Nothing could have prepared him for the strangeness of Inkarra, the misted forest, the exotic perfumes of the peach-colored mountain orchids that grew across the road. Sir Borenson had been raised on Orwynne, an island in the Carroll Sea not more than two hundred miles north of here. Yet once he crossed the mountains, he felt as if he had entered a world of which he had never dreamed.
Night closed in on them soon, and the Inkarran captors traveled noiselessly in near total darkness. They did not speak, did not give their names. The Inkarrans tried to guide Borenson and Myrrima as best they could, moving them this way and that to avoid roots that stretched across the rutted road, but the two daylighters kept tripping. The path couldn’t have been any less negotiable if Borenson was blindfolded. Borenson’s feet were getting bruised and bloody from the abuse.
After two hours of this, the party came to a halt. Borenson could hear laughter, the nasal voices of Inkarrans sounding odd to his ear.
“We wait,” one of the guards said in a thick accent
“What for?” Myrrima asked.
“Lamps. We at village. We bring you lamps.” One Inkarran headed off through the woods.
Borenson peered all about. There were no lights to show him where the village might be. Indeed, he could make out nothing at all, beyond a deeper darkness that showed him the bole of a nearby tree.
“I thought you used flame lizards to guard your houses,” Myrrima said.
“Draktferion very expensive,” the guard explained. “Eat much meat. This poor village. No draktferion here.”
Borenson soon heard rustling in the trees, the sound of approaching feet, and he heard the shy laughter of children. Apparently, he had drawn a crowd.
At last he saw light, a pair of swinging lamps. The lanterns, which hung from chains, were like rounded cups made of glass. In each cup burned Inkarran candles, strange candles as yellow as agates, as hard as stone, and without wicks. Borenson knew of them only from legend. Once lit, each candle would burn without smoke for a week or more. Indeed, he could see no flame from the peculiar candles. Instead, they merely glowed like bluish white embers.
As the guard passed through a crowd of children, the lanterns lit them briefly. The youngest children ran naked, while the older ones wore shifts of white linen. Their pale faces were as white as their clothes. To Borenson, they all looked like ghosts, like a convocation of the dead.
The guard tied a lamp around Borenson’s wrist, and one around Myrrima’s. In its soft glow, he could hardly make out the ground at his feet.
Still, it was enough.
All through the night they walked, until they came down out of the mountains altogether, into flat lands where no trees shadowed their path. They passed village after village, but there was little to see.
The villagers lived belowground, in hollows under the hills. In some richer areas, draktferions did indeed stand guard at the mouth of each village. There, the flame lizards would spread wide their hoods and hiss at the first sign of a stranger, fluorescing. By the flickering bloody light that they threw, Borenson could see the peculiar stelae that marked the entrance to the Inkarran “villages.” The stelae were carved of stone and stood some twenty feet tall. At the top was a circle, like a head, with two branches extending from the base, like arms. On the stelae, carved in stone, were the surnames of the families who lived in the town below.
As they approached a broad river, Borenson was aware that they passed farms. He could smell the rice paddies, and at last they reached a village, where the guards hurried them through a market where merchants hawked white peaches, fresh red grapes, a dozen kinds of melons, and dragon-eye fruits. Freshly killed crocodiles, snakes, and fish hung beside the road, where vendors would cook them while you waited.
The guards bought some winged lizards glazed with some sweet sauce, along with melon, and Borenson and Myrrima fed hungrily while one of the guards disappeared in a crowd.
“Come,” the guard said when he returned. “Boat take us downriver!”
In minutes, the guards had Borenson and Myrrima hustled into an Inkarran longboat. The boat was some sixty feet long and fairly narrow, made of some strange white wood that buoyed high on the water. At the bow of the boat was carved the head of a bird with a long beak, like a graceful crane.
The boat was filled with Inkarran peasants, ghostly white faces. Some of them carried bamboo cages that housed chickens or piglets.
Borenson sat near the front of the boat, looking off into the water. The air was still. He could hear night noises—the peep of tree frogs, the croak of a crocodile, the calls of some strange bird. The laughter and voices of the Inkarrans in town rose like music.
The sky overhead was still hazy, but the moon wafted above the mist, and now he could see the river dimly. Its shores spread broader than any river in Mystarria, mightier. He could not see the other side.
“How far must we go to see the Storm King?” Myrrima asked one of the guards.
“This not for you to know,” he answered. “Keep silence.”
Soon the boat was full of passengers. The guard handed Borenson and Myrrima each an oar, and they rowed together out into the deep. A hundred yards from shore, the current grew swift, and the boat glided under the moonlight. The passengers quit rowing, and left the work to the steersman.
One of their guards, a nameless man with high cheekbones and eyes that reflected red by the light of the lanterns, finally broke the silence.
“We reach Storm King’s fortress by dawn,” he said in a thick accent. “You sleep. You go sleep.”
“Will the king see us?” Borenson asked.
“Maybe,” the guard answered. “Chances good to see king. Not good to get favorable response.”
“Why not?” Myrrima asked.
“You savages. All northern men savage.”
Borenson snorted in laughter, and the guard bristled. He uttered some curse in Inkarran. “No laugh! You no laugh at me! I tell you this for own benefit. Not laugh at Inkarran. Never laugh, unless he laughs first. That giving permission to laugh.”
“Forgive me,” Borenson said. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at the idea—”
“The idea not funny,” the guard retorted. He waited a moment, as if doling out silence as punishment, and then continued, “We Inkarran most civilize people on Earth. You people barbarians. You kings rule by force of arms. When man not follow him, you king resort to brutal. He send army to butcher women and children. This is barbarian way.”
Borenson did not bother to correct the man. The Inkarrans had little contact with his people, and they would believe what they wanted to believe. It was true that women and children sometimes died in war, but that wasn’t the goal of war, only a perennial byproduct.
“In Inkarra, we not make war against innocents,” the guard said. “We choose victims and methods, very careful.”
“You mean that your lords fight one another?” Myrrima asked. “In hand-to-hand combat?”
“Among you people,” the guard answered, “there is but one kind battle. But we see many way settle dispute. You seek take man’s life when he anger you.” Borenson didn’t dare interrupt him, didn’t dare mention that the kings of the North used diplomacy far more often than battle. An Inkarran would not believe the truth. “But Inkarran, we have dozen form war. Each has own rules, own strategies.”
“Like what?” Myrrima asked.
“Gizareth ki,” Borenson suggested.
“Yes,” the guard said, “gizareth mean ‘a man’s honor, ‘ki mean ‘unmake,’ or ‘undo.’ So, in gizareth ki, goal to destroy...how say? ‘word’ of man?”