What place is this? He thought he wondered silently, but someone heard him.

It is the City of the Sleepers. The voice of the girl-child who had given him back his name was faint, as if she stood on the far side of the river he could no longer see. There is only one way through, Ferras Vansen, and that is always forward. Remember…!

And that was the last he heard of her. After that he could scarcely even recall how she looked, how she sounded. He stepped forward and his footsteps made no sound, though he could hear the noise of water dripping and a quiet wind rustling and whispering along the rooftops.

Most of the windows were dark, but a few were lit. When he looked inside he saw people. They were all asleep, even those who stood or moved about, their eyes closed, their movements slow and aimless. Some merely sat on stools or chairs or leaned against the walls of their drab, dusty chambers, motionless as stones or swaying like blind beggars. Some tried to stir pots under which no flame burned. Others tended children who lay like cloth dolls, limbs a-flop as their sleeping parents dressed or undressed them, small heads lolling, mouths gaping while their parents fed them with empty spoons.

After a while he stopped looking into the houses.

As he came to the center of town the streets began to fill with people, although these too moved like weary swimmers, staring into the bruised gray sky with unseeing eyes. Blind sleepers drove carts piled with shrouded bundles, and even the horses that drew the wagons slept, long jaws grinding as they chewed at nothing. The crowds slowly drifted to and fro like fish at the bottom of a winter lake, standing rapt before spectacles they could not see, buying things they could not taste or use. Slumbering musicians played dust-caked instruments, making unheard melodies, while sleeping clowns danced slow as snowmelt and did halting somersaults in the dirt, coming up smeared and draggled.

As he stared around him in fearful wonder, a young woman wandered toward him out of the crowd. She was pretty, or should have been. Her face was bloodlessly pale, with only the barest sliver of her eyes visible under her long lashes, but her mouth sagged like an idiot’s, though she tried to curl her lips in a fetching smile. She lifted her hand to him, offering him a withered flower, a reddish streak running the length of the white petals like a vein of blood. Asphodel, he remembered, the god’s flower, although he did not know what god he meant.

Am I fair? she asked. Her lips did not seem to move enough for him to hear her voice so clearly.

Yes, he said, trying to be kind. He could see that she had been fair once, and might be again, in some other place, under some bolder light.

You are sweet. Here, have my flower. She squeezed her lips together as if to keep them from trembling. It is very long since I have spoken to someone like you. It is lonely here.