Shadowrise (63 page)

The dark woman’s hatred was like an icy blast of wind down a mountainside. Utta could not help herself—she let out a little noise of terror.

Yasammez turned on her as if she had noticed her for the first time. “You. You call yourself a servant of Zoria. What beside sentimental nonsense do you know of the white dove—of the true Dawnflower? What do you know of the way her father and his clan tormented her, killed her beloved, then handed her over to one of the victorious brothers as if the goddess of the first light was nothing but a spoil of war? What do you know of the way they tortured her son Crooked, the one you mayflies call Kupilas, until he was willing to give up his own life to rid the world of them? For thousands of years he has suffered to keep the world safe, agonies you and even I cannot imagine. Then think of this—you call him a god . . . but I call him
Father
.” Her face, the mask of rage, suddenly went as slack as the features of a corpse. “And now he is dying. My father is dying, my family is dying, my entire race is dying—and you talk to me of suffering.”

Utta’s legs buckled at last and she sank down into the mud beside Merolanna. In the moment’s hush she could again hear the cries of Yasammez’ victims across the bay, a chorus of terror that sounded like nothing so much as the screeching of distant seabirds.

The dark lady turned her back on them. “Kayyin, take these things away from me, these . . . insects. I have a war to fight. Tell them the story of how their kind stole the Fireflower and murdered my family. After that, if they still want to die, I will be happy to accommodate them.”

—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”

 

 

“T
HE REPOSE . . . SKRIKERS?I don’t understand.”Barrick took up the heavy oars again and began to row. The weird murk of the darklights lined the river like an arbor of old trees, dense along the bank and stretching high on either side until it finally began to thin far above their heads. “It makes no sense,” he growled at Raemon Beck, struggling to keep his voice to a whisper. “Why would the Dreamless shut themselves away for hours each day when they do not sleep? And if everyone’s inside, why would they have these skriker things guarding the streets? From what?”

Beck had dried his eyes, but he looked as if he might burst into tears again any moment; the man’s weak, puffy face made Barrick angry. “The Dreamless are fairies,” Beck said quietly, “and except for my master they aren’t kind ones. They trust no one—not even their own kind. As for the Repose, it is their law to lock themselves in, and that is what the skrikers see to. My master Qu’arus used to tell me that his people had to shut themselves away because too much wakefulness made their hearts and their thoughts sick. Before the Law of Repose many of them grew so damaged and secretive that they slaughtered their own families or their neighbors. There still are places where you can see the black ruins of estates that burned to the ground centuries ago with the family and all their servants inside, turned into funeral pyres by those who had grown tired of living . . .”

Barrick felt a disturbing moment of kinship with the Dreamless. How often had he dreamed of his own home in flames? How often had he wished for some disaster to end his pain, little caring who else might be harmed?

He rowed as quietly as he could, but the city was still as a tomb; every splash seemed certain to draw attention. The small waterway they were on came to an end, leaving them no choice but to move into a larger branch of one of the main canals. Three or four other boats were visible on the water, albeit distantly, but Barrick pulled hard on the oars and they managed to slip quickly across the wide waterway and then back onto one of the smaller side streams.

It was tiring to go so fast, though: the boat was twice as big as the sort of two-man skiffs used in Southmarch. Barrick found himself thinking of the headless blemmy that had done the work before—he wished they could have brought one of the horrible things, just to spare himself this backbreaking labor.

Barrick soon discovered that if he kept the skiff away from the darklights along the edge of the canals he could actually see fairly well, but the effect was still disturbing: out in the middle of the larger waterways was something like the shadowland twilight he had grown used to, but the banks seemed swaddled in inky black smoke. To see anything of what they were passing he had to move in close, until they were within the penumbra of the darklights and his eyes became accustomed to the deep shadow. But he had no idea whether they could be seen in turn or who might be looking at them.

“We need a place to hide,” he told Beck. “Some place no one will find us while we decide what to do next.”

