Iron Horsemen Read online

  IRON HORSEMEN

  A NOVEL

  BRAD R. COOK

  Copyright © 2014 by Brad R. Cook

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Treehouse Publishing Group,

  a unit of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC.

  Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental, and names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  www.bradrcook.com

  @bradrcook

  Cover design by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Illustration background: Shutterstock

  Steampunk frame: Illustrator Georgie Retzer

  https://www.facebook.com/Illustrator.Georgie

  Rearing horse: Celtic Cat Photos

  https://www.etsy.com/shop/Celticcatphotos

  Interior layout by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Interior art by Jennifer Stolzer

  http://www.jenniferstolzer.com/

  ISBN: 9780989207959

  For Amber

  IRON HORSEMEN

  CHAPTER 1

  KIDNAPPED

  London 1881

  I’d always wanted to be like the heroes in my favorite stories—George Washington, or Sir Galahad, maybe King Arthur, Robin Hood, or Robinson Crusoe—but I knew those lives belonged to great men, not young boys trapped in stuffy old offices in pretentious British preparatory schools. If I wanted adventure, I’d have to make my own. I could not live vicariously through someone else’s. Unfortunately, my opportunities for adventure were not only limited, they were non-existent.

  I spent much of my time in a dark, wood-paneled prison cell lined with cabinets stuffed with odd objects and ancient artifacts and surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves jammed with leather-bound books in every language imaginable. What my cell didn’t have was a single painting or photograph of me. That might not have been surprising if it really was a prison cell, but it wasn’t. It just felt like it.

  My father peered down at me as I picked at the corner of the ancient Greek text I was supposed to find fascinating. His brow lowered into harsh lines as he rebuked me once again.

  “Young man, those words are priceless! How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “I didn’t do anything.” To prove my point, I moved my hand away from the torn corner to the nearest bit of text. “Look, you can still read the words.”

  Professor Armitage, my father, removed thin wire-framed glasses from the end of his nose and rubbed his eyes. He waved his hand over the old manuscript he’d been studying, one of several scattered around his knotted oak desk. The leather chair creaked as he leaned back and gazed out the window.

  “Alexander, I’m almost done with these translations.”

  I said nothing as the professor returned to the page, but I saw it—the expression of satisfaction and pride one might expect to see light up a father’s face on his only son’s birthday. But the expression wasn’t for me.

  “If my theory is right, this is the lost account of a Stone Age civilization’s destruction on the island of Malta.”

  “Exciting,” I groaned. “I’m hungry and it’s almost eight o’clock.” The lines on his forehead deepened to crevasses. After a moment’s pause, when I was certain the thick vein in his neck would pop, I mumbled, “Get out of your dreams and into your Greek. Yes, sir. I will, sir.” But it was lie, a bold-faced one, too. I’d been dreaming of flying, of bursting through a dense cloud bank to surprise my enemy, retrieve a stolen treasure after a terrifying swordfight at dizzying heights, and rescue a damsel in distress. There were no clouds in my book.

  “As punishment for the damage, I want you to read aloud—in the original.”

  Dreams had to wait, as usual. I tossed back two locks of hair and began to read aloud. After a few moments, he tapped the thin metal pointer he’d been using to read, and I looked up.

  “The correct way to say it is xi-fos. Now, what does xifos mean?”

  “Sword.” I quickly replied. One of my favorite words in any language.

  “Once again, but this time in Latin.”

  I repeated the sentence in Latin, and he nodded his approval.

  “Now in Aramaic.”

  “But no one even speaks….” My voice trailed off. The stern look on my father’s face meant a whipping was imminent if I continued. Under my breath I mumbled, “If Mom were alive, she wouldn’t make me.”

  “I will not listen to that kind of talk.”

  Since my mother’s passing, each new school brought more and tougher studies. Maybe my father thought the languages would ground me, or all the studying would keep me out of trouble, but it only filled me with useless information—and endless frustration. Now, we’d landed in Eton, and I wondered when I’d ever go home to America again. A small sigh escaped, but I did what I was told and repeated the sentence in Aramaic.

  “Good. Now continue your homework. I must finish this translation tonight.”

  Relieved, I returned to my silent reading—and to my daydreaming. After a while, when I was sure he lost in his own world, I slid open one of the cabinet drawers and peered at the small leather pouch sitting alone on a folder. I flipped it open to reveal two lenses trimmed with polished brass.

  “Can I use your telescope?”

  “No, put it back.”

  That word, always that word. No. No sweets. No, you’re wrong. No, you can’t stay in America. My jaw clenched, and I watched my father’s eyes glaze over again as he reentered his world of ancient letters. I reached back in the drawer, plucked out the pouch, dropped the telescope into my bag, and slowly shut the drawer. My father would never miss it, and I thought it made a fine birthday present.

  The moments crept by, and I wondered what the boys in the dormitories were doing. What my friends back home were doing? What normal boys with normal fathers were doing?

  “Alexander.” A single shaft of light clung to my father’s face as he snapped up from his work. “There’s something I should tell you.”

