The Garden of Stones - By Mark T. Barnes Page 0,159

face of Belamandris, flanked by one of the Anlūki commanders and the Knight-Lieutenant of Yashamin’s personal guard. The woman’s gaze was fixed firmly on the floor. Her hands quivered; her face was washed of color, a waxen thing, immobile and somehow unreal.

“What is it?” Corajidin asked as his hearts skipped a beat. The kohl around his son’s eyes blurred with tears. “Belamandris?”

“It’s Yashamin,” Belamandris said in a flat voice. “There’s been…an incident.”

Corajidin frowned, head canted to one side. The signs were everywhere. The antiseptic scent and the furious activity in the corridors of the villa. The quiet and the darkness of the room, where Yashamin loved noise and light.

Belamandris gestured for his father to follow.

They had laid Yashamin out on a silk-covered bier in the villa’s small private shrine. She had been washed, her skin anointed with sacred oils: the air was redolent with the scents of myrrh, cardamom, lotus, and henna. They had garbed her in the reds and blacks of a rahn of the Great House of Erebus, rather than in the layers of gray-and-white silk of a nemhoureh of the House of Pearl. Her hair was brushed to a flow of gleaming jet, then dressed with pearls, rubies, and pins of black-and-red gold. Her fingers and toes were bright with gold rings. Her ears and ankles with pearls. Her high-collared tunic covered her throat.

Corajidin rested his hand against her brow. Were it not for the coldness of her skin, she might be sleeping.

Death was supposed to be a thing of neither sadness nor fear. If such was the case, why could he not breathe? Why did tears blur his vision, no matter how often he wiped them away? Where had the sense of nausea come from? Why did his head ache and why did he want to do nothing except curl up in a ball, to inhale the scent of her from her clothes, and to remember the warmth of her body, the sound of her laugh, or the silk of her kiss? He wanted to see the way she frowned when she read.

This was not how it was supposed to be. This was not how he remembered his farewells to those he had professed to love before.

“Observe the rites,” he whispered. Belamandris and ten of the Anlūki stood at attention. Wolfram also remained. Corajidin could feel his speculative gaze. It was to the witch he spoke. “Speak to the Master of the Dead. Have him melt the amber for her Reliquary Mask. Then have her remains laid in alabaster, for her journey home to Erebesq for her cremation.”

“We—”

“Please, do not test me now of all times,” Corajidin warned. Wolfram hesitated a moment, then he must have sensed Corajidin’s mood. He creaked away, reeking of smoke, blood, and marshes. “And bring me more of your ally’s alchemy. My need is dire. Belamandris?”

“Father?” Belamandris bowed his head low.

“The guards who were on duty?”

“Veterans of the Jen Femidhe Sisterhood.”

“Where are they?”

“They took their own lives in recompense,” Belamandris murmured. He gestured to the Anlūki, who followed him from the room to leave Corajidin alone with Yashamin’s remains.

Corajidin touched Yashamin’s face, so beautiful in repose. He leaned down, then grazed her lips with his. Alone he could pretend, for a little while, the salt on her lips had not come from his tears.

Back in his office, Corajidin summoned his scribes. He was afraid that if he stopped, if he allowed himself to pause, he might never move again. He could not go back to his rooms. Could not give himself the time he wanted to sink into a pit of blackest despair until the sun itself burned out and the world was as dark for everybody else as it was for him.

Part of him wondered whether it might be simpler to give up. To rest and let his mourning take its course. Perhaps to test fate to see whether it would, actually, allow him to die even if he did nothing to preserve himself. Maybe he had fought too hard to make his possible future come true? If he had fought less, wanted less, then perhaps Yashamin would not be…But to stop now, midway through the great work she had been such a part of, would be an insult to the dreams she had for them both.

He dictated a letter, to be sent by the fastest couriers at his command to his allies within Amnon. A reminder for them to remember where their loyalties lay, or had been purchased. Now