The Lair of Bones (28 page)

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 handto-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?”

“Credibility,” Borenson said. “You destroy his credibility.

“And how do you fight such a war?” Myrrima asked.

“Rules simple: you cannot lie to destroy man's credibility. That civilized way. You must… unmask deceit before witnesses. Once contest begin, it must end within one year.”

“And you call this war?” Myrrima asked.

Borenson answered, “Don't be fooled. They take gizareth ki very seriously. A man is defined by his word, by his honesty. There are men here, truthsayers, who train for decades to learn how to tell when someone is lying or telling the truth. When you declare war on someone, you can hire one or more truthsayers to denounce the person. They'll dig up every noble thing that the person has ever done, and then shout about it in the public square. Everyone will gather around to listen, because they know that the truthsayers are just warming up. For once they've discussed your virtues, they'll denounce your vices in such excruciating detail that… well, many
a prince has thrown himself down a well. And once they're done with you, they'll repeat it again, and again, and again.”

“For one year,” the guard said. “At end of year, must stop. And victim may retaliate; he hire own truthsayers. Once person suffer at truthsayer, he cannot be made to suffer again for ten years.”

“And what do you accomplish by destroying a man's honor?” Myrrima asked.

“If lucky,” the guard said, “victim will change, grow. There prince in legend, Assenian Shey, who was called to war by brother. Truthsayers, they denounce his vices—” The guard counted them off on hisfingers.” He waste talent, cruel to animals, glutton, let father die after robbers waylay him. The list, it grow endless. Everyone agree that young prince shameless. Still, he manage hold place of power. When his mother died, he become king.

“Ten years pass. The king's brother hire truthsayers once again. After careful examination, truthsayers spoke only of king's virtues. This bring great shame to jealous brother.

“So, you see,” the guard concluded, “here we civilized. Here, not all battles end with death. We can make war on man's estate, or on his sanity. This is way of civilized people.”

“Hmmmph,” Borenson grunted. “You talk about your warfare as if it were more virtuous, but not all of your stories end so well. I'm familiar with the eighty-two forms of war. In the milder forms, you seek to destroy only a man's wealth, or vanity, or reputation, but in the most heinous form, the makouthatek ki, you're not satisfied with killing just one person, you seek to erase both his future and his past. You plunder his holdings, humiliate him before his people, butcher his wife and children so that he does not leave seed in the earth, put him to death, and destroy all those who dare even mention his name. I agree with you that war is a shameful thing, but you Inkarrans haven't found a way to avoid the horrors of war, you've just perfected them.”

“Be careful such talk,” the guard warned Borenson in a voice edged with anger. “Some say forms of war should expand, that in addition to make war on city or family, we should entomb entire nations.”

Borenson laughed dangerously. “I'd like to meet those folks.”

“Then you in luck,” the guard said. “You will.”

“What do you mean?” Myrrima asked with worry in her voice. “Is the Storm King one of those people?”

“He no love Rofehavan, but he not one of those people. Still, you will visit during… kamen to, festival for pay tribute. Lords from all Inkarra must appearance. You surely meet some who wish destroy your kind.”

Borenson fell asleep to the sound of water lapping against the hull of the boat, and near dawn he woke as the Inkarrans on the boat began to stir. Sometime in the night, the cloud cover had broken above them, and stars shone now. Heaven was giving them another fiery display. Dozens of shooting stars streaked through the sky in a perpetual blaze.

Borenson could smell a sea breeze, a smell that always reminded him of home, and he could hear the roaring of a great waterfall ahead. To the north, the heavens shone down on a great city. Patches of farm were laid out in neat squares, and he could see the ghostly Inkarrans working their fields by night.

They had reached the outskirts of the Storm King's capital. The boat soon pulled into some busy docks, where fisherman unloaded their catches of the night. The guards ushered Borenson and Myrrima off the boat, and into the dusty streets.

Here in the city, draktferions lit the hilltops. The guards steered him toward the tallest hill, where hundreds of the fierce lizards blazed. Borenson knew that he had reached Iselferion, the Palace of Fire. The road leading up was paved with cobblestones, unlike all other roads that he'd seen in Inkarra, and the sprawling trees and grounds were well maintained.

As he reached the bottom of the hill, he could see an enormous stele, with a three-pointed crown atop it, that announced the Storm King's residence.

The guard led them up a gentle slope, and then down a tunnel that stopped at an iron gate.

Borenson had never been inside an Inkarran burrow. The mouth of the tunnel was wide enough so that several people could walk abreast, but not so wide that one could drive carts into it. An iron gate guarded the mouth of the burrow. Spikes hammered into the gate were meant to keep out even a charging elephant. The gate was open, and they went down a long corridor. Kill holes and archery slots could be seen in the wails. No sconces lit the way. Borenson's tiny lantern gave the only light. The only sound was a
distant boom as waves crashed against the rocks at the base of the cliff. The surrounding blackness became complete as the guards led Borenson and Myrrima into the palace of the Storm King.

They passed through several darkened antechambers, each descending several hundred feet, when at last a door opened into a vast room. It was enormous, oval in shape, with high ceilings. Its plastered walls had been painted white, and equidistant around this chamber hung a dozen Inkarran lanterns, similar to the one that Borenson carried. Within the chamber, Inkarrans milled about. Most of them seemed drunk, as if returning from a night of revelry, and many laughed. He saw men in their strange tunics, often being held by women in long dresses. They spoke among themselves in whispers, and shot curious glances at Borenson and Myrrima.

In the far corners, merchants had thrown carpets on the floor of the room, and sat hawking bolts of cloth, food, armor, just about anything one might find during a fair.

“As see,” the guard whispered, “lords here from many land.”

Borenson could hardly see the Inkarrans at all. The lamplight was too dim to suit his human eyes. Nor was he certain that he could tell the dress of a lord from that of a pauper.