Ironhand (Taurin's Chosen Book 2) Read online

  And something else—the cool buzz of banish lights, the burning smell of wardwoman’s magic.

  For an instant, I’m back in the alleyway behind my shop, with trolley wheels clattering away in the distance and an eerie man howling in the streets.

  I shake the memory from my head, then stumble as the ground plunges beneath me.

  “Steps,” says a soldier, belatedly.

  I go down slowly, like an old man, feeling each step with a foot. I’m still only half-awake.

  I step into oozing mud. It spreads over my sandaled foot, squelches between my toes. I’m out of the sun, in a small, dark, damp place.

  The dregs of Angel Eye Lake?

  The soldiers shove, and I fall, my knees striking something hard that shivers and rings out.

  Some kind of cage?

  The blindfold slips, and I catch sight of a metal grate under my feet before I’m hoisted up. A squeal and a crash, and the cage jerks, starts to descend.

  A lift.

  I sway, and my arm brushes against the cage bars. Waiting spiders grab at the metal, but a soldier pushes me away from the edge. The spiders resettle my weight, to stabilize me.

  We grind to a stop, and the soldiers push and pull me out of the lift. There’s a low crackle in the air, a whisper-glide against my skin.

  My blindfold, loosened, falls from my eyes.

  For a moment, I think I’ve stepped back into Highwind.

  The ghost flames of banish lights flicker against black and glassy walls. Their reflections remind me of the safe road, and a chill goes over my flesh.

  Machinery hums in the shadows, above the quiet chuckle of water lapping against the walls.

  I glance up at the chamber ceiling and note the supports. Lamps form a ring in the middle of the chamber; two people are silhouetted against them.

  I’m nudged toward them, and snatches of their conversation come to me like the tatters of warding ribbons.

  The lighted end of a cigar burns like a tiny star. “… the body can take only so much stress. It’s a one-way road, so far. Any attempts to reverse it… were not pretty…” The Director drops the butt and grinds it under his heel.

  “… so they’re forever fixed in the form …” The voice is accented, but speaks fluent Highwinder. Incredulously I place it: Daral’s voice, wavering with echoes or an emotion I can’t fix.

  “What in Nine Hells are you doing here?” I growl. I don’t need to fake the anger in my voice.

  “Ah, Kato, so quick to suspicion and rage. My southern colleague here,”—the Director pats Daral’s shoulder as if the other man were the protégé and he the fond mentor—“is here to assist in this grand endeavor. Isn’t it fitting that the university of Jalinoor be represented? Daral here has read my work and has such interesting ideas.” The Director beams; Daral’s face is closed and inscrutable.

  What is he playing at?

  “We haven’t been able to do much with this opening,” the Director says to Daral. “No seams, no edges—it seems to have grown out of the surrounding rock, though it is definitely not stone. Look here.”

  I’m nudged into the ring of lamps behind the two men. Light dances on a large disc, big enough to comfortably admit a man, set in the floor. The Director is right about the make of it—this cross between crystal and metal, that is somehow both and neither at the same time. The way it scatters light in some places, absorbs it in others, the shine of it—all are alien and beyond describing.

  And that’s nothing compared to the way it makes me feel—the tug of it on my soul, a feeling of awe and dread and humbleness and mystery.

  Angel craft.

  The Director squats, points to markings on the circle. “Can’t make head nor tail of those, but then I don’t have your linguistic training.”

  Daral stoops, and peers. His eyes narrow, and a glint comes into them. His lips part, then he shakes his head. “That symbol there is traditionally interpreted as angel, and there look to be symbols for protection and light… but I can’t help you beyond that.”

  Liar.

  “Ah, no matter,” says the Director with a sigh. “But since I’m more interested in what’s inside…” He holds out his hand.

  Daral drops the angel key into it.

  The soldiers tighten their grips as I lunge. I bump one away with my shoulder, take a step forward, and then sink under their weight as they wrestle me to my knees.

  ‘Traitor,” I spit at Daral. “You go too far!”

