“Cold and lonely they are, but there are other ways he might travel them besides his own strength.” Hau spoke gently. “There is a door in Sleep.”
“Ah!” said Hoorooen. “The darklights. I would like to see them again.”
“You are both fools,” snapped Hikat. “The city of Sleep means death, both to us and this mortal cub. There is no chance he could reach the door, or walk through it even if he found it.”
“Unless we help.”
“Even so.” The one called Hikat seemed to take a certain joy in despair. “What we can give him will only help him if he reaches the door—but he will never do so with an entire city full of deadly hatred against him.”
“There is nothing else to do. We have only this one chance.”
“It will freeze up his blood,” Hoorooen said gloomily. “If he travels those roads the void will drink away his life. He will become old and lost… like us. Old and lost.”
“Nothing to be done—he must use Crooked’s roads. There is no other way. But we will gift him with something of ourselves. Those are dangerous paths and we must prepare and armor him to survive them. Bring him toward us.”
“It will diminish us—perhaps even destroy us. And he will only curse you for such a gift.” Hikat sounded almost amused.
“It will almost certainly destroy us.” Hau was sorrowful but resigned. “But the world and everything in it will curse us if we do it not…”
Barrick now found himself aware of his body again, then of the growing light of the fire and the dome-shaped room as well, and even the three Sleepers, but this perception did not bring freedom or even movement. The hooded Sleepers leaned over him as though they were mourners and he the corpse.
“We send him into dry lands,” Hau said.“We must do what we can. But where? In what part of him do we pour our waters—our essence?”
“His heart,” said Hikat. “It will make him strong.”
“But it will also make his heart like stone. Sometimes love is all we have.”
“So? It will give him the best chance to survive, you fool. Or would you betray the world you claim to hold so dear?”
“In his eyes,” said quavering old Hoorooen. “So he can see what he will see in the days ahead and not be afraid.”
“But fear is sometimes the first step toward wisdom,” Hau replied. “To be unafraid is to be unchanging and unready. No, we will simply give our waters to him and his own being shall decide what to do with them. He is lame in one arm, out of balance—that is his weakest spot. We shall do it there, where he is already broken.”
A uniform pressure moved over Barrick then, holding him motionless like a blanket of heavy armor links, but he could still feel the cool air of the room on his skin, the patchy heat of the fire. One of the three figures lifted an object up into the red light of the f lames—a crude, ancient knife chipped from gray stone.
“Manchild,” said the one called Hau, “let what we give you now, the waters of our being, fill you and strengthen you.”
The pressure grew stronger on Barrick’s left arm, the wounded place he had hidden from people’s stares, had always tried to protect. Now he struggled again to protect it, but for all his desperate effort he could not move himself by so much as a finger’s breadth.
“Do it swiftly,” said Hikat. “He is weak.”
“Not so weak as you suppose,” Hau said, then something tore across the skin of Barrick’s arm—a horrible, searing slash of pain. He tried to scream, to struggle free, but his body was not his own.
“I give you my tears,” said Hau. “They will keep your eyes clear to see the road ahead.” Something burned once more in the wound on his arm, salty and terrible. Another scream rose and fell deep inside him without ever breaking the surface.
The second shadowy figure took the knife, which rose and then came down again as another fiery spurt of agony pierced his arm. “I give you the spittle of my mouth,” Hikat growled. “Because hatred will keep you strong. Remember this when you stand before the gods, and if you fail, spit in their faces for what they have taken from us all.” Again Barrick felt a drizzle of misery for which he was allowed no release of movement or sound.
The gods were punishing him, that was clear. He could take no more of such suffering. Even the smallest twinge of discomfort now and his head would flame and burst like a pine knot in a bonfire.
“I am dry as the bones on which we sit,” quavered old Hoorooen. “Tears and spittle I have none, nor any other of the body’s waters. All I have left is my blood and even that is dry as dust.” The knife rose and fell a third time, biting into his mangled arm like a white-hot tooth. Barrick could barely think, barely hear. “But the blood of dreamers may be worth something, in the end…”
Something fell into his wound, powdery but also coarse and sharp, as though someone had stuffed tiny shards of glass into the bleeding place. The pain was everywhere and unendurable, as though biting ants swarmed over his exposed flesh. Wave after wave of suffering washed through him. Barrick drifted farther and farther away, as if he were flotsam carried on hot dark waves, but at last the hurt became a little less and he realized he was hearing voices again.
“You are stronger now—changed. We have given you all that we have left so that you might have a chance to give our dreams meaning. But now we are fading—we will not be able to speak to you much longer.” For a moment, the hard voice of Hikat became almost gentle. “Listen well and do not fail us, child of two worlds. There is only one way you can reach the House of the People and the blind king before it is too late—you must travel on Crooked’s roads, which will fold your path before you so that you may step between the world’s walls. To do that, you must find the hall in Sleep that bears his name.”
“Most of those roads are closed to you,” said Hau, whose voice was more distant now than it had been. “One only you might find and use in time, because it is close by. It is in the city of Sleep—the home of our own people. But know that the Dreamless who live there hate mortals even more than they hate the lords of Qul-na-Qar.”
“But even if our essences may enable him to survive the cold, dead places that Crooked traveled, still it will be for nothing.” Hikat sounded angry again. “Look at him—how will he cross Crooked’s Hall? How will he open the doorway?”
“That is not ours to know,” said Hau. “We have nothing left to give. Even now I feel the outer winds blowing through me.”
“Then it has all been for nothing.”
“Life is always loss,” murmured the old one. “Especially when you gain something.”