“There is no such place,” Beck said bleakly. “Not here. Not in Sleep.”

Barrick scowled. “And you do not know where Crooked’s Hall is, either. You are as useless as a boar’s teats . . .”

At that moment something dropped on them out of the blackness, as though the darklights themselves had spat out part of their essence. Raemon Beck threw himself down, pressing his face against the deck, but Barrick recognized the clot of shadow and its method of entrance.

“I didn’t expect to see you again, bird,” he said.

“Us didn’t expect to see you, neither . . . not alive, like.” The bird bent to groom its chest feathers. “So, how went your guesting with those kindly blue-eyed folk?”

Barrick almost laughed. “As you can see, we’ve decided to move on. The problem is, Beck here doesn’t know where Crooked’s Hall might be. We need somewhere to go where we can be safe from the Night Men. And the others . . . what did you call them, Beck? Skrikers? ”

“Quiet!” The patchwork man looked around in anxious terror. “Do not name them here where the banks are close by! You’ll summon them.”

Skurn, who had been standing on one leg at the bow of the boat while he picked something out of his toes, shook himself and fluttered a little closer to Barrick. “P’raps us could fly up and try to see somewhat for you,” he said offhandedly. “P’raps.”

Barrick couldn’t help noticing the overture of comradeship. “Yes, that would be good, Skurn. Thank you.” He looked at the pitchy clouds of blacklight along the banks. “Find a place where the darkness is not so thick—an island, perhaps. Unused. Maybe wild.”

The black bird flapped upward in a spiral and then leveled out, flying toward the nearest bank.

“My stomach is empty,” Barrick said as he watched the raven disappear. “If we take a fish from this water will it poison us?”

Beck shook his head. “I don’t think so. But there is already food in the boat. I doubt anyone touched it after we brought my master home. With so many lost on our hunting trip and my master wounded we did not eat it all—a good deal of dried meat and road bread should be left.” He crawled forward and found a large waterproof sack folded underneath the foremost bench. “Yes, see!”

The food had a strange, musty taste, but Barrick was far too tired and hungy to mind. They shared a handful of dried meat and two pieces of bread as hard as boot-leather that reminded Barrick of the brown maslin loaves back home.

“And you are truly Prince Barrick!” Raemon Beck had recovered his spirits a bit. “I cannot believe I should see you again, my lord—and here of all places!”

“If you say so. I do not remember our first meeting.” In truth, Barrick didn’t much want to remember. It was nothing to do with the man in the ragged clothes. He had felt such relief at being separated from all that he had left behind—his past, his heritage, his pain—and he was in no hurry to bring any of it back.

Beck haltingly told him of how his caravan had been attacked by the Qar, he the lone survivor, and how after telling his story he had been summoned to a royal council and then had been sent back again to the same place along the Settland Road. The tale took a long while—Beck’s memory had been addled by so much time behind the Shadowline, a stay even longer than Barrick’s—and every name he recovered was a victory for him but gave Barrick only pain.

“And then your sister told the captain . . . what was his name? The tall one?”

“Vansen,” said Barrick flatly. The guardsman had fallen into blackness defending Barrick’s life after Barrick himself had cursed him many times. Was there to be no end to this parade of wretched, useless memories?

“Yes, your sister told him to take me back to where the caravan was attacked. But we never reached it—or I never did. I woke up in the night surrounded by mist. I was lost. I called and called but no one found me. Or at least none of the ones that I traveled with found me . . .” Raemon Beck broke off, shuddering, and would say no more about what had happened to him between that time and the time he was taken in by Qu’arus of Sleep. “He treated me well, did Master. Fed me. Didn’t beat me unless I deserved it. And now he’s dead . . .” Beck’s shoulders trembled. “But I do not think your sister, bless her—forgive me, Lord, I should say Princess Briony . . . I do not think she meant me any harm. She was angry, but I don’t think she was angry at me . . .”

