Skurn dropped onto Barrick’s shoulder, clutching nervously with his claws so that Barrick squirmed in discomfort. He reached out toward the door, expecting that any moment something would happen to stop him—a noise, a sudden movement, an agonizing pain—but nothing like that occurred. His fingers closed on the rough, corroded metal of the handle, but when he pulled the door did not budge or even quiver. It might as well have been part of the wall.
Barrick wrapped both hands around the handle and pulled harder, ignoring the pain from his bandaged palm, but the door seemed as immovable as a mountain. He put his foot against the topmost step and leaned back, using his legs as well as his arms, but he might as well have been trying to heave the entire green earth onto his shoulders. Raemon Beck then put his arms around Barrick’s waist and added his own weight and strength, but it still made no difference.
“Didst think on pushing yon great door, ’stead of just pulling?” offered Skurn.
Barrick stared at him balefully, then stepped onto the threshold and shoved as hard as he could. The door did not budge. “Happy now?” he asked the bird, then turned his back to the door and slid down until he was sitting on the threshold looking back across the gloomy, twilit courtyard, here in this place where no darklights burned.
“Pushed hard, did you?” Skurn asked.
Barrick scowled at him. “Try it yourself if you don’t think so.”
Skurn made a throaty sound of disgust. “Got no hands, does us?”
The raven’s words poked at his memory. No hands. Barrick let his head fall back against the door—it felt as solid as the side of a granite cliff—and closed his eyes, but the thought remained elusive. He was so tired that the world seemed to tilt and pitch around him and he opened his eyes. Surely he had never been so tired in his life…
“Hands,” he said abruptly. “It was something about hands.”
“What?” Raemon Beck looked toward him, but the merchant’s gaze was dull and hopeless. Barrick felt sure he was seeing an army of skrikers making their way across the courtyard of grass, then the courtyard of water…
“Listen,” Barrick said. “The Sleepers told me something about this place—Crooked’s Hall, if this is truly it. They said no mortal hand could open the door.”
Beck barely seemed to have heard him. “We have to do something, my lord. More Lonely Ones will be coming soon!”
Barrick laughed, harshly, bleakly. What use was the knowledge even if it was correct? They were all mortal here, even Skurn. If it had been “no man’s hand,” perhaps the raven could have tugged the door open with his beak. Barrick snorted at the thought. Perhaps they should ask the skrikers to help them…
“Wait. No mortal hand, they said.” He reached into his shirt and took out Gyir’s mirror, then slipped its cord from around his neck. For a moment, feeling the mirror’s substantial weight in his hand he had the strange sensation that it was a living thing he held, but he had no time for such thoughts—the idea that had just come to him was little to do with the mirror, but everything to do with the slender piece of anchor cord on which it hung.
Raemon Beck looked up from his exhausted slouch at the base of the steps. “What is that… ?”
“Don’t say anything.” Barrick leaned closer and threw the cord over the door handle, grabbing it with his hands on either side of the pouch that held the mirror. Then he pulled. Nothing happened.
Skurn flapped up into the air, circling once near Barrick’s head.
“Them gray things. I see more by the river, coming this way,” the bird announced. “Fast, like… !”
Barrick’s fingers began to tingle. A moment later, a flicker of light ran the length of the string, so faint that only the dark shadows in the doorway made it visible. Without thinking he twisted his hands, one over the other, and pulled. The door swung outward with a deep rumble and an almost inaudible screech, as if the hinges were breaking free from centuries of rust. Barrick had to step back as the heavy door slowly swung past him, and Raemon Beck half-tumbled down the steps to the courtyard stones to avoid it. Skurn flapped his wings, hovering before the opening, but then suddenly spun in the air and vanished into the blackness beyond the door-frame as abruptly as if a great wind had caught him and swept him in.
“Hoy, bird!” Barrick flung out his hand toward the emptiness inside the door, but pulled back before his fingers passed into it. It was more than shadow, it was nothingness itself, like the black gulf that had taken Captain Vansen…
He felt a wind blowing past him, pulling at his hair, his clothes… Raemon Beck only had time to tell him, “My lord, I’m afraid… !” then everything seemed to tilt up on edge and they both fell out of the world. Barrick couldn’t scream, couldn’t weep, couldn’t think, could do nothing but tumble through the blackness, the cold nothing-at-all that already seemed to go on forever…
There was only void, without sound or light, without direction, even without meaning. Time itself had deserted this emptiness, if it had ever trespassed here at all. He waited a thousand, thousand years to breathe, and then a thousand more for his heart to beat. He was alive, but he was not living. He was nowhere, forever.
An age passed. He had forgotten everything. His name had gone long ago—his memories, too—and any purpose had vanished long before that. He floated in the between like a dead leaf in a river, without volition or concern and with no motion but what was given to him. The void itself might have rushed and surged like a cataract for all he knew, but because he was in it and of it, he felt nothing. He was a grain of sand on a deserted beach. He was a cold dead star in the farthest corner of the sky. He could barely even think anymore. He was… he was…
Barrick? Barrick, where are you?
The sounds fell upon his thoughts, stunning in their complexity. They were meaningless to him, of course—clumps of noise stopping and starting, artifacts of intent that could mean nothing to a leaf, a pebble, a cold spark whose light had guttered out. But still, the feeling of it tugged at him, quickened him. What did it mean?
Barrick, where have you gone? Why won’t you speak to me? Why have you left me alone?
He thought of something then, or felt it, a mote of brilliance dancing before his eyes, a bit of light… a smear of fire. The brightness finally gave the void shape and as it did it gave him direction as well, up and down, backward, forward… The light emanated from a small, slender figure with dark eyes and darker hair—hair almost as black as the void itself but for one gleaming streak, the fiery smear that had caught his attention through the endless nullity. It was a girl.
Barrick? I need you. Where have you gone?
And then it began to come back to him, but in confused pieces, so that for a moment the black-haired girl seemed to be his sister, or maybe his betrothed. Qinnitan? He tried to call to her with all his strength. Qinnitan!
I am so lonely, she cried. Why won’t you come to me anymore? Why have you deserted me?
I’m here! But although it seemed he was almost beside her, he could not make her hear him. I’m here! Qinnitan! She might as well have been on the far side of a thick, distorting window. They were alone in the void together, but they could not touch, could not speak…
Why? she cried. Why have you forsaken me… ?