  “Now, now, there’s no need for that kind of language.” The Director frowns at me. “This is for all mankind, not only Highwinders or Southerners.”

  My lips peel back from my teeth. “So, you’re going to share everything you find under there with the Khans and eilendi?”

  No answer to that. The Director leans forward and inserts the key into a slot in the center of the disc.

  I lean forward, but the soldiers pull me back. I rather hope the Director will die in some horrible way for his desecration, but Taurin does not oblige me.

  He doesn’t oblige anyone.

  The Director sighs. “I think you’re right, Daral.”

  To the soldiers, he says, “Bring him.”

  That’s a never good sign. I dig in my heels, but there’s not much I can do while trussed up like a chicken. My spiders scuttle anxiously, but there’s nothing to fuel a transformation.

  They throw me next to the Director, and hold me down. He rolls up my sleeve.

  “I hate this,” he tells me. “This fixation with blood, this melding of flesh and mineral. It’s so messy.”

  So says the man who changes ordinary men and women into the frightful monsters of Deep Night.

  He plunges a syringe into my vein, fills it with dark red blood. He squirts it all over the angel key, still in its slot.

  Nothing happens.

  I give a bark of mirthless laughter. “Taurin indeed has deserted me. My blood’s no better than anyone else’s, spiders or not.”

  The Director’s nostrils flare. “That idiot woman. She’s almost destroyed the virtue of your blood. But let’s see what happens if we—”

  Daral raises his hand. “I have a better idea. One not so messy. Use the Chosen’s sword.”

  I slide Daral a sideways look as I’m hauled away. So, he doesn’t want the Director to drain me dry of all blood, does he?

  Movement to one side, and Grip slinks into view, holding an aluminum bag, grinning in a way meant to project both intelligence and trustworthiness, and only succeeding in looking like a fool.

  He upends the bag and my sword clatters to the floor. Grip crouches to pick it up. Sparks fly. Grip yelps and scampers backward, beating at himself.

  My sword lies there, alive as it hasn’t been in years. Light ripples down its length.

  “Get it.” The Director gestures to a soldier.

  “No. Let Kato Vorsok do it. It will work for him and no one else.” Daral’s expression is cool, but I see the tautness of his shoulders.

  Time for me to take a hand. “He’s right. And I’ll do it. I want to get to what’s inside here as much as you.”

  Our world depends on this.

  The Director hesitates, gives a curt nod. His men release me.

  I take my time, rolling my shoulders and flexing my hands, working out the kinks. My right hand responds sluggishly, and I make a show of it. Better to let the Director think that I’m worse for the wear.

  Finally, I stride forward, two steps, and stoop. Pick up the sword.

  It sings to me, and its song pierces my heart. This is the purity of the Chosen’s sword, not the thing it had become after so many battles and so many deaths. I’d used it against my own stubborn countrymen, fighting off pretenders and other malcontents, and it’s song had become a battle anthem of blood.

  After the battle at the Gates, I’d lost even that.

  Why is it whole now? Is it this place, and the proximity to angel craft? I narrow my gaze at the glossy, black walls, made out of the sa
me material as the safe road back in Highwind.

  “Well, go on.” The Director breaks the silence. The soldiers shift their stances, clearly eager to get me back under custody.

  I jump onto the disc, raise my sword in both hands, will my spiders to mesh with the new life of my sword.

  There’s a jolt, then a backwash of energy into me.

  This is what I knew in the first days of being Chosen.

  I am a giant again.

  I stab downwards, driving the point into the angel key.

  For one perfect moment, the sword, the key, and I are one.

  And then the key flashes, and the sword disintegrates into dust.

  I stare into my empty hands, disbelieving. My sword… the Chosen’s sword… is gone.

  I barely register Daral hauling me off, as capillaries within the disc light up.

  The middle of the disc blinks, like a great eye. Its movement is fluid, organic. And then it swirls open, whorls pulling back from the center.

  There’s a small pit underneath. A tiny place, a bowl-shaped hollow lined with a silver metal.

