The cairn grave site

The ground lies in the rocky hills east of the western mountains, near where the four Amultan soldiers were taken. Harveen recognized the country as they came past it, and the party turned east to search the capture site for the two men still missing. Aldo saw the cairn from a couple of hundred feet out, and by the time they reached it he had seen the other thing: there were no stones anywhere near it. Anything small enough to lift had been lifted, and the ground around the grave lies smooth in a country that is nothing but loose rock.

All of it went into the cairn: field-stone stacked a few feet high, three to five days of one man’s labor by the look of it, with one flat slate close to limestone laid across the top to mark it. Two letters are cut into that slate in the formal Golden hand, RC, and Jaden called the cutting a monogram. It is a grave raised in the manner Amulta shares with Yovance and Galderia, where the dead go under stone with the things that mattered to them for the passage. Harveen had never seen a gish grave site that was not decorated, and said so. This one is stone, and two letters, and nothing.

Nobody has opened it. Jaden read the letters herself and knew them before anyone else had spoken; Harveen then named Raerin Corvain as the man beneath them; and from the workmanship Jaden judged that Aldred had raised the whole thing single-handed, which is an inference. Aldo and Mikhail kept a doubt between themselves about whether the name and the stones belonged to each other, and would not disturb a grave to settle it. Jaden went over the outside of it for anything that would say which way Aldred had walked afterward, and found nothing.

Aldo poured wine over the stones. Jaden lay against the slate and held on to it until the sun went down. One of Rakhzan’s hobgoblins knelt and prayed over the cairn in G’lin, pouring water so that the winter freeze would take and hold the soul solid, rigid and strong, which is the rite the Draazstone bands keep for Drozom the Frozen.

The second body lies close by, and it was not buried. A human man, badly rotted with animals at him, stabbed many times over with one of the knives still in him, his leather top and his boots taken off him. The stitching on what was left was done in the Peredhel military manner, which identifies where the leather came from and not the man wearing it. He carried no Ten Lashes brand. They took him for one of the captors, killed here when the four were taken. He also carried one wound at the belly that matched nothing else on him, and nobody with the eye to read a wound went over him closely; it may be no more than what the animals did afterwards.

They came back to it in the winter, at the end of a hard push down from the goat pass with a day’s rations left and nothing much in reserve. The fire pit sits a hundred feet or so past the cairn, and there was firewood still stacked there under the snow. None of them could remember whether they had left it themselves, or whether somebody else had found the place since and come through.

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