The bird was right, he thought. The silkins are just as afraid of this place as everyone else.
Which probably did not mean anything good for Barrick himself, of course, except that he might get a chance to rest and think. The creatures would be waiting when he came back down and he still had no weapon to face them with but his broken spear. And where was Skurn? Had the bird finally deserted him once and for all?
The steep slope made his lungs and legs ache. When he no longer saw any of his pursuers he paused to rest, but could not stop thinking of their featureless, thread-wrapped faces and gummy black eyes and how they might be crawling silently through the trees to surround him, so after a short while he forced himself onto his feet and began to climb once more, searching for open ground and a better vantage point.
The slope became steeper. Barrick frequently had to use his hands on branches and outcroppings to pull himself up, which made his crippled arm ache even worse than his lungs, throbbing and burning until his eyes filled with tears. The hopelessness of his situation began to weigh him down. He was in a strange land—a deadly, unknown land full of demons and monstrous creatures—and all but alone. How long could he go on this way, without help, without food or weapons or even a map? Any bad fall would leave him helpless and waiting for death…
Barrick suddenly tripped and tumbled heavily onto his hands and knees—it hurt so badly he cried out. He sank forward onto his elbows, staring at the ground only a few inches away, eyes blurry with sweat and tears. There was something strange about that ground, he realized after a moment—something very strange indeed.
It had writing on it.
He straightened up. He was kneeling on a slab of the pale ochre stone. Symbols he did not recognize had been scratched deep into its surface, and although they had been polished almost to invisibility by wind and rain, it was unquestionably the work of some intelligent hand. Barrick hastily climbed to his feet. He looked up and saw that the crest of the hill was not as far away as it had seemed—perhaps less than an hour’s climb even at his limping pace. He took a deep breath and looked around for any sign of the silkins—he saw nothing and heard only the wind sighing through the trees—then began to make his way upward once more. Even if he was going to die here on Cursed Hill, he thought, it would be nice to see a high place first. Maybe the gray skies would seem brighter up there—that would be something good. Barrick Eddon was sick at heart with mist and shadowy places.
As he struggled up the last heights he saw that some previous inhabitants or visitors had done more than simply carve symbols into the yellow stones: in some spots curves of outcropping rock had been used as makeshift roofs, with shelters built beneath them, although little was left of these but an occasional wall of loose stones gathered together and carefully stacked. As he neared the summit the yellowish outcroppings became more common, great knobs and curving stretches of stone to which the greenery clung like a rough blanket. The primitive structures also grew more complex, weathered lumps of the hill’s smooth bedrock extended and connected by stacked boulders and even some crude wooden walls and roofs, but all empty and long since deserted, with no sign left of whoever had inhabited them except for the occasional antlike track of carved symbols across their surfaces.
Here in the evergreen highlands the mists were at least as thick and slippery as at the base of the hill, but the place was even quieter, missing even the very occasional bird noises he had heard below. Even though Barrick had not seen any sign of the silkins for what seemed an hour or more, the quiet oppressiveness of the place was beginning to unnerve him, making his plan to stay here seem utter nonsense. It was all he could do to continue climbing toward the highest ridge, only a short distance away now and nothing but pearl-gray twilit sky visible behind it.
He pulled himself up onto a prominence and saw that one last mound of stone, greenery, and muddy earth remained between him and the summit, and that the strangest dwelling of all had been built there, a dome of curving stone protruding at an odd angle from the trees and tangled shrubbery, with a huge oblong window gaping in the undergrowth near it. A stone path wound up the last stretch of hillside from the snag of creepers in which he stood, leading to a dark overhang just below the oblong window. The palisade of broken stones he had seen from so far away, the ones like broken teeth, jutted from the forested peak just above the odd dwelling.
Mist and fog hung over this strange place like one of the asphodel crowns children wore for the feast of Onir Zakkas. The vapors were not only thicker here than at the bottom of the hill, but also seemed a different color and consistency. Barrick stared for long moments before he realized that some of it was not mist at all, but smoke rising from between the trees along the very top of the crest.
Smoke. Chimneys. Someone lived in this godforsaken place. On top of Cursed Hill.
He turned, heart beating even faster now than in the midst of the arduous climb, but before he could take a step back down the slope a voice came to him from nowhere and everywhere, echoing softly in the skirl of wind along the hillside, but also inside his head.
“Come,” it whispered. “We are waiting for you.”
Barrick found he could no longer command his own limbs, at least not to take him farther away from the strange house on the summit, a house that awaited him like an abandoned well into which he might fall and drown.
“Come. Come to us. We are waiting for you.”
To his astonishment, he abruptly found himself a passive observer in his own flesh. His body turned and began to climb the promontory until his feet were on the stony path, then it walked on toward the stone dwelling like a cloud pushed by wind, Barrick watching helplessly from inside it. The oblong window and the shadowed overhang grew closer and closer. The last stretch of the hill’s high peak loomed above him for a moment, then he passed beneath through the opening into darkness.
A moment later the dark gave way to a spreading, reddish light. Barrick recovered a little command of his own limbs, but only enough to pause for a moment, his heart hammering at triple speed, before the unwavering pull of what lay before him exerted itself again.
“Come. We have waited a long time, child of men. We were beginning to fear we had misunderstood what was given to us.”
The stony room rounded upward like a dome on the inside, a strange, pale, cavernous place five or six times Barrick’s height, its uppermost point rife with incomprehensible carvings, scrawls, and swirls just visible through the black residue of smoke. The red light and the smoke both came from a small fire set in a ring of stones on a floor of rubble and dirt. Three hunched figures of about Barrick’s own size sat behind it on a low platform of stone.
“You are tired,” the voice told him. Who was speaking? The shapes before him did not move. “You may sit if that will ease you. We regret we have little to offer you in the way of food or drink, but our ways are not like yours.”
“We give him much,” snapped another voice. It was almost identical to the first and equally bodiless, but with an edge to it that told him somehow it was a different speaker. “We give him more than we have given any other.”
“Because that is the purpose to which we were called. And what we give to him will be no kindness,” said the first voice.
Barrick wanted to run, wanted it badly, but he could still barely move. The raven had been right—he had been a fool to come here. He finally made his voice work. “Who… who are you?”