NIghtbird (Empire of Masks Book 2) Read online

  Nightbird

  Empire of Masks book 2

  By

  Brock E. Deskins

  Copyright ©2017 by Brock E. Deskins

  Dingo Dog Publishing

  Cover Illustration Copyright © 2016

  Copyright, Legal Notice and Disclaimer:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Books by Brock E. Deskins

  THE SORCERER’S PATH

  The Sorcerer’s Ascension

  The Sorcerer’s Torment

  The Sorcerer’s Legacy

  The Sorcerer’s Vengeance

  The Sorcerer’s Scourge

  The Sorcerer’s Abyss

  The Sorcerer’s Return

  The Sorcerer’s Destiny

  BROOKLYN SHADOWS

  Shrouds of Darkness

  Blood Conspiracy

  THE TRANSCENDED CHRONICLES

  The Miscreant

  The Agent

  EMPIRE OF MASKS

  Highlords of Phaer

  Nightbird

  OTHER BOOKS BY BROCK E. DESKINS

  The Portal

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  The rebellion had been won, or at least concluded, in a matter of days. Whether anyone could be declared a winner remained to be seen. Freedom meant an end to the highlords’ reign, but also to everything the people of Eidolan once knew. It was more than just the beginning of a life of self-determination. The very world changed with the sorcerers’ destruction and the end of magic. Landscapes shifted, opening great chasms and raising new mountains almost overnight.

  Other evolutions took more time. Hedon had always been an unforgiving and challenging world, but with the highlords’ demise, it became downright murderous. Storms ravaged the land with increasing frequency. The creatures forced to survive such hellish environments, including much of humankind, changed with it, their transformations fueled by the massive release of arcane energy.

  The metamorphosis was Arikhan’s last act of magic, a spell of epic proportions designed to punish those who brought him and his ruling class down so that the survivors and their offspring would suffer an eternity for their treason.

  The leaders of the rebellion rose up to become the rulers of the four great cities. Thuul, being closest to Phaer when it fell, suffered the greatest. When Brelon finally reached his home aboard the Drake, he found nothing but ruin. As the storms relented, the city’s few survivors struck out across the harsh land in search of new homes, returning to their isolated, nomadic ways.

  Brelon and those who followed him headed north, packed aboard the Drake until it could no longer fly, its heart stone depleted with no known way to charge it. The Thuumian warrior and his crew completed the trek on foot, battling storms, wildlife, and human survivors turned marauders, fighting to stay alive. Out of the two thousand men and women Brelon led through the desert, only nine hundred seventy reached Velaroth where they found not salvation, but a city teetering on social collapse.

  While true magic died with the highlords, a new source of power emerged. Magic had not simply fled the world; it was captured and driven into the ground by the lightning inundating the great dust storms following the sorcerers’ demise. Dubbed mage glass, the artificial stone trapped power within its crystalline structure much like the sorcerer-created heart stones.

  Lowborn sorcerers like Lorbash and the other surviving pilots first discovered the mage glass’ magical properties and potential and learned how to harness it for practical purposes.

  A new kind of sorcerer arose called a techno-arcanist. Techno-arcanists discovered how to exploit the power of mage glass by channeling the gems’ energy through complex sigils and patterns carved into objects and inlaid with gold just as the sorcerers and shipwrights had done to make airships fly.

  It took decades to find arcanstones large enough and pure enough to power and lift an airship. However, the old airships had decayed beyond use and no one in Velaroth knew how to make a new one. Not only were the raw materials in short supply, the few techno-arcanists who arose within the city’s population were unable to recreate the complex geometric patterns needed to make an airship fly.

  Then one day, an airship from Nibbenar, that fabled city whose highborn sorcerer class had been second only to Phaer’s, appeared on the horizon. Nibbenar’s great craftsmen had unraveled the mystery and complexity of airship construction once again.

  Even though the cities worked together, harsh isolation had created a rift filled with deep distrust. Velaroth would not give up the secret of making powder or shimmersilk, which was required to recharge depleted arcanstones, Nibbenar refused to reveal how to make airships, Velaroth claimed the iron and void stone mines as their own and bartered their metalworking skills, and only Glisteran could keep the cities fed. All understood that the road to prosperity and even their continued survival meant cooperation, so they traded their accomplishments and resources but not their knowledge.

  The four surviving cities reached accords. Nibbenar would build airships from the materials Vulcrad provided. Velaroth would craft the shimmersilk sails and powder for cannons and muskets made from Vulcrad’s steel. Glisteran would once again be able to expand her fields and grow enough food to export to the other three cities in exchange for powder, weapons, and airships.

  Despite the cities’ cooperation and trade agreements, not all was harmonious. Beneath the celebration and seemingly warm reunions there lay a deep mistrust. In order to prevent any one city from dominating another, they created a unified military force comprised of soldiers and sailors from all four cities, five if one counted the former refugees from Thuul, but no one did.

