The Garden Of Stones Part 34

"You're fortunate to be alive." Indris gently closed the book he had been reading. "Though once the effects of the lotus milk wear off, you won't feel like it."

Mari tried to sit up, but she did not have enough command over her own limbs. Her torso was wrapped in linen strips painted with esoteric symbols. She lifted the sheet that covered her with trembling arms. Her legs were likewise wrapped, as was her right foot. Mari noted the skin on both her arms was similarly painted. A string of polished stones was wound about her wrist, each one glittering with faint carnelian light. "What treatment is this?"

"It's something I learned from the Y'arrow-te-yi." Indris grinned, a lopsided thing she found very attractive. The wind snagged the unruly tangles of his hair. She wanted to reach out and move it from where it fell over his eyes. "You should find your wounds will heal more quickly than expected, though you'll tire easily for a couple of weeks yet." He took her hand in his own, muscles firm under his skin. "You lingered on the rim of the Well of Souls for quite a while."

"What happened?" she asked. "I remember getting an absolute thrashing from the Iphyri, then...blurs, mostly."

"From what I understand, you and a small number of the Feya.s.sin held the Tyr-Jahavn stair while Nazarafine tried to convince the Teshri of your father's crimes." He looked at her with admiration. "You stood against more than two hundred nahdi in your father's employ, then you alone, wounded as you were, killed more than thirty Iphyri. It was Ekko and the Tau-se who came down to a.s.sist you. Perhaps I'm lucky we didn't fight the Hamesaad after all."

"It would've been a shame," Mari said wryly. "My father and brother?"

Indris leaned back in his chair, expression thoughtful as he gazed out over Amnon. "The quorum was locked on the issue of your father's guilt."

"So, what happens now?"

"Nazarafine took a chance and vetoed the Teshri. She stripped your father of his post as Asrahn-Elect, as well as the governorship of Amnon. The Teshri is up in arms but has agreed to a ruling of the Arbiter's Tribunal at the next a.s.sembly of Peers. Your father is far from having his fangs pulled."

"Where is he?"

"We don't know."

"What about me?" she asked quietly. "There's nothing for me in Erebus Prefecture now."

Indris laughed. It was a bright thing that rose into the air, easy and free. "Mari, after what you've done, I doubt there's anybody who'd want you to leave."

What about you? She wanted so much to ask the question. Would you like me to stay? Is there a future for us, now the dust has settled and we are who we're supposed to be? Yet the words would not pa.s.s her lips.

"That's a relief." Though she had always wondered what it would be like to be set apart from her House, the idea of being truly alone was not something she thought she was quite ready for.

Indris looked deeply into her eyes. "Nazarafine was impressed with you. As was Femensetri. As was Rosha. There are a number of people who owe you a great debt, Mari. Let them repay it. You deserve it."

"Good advice." She did not care about a number of people. She cared about one. The one who truly did not want anything from her. She wanted to take him in her arms, to draw him into her bower and lie with him, exhausted and happy. The intimacy of two bodies, fingers rested upon skin, hair entwined. The resonance of his voice, her ear pressed against his chest. To hear his hearts beat.

"I'm needed elsewhere, for now." He leaned forward to kiss her brow. Did his lips linger? Did his fingers become entwined in her hair? "But I'll be back."

She reached up to cup his head in her hand. Her lips moved to his. Parted, to taste him, made a memory for her to relish until the next time.

She watched him walk away, a shadow in the gloom across an ever-widening distance. She smiled. They parted how they had met, as two people in the dark. He waved, a hesitant thing that ended almost as quickly as it began, before he was gone.

Nazarafine and Ziaire came to visit her shortly after Indris left. Mari had trouble keeping her eyes open, though she did her best to be alert. She missed most of the opening of the conversation, but she managed to nod her head in what she hoped was a sage manner to their questions.

"You've not heard a word we've said, have you?" Ziaire leaned forward, green eyes vivid. "Would you prefer we came back later?"

"No," Mari lied tiredly. "My apologies. Please, what were you saying?"

"We were talking about what to do with you, my dear." Nazarafine sat back on the couch, cheeks red as apples. It might have been the effects of the lotus milk, but Mari caught a wicked gleam in the older woman's eye. "You did an incredible thing here. Not that you would know, but the troubadours are already writing ballads in your name, poets are composing sonnets, and awestruck men are penning love letters to you."

