The Labyrinth of Flame (The Shattered Sigil Book 3) Read online

  THE

  LABYRINTH

  OF

  FLAME

  Book III of the Shattered Sigil

  COURTNEY SCHAFER

  The Labyrinth of Flame © 2015 by Courtney Schafer

  Cover art by David Palumbo

  Illustrations by Kristina Carroll

  Maps by Curtis Craddock

  All rights reserved

  Table of Contents

  Map of Western Arkennland

  Map of Eastern Arkennland

  Map of the Clanlands and Prosul Akheba

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This one’s for everyone who wanted to know the rest of the story. Thanks for coming on the journey with me.

  Chapter One

  (Dev)

  “You want water, boys? It’ll cost you.” The clansman bared yellowed teeth at me and Kiran in a shrewd, fierce grin. A rat’s nest of graying curls threaded with agate chips and bits of carved bone framed his sun-wizened face. Both his rough-woven clothes and leathery skin were the same deep, rusty copper as the sandstone of the natural rock bowl surrounding us. The bowl itself was hundreds of yards wide, its smooth sweep of stone broken by patches of crusted sand choked with spinebrush and pear cactus. Giant boulders loomed at the bowl’s lip. Their shapes were oddly sinuous, like humped, drowsing beasts.

  “We’ve goods to bargain,” I assured the clansman. Another hulking boulder nearby bore a series of scratched symbols to signify this was a trading ground for the fiercely territorial clans who haunted the borderlands between Arkennland and Varkevia. The trade ground hadn’t been easy to find. We were in untracked terrain here, far distant from the regular routes traveled by merchant house convoys. I hadn’t even been sure any clanfolk would show when I blew on the cracked bone flute Kiran had found tucked inside a hole beneath the boulder’s symbols. I’d been relieved beyond the telling when this oldster ghosted out of the rocks in response to the flute’s eerie wail. Kiran and I had mere dregs left in our waterskins, and at least fifty miles yet to go across this barren maze of buttes and canyons to reach the border city of Prosul Akheba.

  A destination we had to reach fast. Otherwise, Kiran was a dead man. We had only a scant supply left of the drug that was keeping him alive and no way of making more. The famed scholars of Prosul Akheba’s collegium were our best hope, and I’d do a hell of a lot worse than risk a shortcut across barren desert to make sure Kiran survived. Without Kiran’s help, I’d never stop his master Ruslan from sending demons from the darkest of legends to rip me and everyone I loved to bloody, screaming shreds.

  “Show me what you have to trade.” The clansman’s sharp black eyes shifted from me to Kiran, who was crouched beside our packs with his night-dark hair obscuring his grimy face. “You’d best not stint, either. From the looks of those…” The clansman twitched a contemptuous finger at our pile of flaccid waterskins. “Without my aid, you’ll soon be visiting Shaikar’s hells. Unless you boys are mages powerful enough to conjure water from stone.” He chuckled, a dry, hissing sound like a snake slithering through sand.

  Kiran raised his head. His blue eyes met mine, full of bitter amusement.

  Yeah, if this oldster knew the truth, he wouldn’t be laughing. Looking at Kiran, all he saw was a weary, travel-stained youth so skinny a strong blow might snap him in two. He’d never guess Kiran was a blood mage, trained to fuel spells with torture and murder, capable of snuffing out a life with a single touch…or conjuring enough water to drown this clansman where he stood.

  I sighed. Too bad Kiran couldn’t cast even a wisp of a spell here in Arkennland without bringing his sadistic viper of a master down on our heads.

  “Go on,” I said to Kiran, with a sardonic lift of my brows. “Show him a stone.”

