“The other servants ran away when Master was struck down. I could not tend to him and control the blemmies. Come with me. Help me! Together we can get him back to Sleep.”
“Us don’t want that!” squawked Skurn from the high stern of the boat, flapping his wings in agitation.
“Quiet, bird.” Barrick looked from scrawny servant to dying master. There had been a moment when he was fighting against the silkins and everything seemed clear: he was meant to do this. Like Hiliometes or Caylor he would find solutions to every difficulty. Here was one such solution—a boat to take him into Sleep and an adviser who would help him to pass unnoticed in that alien place. Perhaps the Sleepers had overestimated the dangers—perhaps these days there were many mortals like this Pick living among the Dreamless.
Still, the idea frightened him. It seemed too simple to be safe, like a scrubbed and shiny carrot sitting in the middle of a loop of string near a rabbit den—but perhaps that was what it felt like to be touched by destiny. He took one last look at the blemmy, shuddered a little, then nodded.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll come with you. For a little while anyway.”
The proper number of oars now clutched in its massive fists, the headless blemmy propelled them down the river. The moderate current did much of the job, but the strange creature proved to see better than Barrick would have guessed, guiding the long boat around obstacles with a nimbleness quite different from its helpless circling in the backwater. While Pick tended to the gray man, who had fallen into a more peaceful sleep, Skurn sulked on the tall stern of the boat or flapped along behind.
“You said your master was struck down,” Barrick asked the patchwork man. “What happened?”
“We were attacked by bandits in the Beggar lands.” He dabbed at his master’s gray skin with a wet rag. “Rope Men, they’re called. Looked ordinary enough at first, but they were starveling thin—like eels with legs—and never closed their mouths. Yellow teeth long as house nails.” The man in the colorful, ragged motley shivered. “One of the master’s guards was killed first, then another of them Rope Men sh–shot Master with an arrow. One of the other servants and I… w–we pulled it out… but then the arrows killed the other guard and the rest of the servants went overboard to get away from them, but they never came up again. It was terrible! The blemmies were rowing fast, though, and the Rope Men were on the bank, so we got away, but the other servant had been shot in the back with an arrow painted like a snake. He died. Master… M–Master got worse and worse…” Pick had to break off. Embarrassed by the man’s weepiness, Barrick turned away and watched the reedy shoreline sliding past until Pick could resume. “That was three sleeps ago by the master’s hour-box. Then we hit a rock and the other blemmy fell out into the water and drowned. You saw the rest.”
Barrick frowned a little. “How could one of them drown? They’ve got no mouths.”
“They do, down low on their bellies. They even make noises when they’re hurt or frightened—a sort of scratchy whistling…”
“Enough.” Barrick didn’t want to think about it—it was too unnatural. “And what will happen when we get to Sleep? Your master’s dying—we both know that. What will happen to you… and to me, for that matter? ”
“We will… be safe, I’m certain.” The man called Pick said this as though he had never actually thought of it before this moment. “Master was always good to me. And there are the wimmuai—he has always taken care of them as well. He lets them die of old age!”
“Wimmy-aye? What are those? Some kind of animal?”
Pick ducked his head. “They are… they are men like you and I. Bred and raised in Sleep, offspring of folk captured over the years at the Shadowline. Master usually has a dozen of them at one time.”
Slaves, in other words. Human slaves. But that was no real surprise—Barrick had never for an instant supposed that mortals would enjoy the same privileges in Sleep as the Dreamless themselves.
Qu’arus spoke in his sleep, a murmured gabble that had the sound of words in it but was no more intelligible to Barrick than the sighing of the wind.
“However did you come to serve such a creature?” Barrick asked.
Pick looked up, his face tight with suffering. “I was… I was lost. He found me. He showed me kindness and took me into his service.”
“Kindness? This… thing? I cannot believe that.”
The other gaped. “But he was… he is… !”
Barrick shrugged. “If you say it is so.” His memories of the other Dreamless, Ueni’ssoh, were of a heartless monster. Could this creature really be so different, or might the man named Pick simply be addled by his experiences behind the Shadowline?
“Hungry,” Skurn said suddenly. The raven launched himself from the stern of the boat, then flapped heavily away over the rushes lining the river and toward the forest.
What ails that bird? Barrick wondered. He has not said a word before that since I can’t remember when. On most days I cannot have a moment’s peace from his yammering.
It became clear as Barrick’s time on the river stretched into what must have been days that Skurn was not just being quiet but actively avoiding company: he spent much of his time in the air, but even when he returned from his solitary flights he tended to perch atop the stern, a curving piece of black-stained wood taller than Barrick, and silently watch the river and bank sliding past.
Perhaps it’s the blemmy that he doesn’t like, Barrick thought. The gods can testify it’s ugly enough to frighten anyone.
The blemmy was indeed ugly, but also very strong, accommodating sudden changes in the river current or avoiding rocks with little more than a flick of an oar. Barrick could only imagine the difference when two of the headless things were rowing together—it must be a very swift craft indeed.
In a rough part of the river, as the blemmy steered the boat between two large rocks visible only by the foam they made on the water’s surface, Barrick almost lost Gyir’s mirror. As he leaned with the boat’s sudden change of direction the leather pouch fell out of his shirt and bounced off the bench. His left hand, his once-crippled hand, shot out and snatched it from the air like a hawk taking a sparrow.
For long moments he stared at it, amazed by what his wounded arm could now do, but also chilled by the idea of what had almost happened. He was a fool to be so careless with the mirror—it was his purpose now. He scoured the boat until he found a spare loop of the surprisingly slender anchor cord and sawed off a piece with his broken spear. He poked a hole in the pouch big enough to accommodate the cord, pushed it through and knotted it, then looped it around his neck before hiding it in his shirt again.
Other boats soon began to appear on the river, mostly small fishing skiffs manned by one or two ragged Dreamless. Barrick saw a few houses and even some small settlements begin to appear along the banks, presumably owned by these same gray-skinned folk. But some craft were a good bit bigger than their own, barges with wide, bruise-purple sails or even long galleys rowed by half a dozen blemmies or more.
“Are we close to Sleep?” he asked Pick after one such craft had surged past them, leaving them rolling in its high wake.
“A day away—no, a little more,” the tattered man said distractedly. His master was still alive, but only barely, and Pick almost never left his side.