The Garden of Stones

by Mark T. Barnes

  She was about to draw her father out further when a bright laugh distracted her. The others also turned to see what was so amusing. Yasha was sitting close to Belam, laughing at some witticism or other. They were of a kind, the two of them. Bejeweled and beautiful, perfumed and smooth, their hair oiled into ringlets. Razors in velvet.

  Yasha smiled. “Belamandris was telling me he plans on finding a bride, Mariam.”

  Belam shook his head from behind his stepmother’s back. He pantomimed strangling himself. Mari fought down a smile.

  “Really?” she replied with false interest. “Who do you have your eye on this time, Belam? Haven’t you already seduced and abandoned a good many women of note?” Including your own stepmother, according to rumor.

  Belam leaned back in his chair, grinning. “I don’t think you’re in any position to judge, Mari. Perhaps if I met a woman as beautiful and accomplished as my sweet sister, then I wouldn’t stray so much.”

  Mari laughed and flicked her brother a rude gesture. Belam pretended to catch it, then put it in his pocket with mock wonder.

  “Belamandris married?” her father interjected. “I will talk with Vashne. His daughter, Vahineh, would make an ideal match.”

  “Vahineh looks like a shoe and reads too much. Nehrun’s sister Roshana is a different matter.” Belamandris frowned when Corajidin snorted, while Thufan barked his fast, false laugh. “Seriously, I don’t see why—”

  “No!” Corajidin sliced the air with his hand. “Everything I have will go to your brother Kasraman when the time comes, so you must make your own way in the world. Part of that is finding a bride who can secure you position and fortune. The Näsarats will provide you with neither.”

  “Roshana’s a woman of beauty and character,” Armal mused. He gazed at Mari. “She’s neither as beautiful, nor as gifted, as Pah-Mariam, of course.”

  “What did the rahn say about us remembering our place, Armal?” Farouk said. “You, too, need to find a bride fitting your station. Don’t aim too high.”

  Armal measured Farouk from his greater height, shrugged his wide shoulders.

  “It’s been a long night.” Belam stretched, leaned forward to kiss Yasha, a touch of the lips that lingered too long for good taste. “There’s going to be a hunt today, and I’ve always wanted to test myself against a wyvern. I need some sleep first, though. My eyes feel like half the sand from the beach is in them.”

  “Forget the hunt,” Corajidin said. “We have a journey of our own to make into the wetlands today. Make yourself available.” Belam nodded, expression dour as he left.

  “You need to think of your own advancement, Mari.” Her father came across and rested his hands on Mari’s shoulders. She was surprised to feel him tremble ever so faintly. “Wolfram came to me almost two years ago and told me I would be the ruler of Amnon and the Rōmarq. It would bring me joy to know there were great days ahead for you. Leaving the Feyassin to form an alliance in marriage to an ally, perhaps?”

  “There’s nobody on my horizon, Father.” Her thoughts strayed briefly to her nameless lover from last night. A dalliance only, no matter what girlish infatuation she felt in the echoes of passion. Mari studied her father. She had never thought he looked old until today. He was still young for an Avān, though in the uncertain light of the lanterns there seemed to be more gray in his hair. Deeper lines etched around the very dark shadows around his eyes. His brow was creased, ravines filled with too many thoughts, too many cares, and the darkness of his schemes. His face and brow were dewed with sweat. “Please reconsider. Is now the time for your ambitions? You’re ill! You should take better care of yourself.”

  “My illness and my destiny seem to be entwined, Mariam.” Her father took her dry hands with his clammy ones. “The Erebus Dynasties ruled half a world during the Awakened Empire.”

  “Until you became drunk on your own power,” Wolfram reminded him. “Your Ancestors were Mahj—Awakened Emperors—until they were led to ceremonial deaths—”

  “By the Näsarat, who reclaimed the Jade Throne at our expense!” Corajidin slammed his fist into his palm. “Even now, six hundred years after the supposed fall of the Awakened Empire, a Näsarat Mahj still sits the Jade Throne in Mediin. We will not stumble this time. Your oracles promised me!”

