“Church of Sorrowful Angels,” said the wagon drover, helping one of the footmen wrestle the coffin off the wagon bed. “They ran out of rain-barrels. They say it ain’t never been used, if you’re worried.”
If we survived this, I was going to have to go find the Church of Sorrowful Angels and talk to their cook. Still, that was a lot of dough. I could probably make half a golem out of that much dough.
But I was talking about making more Bob. Generally you have to be careful when you add water and flour to a sourdough starter, to make sure that you’ve got the right proportions and all, but in Bob’s case, it was easy. I stuck both hands into the soup tureen and tried to convince him that what the world needed was a whole lot more Bob.
As this coincided with what Bob himself had always believed, pretty soon I had commandeered a horse trough and had footmen dumping fifty pound sacks of flour into it. I threw in a couple of dead fish when no one was looking.
By mid-afternoon, Bob filled six rain-barrels, and here I found an example of what Spiraling Shadows called the magic of sympathy. Despite the fact that they were in separate barrels, they were all still Bob. If I shoved an arm into one barrel and told Bob that he was a good and wonderful sourdough starter, the best starter in the whole world, all six barrels glubbed and belched happily. When I tried to explain about the Carex—that there were mean people in the world who wanted to hurt me and Aunt Tabitha and take away Bob’s flour and dead fish, all six barrels hissed and glopped and floury tentacles lashed the air.
“That’s not creepy at all,” said Spindle, turning up at my elbow. “What’ve you got there?”
“It’s only Bob. Well, a lot of Bob. Don’t touch him.” I rubbed the back of my neck wearily. “Where’ve you been all day?”
Spindle shrugged. “Out. About. Y’know.”
Which meant that he didn’t want to talk about it. I gave him a mildly curious look, and he flushed. “Was lookin’ for Knackering Molly, if you gotta know.”
“Oh.” I’d been so busy, I hadn’t thought about her. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. But she won’t come help.” He folded his arms tight and glared down at his shoes. “Says it’s not for little people like her. Says she’ll get crushed. I told her that we needed her, that there weren’t no more wizards but you, but she wouldn’t listen.”
I was disappointed, but I tried not to show it. “I think the last war was really hard on her. She went with the army once. They say that’s when she went crazy.”
“Just ’cos you’re crazy don’t mean you can’t help,” said Spindle, scuffing the ground with his foot.
I remembered Uncle Albert saying that if you slap a medal on someone, you don’t have to ask questions, or fix what went wrong. Had they given Molly a medal, for making the dead horses walk on the battlefield?
It was too much and I was fourteen years old and if I didn’t get back to work, it wouldn’t matter how heroes were made and whether that was good or bad or indifferent. I socked Spindle on the arm. “Come and help me get Bob into jars. I’ll tell him you’re a friend.”
* * *
It took over a hundred jars to contain Bob. I think we used the entire stock from the palace. We all had pickled beets and pickled eggs and pickled beef and pickled asparagus for lunch and dinner, to free up the jars, and by the end of it, I didn’t want to see a pickle ever again. The job was made more difficult because Bob was fighting mad now—I think Spindle dumped a couple of jars of pickled chili peppers into the barrels when I wasn’t looking—and was striking out at strangers, so Spindle and Aunt Tabitha and I were the only ones who could get him into the jars.
Jenny the kitchen maid was really helpful. She kept finding jars tucked into corners and bringing them out, which was more than the head cook had done.
“Oh, her,” said Jenny, sniffing. “She went off with a flea in her ear after your aunt told her off. Don’t tell her I brought you the pickled radishes, though. Those are her specialty, y’know. She’d be right mad if she knew that you were stuffing dough into all those jars.”
I was latching the very last lid onto the very last jar when Joshua appeared at my elbow. It was early evening. The sky looked old and bloody over the western walls.
“Mona?” he said.
“They’re finishing the oven now,” I said, not looking at him. “Another hour to get it evenly heated, and we’ll start baking.”
