“I am a prince of the house of Eddon.” His voice was quiet and shaky at first but grew louder. He held his spear up so the things could see it. “The house of Eddon!” Then he set it down by the roots of the tree, digging the spearhead into the bark, and stepped down hard, breaking off most of the haft behind the pitted metal. He picked the spearhead up and held it in his good hand like a dagger. “And if you wretched ghosts think a pack of things like you can bring down the house of Eddon,” he cried, his voice rising to a shout, “then come to me!”
And come they did, silks waving. If they had moved on him together, attacking from above as well as the front, he would certainly have died: their movements were swift and silent and the mist made it hard to distinguish them. But they did not seem to have the minds of men and came at him instead like hungry beggars, first one and then another grabbing at him and trying to trap him in clinging silk. Barrick managed to use those sticky tendrils to pull one of the attackers toward him, and then ripped out the silkin’s middle with what remained of his spear. The hideous thing tumbled to the ground near the corpse of the first one he had killed, bubbling gray from its belly and moaning like a distant wind.
The rest of them rushed toward him then. Barrick did his best to remember the lessons Shaso had taught him so long ago—back when the world had still made sense—but the old Tuani master had never taught them much about knife fighting. Barrick could only do the best he could, struggling to retain his weapon at all costs. He fought as in a dream, with strands of sticky white clinging to his arms and legs and face and obscuring his vision. He grappled with the silkins, holding them with their own threaded, leaf-tangled coverings as he tore at them with his blade. Each time he threw one down another came forward to take its place; after a while he could see nothing except what was just before him, as if all the rest of the world had gone dark. He slashed and slashed and slashed until every bit of his strength was gone, then he fell down at last into utter senselessness, not certain whether he was alive or dead and not caring.
“Nry nnrd nroo noof?” the voice kept asking him—a question for which he did not have an immediate answer.
Barrick opened his eyes to find himself face to face with a nightmare—a thing like a rotting apple-doll. He shrieked, but the sound barely hissed out of his parched throat. The raven flew up and away with much flapping of wings, then settled down a short distance away, dropping the ghastly thing that had dangled from his beak onto the soft ground.
“Why did you move?” Skurn asked Barrick again. “Told you to stay waiting, us did. Said us were coming back.”
Barrick rolled over and sat up, staring around in sudden panic, but there was no sign of his attackers anywhere. “Where are they, those silky things? Where did they go?”
The raven shook his head as though dealing with a sadly stupid fledgling. “Exactly, just as us said. This be silkin land, and no place for you to go wandering.”
“I fought them, you idiot bird!” Barrick staggered to his feet. He ached in every muscle but his crippled arm felt a hundred times worse than that. “I must have killed them all.” But even the silkin corpses were gone. Did things just evaporate after they were dead, like dew?
Barrick saw something and bent to pick it up on the end of his broken spear. “Aha!” He jabbed it triumphantly in the direction of the raven, even his good arm trembling with weariness. “What’s that then?”
The raven eyed the glob of black goo tangled in broken strands of dirty white. “The dung of somewhat that were sick.” Skurn examined the mess with interest. “That be our guess.”
“It’s from one of those silk-things! I stabbed it—I ripped them open and they bled out this foul stuff.”
“Ah. Then we should get on,” Skurn said, nodding. “Eat this quick-like. Silkins’ll come back with more of their kind soon.”
“Ha! Do you see! I did kill some!” Barrick paused in sudden confusion. “Hold,” he said. “Eat what?”
Skurn nudged at the thing he had dropped on the ground. “Follower, it is. Young one, but cursed heavy to carry.”
The dead Follower was about the size of a squirrel, its round little head dominated by a jagged, wide mouth so that it looked like a melon broken under someone’s heel. The knobs of bone protruding through its greasy fur, hardened into gray lumps on the adult specimens Barrick had seen the day they found Gyir, were still pink and soft on this young one. It did not add to the thing’s beauty. “You want me to…” Barrick stared. “You want me to eat that… ?”
“You’ll get no nicer treat today,” the raven said crossly. “Trying to do you a favor, us was.”
It was all Barrick could do not to be immediately and violently ill.
After he had gathered his strength, he got back onto his feet. In one thing, anyway, the raven was undoubtedly right—it would not be wise to remain too long in this place where he had killed silkins.
“If you’re going to eat that horrid thing, eat it,” Barrick said. “Don’t make me look at it.”
“Bring it along, us will, in case you change your mind…”
“I’m not going to eat it!” Barrick raised his hand to smack at the black bird but did not have the strength. “Just hurry up and finish it so we can go.”
“Too big,” said the raven contentedly. “Us has to eat it slow, savory-like. But it’s too big for us to carry far, either. Can you… ?”
Barrick took a deep, slow breath. Much as it shamed him, he needed this bird. He couldn’t forget the loneliness that had surrounded him only an hour before when he thought the raven was gone. “Very well! I’ll carry it, if you can find some leaves or something to wrap it in.” He shuddered. “But if it starts to stink…”
“Then you mought get hungry, us knows. Never fear, us’n’ll find a place to stop before then.”
When they had covered enough ground that Barrick felt a little safer they settled into a hollow where he would be sheltered from the worst of the wind and mist by a large rock jutting from the side of the dell. Barrick would have given almost anything for a fire, but he had lost his flint and steel in Greatdeeps and he did not know how to make flame any other way.
Kendrick would have been able to do it, he thought bitterly. Father would, too.
“At least we seem to be leaving the silkins’ territory,” he said out loud. “We walked for hours without seeing any.”
“Silky Wood goes a long way,” the raven said at last. “Us doesn’t think we’re even halfway to the middle.”
“Blood of the gods, you’re joking!” Barrick felt despair slide over him like a thundercloud blotting the sun. “Do we have to walk straight through it? Can’t we go around it? Is this the only way to go to…” he wrestled with the throaty, alien words, “to Qul-na-Qar?”
“We could go round the wood, us guesses,” Skurn informed him, “but it would take a long time. We could go sunward of it and then pass through Blind Beggar lands instead. Or withershins, and then we’d be traveling Wormsward. Either way, though, us’ll still find trouble on the far side.
“Trouble?”
“Aye. Sunward, in the Beggar lands, us’ll have to look out sharp for Old Burning Eye and the Orchard of Metal Bats.”
Barrick gulped. He didn’t want to know anymore. “Then let’s go the other way around.”
Skurn nodded gravely. “ ’Cepting that if we go withershins, us’re in a swampy place us heard is called Melt-Your-Bones, and even if we miss the woodsworms we’ll have to look smart so we don’t get caught by the Suck-down Toothies.”