by Sean Wallace
Tariel whispered to her salamander, and her musket barked fire and noise. The lead Iron Ringer was instantly relieved of all worries about the honor of his company. As she began to reload, shrieking cannonballs gouged the earth around us and before us, no shot yet closer than fifty yards. Bowel-loosening as the flash of distant cannonade might be, they would need much better luck and direction to really endanger us at that range.
I enacted a defensive spell, one that had become routine and reflexive. A sheen appeared in the air between us and the edge of the ridge, a subtle distortion that would safely pervert the course of any musket ball not fired at point-blank range. Not much of a roof to shelter under in the face of artillery, but it had the advantage of requiring little energy or concentration while I tried to apprehend the situation.
Rumstandel cast slips of paper from his coat pocket and spat crackling words of power after them. Over the ridge and across the field they whirled, toward the Iron Ring penitents, swelling into man-sized kites of crimson silk, each one painted with a wild-eyed likeness of Rumstandel, plus elaborate military, economic, and sexual insults in excellent Iron Ring script. Half-a-dozen kites swept into the ranks of the charging men, ensnaring arms, legs, necks, and muskets in their glittering strings before leaping upward, hauling victims to the sky.
“Hackwork, miserable hackwork,” muttered Rumstandel. “Someday I’ll figure out how to make the kites scream those insults. Illiterate targets simply aren’t getting the full effect.”
The cries of the men being hoisted into the air said otherwise, but I was too busy to argue.
The war machine lurched on, cannons booming, the shot falling so far beyond us I didn’t see them land. So long as the device was in motion, I wagered its gunners would have a vexed time laying their pieces. That would change in a matter of minutes, when the thing reached spell and musket range and could halt to crush us at leisure.
“We have to get the hell out of here!” I cried, somewhat suborning the authority of my mother, who was still caught in the trance of seed-surveillance. That was when a familiar emerald phosphorescence burst around us, a vivid green light that lit the churned grass for a thirty-yard circle with us at the center.
“SHOT-FALL IMPS,” bellowed Caladesh, which is just what they were; each of the five of us was now beset by a cavorting green figure dancing in the air above our heads, grinning evilly and pointing at us, while blazing with enough light to make our position clear from miles away.
“Here! Here! Over here!” yelled the green imps. The reader may assume they continued to yell this throughout the engagement, for they certainly did. I cannot find the will to scrawl it over and over again in this journal.
Shot-fall imps are intangible (so we couldn’t shoot them) and notoriously slippery to banish. I have the wherewithal to do it, but it takes several patient minutes of trial and error, and those I did not possess.
Fire flashed in the distance, the long-range batteries again, this time sighting on the conspicuous green glow. It was no particular surprise that they were now more accurate, their balls parting the air just above our heads or plowing furrows within twenty yards. This is where we came in after the last intermission, with the enemy bombardment, the scrambling, and the general sense of a catastrophically unfolding cock-up.
Rumstandel hurled occult abuse at the penitents, his darkening mood evident in his choice of spells. He transmuted boot leather to caustic silver slime, seeded the ground with flesh-hungry glass shards, turned eyeballs to solid ice and cracked them within their sockets. All this, plus Tariel’s steady, murderous attention, and still the Iron Ringers came on, fierce and honor-mad, bayonets fixed, leaving their stricken comrades in the mud.
“Get to the horses!” I yelled, no longer concerned about bruising Millowend’s chain of command. It was my job to ward us all from harm, and the best possible safeguard would be for us to scurry, leaving our dignity on the field like a trampled tent.
The surviving penitents came charging up a nearby defile to the top of Montveil’s Wall. Caladesh met them, standing tall, his favorite over-and-under double flintlocks barking smoke. Those pistols threw .60 caliber balls, and at such close range the effect was . . . well, you’ve squeezed fruit before, haven’t you?
The world became a tumbling confusion of incident. Iron Ring penitents falling down the slope, tangled in the heavy bodies of dead comrades, imps dancing in green light, cannonballs ripping holes in the air, a lurching war machine – all this while I frantically tried to spot our horses, revive my mother, and layer us in what protections I could muster.