  “Oracles never promise anything, though I’ve seen some of what you say,” Wolfram agreed hesitantly. “The further away the future is, the harder it is to know. I’ve warned you against relying too much on the currents of the future. You wouldn’t be the first to drown in them.”

  “Nor will I be the first to navigate them.” Corajidin took Yasha by the hand, raised her to her feet, whispered something to her. His hand grazed her breast. Slid to her hip. Settled on the swell of her buttocks. He looked to the others in the pavilion. “Though now there are other affairs I need to wrestle with.”

  Mari held up her hands in mock surrender. As she left the pavilion, Wolfram was only a stiff-legged step behind her, Brede following him with her head down. The others wandered away down the long avenues between tents. Only Farouk remained outside the tent, glaring at Armal’s back as the giant and his father headed off to their beds.

  “Wolfram?” Mari said, turning to face him. The taller man lurched to a halt. Brede stopped and stared at Mari with wide blue eyes, her beauty apparent for a moment. Mari talked softly so she would not be overheard. “You said you saw some of what my father spoke of.”

  “It’s like seeing the shape of the breakers in the mist. One isn’t sure where the foam ends and the mist begins. Soon enough, it all looks like churn.”

  “What did you tell him?” Mari did not want to get within arm’s reach of the man.

  Wolfram’s laugh was smooth as silk on skin. “Oracles don’t think in mortal frames of reference. Sometimes their visions can be difficult to interpret or ambiguous—”

  “Answer my question, if you’d be so kind.”

  “Why not? I told your father his children would never sit the throne. I told him, though he would hear none of it, that it would be the Thrice Awakened who would rule the Avān. He forgets that your people still have a Mahj! Shrīan may have turned its back on the Empress-in-Shadows, but I understand she still considers herself the monarch of the Avān people—even though she’s not stirred from Mediin for the past six centuries.”

  Mari felt her hearts lurch in her chest. “The Thrice Awakened? What in the Ancestors’ name is that? A rahn is only ever Awakened once, when their predecessor dies. What’s my father thinking?”

  Wolfram turned the shadows of his face toward her. She could smell cloves and rum on his breath. “It’s in his head he’ll rule your people, girl. He sees the Rōmarq as a place of ancient weapons, lost wisdom, and the redemption of Sedefke’s scribbling. Your father believes this time and place is the key to his success. And his survival. One’s own death is a powerful motivator. Often there’s room for naught else.”

  “And will he succeed?”

  Mari could sense the smile behind the length of his beard as Wolfram limped away on infirm legs.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Hatred is an appetite never satisfied.”—from the Nilvedic Maxims

  Day 312 of the 495th Year of the Shrīanese Federation

  Not as fanciful as the stylized, bird-shaped Seethe skyjammers, the Avān-built wind-skiff resembled more an oceangoing vessel, sans masts or sails. The hull was a flattened crescent moon of varnished wood with stained-glass windows along the cabins at prow and stern. Poking like a clockwork mushroom from a hole at the center of the keel was a spinning Disentropy Spool, the bottom of which was an ornate flywheel of bronze, brass, and gold, studded about the rim with silver spheres the size of a man’s fist. Milky light swirled about the spokes, where raw disentropy was shaped into a miniature cyclone, lit from within. Fore and aft, the hull was blistered by the coruscating silver cogs of Tempest Wheels. Corajidin likened them to an upside-down stack of dishes: a large round cog atop a series of other rotating c
ogs, each one smaller than the one above it. Lightning arced from flashing metal. The Tempest Wheels thrummed and snarled as they spun. He felt the rush of power from the wheels as he approached them, powerful enough to lift and propel the wind-skiff at great speed through the air.

  Corajidin boarded and found Belamandris seated in the weather-beaten pilot’s chair, the polished brass and wooden controls rising around him like a giant spider on its back. His son’s pique at being asked to forgo his hunting had soon vanished in the obvious enjoyment of piloting the flying ship. Wolfram limped aboard, legs creaking, staff thumping on the deck. The guards gave the ancient witch a wide berth. Shortly after, the vessel rose from the ground with a snarling hum. The air crackled. Corajidin felt the faint prickling along his skin as the fine hairs on his arms stood on end. With ever-mounting speed, the wind-skiff powered away from Amnon, across the swirling width of the silted Anqorat River, and into the Rōmarq.

