The Garden of Stones by Mark T. Barnes Page A

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 cogs, 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 ashe 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