They weren’t sufficient. A swarm of small water elementals burst upon us, translucent blobs the color of gutter-silt, smelling like the edge of a summer storm. They poured themselves into the barrels and touch-holes of Caladesh’s pistols, leaving him cursing. A line of them surged up and down the barrel of Tariel’s musket, and the salamander faced them with steaming red blades in its hands like the captain of a boarded vessel. The situation required more than my spells could give it, so I resolved at last to surrender an advantage I was loath to part with.
On my left wrist I wore a bracelet woven from the tail-hairs of an Iron Unicorn, bound with a spell given to me by the Thinking Sharks of the Jewelwine Sea, for which I had traded documents whose contents are still the state secrets of one of our former clients. I tore it off, snapped it in half, and threw it to the ground.
It’s dangerous arrogance for any sorcerer to think of a fifth-order demon as a familiar; at best such beings can be indentured to a very limited span of time or errands, and against even the most ironclad terms of service they will scheme and clamor with exhausting persistence. However, if you can convince them to shut up and take orders . . .
“Felderasticus Sixth-Quickened, Baronet of the Flayed Skulls of Faithless Dogs, Princeling of the House of Recurring Shame,” I bellowed, pausing to take a breath, “get up here and get your ass to work!”
“I deem that an irretrievably non-specific request,” said a voice like fingernails on desert-dry bones. “I shall therefore return to my customary place and assume my indenture to be dissolved by mutual—”
“Stuff that, you second-rate legal fantasist! When you spend three months questing for spells to bind me into jewelry, then you can start assuming things! Get rid of these shot-fall imps!”
“Reluctant apologies, most impatient of spell-dabblers and lore-cheats, softest of cannonball targets, but again your lamentably hasty nonspecificity confounds my generous intentions. When you say, ‘get rid of’, how exactly do you propose—”
“Remove them instantly and absolutely from our presence without harm to ourselves and banish them to their previous plane of habitation!”
A chill wind blew, and it was done. The shot-fall imps with their damned green light and their pointing and shouting were packed off in a cosmic bag, back to their rightful home, where they would most likely be used as light snacks for higher perversities like Felderasticus Sixth-Quickened. I was savagely annoyed. Using Felderasticus to swat them was akin to using a guillotine as a mousetrap, but you can see the mess we were in.
“Now, I shall withdraw, having satisfied all the terms of our compact,” said the demon.
“Oh, screw yourself!” I snarled.
“Specify physically, metaphysically, or figuratively.”
“Shut it! You know you’re not finished. I need a moment to think.”
Tariel and Caladesh were fending off penitents, inelegantly but emphatically, with their waterlogged weapons. Rumstandel was trying to help them as well as keep life hot for the Iron Ring sorcerer that must have been mixed in with the penitents. I couldn’t see him (or her) from my vantage, but the imps and water elementals proved their proximity. Millowend was stirring, muttering, but not yet herself. I peered at the towering war machine and calculated. No, that was too much of a job for my demon. Too much mass, too much magic, and now it was just 200 yards distant.
“We require transportation,”
I said, “Instantly and—”
“Wait,” cried my mother. She sat up, blinked, and appeared unsurprised as a cannonball swatted the earth not ten feet away, spattering both of us with mud. “Don’t finish that command, Watchdog! We all need to die!”
“Watchdog,” said Rumstandel, “our good captain is plainly experiencing a vacancy in the upper-story rooms, so please apply something heavy to her skull and get on with that escape you were arranging.”
“No! I’m sorry,” cried Millowend, and now she bounced to her feet with sprightliness that was more than a little unfair in someone her age. “My mind was still a bit at luncheon. You know that flying around being a hundred of myself is a very taxing business. What I mean is, this is a bespoke ambush, and if we vanish safely out of it they’ll just keep expecting us. But if it looks as though we’re snuffed, the Iron Ring might drop their guard enough to let us back in the fight!”
“Ahh!” I cried, chagrined that I hadn’t thought of that myself. In my defense, you have just read my account of the previous few minutes. I cleared my throat.
“Felderasticus, these next-named tasks, once achieved, shall purchase the end of your indenture without further caveat or reservation! NOW! Interpreting my words in the broadest possible spirit of good faith, we, all five of us, must be brought alive with our possessions to a place of safety within the North Elaran encampment just south of here. Furthermore – FURTHERMORE! Upon the instant of our passage, you must create a convincing illusion of our deaths, as though . . . as though we had been caught by cannon-fire and the subsequent combustion of our powder-flasks and alchemical miscellanies!”
