She found a little voice, but it was faint as a whisper. “Get the boy! Get Pigeon! Don’t leave him behind!’
Before she could see whether the soldiers were bringing the mute child, she was dumped unceremoniously on the deck at the top of the stairs. Fire was everywhere, not just crackling in the deck but on the mast and even higher, flames capering in the sails and dancing across the rigging like wicked demon children. Some of the sailors were throwing buckets of water onto the blaze but it was like throwing pebbles at a sandstorm.
Another soldier dumped Pigeon beside her. The boy was alive, moving a little, but almost entirely insensible. She stared dully at the chaos for a moment, the men running, screaming, bits of flaming rope smacking down from above like the hell whip of Xergal, and then remembered what she had done. What horror her little candle had caused! Qinnitan struggled up onto her knees. No point trying to wake Pigeon: she would let the water do that job, or else finish the job the fire had just failed to do.
This time I’ll die for certain before I let anyone take him again…
She waited a few more stuttering heartbeats until the men nearest her had their backs turned, then she lifted the boy’s limp form as best she could and stumbled to the nearby rail. She leaned her back against it, heaved Pigeon up until his weight was across her shoulder and chest, then clung to him as his momentum carried them both over.
The fall took longer than she expected, time enough for her to wonder if dying in cold water would be better than dying in fire. Then they hit the water hard and green darkness closed around them like a fist.
14. Three Scars
“Before the Vuts were driven out the lands now behind the Shadowline, the farthest northern outpost of men was the Vuttish city Jipmalshemm. In writings from that city there is much talk of a fearful place named ‘Ruohttashemm,’ the home of ‘Cold Fairies,’ which was also called ‘the End of the Earth.’
Barrick Eddon floated on the darkness like a leaf on a slow-moving river. The thoughts that made him took their direction from that flow: what they lost in complexity they gained in cohesion. It was peaceful, even pleasant, to be nothing, to want nothing, but the part of him that was still Barrick sensed that such peace could not last.
It didn’t. Voices rose from the nothing—three voices entwined, three voices speaking as one, surrounding him with a tangle of words that only gradually came to reveal their meaning.
… Long ago, when the Dreamless broke away from their kin, it was because their own eternal wakefulness had driven them mad. The sleep of the People has always dulled the pain of their long lives, and even those highest and most long-lived, the Fireflower’s children, can take a sort of rest and let their minds roam unfettered. But no such peace eased the pain of the Dreamless, trapped forever in the echoing cavern of their own thoughts.
So it came to pass that they turned against their fellows, turned against the rest of the People and went away into the wilderness to make new lives. In the forest beyond the Lost Lands they built a great city and named it Sleep, and even now no one can agree whether they named it in angry defiance of the People they had deserted or as the saddest of jests.
Nothing is more bitter than a family divided. As the years sped by the People and their unsleeping kin shed each other’s blood and opposed each other’s wills. Distance became enmity. The Dreamless ceased to venerate even those gods they had once loved, until the temples and sacred places of Sleep fell into ruin.
In all the rolling centuries since the sundering, out of all the Dreamless, the blood of the People has bred only we three who slumber as our ancestors slumbered. And in that slumber we dream far and clear.
Shunned by all, we were driven out of Sleep, but we were also unwanted in our ancestral halls, the House of the People. Thus we too went into the wilderness and have lived so long in the savage waste that we do not even remember the ways by which we came and could not find our way out again even if we chose.
Still we sleep, though, and when we sleep, we dream. In those dreams we see what is to be, or at least what might be—in any dream there are shadows and confusion, real foretellings mixed with false. But we know that we three were made different for a reason. We know that our dreams have meaning. And we know that no one else, mortal or immortal, has been given the visions that are vouchsafed to us.
We do not know who gives us the gift of these particular and heretical dreams, or why we were singled out and then doomed to wait so many centuries to use it. We do know that to ignore our gift would be to turn our backs on the one thing that holds all worlds and times together—the spirit of which the Book of the Fire in the Void is word and thought—which is also the one thing that lends any hope of meaning to our own existence…
These words, these thoughts, were Barrick’s only companions in the void. The three speaking as one gradually unraveled into three separate voices once more, each with its individual character, but darkness still surrounded him: only the voices of the Sleepers kept him close.
“What are we to do?” asked the first voice, the kindest of the three. “The story is unfolding but the characters have been misplaced or their entrances and exits mistimed.”
“It was all bound to go wrong. I have said so.” The sour one. Angry… or frightened?
“Did we see this before?” This one he remembered well, old and confused. The name… the name had been something like the wind blowing in a lonely place, a keening sigh. “I do not recall it. I am cold and frightened. When the great ones come back they will be so angry with us all.”
“It is not for ourselves we do this, but for the story. Even the gods cannot destroy the story that we all are…”
“Untrue,” said the sharp, angry voice. “They can suppress it for so long that its shape becomes meaningless—until the tale has waited so long to come true that it becomes unrecognizable. The ending can be held off so long that it outlasts the world itself.”
“Only if we surrender,” said the first Sleeper. “Only if we refute our own dreams.”
“I wish I did not dream,” said the old one. “It has brought only sorrow. We had a family once, you know…”
Hoorooen. That was the name of the ancient one with the querulous voice. Hoorooen. And the others had the same sound to them…
“Quiet. It is time we think of what we can do. You heard the blind king. This little one, this young creature of the sun, must reach him soon or all is lost.”
“You struggle uselessly. Can the little mongrel fly? No. It is done, I tell you.” Hikat, this one, Barrick remembered—a sound like an ax striking wood. Hikat. And the other was called…
… Hau. “It is not done. There is a way. He can go by Crooked’s road.”
“He does not know how—nor could he learn before years had passed.”
“I knew once,” piped old Hoorooen. “Did I not know? I think I did. I think I remember Crooked’s roads and they were cold and lonely.”