The Silence of Medair

"I stole nothing, Medair," Ileaha replied, skin splotchy with anger, hurt in her eyes.

"No."

Medair retrieved her satchel from underneath the couch, then handed Ileaha the crumpled map. "This is the Mersian Herald’s, I believe."

She left without farewells, tired of talking to people who could not understand because she dared not explain. Ileaha did not try to stop her, and the guards did not seem to know she was not supposed to go.

With no help amongst the living, Medair decided to search for it in the halls of the dead. Her oath had been to Grevain Corminevar. She would seek counsel from his grave.

Chapter Nineteen

Even stone ages.

The Hall of Mourning was a place of high ceilings and dark shadows. It covered several echoing chambers, tiered and separated by balustrades. Telsen had called the Hall the Gallery of the Dead.

Centuries had added hollows to the shallow stairs, and stains of damp on the walls. She bent to touch the depressions in the cold, grey stone and marvelled at the number of feet which must have passed this way since Telsen took her on tour.

Gazing out over the sarcophagi of generations of Corminevars, Medair saw that the Hall had been extended. Through a wide new opening to the right of the second tier she could dimly make out stone railing and marble. Built to house five hundred years of Ibisians who had ruled from a stolen throne.

The Hall was not permanently lit, and she felt suddenly uneasy about venturing among the dead. Waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, she hesitated at the foot of the entrance stair. Light reflected past her off the polished floor of the Hall of Ceremony, where several large mageglows provided a steady, clear illumination. It only served to make the shadows deeper.

Voices prompted her to edge to one side, where must and dust waited to assail her nostrils. The palace seemed overfull of guards today. They had watched her suspiciously as she’d made her way down from Cor-Ibis' rooms. She’d had half a mind to don her ring, but was tired of the vague sensation of illness. Besides, there was no ban of which she knew against visiting the Hall of Mourning. Skulking around invisibly would only make her seem guilty of something.

The source of the voices proved not to be guards, but a group of young nobles, walking in a tight cluster. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, and waited until they had passed through the Hall of Ceremony. Then a series of careful gestures served to conjure a bobbing mageglow bright enough to keep the shadows at bay without drawing the attention of passers-by.

Her footsteps echoed as she walked across the first tier, where the earliest kings and queens of Palladium lay in stone-wrapped state, their likenesses carved by hands long turned to dust. The second tier was larger, but held fewer sarcophagi. It had once been considered fitting for the coffins of monarchs to be more than a container for their bodies, for their lives to be reflected by some tribute. So there were friezes, columns, crypts within crypts. They ranged in complexity from the wrought iron fence around Iriane the Just, to the miniature palace which housed the remains of Varden the First.

She paused momentarily at the entrance of the new extension. A corner of pale stone was visible in the light of her glow, but the rest was little more than black shapes in darkness. Ibisian dead: she had no wish to look upon them. Gritting her teeth she went onward, to the third tier. This was where Grevain Corminevar’s mother had been laid to rest, where the last true Palladian Emperor would surely lie.

White, pure, unembellished. Her mageglow heated its milky depths. Medair stumbled to a halt, having discovered not the resting place of her Emperor, but the one who had destroyed him. There were no markings of any kind on the tomb, not even his name, but Medair knew it could be no other. Standing alone at the very end of the Hall, an achingly simple box of near-translucent marble which held the mortal remains of Ieskar Cael las Saral-Ibis.

Twenty-three and dead. She refused to think of it, of him. He had destroyed the Empire and deserved no thought at all.

With grim determination she dragged her eyes from the soft marble, sought and found the carved, grey face of the man to whom she had sworn her life. Grevain Corminevar’s sarcophagus lay in the shadow of two of Farak’s handmaidens. The statues towered some seven feet high, leaning out of the wall at the head of the sarcophagus, each holding a stone arm forward, hands resting on the shoulders of his image. Their heads were bowed in sorrow or contemplation.