EPILOGUE
Always Opportunity
There’d been a man at the gravesite when Bero first went, a young man who stayed there a long time, but the second time Bero snuck into the cemetery with Mudt, it was at night and the eerie hillside was empty. He found the right place easily enough. Due to space considerations, most Kekonese were cremated and their ashes entombed. Not many families were afforded full burial plots and large marble monuments.
Kaul Lanshinwan had been laid to rest near his war hero father. Bouquets of spring flowers, bowls of bright, waxed fruit, and sticks of burnt-down incense in small cups of sand had been left at the foot of the headstone by the clan faithful. Below the name and dates carved into the marble, there were only two simple lines:
BELOVED SON AND BROTHER.
PILLAR OF HIS CLAN.
With a violent motion, Mudt spat on the grave and made to kick over the items on the ground. Bero yanked him back and hissed, “Don’t be an idiot.
You want them to start guarding this place?” The boy pulled away from Bero’s grasp but stopped trying to do damage. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and glanced around the moonlit cemetery with sullen unease. Grave- robbing was, after all, punishable by death.
Bero crouched down and ran his hands along the base of the monument.
He pressed his palms to the grassy earth and brought his cheek so close to the ground he could smell the pungent odor of the moist dirt beneath the growing turf. Several feet below him lay the body of the man he’d killed, and Bero was certain that buried with him was jade. Jade that belonged by right to Bero. Now that he had the entire stash of shine safely stored away and the clan war had ebbed so Janloon was almost, it seemed for now, back to normal, he could think on how to make his luck again.
There was always opportunity in this city.