“Thirst,” Meve said, and then began to struggle slowly to her feet. She swayed as she rose, a tiny, brittle bundle like a dried bird’s nest, all mud and sticks. Gulda went to help her but Meve swatted her sister away with a tiny, trembling hand. When she turned back to them, Chert saw her eyes were white with pearl-eye—she was almost certainly blind.
“Dreams… changed…” she rasped, thrusting her hand at Chert as though he had stolen something from her. “Hot. Hot sleep! Cold time. Angry!”
He shrank back but Flint stepped forward and took her bony fingers in his own. The tiny old woman was shaking all over as though with a fever.
Her sister hurried to comfort her. “Oh, there, my love, my sweet, there,” she said, kissing the sparse white hairs on her sister’s head. “Don’t fear. Gulda’s with you. I’m here.”
“Fear,” said Meve in a rasping whisper. “Here.”
“What’s here, my love? What’s here?”
The little old woman spoke so softly Chert could barely hear her. “Angry…”
Ena, Longfingers’ daughter, brought them back to the fifth lantern on the estuary path and let them take off their blindfolds again. Chert was glad to have his sight back, but he had been even happier just to escape the salty, smoky air of the drying shed.
“So, did you find what you were looking for, little man?” the girl asked Flint.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I am touching unfamiliar things in the dark, trying to make out their shapes.”
“A strange one, aren’t you, boy?” The Skimmer girl turned to Chert. “I remember now who you are—Chert of the Blue Quartz.”
Chert, who had thought the long night of strange surprises was over, stared at her. “How do you know me?”
“Never mind that. Better not saying. But you’re a friend of the Ulosian, Chaven, aren’t you?”
Even if she had helped them in some way—and since Chert had no idea what Flint had been doing, he couldn’t even say that for certain—he was not such a fool as to tell a near stranger anything about the fugitive physician. “I used to visit him. That is common knowledge. Why?”
“I have a message for him. We helped him and he promised us payment. Days of work we gave him and because he has not paid us our due it makes my father look foolish in front of the others. If you see him, tell him that—the Skimmers want their payment.”
As Chert and Flint made their way through Chaven’s house toward the hidden door and the tunnel to Funderling Town, they heard noises—footsteps and what sounded like distant, ghostly voices. Chert’s superstitious fright quickly gave way to a more straightforward terror when he heard the voices more clearly and realized that some of Hendon Tolly’s guardsmen were in the house looking for them.
They must have been watching the place, he thought, fighting down panic. But we stayed in the shadows—perhaps they are not sure we came in. Earth Elders, let it be so!
Chert knew the place better than did any guards, at least the lower levels, and they managed to get out the door at the bottom of the house before any pursuers caught them. Once outside, Chert jammed the door closed with shards of rock and hoped that if the guards found the door behind the tapestry on the other side, they would think it had been sealed off long ago. But it meant that Chaven’s observatory was being watched carefully. The place was no longer safe.
We are running out of ways to escape Funderling Town, he thought as he followed the boy back toward the temple. Or even just to see the sky. Soon we will be like those rabbits trapped in their run by hunters. Stormstone’s worst fears for our people are coming true.
22. The Patchwork Man
“The Dreamless are another tribe of Qar, claimed by some to be related to the Cold Fairies. All that is known of them for certain is that in the days of the Theomachy or just after they left the other Qar and went to make a home for themselves called the City of Sleep.”
The many rivulets that Barrick had seen or even crossed as he made his way down from the heights around the Cursed Hill now began to join together, streaks of dull silver snaking through the gray-green moorlands in the perpetual twilight, one emptying into the next and then the next until they had swollen into a single cataract too wide to cross, whose thunder was always in his ears.
“This must be the river Fade.” Barrick paused to rest a moment on a high, rocky part of the bank as the water foamed past beneath him. A cloud of mist wet his clothes but for once he did not mind being damp. “Does it stay like this all the way into Sleep?”
“Not so much,” said Skurn as he fluttered from side to side, unwilling to land on the wet rocks. “At bottom of hills it goes a bit more calm, like, and a good bit wider—you’ll see it. But it follows all the way to that bad place, yes. Are you different minded now?” he asked hopefully.
Barrick shook his head. “No, bird. I must go there.” The whole venture was foolish, of course, and almost certainly doomed to fail, but a curious, unfamiliar sort of bubbling in his blood was leading him on. He felt inexplicably certain he would find solutions to his problems when he needed them.
Is this what it feels like to be well, he wondered, worrying about no one save myself, and not much about me?
Part of it was having a healthy body: his arm, which for most of his life had felt like it was not part of him except for the pain it caused, no longer bothered him. More than that, it felt as strong as his other arm, although he could tell by some small experiments that it wasn’t. The muscles were shrunken from long disuse and he could not squeeze a stick as hard as he could with his healthy hand; still, the transformation was remarkable.
“I am changed,” he said to the twilight sky. “I am saved.”
“Pardon?” Skurn, who had been exploring ahead, flapped down to land on Barrick’s shoulder. His odor was worse than usual, if such a thing were possible.
“Nothing. What have you been eating?”
“Fish. Found it on the rocks down there. Leaped out, it did, missed the water coming down. Been softening in the air for days. Very beaksome indeed.”
“Get away from me. You stink.”
“Be no posy thyself,” said the bird in a hurt tone as he flapped away.
The moorlands were covered with green but desolate meadows, empty lands that showed every sign of once being inhabited, although by whom Barrick could not have guessed: stone ruins overgrown by grass and brambles dotted the lonely fields, cottages of almost every size, from stony lean-tos built into the sides of the hills, some of which looked big enough to house fabled Brambinag and all his family, to delicate miniature villages whose tallest buildings barely reached Barrick’s waist, constructed of bark and grass and river-smoothed stones. Had he not already met the Tine Fay he would have thought these structures were like his sister’s doll house, built only to amuse children. But why would the little people leave a civilized existence to move into dangerous Silky Wood and live like savages such a short distance away? What had driven them out of this green place, along with all the others who had lived here, leaving behind only these quiet, sad remains?
“How far?” he asked Skurn yet again. It was his third day in the meadow and his new sense of confidence was beginning to fade into the unrelenting sameness of following the river down from the moors and into these empty meadows. The wind blew almost continuously here, making Barrick feel as if he was trudging uphill even on the most level ground, and his tattered clothes did little to keep him warm.