  Kiran rummaged in his battered pack and produced a crimson carcabon stone the size of his thumb. We’d chipped a handful of stones that large as we’d descended the cliffs of the Whitefires’ southern peaks, which stabbed skyward like bared fangs above the boulders. This late in the summer, no snow lined those stark granite pinnacles, which meant we hadn’t seen water since we crossed the range’s crest. The red-rock desert surrounding us wasn’t quite as arid as the alkali flats of the Painted Valley some two hundred miles to the north, where my home city of Ninavel depended entirely upon mages’ spellcasting for water. Here seeps lay hidden deep in caves and canyons, but their exact locations were jealously guarded secrets.

  Which left us at one hell of a disadvantage in this trade, but I’d make it work. I had to.

  The clansman squinted at the carcabon. “A promising start, but far from enough. How many gems this size do you have?”

  Apparently he thought us such idiots we might blurt out the full extent of our stash. “Enough to give you two stones per filled waterskin.”

  The clansman’s smile sharpened. I crossed my arms, letting the warding charms banding my wrists catch the light of the afternoon sun. A warning: we were no easy prey, although not for the reason he’d think. The charms I wore were Alathian-made, stolen from the mages of the Council’s Watch before Kiran and I escaped through their warded eastern border into the Whitefires, and the magic bound within the rune-marked silver met the ridiculously strict Alathian legal standards. The wards would stop a blade, maybe even a dragonclaw charm, but they wouldn’t so much as singe an attacker’s hand. The runes looked close enough to those seen on far nastier charms made in Ninavel that I hoped the clansman wouldn’t know the difference. Alathians didn’t often cross the mountains.

  “Two stones, you say? I say your lives are worth far more.” The clansman pursed his lips. “Ten stones per skin.”

  We didn’t have anywhere near so many gems. Kiran and I exchanged another swift, speaking glance; his dark with worry, mine a reassurance: Take it easy. I’ve got this.

  “Khalmet wasn’t so kind to a pair of footsore prospectors this trip,” I said. Kiran bowed his head again. I couldn’t see his eyes anymore, hidden as they were by his hair, but irony was plain in the slant of his mouth. Yeah, “not so kind” was quite the understatement. These last months, I’d begun to suspect the god of luck’s skeletal bad hand was permanently fixed to my shoulder, dooming me to disaster—and I hadn’t endured half of what Kiran had suffered.

  I said, “Most I can give is three stones per waterskin, but every stone is top quality. Plus I’ll throw in a bonemender charm, the best you’ve ever sparked.” The bit about the bonemender wasn’t even a lie. The Alathian Council wasn’t ha
lf so tight-assed about healing spells as they were about every other kind of magic.

  The clansman’s black eyes glittered. “Give me those warding charms on your wrists along with the bonemender, boy, and you’ll have a deal.”

  I snorted. “Do we look like soft-headed merchanter marks to you? Fuck if I’ll hand over my protection so you can jump us the moment we turn our backs.”

  The clansman released another hissing chuckle. “No need for fighting, not here in Shaikar’s furnace. You’d best take my terms, or all I need do is wait and take gems and charms alike from your parched corpses.”

  Kiran tensed, and I willed him not to raise his head again. I didn’t want the clansman to get too good a look at him. I’d have left Kiran hidden in the rocks, but tales I’d heard in my convoy days had left me leery of that idea. Supposedly clanfolk never came to a bargain alone, and they didn’t take well to the suggestion of ambush.

  I said, “Leave us to die of thirst, and we’ll see you get nothing. Pound the carcabon to powder and slag our charms. You want to profit from us, you’ve got to trade for it.”

  “You have a ringtail’s boldness,” the clansman said with a yellowed smirk. “Yet I am no fool. Men do not avoid the trade road and risk dying waterless without reason. Such travelers had best offer enough to buy my clan’s silence as well as our water.”

  Great. If I gave into his arm-twisting, I’d only confirm we had something to hide—and I sure as hell didn’t trust we could purchase his silence.

