Even as Barrick realized he was dying, that the breath trapped in his lungs was turning to hot poison, he saw that the bubbles were forming actual shapes, shapes ghostly as mist that circled him, watching. Did he see pity on those spectral, frothy faces, or only curiosity?
The god’s children, his thoughts told him, but they were not exactly his own thoughts.
Something clasped his arm and drew him out of the cloud of bubbles into shadowed green emptiness. Floating, he could not resist, but everything around him was turning black and he did not really care to resist anyway. Was he rising? No, sinking…
Her face loomed close to his, smooth and pale, hard as a statue, green as southern jade. For a dreamlike instant he thought it was his own mother’s face—Meriel, the mother he had never seen, who had died birthing him. The apparition held her hand up before him and caught a bubble the size of a duck’s egg; when it touched her slim fingers, it began to grow until it had become as big as a rubyskin melon. He could scarcely see it, but felt it press against his face, cool and delicate as a first kiss. New air pushed into his chest, replacing the water that had been choking him, and suddenly the darkness was crossed with streaks of light as his thoughts stirred back into life once more.
Do nothing, manchild—only breathe. Saqri’s voice was distant at first, but by the last words it filled his mind. We must give thanks to the god, even if he only sleeps and dreams us. Even more so, in fact, if he only dreams us.…
Barrick had no idea what she meant. He was content to float and taste the sweetness of air while all around him the green seemed to grow deeper and wider until he thought he could see shadowy shapes on all sides, pillars and arches. He couldn’t tell if they were natural or the work of some supernatural hand—in fact, he could not be entirely certain he was even seeing them.
But behind the vertical shadows was one deeper and darker than all the rest—a cave? A hall? For a moment, as a little light streamed down through the green from above—and as he realized for the first time where “up” actually was—he thought he could make out a massive shape crouched deep in that darkness, something so big and so strange that he could barely steel himself to face in its direction, let alone look carefully.
Tell him, she said.
Tell him what? Despite the bubble of air over his face, diminished in size now but still filling his lungs with life, he was finding it hard to take a breath. Something was in that cave, something unimaginably huge and powerful and alive, and he was terrif ied…
Tell him!
I… we… thank you. Thank you, Lord Erivor. By… He could remember nothing—all those bored mornings sitting in the chapel, and how could he have ever guessed this hour would come? Why hadn’t he paid better attention? By the blood of… of my ancestors, who have always served you, O Lord, and upon whom you have showered your blessings… No! That was wrong! That was the harvest prayer to Erilo!
Something stirred in the depths of the shadows; even with an incomprehensible weight of water pressing down on him from all sides Barrick could feel it in his bones. Whatever it was, it had become restless. Awake, angry, it could pull down mountains.
As panic rose, something else drifted up in him, too—not the voices of the Fireflower, which had become almost ordinary, but another voice, thin and quavering—a memory of Father Timoid, reciting the Erivor Mass, words that he had forgotten he knew.
And as the last oh-so-familiar word fell down into the blackness, the great shadow stirred again and slowly drifted backward into deeper dark. The presence that had, merely by existing, almost squeezed Barrick breathless began to recede from his thoughts, from his senses.
Thank you, Great Lord. It was Saqri’s voice, and to his astonishment there was a teasing lilt to it, like a cheeky girl taxing a beloved older relative. Thank you for your help, both to bring us here and to send us a little farther on, where the air is not so damp…
Send us? Barrick thought. Where? Hasn’t there been enough sending and coming and going… ?
He and Saqri began slowly to rise. The green grew brighter, the streaks of light smearing into one general circle that glowed high above them like a burning jade sun.
Barrick rose, and as he did the voices of the Fireflower woke again into what seemed a chorus of alarm and wonder, as though the darkness of the depths had made them somnolent, but the growing circle of light had wakened them.
And then the light widened overhead, swift as a brushfire sweeping across a hillside, brightness that expanded to swallow him up as he broke out of the green and into the dazzle, splashing and gasping for air. He discovered there not the unbroken sea as he had expected, an endless expanse of waves, but a jut of rocks and beyond that the dim shape of something he had not seen in so long that he almost could not recognize it, especially as the voices inside him grew to a singing crescendo.
Jutting on the horizon like a mountain range whose peaks had been whittled into sharp points, blasted white by the sharp morning sun so that it seemed sculpted in ice, loomed Southmarch Castle, the only home Barrick had ever known. It no longer seemed familiar to him, but had instead become something beautiful and strange.