  I half listened, ready for another lecture on something old and uninteresting. “Huh.”

  After a moment of silence, I glanced up and saw my father watching me, studying me like one of his yellowing codices. He shook his head sadly. “Never mind, you’re not ready.”

  Ready for what? Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. Even if I was ready, he’d never see it. To calm myself, I refocused on the book. I certainly didn’t want to transcribe the sentence into hieroglyphics.

  My stomach roiled—we never ate dinner until our work was done for the evening—and I suddenly had the feeling that I might be getting sick. My pulse quickened and I sat up. Something nagged at me, but I could not say what, just that everything felt off kilter somehow.

  A loud bang rang out from the hallway and we both jumped.

  “Probably just the janitor,” the professor said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Nothing to worry about. Right. I shook my head in disbelief. Eton College might be the most exclusive school in the British Empire, but I had plenty to worry about. The heirs of British aristocracy, my classmates, had treated me like a second-class citizen since I set foot in the place, and because of my father’s position, I couldn’t fight back when they tormented me. There were probably some snooty upper-crust dandies lurking out in the hall, just waiting to pummel me again. If only I was back home in America. I imagined
whipping out a saber and showing them what a real sword fight was like—not that I was ever allowed to practice.

  “Don’t worry,” my father said again, as if to reassure himself more than me. “There’ll be no intruders at Eton. They promised we’d be well-protected here.”

  “Well-protected? Who promised—” I started to ask just as the door blew off its hinges and slammed into the far wall, a long crack seamed down its center. I screamed and scrambled to my feet as four stocky brutes marched in wearing long, dark overcoats and derby hats with rounded goggles. Wielding menacing, short black clubs, they looked like they’d just come from London’s Whitechapel district with murder on their minds.

  My father was on his feet in an instant. He grabbed one of the ponderous tomes from the pile on his desk and slammed it down on the nearest derby. A dusty cloud enveloped the intruder’s head like a halo as he staggered back.

  My father just clocked a nefarious henchman! I’d never even seen him make a fist.

  “Get back!” my father yelled, shoving me toward the windows.

  The dusty bruiser regained his footing, grunted in annoyance, and snorted from his nose like a raging bull. He raised a fist the size of my head.

  My father held the book in front of his face. “Why did I have to grab this one?” he moaned.

  The book took the punch, and my father fell against his desk, but quickly scrambled away as a second blow whooshed past.

  The men surrounded him with raised clubs.

  I wanted to scream, but found my voice trapped in my throat like it was stuck behind a locked door. These were not annoying classmates. They were not from Eton at all.

  The biggest brute, with a mask of bronze plates fastened over the right half of his face and an eye that sparked with electricity, stepped forward. “Ya’ll gonna be comin’ with us, Professor.” His deep southern American drawl had a harsh, guttural tone.

  They weren’t even from England!

  “Who are you?” My father demanded.

  “Nevermind ’bout that.” A whirring sound buzzed past my ear as a grappling hook connected by a thin wire shot out from the leader’s sleeve. I barely uttered, “Watch out!” before it had snagged my father’s shoulder.

  My dad pushed me aside. “Run!”

  But I was frozen in place.

  The grappling hook yanked my father off his feet and dragged him across the floor. The leader of the group pressed his heavy booted foot down on my father’s chest as the grappling hook retracted into his sleeve. The lamplight reflected off the man’s belt buckle. It was unmistakable: engraved in silver, the crossed bands of stars from the Confederate flag flickered like they were waving in the wind.

  The henchman looked down at my father and gave him a crooked one-sided smile. “Now, what you gonna do? Speak Greek to us?” The other men laughed as if that was the funniest joke they’d ever heard, but their laughter was cut short when the room exploded in glass.

  CHAPTER 2

  SAVED BY THE BARON

  The window beside my head shattered, and I ducked as wood and glass rained down around me. The whir of wings whizzing past, the whipping of a cloak in the wind, and the solid thud of feet landing on stone made me look up to peer through the protective shield of my arms.

  “That’s not how you treat an Etonian.” The same aristocratic British accent of my classmates cut through the night air. The glint off polished steel flashed in front of me and the closest bruiser grunted in protest as the blade sliced through him. Blood poured from his chest, his eyes rolled up under the brim of his hat, and he slumped to the floor. My heart burned and lurched against my ribcage as I realized his had stopped. I trembled in shock.

  The Englishman, a tall, broad shouldered man in a blue cloak, wrenched his sword free, and spun on the heel of a well-polished boot. His thin double-edged sword struck the Confederate, slid upward, and flung the black derby right past my head. The bronze clad man’s right eye sparked even brighter at the affront, and a thick serrated blade just over a foot long slid out of his right sleeve and clicked into place.

  “Yeow!” My father yelped as his foot struck a metal plate on the man’s chest. “What are you?”

  I retreated further into the corner, pulled my knees tight against my chest, and buried my face as the two men circled my father.

  But when the man my father had pounded with the book began screaming, “Get this thing off me!” my head snapped up and saw him, face splattered with blood, flailing against a small bronze dragon slashing and biting, all talons and teeth.