"Obviously the ones who don't know me." Mari chuckled, wincing at a stab of pain in her chest. "I did what I was trained to do."

"Had that been the case, you'd have sided with your father and events would have turned out differently." Ziaire smoothed the sheets around Mari's feet before taking a seat on the cot. The courtesan looked radiant in folds of jade-and-emerald silk, embroidered with yellow b.u.t.terflies. It was the first time Mari had seen her dressed other than in the pale robes of her order.

"We appreciate you took a great risk in helping us," Nazarafine said. "You also sacrificed everything to bring us here. We can't begin to thank you enough. We can, however, give you something back."

"Pardon?"

Nazarafine placed a polished wooden box in Mari's hand. Mari fumbled with the clasp. Inside, resting upon a bed of white silk, were two white-gold lotus flower insignia. The ones given to the Knight-Colonel of the Feya.s.sin.

"But Qamran-"

"Agrees there's no better person for the role," Ziaire said. "As did the others. You'll need to mend some bridges, but they all appreciate what you did. The honor of the Feya.s.sin has never been greater, thanks to your final stand."

Mari felt her hearts skip and her breath shorten. She touched the insignia with the tip of her finger, as if to prove they were real. When she looked up, both Nazarafine and Ziaire were grinning at her.

"You swore an oath as a Feya.s.sin, Mari," Nazarafine prompted. "It suited you well, I think. Perhaps you should see this as a more pure form of service, where more than one person's life is at stake should you fail. Are you interested?"

"Interested?" Mari could not help the width of her grin.

Nazarafine grasped Mari's hand in her own. "When you're recovered, come to Avnweh. There's a lot for you to do to restore the numbers of the Feya.s.sin and not a lot of time to do it in. Try to make it sooner rather than later?"

"I will," Mari promised.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX.

"We merge the myriad mistakes and setbacks in our lives into some kind of golem, some creature of st.i.tched-together horrors, half truths, and deceptions. We cover this chimera with the torn skin of our successes and call it Destiny. With luck, it will have the strength to kill Fate where it stands, for none shall determine my future save me!"-from The Rise of the Eclipse, by Erebus fa Corajidin, 495th Year of the Shranese Federation Day 335 of the 495th Year of the Shranese Federation Corajidin sat in the morning sun upon an antique throne on the lawns of a small palace near the quaint town of Shenhe-am'a-Djin in the mountains of Erebus Prefecture. It was mostly disused, a place where old paint clung to the worm-eaten wood like scabs. From a distance the sound of his followers' prattle was dim. The sky above was empty except for the bloated gray clouds that meandered, bellies distended with rain, across a hammered-pewter sky. The air smelled of storms.

His empty hand was curled in his lap. Dried blood had seeped into every whorl and line on his skin. It turned the cuticles into bloodied crescents, the horns of some miniature bull after it had gored its fighter. His other hand lay curled in his lap under pus-and bloodstained bandages. His chest still ached from Thufan's attack. Though the bones had healed and the skin sealed so there was little except a faint redness, the pain would not go away. Every breath was a remembered agony.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Thufan's maniacal face.

Corajidin turned his head at a rustling in the long gra.s.s behind him. The dry creaking of calipers, iron, leather, and wood sounded with each limping step. The stave upon which the Angothic Witch leaned was blackened and burned. Slivers of mismatched wood had fallen loose. Many of the strips of leather and crooked old coffin nails had either melted or been burned away. Swathed in a hooded cloak of hypnotic silver-and-black thread, a tall, slender figure lurked in Wolfram's shadow. From what light pa.s.sed the hood, Corajidin could see she was a Seethe woman. She in turn was trailed by three diminutive figures, who crouched at her feet when she came to a stop, their shapes obscured. The scent of perfumed rot, sweet as dead flowers, clogged Corajidin's nostrils.

Belamandris should have been there, as handsome and straight as Wolfram was not. Yet his beautiful son lay under a Preservation Shroud, trapped between the heartbreaking moments of life and death. Wolfram could not heal him, and Corajidin could not let him go.

"Has it has happened as you told me it would, witch?" Corajidin asked.

"I told you your people would remember your name, great rahn."

"Have my allies come to a decision?" Corajidin saw the throng of upper-caste women and men, his allies among them the leaders of business, of industry, of the Hundred Families of Shran. They walked from the villa, heads held low for fear of Corajidin's displeasure.

