by Rabia Gale
“Excuse me. I need to quiet her.” Cloud points up towards the wall. Screech is a spread-winged silhouette and a demonic wail against the sky.
“Is Flutter back?”
Cloud shakes her head no, and glides away.
Nine-bloody-forsaken-Hells!
I look at the fighting mass of my army. My army, my responsibility. Sera’s no longer.
Taurin’s veil, they were a mess.
I grab an eerie man, spin him around to face me. His face goes from gleeful and bloodthirsty to shamed when he sees me. I shake him till his teeth rattle, toss him out of the fight.
I wade in, thumping eerie men heads and slapping cobble crunchers. Stray elbows jab me in the stomach, a punch gone wild lands against shoulder. I bite back my yelp.
Show no weakness.
A cobble cruncher attaches itself to my leg, starts shredding my pants as it screams a high-pitched war song. I pull it off, leaving gashes in my skin, and raise it to my face.
It twists, until it recognizes me. “Hullo, guv.” It touches its red hat as it dangles from my fingers. Kunj.
“Stop this,” I say, “right now.”
“Sure thing, guv!” It swings and I let go. Its feet rest briefly on my shoulder and then it’s scampering over eerie men heads, chanting to its fellows. Within moments, cobble crunchers scoot out of the writhing mass and stand by the walls, grinning at me.
It takes longer to cool the eerie men down. I take a bite in my arm, and crack a few skulls together. Once, an eerie men leaps at me, claws and teeth extended. My sluggish spiders move to defend me, but there’s no way they can get my armor up that fast.
Leap jumps in front of me, knocks my attacker to the ground. Our eyes meet, and I nod my thanks. Then he’s gone, breaking up other fights and soon I’m standing in the center of a spreading calm, surrounded by eerie men stumbling, groaning, and clutching various parts of themselves.
I’m tired. I wish I could collapse and sleep for a hundred years, but I stiffen my legs and knees. My glance falls, hard and heavy like a hammer-blow, on each face as I issue punishments. Latrine duty. Wall duty. Heck, even “sweep out dusty chambers no one will ever use” duty. Grip lurks toward the back of the mass of hang-dog eerie men, a slight smirk on his lowered face.
I know he’s been involved in all of this. I take special pleasure putting him on cleaning duty in the underground chambers the cloaks have claimed for their own. He’d find it hard to wreak havoc with that lot. I know he doesn’t care much for Cloud.
I let Leap supervise the penitent. I call specific individuals up to me—Bound and Gash, both shame-faced, and Kunj and Vrzk, who represent the cobble crunchers.
Yes, the cobble crunchers food is gone. Empty, dented cans make a forlorn heap against one wall. The well is fouled, and I need only lean over the opening for one quick, shallow breath to know that.
We need water badly. Without that well Kaal Baran is not a shelter but a death-trap.
For a moment, a longing for Highwind pierces me. Highwind, with singing streams under every road, tinkling waterfalls at every culvert, the great river rushing through the city like a foaming, roaring beast, and the chill air coming off the mountain lakes. Highwind, with all that water to spare.
Couldn’t these creatures understand how careful one must be with water in the desert?
Of course not. Water was everywhere in Highwind, for Deep Night denizen and human alike. For feral dogs and stray cats, kana rats and cobble crunchers. For night walkers, rooted into the earth… Oh.
“You!” I crook my finger at a ditch-digging team as they slink past me, hunched under shovels.
They look at me with an upward flicker of their eyelids. If they had been dogs, their ears would’ve been pressed against their heads and their tails tucked firmly between their legs.
“You’re off ditch-digging duty, and on to well-finding duty. Go to where the night walkers are. Dig next to them. And for Taurin’s sake, don’t rile them like you did the cobble crunchers! If they stomp on your fetid heads, I’ll just cheer them on, understand?”
The eerie men nod and hurry away. I stand up straighter.
The air next to me shimmers. I flinch, reaching with my right hand for the sword at my hip.
The hand I don’t have. The sword that’s on the other side of my belt.
