Free The Garden of Stones by Mark T. Barnes Page A

fair to his friend.
    “Shar, you’re a rich woman now.” Shar’s eyes narrowed to golden slits. “You could try to find your family’s Sky Realm. With your reputation, any of the Sky Realms would—”
    “One day perhaps, but not today. If this is about guilt…”
    “For such can be the burden of the moral, spiritual man,” Omen offered philosophically. “Riddled with guilt and nettledby regret, Indris has never been comfortable with losing his friends. His instinct is to say yes, when he should say no.”
    “So we’re going to leave Amnon, neh?” Shar strummed her sonesette. “Where are we going?”
    “I was thinking of Ankha.” He knew better than to argue with her. It was as useful as asking a storm to stop. “Or Faroza. Tanjipé, maybe? Anywhere but here. We came too close this time.”
    “No arguments from me.” Hayden put his rifle down and picked up several scrolls that lay curled on the table. “We’ve got offers of paid work from your ghost friends in the Sussain, from nahdi companies in Ygran and Tanis. There’s even an expedition off north, to the Spines.”
    “The Dragons? Let’s not. I was thinking of something more relaxed.” Indris wrinkled his nose. “We’ve more than enough money, so why not enjoy ourselves?”
    “The Floating Palaces of Masripur,” Shar suggested wickedly. Masripur, a Tanisian city on the northern shores of the Marble Sea, was known for its libertine sensibilities. Almost anything could be bought there if the price was right. It was one of the most popular cities for nahdi. The caste-merchants of Masripur who profited from war were some of the wealthiest people in southeastern Īa.
    “What about Ariskander?” Shar asked.
    “What about him?” Indris replied. “He’ll be busy enough trying to maintain order in Amnon without me adding to his troubles.”
    Shar caught her bottom lip between sharp teeth, white against the blue of her lips. “And Far-ad-din?”
    “We’ve done all we can for Far-ad-din. He invited us here to scout the Rōmarq and report what we found. He knows as much as we do about the tomb robbers in the wetlands.”
    “Far-ad-din is more than our employer!” She poked him in the ribs with a calloused finger. Indris yelped with the sharp pain. “Serves you right! If that was all he was, we’d have run rather than fight for him at Amber Lake.”
    “For the love of…” Indris’s eyes widened in surprise as the others looked in his direction. “What? My father-in-law needed our help. We helped. I owed Far-ad-din at least as much.”
    “Because he helped raise you as a child, or because you married his daughter and she—”
    Indris felt an old pain at the mention of Anj-el-din. Her fate felt like one of the ancient questions his Sēq Masters posed their students to unearth the secrets of the past.
Who was Anj-el-din and where did she go?
He fought down the melancholy he knew would settle on him if left alone. “A little of both, I suppose. We fought to give Far-ad-din a chance to survive. If he’d bothered to escape when I advised him to, things would’ve been much simpler.”
    “You should at least find somebody else to tell what you found.” Omen reached down to gently remove a cat that had started to scratch at his wooden leg. “Treasure hunters in the Rōmarq? Far-ad-din tried very hard to dissuade the smuggling of relics. Who knows what kinds of unpleasantness have been dragged from the swamp?”
    “If you’d have come with us, maybe you’d know?” Indris offered reasonably.
    “All that water and mud…” Omen fluted, tones low. “The damp might have settled in my legs. Could have caused rot. Highly inconvenient.”
    “Face it, Omen. Like me, you hate the idea of the place.” Hayden tapped his fingers on the table. “I reckon no person whole and right in the head would set foot there. Shar’s right,though. Them treasure hunters could be bad business. From time to time, I listen to your talk about them ancient