"You're destined to be the keeper of your people," Wolfram's beautiful voice intoned. "No matter what the arbiters say, these leaders of Shran will elect you Asrahn, as was foretold."

"Yet for this to happen I must live, Wolfram."

Corajidin heard a faint chittering noise. The wind gusted to reveal in part the features of the three...things that followed Wolfram's ally. They were three small women, eyes st.i.tched closed, twisted yellow nails clicking together like insect mandibles, where they crouched at their mistress's feet. Their mouths split in shadowy, toothless grins. Corajidin could see their gray tongues working, pierced with rings of blackened steel. A fine yellow dust clouded their skin and swirled in the air around them.

"As to that," the Seethe woman's voice ground out, sounding like flecks of rust popping from a gate. She folded back her hood and cloak. Her Seethe clothing was frayed, tied together with strips of linen. Her face, which he recognized with a start, was austere in its beauty, but marred by the scabrous green stone that glowed balefully from the center of her forehead, like an infected wound. Blackened veins radiated from it, dark against pallid flesh. She produced a vial of fluid, which she held out to Corajidin. "In honor of the alliance between the Soul Witches and the Asrahn of Shran. Distilled from the very essence of the qua. May it serve you well."

"I know you..." Corajidin breathed. He took the vial with a trembling hand. "You are-"

"I was Anj-el-din, daughter of Far-ad-din of the Din-ma troupe." She smiled a black-toothed smile. "You may call me the Emissary. My masters from the Drear have shown me there are more important things than names. Such as what powerful friends can do for each other. So, why don't you tell me what it is you want, great Corajidin?"

Corajidin opened the vial. It seemed he would live after all. "I want it all."

CAST OF CHARACTERS.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

It was only once I'd written and edited the book I realized how many people are involved, not only directly in the process, but also being with me during what proved to be a long and immensely satisfying journey.

To my parents, Terry and Cecilia, who never stopped a child from using his imagination, and encouraging his love of language. To my brothers and sisters, Matthew, James, Jahna, and Lee, for supporting my pa.s.sion.

To the friends who've been with me since the beginning of the journey, or joined me along the way. You were always supportive, inquisitive and enthusiastic, keeping me grounded and happy, while letting me fly: Glenn, Mark, Kate, Anna, Emma, Anne, Stuart, Kelly, Martin, John, Robert, Kurt, David, Tom, Eloise, Sylvie, Suzi, Karina, and Niki. You are an amazing group of people and I count myself fortunate indeed to know you. Thanks very much for being who you are.

To the organizers, mentors, and graduating cla.s.s of Clarion South 2005. All these years later and I still hear your voices every time I choose a word, design a character, or plot something out. A special mention to Kate Eltham, Robert Hogue, Sean Williams, and Scott Westerfeld for their help and guidance along the way.

To my first readers, Emma, Anne, and Stuart. Thank you so much for your diligence, time, patience, and insight.

To John Jarrold, my agent and a man who never doubted we'd be published. A fantastic agent and a man generous with his time, his experience, and his wisdom. May this be the first of many books we work on.

To David Pomerico at 47North for seeing something in the first draft of the ma.n.u.script and wanting to see more.

To my editors, Juliet Ulman, Robin (Surname?) and (sorry, I don't have any other names) who have taken what I wrote, honed it, and polished it, turning it into what I truly hope you as the reader are going to enjoy and want to keep for years to come.

And finally to the authors who inspired me as a child, through my teen years and into adulthood. It was your wonderful visions of fantastic worlds, your sense of drama and adventure, of comedy, tragedy, and romance, and the way I was inspired by tales of heroism and grace, that made me want to be a storyteller. Without your work, I'd never have known this was what I wanted to do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Mark Barnes was born in Sydney, Australia, in September of 1966. A strong athlete, he was also drawn to the arts at a young age, penning his first short story as a seven-year-old. He worked in finance and advertising and eventually landed satisfying work in information technology, where he continues to manage a freelance organizational change consultancy. In 2005, when Mark was selected to attend the Clarion South residential short story workshop, he began to write with the intention of making it more than a hobby. Since that time Mark has published a number of short stories, worked as a freelance script editor, and has driven creative consultancy for a television series. The Garden of Stones is his first novel.

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