And then Cloud’s standing there, watching me fumble for the hilt with my left hand. The sword is cold and empty, no longer a line of fire-orange and blood-red in my mind’s eye.
She could’ve ripped out my heart while I stood there, forgetting that I only have the one hand.
Kato One-Hand, the Once-Champion. Fitting epithet.
Leap’s voice comes unbidden to my mind: Ironhand…
“What is it?” My voice comes out harsh, to compensate for my weakness.
“She’s back,” says Cloud.
I see Flutter on the road from the top of the ramp. She moves like a wounded moth, darting here, swooping there, meandering in serpentine twists both on and off the road. She darts into a thorn bush, gets snagged for several moments. She thrashes and pulls away, but the thorns only dig in deeper.
I stride down to her, keeping my feet from running, keeping my voice from crying out in relief.
By the time I reach her, she’s managed to tear herself away from the bush. Thin blood, a sickly yellow, drips down the rips in her cloak. Gone are the rich dark browns and the bright blue sigils. Instead she looks grey, as insubstantial as a shadow.
“Flutter…” I stop at the sight of her eyes. They’re like huge holes torn in her paper-white face. The edges of her shimmer and curl as if invisible flames lick at them. Her substance is going up in smoke as I watch.
“Kato,” she says, in a high child-like voice. “Kato. Kato.” She takes my arms with both her pale hands; her touch is cold and light, like frost. “Bad things come.”
My stomach clenches. “What bad things? From where? Flutter—” I want to shake the knowledge right out of her, but she’s in a bad way. “Tell me, Flutter. What did you see?”
She looks at me, but doesn’t see me. “Kato. Kato.” Her voice is high, echoing, and sweet. “Bad things come. Bad things come.” She repeats the same empty words like a litany.
They grate down my nerves. I’d rather hear several dozen repetitions of the Great Invocation.
“Cloud!” I shout, and turn. Then I startle.
The other cloak’s right behind me.
“Take her.” I have to pry Flutter’s hands away. I see her disintegrate with every touch, losing particles. I wince.
Cloud makes a low soft humming in her throat and wraps Flutter up in her wings.
Daral’s behind me. “What—?”
Flutter’s face is a dirty white amidst black cloak and dark hair. “Kato. Bad things come. From the salt.” She sways, and Cloud sweeps her away.
The salt fields.
This is not good at all.
“Wake not the sleepers under the salt,” murmurs Daral. “Beware the wind that blows the Horn of Reckoning.”
I cast a sharp sideways look at him. So he understands the language of Highwind, does he? Instead I say, “We should look into this.”
Three days ago, the most awful things in my world were golems and garguants, losing Sera, and the Dark Masters imprisoned within Tau Marai.
Now fear strokes an icy feather down my spine.
There’s nothing I can do for Flutter, surrounded and veiled and cocooned by others of her kind. It’s not even midday, and there’s an ache deep in my muscles.
The water skin at my belt is full, though, and my nerves twitch with a desperate need to know.
“I’m going to walk up to Tapek Ridge and take a look down,” I tell Daral. I’m already moving.
“I’m coming with you,” he says.
I don’t slow my long-legged stride for him, but he keeps up. We turn off the road together, drive our feet against rock, begin climbing. I step on desert scrub, crushing it under my boot. It
s bitter green scent rises in the air.
Once a brown-and-black snake slithers into a hole to our right. A desert toad, warty, blends in with a flat-topped rock. In one small valley, water trickles through a crack in a shadowed hollow. We refill our skins and keep going.
The hills give way to Tapek ridge, an upthrust block of stone, stubbornly square and angular. We half-climb, half-hike up a narrow path to its top. My nails break upon rock.
It’s windy at the top. Hot gusts lash my body, throw grit into my eyes. I peer out toward the unseen salt plains, ringed with hills.
Beside me, Daral mutters, “Taurin’s veil!”
We don’t need to see into the basin to know that Flutter is right.