He nodded. “In that case—”
Something landed on my shoulder.
I let out a squawk and ducked down, and my gingerbread man climbed on top of my head and started waving his arms angrily at my attacker. Joshua, who should have been helping, started laughing instead.
It was a pigeon.
This was a big glossy gray bird, with that subtle oily iridescence along his neck feathers, but still, a pigeon. You get them everywhere in town.
The pigeon puffed out its chest and looked down its beak at me, which is not the sort of behavior you expect from a bird that lives in gutters.
Joshua finally managed to stop laughing and said, “I think that’s one of Annalise’s. See if it’s got a message.”
“A message?” I stared at the bird, who was uncomfortably close to my face.
The pigeon lifted one foot. It had a little capsule strapped to its leg. Using its beak, it removed the capsule and held it out toward me.
“Joshua, the bird is giving me something!”
“It’s a messenger pigeon,” said Joshua. “Annalise—she’s a wizard, travels with the army. She does homing pigeons. Unfortunately while she can send them here, we can’t send them back to her—they’re strictly one-way birds. They can find their way home, and that’s it. Still, she can usually magick them into finding a specific person.”
“Shouldn’t it be trying to find you then? Or the Duchess?”
“She got one a few hours ago,” said Joshua, the laughter fading from his voice. “They got our message. The army is a little more than three days away. They’re doing a forced march, and hope to cut it down, but even an army can’t run all the way here.”
Well. I hadn’t had much hope. It felt less like a fist in the gut and more like a confirmation of what I had known all along. The army couldn’t save us. The Golden General couldn’t save us. It was up to us.
The bird shook the message-capsule at me. I took it gingerly between my fingers, expecting a peck.
There was a note inside. It was written neatly on a sheet of onionskin paper, folded so tightly that an entire sheet could fit into the tiny capsule. I smoothed it out and read,
To Mona, the Wizard of the Bakery, greetings from General Ethan.
Ah. Of course. The Golden General was sending me letters now. Naturally this was the next logical step. After this, Our Lady of Sorrowful Angels would step down off her church spire and roll up her sleeves and begin punching dough alongside Aunt Tabitha.
“From Ethan?” asked Joshua.
I nodded. “How did he know who I was?”
“The Duchess sent a very thorough report with the riders, and you’re the only wizard at our disposal. I can’t imagine there’s too many wizard girls running around the palace right now.” Joshua laughed wearily. “Would that there were. A few more like you, and we might not need the army.”
“Ha-ha,” I said, smoothing the creases out of the letter and reading farther down.
Her Grace the Duchess informs me that in our city’s hour of need, you have stepped forward. You have all my gratitude, Wizard Mona. I implore you, leave no stone unturned in your efforts to save our city. Do not be bound by what seems foolish or impossible. In magic, creativity is as important as knowledge. The greatest wizard I have ever known would have been considered a minor talent by our standards, but he was relentless in finding ways to make things work with what he had. I hope that you will be the same.
We will be with you as soon as we can.
Yrs,
General Ethan
Its job done, the pigeon launche
d itself heavily off my shoulder and circled the courtyard, gaining altitude. It vanished over the top of the palace, presumably to some hidden dovecote where the homing pigeons roosted.
I folded the note and shoved it into my pocket. I hadn’t expected a letter from the Golden General in the first place, so it was stupid to feel disappointed that, when one arrived, it didn’t include handy advice like, “By the way, I’ve hidden the magic superweapon in the third broom closet on the left.”
Still, a superweapon would have been nice.
You might think that having the Golden General watching over your shoulder—even by homing pigeon—would be daunting. But really, when everybody was going to die if I failed, piling “and the great hero of our army will be very disappointed” on top didn’t mean that much.
In a way, the letter was actually encouraging. In magic, creativity is as important as knowledge. If anybody knew, it’d be the Golden General. He was a wizard, after all, and a very well trained one. If he said that you could do a lot with a little magic….well.
