Queen of the Night Guild Read online

  Queen of the Night Guild

  Book Three in the Queen of Thieves Series

  Andy Peloquin

  Copyright © 2017 by Andy Peloquin

  Kindle Edition

  Text by Andy Peloquin

  Published by Dragonblade Publishing, Inc.

  Reproduction of any kind except where it pertains to short quotes in relation to advertising or promotion is strictly prohibited.

  All Rights Reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  License Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it or borrow it, or it was not purchased for you and given as a gift for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. If this book was purchased on any unauthorized platform, then it is a pirated and/or unauthorized copy and violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Do not purchase or accept pirated copies. Thank you for respecting the author’s hard work.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Books from Dragonblade Publishing

  Dedications

  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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Child of the Night Guild

  A Word from the Author

  Excerpt from Traitors’ Fate

  About Traitors’ Fate

  About the Author

  Dedications

  For Carolina, the one who makes it all matter.

  Sign Up for my Private Reader List to get exclusive short stories and previews in the Queen of Thieves and my other series.

  Chapter 1

  Flames of a sickly blue-green consumed Old Town Market, and Ilanna’s world with it. Fear rooted her to the spot. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She could only stand on the Praamis rooftops and watch the fire consume everything she held dear.

  The rumble of a collapsing building snapped her from her stupor.

  “Kodyn!” She raced toward her home with speed borne of desperation. She ducked under eaves, leapt up walls, and darted across the bridges of the Hawk’s Highway, not caring that a single
misstep could send her plummeting. She had only one thought: save her son.

  An inferno consumed Old Town Market. To circumvent the blazing marketplace would cost her precious minutes. Without hesitation, she slithered down a rope and sprinted directly toward the fire. Smoke hung thick and heavy in the air, blotting out the stars. Her body ached from the frenzied pace, but she had no time to slow. Kodyn needed her.

  Tongues of green fire licked at her as she passed. The wind that rushed through the burning stalls, tents, and shops blasted her with the heat of a smith’s furnace. Covering her face with her cloak, she rushed through the eerily-colored blaze.

  People shouted and cried, and pack animals added their screams to the chaos. Figures rushed past her in a blur. Ilanna twisted out of the path of a burning wagon pulled by terrified horses. Hands grabbed at her, but she ripped free of the grasp and shoved at the person. A cry of pain echoed in her ears, accompanied by the sound of a collapsing stall. Nothing mattered but reaching her child in time.

  She barreled her way through the marketplace and dashed up the street that led to her house. Fire consumed her front gate. Lungs burning, she raced around the back and bounded over the wall. Her eyes widened in horror. It seemed as if the stone walls themselves burned. A pillar of green fire reached devouring fingers toward her.

  Instinct sent her hurtling toward the back door. She crashed through it and into a world filled with blinding smoke and blistering flame. The kitchen was ablaze, but the fire hadn’t yet reached the stairs leading to the stuffy room on the second floor. The room where Kodyn and Ria slept.

  A loud crack sounded overhead, and she jumped to one side as a roof beam collapsed. Sparks flew up, stinging her eyes and scorching her hands. The roof crackled and groaned, sagging above the stuffed armchair. Cloth and wool burned along with the rest of her home.

  Though her lungs begged for air, she forced herself deeper into the blaze. She had to get Kodyn and Ria out. Her feet flew up the stairs, but she hadn’t made it halfway up before the upper level buckled. She had a heartbeat to leap to one side to avoid being dragged down by the crumbling staircase.

  Sharp pain lanced up her right leg as she landed. She collapsed but leapt up a heartbeat later, eyes fixed on the door that led to Kodyn’s room. She had no way to get up there. No way to save him.

  “Kodyn!” Her cry cut off in a choked cough. The eerie, green flames gave off a smoke so thick it clung to her body and seeped through her skin. Her stomach heaved and twisted. In desperation, she cast around for anything she could use to get up to the second level. Ria and Kodyn needed her. She had to reach them.

  But the fire consumed everything. There was no way to save them.

  The blaze surged toward her, as if sensing fresh fuel to devour in its all-consuming fury. She hacked and gagged in the thick smoke. The lack of oxygen set her head whirling. Was she imagining it, or did she hear a faint scream?

  The stench of burning hair and cloth filled her nostrils. She had seconds before the fire engulfed her. Instinct screamed at her to flee.

  Her gaze darted up to the second level. How can I leave him? She had no choice.

  She staggered toward the back door on leaden feet. A cold numbness filled her. She moved without thinking, her body directing her as her mind collapsed. She sank to her knees in the stream that cut through her garden. With her back against the wall, she watched the blue-green fire consume her house.

  A figure appeared from the swirling smoke. A man with a soot-stained face knelt before her. His mouth moved but she heard nothing. The crackling flames and the pounding of her heart drowned out all other sound.

  The hypnotic dance of fire held her rapt. It seemed she watched the house burn from behind her own eyes. Sorrow held her captive within her own body. She could do nothing but stare in horror as the fire destroyed her world.

  * * *

  Ilanna knelt in the ashes of her life. The fire had cooled hours ago, but she’d been unable to force herself to move. Now, beside the remnants of the armchair—the chair where she’d sat with her mother, where she’d read stories to Kodyn—her mind rejected the truth. She was in a stranger’s house, staring down at the charred pages of someone else’s book. The ashen shards of clay roof tile belonged to someone else. Anyone else. They couldn’t be hers.

