Branded (Master of All Book 1)

by Simon Archer

  “Shikun!” I cried out as the acid began to pool up in the shallow bowl of the floor. It was only an inch deep now, but we only had six inches tops before there wouldn’t be a safe place to stand without flying or stuffing ourselves into niches. “Take to the air and see if you can pry or rip any stone out of the walls! Try at the points between the niches, the rock is thinnest there!”

  “Yes, William, I’ll do my best!” The draconian launched herself into the air again, straight toward one of the carved sections of stone in the opposite wall. Me, I turned toward the wall I was against and gripped Libritas tight.

  “I don’t mean to rush, Lib, but you’ve had a few moments,” I sent to my Brand. “We need answers, or we’re done.”

  There was a moment of silence that hung in the air. Well, relative silence, because the hissing of acid was a constant, as was the sound of Shikun straining against the stone wall. I swore I heard a crack of rock, but whatever headway she was making, it wasn’t near fast enough.

  Then Lib’s voice cried out in my ear. “I have it! These symbols do as the Weaver said, but more importantly to us, they are a runic matrix.”

  “In Uplander, please,” I sent back.

  I could almost hear the roll of Libritas’s non-existent eyes. “Yes, well, to put it simply, all the runes must be intact to maintain the strength of the stone.”

  “And let me guess.” My hand searched the wall and found the nearest carving I could find. “We can overwrite these runes just like we can overwrite brands?”

  “Indeed, William!” The Brand of Freedom sounded truly proud. “You’re catching on quickly!”

  I didn’t waste time with a reply, not with the acid mere inches from my heels now. I simply shifted my grip on Libritas to hold her by the metal shaft, close to her runic tip, took a deep breath to focus on her magic, then slammed Lib into the rune I had found.

  There was a flash of golden light and a rush of power through Lib as she overwrote the strange rune with her gold-and-silver spiral mark. From there, Lib’s light ran like electricity through a circuit, coursing through the runes that marked the walls.

  The effect was drastic and immediate. The hissing and smoking from the acid intensified crazily, cutting into the stone faster than it could fill the room. More than that, a thunderous crack of stone filled my ears from behind as Shikun tore the now-weakened stone asunder with her draconic strength.

  I let out the breath I had been holding and turned around carefully to see the dragon-girl hefting a large hunk of stone. I nodded to Shikun, and she spun in mid-air and hurled the big chunk of rock right into the acid-pouring niche to buy us more time. As for me, I took a deep breath, tensed up, and leapt across the pool of acid. I landed nimbly on the small strip of safety near the hinges of the doors.

  I grinned as I summoned up Libritas’s full heat and drove my Brand into the stone by the edge of the door. As I expected, without the magic protecting it, Libritas melted into the rock like a hot knife through butter. It was slow going, but it sped up a moment later when Shikun flew above me and unleashed her talons. It was like a rock wyrm going to work.

  “No more boasts, Weaver?” I called out as we cut through the last strip of stone around the hinges. The fact he didn’t respond with a fresh villainous monologue told me that he was panicking now. “Don’t worry, we’ll be with you in a moment.”

  With that, I jammed Libritas clean through the wall at the lower hinge as Shikun pried her claws around the upper hinge. We both sucked in a breath then heaved, me using Lib as an enchanted crowbar while Shikun pulled back with powerful flaps of her flaming wings.

  There was one last shriek of metal and stone before the alien metal flopped forward, crashing down into the pool of acid to reveal the chamber beyond.

  Without another word, I leapt over the door and into the heart of the Weaver’s lair with Shikun right behind me.

  26

  The smell hit me before anything else, a strange mix of ancient rot, spilled blood, and fresh burning incense. It reminded me of a teenager trying to hide his pot smoking from a nosy mom, well, if pot smoking involved torture and murder. We pushed through that stomach-churning aroma and out of a short connecting hallway into another vast chamber, and unlike the acid room, this one was truly vast.