You couldn’t argue that my bread golems weren’t creative. I just had to think of even more creative things to do.
“We’re beginning the heating now,” called a blacksmith, as the first load of charcoal went into the oven.
“You can be spared for an hour, then,” said Joshua, as I turned away from the ovens “Come with me. The Carex have reached the outlying areas.”
Twenty-Nine
Joshua and the Duchess and I stood on the wall over the great gate of the city and looked out over the army of Carex mercenaries. Oh, it was grim.
They could have reached us by nightfall if they wanted to. All they had to do was keep marching past the outlying farms. But instead they paused at every one and set the fields to the torch. The daylight was fading, but burning wheat made thin bright lines that winked out, one by one, as the farms burned to ash.
I wiped my face. I was so angry I was crying. Spindle stood next to me, his arms on the blocky stones of the battlements, and his face was the same as when he’d found Tibbie’s bracelet in the bakery. The gingerbread man hid his face in my hair.
There was no point to it. That was the infuriating thing. Sure, the Carex were going to try to kill us because they wanted our city, and that was pretty awful, but at least you could see why they were doing it. Burning the farms was just senseless destruction. We weren’t going to get any supplies past their army, so it wasn’t like they were burning the crops to keep us from getting them. They were pulling the wings off a fly because they could.
“The people were evacuated this morning,” said the Duchess. “The animals, too. Every park in the city is crammed full of pigs and chickens and cows and farmers yelling at each other.” She sighed. “At least we won’t lose many lives to this. But great good gods, what a waste.”
The army was close. You could just make out individuals in the ragged lines marching toward us.
There were a lot of them.
Don’t ask me how many there were. I can estimate a cup of flour or a tablespoon of baking powder, but armies aren’t ingredients. There were a lot. Compared to the pitiful number of men I had seen drilling earlier…
So, we’re doomed, my gut said conversationally.
Yup, said my brain.
So long as we’re clear.
The great gate was closed, of course—all the gates in the walls of the city were closed and barred with iron portcullises—but the city didn’t exactly stop there. The problem with having a walled city is that it limits how big you can get. The current walls were actually the third or fourth set of walls around the city, in concentric rings like an onion. Unfortunately previous generations had cannibalized those earlier walls for building materials, so if we didn’t hold them at the gate, we didn’t have much in the way of a fallback position.
Outside the walls, however, it’s not a sharp transition with city on one side and country on the other. There’s a whole town of sorts outside the gates. People driving their goods to the city to sell are hot and thirsty by the time they arrive, so somebody sets up a food and drink stand outside to meet them. Over time, the stand becomes a bonafide inn, and then somebody else sets up another food stand, and so on and so forth. Some people can’t afford to live in town, and rather than set up in a place like Rat’s Elbow, they opt to live just outside the city walls. And there are a whole lot of businesses that you really don’t want inside the city, like the knackers and the tanners (the smells associated with leathermaking will make your nose try to crawl off your head) and of course the knackers and the tanners need someplace to live and somebody sets another food stand up to sell to them (although most of them burned out their sinuses long ago and can’t taste a thing) and…you get the idea. We have half a mile worth of town along all the major roads into the city, before you get to the walls at all.
I expected the Carex to burn that, too, but they didn’t. Joshua shook his head when I asked. “The fire will spread too quickly,” he said. “They have to camp there, and there’s too much chance that the whole place will go up like a tinderbox. If they’re fighting fires, they’re not fighting us.” He put a hand on his sword-hilt. “They know that there are probably still people in there—there are always people who won’t listen to the evacuation order—but even if we had a dozen trained assassins hiding in the knackeryard, they’d still lose fewer people than if they turned the whole place into an inferno.”
“Do we have a dozen trained assassins?” I asked hopefully. The Spring Green Man had definitely soured me on the notion of assassins, but I was willing to change my opinion.
“No,” said Joshua.