  Occasional twinges ran up her arms and along her back. Burns turned the skin on her legs stiff, made each movement misery. A crumbling roof beam crashed to the ground a hand’s breadth from her foot. She didn’t move. Better it land on her head and put an end to it all. She would be with Kodyn then.

  Hands gripped her arms and pulled her to her feet. She looked around in a daze, her mind barely registering the faces of those dragging her into the garden. Her house gave an ominous rumble and collapsed in a shower of dust, ash, and flying sparks.

  Everything she’d loved was in that house. Kodyn, the son she could not give up even though she refused to raise him in the Night Guild. Ria, the dark-skinned Ghandian girl she’d rescued from a brothel and grown to care for. Now, the fire had taken it all. She had nothing left.

  Her eyes fell on an object lying in the garden. She ripped free of the men’s grasps and scooped it up. The wooden hawk had escaped the worst of the blaze. It was all that remained of Kodyn, her little hawk.

  She allowed herself to be pulled away then. The men half-carried her through the collapsed front gate and up the street, away from Old Town Market. A crowd had gathered there, faces as grey as the embers of their homes. A pair of matrons surged toward her with blankets and water skins. Ilanna sagged into their arms. They hauled her into a nearby warehouse and settled her into a corner, pressing a crust of bread into her hands. Ilanna stared at it in mute silence. She had no words to offer thanks, no strength to even nod her head. She could only sit and stare at her soot-stained hands.

  She was Ilanna, Journeyman of House Hawk, a legend in the Night Guild. She had climbed the impossible heights of the Black Spire, defied the Secret Keepers by stealing from the Temple of Whispers, stolen from the most impenetrable place in the city. Yet she couldn’t even save the ones who mattered most.

  She clutched Kodyn’s wooden hawk in a death grip. The fire that consumed him had also devoured everything she had to remember him by. Only this little toy, stolen for him years earlier, had survived. She clung to it like a dying man grasped for one more breath.

  How long she sat there, mute and motionless, she had no idea. Her eyes never left the scorched figurine. Her world had crumbled overnight.

  “Ilanna?”

  The sound of her name filtered into her brain. She raised her eyes.

  “Ilanna, is that you?”

  The man who knelt before her seemed somehow familiar. The small part of her mind that still functioned catalogued his features: a shock of dark hair, sharp features, fingers that refused to stop moving, and orange stitching on his scruffy clothing. A Fox.

  Idan. One of the Foxes who’d trained her in the art of picking pockets more than a decade earlier.

  She opened her mouth to answer, but no words came out.

  “Keeper’s teeth, it is you.” Idan searched her eyes. “Are you hurt?”

  Ilanna looked down at her hands. Beneath the soot and ash, burned skin had begun to peel away. The pain hadn’t yet penetrated her numb mind. Shock and sorrow kept everything else at bay.

  The presence of a fellow Journeyman tugged at her thoughts. If anyone thought to question what brought her to Old Town Market—more specifically, to the house where they’d found her—what would she say to that? She had no answer. Worse, she could not begin to think of anything beyond her grief.

  “She’s in shock.” A woman in the white robes of a Sister of Mercy, priestess of the Lonely Goddess, crouched before Ilanna. “Here, let me take a look.” The woman pried open Ilanna’s fingers. “Not burned too badly, but best we put some salve on it before the burns stiffen.”

  The wooden figurine dropped from her numb fingers, and Ilanna came to life long
enough to snatch at it. She stuffed it into her breast pocket. Only once she knew it was safe did she allow the Sister of Mercy to tend to her burns.

  “Can you stand?” The white-robed woman tugged at her arm. Idan slipped his hand under her armpit and helped lever her upright.

  “Good.” The Sister of Mercy nodded. “Get her to walk around. Talk to her. Moving her body will help her mind to recover.”

  Idan nodded. “I will. But my friend…”

  “Which one is he?” The priestess glanced around.

  Idan pointed to a shivering lump of blackened flesh huddled on a nearby cot. “Tunn was sleeping in an alley near the market when…” He swallowed and looked away.

  A frown flitted across the Sister of Mercy’s face, but she nodded. “I will lend him what succor I can. Go, take your friend home.”

  Home. The word felt like a blow to the gut. She had no home. The fire had devoured it. She had nothing left.

  “Come on, Ilanna.” Idan guided her through the cots and blankets laid out on the ground. “Let’s get you back to the Night Guild,” he whispered.

  The Night Guild. Thieves, murderers, poisoners, and thugs. Her home for over fifteen years. Her father had sold her in payment of his debts and, in doing so, condemned her to a life of slavery. Oh, the Night Guild dressed it up as earning a living, but they’d held her captive since her eighth nameday.

  Until last night. Last night, she had done the unthinkable, the impossible. She had stolen the golden sarcophagus of Lady Auslan, worth two million imperials. More than enough to buy her freedom. She’d had enough gold to get away from her past and start a future with Kodyn. And Ria.

  What did she have now? A fortune in gold and no one to share it with. All that remained of the life she had dreamed of was this charred lump of wood. The Night Guild had stopped being home the day she gave birth to her son. Now, she would return to the cold earthen walls of the Guild tunnels. To her stuffy, windowless room and her empty bed. She’d survived this long because she’d had Kodyn to cling to. Everything she’d done had been for him. Without him, what did she have to live for?

  Idan kept up a stream of conversation, but his voice blended with the background hum of the city around her. The city of Praamis bustled in the daylight. She heard nothing, saw nothing. Felt nothing. The world faded into a blur. Only Idan’s grip on her arm kept her placing one unfeeling foot before the other.