They were a week ripping north into the warming seas. For another few days they nosed along the coastline south of Teh, debating where to dock. On Leeka’s council, Dariel did not sail around the cape. Teh itself was populated by hordes of sun-loving Numreks. And beyond it the Inner Sea bustled with far too many ships. So the Ballan came to dock at a trading town called Falik, a Balbara port that served as a conduit from eastern Talay into the interior.
From the moment he stepped onto the pier and began negotiating docking fees, there was no doubt he was at the edge of a great, populous, and distinctly different culture. Dariel felt the palpable foreignness of the place all around him. He was no stranger to cultures other than his Acacian ancestry. His crew was a mixed-raced bunch, with origins and customs they held to with a sort of immigrant pride. But he had mostly faced diversity on a small scale, among a handful of people bound by common inclinations. In Falik a wall of dark faces punched him in the eye no matter where he looked. Scents of foods strange to him followed his nose, competing one against the other to distract him, confuse him. He could not quite be sure if the speech that bombarded his ears was of a single tongue or many languages thrown together. Either way, he had never heard such an unintelligible confusion of human speech.
As wide-eyed and staring as he was, the Balbara showed little interest in him. They went about their business as if he were but a vapor of a man, meriting no more attention than their brief exchange required. He felt sadly pale in comparison, a glass of weak tea floating in a sea of black coffee. It was not even that the population was entirely Balbara or even homogeneously Talayan. There were many other races among the throng. Perhaps four out of ten persons showed their distant origins in some way. But the Balbara were so forceful in their presence-with the solid impact of their skin color and the breadth of their features and the muscular bulk of their bodies-that they always seemed more populous than their actual numbers.
Dariel left most of the crew with the Ballan. With a small company, including Leeka and Wren and Clytus, he set out for the village his brother was supposed to have called home all these years. On the first day of his arrival at Palishdock, Leeka had named the village of Umae as Aliver’s hiding place. Thaddeus, the old soldier claimed, had known all along where Aliver was. He had ordered Leeka to bring Dariel to him when the young man was ready. Now, it seemed, Dariel was ready, though he did not entirely feel like it.
Leaving Falik, they fell into the flow of caravans heading inland, dusty travelers who likewise covered the miles on foot, some tugging camels and horses and mules laden with all manner of goods. For the sake of anonymity, it felt good to move within the traffic of people, just one of many beating the hard-packed path across a coppered landscape of shrub and acacia. Dariel expected the numbers to dissipate once away from the port, individuals turning toward their differing destinations. Three, four days in, there was no sign of this happening. He had no way of gauging what the normal flow of pilgrims and merchants might have been in the region, but he soon realized that the migration in which he flowed was not a normal thing. Their numbers were increasing. On waking each morning he found more tents had sprouted around him during the night. People, he came to understand, were speaking of revolt, of change, of war. They were heading toward the same conflagration Dariel was.
Leeka walked beside him at greater ease than ever before. Now that they were in motion, the man seemed to relax. His long work of convincing Dariel to confront his fate was behind him. This, it appeared, was something of a pleasure jaunt. His stern features mellowed. For the first time Dariel wondered if the man had been a father. Had he been married? He could be a grandfather now, and he might, from the look of him, have been a pleasant one.
He once said, “You look rather pleased with yourself.”
“I am pleased with the world,” was Leeka’s response.
Late on the fifth day Dariel asked him if they were approaching a great city or trading outpost. He thought there would be only small villages all the way to Umae, which was a small village itself. Leeka answered that this route connected the dots from village to village. But no, he said, there was no great city on the horizon.
Dariel studied the distance as if he doubted this, as if through looking hard enough he would see buildings rising from between the spaced acacia crowns. “Maybe we should cut away from the main route and travel alone,” he said. He did not offer a reason for this. He was not sure he had one. He felt safe enough. It was just that throughout his life as a raider Dariel had always been among small bands of people. They had lived scattered throughout the island chains. It was beginning to unnerve him to have so much humanity around him, especially when they were supposed to be navigating the wilds of the Talayan bush country.
“We cannot cut away from them and yet still reach our destination,” Leeka said, humor in his eyes. “Even if we did, we’d find others walking beside us.”
That evening their small group built a fire. Wren went off to buy meat and returned with an entourage of several adolescent Balbara boys. They were obviously enamored of her, clamoring over each other to be useful. Dariel offered no greeting to them, but they settled in and the others seemed happy enough to jest with them. The boys spoke Acacian proficiently, except when reverting to their native tongue to share peals of laughter at the foreigners’ expense. Before long a flutist joined them, offering music in exchange for food. By dusk they hosted a festive gathering, from which people came and went as they wished.
Dariel sat at the edge of it, feeling strangely deflated. He could not put a finger on why. Nobody else seemed to feel the same melancholy. Clytus-mildly intoxicated at this point-led the boys in a raunchy song about an old peasant who loved one of his hens in an inappropriate way and got into all manner of trouble for it. Leeka sat in quiet conversation with a honey-pale man whose origins Dariel could not place. Even Wren seemed at home among these people, laughing with them. She looked up at him and smiled every so often, but she took no notice of his mood. And that was part of his problem. Nobody noticed him. Nobody looked at his features and read his identity on his forehead. He had wanted to remain anonymous until finding his brother, but now that it was clear he was anonymous, he began to doubt this whole venture. How could he be central to the workings of the world when nobody even knew who he was?
Still, listening to the roundabout flow of the conversation he did hear a few things that interested him. Several people claimed to have just recently come off the mist. They did not know how it happened. They had not planned it, and each of them admitted they had committed their lives to the opiate. They would have worked all day forever just so long as they could dream their nights through in mist trance. But something had changed. Each of them had a different story, but all amounted to the same thing. The mist, instead of providing them joy, became a nightmare. Instead of losing themselves in their most cherished fantasies, they were thrown into the most vivid versions of their greatest fears. This happened night after night, getting worse each time. Within a week the nightmares were so bad that every one of them stopped the drug and chose instead to suffer through the near-death experience of withdrawal. It was an ordeal they would never forget, but they did not die because of it. And now, clear headed and free from the hunger, they had found joys in living they had forgotten about entirely. It was a miracle of sorts, and it seemed to be spreading across the world just like a contagion.
At some point an Acacian joined them. He offered to tell a tale of the Snow King in exchange for a few strips of goat meat. In between pauses in which he chewed or drank, the man told of how the Snow King decided that only the ancient, banished magicians could bring balance back into the world. He went in search of them, ranging all through Talay, fighting back packs of laryx, going days without food or water, stumbling through regions that would have withered most men. He told of how he eventually found them, rocklike giants that they were, and how he had to use tricks and cunning to convince them to join in the coming war.