“Man? A man?” The fellow nodded slowly, his multicolored rags swaying. “That’s a word. Yes, that’s a word.”
“Where are you from?” Barrick looked around in case the grimy creature might have confederates standing by to jump out and rob him, but there was no sign of anyone else nearby.
“From… yes, from the sunlands,” said the stranger at last—slowly drawing it out, as if he had come up with the answer to a nearly impossible puzzle. “But I don’t remember it well,” he added sadly. “It was so long ago.”
“What is your name?”
The patchwork man showed a sickly smile. “Master calls me ‘Pick.’ ”
Barrick stepped back and let him approach the fire. Pick scuttled past him and squatted, holding his hands up to the low flames, his entire body wracked with shivers.
“What do you want?” Barrick asked at last. “Are you lost? Or do you mean to try and rob me?”
The one named Pick cowered as though he’d been slapped. “No! Please, do not hurt me, I beg you. I have been looking so long for someone who can help me. It is my master, my poor master!”
Every nerve and muscle urged Barrick to walk away from this ragged madman—Skurn had already flapped into the air, as though the man’s folly might be infectious. “What are you talking about?”
“One of the blemmies fell out of the boat. I tried to help, but I fell too. I nearly drowned! I have been trying to find help for hours. But my poor, sick master…”
“Blemmies?”
“Just come.” Although he was still dripping wet, the patchwork man now leaped up from the fire and began trotting back toward the river, turning every few steps like an eager dog to see if Barrick was following. “Come and you will see!”
Skurn hovered over Barrick’s head making dire predictions as he made his way down to the wide bank of swaying reeds and the path Pick had already trampled through the weeds and mud. “Enough, bird,” Barrick said at last. “Do something useful. Fly ahead and see if the fellow’s waiting for me with a club or something.”
The raven appeared a few moments later. “He’s standing looking out at the water, waiting, like. There’s a boat out there, but us don’t like it—there be somewhat fierce wrong with it.”
When Barrick reached Pick’s side he saw that the smaller man was, as Skurn had said, standing on a patch of trampled weeds staring out at a place where the river widened into a calm backwater. At the center of it, a long stone’s throw away from the bank, a black boat was being rowed in slow circles by a strange, hunched figure.
It took Barrick a moment to make sense of size and distance. “The one rowing is a big, big man. Is that your master?”
Pick looked at him as though Barrick had said something utterly mad. “That’s the other blemmy. He’s only got one oar.”
“Still, he could pole his way back to shore,” Barrick suggested, wondering what kind of half-wit rowers Pick’s master had hired. “Tell him that.”
“He’s…” The patchwork man wiggled his hand beside his head. “Can’t hear,” he said at last.
“Oh, for the love of…” Barrick looked out at the hunched figure and the long, circling black boat. “Then just swim out and show him.”
Pick was pulling strands of river-weed out of his hair. “Can’t swim. Almost died when I fell in, but I found a place where the bottom was shallow, praise the Betweens.”
Barrick looked at him, then turned back to the river. “Anything in that water I should know about? Anything with big teeth, for instance?”
“I got out,” Pick said. “But I thrashed around a long while first.”
Barrick cursed silently under his breath and waded in. Halfway out the muddy bottom fell away beneath his feet and he had to begin swimming. As he neared the slow-moving boat he expected the rower would turn toward him, but instead the man only stayed in his odd, bent-over position like someone who had gone dizzy, but meanwhile his wide back flexed and the thick arm plied the single oar in its lock, over and over.
The rower finally noticed him when Barrick’s fingers closed on the wooden gunwale of the boat and he began to pull himself on board. He had only a moment to note that both the boat and the rower were even larger than he had guessed from the shore, and that a long, pale figure lay underneath a small tent on the deck, then the massive rower turned to look at him, still without raising his head.
That was because he had no head, Barrick saw—only two wide, wet eyes on his chest. With a shriek, Barrick jumped back into the water, almost hitting his head on another oar which was floating there. He dipped under the surface and then came up again. In his sudden fright he swallowed more than a little of the green water.
“Gods in heaven, what kind of demon is that?” he spluttered.
“No demon!” Pick called from the reedy bank. “Just a blemmy! It will not harm you!”
If he had been on dry land it would have taken Barrick a much longer time to work up the courage to approach the boat again, but he could not tread water forever. The creature turned to him as he crawled onto the boat once more, but otherwise did not react. Its broad arms continued plying the single oar, steady as the paddles of a millwheel, and the boat continued to circle the backwater in wide, lazy loops.
When they passed close enough to the other oar, Barrick scooped it out of the water and offered it to the blemmy, trying not to look too hard at the dull, unblinking eyes in its chest or the empty place between its shoulders where a neck and head should be. The creature did not seem to see it, but when Barrick slid the oar back into the lock the blemmy clutched it without hesitation and began plying both oars together. The boat headed out toward the downstream current.
“How do I make it head for land?” he shouted. “Does the cursed thing have ears?”
“Put your hand on it and say, ‘s’yar’!” Pick shouted back. “Loud, so it can feel you!”
Barrick put his hand on the blemmy’s shoulder, which was overlarge but otherwise natural to the touch, and said the word. The monster shipped one oar until the little boat had swung around to face the bank, then began rowing with both oars again. Within moments the boat’s thin black keel ran up onto the muddy reed forest and Barrick leaped out. When the boat would go no farther the blemmy merely stopped rowing, its eyes staring from its chest at Barrick and Pick with no more curiosity than a cow in a field.
The patchwork man scrambled up onto the boat and folded back the tent, then kneeled beside the unmoving figure. His excitement gave way within moments to quiet weeping. “He is worse! He will never live to reach Sleep!”
Barrick tried not to look startled. “Your master is… from the city of Sleep?”
“Qu’arus is a great man,” Pick said as if Barrick had suggested otherwise. “All of the Dreamless will mourn him.”
“Kyow-roos.” Barrick tried it on his tongue. “And he is one of them? One of the Dreamless?”
Pick wiped his eyes but it was useless: the tears kept flowing. “Yes—he saved me! I would be dead were it not for his kindness. And he almost never beat me…” He collapsed onto the silent figure’s chest, his body heaving, as Barrick climbed back into the boat, stepping gingerly around the silent blemmy to get a look at Pick’s master.
Although he had been half expecting it, it was still a shock to see the silky gray skin and gaunt features so similar to the demigod Jikuyin’s murderous pet wizard, Ueni’ssoh. Pick’s master was in the grip of some delusional fever but too weak to move much. His staring eyes, which rolled from side to side, fixing on nothing, had the same weird hue as Ueni’ssoh’s—bluish-green as Xandian jade, with no trace of white. Faced with this monstrous reminder of Greatdeeps, it was all Barrick could do not to plunge his blade into the creature’s heart, but the tattered servant clearly felt differently: when Pick looked up at Barrick his eyes were red and his face wet with tears.