Ironhand (Taurin's Chosen, Book 2)

IRONHAND

Taurin's Chosen Book Two

Rabia Gale

Kato Vorsok closed the Gates and sealed in the enemies of all mankind. Now he’s stranded in the desert with a ragtag army of supernatural creatures far from home. Keeping order and finding provisions are the extent of his problems.

Or so he thinks.

Deep in the salt, an ancient demon from a mythic past stirs. Once, angels walked the world and battled such monsters, but they’ve been gone a long time.

Now there’s only Kato, a reluctant hero with no illusions about himself, and Flutter, a woman-turned-demon who’s falling apart.

They won the battle, but will they lose the war—and the whole world with it?

Ironhand is a fantasy novella.

Published by Rabia Gale

Cover art and design by Ravven

Copyright © 2015, by Rabia Gale. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This e-book is licensed for your enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Ironhand

Books by Rabia Gale

About the Author

Prologue

Operation Shiknai—Glory, in the language of the Taurin-worshippers—was a failure. But then it had always been a long stretch.

The Highwind scout lay on his stomach atop the ridge and peered down at the valley of Tau Marai through his binoculars. The mechanical pieces of its ancient guardians lay scattered about like broken toys, interspersed with the groaning bodies of the army Sera Vorsok had led against them. Dark stains dotted the ground.

Sera Vorsok was dead and her project with her. For four years, Highwind had supported the foreign woman’s scheme to destroy her people’s old enemy, break open the city of Tau Marai, and steal its treasures. Highwind had helped fake her death, and hidden her as she worked. She’d been given funding and equipment: all the support needed to engineer a cohort of Highwind’s supernatural creatures into super-soldiers. Mourning cloaks and wind swifts, eerie men and night walkers—all had been modified for this fight. The higher-ups had even turned a blind eye as the woman wreaked vengeance on those of her people she believed had betrayed her.

The scout grimaced, remembering certain missions. He’d been prepared to get his hands dirty in his type of work, but kidnapping scared women and dragging them back to Highwind to be stripped of their humanity hadn’t been part of his expectations.

Still, Sera Vorsok had come close to achieving her goals.

The scout scanned the valley, pausing at a weary, defiant figure, grimly pushing himself from one broken, bleeding body to the next.

Kato Vorsok, still going even after the day’s betrayal and battle, and despite losing his right hand.

He’d been a surprise.

Sera Vorsok had spoken dismissively of her husband as someone who’d lost his fire after his defeat in this very valley several years ago. He’d fled to Highwind with his wife, and dwindled into a mere drinks’ shop owner. Kato would be no threat to their plans.

Sera had misjudged. One of her victims—a woman turned into a demon—had escaped the laboratory and made her way to Sera’s husband. Kato Vorsok had finally woken from his malaise. This was the man, after all, who was the Chosen of the southerners’ god, who’d been lauded and hailed as the Champion of these lands.

Today, the scout had seen Kato transform his own body into a weapon, skin hardened to iron and sword blazing as an extension of his arm. Single-handedly, he’d taken down a swarm of giant acid-spitting flying beasts.

And when Sera Vorsok died opening the Gates of Tau Marai, it was Kato Vorsok who closed them.

The scout pulled a cylinder from his belt and popped the cap open with a flick of his thumb. A hiss, and a golden scroll slid out. The scout stretched it flat with his left hand—it felt uncomfortably like warm skin—and wrote with a stylus. No words appeared, but the parchment grew more alive, edges curling in impatience, hues of brown and yellow and orange shivering through it.

The scout placed his thumbprint at the bottom of the missive and lifted his hand. The released creature—both messenger and message—scuttled away, blending into the desert landscape. It was soon out of sight.

The scout wriggled backward, away from his lookout position. He’d watched, and he’d reported.

Now it was up to the Director to make the next move.

Ironhand

THE SALT FLATS GLITTER UNDER a heat-bleached sky. Mountains of rock are frozen mid-tumble into the valley below. Their slopes are bare, banded yellow and orange and brown. Only a single skeletal structure, with stilt-like legs and a cone-shaped top, breaks the landscape.

