“Us?” the sharper, second voice said. “There is no true name we could give ourselves that you would know or understand.”
“Tell him,” spoke up a third, similar to the others but perhaps older and more frail. “Tell him the truth. We are the Sleepers. We are the rejected, the unwanted. We are those who see and cannot help but see.” The voice was like a ghost murmuring at the top of an empty tower. Barrick was shivering hard, but he could not make his limbs work to run away.
“You are frightening the Sunlander child,” the first voice said in mild reproach. “He does not understand you.”
“I am no child.” Barrick did not want these creatures in his head. It was too much like the last moments before the great door of Kernios—the moments in which he had felt Gyir die. “Just let me go.”
“He does not understand us,” said the weakest of the voices. “All is lost, as I feared. The world has turned too far…”
“Be silent!” said the harsher second voice. “He is an outsider. He is a Sunlander. Blood means nothing beneath the Daystar.”
“But all blood is the same color under Silvergleam’s light,” said the first. “Child, rest easy. We will not harm you.”
“You speak only for yourself,” said the second voice. “I could burn away his thoughts like dry grass. If he threatens me, I will.”
“Now it is you who should be silent, Hikat,” said the first voice. “Your anger is unneeded here.”
“We are scorned by all the world,” said the one called Hikat. “We nestle in the very bones of those who would destroy us as they hover at the edge of wakefulness. My anger is unneeded, Hau? It is you who are useless, with your impossible schemes and dreams.”
“When is the child coming?” asked the trembling third voice. “You spoke of a child?”
“The child has already come, Hoorooen,” the first voice answered. “He is here.”
“Ah.” The weak voice let out something that felt like a sigh inside Barrick’s head. “I wondered…”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Barrick tried again to turn and leave the domelike cavern but could not make his limbs do his bidding. “Are you all mad? I don’t understand anything you’re saying, not any of it. Who are you?”
“We are brothers,” began Hau, “children of the…”
“Brothers?” This was the one called Hikat. “Fool! You are my mother—and he is your father.”
“I had a son, once ...” quavered Hoorooen.
The centermost of the three figures slowly stood. Its robes flapped open, and for a moment Barrick saw a glimpse of withered, sexless gray flesh. His heart stuttered and seemed to go cold in his chest; if he could have scrambled away from the firepit he would have. He had seen skin of that stony color on Jikuyin’s cruel servant, Ueni’ssoh, but this creature seemed as dry and drawn as a mummified corpse.
“But we are not that one, Barrick Eddon,” said Hau as if the boy had spoken these thoughts aloud. “We are not your enemies.”
“How do you know my name?” It seemed more than impossible, here at the ends of the earth when he had almost forgotten it himself, and it terrified him. “Tell me, curse you—how do you know my name!”
“He attacks us!” Hikat cried. “We must destroy him… !”
“Who is there?” quailed Hoorooen.
“Peace, brothers. He is only frightened. Sit, Barrick Eddon. Listen to all we have to say.”
The thing that kept him from running now helped him to sit beside the fire. The rippling flames made the three figures seem to float before his eyes like something seen in the last moments of waking.
“All of us were born long ago in the city called Sleep,” Hau began. “It is true that Hoorooen is the eldest, but that is all that can be said for certain. Even Hikat, the youngest, is so old now that we cannot remember when he came into the world.”
“She,” said Hikat, but for the first time some of the edge of anger was gone and the voice sounded almost wistful. “For some reason I feel I was a woman.”
“It matters not,” said Hau kindly. “We are old. We share blood. We were born to the people called the Dreamless, in the city called Sleep, but they cast us out…”
Barrick felt a stirring of fear again. “The Dreamless!”
“Hold until you hear all our story. Not all who walk beneath the darklights of Sleep are as cruel as the one you met, but we are different from all of them. We are the Sleepers.”
“They sent us away,” said Hoorooen. “I am the only one who remembers. We slept, and that frightened them. We dreamed…”
“Yes,” said Hau. “Among the Dreamless, we alone dreamed, and our dreams were no mere fancies but the true flickering of the fire in the void. In our dreams we saw that the gods would fall, and saw that the Dreamless would turn against their masters in Qul-na-Qar. We saw the coming of the mortals into the land. All this we saw and foretold, but our own people did not heed us. They feared us. They drove us out.”
“I have never seen the darklights,” said Hikat angrily. “My rightful home was stolen from me.”
“You saw them,” Hau declared. “You just do not remember. We have all lost so much, waited so long…”
“I… I don’t understand,” said Barrick. “You… you are Dreamless? But I thought the Dreamless never slept…”
“Let me show you.” The middle figure threw back its hood. As with the gray man in Greatdeeps, skin as fine and thin as silk clung to his gaunt features, but Hau’s skin was also scored with a stitchery of innumerable fine wrinkles, so that he looked as though he were made of cobwebs. The biggest difference, though, was that where Ueni’ssoh’s eyes had been unblinking, silvery-blue orbs, the creature who stood before Barrick had only more wrinkles of flesh beneath his brows, his sockets as empty as desert sands.
“You’re blind!”
“We do not see as others do,” Hau corrected him. “Had we been like our unsleeping brethren we would have been blind indeed. But in our dreams we see more than anyone.”
“I am tired of seeing so much,” said Hoorooen sadly. “It never makes anyone happy.”
“The truth makes no one happy,” snapped Hikat. “Because all truth ends in death and darkness.”
“Quiet, my loves.” Hau lowered himself back to the ground, then reached out to his comrades. After hesitating a moment, they both took the offered hand, so that the Sleepers were joined. Hikat and Hoorooen then extended their own hands on either side of the small fire. Barrick stared at the trio across the flames, not understanding, or not wanting to understand.
“Take our hands,” Hau said. “You have come here for a reason.”