Page 51 of The Shrouded Queen
TWENTYAMUNET
Nasir wasn’t in the house. I asked one of the guards who stood by the front door where to find him, and he directed me down the street. “Seeing to the final preparations,” he said mysteriously.
Jasim shadowed me as I wound through the streets. The coarse wig irritated my inflamed skin. The itch was loud, demanding my attention, nearly as loud as those claws against glass. It was as if the reprieve this morning had been the calm before a storm. The claws were no longer just scratching; they were breaking through. The sound of splintering glass crashed through my head. The distant mine’s persistentchink, chink, chinkonly seemed to accentuate it. So much noise, so much distraction—
Amunet.
My head snapped to the left.
People bustled about. No one so much as glanced in my direction.
“My queen?” Jasim’s hand landed on his scimitar. “What is it?”
The voice had been so clear. Yet the space before me was empty.
A chill washed over me. I scored my nails over the back of my neck, readjusted my wig, and kept moving. My jaw was clenched so hard, my molars threatened to crack. Jasim’s eyes seared into the side of my face, but I kept my gaze studiously ahead.
We turned a corner and came upon the mine.
The crater plunged eternally into the ground and spanned a few miles in diameter. Men and women currently hung into the gaping maw on thick ropes, sweating in the early morning sun, the sound of their pickaxes ricocheting against the walls and up into the air. The hole was so deep, no one had ever reached the bottom.
Supposedly, the crater was a remnant of the War of the Ancients, like the various megaliths that dotted Ashorah’s landscape. On my first patrol here, Nasir had told me some of the theories for what could have left such a scar on the world. An arrow forged of stars. A catapult that had launched the sun itself.
Or a fallen god.
The story went that somewhere in the dark recesses of the never-ending hole slumbered a fearsome god—a god that had been forgotten since the War of the Ancients—just biding its time until it unleashed itself upon the world.
I found myself staring into its black depths. The sun struggled to penetrate very far. How anyone could voluntarily lower themselves down there, and for what, I didn’t know. It looked far too similar to the suffocating darkness that haunted my nightmares. Goose bumps spread down my arms. Fuck, I hated the dark.
“Queen Amunet?”
I looked up. Nasir stood a few yards away from the crater with his guards—including the insolent female one—constructing a pyre. He waved me over.
It looked like the pyre was nearly finished, and there were fifteen bodies lined up in front of it. They’d been draped in sheets of varying faded colors, but their faces were left exposed. If not for the grayish pallor to their otherwise dark skin and their purple lips, they would’ve looked like they were merely sleeping. Many of their faces were mottled with sunburns.
It was Ashoran custom to embalm the dead and place them in tombs. All Khadas were laid to rest beneath the palace, while advisors were allowed use of the mausoleums speckled throughoutKetopolis. And the everyday Ashoran… well, I didn’t know what they did exactly. I doubted they could afford tombs. Maybe they just stuffed their loved ones in a mountain.
But these bodies didn’t look as if they’d been embalmed at all. There was no smell of myrrh, cassia, or any other typical spices.
Nasir noticed my curious gaze and explained, “Heatstroke and dehydration.”
I nodded. That was how most people died in Ashorah. “They shouldn’t be left in the heat without being embalmed.” It was a miracle they weren’t already rotting and rank.
Sweat stained Nasir’s tunic, visible even beneath his leather armor. “They won’t be embalmed.” He nodded to the pyre. “We burn our dead.”
I glanced sharply at him. “You what?”
“We’ve run out of places to bury them in the small territory you’ve allowed us. We have no choice.” The smile he gave me was flimsy. “Of course, we are grateful to have any territory at all, my queen.”
“But how will they reach the After Realm without their bodies?”
Nasir drew in a deep breath as if it was a thought that had haunted him for some time. But he only repeated, voice tight, “We have no choice.”
No wonder Shaya had been so silent. His very essence was tied to death, to the people who came to his realm. If the other principalities were also burning their dead—if people in Ketopolis were, too—then Shaya had very little to draw from. He was weak.
A bigger sacrifice than a candle would be needed, indeed.
Nasir accidentally stepped on a woman’s burial shroud as he faced me. “Walk with me?”