  As the wind-skiff scudded low over the wetlands, where water seeped and pooled between bruise-shadowed flora and stone, Corajidin squinted at the life that teemed in the muck. From the glass-walled cabin he watched cormorants take flight as the skiff passed close by. Nut-brown fishermen and hunters poled flat-bottomed boats, eyes intent on the mirrored waters. Angh-hounds, near skeletal scavengers with ax-blade heads, tore into the sun-baked carcass of a water buffalo, which had no doubt been brought down by something larger: a clouded reed lion, or perhaps Fenlings who had been chased away from their kill. He watched a massive crocodilian surge out of the water to snap at a brown-and-gray-furred marsh devil. The bearlike devil opened its red maw as the crocodilian charged forward, but the struggle slipped from Corajidin’s view as the wind-skiff changed course.

  After three hours of flight, he saw stone formations begin to emerge from the marsh. The line of a black stone wall. A roof sagging under the weight of cracked, faded terra-cotta tiles. Hoary cypress trees bowed their aged heads, their thick roots lifting flagstones and toppled walls alike. Corajidin joined his son as the shadows of smooth black towers soared above the foliage, rising straight-backed beside the sandstone and wooden ruins clustered about them.

  Belamandris bent to the controls. There came a hollow clunk from beneath his feet as crablike legs emerged from the hull. The wind-skiff bounced a little as the legs took its weight. Light frayed away as the Tempest Wheels slowed their spin to eventually stop. The Disentropy Spool continued to whir for a few moments before it, too, was still. Corajidin desperately wished for a bowl of wine to remove the metallic taste from his tongue.

  Brede emerged from an avenue between dark stone columns. She had taken the other wind-skiff shortly after dawn, to help Kasraman prepare for Corajidin’s arrival. She had a courtesan’s body beneath her layered clothing; her features were less beautiful than they might have been for their hollowness. An Angothic kindjal, a straight-backed sword with a curved edge, was sheathed at her hip.

  Brede dropped to one knee as Wolfram approached. The Angothic Witch rested his hand on her head possessively, the touch part benediction and part caress. The apprentice looked up at her master with adoration. “Please follow me, my master.”

  “What progress?” Corajidin asked. There was something forbidding about the ruins he did not like. The damp air was difficult to breathe. “Do you actually know what this place was?”

  “No, great rahn. These ruins have been occupied over many periods of history,” she said. “Some of what we’ve found dates back—”

  “What of Sedefke’s library?” Corajidin could not help the eagerness in his voice. “Or a Destiny Engine? Surely there is something here worth the trouble?”

  “There’s no guarantee Sedefke’s library was in this city. The Time Masters had many cities in the Rōmarq prior to its flooding. And we’re not the first people to rummage through these ruins. The Time Masters vanished and left little behind we can comprehend. The Avān settlers were more considerate with their castoffs. But there are no signs of Sedefke here. Yet.”

  She led them through a complicated maze of stone walls and cobblestone paths overrun with vegetation. Farouk walked ahead, directly behind the apprentice, his hand curled around the hilt of his sword. The other members of Belamandris’s company of Anlūki trod in light-footed formation about Corajidin and Wolfram, startling at every hoot, cry, howl, and scrabble around them. Only Belamandris seemed truly at ease.

  “Be wary,” Brede warned as they entered a very long, dimly lit lane between several black stone buildings. The light at the far end was a solid bar of glaring white. “Sometimes our…allies…can be unpredictable.”

  “What else lurks here?” Belamandris looked about with interest.

  “We’ve an arrangement with the Fenling.” Brede smiled. Corajidin was struck by how attractive the woman could be in motion. “Though they’re unruly and hard to communicate with. Their leaders, the shamans among their people, are quite corrupt. We’ve been feeding them captives from the Battle of Amber Lake. The Fenling, it seems, have quite the taste for flesh.”

