Utta’s legs buckled at last and she sank down into the mud beside Merolanna. In the moment’s hush she could again hear the cries of Yasammez’ victims across the bay, a chorus of terror that sounded like nothing so much as the screeching of distant seabirds.
The dark lady turned her back on them. “Kayyin, take these things away from me, these… insects. I have a war to fight. Tell them the story of how their kind stole the Fireflower and murdered my family. After that, if they still want to die, I will be happy to accommodate them.”
28. The Lonely Ones
“In the tome known as Ximander’s Book it is written that one family of the Elementals did join forces with the Qar long ago, and that they are called the Emerald Fire. According to Ximander they are a sort of royal guard to the king and queen of the fairies, like the Leopards of the Xixian Autarch.”
“The repose… skrikers? I don’t understand.”Barrick took up the heavy oars again and began to row. The weird murk of the darklights lined the river like an arbor of old trees, dense along the bank and stretching high on either side until it finally began to thin far above their heads. “It makes no sense,” he growled at Raemon Beck, struggling to keep his voice to a whisper. “Why would the Dreamless shut themselves away for hours each day when they do not sleep? And if everyone’s inside, why would they have these skriker things guarding the streets? From what?”
Beck had dried his eyes, but he looked as if he might burst into tears again any moment; the man’s weak, puffy face made Barrick angry. “The Dreamless are fairies,” Beck said quietly, “and except for my master they aren’t kind ones. They trust no one—not even their own kind. As for the Repose, it is their law to lock themselves in, and that is what the skrikers see to. My master Qu’arus used to tell me that his people had to shut themselves away because too much wakefulness made their hearts and their thoughts sick. Before the Law of Repose many of them grew so damaged and secretive that they slaughtered their own families or their neighbors. There still are places where you can see the black ruins of estates that burned to the ground centuries ago with the family and all their servants inside, turned into funeral pyres by those who had grown tired of living…”
Barrick felt a disturbing moment of kinship with the Dreamless. How often had he dreamed of his own home in flames? How often had he wished for some disaster to end his pain, little caring who else might be harmed?
He rowed as quietly as he could, but the city was still as a tomb; every splash seemed certain to draw attention. The small waterway they were on came to an end, leaving them no choice but to move into a larger branch of one of the main canals. Three or four other boats were visible on the water, albeit distantly, but Barrick pulled hard on the oars and they managed to slip quickly across the wide waterway and then back onto one of the smaller side streams.
It was tiring to go so fast, though: the boat was twice as big as the sort of two-man skiffs used in Southmarch. Barrick found himself thinking of the headless blemmy that had done the work before—he wished they could have brought one of the horrible things, just to spare himself this backbreaking labor.
Barrick soon discovered that if he kept the skiff away from the darklights along the edge of the canals he could actually see fairly well, but the effect was still disturbing: out in the middle of the larger waterways was something like the shadowland twilight he had grown used to, but the banks seemed swaddled in inky black smoke. To see anything of what they were passing he had to move in close, until they were within the penumbra of the darklights and his eyes became accustomed to the deep shadow. But he had no idea whether they could be seen in turn or who might be looking at them.
“We need a place to hide,” he told Beck. “Some place no one will find us while we decide what to do next.”
“There is no such place,” Beck said bleakly. “Not here. Not in Sleep.”
Barrick scowled. “And you do not know where Crooked’s Hall is, either. You are as useless as a boar’s teats…”
At that moment something dropped on them out of the blackness, as though the darklights themselves had spat out part of their essence. Raemon Beck threw himself down, pressing his face against the deck, but Barrick recognized the clot of shadow and its method of entrance.
“I didn’t expect to see you again, bird,” he said.
“Us didn’t expect to see you, neither… not alive, like.” The bird bent to groom its chest feathers. “So, how went your guesting with those kindly blue-eyed folk?”
Barrick almost laughed. “As you can see, we’ve decided to move on. The problem is, Beck here doesn’t know where Crooked’s Hall might be. We need somewhere to go where we can be safe from the Night Men. And the others… what did you call them, Beck? Skrikers? ”
“Quiet!” The patchwork man looked around in anxious terror. “Do not name them here where the banks are close by! You’ll summon them.”
Skurn, who had been standing on one leg at the bow of the boat while he picked something out of his toes, shook himself and fluttered a little closer to Barrick. “P’raps us could fly up and try to see somewhat for you,” he said offhandedly. “P’raps.”
Barrick couldn’t help noticing the overture of comradeship. “Yes, that would be good, Skurn. Thank you.” He looked at the pitchy clouds of blacklight along the banks. “Find a place where the darkness is not so thick—an island, perhaps. Unused. Maybe wild.”
The black bird flapped upward in a spiral and then leveled out, flying toward the nearest bank.
“My stomach is empty,” Barrick said as he watched the raven disappear. “If we take a fish from this water will it poison us?”
Beck shook his head. “I don’t think so. But there is already food in the boat. I doubt anyone touched it after we brought my master home. With so many lost on our hunting trip and my master wounded we did not eat it all—a good deal of dried meat and road bread should be left.” He crawled forward and found a large waterproof sack folded underneath the foremost bench. “Yes, see!”
The food had a strange, musty taste, but Barrick was far too tired and hungy to mind. They shared a handful of dried meat and two pieces of bread as hard as boot-leather that reminded Barrick of the brown maslin loaves back home.
“And you are truly Prince Barrick!” Raemon Beck had recovered his spirits a bit. “I cannot believe I should see you again, my lord—and here of all places!”
“If you say so. I do not remember our first meeting.” In truth, Barrick didn’t much want to remember. It was nothing to do with the man in the ragged clothes. He had felt such relief at being separated from all that he had left behind—his past, his heritage, his pain—and he was in no hurry to bring any of it back.
Beck haltingly told him of how his caravan had been attacked by the Qar, he the lone survivor, and how after telling his story he had been summoned to a royal council and then had been sent back again to the same place along the Settland Road. The tale took a long while—Beck’s memory had been addled by so much time behind the Shadowline, a stay even longer than Barrick’s—and every name he recovered was a victory for him but gave Barrick only pain.