  “You’ll not eat me!” The last bruiser covered his head and bolted for the hall.

  The little creature locked eyes on the fleeing long coat and screeched. Bronze wings stretched out and flapped as it launched and soared out of the room, spitting a fusillade of fireballs toward its prey as it exited.

  I squeezed my eyes and shook my head as if to clear the vision from my head. Was that a real dragon? Couldn’t be. There are no such things as real dragons. Besides, that creature was made of metal.

  When I opened my eyes again, a different room lay before me. Gone was my quiet prison. With one henchman dead, the dusty one blinded by blood, and the third running in terror, only the bronze-clad Confederate remained.

  “Yer one of them, ain’t yah?” he asked the Englishman.

  “Doesn’t matter who I am, what matters is that you’re not leaving with the professor.” He whipped his cloak back and kicked the serrated blade into the desk with the heel of his polished boot. The thick blade stuck in the oak, and with a quick flip of his wrist he brought his sword down upon the Confederate’s right arm. The blade sliced off the man’s sleeve clean and neat, and the fabric slid to the floor in a heap. What remained behind, attached to the man’s upper arm, were the gears and wires of a complex animatronic arm.

  My eyes bulged out in surprise.

  “Colonel Hendrix!” The bloodied henchman cried out in a thick cockney accent. “A Bobbie’s whistle!”

  I locked on to the rapid high pitched sound. Was help coming?

  The colonel snarled. “Get out of here and see where that yellow-belly went!”

  Wrenching his blade free from the old oak, Hendrix retracted it back into his arm. With the claw that replaced it, he snatched the desk and threw it at the Englishman.

  I screamed and tucked back into a ball. The desk tumbled and slammed into the wall and settled in front of me. The shelf collapsed, pottery smashed all around, and a Bronze Age dagger tumbled blade-down and stuck in the floorboard between my legs with a sharp snick.

  I yelped and struggled to get to my feet, but the desk was in my way. I could only watch as Col. Hendrix snatched the ancient manuscript with one hand and my father with his mechanical arm. I opened my mouth to cry out but my voice failed, choked by tears.

  “Alexander!” my father screamed as the colonel dragged him out the door.

  Kicking the desk away, the blue-cloaked Englishman scanned me for injuries, and then ran into the hall. Alone, I climbed over the desk. There, on the floor at my feet, my father’s eyeglasses lay atop scattered papers. I picked them up and stared at the warped office through the lenses.

  After a few moments, the man in the blue suit returned and reached out his hand. “Professor Armitage’s son, I presume. Baron Kensington, pleasure to meet you.”

  “Thank you, I’m Alexander.” My chest seized, and I could hardly breathe. Red-stained parchment lay beneath the dead henchman. I’d never seen so much blood, but the baron didn’t even notice. I slumped back onto the floor.

  “Are you injured?” the baron asked, his hand still extended. I grasped it and he helped me to my feet as papers still drifted through the air.

  “What? No, just confused. Where’s my father?”

  “They’ve fled for now.” The baron sheathed his sword in a cane scabbard. “I’m afraid you can’t help him at the moment.”

  “Who was that, and why did he take my father?” Pain wrenched my gut, worse than any b
ully’s punch. I was alone.

  “They won’t hurt him, they need him.” The baron kept an eye on the opening where the shattered door used to hang. “Her Royal Highness sent me to retrieve you and your father.”

  “The Queen?” The Queen? What would she want with my father?

  “Yes, gather your possessions, you’ll come with me for now.”

  I placed my father’s glasses in their case, put them in my leather bag, and slung it over my shoulder. The dead man’s baton lay at my feet, and I scooped it up and dropped it in the bag, too. Then I grabbed my leather coat from the overturned rack.

  The nobleman motioned toward the door. “My carriage is waiting outside.”

  As the small bronze dragon flew through the doorway, I clutched my bag to my chest, in some strange sort of defense. I probably should have covered my face, but it was instinct. The dragon landed on the baron’s shoulder. The nobleman rubbed the horned nubs on its head and fed the creature a bit of dried meat from a suit coat pocket. I could see now that it was the size of an eagle or a hawk, and watched in wonderment as it wrapped a long tapering tail around the baron’s shoulders.

  I wondered if it could be a machine, but the eyes held the glimmer of intelligence. “Is that a dragon?”

  “His name is Rodin,” he said, ignoring my question and striding forward. I rushed to catch up with the baron. After a pause, he said, “There’ll be plenty of time for questions later.”

  A steam-powered carriage waited outside with a squat man atop the driver’s perch. He jumped off, opened the door, and the baron climbed inside. I nodded and stepped into the carriage. The driver lifted his cap, revealing long scattered locks of bright orange hair.

  I had so many questions to ask, but I fell silent when I caught the shattered window of my father’s office out of the corner of my eye. I heard the driver climb atop his perch and release a lever. A loud chug chug chug from the back of the carriage made me turn just as the steam engine belched a puff of white smoke, and we lurched forward and started down the cobblestone road.