  “Which reminds me.” Corajidin rubbed his temples in an attempt to master a shooting pain in his head. “Nehrun warned me Ariskander has already given the order for the Tau-se to scour the Rōmarq in search of Far-ad-din. I have the route they will take. It would be advantageous if the Fenlings were to kill them, so no word of Far-ad-din, or what we’re doing here, ever gets back to Ariskander.”

  “Easily arranged.” Wolfram’s grin was feral. “Brede?”

  “I’m yours to command in all things, my master,” she replied with reverence. “I’ll send the Fenling war-bands out as soon as possible.”

  As they moved deeper into the ruins, one of the guards choked down a curse. Corajidin followed the man’s gaze to where several humanoid shapes, sharp-featured women with long, matted tresses, hung upside down from wooden beams by pale, clawed feet. Their arms, attached to leathery wings, were wrapped around them. One of them hung low so low Corajidin could see the bloodred of her irises as her large, dark-lidded eyes slowly opened. She stared as the group walked past, her expression still.

  “Reedwives,” Brede offered without being asked. “They’re usually quiescent during the day, but dangerous when roused. I’ll send them out tonight, in case the Fenlings fail in their task.”

  They walked the rest of the way in silence. Corajidin uttered a small sigh of relief when they emerged on the other side. The Angothic apprentice led them through wide, white-paved streets, across gray stone bridges, through gardens and parks long left to seed. At the far end of a long narrow strip of garden, near a pond choked by purple-flowered lilies, she took a flight of cracked stairs. The sound of picks, hammers, and voices echoed along the moldering streets. The air was thick with the drone of mosquitoes. The scent of sun-baked mud, damp grass, and wet fur filled Corajidin’s nose.

  From the top of the stairs, they could see the extent of the work being done. Bound-caste prisoners—stripped down to mere lengths of cloth covering the torso and upper thighs, tied about the waist with rope—hammered and dug in the fetid water. Leeches clung to their skin like glistening black scars. Women, men, and children. The elderly. Human and Avān. Whoever could be procured, or whoever would not be missed, was being worked to the bone under the watchful eyes of hard-bitten Erebus officers in civilian clothing.

  “Where are the Fenling?” Belamandris asked. “Weren’t they supposed to be working for us?”

  “They work indoors during the day, Pah-Belamandris,” Brede replied with a nervous smile. “We found early on they’re not at their best in the bright light. So we work them in the underground chambers, the tunnels, or at night. Their warriors are more robust, so we use them whenever we need them.”

  “The relics?” Corajidin prompted her. “When can you show me what you have?”

  “If you would follow me? Pah-Kasraman waits for us.”

  Corajidin gave orders for his guard to remain behind. Belamandris and Wolfram joined him as he followed Brede along a black
marble portico dotted with pale orchids. The remains of ancient towers reached into the air, climbing between the dark, claustrophobic canopies of nearby trees. Sound became muffled. It grew difficult to breathe. He felt as if he were trying to walk through molasses as the air closed in about him. Corajidin looked around to see the others equally as discomfited.

  Brede led them into a chamber whose lofty ceiling vanished into what appeared to be a dark, roiling murk above. Faint lights blossomed there from moment to moment, like flares of lightning deep within a storm cloud. There was the hint of movement in the high shadows, of old engines still at work being long gone. Hundreds of columns stretched high, each of a dusty white stone that resembled marble, though they glimmered with a gray-white haze. Everything seemed slightly blurred, as if the building itself was somehow ephemeral. On the floor at the center of the room a series of concentric steel rings turned, their surfaces marked with a series of arcs, lines, and circles, forming new patterns on the floor every few minutes.

  Pieces of metal, wood, crystal, and stone littered the floor and the various trestle tables around the chamber. Erebus soldiers carefully brushed at dirt that clung to some of the pieces. Some items Corajidin recognized: antique air-powered storm-rifles and pistols; melee weapons of various generations, mostly Avān though there were others, more exotic; armor; crystal sheets crammed with engraved letters; scrolls; books; statues; and other ornaments. Yet there was more he could not place. Giant wheels of blackened metal. Skeletal frames, like bones fused into improbable shapes. Spheres of glowing glass set on ornate metal stands. Polished skulls. A glittering wire frame that held coils of mist in suspension, images almost forming before they broke apart.