Their journey had begun before dawn. In that time, they traveled hundreds of miles.
The journey up the slopes was tedious. Myrrima never even got to see one of the much-vaunted hollow wolves up close. In the distance she saw a pack of them sweeping over the snow—white on white—wafting ghostlike over the slopes of a nearby mountain. Even from a distance they looked huge.
The hollow wolves saw her party and redoubled their speed, hoping to catch up, but they were no match for force horses. Borenson let the mounts race for an hour.
When next they stopped, they were near the mountain peaks. The snow was now six inches deep and crusted from last night’s freeze. Myrrima followed its course up the mountains with her eyes. The snow-covered trail looked broad and easy as it wound through the hills. It had been cut wide enough to accommodate wagons, and was none too steep.
Somehow, in Myrrima’s imagination, the Alcair Mountains had always seemed impassable. Perhaps for one without endowments the journey would have been more challenging. But she suspected that there wasn’t so much a physical challenge in crossing the mountains as there was a political one.
At the mountaintops, stone wheels stood against the sky. The wheels looked to be more than thirty or forty feet tall. The line that they formed zigzagged crazily, marching up one ridge, then diving into a ravine, like rocky pearls to decorate the hills. On each stone wheel a rune had been carved. Myrrima eyed them, not quite able to make out the design.
“Don’t look at the runewall!” Borenson warned. “Not unless you have to. Keep your eyes on the road!”
Myrrima averted her gaze, but now felt curious. What was the runewall? The runes looked as if they had been carved on individual tablets of stone and then rolled into place. The making of this massive bulwark had been a monumental task. The border between Rofehavan and Inkarra spanned a thousand miles. Building a barrier like this would have taken tens of thousands of masons a period of decades.
The fact that gazing upon it was forbidden made it that much more enticing. Myrrima wanted to feel the awe of it.
“I had no idea it would be so vast,” Myrrima said. She studied the ground. The snow here was dirty, streaked with ash. She looked for the source of the ash, but could see no sign of a fire. There were no trees so high, only low shrubs here and there that thrust their dead branches up between the rocks.
She dutifully kept her eyes on the road as the horses plodded step after weary step, and felt a most peculiar sensation. The stone bucklers loomed enormous in her mind. It was as if the very shadow of them weighed upon her consciousness. As she drew nearer, she could feel them, demanding her regard.
She had to will herself not to look. She had to force herself to focus on a rough stone road ahead, or the twisted roots of a dead bush, or plain rock casting an uneven shadow in the snow. Even when she did, her eyes sought to flit away, to land like sparrows upon those monoliths that formed the runewall.
The desire to look and be done with it burned her mind, left an acid taste in her mouth. She could close her eyes and feel the stone tablets looming above her. She could track them thus.
An awful certainty grew in her: to keep her eyes closed was better than to look.
Suddenly at her back she heard a loud thump, and the mount that she trailed pulled at its reins. Carefully keeping her eyes averted, she turned to glance back at the horse. Its eyes had gone wide, as if in shock, and it stared in frozen horror toward the monoliths.
Myrrima worried that the animal had picked a lamentable time to look up, but knew in her heart that it was no accident. Even this dull beast felt the forbidding presence of the wall.
If a horse can look upon it, I can too, Myrrima thought. And instantly her eyes darted toward the road ahead. She was just beneath the skyline now, not more than fifty yards away.
A vast archway spanned the road. Overhead, the skies were blue, but clouds on the far horizon lay opalescent beneath that dark arch, making it look for all the world like a blind eye.
An inscription above the arch was written in both Rofehavanish and Inkarran: Beyond This Point, Your Tribe is Barren.
She struggled now to avoid looking at the monolithic stones raised up like shields on either side of the arch. But she had let her gaze stray too far, and now it was taken hostage.
She saw vast round stones, like wheels or shields, on either side of the road. Her eyes went to the northernmost stone. Inscribed upon it was a trail, a groove in the rock, leading downward and inward, like a map. She recognized that it was a rune, a mesmerizing rune, and powerful. She tried to look away, but could not. Her eyes were forced to follow that groove along its tortured path, winding down, down. And as it wound, she felt the weight of ages slowly passing by, wheeling beneath her. Civilizations could rise within each turning of the wheel, and worlds could rot. Great cities formed, and in her mind’s eye, Myrrima saw them crumble. Their foundations sank and moldered among forgotten forests. Monuments to proud kings wore away. Their squalid children fought and sought shelter among the ruins. In time they began the process of building again. Still the wheel turned, and Myrrima was swept away among the dreams of proud lovers, the boasts of warriors, the wild utterances of poets and prophets, and still the wheel turned toward its devastating conclusion.
Her heart surged in panic, and her mouth went dry.
Looking at this will kill me, Myrrima thought feebly. She fought it, tried to close her eyes and twist away. A groan escaped her, but she stared on, her eyes following that twisted groove along its fearsome course—as towers rose and dreamers dreamed and proud lords made war under a hazy sun—until it all stopped.
Immediately an emotion surged through her, struck her with awful force.
You are nothing, a voice seemed to roar through her mind. All your deeds and dreams are futile. You strive for beauty and permanence, yet you are less than a worm on the road, waiting to be crushed beneath the wheels of time.
The conviction of this, the power of it, overwhelmed her. The visions elicited by the rune proved the argument. How dare one like her seek to enter Inkarra? She was loathsome. Better to turn the horse back now and run it madly over some cliff than to proceed.
Myrrima never thought about what she was doing. She merely groaned and reined in her mount, tried to turn it, and spurred its flanks with her heel. She sought escape.
Nothing that had ever happened to her was as cruel as the thought of facing that rune. Until now she had lived in relative peace, not knowing of its existence.
But now that she had seen it, she could never be free. Better to be nothing. Blind with panic, she did not see the cliffs below.
All the heavens had gone black, and she fled through a dark tunnel toward oblivion.
“No!” Borenson shouted. “No!”
Her husband came off his horse and grabbed her own mount by the reins. He was fighting the beast, trying to subdue it and the Inkarran’s horse at the same time. Myrrima could not see him, but felt his hands grab her wrists, pull the reins. She gouged her mount’s flanks. She was riding his big strong warhorse, and as the beast pawed the air, she felt certain that it would deliver a crushing blow to Borenson’s skull, as it had been trained to do. But Borenson had been its handler for years, and perhaps that alone saved his life.
He wrestled the horse down, shouting at Myrrima, “Don’t look! Don’t look at it!”
Myrrima was blind with panic, but suddenly she began to see as if through a haze.
Borenson peered up at her. His own eyes went to the runewall, and he gazed at the horror there. Fierce tears welled up, and he stared in defiance. “It’s a lie!” he raged at her. “I love you! I love you, Myrrima. Damn those bastards.”
He turned and led the horses onward. Each step seemed to fall painfully, as if his legs were slogging through molten iron.