  The vault was a long rectangular room, maybe half a football field deep and thirty paces wide. Unlike the rest of the tunnels and catacombs, this room was well-lit by dozens of lit torches and burning braziers, enough to show the crumbling arches that supported the soaring ceiling above our heads. The back end of the room was lined with bookcases, most of which were empty or filled with moldering, web-covered mounds of… something foul. However, there were still plenty of books and scrolls still there, and several more bundles of them set out in front of the shelves, no doubt ready to be taken with the Weaver in his escape.

  It was the front section of the room right before us that made my anger for the Weaver burst into a raging fire. What was laid out before us was a literal medieval torture chamber. A pitted iron rack was laden with various pokers, blades, pliers, brands, and other torture implements. A thick, wooden chair festooned with metal bands, screws, and adjustable spreaders sat against one wall alongside a series of chains mounted to the wall. On the opposite side, an iron maiden hung open, viscous fluids dripping from its spikes, while next to that was a large wooden wheel held up in a metal brace of some kind, like a child’s gyroscope toy. That might have been innocent enough if not for the manacles that hung from four equidistant points on the ring or the rusty stains of dried blood that soaked both into the wood and stone beneath.

  The only thing that separated the two halves of the room was a moldering red carpet thrown haphazardly from wall-to-wall.

  I didn’t let that horrific scene distract me from my quarry. Not that it was hard to find him as the four-armed spider-man scuttled back and forth across the library area of the lair. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Weaver, now that I finally had a chance to see him, was how unremarkable he looked. Well, unremarkable for an ettercap, that is. Unlike Uruk, who had dressed in royal silken robes that made him stand out among his orcs, the Weaver was simply garbed in the same rough robes and mismatched bits of kit as the bandits he had sent before him.

  Two things did catch my eye about him, though. The first and most obvious was the length of twisted steel he gripped tightly in one of his right hands. While Libritas was shining, this Brand was a coal black thing that almost seemed to eat the surrounding light, and where Lib’s runic tip was made of beautiful spiraling lines and swooping circles, Karthas’s head was a geometrically precise spider-web pattern that glowed a dull red.

  The second thing that stood out about the Weaver was his eyes. They were the same shiny compound things as the other ettercaps, but there was a spark of malevolent cunning in them.

  He saw us, and we saw him, and then all Hell broke loose. Shikun let out a roar of pure fury as she launched herself into the air with a beat of her wings. In her wake, I broke into a sprint as Libritas burst into her full radiance, while the Weaver let out a clicking hiss of alarm as he scuttled toward the rear of the vault.

  “Amalthea!” he cried out, all pretense of calculated calm gone now. “Save me, you lazy cow!”

  At those words, before Shikun was even half-way across the room, the carpet seemed to shift as a loud yawn echoed through the room. The air above the carpet started to shimmer like heat coming off desert sands, and my instincts immediately screamed an alarm of danger in my head. I slammed on the breaks, skidding to a halt well short of the shimmer as I called out to Shikun.

  “Stop! It’s another trap!”

  The dragon-girl might have wanted to crush the Weaver in her claws, but my words managed to cut through her fury. She twisted in mid-air as her fiery wings flapped in a hard backbeat, abruptly stopping her forward momentum before she barreled into the shimmering form. However, the rippling distortion wasn’t content in staying still, and before Shik
un could retreat, it pounced forward, coming into full sight as it swatted the draconian with a leonine paw.

  The wondrously terrifying figure that knocked Shikun from the air like a cat toy looked almost exactly like a sphinx from Earth mythology and was most definitely female. From the waist down, Amalthea had the form of a giant lioness with tawny golden fur, while her torso was that of a well-proportioned human woman before her forearms turned leonine once more. Immense eagle wings with pearly white feathers spread almost the length of the room as the sphinx sat back on her haunches, long black hair wreathing a lazily grinning face, a feline glint to her steel-grey eyes. In all, Amalthea had to be at least ten feet tall as she sat before us, maybe taller.

