Free The Garden of Stones by Mark T. Barnes

Omen’s narrow chest and bronze ribs, the telltale glow of his jade Wraithjar. Only his face remained unworked, a head-shaped block sans hair, with shallow depressions where his eyes would have been.
    Though he was happy his friends were there, Indris only half listened to what was being said. His mind was on his encounter with the compelling woman from last night, their mutual seduction and abandonment, his mixed feelings of guilt and relief. It had been more than a year since he had sought the comfort of another. The memories, the sensations, of last night were bittersweet.
    A shape overhead occluded the sun. Indris looked through the screen to see the bronze-chased hull of another Seethe skyjammer flying out to sea. Rendered in the shape of a bird like most Seethe vessels, the skyjammer’s hull and broadwings were built of lovingly polished blue-gray wood. In the wings and wedge-shaped tail sat silver and crystal Tempest Wheels. Light flickered and sparked from the rotating platters. There was a faint humming growl as the skyjammer passed by. Disentropy Spools rotated beneath each wing where the silver dumbbells released threads of light like fine silk, which unraveled into the air behind the skyjammer in a pallid cloud.
    Indris looked out across the Marble Sea to where the remnants of sunken buildings, ruins of marble and translucent crystal, stood their lonely vigil in shallow waters and atop tall hills now turned islands. There was a sense of longing in watching the sea eagles circle the shattered crystal towers of the ancient city of Nashrandi. Or Tan-li-Arhen of the Rainbow Spires. From the deck of a skyjammer, he had seen the bleached lines of roads and the blurred outlines of buildings beneath the water. It was this pallid discoloration that gave the sea its name.
    “Swap you a song for your thoughts?” Shar sidled up next to him on the couch, where the Seethe war-chanter tuned her sonesette. The afternoon light accentuated the sheen along her straight nose and the yellow of her whiteless eyes. Seemed to deepen the shadows of scutes around her eyes and forehead.
    “What benefit in staying?” Indris mused. “There’s nothing here anymore.”
    Shar looked up from her tuning. She followed his gaze toward the skyjammer. “Do you mean them or us?”
    “Either. Both.”
    “Leaving places with you is something I’ve become used to.”
    “‘And they left their land drowned in their tears, for those far distant shores bereft of fears,’” Omen intoned, his flutelike voice resonant. “I hear them, you know. The whispersof those who linger on the rim of the Well of Souls. Some are frightened. They want to stay but do not know how…”
    “I imagine they’ll find their way,” Hayden interjected, scrutinizing the revolving ammunition cylinder of Indris’s storm-pistol. “You know, talk of ghosts and the undead, Nomads as you Avān are inclined to call them, ain’t something all folks is comfortable with.”
    “Death has surrounded us for years, friend Hayden,” Omen replied. “I met mine centuries ago yet decided I had not experienced all there was in the world. My people may call me and others like me heretics, yet they cling to life as dearly as I. One day, such a choice will come to you.”
    “Oh no!” Hayden laughed. “Burn my body and throw my ashes into a strong wind. I don’t figure on anything using my dead flesh as no puppet!”
    “When I die,” Shar said dreamily, “my spirit will return to the winds, where it will fly above the torments of the world. Perhaps your ashes will fly with me for a time?”
    For reasons of their own, Omen and Hayden had chosen lives of adventure away from their homes. Shar was different. The Rayn-ma troupe, her extended family, had been all but wiped out in various mercenary battles. Indris and Shar had tried to find word of Rayn-ma survivors for years without success. While Shar had never complained, Indris wondered not for the first time whether he was being