"Saqri! Saqri, where have the voices gone?"

"If you mean the Fireflower ancestors, you cannot hear them now but you will again. Here you are no longer in your own land, where they can speak only into the ears of Crooked's children. We have crossed over into lands you have only glimpsed in the deepest and strangest of dreams. We are with the dead… and the slumbering gods."

And she flew on with Barrick running behind her, the dream of a man in the dream of a horse, chasing the queen of the fairies across the endless, empty lands.

The darkness was almost complete but Barrick was not frightened. He could see only what was in front of him, and that barely. Nothing spoke in his head but his own thoughts. Occasionally Saqri broke her long silences to give him encouragement or make some cryptic remark. At last they had gone so far into the valley that the barren hills climbed high on either side and the darkness became a sort of tunnel, with Saqri's whiteness the only thing he could see. "Where are we going?"

"We are there… I believe." Her thoughts were strangely hesitant. "The Valley of the Ancestors. I hope it is so, anyway…"

"Hope so? What do you mean? You've been here before, haven't you?"

She actually laughed. It had an edge of wildness. "How could I? These are the lands beyond-where the dead go. And I am still alive…!"

"But you… we're…" Suddenly the darkness and the deep-shadowed hills twisted, becoming something even deeper and stranger than before: Barrick felt as though, instead of running on a broad greensward, he now was galloping across an impossibly narrow bridge with nothingness yawning on either side.

The dead lands. The Valley of the Ancestors. The fear was growing so thick he could scarcely breathe. What has happened to my life?

"Quiet now." Saqri's voice was music in a haunting minor key. "We are close. We must not frighten them."