  Unlike the other enslaved women I had encountered, she was clothed in riches and finery, well, in as much as she was clothed considering her form. White silk wrappings covered her breasts, while a collar made from gold and inlaid with precious stones hung around her neck in an almost Egyptian style. Beaten copper disks adorned her ears, while a strange, black iron halo hovered over her head, spikes protruding from its edges.

  I recognized it immediately as an imitation of the thorny brand that had scarred Petra and stood prominently on Amalthea’s left paw: the mark of Khaba va’Khem.

  Fortunately, Shikun seemed completely uninjured by the sphinx’s slap and was already starting to get to her feet. I grabbed her shoulder and helped her the rest of the way up as the laziness in Amalthea’s gaze turned to a hard sternness.

  “Continue your packing, Weaver,” the sphinx declared, her rich voice rolling out with a certain feline purr to it. “As for you, William Tyler, and you, Shikun the, well, formerly wingless… I cannot allow you to pass.”

  Shikun growled, silver flames puffing out of her mouth and nose as she barked back, “I don’t want to fight you, Amalthea, but if I have to burn my way right through you to get to him…”

  “If you do not wish to fight, Shikun, then do not cross this space,” Amalthea purred as she shredded the carpet with one swipe of her claws. What had once been hidden by the carpet was another matrix of runes, but unlike the ones in the acid chamber, these were very new and filled with a luminous green light that made me think of how radiation looked in a cartoon. “It is not simply my might that guards the way, but the magic of the Khalati Record I wove into the very stone.”

  “Hold on, Shikun,” I warned as I put a calming hand on her shoulder. “That sounds like some serious shit right there.”

  “It is indeed,” Libritas sent into my mind in almost perfect synch with Amalthea who said the same thing aloud. My Brand kept explaining, though.

  “The sphinxes of Etria are all connected to the Khalati Record,” she sent rapidly. “It’s… difficult to explain, think of it as a mystical repository of all the written knowledge in Etria. What that means right now is that the sphinxes’ knowledge of magical symbology and runes is second to none. Whatever that matrix is set to do, it will be incredibly powerful and destructive.”

  I nodded at that. While I understood Shikun’s need for revenge, I wanted to avoid a pitched battle now more than ever. I didn’t want either woman hurt, especially with the Black Runes pulling the strings, and I really didn’t trust this chamber to hold up to a pitched battle. Shikun was amazingly strong and destructive, I knew that well, and from what Lib just told me, we didn’t want to trigger those runes. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if we wound up buried down in these tunnels.

  Still, we had to try something. While Amalthea had us in a stalemate, I could hear the Weaver cackling madly as he kept at his work, and a moment later, the distinct sound of stone grinding on stone split the air. No doubt it was that secret escape route Shikun had told me about.

  “Just be thankful that Master Khaba has not prioritized your destruction, William Tyler,” Amalthea purred with a sly smile. “You are a very well formed Uplander, and I would not wish to see you rendered to your component atoms by my magic.”

  Shikun bristled and tensed, her dragon tail lashing as her wings seemed to burn hotter. “Give me the order, William,” she growled. “I know I can break through!”

  I shook my head. “No, we’re not going to risk it.” My eyes were locked not on Amalthea’s face but on her paws as she shifted on her haunches. No, she was too careful, never letting even a bit of her brand pass beyond the runes, while never revealing enough of the matrix to allow a clear strike to dispel them with Lib. “And we’re not going to risk Amalthea’s life either.”

  “Noble of you,” the sphinx acknowledged. “If only we had met under better circumstances… before…” A faint sigh escaped her lips as she curled in her branded paw, and for a moment, I could see past the haughty and proud veneer to the scarred, enslaved girl beneath it still hoping for her freedom.

  I wasn’t the only one who noticed that gesture. Shikun’s fierce expression softened as well even as her muscles relaxed… and then the Weaver ruined the moment by letting out another cackle.

  “Weak softskins, all of you!” The grinding sound picked up intensity, and I could now see where the back wall of the vault was slowly splitting apart. “Your sympathy for your fellows is your weakness!”

  The Weaver could have already made a break for it, but he couldn’t exactly flee alone, could he? He needed Amalthea to escape because otherwise, we’d simply backtrack and hunt him down with Shikun’s wings giving us the advantage. That gave us a precious few more minutes to figure this out.

