“Am I still… ?” Barrick shook his head. “I must be. Behind the Shadowline?”
The hairless one cocked his head as if he had to consider the question. “You are still in the People’s lands, yes, of course—and this is the People’s greatest house.”
“The king. Is the king here? I have to give him ...” He hesitated. Who knew what intrigues existed among the Twilight People? “I need to speak with him.”
“Just so,” Harsar said again. He might have smiled—it passed like the flicking of a snake’s tongue. “But the king is resting. Come with me.”
The strange little creatures gamboled around their feet as they left the room with the glowing floor and stepped out into a high hallway, dark but for shimmers of weak turquoise light. Barrick was exhausted, breathless. He had reached his destination at last, he realized—Qul-na-Qar, as Gyir the Storm Lantern had named it. Even the compulsion that the dark woman had put upon him, which had subsided over time into a sort of dull, constant ache, was now satisfied. He had done it!
But what exactly have I done? With the need at last satisfied, uncertainty began to blossom. What will happen to me here?
Everything about the place was strange to Barrick’s eyes. Its architecture seemed shapeless, every right angle subverted by another less explicable shape; even the dimensions of the passages shifted between one end and the other for no reason he could see.
The light was odd as well. At times they stepped into utter darkness, but then flagstones down the center of the floor gleamed beneath their feet. Most other places were lit by candles, but the flames were not all the ordinary yellow-white: some burned pale blue or even green, which gave the long halls the watery appearance of submarine caverns.
Barrick was also beginning to notice that everywhere he went he seemed to be surrounded by quiet noises—not just the breathy sounds of the little creatures scampering around Harsar’s legs, but sighs, whispers, voices quietly singing, even the gentle fluting or sounding of invisible instruments, as though a host of ghostly courtiers hung in the air above their heads and followed wherever they went. Barrick could not help remembering an old Orphan’s Day tale from his childhood, Sir Caylor with the bag of winds that had swallowed all the voices in the world, and how some of them leaked out as he rode and almost drove him mad.
“And only he returned to tell the tale ...” Barrick thought. That’s how it ended.
Remembering that famous tale of a lonely escape brought another thought. “Wait,” he said. “Where are they? The others who came with e… !”
His slender guide stopped and gave him a mild but disapproving look. “No. You were alone.”
“I mean they came through Crooked’s Gate with me. From the city of Sleep. A man named… named Beck—and a black bird.” For a moment he hadn’t been able to remember the merchant’s name: the last moments in Sleep seemed far away not just in distance but in time.
“I’m afraid I cannot help you,” the hairless one said. “You must ask the Son of the First Stone.”
“Who?”
The disapproval became a shade less mild. “The king.”
They continued through the empty halls. Barrick was finding it hard to keep up with his guide’s deceptively rapid pace, but was determined not to complain.
It was perhaps the strangest hour of his life, he would think later—this first time in Qul-na-Qar, this last time of seeing it with his old eyes, his old way of looking and understanding. The shapes of the place were like nothing he had experienced: the building was clearly orderly and logical, but it was a logic he had never encountered before, with walls abruptly bending inward or ending in the middle of a room for no clear reason, and stairs that led up to the high ceilings and then back down again on the other side of the room, as though built solely on the chance that someone might wish to walk high above the room. Some doors opened onto apparent nothingness or flickering light, others stood in isolation with no wall on either side of them, disconnected portals in the middle of chambers. Even the building materials seemed bizarre to Barrick’s eyes: in many places dark, heavy stone was coupled with living wood that seemed to grow within the substance of the walls, complete with roots and branches. The builders also seemed to have exchanged random sections of wall for colorful streaks of gemlike, brilliantly glowing stuff as clear as glass but thick as slabs of granite, allowing views of what was outside but never clearly enough for him to make out more than a blur of shapes and shadows. And everywhere they went seemed deserted.
“Why isn’t anyone here?” he asked Harsar.
“This part of the People’s House belongs to the king and queen,” the servant answered, giving his little pack of straying followers a stern glance until they trotted back to him. “The king himself has few servitors and the queen is… elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere? ”
Harsar began walking again. “Come. We still have far to go.”
The empty halls and the chambers they traversed to get from one hallway to another were furnished, some of it quite ordinary to his eyes, some almost incomprehensible, but Barrick could detect a similarity between every piece, from the simplest to the most complex, a unifying vision behind them all that he could not fail to notice because it was so different from anything he had known, as if cats had made clothes for themselves or snakes had choreographed an intricate dance. Chairs, tables, chests, reliquaries—no matter how simple or ornate the pieces, they all had an obvious similarity he could not quite grasp, a disturbing shared subtlety. From a distance the carpets on the dark, polished floors and the tapestries hung on the walls seemed familiar enough objects, but when he looked more closely their dense, complex designs made him dizzy and reminded him uncomfortably of the living lawn that had guarded Crooked’s Hall. And though some chambers had tall windows opening onto the twilight sky, and some were windowless, though some sparkled with a thousand candles and others had no candles or lamps at all, the light was much the same in all of them—that muted, watery, inconstant glow. Traveling through Qul-na-Qar was a little like swimming, Barrick thought.
No, he decided a moment later, it was more like dreaming. Like dreaming with his eyes wide open.
But of all the unusual feelings that swept through him as he walked this first time in the House of the People, the strangest was that Barrick Eddon felt as if he had at last, after a lifetime of exile, come home.
At last, just when he was beginning to stumble from weariness, his guide showed him into a small, dark room that was built to a more human scale than many of the others, a sort of retiring chamber with polished wooden chairs of smooth and simple (but still undeniably alien) shape. Its walls were filled with niches like a beehive. Each of these small compartments held what looked like a single statue carved from shiny stone or cast in metal, but Barrick saw nothing familiar in any of their shapes; he thought they looked chance-made, like slops left over from the construction of more sensible objects, lovingly collected from the forge floor and displayed here.
Harsar pointed to a bed, a simple thing in a simple wooden frame. “You may rest. The king will see you when he is ready. I will bring you food and drink.”