“Thought you were dead!” After a moment, when he had not responded, something poked at his ear. “You don’t be dead, do you?”
Barrick groaned and sat up. He ached all over from his numerous falls—except, oddly, his crippled arm, which still retained a stony numbness, although he could flex it now at least as easily as he ever could. “Skurn?” He opened his eyes. The black bird, head tilted to one side, stared at him with its fathomless black eye. “Gods, it is you.” He let himself slump back, then sat up. “A fire! I can make a fire.”
He scrambled to find enough dry leaves and grass to make a pile, then went to work, striking down at the crescent-shaped piece of metal with the flint. Once a few sparks fell onto the grass Barrick blew on them; after a little while he was rewarded with a curl of smoke and then a tiny, near-transparent flame. Relieved, he sat back and warmed his hands in front of the miniature blaze. “We must make camp somewhere nearby so I can build a proper one,” he said.
“Not here.” The raven lowered his harsh voice. “Here at the hill’s bottom, silkins will find us.”
Barrick shook his head. “I don’t care. I have to rest, at least for a little while. I have climbed all the way to that hill’s top today.”
Now the bird tilted its head again, this time to inspect the boy. “Is that what you’ve been at all these last days? Climbing up hill and down hill like a Follower up a tree?”
“Days? One day at most, surely.”
The raven examined his face carefully, as though he might be joking. “Days. But Skurn stayed. Skurn waited!”
Barrick did not have the strength to argue with a mad bird. He shielded the infant blaze with some stones, then went in search of a better place to camp—somewhere on good, natural stone, not the bony, yellowy stuff of the heights. Barrick wanted no more of any gods for a while, whether living or dead.
The heat of the fire was even more heartening than its light—it was wonderful to be warm again for the first time in longer than he could remember. After an hour or so the cold only lingered in his crippled arm, but even that was not a painful chill but a kind of absence, as if the organs of suffering had been somehow removed when he had gained his three parallel scars. They were all covered by scabs now and scarcely discomforting at all. His arm even seemed to have a degree of mobility it had not shown before, although Barrick could not tell whether that was because it could actually bend farther or just because it hurt less. The muscles were still weak, but it seemed a different kind of weakness, as though with more employment it would gain strength, like any ordinary limb long disused.
As a result he was in the best mood he had seen in a long while. Even in those first heady moments after he had escaped Greatdeeps and the monster Jikuyin, his happiness had been undercut by the loss of his two companions, Gyir and Vansen. Barrick knew he was still in great danger, perhaps with even more perilous times to come, but just now being warm and not in pain seemed a blessing as great as any that heaven could grant.
He stretched and yawned. “Tell me what you know about the city of Sleep,” he asked Skurn, who was busy smacking a snail shell on a rock like a tiny blacksmith at his anvil.
The raven dropped the snail and turned toward him, feathers bristling around his neck like a courtier’s ruff. “Pfagh! That be a foul name. Where did you hear such?”
“Spare me the warnings and the gloomy predictions, bird. Just tell me what you know.”
“Us knows what any know and naught more. Night Men live there, who once were high among the Twilight folk until they fell into wicked ways, making foul allies and marrying only ’mongst theyselves and such. Then were they sent away. They made up their own city which they built in the dead lands down Fade River from here. None go there by their own will, it be said.”
The idea that he would go to such a place seemed both frightening and amusing to Barrick—amusing only in that it was so clearly ridiculous. Follow the river Fade! It was like some bard’s poem of fatal heroism. The Sleepers might have said a door in Sleep was his only way to reach the Qar king in his royal city, and it was true he had promised to take Gyir’s mirror there, but that did not seem nearly enough compulsion to force him toward such an obviously murderous spot. What made them so sure he would do it? Why would any person who was not a half-wit go to such a place?
“Is that all you know, bird? How far away is it?”
“Us could fly there on five or six meals, like, but why would us?”
“I don’t mean flying. How far for someone like me to walk?”
The raven dropped the snail shell again and hopped closer, examining Barrick carefully once more as though suddenly concerned that he was sharing the campsite with an imposter. “Just finished running up and down Cursed Hill, you did. Dost young master plan to visit every deathly spot in all the Twilight Lands, like pilgrim?”
Barrick grinned sourly. “What do you know of the gods, Skurn? Of what happened to them? Are they really gone from the world?”
Now the raven appeared truly agitated, hopping and flapping his way around the fire until he had found a stone to jump onto, as though he suddenly wanted to be a little farther off the ground. “Why yon strange questions? Us dasn’t think too much about the ways of the gods, let alone speak on ’em. When they hears they names—even in dreams—they takes notice.”
“Very well. No more talk.” The pull of sleep was getting strong now, the fire like a warm blanket draped across his front, comforting, almost homely. “We can speak more on it tomorrow, when we set out.”
“Set out?” The raven’s voice had an unarguable touch of worry in it. “Set out where, young master?”
“For the city of Sleep, of course.” Barrick almost smiled again. Was this how they had felt, those great heroes of old, Hiliometes or Silas or Massilios Goldenhair? As though they were part of some greater thing, tugged along through no choice of their own, helpless… but almost uncaring? It was a strange feeling. All of him, even his thoughts, seemed at this moment to be strengthened, yet as unfeeling as his arm. He looked down at the blackening blood on his skin, the three marks as though he had been clawed by some bird twice Skurn’s size or more. What had the Sleepers given him?
Life is always loss, especially when you gain something, the old one had said. Did that mean they had also taken something from him? But what had he lost?
“You do not mean it, young master, do you? Not to go to such a place.”
“You need not go, Skurn. This is my journey.”
“But the silkins in the forest—and the Dreamless in that dreadsome city! They will freeze our blood and eat our skin!”
“You need not go.”
“Then I will be lost here and alone.”
Barrick fell silent then, but not out of pity for the bird. After he had slept he would wake. After he had awakened he would set out. He would walk until he reached the city called Sleep, then he would see what happened next—death or something else. He would go on like that until everything was over. It seemed simple, somehow.
But what had the Sleepers taken from him to give him such simplicity? And what had he lost… ?
Weariness took him then, pulling him down into darkness, carrying him away from the flickering fire to a place that mortals shared with gods.
Part Two
CLOAK