  That thought made me focus more on Amalthea. She was the key to his escape… and that’s when I started thinking about sphinxes and the legends surrounding them. Earth mythology clearly drew a lot from the reality of Etria’s magic and creatures… and that meant…

  “Lib!” I cried out mentally as I had what I hoped was a real eureka moment. “Etrian sphinxes, are they like the Earth legends? The whole guardian of Thebes thing?”

  “Indeed.” Thank God that Libritas could do more than read my mental words because she seemed to grasp my meaning without needing to hear the entire legend. “Sphinxes are fascinated by words, language, and wordplay due to their connection to the Khalati Record, and if asked to engage a contest of words, they are compelled to…” She let out a mental gasp. “Gods, I am a fool! William, yes, that is our best hope!”

  Shikun was stalking from side to side, almost ready to risk the field of death and a battle with Amalthea anyway, when I strode past her, chin held high and Libritas glowing at my side. The sphinx tilted her head curiously at me while Shikun gasped in worry as I literally toed the line of the runic matrix.

  “Amalthea,” I shouted upward, “want to have a little friendly competition? Like, say, a riddle game?”

  The dragon-girl’s gasp turned into a weird little cough of confusion, but the Weaver realized what was about to happen because his mocking laughter cut off immediately.

  “Do not dare, slave!” the spider-man shouted. “Khaba va’Khem--”

  “--is not here, Weaver.” Amalthea’s voice boomed through the vault and reverberated off the walls before it returned to a regal tone. “I would be interested in this little game of yours, William Tyler. What would be the rules?”

  “Simple,” I said with a grin. “We ask each other riddles, one at a time, first one of us that can’t answer loses. Should be an easy win for someone as obviously learned as you, mighty sphinx.” I shrugged helplessly. “But what other chance do we have when faced with your magic?”

  Amalthea preened as she reclined forward, her wings folding along her back as her leonine tail began to swish happily. “Naturally. I agree to these rules, and in my great generosity, I will even let you ask the first riddle.” She set her chin on her crossed paws. “What, then, is the wager?”

  The Weaver kept ranting behind her, Karthas burning red hot in his hand as he waved the Brand menacingly, but the sphinx ignored him, and so did I.

  “Also simple.” I pointed at Amalthea’s paws. “I win, you turn off your little death spell here and then hold yo
ur left paw out for me. You win, you don’t just get to leave peacefully with the Weaver, but Libritas and I will go with you as well. No fighting, no muss, a perfect present for your master.”

  “William, no!” Shikun hissed in my ear, her hand gripped around my shoulder in fear for me. “The legends say that sphinxes know everything. There’s no way you can beat her and… You can’t… I… I can’t risk losing you! Not now, not after we just… we--”

  I would have been afraid too if I was her… because she didn’t know that I had what I hoped was an ace up my sleeve. To assuage her fear, I cut her off by taking her hand in mine, turning towards her, and then pulling her in for a swift, hard kiss. The gesture took her by surprise for only a moment before she leaned into it, her arms going around my neck as mine looped around her waist. Shikun’s lips tasted of cinnamon and exotic spice, and the dragon-fire in her mouth only added an invigorating warmth to our kiss.

  “Very well, William Tyler,” Amalthea called from above. “I accept your wager.”

  Shikun and I reluctantly pulled apart, but she kept one of my hands tight in her grip as we turned to the sphinx together.

  “Okay, then let’s get this show on the road,” I called back. “You ready, Amalthea?”

  The Weaver’s ranting ended abruptly, and he rushed around behind the sphinx, either in a panic or preparing some last surprise for us, but I wasn’t worried, not anymore. I’d either stump Amalthea with this, which would mean the Weaver was toast no matter what he was up to, or Amalthea would stump me, in which case nothing we could do would matter.

  “Ask your first riddle,” the sphinx said as she began to wash her unbranded paw. “Please, start strong. I hope to actually be challenged this time.”