“Hurts… !” Beck moaned. “Cold… !”
“Don’t fall!” Barrick was fighting to keep his balance; if he went into the water he knew he would not come out again, that the mist-faces would bleed his strength away.
That’s it—they are bleeding us empty, like leeches…
The cold patches on his skin were spreading. His clothing did not seem to protect him from the heat-eaters at all, as if fever chills crawled through him—but these were on the outside, working their way in…
Warmer on the inside, he thought blearily. We’re all warmer on the inside. They want warmth…
The idea was a mad one, but he knew he had only moments to do something. He lifted his left hand and slashed at it with Qu’arus’ short sword. He barely felt the blade cut, as though he had plunged the arm in snow first, but blood welled in the crease of his palm and began to drip down his wrist. Barrick stretched out his arm, struggling to stay upright, and let the blood drizzle into the water.
Immediately the mists began to swirl faster, circling around the place where his blood was spreading pinkly through the water. The fog above the pool thickened, then it too began to turn a subtle rosy shade, like low clouds refracting the coming dawn.
“Move!” Barrick cried, but his voice was so weak he found it hard to believe that Beck could even hear him. He let more blood drip, then took a staggering step to the next flat stone. The mists swirled for a moment around the blood before moving toward him again. Barrick shook out more blood, but already the flow from his palm was beginning to slow. He cut himself in a different spot and let it drip into the water. Even the mist clinging to Raemon Beck’s legs seemed to grow thinner as some of it wafted to the spot where Barrick’s blood stained the water. Beck’s first step was like a man waist-deep in mud, but the second came a little easier; after a few moments they were both lurching forward across the stepping stones toward the safety of the courtyard’s far end.
By the time they collapsed into the archway, wheezing and shivering, Barrick had cut his arm in three more places. His entire arm and hand below his elbow were streaked and smeared with red, the few patches of clean skin as startling as eyes in a dark forest.
When Beck had caught his breath he tore off the ends of his tattered sleeves and began to wrap them around Barrick’s wounds. The bandages he made were not the cleanest, but they stanched the blood well enough.
Barrick peered unhappily across the next courtyard. This one seemed even more innocuous than the others, a featureless stone close with steps at the far end leading up to what looked like a simple, closed door—but he knew better. “What’s waiting for us this time, do you think,” he asked sourly, “—a nest of adders?”
“You will defeat it, Highness, whatever it is.” Something in Raemon Beck’s tone made Barrick turn to look at him. Was that admiration he was seeing? Someone admiring the infamous cripple, Barrick Eddon? Or had the day’s terrors simply injured the man’s mind?
“I don’t want to defeat it.” Barrick could see Skurn circling high above their heads, far away from bewitched grasses and blood-drinking mists. One of them had some sense, anyway. “I want someone to come with a battering ram and knock it all down. I’m weary of all this.”
Raemon Beck shook his head. “We must go forward. More skrikers will come to avenge their sisters and we will not surprise them the same way again.”
“Sisters?” It made him feel ill. “They truly are women?”
“Not human women,” Beck said grimly. “She-demons, maybe.”
“Forward, then, as you say.” Barrick knew there was a certain inevitability to what was happening: of course he couldn’t go backward, anymore than he could go backward through life to repair the mistakes already made. He got to his feet, groaning. The numbness of the biting mist had worn off and he ached all over. What would the people of Southmarch think of their wretch of a prince if they saw him now?
Here I stand, he told himself, the Prince of Nothing. No subjects, no soldiers, no family, no friends.
Skurn dropped from the sky and fluttered down onto the paving stones on the far side of the archway. As the raven strutted back and forth only a few paces away, Barrick half expected something to reach up from between the stones and throttle the black bird, but either the lurking danger did not care about ravens or it was something more subtle.
“Happy now?” Skurn demanded. “Can’t help wondering, us.”
“Shut your snailhole, bird. I had to come to this wretched city. Now I have to do this as well. Nobody forced you to come along.”
“Oh, aye, cast us out, ’course. All us did was warn you. Fair payment.”
“Look, instead of scolding me like an old woman, tell me if you’ve seen anything. What’s beyond this next courtyard?”
The raven eyed him. “Naught.”
“Truly? Then what’s on the other side of that door?”
Skurn squinted across the courtyard toward the ancient wooden portal, which was unmarked except for a corroded metal boss in the middle—a handle, perhaps.
“On other side? There be no other side.”
“What are you talking about?” It was all Barrick could do to keep his temper. “Once we cross that courtyard and open that door, there has to be something on the other side—a building? Another courtyard? What?”
“Naught—us told you!” The raven fluffed his feathers in irritation. “Not even door. On far side be the outside of yon big wall. Then trees and whatnot. Same as the front, like. Nothing else.”
Repeated questioning finally established that what sounded like a misunderstanding was in fact the truth: according to Skurn, who had flown over the site several times, nothing stood on the other side of that final wall with the door in it, and on the outside there was no sign that the door even existed. It was all some elaborate trick. Barrick slumped down in the archway, defeated, but Raemon Beck tugged at his arm.
“Come, Highness. Do not despair. We are nearly at the end.” The man’s patchwork clothing was now almost as badly torn and dirtied as Barrick’s own clothes, which he had been wearing for months. Barrick suddenly wondered what he must look like to someone else—what he must smell like.
Prince of Nothing, he thought again, and began to laugh. It took him so hard that for long moments he could do nothing but sit, bent double, wheezing.
“Highness, are you hurt?” Beck tugged again. “Are you ill?”
Barrick shook his head. “Help me up,” he said at last, still struggling to catch his breath. He didn’t even know why he was laughing. “You’re right. We’re nearly at the end.” It was just that he had a different idea of what the end meant than Beck did.
Once on his feet Barrick did not pause—what use in waiting any longer?—but walked out of the arch and began to make his way across the cracked and crumbling stone flags of the empty courtyard. He did his best to hold his head up and walk forward bravely, although he knew that at any moment something would reach up from below or drop on them from the sky. But to Barrick’s weary astonishment, no reaching hands clutched at him, no menaces leaped out of the shadows. He and Beck marched slowly but steadily across the stone courtyard until they stood on the steps looking up at the great gray door and its crude metal handle.