Dreams of Steel

He is scared to death that what happened to his wife and baby will happen to me and mine. I think. He has grown a little strange, almost haunted. He is terrified of something. He jumps at every little sound. He searches the corners and shadows every time he enters a room.

Chapter Seventy-Five

Ram was scared with good reason. He had learned something he should not have. He knew something he was not supposed to know.

Ram is dead.

Ram died fighting his Strangler brothers when they came to take my daughter.

Narayan is a dead man. He is walking around somewhere out there, maybe gri

I should have been more wary. I knew he had his own agenda. I have been around treacherous men all my life. But never, ever, did it occur to me that, from the begi

Gri

I never even chose a name before they collected their Daughter of Night.

I should have suspected when the dreams went away so suddenly. As soon as I had been through that ceremony. I was not the one consecrated there. I did not change. I could not be marked that easily.

Ram was only a yellow rumel man but he knew they were coming. He killed four of them. Then Narayan killed him, according to the women. Then Narayan and his band fought their way out of the fortress. All while I still lay unconscious.

Narayan will pay. I will tear his heart out and use it to choke his goddess. They do not know what they have awakened. My strength has returned. They will pay. Longshadow, my sister, the Deceivers, Kina herself if she gets in my way.

Their Year of the Skulls is upon them.

I close the Book of Lady.

Envoi

Down There

Incessant wind sweeps the plain of stone. It murmurs across pale grey paving that sprawls from horizon to horizon. It sings around scattered pillars. It tumbles leaves and dust come from afar and stirs the long black hair of a corpse that has lain undisturbed for generations, desiccating. Playfully, the wind tosses a leaf into the corpse’s silently screaming mouth, tugs it out again.

The pillars might be thought the remnants of a fallen city. They are not. They are too sparsely and randomly placed. Nor are any of them toppled or broken, though some have been etched deeply by gnawing ages of wind.

And some seem nearly new. A century old at most.

In the dawn, and at the setting of the sun, parts of those columns catch the light and gleam golden. For a few minutes each day auric characters burn forth from their faces.

For those remembered it is immortality of a sort.

In the night the winds die and silence rules the place of glittering stone.

To Be Continued in Glittering Stone