Shadowrise (39 page)

Again the northern king fell silent. When he spoke again his voice was quite different, somber and almost without feeling.

“I have bored you long enough. I thank you for indulging me. I think I will go and walk up and down the decks of my prison a little while and listen to the gulls.”

The paramount minister of Xis heard Olin move, followed by his guards, the footsteps slowly growing fainter. After he was gone, no one else moved or spoke. Had he been talking to the guards, or to empty air after all, addressing only the cloudy spring sky? Vash slid himself out of the pantry as carefully as his stiff old bones would permit and hobbled down the stairs to the deck, then climbed back up to where Olin had been. The king had indeed left—Vash could see the top of his head at the far end of the ship, where he leaned on the rail under the wary eye of several soldiers—and there was no sign of the autarch or Panhyssir or Dumin Hauyuz or any other rational being. The only soul on the deck was the halfwit scotarch Prusus lolling in his chair, hands and head jerking, a thread of spittle dangling from his chin. For a moment Prusus the Cripple seemed to look back at him, but as Vash walked toward him the scotarch’s stare rolled vacantly, as though the paramount minister had suddenly disappeared from his view.

Pinimmon Vash stopped in front of the quivering shape and looked the scotarch up and down, thinking . . . wondering . . .

The world has slipped its mooring,
Vash thought.
Yes, the world I knew has drifted out of familiar waters. Where it goes now, only gods and madmen can guess.

“Something is following us,” Barrick whispered.

“Aye.” When the raven spoke quietly he was hard to understand, all rasp and whistle. He fluttered down onto a stone and clung to the mossy surface, then lowered his head between his shoulders and fluffed himself bigger. “Silkins,” he croaked. “Saw them when us flew over trees. Five nor six, us guesses.”

“Let them come.” He feared them, but Barrick also felt strangely sure he had not come so far and survived so much to die at the hands of these spindly thread-covered monstrosities. He felt strong—weirdly so, as though something powerful bubbled inside him like the foam on a mug of beer. It almost made him want to laugh out loud.

“Let them? Kill us both, they will—or worset, take us back to they hanging nests and put they grubs in our bellies.” The raven flapped up into a tree branch several paces ahead. “Seen it happen to Followers, I have. Not even dead when the younglings hatch . . .”

“They won’t do it to me. I won’t let them.”

The black bird shuddered and puffed up his feathers again. “Did you take a bump to the head when you climbed so long on that dire hill? Not at all the same since then, you.”

Barrick couldn’t help smiling. It was true, although he wasn’t certain why. He
did
feel different—stronger, more certain . . . better. Even the constant dull ache in his crippled left arm, a pain that had plagued him for most of his life, was now gone: the only discomfort was an occasional prickle of the skin, as though he had slept on it.

Barrick held the torch near his forearm. The scars the Sleepers had made were all but gone, only three white stripes remaining that looked years old, although it had been no more than a day or two since he had descended from Cursed Hill. Even his hand, the loathsome crab-claw he had always tried to hide, now looked scarcely different from his other hand. What magic had those blind things done to him? It seemed they had brought him only good, but a nagging memory reminded him that they had spoken of a price . . .

Barrick tripped on a root and stumbled badly before regaining his balance. The ground was slippery from the mist that cloaked the twilight forest. A healthy arm wouldn’t keep him from falling and hitting his head.

“Surely us must find a place to be safe, Master,” Skurn said in a wheedling voice. “To rest. Tired, you are, and tired makes mistakes, as our old mam always said.”

Barrick looked around. He had been walking for what seemed most of a day, following the raven’s recollection of the best route toward the city of Sleep and its fearful inhabitants, the ones Skurn called Night Men. It wouldn’t hurt to stop and rest, especially if a group of silkins were following. He could roast the roots he had dug that morning, which would at least make them seem a little more like actual food: he had discovered several things that grew here which he could eat and keep down, but cooking them definitely helped.

“Very well,” he said. “Find me a place with a rock I can put at my back.”

“Wise you are, so wise. Us will find a helpsome spot.” The raven flapped heavily up through the canopy of trees and out of Barrick’s sight.

 

The thing was, Barrick reflected as he chewed, roasting these pale, soggy roots made them taste more like food, but it didn’t make them taste like good food.

“Couldn’t you find us an egg or something? ” he asked. “A bird’s egg? ” He had learned that it was important to be specific.

The raven turned toward him, the legs of some crawler he had pulled from under a log still wriggling in his beak. He tipped back his head to gulp it down, then shot Barrick a look of reproach.

“Hasn’t Skurn looked and looked? Didn’t us offer you the best us found, not even keeping none back for ourself?”

The “best” had been a large, soft grub the size of Barrick’s thumb, pale and waxy as a candle and leaking greenish fluid where Skurn’s beak had crimped it too fiercely. He had thanked the raven for his generosity and given it back.

“Never mind. These roots are fine.” He laid three more pieces of wood that had been drying on the flames, then began to sharpen the head of his broken spear with a round stone. He could not get over the strange pleasure of having two arms that did not hurt.

“Tell me another tale,” Barrick said after a while. “What happened to Crooked after he threw the gods into his grandmother’s lands?”

“Great-grandmother’s,” the raven said, looking around as though something else toothsome might be crawling by. “It were his great-grandmother, Emptiness. She taught Crooked all her tricks of coming and going.”

Find Crooked’s Hall,
the Sleepers had told him. Crooked’s Hall, Crooked’s roads, Crooked’s doorway—did they actually expect Barrick to travel as the gods traveled? “So what happened? Did he become the king of the gods?” But Crooked, who until now had always been Kupilas as far as Barrick knew, was just a minor god, wasn’t he? The
Book of the Trigon
talked of Kupilas only as the clever patron of blacksmiths and engineers.
And physicians,
he remembered.
Chaven had a statue of him in his house.
“What happened after he killed Kernios?”

