25. Into Sleep
“It is said that the fairies known as the Dreamless go abroad only at night, and that they steal the dreams of mortal men because they have none of their own. It is also said that the Dreamless make pets from the ghosts of mortals who have died without a Trigonate blessing and use them for a hunting pack.”
The cloud of darkness covered a sizeable portion of the sky above the river by the time Barrick began to see the first bridges across the Fade, signs of the approaching city. At first he didn’t even realize the asymmetrical shapes were bridges because they seemed to be jagged slabs of natural stone eroded by wind and water. As he saw more of Sleep he came to realize that this was the way of the Dreamless: their most careful constructions looked like preposterous accidents, with scarcely a straight line to be found anywhere.
The Fade itself was becoming busier, too, although all the boats and ships they saw, small or large, rowed by gray-skinned Dreamless or headless blemmies like the one laboring in their own craft, seemed to pass in funereal silence. There was no question, however, that the occupants of the other boats noticed Barrick and Pick: even the humblest Dreamless fisherman stared at the Sunlanders as though they had never seen anything so odd and so unpleasant in their long lives.
“Why do they look at us like that?” Barrick whispered. “Like they hate us?”
Pick shrugged, then lifted his bowl over the side to get more water for his master. “They do not love our kind, of course.”
“But you said there were many of us kept here as servants.”
“Oh, yes, Master keeps many. Not all are wimmuai, either. Some came from the Sunlands like you and I.”
“Then why are the Dreamless staring at us?
Pick paused as he was crawling back under the tent on the deck. “I’m sure they are only staring at our boat because it belongs to Qu’arus. Perhaps they wonder why they do not see him—he is well known to many in Sleep.”
After that the man in the patchwork clothes returned his attention to his dying lord and would not answer anymore questions.
Soon they reached the first of the darklights, a beacon atop a high-backed bridge that appeared to be a cauldron steaming out pure blackness—not a cloud, like smoke, but something thinner and less tangible, a stain that spread across the gray day. It stretched across them like a shadow as they neared the bridge and then slid past it. Barrick felt a chill seize his heart.
As the labyrinth of the city began to grow around them the gloom grew deeper. They passed more and more darklights, perched atop bridges or leaking from sconces on rough walls. The world became darker and darker, as though night had finally fallen over the shadowlands, but it was a curious sort of night that stretched in pools from the darklights instead of arising everywhere and equally: for a long time twilight still hung over their heads, gray sky glaring through the spaces between the somber darklights as distinctly as bright noon. Soon enough, though, there were no more spaces: the twilight had vanished altogether, hidden behind a curtain of inky darkness.
And with full dark came the Dreamless themselves, spilling out like termites from a split log, although at first Barrick could barely make out anything more than dim shapes moving through the streets of Sleep on either side of the river and crossing the bridges overhead, figures gray and indistinct as ghosts. As his eyes became more used to the darklights he could see them better. The color of their skin seemed always the same, but the Dreamless themselves were as different as the Qar he had seen at Kalkan’s Field: some of them could have easily passed for human, but others were so disturbingly formed that Barrick could only thank the gods for the robes they wore. He also could not help but feel every single one of the Dreamless was watching him.
The River Fade became a wide, stone-sided canal, its edges entirely covered with docks and buildings, some of them so tall that Barrick could not see their tops above the murk of the darklights. As they slid deeper into the city, the blemmy still tirelessly plying the oars, Barrick felt as though he was being swallowed by something.
The Fade soon began to split into a series of lesser waterways. The blemmy steered down first one, then another, as if it knew exactly where it was going. The smaller the canals, the fewer passersby, until at last Barrick could see nothing else moving in this part of the bleak stone city except their own boat.
They had reached an area of silent marble buildings that were almost impossible to see clearly through the darkness. Huge willows lined the canal bank, long limbs swaying in the breeze, but the entire neighborhood seemed otherwise as lifeless as a mausoleum. The blemmy slowed the boat and then brought it to a stop at an ornate dock jutting several yards out into the water. While Barrick crouched in the stern, surprised by the sudden end to their journey, a crowd of shadowy figures drifted toward them out of the darkness, filling the dock while making no more noise than cats—almost a dozen Dreamless men and women dressed in black. Then one last figure came down the dock and the others made room for her. When she reached the end of the pier she stopped, her hands extended before her as though she walked in her sleep. Pick had folded back the tent. She stared down at Qu’arus where he lay in the bottom of the boat. Barrick thought at first that the Dreamless woman wore some kind of cowl, but then realized that the top of her hairless head was covered in plate, like the shell of a beetle. Her features were slender and mobile—her face looked nearly human but for her corpselike pallor—but much of her exposed skin was covered in bony carapace. He could not be certain because of her strange, Dreamless eyes, but he thought she had been crying.
When she spoke her voice was soft, though the language itself was harsh. The brief words could have been either a blessing or a curse for all that Barrick could understand them.
Pick looked up at her with a strange sort of satisfaction on his face. “I have brought him home, Lady.”
She stood silently for a moment, then turned and moved back up the dock, her filmy black garment billowing around her ankles like mist. Several of the others lifted Qu’arus from the boat with Pick’s help, then carried him along the dock after her, then up the steps toward what Barrick now saw was a great, dark house.
“Come inside quickly,” Pick whispered. “It will be Repose soon—the skrikers will be out.” After this incomprehensible warning he hurried up the dock after his master’s body. Another servant, whose gray skin was as wrinkled as a wasp’s nest, had tied a rope around the blemmy’s waist and led it off through the willows and around the side of the squat, stony house. Barrick looked down at the place where Qu’arus had lain and saw for the first time that a gray wool cloak had been folded beneath him, no doubt by Pick to protect his master from the hard boards of the deck. Barrick lifted it and something fell out of the cloak and back into the boat with a clatter, making him look around in fear, but he was alone on the dock. The thing that had fallen was a short sword in an unadorned black scabbard. When he drew it Barrick saw with approval that its edges were sharp as a shaving razor, the kind of weapon he had not had since he had fought the Qar with Tyne Aldredge. He wrapped it back up in the cloak, then looked around for a place to hide them both. Something rustled beside him and he jumped, so startled that he almost dropped both objects into the river.