even with the ones that do, you're better off not to listen." He shook himself like a wet dog, beset by some evil memory. "Especially when they invite you back to their houses. It's not like one of those children's tales, you know."
"I'll do my best to remember that."
The island was much as Skurn had described, a small, overgrown knot of stone in the middle of one of the large canals, far enough from the darklights that it basked in a pool of twilit gray. Some immense structure had once stood among the dark pines, taking up most of the small island, but little remained of it now except a few crumbling walls and the circular ruins of what might have been a tower.
There was no beach to be found, and nothing left of the dock that had once served the island except a few bleached piers that looked enough like great ribs to make Barrick think uneasily of the Sleepers and their bone mountain. They moored the boat to the closest of these and waded to the rocky shore through water up to their chests; Beck and Barrick were both shivering by the time they reached dry ground and crawled into the shelter of the pines.
"We need a fire," Barrick said. "I don't care if anyone sees it or not." He got up and led Beck through the thick growth until they reached the remains of the stone tower. "This will at least hide the light of the flames," he said. "There's nothing we can do about the smoke."
"Use these," said Beck, bending to pick deadfall from the ground. "It's a good wood and they'll put off less smoke than green branches."
Barrick nodded. So the man wasn't useless after all.
With a small fire burning, Barrick finally settled back to warm his hands and realized that Skurn was gone. Before he had too much chance to think about it the bird came back, flapping down through the upper branches before hopping the rest of the way from limb to tangled limb. Something dangled in his beak, a dark bundle that he dropped with great ceremony.
"Us thought you would be hungry, like," the raven announced.
Barrick examined the almost eyeless corpse, a creature like a large mole but with longer and more delicate, fingered paws. "Thank you," he said, and meant it: he was painfully hungry. Except for the few morsels he had shared with Raemon Beck he hadn't eaten in what seemed like days.
"I'll do for that," Beck said. "Have you a knife?"
With some reluctance, Barrick produced Qu'arus' short sword. Beck examined it for a moment and raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. The merchant bent to the task of skinning and gutting the creature while Barrick stoked the fire, and he gave the entrails and hide to Skurn without asking. The raven gulped them down, then hopped onto a stone and began to groom himself.
"So what do you know of this city?" Barrick asked as their dinner roasted on a pine-skewer over the open flame. The smell was most distracting, musky but appetizing. "Where are we? How is the place shaped?"
Beck wrinkled his dirty face in thought. "I know little, to be truthful. The only time my master took me out before the hunting trip was on a ceremonial visit to the Duke of Spidersilk. He brought several of his mortal servants-just to put out the duke, or so it seemed." A sad little smile flickered on Raemon Beck's lips. "We had to go far into the city, and he pointed things out to me along the way. Let me think." He picked up a pine twig and began to draw with it in the dark, damp soil. "It has a shape like this, I think." He scratched an awkward spiral. "K'ze-shehaoui-the River Fade-that is what they call the great canal," he said, tracing this main line. "But there are other waterways crossing it all the way in." He drew other lines across the main line. The shape began to look like one of the halved chamber shells the priests of Erivor wore upon their breasts as an emblem of their god.
"But where are we?" Barrick asked.
Raemon Beck rubbed his face for a moment. "I think the house of Qu'arus must be somewhere here," he said, jabbing with his stick about halfway along the outermost spiral. "Master was always proud that he lived outside the heart of the city, separate from the other wealthy, important families. And this spot is probably somewhere near here." He poked again, scratching a larger mark on the second and third spirals. "I couldn't guess how far we've come exactly, but I know that part is full of islands."
Barrick frowned. He pulled the meat from the fire, then set it on a clean rock and began to cut it into two portions, an awkward process with a blade so big and a meal so small. He left Beck's on the rock and began to eat his own share with his fingers. "I need to know more. I have been set a task."
"What kind of task?" Beck asked.
Even the unfamiliar human company and the comfort of a hot meal was not enough to induce Barrick to share all his secrets with someone who was after all nearly a stranger. "Never mind that. I need to find a certain door, as I said, but I have no idea where it might be except for the name Crooked's Hall. What else can you tell me? If you don't know Crooked's Hall, is there a famous door somewhere in Sleep? An important gate? Something guarded?"
"Everything is guarded," Beck said grimly. "What is not watched by the skrikers is in the houses of the Dreamless, clutched tight."
"You mentioned some fellow your master took you to see-the Duke of Spiderwebs, was it?"
"Spidersilk. He is tremendously old. My master said he was one of the oldest in the city, second only to the members of the Laughing Council."
Despite himself, Barrick blinked. "What sort of name is that?"
"I don't know, my lord. Master hated them. He said someone should suck the last of the juices from them and then we could all begin again. He also said that laughter should have a sound, but I do not know what he meant."
Barrick was growing impatient with all the history. "This Spidersilk- where is he? Could we reach him? Could we make him tell us what we want to know?"
Raemon Beck stared in abject horror. "The duke? No! We cannot go near him. He would destroy us without lifting a finger!"
"But where did he live? Can you at least tell me that?"
"I'm not certain. Somewhere near the heart of the city. I remember because we passed many of the oldest places as we reached the middle of Sleep, some of them burned and others fallen down into ruins, some of them so surrounded with darklight that I could not see them even from a short distance. My master pointed out many things-such strange names!-the Garden of Hands was one, and a place called Five Red Stones, the Library of Painful Music-no, Pitiful Music…" He took a breath. "So many names! Syu'maa's Tower, Traitor's Gate, the Field of the First Waking…"
"Hold," said Barrick, suddenly intent. "Traitor's Gate? What was that?"