“Enough, man. Leave it.” Barrick had heard as much as he could bear.

Beck lapsed into silence. Barrick sat hunched in the robe that had cushioned Qu’arus on his dying journey and took up the oars again, rowing just enough to keep them in the middle of the quiet, backwater stream while they waited for the raven’s return. The canal was narrow and the houses rose up on either side, scarcely distinguishable from the rough stony cliffs out of which they had been carved, only recognizable as dwellings by the occasional tiny window and the huge, gatelike doors in the walls above the waterline.

Doors,
he thought.
More doors in this city than I can count. And all I have to do is find the right one.

 

Skurn dropped down out of the dim sky and spread his wings to land on the boat’s tall stern. It was easy to forget how big the bird was, Barrick thought—its wingspan nearly matched the spread of a man’s arms. The raven did not speak at once, but picked and pruned at his feathers. It was clear Skurn wanted to be asked.

“Have you found us anything? A place to go?”

“Mought be. Then again, moughtn’t.”

Barrick sighed. Was it any wonder he was mostly alone in the world and preferred it that way? “Then please tell me,” he said with exaggerated courtesy. “Afterward, I will thank you fulsomely for your kind service.”

Pleased, the raven fluffed himself and stood straighter. “Happens that this is what Skurn has found—a skerry off the great canal, midstream. Trees and such, and only ruins. Us didn’t see sign of naught on two legs.”

“Good,” said Barrick. “And I do thank you. Which direction?”

“Follow us.” The raven flapped up again.

As Barrick paddled after the slow-flapping shape, Raemon Beck suddenly said, “Not all the animals here talk. And sometimes even with the ones that do, you’re better off not to listen.” He shook himself like a wet dog, beset by some evil memory. “Especially when they invite you back to their houses. It’s not like one of those children’s tales, you know.”

“I’ll do my best to remember that.”

The island was much as Skurn had described, a small, overgrown knot of stone in the middle of one of the large canals, far enough from the darklights that it basked in a pool of twilit gray. Some immense structure had once stood among the dark pines, taking up most of the small island, but little remained of it now except a few crumbling walls and the circular ruins of what might have been a tower.

There was no beach to be found, and nothing left of the dock that had once served the island except a few bleached piers that looked enough like great ribs to make Barrick think uneasily of the Sleepers and their bone mountain. They moored the boat to the closest of these and waded to the rocky shore through water up to their chests; Beck and Barrick were both shivering by the time they reached dry ground and crawled into the shelter of the pines.

“We need a fire,” Barrick said. “I don’t care if anyone sees it or not.” He got up and led Beck through the thick growth until they reached the remains of the stone tower. “This will at least hide the light of the flames,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about the smoke.”

“Use these,” said Beck, bending to pick deadfall from the ground. “It’s a good wood and they’ll put off less smoke than green branches.”

Barrick nodded. So the man wasn’t useless after all.

With a small fire burning, Barrick finally settled back to warm his hands and realized that Skurn was gone. Before he had too much chance to think about it the bird came back, flapping down through the upper branches before hopping the rest of the way from limb to tangled limb. Something dangled in his beak, a dark bundle that he dropped with great ceremony.

“Us thought you would be hungry, like,” the raven announced.

Barrick examined the almost eyeless corpse, a creature like a large mole but with longer and more delicate, fingered paws. “Thank you,” he said, and meant it: he was painfully hungry. Except for the few morsels he had shared with Raemon Beck he hadn’t eaten in what seemed like days.

“I’ll do for that,” Beck said. “Have you a knife?”

With some reluctance, Barrick produced Qu’arus’ short sword. Beck examined it for a moment and raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. The merchant bent to the task of skinning and gutting the creature while Barrick stoked the fire, and he gave the entrails and hide to Skurn without asking. The raven gulped them down, then hopped onto a stone and began to groom himself.