Barrick found a little of his strength again, although the scalding pain still swirled through him like hot metal in a crucible. “What are you talking about?” he demanded. “I don’t understand! Is this all a dream?”
Hau’s voice was little more than a whisper now. “Of course. But true, nevertheless. And if you reach Crooked’s Hall at last, remember this one thing, child—no mortal hand can open the door there. It is written in the Book itself—no mortal hand…”
“I don’t understand you!”
“Then you will die, pup,” said fading Hikat. “The world will not wait for you to understand. The world will murder you and all like you. The Eon of Suffering will begin and you will all be punished for having left them outside in the cold so long.”
“Who? Leaving who outside?”
“The gods,” old Hoorooen moaned. “The angry gods.”
“You’re telling me to walk into the city of the Dreamless?” Face certain death there just for a chance to fight against the gods themselves? It was utter madness. “How can I believe any of this?”
“Because we are the Sleepers, the dreamers,” one of them murmured—it might have been Hau. “And we have lived very close to them. Close enough to hear their dreaming thoughts, which roar in our ears like the ocean.”
“Whose thoughts? Do you mean the gods?”
“Look back as you leave.” The voice was so faint he could no longer tell which one spoke. “You will see. You will see them and perhaps you will understand… and believe…”
And then Barrick’s eyes were open and he was alone in the cave. The whispering shapes who had sat over him were gone. The fire was out, but a little light fell from the single oblong opening in the cavern wall. He looked down at his forearm. Three stripes of blood showed where the skin had been cut, but the wounds seemed largely healed, as if he had been lying there for days instead of hours. Had it all been a dream? Had he cut himself, hit his head, stumbled here, and fancied the rest while he lay in a swoon?
Barrick stood on shaky legs. He might have been dreaming, but he hadn’t been sleeping—that seemed clear just from how weary he felt. He still desperately needed fire, so he limped forward to see if he could find a piece of smoldering wood, but to his amazement and disappointment the ashes were white and cold, as if nothing had burned there for years. He was about to turn away when he saw something half-buried in the ash and dirt beside the circle of stones. Barrick bent, favoring his injured arm, which did not hurt as it usually did. (In fact, it was cold and stiff but painless, as though he had soaked it a long time in a mountain stream until it had gone numb.) He scraped at the dirt and uncovered a ragged, ancient leather pouch, so long in the damp ground that the leather was almost as hard as stone. When he peeled it open a chipped piece of shiny black stone fell out; a little more work and he withdrew a crescent-shaped piece of rusted steel from the remains of the leather. Steel… and flint! He had found someone’s fire-making tools! He could hardly wait to try it. Even if all the rest of this interlude had been no more than an exhausted dream, everything would be better now that he had fire.
He folded the remains of the leather sack around his find and tucked it into his belt. Barrick was exhausted and needed sleep, but he was reluctant to stay in this strange place any longer. If he had not dreamed the three strange Sleepers, perhaps they had only left for a while and would be coming back soon. They had not harmed him beyond whatever mysterious thing they had done to his arm, but they had certainly held him prisoner and had talked madness to him about the gods and doorways and folds in the world.
And his arm… what had he dreamed about his arm? What had they done? He held up his left hand, which was not clenched as it usually was, as it had been for years, but instead was simply closed: with a little effort he could actually open it, something he had not been able to do in a long time. He was so startled by this that he laughed a little.
What happened here?
And there had been more: he had dreamed of the dark-haired girl again, and this time he had dreamed her a name—Qinnitan, and somehow that felt like a true thing. But if that dream had been real, what of the rest… ?
No, it was dangerous to think that way, Barrick told himself. Those were the sort of lies priests told people to keep them stupid—that the gods saw everything, that they had a purpose for everyone. Although now that he thought of it, that hadn’t been what the Sleepers had said. Hadn’t they suggested the gods themselves were the enemy? “The Eon of Suffering will begin,” one of them had told him, “and we will all be punished for having left them outside in the cold so long.”
Barrick Eddon walked out of the domelike chamber into gray twilight. His eyes seemed to see subtleties in the dimness he had not noticed before—perhaps, he thought, because he had been so long in the dark cavern. Then, as he made his way down the path and off it and onto the raw stuff of the hillside, he remembered something else one of the Sleepers had said when he had asked whether they were really talking about the gods—the same gods Barrick knew. For most of his life Barrick had scorned his people’s beloved oniri, the oracles and prophets who claimed to know the gods’ will, but the strange Sleepers had said they heard the gods’ very thoughts. How could that be?
“Look back as you leave,” the quavering voice had told him. “You will see. You will see them, and perhaps you will understand.”
Barrick did look back, but at the moment a fold of the hillside blocked the place he had been: all he saw were trees and glimpses of the butter-colored stone that dotted the hill. He shook his head and resumed hunting for a place to make camp.
A little later, when he had all but forgotten, he chanced to look back again, and this time he had descended far enough down the slope that he could see the whole crest of the hill.
“You will see them, and perhaps you will understand…”
The forms had been too harried to notice on the way up, and had been too close to see or blocked by trees before, but now they suddenly leaped to his eyes. Beneath the earth and greenery of the hillside loomed shapes the color of old ivory, but they were not outcroppings of stones, as he had thought. Rather they were half-buried…
Bones… ?
He had missed seeing it before because it was not one simple shape but two, wrapped together in a complicated way—two vast skeletons tangled in an embrace of love or death, giant bones which had perhaps once been buried, but which had been lifted up into the air by the living earth, a thin mantling of soil cloaking them like a shroud and providing the nurture of trees and vines. The tooth-shaped rocks on top of the hill were teeth, the immense jaw of a mostly buried skull, broken loose and exposed by wind and rain. The other skull… the other skull…
That’s where I was, he realized, and a curtain of darkness threatened to fall over his mind and chase him away into the void. With the dreamers… inside a god’s skull…
Barrick turned and fled down the hill—slipping and sliding, rolling more often than he ran, forced to vault over the branches that threatened to trip him, and which to his fevered thoughts seemed to be the finger-bones of the immortal dead, reaching up through the soil to snatch him and pull him down.
It might have been luck that he did not drop the flint and steel during that stumbling, terrified trip down the hill, or when he collapsed in weariness at the bottom. It might also have been luck that the first thing that found him there was not a silkin but something with a harsh, familiar voice.