Shadowrise (51 page)

Rain was pattering heavily on the leaves above his head, loud enough to be heard even over the rushing of the river. Barrick had struggled with damp kindling for a long time before finally getting it to light, and had just got the fire burning well enough to continue on its own when he heard a sound and saw an upright shape moving through the reeds near the river’s edge some distance away. The intruder was not making much attempt to conceal itself—in fact, it was making a rather considerable amount of noise—but the hairs lifted on the back of Barrick’s neck and he rose to a crouch, pulling the broken spear from his belt.

He stayed in this position, silent and alert, as the thing stumbled nearer. It seemed oblivious to Barrick’s presence—unless, he reminded himself, it was trying to trick him. He held his breath and did not move as it emerged from the reeds and turned its grotesque head toward him. For a moment it seemed his worst fears had been made flesh—the thing was some sort of monster, a shambling heap of strange colors and waving fronds.

Barrick had already scrambled onto his feet, uncertain whether to attack it or run away, when he realized that what he had supposed was its head was only the hood of a cloak pulled low against the rain. The fronds were its tattered clothes, the colors surprisingly gaudy and bright, so that the strange figure seemed more like something out of a religious procession than any forest wild man.

Skurn dropped down onto his shoulder, startling Barrick badly. “Not right,” the bird said in a quiet, anxious rasp. “Seen naught like that before. Don’t go near. Us doesn’t like it.”

The thing had spotted their fire and hurried toward them, arms waving, shouting meaningless words in a scratchy voice:
“Gawai hu-ao! Gawai!”

Barrick sprang back a step, brandishing his spearhead. “Stop!” he shouted. “Skurn, tell it some fairy-talk! Tell it to stay back!”

The tatterdemalion figure stopped and pushed back its hood, revealing a pale, mud-streaked face that Barrick could not help thinking looked rather ordinary, not to mention as human as his own. “What . . . what did you say?” the newcomer asked. “Is that sunland speech?”

It was a moment before Barrick remembered that was what the shadowland folk called the other side of the Shadowline. “Yes,” he said, but kept his weapon leveled toward the newcomer. “Yes—that’s where I’m from. You speak my tongue?”

“I do! I remember it!” The stranger took a few more staggering steps toward him. “Oh, by the Black Hearth, and you have a fire—all blessings on you, sir!”

Barrick waved him back with the spearhead. “Stop there. What do you want? And who are you?” He examined the odd figure. “You don’t look like a fairy. You look like a man.”

This startled the stranger, who wrinkled his face into a comical squint as he considered. He certainly had none of the exaggerated boniness of the Qar. His face was straw-thin and dirty, with grime in every wrinkle, and his hair was a wet tangle festooned with twigs and leaves. Still, though he had more than the usual number of missing teeth, he didn’t look much older than the prince himself.

“Man? A man?” The fellow nodded slowly, his multicolored rags swaying. “That’s a word. Yes, that’s a word.”

“Where are you from?” Barrick looked around in case the grimy creature might have confederates standing by to jump out and rob him, but there was no sign of anyone else nearby.

“From . . . yes, from the sunlands,” said the stranger at last—slowly drawing it out, as if he had come up with the answer to a nearly impossible puzzle. “But I don’t remember it well,” he added sadly. “It was so long ago.”

“What is your name?”

The patchwork man showed a sickly smile. “Master calls me ‘Pick.’ ”

Barrick stepped back and let him approach the fire. Pick scuttled past him and squatted, holding his hands up to the low flames, his entire body wracked with shivers.

“What do you want?” Barrick asked at last. “Are you lost? Or do you mean to try and rob me?”

The one named Pick cowered as though he’d been slapped. “No! Please, do not hurt me, I beg you. I have been looking so long for someone who can help me. It is my master, my poor master!”

Every nerve and muscle urged Barrick to walk away from this ragged madman—Skurn had already flapped into the air, as though the man’s folly might be infectious. “What are you talking about?”

“One of the blemmies fell out of the boat. I tried to help, but I fell too. I nearly drowned! I have been trying to find help for hours. But my poor, sick master . . .”

“Blemmies?”

“Just come.” Although he was still dripping wet, the patchwork man now leaped up from the fire and began trotting back toward the river, turning every few steps like an eager dog to see if Barrick was following. “Come and you will see!”

Skurn hovered over Barrick’s head making dire predictions as he made his way down to the wide bank of swaying reeds and the path Pick had already trampled through the weeds and mud. “Enough, bird,” Barrick said at last. “Do something useful. Fly ahead and see if the fellow’s waiting for me with a club or something.”

The raven appeared a few moments later. “He’s standing looking out at the water, waiting, like. There’s a boat out there, but us don’t like it—there be somewhat fierce wrong with it.”

When Barrick reached Pick’s side he saw that the smaller man was, as Skurn had said, standing on a patch of trampled weeds staring out at a place where the river widened into a calm backwater. At the center of it, a long stone’s throw away from the bank, a black boat was being rowed in slow circles by a strange, hunched figure.

It took Barrick a moment to make sense of size and distance. “The one rowing is a big, big man. Is that your master?”

Pick looked at him as though Barrick had said something utterly mad. “That’s the other blemmy. He’s only got one oar.”

“Still, he could pole his way back to shore,” Barrick suggested, wondering what kind of half-wit rowers Pick’s master had hired. “Tell him that.”

“He’s . . .” The patchwork man wiggled his hand beside his head. “Can’t hear,” he said at last.

“Oh, for the love of . . .” Barrick looked out at the hunched figure and the long, circling black boat. “Then just swim out and show him.”

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 . . .”