“Is that true, then… ?” said Barrick, amazed.
“Not in the least,” the queen told him. “Or at least not in my knowledge. Anglin’s folk were fishermen, but they were also good fighters, and gained their thrones by wit and strength. No gods had a hand in it—at least not directly.” Did she smile? “But long has your house held Erivor your special patron, and many sacrifices and festivals have you given in his honor, century upon century. It could be that he would listen to you, not because you have the blood of Crooked in you, but because you are an Eddon, and the Eddons have long and richly worshiped him.”
Barrick’s head felt as though it were spinning. “But… but you said he was asleep!”
“The sleep of gods is not like the sleep of others,” she explained. “And in all the time your family has prayed to him and sacrificed to him, he has always been sleeping, for a thousand years and more.” Now she did smile, the smallest stitch taking up the corner of her mouth. “So pray, Barrick of the Eddon. Down upon your knees and pray to your old tribal god. Ask him to open a way for us.”
Was she mocking him?
“Kneel?”
She nodded. “It helps one’s perspective. Treating with the gods requires courtesy, and courtesy is ultimately an acknowledgment of power—the true power on both sides of the conversation.”
“But I have no power at all!”
Saqri did not bother to agree with this.
Barrick lowered himself to his knees. He could not help noticing how much easier it was now that his arm no longer pained him, and how much more comfortable it was now that the bruises and bloody scrapes of the journey were beginning to heal.
Ask him… someone said quietly in his head; he couldn’t guess whether it was Saqri or one of the bodiless voices. Ask the sea lord… to open the way…
Barrick closed his eyes, uncertain of what to do. He had prayed countless times, especially in his childhood—oh, how he had prayed for the nightmares to stop, for his arm to be healed, to be able to play like the others—but never with such an unusual request in mind. He tried to remember some of the rituals held on Father Erivor’s sacred days, but with little success.
Father Erivor… that was what Barrick’s own father had called him, almost as a joke. “Father Erivor and all his little fishes preserve us!” the king would growl when he was particularly exasperated with one of his children.
Why did you leave me to suffer alone, Father? Why? It was bad enough what Olin had done, throwing his son down the steep tower steps, but why had he spoken so little of it afterward? Shame? Or because he was too busy with his own problems and the problems of the realm?
Father Erivor. Barrick tried to remember what he had thought then, as a child, when that name still meant somebody real—not just the bearded, blue-green giant portrayed on the chapel wall, silver fish surrounding his head like the rays of the morning sun, but the shape he saw in his head when they bowed their heads together and Father Timoid led them in prayers to the family patron.
Great Erivor, monarch of the green-lit depths…
As a child Barrick had imagined the god moving slowly at the bottom of the sea, slow as the great turtles or the ancient pike that lived in the castle ponds, wrapped in waving fronds of kelp.
Great Erivor, who has blessed us beyond other men…
It was strange, but Barrick could no longer tell if his eyes were closed or open. He seemed to hear the wind battering the waves to froth.
Great Erivor, who calms the waves and brings his bounty to our nets, who rides the great whalefish and tames the world-girdling serpent, hear us now!
The darkness swirled. The darkness was shot through with green light and flittering, bright shapes.
The darkness grew deeper, greener, and even more quiet. The winds that had howled in Barrick’s ears only moments before were muffled, and even the waves themselves became only a distant roiling. Down here all was silent, the sediments ancient, the kelp coiling and uncoiling, fish darting through its strands. Here dark things swam and crawled. Here mighty armored shapes moved through the dim, greenshot day and the lightless night.
Erivor? Barrick tried to send his thoughts out as boldly as he could. My family has always given you what was due. You have been our patron, our lord. Please, lord, help me now!
Something in the darkness shifted—nothing he could see, but something he could feel, as if the massy ocean floor itself had shrugged. It was so near—and so huge! The sheer size of what he felt terrified him, and for a moment Barrick Eddon almost flung himself away from the thing that frightened him, away from the darkest deeps and up toward the light. Then he remembered what would happen if he failed.
My lord! Hear me! Open the road for me to your house. Open the door! If you ever loved us, now is the time to help us! Please, Father Erivor!
And then he felt… something. It reached out to him and touched his thoughts, mossy and gigantic as a mountain. He could feel the immense slumbering impossibility of it, this thing sunk deep in millennia of sediment, slow as a starfish moving across a rock but also with parts of its thought as swift as tiny fish dodging in and out of the safety of coral fronds.
Manchild… ?
The thought was ageless, ponderous and strange, as though the lord of the sea truly were a giant turtle or lobster, something immense buried in the muck for thousands of years, its shell covered in countless other, smaller living things, waiting for who knew what distant happenstance.
Will you open the door for me, Father Erivor?
It could barely hear him, barely sense him at all. It was not entirely asleep, but it certainly was not awake—he could feel the greater part of its thought lying beyond his reach, inert, dreaming, moving at a rate so slow that no living thing could understand it. Door… ?
The door to your house! Open it for me! A thought occurred to him, floating in like a bubble. I will make you many sacrifices, I promise!
The door… it said again, and then he could feel the immense thing suddenly very near—a bright eye in the darkness, a mouth that might have been a hole into the heart of the world, a lightless whirlpool. It was so much bigger—it was big as the world… !
Little worshiper… you… may… pass.
The darkness fell away and Barrick fell with it. For a moment all was as it had been when he traveled through Crooked’s Hall out of Sleep. Then pressure and cold smashed in on him, crushing him almost to nothingness. Terrified, he opened his mouth to scream, and it filled with salty water.
Father Erivor had opened the door to his house, but his house was at the bottom of the sea.
Barrick was deep, deep in green water—only the gods knew how deep. He’d swallowed more than a little of it in his initial shock, a stinging mouthful that burned in his throat and windpipe until all he wanted to do was cough, which he knew would doom him. He clenched his teeth against it, flailing against the cold water, but he did not even know which way was up. He opened his eyes to the caustic green and saw bubbles streaming and circling him like dandelion fluff. The Fireflower chorus in his head was shrieking a warning but it seemed muffled, distant. He watched the bubbles swirl even as the water began to grow dark—as if here, deep beneath the ocean, twilight had fallen. It was beautiful in a strange way.…