  “Reason?” I kicked Kiran’s pack, sourly. It slumped over onto the sandstone without any clinking of gems or ingots. “Only thing to do with a prospecting trip as Khalmet-cursed as this one is to end it fast. Plodding all the way out Firestrike Canyon to the convoy route wastes weeks. We shortcut across the desert and resupply in Prosul Akheba quick enough, we can gem-hunt in a different mountain cirque before the snows come. Otherwise, we’ll be starving this winter. Avoiding that is worth a little risk, and I don’t give a damn who knows it.”

  Kiran muttered in agreement, sounding properly glum about it. He’d gotten a lot better at playacting since I first met him. Helpful as it was right now, I wasn’t so sure it was a good change.

  The clansman’s weathered face gave me no clues about whether he was buying my little tale. “Might be starving sooner,” he said. “The Akhebans are jumpy these days. Doubt they’ll let a pair of convoy-less stragglers inside the city’s wards without good reason.”

  Was he lying, hoping to suss out if we were truly destitute or not? Suliyya grant he was lying! We couldn’t afford any delays in reaching the collegium.

  “What’s got the Akhebans so spooked?”

  The clansman twisted a hand in a gesture I couldn’t read. Fading blue tattoos covered his bony knuckles and spiraled up his wrists. “New demon cult’s on the rise.”

  The word “demon” set my heart hammering; beside me, Kiran had frozen into utter stillness.

  Damn it, this news might have nothing to do with us. I’d heard enough tales from convoy drovers to know that cults continuously bloomed and faded in Varkevian cities, as disciples of each new doctrinal craze fought to gain power and sweep aside the old. Sounded crazy to me, but the Varkevian-born drovers I’d known panted after every bit of cult-related news with all the passion of streetside gamblers watching a snakefight. They did love their stories of gods and demons.

  Yet certain of those stories contained cold, hard truth. I couldn’t stop a glance at Kiran, who remained rigid as stone.

  The clansman was watching Kiran too. Unease rippled through me.

  “Cityfolk chase after nonsense, but we black-daggers know the truth.” A sudden, dark fervor colored the clansman’s voice, and his guttural accent grew thicker. “Shaikar is master over all, and rare are the mortals blessed with a chance to gain his favor.”

  The oldster looked as Varkevian as they came, but I’d heard some clanfolk claimed descent from the infamous black-dagger Kaithans, who’d long ago been exiled from the tribelands beyond the southern blight. The other Kaithan tribes hadn’t taken too well to the black-daggers’ insistence that Shaikar, lord and guardian of the deathless hells, wasn’t merely the brother of all the other gods in the southern pantheon but their creator and master.

  I shrugged, carefully noncommittal. “All I know about the gods is that right now they don’t like me. So trade us water, and let a pair of Khalmet-touched prospectors cross out of your clan’s territory before our misfortune spills over onto you.”

  The clansman’s gaze still rested on Kiran, and his eyes had gone opaque in a way I didn’t much like. Bad enough that Kiran’s bone-pale skin marked him as foreign in ancestry. But his pallor hadn’t changed a whit even after a solid month of traveling under the ferocious blaze of a high altitude sun. Pasty-skinned immigrants from the far north often wore sun-shroud charms to stop themselves from burning and blistering, but no sun-shroud was so strong as to prevent them from tanning entirely. I’d made Kiran grime his face, neck, and hands with coppery dirt to hide their lack of color, and clothe every inch of the rest of his skin despite the heat, but still. The last thing I wanted was for some tale of a bizarrely pallid young prospector to reach Ninavel.

  The clansman spoke. “True enough that we want none of strangers’ misfortune.” His eyes flicked back to me. “What other healing charms have you?”

  Not many. Some skinseal charms, a lone bloodfreeze…no, I wasn’t going to give up the one charm we had that could stop serious bleeding, and skinseals were common as sand, hardly worth ten decets. I did have one other charm that might work as a bargaining token.