A pustule of light, oily and rainbow-colored, streaked with darkness, domes the salt basin. It seems to be sucking in the very sky—clouds streak and shred towards it, an agony of white bleeds out from torn blue.
“This is—wrong,” whispers Daral.
My entire body fights against the wrongness of that light, the wrongness of the sky around, the wavering edges of the hills surrounding the basin. My spiders cower; I think I sense bindings within me loosen and shift.
I force myself to step back. Pinpricks of light explode in one eye, a whine rises to a scream in one ear. My tongue is thick and swollen in my mouth, and when I speak, I taste something so alien that I have no words for it. “We have to—”
Daral looks like he wants to be sick. “Listen.”
I close my eyes. And there, tossed about in rags on the wind, is the mournful sound of a horn blowing Too late too late.
I turn away and heave up everything in my stomach.
A ruddy light slips across the rock faces and dribbles into the valley of Tau Marai. The silence here is vast and empty and weighs down upon me. My feet on the ramp slow of their own accord.
The bronze gates on the far side rise higher than any city wall ever built. Mountains loom behind them. Their rocky arms encircle Tau Marai, sealing the Dark Masters in their prison.
The valley walls are pocked with openings. The guardians lived there once—the golems and the Garguants that kept the curious out and the Dark Masters in. For years, we thought they were the enemy, the army of the Dark Masters.
Successive Champions of Taurin battled these mechanical monsters, whittling their numbers down to a few. And then Sera’s army destroyed the rest of the golems and I took down the Garguants to save her—and now the jailers are all gone.
Who will drive back the Dark Masters if they attempt to break out?
A shadow passes over my soul, and a chill takes root in my heart.
The Gates. For a few moments, they’d been open. A few moments in which a doorway had existed between Tau Marai and the rest of the world.
And now Flutter says things in the salt are stirring.
What if something got out?
I’m breathing fast and shallow. My chest squeezes painfully, but no, this is not the transformation.
It’s fear. Pure paralyzing fear. My arms and legs are leaden with it, my head light, my heart beating fast and furious.
No, Taurin, no.
I can’t do this again.
I’ve fought golems and Garguants. I’ve hunted mourning cloaks and night walkers. I watched Sera die in a flare of blinding light. I held the Gates as they opened and I saw the twisted nightmares within.
I gave my body up to pain and consuming fire. Flutter saved me, but I lost my hand.
I can’t fight what’s coming out of the salt.
I am afraid, more afraid than I’ve ever been before.
Taurin, please!
I hadn’t pleaded with my god since the day I lost at Tau Marai seven years ago. I hadn’t wanted anything to do with him since.
But I plead now, falling on my knees in the desert dust, silent tears coursing down my cheeks. I rain blows on the soil, and a cloud of grit envelopes me. It coats my lips and mouth, pricks my eyes.
No, Taurin. No more. No more pain. I can’t!
Haven’t I lost enough? Given up enough? Isn’t it time for someone else to bear the burden?
Kato Vorsok.
A cool voice, one that reverberates inside my head. A voice I know isn’t mine. It stops the frantic wheeling of my thoughts. I draw my breath in, shuddering. My chin is lowered to my chest.
Kato Vorsok. It’s a voice at the edge of my hearing, both high and low at the same time. It sets my bones jangling, cuts into my skin and veins, threatens to undo every binding within me.
A voice that speaks to the patterns that underlay everything in this world.
Kato Vorsok.
I smell rain, the aftermath of a lightning strike. Pain curls through my ears, my nerves crawl away from that voice.
If it calls my name again, I shall die.
“I—” My mouth is dry. “I am here.”
Silence. Waiting. A great pressure upon my ears and my chest.
The same pressure I remember from the night I woke up and found a wounded mourning cloak behind my shop in Highwind.
“I am here, Lord.”
You are Chosen.
And then it’s gone. The voice, the pain, the pressure, the feeling of the world bowing and groaning under a weight too great for it to bear.
I sit there on my knees, heaving in lungfuls of air.
And then I reach, blindly, for the rooted night walkers close by and hoist myself onto my shaking legs.
