No. He closed his eyes. That was human blood, the same as the thin stuff in his own veins that tried to weaken him. He had to be Qar now.
Barrick tried to stand, but his legs and arms would not support his weight. The Fireflower voices murmured in dismay at his helplessness.
That is how the Dreamers changed me, he realized. They took the old, weak Barrick away and buried him deep inside me. So I could reach Qul-na-Qar. So I could live with the Fireflower. They buried him and built a wall around my heart to keep it strong. And in the midst of everything else—the fetid, bursting air and the chants of the priests and even a dim apprehension of the vast and terrible something lurking behind it all—Barrick felt the poisonous gift of the Dreamers flowing back again to protect him, to make him safe from his own humanity.
They need me—the People need me… !
He got his knees beneath him and did his best to rise, his bruised and bleeding limbs as wobbly as those of a newborn colt. A half dozen of the Xixian soldiers fell on him at once and began to push him back down on his face, but the autarch turned and lifted his hand.
“Stand back, Leopards. I will not make the mistake of underestimating you again, Olin’s son. Clearly, your pariki friends have given you some sprinkling of their magicks. Mokori!”
A massive hand closed on the loose mail of Barrick’s armored neck, cutting off his air as it jerked him onto his feet. An instant later, a golden wire thin as a silkworm’s strand dropped over his head and he was pulled back against one of the largest bodies he had ever encountered. The autarch laughed and waved his hand again.
“Do not kill him, Mokori! Olin’s son will play audience. I suspect he may be one of the few people who can understand what is happening.” The autarch stepped back to reveal Barrick’s father, twitching on the ground like a man in the grip of a killing fever.
“Look, Olin—if you still are Olin,” the autarch crowed. “One of your sons has come to watch you play host to Xergal, the god of death and the underworld.”
Each time Barrick moved, the wire tightened around his neck. He didn’t think that in his battered condition he could have fought free anyway—the strangler Mokori was almost as big as Hammerfoot the Ettin—but the sight of his father’s suffering, even through the Dreamers’ deadening spell or whatever they had done to him, made him squirm and struggle despite the noose around his neck.
“Father?” he cried. “Father, can you hear me?” But Olin did not seem even to see him, let alone recognize him. Now Barrick began to feel the greedy joy of the invisible watcher. It fed on misery, somehow—on deceit and shame. That was how it had kept itself alive all these centuries in the dreaming lands… alive, perhaps, but not sane.
Suddenly Olin doubled over and fell onto his face, legs kicking like a hanged man’s. The sound that came from the king’s throat was so desperate and horrible that Barrick’s eyes filled with hot tears. Despite all his grievances, despite any wall around his heart, at that moment Barrick would have given his life to save his father from such suffering.
“Midnight is upon us!” cried the autarch. “He comes—the god comes! He enters the vessel!”
“That vessel is a man, curse you to the lowest hells!” Barrick shouted. “He is a king!”
“Come to me, great god—Xergal, or Kernios, or whatever name you wish!” the autarch cried, louder by himself than all the chanting priests combined. “Come to me, Earth Lord—Isolator—Gray Owl—Ageless Pine! I summon you to cross the void! I have made a home for you here!” Both of the autarch’s arms spread wide, as though he welcomed a lover. “Enter and be my servant forever—my slave!”
And then King Olin’s grunts of pain abruptly stopped. Barrick’s father rolled onto his back as though thrown there, and his limbs shot out straight; for a moment his entire body seemed to bulge and distort, rippling from his head to his extremities as though something hot had been poured into his skin.
Barrick heard a shout of misery and recognized it as his own. I’ve failed you all, he thought, battered by the confused and chaotic swell of the Fireflower voices. Failed.
Another cry came, this one from one of the Xixians, then more and more, voices of soldiers and even priests, all rising in fear. Olin’s body rose from the ground like a puppet being lifted by its strings until he stood upright and motionless. All across the platform and on the ground nearby the autarch’s men stumbled back, some making the sign of Nushash with spread fingers like the sun’s rays, others openly weeping with terror, overcome by what was happening in this strange place so very far from home. Olin had become utterly motionless, as if he were some smaller replica of the Shining Man that still loomed over them all, the dark, man-shaped shadow at the center of the island.
“Speak to me, servant,” said the autarch. “Are you indeed the god of the dark earth?” The thing, Barrick saw, did not look much like Olin anymore.
Thin end of the wedge, the awed voices whispered in his thoughts. The crack in it all. The last… !
The thing turned its head slowly toward the autarch, and Barrick gasped at how his father’s eyes had changed; whatever looked out of them stared out from a crawling tangle of fiery lines that filled the eyes from lid to lid, a squirming glow that bathed even the king’s brow and face… but it still did not speak.
“I said, who are you?” The autarch’s voice had become a little shrill.
“I am he who commands the Owl,” it said in a voice of such musical sweetness that for a moment Barrick almost felt glad that he had tasted so much horror, just to hear it. But even as the words faded, he felt the undertaste of boundless cruelty that was in it and it made his gorge rise. “I am the master of the Knot and keeper of the Pine. I am the Crowfather.”
Sulepis clapped his hands together like a pleased child. “The God of Death—and he is my slave! You are my slave, are you not, Master of the Depths?”
“I am the slave of my summoner as long as he holds me in this world.” Again that beautiful, horrible voice made Barrick want to throw himself at the thing’s feet and beg forgiveness, or hurl himself into the silvery sea to drown. But the most dreadful thing of all was that it was his father’s skin it wore, his father’s face being awkwardly moved by those inhuman emotions. How could he have ever thought he truly hated Olin when seeing this wrenched at his heart so?
“Then you must do what I say! You must!” The autarch closed his eyes and went almost completely still as if captured by the transport of love-making or religious frenzy. Barrick had never seen such an expression of rapture on a human face.
“As long as I am held here, I will do what I am told,” the dead-eyed thing said. “I will burn this world to its foundations if you so direct me. I will suck the life from every plant and bird, everything that walks and breathes.” And saying this it laughed, a noise of such melodious horror that the Fireflower voices inside Barrick were shocked into silence again.
This god is insane, he realized. It has been locked away from the world too long. Like a dreamer who never wakes, it no longer knows the difference between what is outside itself and what is inside.
And now it had been loosed on the world, its only keeper the madman in golden armor. The autarch had begun to laugh, too, a loud and excited sound that was nearly a shriek of triumph. “Yes! Yes! Mine mine mine!” It was hard to say which of the two sounded less human.