He came struggling up out of the darkness when he felt a touch on his face—his hand, his injured hand, shot up and grabbed. Somebody—Beck, he realized, it was Beck—whimpered with pain.
“Don’t… hurt me.”
“Why did you touch me?”
“I… I know you.”
He opened his eyes wide. Beck was cowering down on the straw. Old Finlae had fallen asleep. “What are you talking about? Of course you know me—I came here with you.”
“I know you… from before. What is your name?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why should I tell you?”
“I know you! I have seen you before. We have… I think we have met. In… in the before…”
He realized he was still squeezing Beck’s fingers in his own, hard enough that the other man was grimacing in pain. He let go. “In the before? You mean before you came here?” It was possible, he supposed. It was not as though he had been unknown in the world on the other side of the Shadowline. And what harm was there in admitting it now? “My name is Barrick. Barrick Eddon. Do you still think you know me?”
A look of nothing less than gratitude swept across the other man’s face. “By the gods, yes! I remember! You are… you are the prince! By the Three, yes, you are the prince!”
“Not so loud! Yes, I am.” But it was strange—he did not feel much like it. In the past, for all his unhappiness, he had never doubted that he was the son of a king. Now it seemed to be someone else’s life, a story he had heard but never lived himself.
“You and your sister…” Beck flapped his hands in excitement. “You spoke to me. You asked me questions. After the first time…” His face fell. “After the first time I saw the Twilight folk.”
“If you say so.” Barrick had no recollection of the man.
“Do you truly not remember? My name…” he paused, squinting. Clearly he had not summoned the memory in some time. “My name is Raemon Beck.”
The name meant nothing to him, but Barrick liked it better that way: he wanted no more reminders of the past. He could remember quite a bit from what Beck called “the before”—names, faces—but the memories were distant and curiously flat, with little feeling attached to them, like the diminished ache of a very old wound. Even thoughts of his sister, which seemed as though they should mean more, seemed instead to be something that had been stored so long it had lost all savor. And Barrick was more than content to leave things that way.
“What are those creatures?” he asked suddenly, pointing at the black lizards, which lay clustered around the flames in the center of their pit like Kernios’ slaves in the underworld. “Why are they here?”
“Salamanders—fire lizards. They are Master’s pets. He likes… he liked to feed them.”
Better than he fed you, I’ll wager, Barrick thought but did not say.
Raemon Beck had more questions about how the prince had crossed the Shadowline, but Barrick would not be drawn into idle talk and eventually Beck gave up; soon the only sound was the crackling of the fire and old Finlae’s thin snoring.
In his dream—for it must be a dream, he realized, even though he did not remember falling asleep—the lizard’s eyes were as bright as the flames around it. The black-armored creature sat not beside the fire but in it, crouched in a split log that burned and blackened in the depths of the blaze.
“Who are you that comes here without Tile or Pool?” it asked him in a voice like music.
“I am a prince, son of a king,” he told the creature.
“No, you are an ant, son of another ant,” the salamander lazily informed him. “An insect with the gift of a little power coursing in your veins, but still an insect for all that. Hurrying here and there, soon to die. Perhaps you will see my return. That will be a glory that might lend your small life some meaning.”
He wanted to curse this cruel, arrogant creature, but the lizard’s stare held him prisoner, as helpless as if he truly were the small, creeping thing it had named him. His heart felt cold in his chest. “What are you?”
“I am and I always was. Names do not matter to my kind. We know who we are. It is only your kind, with blinkered senses and swift lives, who insist on the tyranny of names. But no matter what your wise ones believe, you cannot command something simply by naming it.”
“If we matter so little, why are you talking to me?”
“Because you are a curiosity, and although I do not have long to wait now, I have been forced to remain idle for longer than I would like. I am bored, and even a crawling ant can provide amusement.” Its tail whipped a little from side to side, knocking up a spray of sparks. The crackling of the fire seemed to be getting louder—Barrick could barely hear the last of the salamander’s words.
“I would kill you if I could,” he told the creature.
The laugh was as beautiful as the voice, singing and silvery. “Can you kill the darkness? Can you destroy the solid earth or murder a flame? Ah, you entertain me most graciously…”
But now the noise of the blaze had become as loud as someone else speaking—no, more than one person. The fire spoke with several voices, the tongues of reddish light leaping up and enveloping the black lizard completely.
“… When a poor man is trying to sleep,” one of the voices said. “Burbling and bubbling.”
“Shut your mouth, Finlae,” Beck said.
“But why would they want to do that?” said a voice Barrick hadn’t heard before. “They do no harm…”
Barrick opened his eyes. Raemon Beck and ancient Finlae were talking to a third man, a large fellow with his hair chopped in uneven swathes like hastily-cut hay.
“You misheard,” Beck told the newcomer, then saw Barrick sitting up. “This is Marwin.”
“I knew someone named Marwin,” the big man said slowly. He had an accent a little like what Barrick had heard of Qu’arus. “That’s all I said. Could be it was me, but I can’t remember.”
“Exactly,” Beck said. “Your memory is bad and your ears aren’t much better, so you must have been mistaken about what you heard just now.”
The new man turned to Barrick. “I’m not. Mistook, that is. They were talking about them lizards—Master’s sons and Master’s brother, they were talking to the mistress. ‘Then get rid of them,’ she says. ‘I can’t stand the way they smell or the way they talk.’ Then the menfolk went to get clubs and spears.”
“See?” said Beck. “Marwin is a dullard and he gets everything wrong. Why would she say that? Lizards can’t talk.”
For an instant Barrick remembered something about a talking lizard—had it been a dream?—then the hairs on the back of his neck began to tingle. “You heard them say ‘lizards’?” he asked.
Marwin shrugged his wide, sloping shoulders. “They said, ‘o hasyaak k’rin sanfarshen’—that means ‘animals in the cellar.’ ” He looked around the broad, firelit chamber, frowning. “And this is the cellar.”
“You fools.” Barrick scrambled to his feet, his heart suddenly thumping in his chest. “They are not talking about some filthy lizards—they’re talking about us.”
“They would not hurt us!” Beck’s dirty face had gone quite pale. “Master loved us!”
“Even if he did, your master is dead.”
“When I came out of the trees he sang to me with his eyes,” Finlae said.
“I don’t doubt it—but I don’t care,” Barrick said. “Help me out of here, Beck. The rest of you may stay and die if you wish.”