But not now. With Highwind creatures crawling all over Kaal Baran, mysterious visitors in the night, and Flutter gone, the angel key is no longer safe from discovery.
I stretch out my profane hand over the pedestal. The silence shifts, as if someone breathed in. My chest tightens.
I know this. It’s happened before.
“No!” I grind out between clenched teeth. My voice is harsh, swallowed up by the stillness. I throw my head back and howl to the shadows above. “No! I will not submit. Not again!”
I snatch at the key, half-expecting to be zapped to ashes at the sacrilege. It bites into the palm of my hand. Cold sinks its fangs into my flesh.
My arm’s going numb.
I stagger back from the pedestal and shout to those half-seen images of angels and demons. “I’m through, you hear? I’m done with this Chosen business.” Nine hells, my head’s pounding and my vision’s blurring. I blunder toward the barrier, push my way through. There’s a buzzing in my ears and pinpricks all over my skin as I break free.
It matches the angry boiling within me.
Curse it all. I’d seen the look on those serene not-alive statues.
They’d been amused.
But at least I have the key.
I snap awake from a light sleep, and look straight into a torch. “Get that away from me!” My voice is sleep-roughened and I blink away tears. My cheeks are hot from the flame.
The torch retreats, but its light flickers on the teeth and piercings of an eerie man.
Not the best thing to wake up to.
“What is it?” Is Flutter back?
“The crunchers caught something.”
I recognize the voice, and the face. Malicious and hating, looking at me from behind Leap’s prone body. What’s his name again? “Grip.”
The eerie man slants his head in a nod. I’d fallen asleep against a wall, and I lever myself up, one-handed. My head’s swimming from exhaustion. Tears and flames dance in my vision.
Grip muscles in, closer, as if to help me. Expressions flit across his face. I can almost hear him thinking. Human… slow, weak, stupid… tired… I could…
I straighten and bop him on the head, a whack with the back of my hand. He flinches away, making himself even smaller. I’m taller than he is and I’m still the leader of the pack.
“Don’t wave that torch in anyone’s face like that again, idiot.”
Grip ducks his head in acknowledgment, but he’s not fooling me. He’s not cowed, merely retreating for now.
I follow him, noting that his shirt is mere rags. These eerie men don’t understand how merciless the desert sun is. I add Procure adequate clothing to my list of things to do, right next to Be a hero.
We pass a bunch of eerie men talking together in their deep growl. I catch the words “Here’s Ironhand” and find myself clenching my left hand again. I’ve taken to wearing my sword on the right—it feels uncomfortable and out-of-balance there. I haven’t unsheathed it since… since that day… and it feels empty and dead to me, nothing more than a piece of long metal with a pointed end.
Leap grins at me. There’s a white stripe of a bandage across his face, but no hostility. He falls into place behind my shoulder as I cross the courtyard.
For some eerie men, thumping them is the way to earn their respect.
We go inside the fort, light skittering over its pale stone and mosaic floors. Ghosts brush against my mind.
Sun sparking on the walls… Sera, head tipped back in awe… “Kato, this place is wonderful!”… images of sea monsters and sky creatures… the clatter of feet and the dragging of stores…
And then we’re through a doorway. It used to have doors, brass-coated wood, covered with intricate designs that Sera spent hours sketching. Her army kicked the doors down before Flutter and I arrived through the portal. I can still see the gouges in the stone.
The beauty of this place held no meaning for her then, only its power.
Just the way she viewed me at the end. I force back the guilt and the black anger that rises behind it. I’d grieved three years for her. I won’t give her power over me any longer.
Inside the chamber is a knot of cobble crunchers, several of them sitting on something that bucks and heaves, with many more on their stomachs beside it, each gripping a limb.
The cobble cruncher on top of the heap greets me. “Eh, tall’un!” Its name is something unpronounceable, spoken as if through a mouthful of gravel.
I call it Kunj, because that’s the only syllable I can catch.
And it’s the only cobble cruncher I recognize, because for some reason, it wears a tiny red top hat and a fake silk flower on its shirt.
“Book and bound!” Kunj grins at me. His head bobs as his ride bucks under him. More cobble crunchers throw themselves on the pile.
“Look what I found,” translates Leap, grinning. He makes no move to help the crunchers.
“What is it?” I crouch down by the crunchers, and think I see the flash of a carapace, a bunch of waving stick-like legs.
“A squatter!” pipes up a cobble cruncher, only to be shouted down by its fellows. “Na, a scuttler!” “A squeaker!”
I nod at Leap. He wades into the group, grabs a bunch of the stalky legs in one hand, and lifts. Cobble crunchers leap and fall off, and soon Leap is left holding a—
A machine.
It’s made of brass and iron, like the golems. It’s part-crab and part-spider, with many-jointed limbs, eyes on stalks, a shell.
It twists in Leap’s hand. Legs snap.
The creature flies through the air, lands on a wall. It scuttles up, as Leap throws away the severed limbs and pounces. Cobble crunchers boil up the wall, but the thing is too quick. It’s at the top of the wall