  In the middle of that, a clear tube.

  And within the tube are…

  Angel wings.

  The bubble around the basin is a pustule on the land, throbbing with angry colors. I’m in a huddle under the Horn of Reckoning, blue sigils pulsing in my wings, peering through the membrane and into the salt below. Its surface churns and heaves like a dirty sea.

  I cannot look away.

  The eilendi scrounged up five Circles, with four others at anchor points around them. Their song shudders through me, and as their eyes open wide with a look of deep-seeing, so do mine.

  I See.

  The strings of the world at that place, not stretched or corroded, but totally changed. No longer vibrating loops, but different in shape and color. They’re sickly green knots, and as they change, so does the world around them. The mountains are melted into thick sludge, yet they still hold their shape. The rocks from the explosion spiral lazily in the bubble, and light—light is crazy, bending in all directions.

  I look at Jazala in the central Circle. Her face is skeletal in the lurid light. Sweat beads her cheeks and forehead, and when she sings, her mouth gapes open to reveal a black hole.

  A ripple in my vision, and suddenly I’m no longer standing at the edge of the salt, but in a light well, frustration knotted inside me as I strive to untangle a pattern of yarn. I’m a child again, and my hands are small and brown, my fingers slick. I’m failing and I know it and the eilendi will kick me out of training and I’ll be sent home in disgrace and…

  Cool calloused hands cover mine. A calm voice says, “Try it this way, child,” and I crane my head to stare into eyes so serene, so kind…

  … there she is again, gliding to take her place as Prayer Leader, while I peer from under a novice’s arm at the woman who is such a legend that even I, a desert brat, have heard of her. And she half-turns her head, and winks at me…

  … she chooses me as a disciple when I’m only fourteen, and performs the Ceremony of Passage when I go from novice to eilendi…

  I blink, I am back again at the salt, and my lips shape her name. Her real name.

  Did she hear me? A frown mars her forehead, she shifts, but her eyes are still closed. I bite my lip, and look around, nausea churning in my stomach.

  This is bad. This is all wrong.

  They sent all the others away from here: Mehmet and the rest of the baradari, the apprentices and novices who had come up to the salt. They’d have sent me away, too, had they been able to get a hold of me.

  There’s a hiss and a sigh. I stumble away just in time as the Horn melts to liquid, and spatters in hot drops on the hard-packed sand. Some splash onto my wing, burning holes. I stagger back, and my other wing brushes the ground, edges no longer ragged with old tears, but whole again.

  What the….?

  Time itself is no longer anchored.

  Not strongly held together in the first place, my atoms are being dragged apart or smashed together.

  No! Not dissolution! Not now, not again!

  It’s worse for the eilendi.

  They’re out of tune—each Circle running ahead or behind the next.

  In one, the eilendi can no longer hold the rot at bay. Their members age at alarming speed. Their hair turns white and wispy, falls out. Their skin wrinkles and dries, sprouts age spots. They wither in an instant, collapse into brown dust. A glimpse of falling teeth and bones, and those, too, vanish.

  In another, the eilendi are still shaping the first word, mouths stretching in slow motion, eyelids descending in a centuries-long blink.

  They can’t do it. They can’t make it.

  The ground shudders as two massive hands are thrust out from the salt, looming like trees, grasping at the sky. Huge and black, flickering as they blur from solid to gas and back, they sink into the shoulder of a melted mountain. The mountain sags and collapses into itself, taking an entire Circle with it. They hardly recognize their doom before they’re covered over with dirt and rock.

  I whisper prayers for the dead, my eyes leaking mist.

  The demon’s skeletal head, dark as midnight, rises out of the salt. Its eyes, burning with hate as hot as the sun and as heavy as a sledgehammer, rake over the world.

  In that instant, every word is torn away from us. The eilendi go rigid with horror, and the greasy bubble ripples, expands outward.

  In the central circle, all the eilendi fall to their knees, save for her. She’s still chanting, stretching her arms to the skies, and it takes precious moments to recognize what she’s doing, even as her body turns transparent.