“Is us a Night Man, full of secrets?” the bird said with a touch of indignation. “Do us know all the Firstborn know? Anyroad, Crooked didn’t kill nobody—he threw the Earthlord and them others into the place where they sleeps forever.”

“But what happened to Kupilas? To Crooked? What happened to him?”

Skurn shrugged, a motion where he lifted his feathers in a ruff around his neck and wiggled his head. “Don’t know. Him were hurt bad by Earthlord’s spear. Dying, some say. Don’t know any more of the story, us. Mam never told it.”

And Barrick had to be content with that.

 

He was half asleep and drifting when he felt something poking at his hand, something sharp and hard. A beak.

“Hist!” The raven crouched beside him, spotted feathers all a-prickle so that he looked more hedgehog than bird. “I hear somewhat . . .”

Barrick sat up straight but stayed silent, listening. He gradually became aware that something sharp was poking into the back of his neck, and this time it wasn’t Skurn. He swatted at it but could not dislodge the painful thing from his skin. An instant later something else dropped down from the branches and caught the meat of his right arm—a thorny branch, bent like a hook, on the end of a strand of pale silk.

Before he had time to think several more strands came whipping down from the shadows above him. A few only flailed past him and then snapped away, but two more caught in his ragged clothes and pulled tight, like the thorny barbs already snagged in his neck and arm. Small, sharp pains bloomed all over him.

“They come, Master!” Skurn shrieked, flapping up into the air just as another barb shot out and swung through the spot where he had been. “Silkins!”

Now Barrick could see them, thin gray-white shapes scuttling through the upper branches above his head, casting down their weighted, thorn-hooked barbs to entangle him. He tried to reach into his belt for his broken spear but one of the creatures yanked on a silk strand hooked in his arm to keep him from reaching the weapon. Barrick grabbed the silk and pulled back hard until it slackened and he could grab the spearhead. He leaned out with his left hand and swept it up to cut through the strand imprisoning his arm, saying a silent prayer of thanks he had sharpened the edge. It took longer to work loose the thorny branch in his neck, and when he brought his hand away his fingers were smeared with blood.

Two of the maggoty things came tumbling out of the trees, silent as ghosts in the twilight, swinging their silks like horse-trappers as the dark wet spots of their eyes gleamed with reflected twilight. Barrick ducked under a flailing silk rope and felt the barbed hooks catch and tear at his scalp. He tore them loose from his head just as the creature leaped forward. Its strange, boneless limbs folded around him, and although it weighed little, the force was still enough to knock him off his feet. He fell and rolled, the silkin clinging to him until they both tumbled to a stop, Barrick’s right arm pinned beneath his own body. A strand whipped around his neck and pulled tight. For a moment, with only his useless left arm free, he knew he would die.

But his left arm wasn’t useless any longer. He reached up and caught the strange, slippery-but-sticky thing on his back and dug in his fingers. The strand around his neck tightened for a moment, but then he had tugged the thing loose and dragged it down onto the muddy forest floor.

I’m strong!
He could have shouted it—he could feel it in him like a joyful flame.
Strong!

Barrick was not able to get a solid grip on his attacker but as it rose up into a crouch he lunged forward and shoved the creature backward into the campfire even as another pale, half-human figure leaped down onto his back.

A horrible, whistling shriek went up from the one that had stumbled into the fire. The burning silkin staggered out of the firepit, pale yellow flames running up its legs and torso, the blackness beneath its mummifying threads beginning to ooze and bubble as the fire took it. Within a few heartbeats it was blazing like a torch, filling the twilight with shrilling screams so high in pitch that Barrick could hardly hear them.

The way to survival suddenly seemed clear. He leaped toward the fire, dragging the second silkin with him, and grabbed a burning piece of wood. With the broken spear in one hand and the flaming brand in the other he turned on the silkin clinging to his ankles and shoved the fire into the creature’s featureless face until it sizzled and bubbled. Piping in agony, it pulled free of him and leaped away, blindly tearing at its own head before striking a tree trunk. It lay twitching for a moment, then crawled away into the undergrowth, rolling and lopsided as a drunkard.

Barrick grabbed the spearhead tight and beat his hand upon his breast. “Come on, then!” he shouted at the ghostly shapes still swarming in the trees above. “Come and get me!”

Two more jumped down, then a third. Skurn came out of nowhere and snatched with his talons at the one nearest Barrick, which gave him a moment to swipe the torch against it. He narrowly missed singeing the bird, who flapped up again, cawing in alarm. The silkin’s wrappings did not catch, but Barrick stabbed at it again with his blade and spilled its black ooze, then turned and shoved the flame up against the next one even as it lurched forward. For long moments he could not tell how many of the silkins surrounded him, or how he was faring, but he could smell the ghastly, salty stink of the things as they burned. He began to laugh as he slashed with spearhead and torch, striking at everything that moved. From the corner of his eye he saw Skurn beating his way up into the air, looking for safety. Barrick only laughed louder.

 

An hour might have passed, or only moments—Barrick couldn’t tell. The last moving silkin was at his feet, trying to hold in its slow-dripping innards where Barrick had slashed its belly wide open. In a fever of gleeful rage Barrick dropped his spear and grabbed at the creature’s head, his fingers compressing the silk-wrapped ball as if it were a rotten melon. He pulled it upright, then shoved the torch into its gaping, sticky eye.

“Die, you filthy thing!” He held it down with his foot until it was burning too hot to stand over it. Three more of the creatures lay motionless and oozing at his feet, and nothing else moved in the trees.