"I… I don't remember…"
Barrick reached out and grabbed Beck's arm with his left hand, and only realized that he was hurting him when he heard him whimper. He let go. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I must know. Think, man! What was it, this Traitor's Gate?"
"Please, Lord, it was… it was one of the places so dark I could not see it. But Master said something…" Beck squinted his eyes, clearly trying hard to remember, all the while rubbing the arm Barrick had squeezed. "He said it was a hole."
"A hole?" Barrick had to restrain the impulse to grab the small, dirty man again and shake him this time. "Is that all?"
"I know it sounds strange, but he called it a hole… what did he say? A hole that even the gods could not… could not…" His face brightened. "That even the gods could not close."
Barrick's heart was beating fast. He had heard enough talk of Crooked's roads to know this was something he could not ignore. "Show me how to find it."
Beck's look of satisfaction evaporated. "What? But… my lord, it's in the heart of Sleep-in the district of Silence where only those who are called may go. Even my master would not have set foot there without being summoned by Spidersilk…" He jumped at a loud clacking noise, but it was only Skurn cracking a snail shell against a rock.
"My master was very clever," Beck said. "If he wouldn't go there by himself, neither should we. You do not know these creatures, Prince Barrick-they've no souls, no kindness at all! They will skin us just to amuse themselves, with less concern than I gave to this coney!"
"I will not force you to go with me, but I cannot let the chance pass." Barrick wiped his hands on his ragged clothes and began smoothing out a place to lie down. "I must see this place, Beck. I must find out if this… hole that even the gods can't close is what I'm looking for. I have a task, as I said." He reached into his shirt to touch the mirror in its bag. "You are free to do what you want."
"But if you leave me, I will be caught! A runaway servant-and a Sunlander!" The man's eyes filled with tears. "They will do terrible things to me!"
Some of the coldness had returned to his heart: Barrick was suddenly tired and did not want to listen to this weak fellow's weeping-he could almost feel himself hardening like clay becoming brick. He lay back in the hollow between two pine roots and rolled the hood of Qu'arus' cloak behind his head as a cushion. "I cannot make your decisions for you, trader. I have responsibilities beyond shepherding one man." He closed his eyes.
It should not have been easy to fall asleep with Beck sobbing quietly only an arm's length away, but Barrick had scarcely slept in the house of the Dreamless-would not have said he slept at all, but for the memories of that strange lizard-dream. The world quickly slipped away.
In his dream he stood on a hilltop, an oddly featureless place the color of ancient ivory. A crowd of people had gathered on the slope below him, their staring faces like a garden bed of unusual flowers. He could recognize some of them instantly-his father the king, Shaso, his brother Kendrick-but some of them were less familiar. One might be Ferras Vansen he realized after a moment, but at the same time it was an older man with a gray-shot beard and thinning hair-a Vansen who could never exist because the guard captain had died in Greatdeeps, falling into endless darkness. Most of the rest were strangers, some in antique-looking dress, others as weird and misshapen as any of the creatures he had met in the demigod Jikuyin's slave cells: the only things the strange assembly seemed to share were their silence and attention.
Barrick tried to speak, to ask them what they wanted of him, but his mouth would not form the words. His face felt numb, and although the muscles of his jaw and tongue twitched, something kept them from moving freely. He reached his hand to his lips. To his horror, he felt nothing there but skin, stiff as old leather. His mouth was gone.
Barrick? Is that you?
Someone spoke from behind him, the achingly familiar voice of the dark-haired girl-Qinnitan, that was her name-but he could not answer her no matter how he tried. He struggled to turn toward her but could not move, either-his body had become as numb and hard as his face.
Why won't you talk to me? she asked. I can see you! I have wanted to talk to you so long! What have I done to anger you?
Barrick strained until his vision swirled, trying to make his stony muscles move, but it was useless. He might as well have been a statue. The expectant faces still gazed up at him but some of them began to change, showing impatience and confusion. He stood looking down as the sky darkened and rain began to fall, cold drops that he barely felt, as though the very flesh of his body had become something thick and stiff as tree bark. He heard Qinnitan's voice again but it grew fainter and fainter until at last it was gone. The crowd began to disperse, some clearly enraged by his inaction, others merely puzzled, until he stood by himself on the bare hilltop, dripping with rain that he could not wipe away.
"Prince Barrick, if you truly… ah!" Raemon Beck, who had only shaken Barrick once, was startled to feel Qu'arus' blade pressing against his neck.
"What is it?"
Beck swallowed carefully. "Could you… could you please not kill me, my lord?"
Barrick withdrew the blade and slipped it back into its scabbard. "How long did I sleep?"
Beck rubbed his throat. "It's always hard to tell here, but the quarter bell rang a short time ago. We do not have long before Repose is over and the Dreamless are out on the canals again." Pale and with dark circles under his eyes, the young merchant looked as though he had not managed to sleep at all. "If you truly mean to look for this place, we should go."
"We? Does that mean you are going with me?"
Beck nodded miserably. "What choice do I have, my lord? They'll kill me either way." His mouth pursed as he struggled with his composure. "For the first time in a long while I was thinking of my children and my wife… thinking of how I will likely never see them again…"
"Enough. That does neither of us any good." Barrick sat up, stretched. "How much longer will this Repose last?"
Beck shrugged miserably. "I told you, the quarter bell rang. That means three-quarters of it is gone. I do not even know how to judge time anymore, Prince Barrick. An hour? Two hours? That is all we have."
"Then we must try to find the center of the city before then. What of these skrikers? Will they interfere with us on the river?"
"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 proximity 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.