  “Watch ou—!” I yell, but my words are torn to tatters and flung aside.

  I plunge into the midst of eilendi, scattered like cast-off flowers. I reach for her, but a fierce light pushes me back, acid heat stings even my fluid body.

  And right before she turns to vapor and boils away, her eyes open and she looks at me.

  Sees me.

  Her mouth shapes the words I know you.

  The changing world rushes into our own. My body does the only thing it can to protect itself.

  It flies apart and flees.

  The last thing I know are the screams of the eilendi, strangled in their throats.

  I flit through empty corridors, and ghost over cracked tiles. Round and round I go, an aimless cloud of particles, pushed this way and that by breaths of air.

  Oh.

  I’m back in Kaal Baran.

  I hover over the paving stones of the courtyard, buckled and broken in the battle between Kato’s ragged army and Highwind soldiers.

  There are no eerie men. The cloaks are gone where even I can’t reach them. The flashes dissipated.

  No Kato.

  I mist through the outer gate. The rust leaves an iron tang in my mouth, a red streak across my soul.

  I stand in the quiet valley and look at Tau Marai, a hunched shadow in the dying day. It’s better than craning over my shoulder and seeing the lurid light over the salt. The wrongness of it has hooked itself into my soul. It spreads slowly, but surely, like an oil stain across the desert.

  Once the Dark Masters were the horrors of our world. How could we imagine the greater terror of the salt demons?

  But there’s nothing I can do, save feel some measure of acceptance, even peace. At least I will die quickly.

  A scuttle among a pile of rocks by the canyon wall. My muscles clench. “Come out,” I buzz.

  It’s a mechanical spider the size of a dog, bronze and leggy. It stops just at the edge of my vision.

  I can discern no eyes, but its attention is on me.

  It waits.

  “What was your role in all this?” My words are a dry whisper. “Not a golem, not a Garguant. You’re not something the chroniclers ever wrote about. Not a guardian, then, nor a soldier. But something else. A builder, perhaps?”

  There are tiny spiders in Kato’s body,
this I know. Is this one of their bigger cousins, a creature whose responsibility is to build and repair the guardians of Tau Marai?

  And still it waits for me.

  I take one step towards it. Then another.

  The spider turns, movement slow and deliberate. It tip-toes into the darkened valley on delicate legs, like a wary child.

  It’s trying to match its pace to mine. It doesn’t want to lose me.

  I skirt the remnants of golems. Already there are fewer of them, as if they’ve been scavenged. Rocks are piled along the valley walls and I scramble over them as the spider leads me on. My palms sink into stone, and when I shake them loose, crumbs of mineral are lodged into my long, fragile mourning cloak bones.

  Small caves riddle the walls, dark like eyeless sockets. Even though I am a creature of Deep Night, even though I see with senses that do not rely on the light, a tremor goes through me as the spider eases its carapace into one of them.

  I… remember… As a small child, I was warned about crevices in the desert and the creatures who hid in them.

  What can poisonous snakes and stinging scorpions do to one such as me? I plunge in after the spider.

  The tunnels are circular and winding, as if they’ve been burrowed by giant worms. Shallow, round nooks are hollowed out of the walls at intervals. In them are golems: broken parts and detached limbs and half-built torsos.

  So that’s the way of it.

  There are other spiders here—a shifting in the dark, a click-clicking of legs over stone. Their attention presses upon me and I want to sink into the ground. My cloak trails into rock as I hunch; I lose atoms of myself with every step.

  How much longer can I hold myself together? Already I feel like my current clarity of mind is just one glimpse of light in the midst of a storm.

  I’m dying, drip-dripping into the earth.

  What do you want from me? The spiders’ silent urgency shoves me on. I can no more resist them than I can the wind. I stumble into a larger cavern, then blink as a light comes on. A globe of yellow light shines from the ceiling.

  The spiders draw back as I enter, then close ranks behind me, waiting.