The Garden of Stones: Echoes of Empire by Barnes Mark T

Author:Barnes, Mark T.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2013-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Wolfram unrolled a long rug, embroidered with intricate geometric and angular knot-work patterns. There were faces woven into the borders. Half-seen, possibly imagined terrors lurked in its depths. They lay in wait amid the weft and warp. Corajidin had a faint sense of vertigo when he tried to unravel the designs with his gaze. Brede took a bag and began to mark out a line of sea salt around her master. When Corajidin asked why, she replied it was to ensure no unclean spirit could escape. His lips curled in an uneasy grimace. Brede’s face was a study in gravity. She asked Corajidin to kneel on the rug in front of her master. Brede took her place beside Wolfram, her kindjal across her lap. Wolfram began a sonorous chant in his beautiful voice.

The Angothic Witch’s voice drummed across Corajidin’s skin. He felt the vibrations on his face, his temples, his chest. Wolfram’s voice, the cloying incense, the unexpected heat, his infirmity, and fatigue took their toll. The intricate designs on Wolfram’s meditation rug began to blur. Dark-blue and gray lines seemed to sink, became water- and shadow-filled valleys of some woven netherworld. Warmer browns, reds, and greens drifted, took on substance as frayed serpentine shores, hills, and forests lit with points of fire. White-and-yellow threads rose in knotted clouds and beams of sunlight. The patterns of the carpet rose about him, surrounded him, enveloped him.

His breath rasped. His hearts beat like drums. The sound of his blood rushing in his skull roared in his ears. Tired as he was, there was part of him that wanted to speed naked and alone through the elder darkness, hungry for the taste of flesh as his forefathers had been. For blood, for the sweet, sweet, sweet flicker of life’s candle, extinguished by fang and nail.

Disoriented, Corajidin raised his eyes. He knelt on long grass made of woolen strands in the shadow of woven trees. Knots the size of boulders, faded from wear, surrounded him. Folds in the carpet became long hills of frayed green, high above the still threads of blue-gray rivers. A pack of flat wolves, their features blurred to ragged slits for mouths, mismatched black stitches for eyes, were caught midleap amid the trees. Hooded women and men lurked in the shadows around heatless renderings of flame, featureless round hands clutched about the curved strands of sickles. Above him a ragged hawk hung still in a static sky of burned umber. There was no breeze, or motion, or sound, or scent, or any sign of life.

The world stretched. The long lines of interwoven cords that made land, rivers, and sky flexed. Corajidin felt the tremor through his knees as the tableau shook. Then he was being dragged through the fibrous diorama. Caricatures of flora and fauna sped past like two-dimensional cutouts, daubed with colors never to be found in nature. He expected there to be wind in his face, for his eyes to tear as they did when he stood at the prow of his wind-frigate.

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