Beck rubbed his throat. “It’s always hard to tell here, but the quarter bell rang a short time ago. We do not have long before Repose is over and the Dreamless are out on the canals again.” Pale and with dark circles under his eyes, the young merchant looked as though he had not managed to sleep at all. “If you truly mean to look for this place, we should go.”
“We? Does that mean you are going with me?”
Beck nodded miserably. “What choice do I have, my lord? They’ll kill me either way.” His mouth pursed as he struggled with his composure. “For the first time in a long while I was thinking of my children and my wife… thinking of how I will likely never see them again ...”
“Enough. That does neither of us any good.” Barrick sat up, stretched. “How much longer will this Repose last?”
Beck shrugged miserably. “I told you, the quarter bell rang. That means three-quarters of it is gone. I do not even know how to judge time anymore, Prince Barrick. An hour? Two hours? That is all we have.”
“Then we must try to find the center of the city before then. What of these skrikers? Will they interfere with us on the river?”
“Interfere?” Beck laughed, the sound hollow as a rotten log. “You do not understand, my lord. The Lonely Ones are not sentries or reeves like we had back in Helmingsea. They will not ‘interfere’; they will turn the marrow in your bones to ice. They will pluck out your heart and swallow it whole. If you are on the water and you hear their voices calling to you, you will drown yourself to get away from them.”
“Stop talking in puzzles—what are they?”
“I don’t know! Even my master was afraid of them. He told me his people should never have brought them to Sleep. That’s what he said—‘brought them.’ I don’t know if they found them or bred them or summoned them like Xandian demons—even the Dreamless speak of the skrikers only in whispers. I heard one of Qu’arus’ sons tell his brother they were like white rags caught on the wind, but with the voices of women. The Dreamless also call them ‘the Eyes of the Empty Place.’ I don’t know what that means. May the gods help me, I never want to find out.” He was all but weeping again.
“Stop this blubbing. Here, look at your map.” Barrick squatted over the spiral the merchant had drawn. “We don’t dare go straight down the big canal, especially if Repose is ending soon, as you say. You must help me find our way to the center by smaller waterways.”
“The small canals—it’s all darklight,” Beck said. “You can’t see anything. Some of them are blocked with water gates—we’re blind, they’ll still be able to see us ...”
Barrick groaned in frustration. “Still, there must be a way to get there, even if we have to go right down the middle of the biggest canal ...”
“Like a snail shell,” Skurn said suddenly. The bird lifted his head from where he had been pecking through the fractured, sticky remains of just such an object. “Seen that, us has. From above.”
“Yes. We want to get to the center, but Beck says we can’t go down the smallest waterways without being noticed.”
“Us could find a way,” Skurn said. “Island to island, where the dark don’t reach.”
“Then do it,” Barrick told him. “Do it, and I promise I will catch you the biggest, fattest rabbit you ever saw and I won’t take even a bite myself.”
The bird tipped his head sideways to look at him, black eyes alive with reflected firelight. “Done,” he said and spread his wings. “Keep up best as can, then.”
Before getting back into the skiff Barrick stopped to extinguish the fire, but before he kicked the sandy dirt over it he took a pine bough, sticky with sap, and held it in the flames until it caught.
“That’s real fire!” Beck said when he saw it. “Put it out!”
“It’s dark as night out there. I’m not going to feel my way through this cursed city on hands and knees. Besides, if the Dreamless don’t like twilight, maybe they’ll be scared of actual fire.”
“They hate light, but they’re not afraid of it. And they’ll see it from far away. If we carry that, we might as well go shouting at the top of our voices for the skrikers to come and find us.”
Barrick stared at him, trying to sift the man’s sense from his fearfulness. At last he threw the torch into the river; a wisp of smoke drifted after them as they slid away from the island.
Barrick had not liked the gloomy city before, but as they worked their way deeper and deeper into the heart of Sleep he liked it even less. It might be a less forbidding place when Repose had ended and the streets were full again, but it was hard to imagine it ever being cheerful, or even ordinary. The waterways, with their high, leaning sides, docks like crooked teeth, and bridges hanging close overhead, seemed almost intestinal—as though the city were some great, mindless creature like a starfish, absorbing them slowly into itself. The houses, even the largest, seemed cramped and secretive, with small windows like the foggy eyes of blind men. Barrick also saw little in the way of public places, at least that he could recognize as such, only the jagged bridges and occasional barren open spaces which looked less like squares or markets and more as if the buildings that had once stood there had vanished without being replaced. Worst of all, though, was the aura of brooding silence that hung over the dark maze. Its residents might be called Dreamless, but instead of perpetual wakefulness every building Barrick and Raemon Beck passed seemed a sort of nightmare construct, a hard shell hiding a seed of slumbering malice in its depths, as though Sleep were not a city at all but a mausoleum for the uneasy dead.
They had just slipped out of the security of one of the midcanal islands and were rowing across an open space toward another skerry of rocks, trees, and twilight when the last bell of Repose rang, a dull reverberation that Barrick felt in his bones more than heard in his ears.
“They will be coming out now,” Beck said quietly, but he was struggling to stay calm. “Someone will see us.”
“If you keep twitching and jumping that way someone will certainly notice. Sit still. Look as though you belong here.” Barrick pulled his own hood farther down over his face. “If you don’t have something to cover your head with, lie down.”
Beck found a piece of patched sailcloth and wrapped it around himself. “It is just that I know these folk. They are cruel, the Dreamless—cruel for no reason! They are like boys pulling the legs off flies.”
“Then we’ll have to make sure they don’t get hold of our legs, won’t we? Now where did that cursed raven get to… ?”
Barrick was still looking for Skurn as they passed beneath a place where several ancient bridges seemed to cross over and under each other at different heights, like the thorny branches of a rose bush, connecting a series of crumbling ivied, tile-covered towers on either side of the shadowy canal. A smear of grayish movement along one of the bridges caught Barrick’s eye, as if someone up there was waving a handkerchief at him. He glanced up. Something looked back down at him. He could barely see it through the guttering darklights but he felt its gaze like a claw of ice tightening around his heart.
“What are you doing?” Beck whispered urgently. “You dropped the oar!”
Barrick heard his companion splashing as he dragged the oar back into the boat, but it might have been happening on the far bank. “Where… where did it go?” he said at last, barely able to speak the words. “Is it still up there?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Its eyes—they were red. I think it was alive, but… but it… wasn’t ...” His mouth was dry as sand, dry as dust, but he swallowed anyway. “It looked at me ...”