  Within a few short years, the cities ceased looking like a mass of vagabonds squatting in ruins. The ability to trade raw materials once again created businesses, and some of those businesses produced the first real wealth and upper-class society in two centuries. It also created competition and bred envy and jealousy.

  As so often happens, the taste of success stirred an insatiable hunger for more wealth and power. Just as with the highlords’ reign, there grew divisions amongst the classes, if a bit more subtle. The ruling class eyed each other with covetous hearts and harbored feelings of disdain for the lowborn while hiding their true feelings behind polite smiles, civil tongues, and ceramic masks.

  Two hundred years ago, the lowborn fought a war for independence and to change the world into something better for all of mankind. In their attempt to do so, they nea
rly destroyed it, only to find that while roles shifted, little ever truly changed.

  CHAPTER 1

  (Year 197 AC)

  Kiera slipped between the deep pools of darkness dotting the third-floor hallway like the ghost of a long-dead previous owner, invisible to all senses. Crouching in the concealing shadow of a small table with a large vase atop it, she checked that the hood drawn over her head still covered her shoulder-length black hair and tugged the wrap higher up her short, slightly wide, freckled nose.

  Her dark blue eyes flicked from side to side as she cocked an ear toward the enormous ballroom ringed by the two upper-floor balconies. Heavy footsteps below gave away the position of one of several interior guards as he patrolled the luxurious mansion. The fifteen-year-old nightbird waited with bated breath as the footsteps receded into another room.

  Kiera stood and slinked to the door near the end of the hall. Using her lock picks, she tickled the pins until they relented to her gentle probing and released their hold on the bolt. Opening the door just enough to clear the bolt from its recess, she slid a parchment-thin strip of metal between the top of the door and the frame. As Kiera expected, the probe bumped up against a spring-loaded pin, which was certainly part of a windup alarm bell.

  Kiera gently pushed the door open, slipped inside like a dancer performing a pirouette, in order to keep the alarm pin depressed, and closed it behind her. Her heart thudded in her chest despite her having defeated three such alarms already, but this was by far the riskiest job she had ever done and her nerves had been raw from the start.

  Kiera was no stranger to pilfering. Her indoctrination into the world of petty crime started when she was just a child at the Wayward House for Orphaned Waifs. Care for Velaroth’s unfortunate children was supposed to be paid for by the city ministry through taxes and private donations. However, as with any business, there were side channels who needed paid as well.

  It was said you could not take a piss in Velaroth without paying at least three people: the man who owned the bucket, the one who emptied the bucket, and whoever owned the hole into which it was dumped, and the Wayward House was no different. If you wanted to eat more than the most basic gruel, you paid the kitchen staff. If you wanted more than a single, moth-eaten blanket to increase your chances of making it through the winter without contracting and possibly dying of some virulent illness, you paid the housemaster.

  The worst one, the one every smart child paid before anyone else, was Remus Shakely. Remus was a nobody. A big, ham-fisted, groping pervert of a nobody orderly. He stalked the halls at night to make sure everyone stayed in their beds unless they were going out to earn their tributes. Anyone who could not pay in coin paid in flesh. The kind of flesh depended on your age and usually gender, but not always.

  It only took Kiera a few beatings to learn that paying in coin was vastly preferable to paying in flesh no matter what it took to get it. Even so, she suffered more than her fair share of beatings thanks to an inability to check her temper and keep her mouth shut.

  That ended two years ago when she and her two brothers decided it was time they all left the Wayward House together. Wesley and Russel were not her real brothers, but they were the closest thing to family she knew. Wesley and Russel were brothers in blood. They had a family before coming to the Wayward House when Wesley was nine and Russel was seven. That was before their father had died in an accident at his job. Illness had taken their mother a few years before.

  Despite being just a year older than Russel and three years younger than Wesley, Kiera became something like a big sister or even mother to them. Wesley was a terrible thief and was almost always short on Remus’ tribute, partly because he had to pay for both him and Russel on account of Russel being…special.

  Russel never talked. Kiera did not know if he could. When he did decide he needed to speak it was in sign. Mostly, he sat on his bed with his hands over his ears and rocked back and forth.

  When Wesley came up short, Remus took his tribute in flesh. Wesley took the floggings in stride, but Remus was not always satisfied with just beatings. Probably because Wesley did not cry enough when he got them. Wesley and Russel were oddballs, and being an oddball herself, Kiera took a liking to them. It was a lot of work, but she managed to placate Remus with her tributes enough to cover all three of them when Wesley needed the help.

  When Wesley turned sixteen and was forced to leave Wayward House, Kiera and Russel decided to go with him. Wesley would not leave Russel behind and Russel could not manage without him. Kiera knew that Wesley and Russel would never survive on their own, so she left Wayward House telling Remus she and Russel were going on a job and never returned.

