Shadowrise (31 page)

“Even so.”
The one called Hikat seemed to take a certain joy in despair.
“What we can give him will only help him if he reaches the door—but he will never do so with an entire city full of deadly hatred against him.”

“It will freeze up his blood,”
Hoorooen said gloomily.
“If he travels those roads the void will drink away his life. He will become old and lost . . . like us. Old and lost.”

“It will diminish us—perhaps even destroy us. And he will only curse you for such a gift.”
Hikat sounded almost amused.

“It will almost certainly destroy us.”
Hau was sorrowful but resigned.
“But the world and everything in it will curse us if we do it not . . .”

Barrick now found himself aware of his body again, then of the growing light of the fire and the dome-shaped room as well, and even the three Sleepers, but this perception did not bring freedom or even movement. The hooded Sleepers leaned over him as though they were mourners and he the corpse.

“We send him into dry lands,”
Hau said.“
We must do what we can. But where? In what part of him do we pour our waters—our essence?”

“His heart,”
said Hikat.
“It will make him strong.”

“In his eyes,”
said quavering old Hoorooen.
“So he can see what he will see in the days ahead and not be afraid.”

“But fear is sometimes the first step toward wisdom,”
Hau replied.
“To be unafraid is to be unchanging and unready. No, we will simply give our waters to him and his own being shall decide what to do with them. He is lame in one arm, out of balance—that is his weakest spot. We shall do it there, where he is already broken.”

A uniform pressure moved over Barrick then, holding him motionless like a blanket of heavy armor links, but he could still feel the cool air of the room on his skin, the patchy heat of the fire. One of the three figures lifted an object up into the red light of the f lames—a crude, ancient knife chipped from gray stone.

“Manchild,”
said the one called Hau,
“let what we give you now, the waters of our being, fill you and strengthen you.”

The pressure grew stronger on Barrick’s left arm, the wounded place he had hidden from people’s stares, had always tried to protect. Now he struggled again to protect it, but for all his desperate effort he could not move himself by so much as a finger’s breadth.

“Do it swiftly,”
said Hikat.
“He is weak.”

“Not so weak as you suppose,”
Hau said, then something tore across the skin of Barrick’s arm—a horrible, searing slash of pain. He tried to scream, to struggle free, but his body was not his own.

“I give you my tears
,
”
said Hau.
“They will keep your eyes clear to see the road ahead.”
Something burned once more in the wound on his arm, salty and terrible. Another scream rose and fell deep inside him without ever breaking the surface.

The second shadowy figure took the knife, which rose and then came down again as another fiery spurt of agony pierced his arm.
“I give you the spittle of my mouth,”
Hikat growled.
“Because hatred will keep you strong. Remember this when you stand before the gods, and if you fail, spit in their faces for what they have taken from us all.”
Again Barrick felt a drizzle of misery for which he was allowed no release of movement or sound.

The gods were punishing him, that was clear. He could take no more of such suffering. Even the smallest twinge of discomfort now and his head would flame and burst like a pine knot in a bonfire.

“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.”

“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.

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 of the hill.

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 . . .

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.