  “I’ve a frostflower I’m willing to trade.” Weak like most Alathian charms, its magic likely to fade within an hour of being sparked, but it could save a man from death by heatstroke. I didn’t much like trading the frostflower before we finished traveling the desert, but the charm wasn’t half so vital as my warding bracelets.

  The clansman grunted in grudging approval. “Give me frostflower, bonemender, and the gemstones, and you’ll have your water.”

  “Done,” I said. “So long as you give us the water first.”

  The clansman spat on a palm and held it up—a gesture I’d seen Varkevian drovers use to mean a pact sealed. “Don’t worry, young ringtail. We black-daggers hold to our bargains. Give me your waterskins and wait here.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Not long,” the clansman said. “Certain of my kin are close. They carry enough water to fill your skins.”

  By close he probably meant watching from the rocks, ready to gut you if I order it. I surveyed the humped wall of boulders again and saw nothing. It didn’t stop the itch of my nerves.

  I shook the last few drops from my three waterskins into my mouth. Kiran had enough remaining in his skins to manage several gulping swallows before we handed the lot over. The brief taste of wetness on my tongue only made my parched throat cry out for more.

  The clansman took our waterskins and slipped back into the boulders. Kiran stood, raking his hair off his face. His eyes looked eerily blue against the dirt darkening his skin.

  “You look worried,” he said quietly.

  “He rolled over awfully easy at the end.” I kept my voice just as low and my eyes on the rocks above. Damn, but I wished I had a proper weapon, like a boneshatter charm, or a heart-rot. All I had besides the warding charms on my wrists was the knife at my belt—a simple, short blade meant for camp chores. I was a mountain outrider by trade, far better at scaling crags and icefields than fighting.

  “You think his clan is so superstitious they might decide to avoid any supposed misfortune by killing us instead of trading?” Kiran glanced around at the silent desert. One hand drifted up to his chest. I knew he was thinking of the amulet that lay hidden beneath his tightly laced shirt. The one powerful charm we possessed—it kept us hidden from the strongest of seeking spells and blocked Kiran’s mental bond with his master Ruslan. But it could only conceal Kiran so long
as he didn’t cast, and the charm wouldn’t do a damn thing to help us in a physical fight.

  “I don’t know how clansmen think.” I’d never been so far south before. “Wish Cara was here. She’s worked all the desert routes; she might’ve had dealings with clanfolk.”

  “I wish we were with her,” Kiran said with a wry ghost of a grin. “Traveling in the cool air of the mountains. Preferably wading along a stream, drinking whenever we felt like it.” He licked cracked lips and sighed.

  I heaved a sigh of my own, but not out of desire for snowmelt streams. Lover, climbing partner, the one friend in the world I’d learned to trust without reservation…it’d been two weeks now since Cara left us to head north, and the ache of her absence gnawed deeper with each passing day.

  She’d left for good reason, shepherding two orphaned kids to safety. One of those kids was a girl I’d vowed on my life to protect, the daughter of the outrider who not only had taught me everything I knew of the mountains but saved me in every possible sense of the word. I’d do damn near anything to keep Melly safe—a truth Ruslan had used against me before. Logic said Cara taking Melly out of reach of our enemies while I kept on with Kiran was the smart move. Cara meant to rejoin us after she got Melly and Janek settled with her kin in the Tarnspike Mountains up in Arkennland’s northern wilds.

  But any reunion would be months away, and I didn’t know if any of us would survive to see it.

  I turned to Kiran. “Can you sense how many clanfolk might be skulking in those rocks?”

  Kiran gave a hollow laugh. “Right now I can barely sense you. If I dared drop my barriers…” Yearning flashed across his face.

  “Never mind,” I said hastily. One hint to Ruslan that Kiran was no longer captive in Alathia, and we’d be fucked. I knelt beside my pack and beckoned Kiran to crouch with me as if we were checking over the pack’s contents in preparation for the trade.

  Moving my mouth as little as possible, I muttered, “You’re carrying the drug vial on you, not in your pack, I hope?”