The Horns of Ruin by Tim Akers, 2010

Three brothers — a mechanic, a healer, and a warrior — turn divine, and each forms a cult. Then the mechanic kills the warrior, and the warrior and healer cults combine to kill the mechanic and subjugate most of his followers except for a small, break-away sect of assassins called the Betrayers. Or, at least, that’s how I imagine they tell it to the children in Sunday school. The story begins with Eva Forge, the warrior cult’s last Paladin, accompanying the cult’s elder on a trip the healer’s cult to requisition a mechanic for unspecified purposes. On their return trip they are attacked by persons and things unknown, except for the Betrayers, and the elder and the mechanic disappear, which sets Eva off on a rambunctious scramble to rescue them. It also marks the beginning of Eva’s gradual enlightenment, in which she learns not only the secrets and truths, but also the lies. Eva recovers the mechanic, and together they dive into the heart of it.

The story is a combination of steampunk, hack ’n’ slash, and magic. One of the more interesting parts is Eva’s development from an EVA SMASH character to a relatively more thoughtful and rational one. The tale spinning does the job; the story starts off mysterious and tangled; by mid-book the threads have been picked apart and laid out semi-neatly; the rest of the book weaves some of them into something resembling a satisfactory ending. The other threads are left for what feels like a set-up for the next book in the series, but as far as I can tell this is a one-off, which means the ending could also be considered sloppy and unsatisfactory. The story has some other amusements/annoyances. Cult members get power by invoking their ancestors. Eva starts a battle with an ivokation for strength, swings her sword around for a while, then stops and invokes a stronger shield, then continues the battle until the next invokation — not the kind of pacing you want in an action scene. Towards the end Eva gets run through by a sword from behind, yet she doesn’t die, she kills the Betrayer who runs her through, and guts the Betrayer she was originally fighting. There’s a good, spoiler-filled reason why she doesn’t die, but even so that kind of thing tends to run roughly over a reader’s charity, or at least it did this reader’s charity.