The night walkers. They feel different. No longer smooth and hard as polished stone, but rough and ridged, bark-like. I peer closer at them in the twilight. No longer knife-cuts in the darkness, all sharpness and straight lines, but like tough, twisted trees. They’re bent into branches, and their color…
Patches of sandstone orange and red and yellow pattern their bodies.
They’re changing, too. The desert is changing them.
At their feet is the newly-dug well, smelling of moist soil.
Night walkers always find water.
I let go of the one I’m holding on to and walk stiffly down to the valley.
There’s a hard knot inside me, a knot in which I’ve twisted up all my fear and anger and despair.
All these years and now he returns to me!
But like a cooling wind, the memory of his words whisper into my heart. Kato Vorsok. You are Chosen.
Laughter bubbles up inside me. I throw my head back and let it out. It bounces off the walls, breaking the temple-like silence. The silence withdraws, watches me with disapproval.
“Do you hear that?” I demand of it, the valley, Tau Marai, and the Dark Masters within. “I am Kato Vorsok. I am Chosen.”
Great. I sound like a lunatic. I choke back my bleak bitter laughter.
Chosen for what?
To die? In one last glorious hopeless stand? Me with my one hand and the dead sword and the transformation that has lost its power?
Ironhand, Leap had called me, all because I bashed his thick skull with my left fist, and bit back the cry of pain before it escaped my lips.
I look at the dark lumps of dead golems scattered in the valley, and then I know what to do.
I kneel by the carcass of my enemy. I touch its metal skin with my one hand. Its armor is strong. I know that.
I will consume its strength, claim it for my own.
I lean over the golem, touch the stump of my right arm to its battered chest.
Then I call my spiders to feed.
I’m used to the sunburst of the transformation, the lightning-quick unraveling and reassembling of my being. But my spiders are tired, and their work slow. I grit my teeth as they split open my skin, as they break down the metal and drag it back inside me. The pain is dull and raw and prolonged.
As time trudges on, I feel every particle of metal travel into my body. I feel it bind to my bone. I feel my spiders build the framework, spin out nerves as fine as wires, overlay everything with sheet upon shifting sheet. Tremors go through my body, I taste the tang of iron and blood.
A great cold washes over me, and I’m shivering in the shadows of the valley. The pain doesn’t come in waves, like I’m used to—it builds to a high red plateau with no drop-off in sight. I can bear it no longer. I try to pull away, but my arm is fused to the dead golem’s chest, bound to it by a shapeless lump.
I can’t do anything but watch as spiders chisel and shape. Pinpricks of red-hot agony burst like stars in the midst of my dull pain, as if I’m being attacked by a swarm of angry bees.
I can’t hold myself up anymore. My head sinks till it touches metal. A black tide washes over me, and I welcome it.
I wake in darkness, with a twitch and a jerk.
My hands flex.
My… hands… flex.
I touch my right hand with my left, and run my fingers over smooth metal. I curl the fingers of my right hand, feeling the oiled movement of my joints. It’s heavier than my flesh-and-blood hand had been; the wrist has been strengthened to compensate.
They added metal to my left hand as well, for balance. I sense the strengthening bands of metal all up my arms and into my shoulders.
My spiders think of everything.
All that remains of the golem is a crumpled heap of metal flakes.
I plant my new hand in the dust. I can touch and hold again, but it feels different—less immediate.
Now is not the time to explore the features of my new hand. I’m exhausted. I get to my feet and trudge back up to the fort.
I hear him long before he comes into view. His feet are nearly soundless on the floor, he blends almost perfectly into the shadows.
He’s good, but not good enough.
I drop down from the ceiling in a rush of black smoke. My feet mist, then solidify as they find tile.
He starts forward to attack, thinks better of it, puts his heels back down on the floor, hard. He slips something back into his clothing, something darkened, but metal and sharp.
I cross my arms. I’m fed and watered, patched together by my fellow cloaks. The patches won’t last long, but for now I’m stronger and faster than he is. And my eyes magnify every movement, every play of light.