The stillness of a thousand dry seasons lies sweltering on the valley floor, sweating salt. The salt is divided into hexagonal cells, edged with thick white crystalline braids.

Nothing changes here. Nothing ever will.

But wait.

Something comes over the mountains. Something slight and small and invisible.

A breath of air.

It nudges at the slurry of stillness, lightly first, then harder. Wind slides, banner-like, into the valley and the ancient quiet gives way, slowly, reluctantly.

Salt specks spiral up into the air. The white surface cracks. A low throbbing hum emanates from the conical top of the lone structure.

The wind increases in strength all afternoon and evening, as the sun sweeps the sky and the earth groans in reply.

The horn blows, deep and urgent and continuous.

But there is no one to hear.

Flutter is dying.

They all are, these creatures of cool Highwind, withering in the dry heat and the bright light. Eerie men pant in the courtyard of Kaal Baran; cobble crunchers hide in its nooks and crannies. Sera’s altered wind swifts evaporated a long time ago, and the mourning cloaks are spread thin and turned to mist, damp patches on the rocks.

And these are just the survivors.

I gave mercy to many more the day the Gates closed again, in the deepening twilight. I stumbled from one broken body to another, stepping in blue and black and gold blood, the stench of rot in my nose, and dispatched the wounded with a few muttered phrases. Bits of prayers to Taurin, substituting ishtaur for itauri. Replacing darkchild for Taurin’s child, in case he was inclined to be merciful to these poor creatures.

Who am I fooling?

I’m dying, too, trapped in Kaal Baran with an almost-dried up well and barely any food. Well I know that the trip to the nearest settlement is over a week long. Sera expected to be supplied through her portal in Highwind, but that portal is now gone. Flutter and I have looked at the consoles Sera set up in the Chamber of Secrets. We’ve pressed buttons, tugged wires, kicked at the blasted boxes.

All right. I kicked the boxes.

Nothing.

There’s weaponry in other rooms, and a very little store of food. Canned meat for the eerie men and tins of worms for the cobble crunchers. Bags of white crystals for the cloaks—I dump handfuls of it in a trough in the courtyard, then fill it, awkwardly, left-handedly, with water from the well. There’s mud in the water, but the cloaks don’t care. They float in from cracks and mist up out of wall, put their pale faces into the water and feed.

I don’t watch them.

But there is one place I haven’t yet looked at. One place that I never told even Sera about, never mentioned to Flutter, would never go to with an entourage of Highwind creatures dogging my steps and peering over my shoulders—or in the case of cobble crunchers, from behind my legs.

It’s the thought of curious eyes that hold me back from that chamber, I tell myself. Coward, I think a moment later.

No, that place is not meant for failures and blasphemers like me.

Instead, I look for Flutter. She’s not inside the courtyard, of course. No, she’s out in the valley.

The gates of Kaal Baran are open, and I walk down the ramp into the narrow valley. The ground between me and the bronze Gates of Tau Marai, small in the distance, is scuffed and stained from the recent battle. We buried the dead bodies, but the broken bits of golems are still there. I don’t like leaving them, but we haven’t the strength to move them.

We know so little about golems, even after all these years of fighting them. Why shouldn’t they reassemble themselves out of the parts strewn across the battlefield and walk off it?

I pass what looks to be a small grove of bare trees. Night walkers, rooted in the shadow of the canyon wall. They haven’t moved in days. They’re the only part of Sera’s army—now my responsibility—that haven’t tried to kill me, either intentionally or not, nor complained about being hungry or tried to steal my shoes or take over. No, they’ve just stood there and that’s earned them a bucketful of water around their ankles every evening.

Highwind is a place of water. The Salera Desert is not.

Flutter’s a shadow at the foot of the ramp, thin and insubstantial in the hot brightness. I stumble over a stone, and reach out for the wall with my