Spindle coughed. We all looked at him, and he stared up into the sky with his hands behind his back and said, “Well…not assassins, ’zactly…”
“Spindle,” said the Duchess, with weary amusement, “what do you know that we don’t?”
“Coupla the guys,” said Spindle. “Outta the Rat’s Nest, you know. We ain’t like the army, but this is our city too.” He scratched his chin. “Heard that a couple of ’em went out the smuggler’s tunnels. Slug wouldn’t go, but One-Eyed Benji and Leaky Peg did, and most of Crackhand’s bully-boys.”
“The names of these people amaze me,” murmured the Duchess. “Really, the nobles are so unimaginative by comparison. I wonder if Leaky Peg would like a cabinet position?”
“Dunno how much good it’ll do, having them out there, but can’t hurt,” Spindle finished.
“It may help a great deal,” said Joshua. “Taking out a few individual fighters won’t make much difference, but if they can make the Carex agitated and jumping at shadows—I’d far rather face an army that didn’t get a good night’s sleep.”
“If you get the chance, Spindle,” said the Duchess, looking bemused, “please extend the thanks of the crown to One-Eyed Benji and Crackhand and…well, everyone. I doubt they’d like public recognition.”
“They’re stopping,” said Joshua, leaning over the battlements.
He was right. They had halted a few hundred yards from the gate. We could hear them in the distance, a hum of voices and jeers and laughter, not unlike the sounds of the city itself.
“Can’t we do something?” I asked. “They’re sitting right there!”
Joshua shook his head. “Out of arrow range. They know exactly what they’re about. They’ll set up camp, and Oberon must have told them that we don’t have the resources to lead a charge against them.”
We stood on the battlements while the sun went down behind the enemy. Rising smoke from the burning fields made black columns against the sunset.
I turned away. I felt ancient, like I’d aged a lifetime standing there. The Mona who had spent the afternoon putting jar lids onto sourdough starters seemed distant and young and innocent, and the Mona who had found a dead girl on the bakery floor was some other person from somebody else’s life entirely.
It’s a strange way to feel when you’re fourteen.
“I need t
o get back to the ovens,” I said. “I have a few more ideas, but we don’t have very much time.”
Thirty
When I got back to the palace kitchens, the blacksmiths weren’t ready yet. Argonel was overseeing one of the shields full of hot coals, which hadn’t been attached properly and had spilled down over the cookie sheet. “Sorry, Wizard Mona,” he said, waving an apprentice into position. “I’d threaten to have the man responsible horse-whipped, but I fear that it was me. We’ll have it up in an hour or less.”
“It’s all right,” I said absently, reaching up to pat his arm. He had biceps bigger than my head. “There’s something I need to do first.”
I’d rather face an army that didn’t get a good night’s sleep…
I was nearly at the kitchen door when Harold the guard stepped out and pulled me aside. “Wizard Mona—”
I was pretty sure that I was going to get really tired of being called Wizard Mona before this was over. “Yes?”
He shifted his feet and said, “Mona—Wizard Elgar’s escaped.”
My head was still full of Carex and burning fields and I started to say, “Who?” and then the bottom dropped out of my stomach because he was talking about the Spring Green Man.
“Escaped,” I said faintly.
Harold nodded. “He may have had an ally on the inside. We haven’t had time to smoke out all of Oberon’s people yet. He shouldn’t have been able to escape from a wizard prison by himself, but we’ve been so short-handed that we haven’t been checking the cells as regularly as we should, and—well—he’s gone.”
My stomach seemed to be laying somewhere on the ground several feet away. On the other side of the courtyard, the apprentices yelled, “Hup!” and the shield of coals swung clanking on the chains. There was a hiss as coals splashed over the sides and somebody cursed.
“It would be very foolish of him to come after you,” said Harold earnestly, putting a hand on my shoulder. “He’ll probably go over the walls and try to meet up with Oberon. It would be suicide to try to get to you now.”
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking Page 19