  They each handled their experience at Wayward House differently. Wesley sought to numb himself to the abuse through drugs. Kiera turned inward, shielding herself against pain and fear with a cloak of anger and the determination to be strong enough so that no one could hurt her again. While her acerbic disposition was effective at keeping some threats away, it also prevented her from forming anything resembling a close relationship. Russel simply vanished inside his own mind.

  Still being under the age of sixteen, she and Russel were considered fugitives. If the gendarmes caught her or Russel out on the streets, they would immediately return them to the home where they would be severely punished and kept as prisoners until they became of age. Kiera was not too worried. Russel never left the derelict airship where they lived and she never got caught. Tonight would be no exception despite the job’s high risk.

  Hedon’s twin moons poured bluish light through the large room’s pair of windows and illuminated the two forms sleeping in separate beds. The larger of the two filled the bedchamber with rasping, half-choked snoring. Moving as slowly and silently across the chamber as the moons’ orbit, Kiera crept to the big dresser at the end of the room opposite the beds.

  A large wooden jewelry box inlaid with gold and semi-precious stones rested atop the dresser. The lock was simple compared to the ones in the doors she had already bypassed, and she had it unlocked in less than a minute. Kiera used the thin strip of metal to probe beneath the lid and felt it catch on something partway down one side.

  “Paranoid much?” Kiera whispered to herself.

  She froze when the master of the house snorted and stirred. When his rattling snoring returned, she held the alarm pin down with the probe and opened the box. A broad smile crept across her face as she gazed at the glittering jewelry inside. Kiera jammed a small nail between the alarm pin and the box’s frame to keep it depressed so she could free her other hand.

  Retrieving a small sack from her pocket, she carefully plucked the valuables from the box and dropped them into the bag. Satisfied with her haul and not wanting to risk setting off any alarms attached to the box’s two drawers, Kiera lowered the lid and tiptoed toward the windows off to her left.

  All she needed to do was slip out of the window and scale the wall surrounding the mansion. Once she was on the street, she was all but home free with enough loot to satisfy Nimat, Velaroth’s self-proclaimed underlord, for at least a few months. Kiera stepped up to the window, slim probe in hand, and bent forward to slip it into the jamb to check for the inevitable alarm trigger. Her heart lurched when she felt the floorboard beneath her soft-soled shoe dip ever so slightly.

  “Shit.”

  The shifting floorboard depressed the catch hidden beneath it, releasing the pin holding the spring-loaded alarm bell hammer. Now free, the hammer beat against the bell like a deranged blacksmith. The master and mistress of the house bolted upright in their beds, startled awake by the bell’s angry klaxon.

  The lady of the house spied Kiera next to the window and released a shriek that nearly drowned out the alarm. The man cursed, rolled his bulk from the bed with surprising speed if not grace, and felt for a flintlock pistol resting on the nightstand.

  Kiera lunged for the window but dropped to the floor when she heard the flintlock’s hammer cock back. The room lit up with
the flash of the discharge and filled with smoke. Shattered glass rained down onto Kiera’s back when the ball shattered the window.

  “Guards! Intruder!” the man sputtered as he fumbled with his bag of powder and shot.

  Kiera bolted for the window once again only to find two men on the ground aiming their muskets at her. She threw herself away from the window and dropped back onto the floor as one ball struck the wall above her head and the other shattered a section of the frame to her right.

  The man cocked his pistol back and swung it about. “Where’d ya go, you little rat?”

  Kiera rolled beneath the still shrieking wife’s bed and kept crawling until she saw the man’s pudgy ankles sticking out from beneath his long nightshirt. She grabbed one ankle with both her hands, her fingers sinking into the puffy flesh, and yanked as hard as she could.

  The man cried out, toppled backward onto his rump, and discharged his pistol into the ceiling. Kiera swung her legs out from beneath the bed, kicked him in his prodigious gut with both feet, and blasted the wind from him before running for the door.

  Kiera left the man wheezing and gasping for breath. She burst out of the bedroom and into the hall to find a pair of men charging up the stairwell to her right. She waited for them to reach the landing she was on and start running toward her before vaulting the balcony banister and hopping over the side.

  One of the armed men shouted at her to stop. The other fired his musket. Kiera felt a powerful tug on the pouch full of pilfered jewels tied to her belt when the ball ripped through it. Several pieces jettisoned out into the open room behind her and chimed as they struck the floor.

  She dropped below the railing, caught the second-floor banister, and made to jump to the ballroom floor in hopes of retrieving at least some of her precious loot. Another man ran in and raised his musket. Kiera swung her legs over the second-floor railing and threw herself onto the landing as the lead ball shattered the wood beneath her left hand.