I remain very proud of that last flourish. Wizards, like musketeers, are notorious for carrying all sorts of volatile things on their persons, and if we were seen to explode the Iron Ringers might not bother examining our alleged remains too closely.
“Faithfully shall I work your will and thereby end my indenture,” said the cold voice of the demon.
The world turned gray and spun around me. After a moment of disjointed nausea I found myself once again lying under sharp-elbowed Caladesh, with Rumstandel, Tariel, and my mother into the bargain. Roughly 600 pounds of Red Hats, all balanced atop my stomach, did something for my freshly eaten pie that I hesitate to describe. But, ah, you’ve squeezed fruit before, haven’t you?
Moaning, swearing, and retching, we all fell or scrambled apart. Guns, bandoliers, and hats littered the ground around us. When I had managed to wipe my mouth and take in a few breaths, I finally noticed that we were surrounded by a veritable forest of legs, legs wearing the boots and uniform trousers of North Elaran staff officers.
I followed some of those legs upward with my eyes and met the disbelieving gaze of General Arad Vorstal, supreme field commander of the army of North Elara. Beside him stood his general of engineers, the equally surprised Luthienne Alune.
“Generals,” said my mother suavely, dusting herself off and restoring her battered hat to its proper place. “Apologies for the suddenness of our arrival. I’m afraid I have to report that our reconnaissance of the Iron Ring war machine ended somewhat prematurely. And the machine retains its full motive power.”
She cleared her throat.
“And, ah, we’re all probably going to see it again in about half an hour.”
ENCLOSURE: Invoice for sundry items lost or disposed of in Elaran service, 13th instant, Mithune, 1186. Submitted to Quartermaster-Captain Guthrun on behalf of the Honorable Company of Red Hats, countersigned Captain-Paramount Millowend, Sorceress. 28th instant, Mithune, 1186
ITEM VALUATION:
Bracelet, thaumaturgical . . . 1150 Gil. 13 p.
Function (confidential)
Spyflask, thaumaturgical . . . 100 Gil. 5 p.
Function (reconnaissance)
Total Petition . . . 1250 Gil. 18 p.
Please remit as per terms of contract.
WATCHDOG – Actually, I picked up your spyflask when you rather thoughtlessly dropped it that afternoon. I did mean to return it to you eventually. These minor trivialities of camp life do elude me sometimes. I hadn’t realized that the company received a hundred gildmarks as a replacement fee. Do you want me to keep the flask, or shall I write myself up a chit for the hundred gildmarks? I am content with either. – R
13th Mithune, 1186
Somewhere near Lake Corlan, North Elara
But they didn’t come. Not then.
Afternoon wound down into evening. Presumably, the Iron Ring thought it too late in the day to commence a general action, and with all of their sorcerous impediments supposedly ground into the mud, one could hardly blame them for a lack of urgency. The war machine stood guard before Montveil’s Wall, and behind it came the creak and groan of artillery teams, the shouts of orders, and the tramp of boots as line regiments moved into their billets for the night. The light of a thousand fires rose from the captured Elaran fieldworks and joined in an ominous glow, giving the overcast the colors of a banked furnace.
In the Elaran camp, we brooded and argued. The council ran long, in quite inverse proportion to the tempers of those involved.
“It’s not that we can’t dig,” General Alune was saying, her patience shaved down to a perceptibly thin patina on her manner. “For the tenth time, it’s the fact that the bloody machine moves! We can work like mad all night, sink a shaft just about the right size to make a grave for the damn thing, and in the morning it might spot the danger and take five steps to either side. So much for our trap.”
“Have you ever seen a pitfall for a dangerous animal?” said Tariel, mangling protocol by speaking up. “It’s customary to cover the entrance with a light screen of camouflage—”
“Yes, yes, I’m well aware,” snapped General Alune. “But once again, that machine is the master of the field and may go where it pleases, attacking from any angle. We have no practical means of forcing it into a trap, even a hidden one.”
“Has the thing truly no weak point, no joint in its armor, no vent or portal on which we can concentrate fire? Or sorcery?” said Vorstal, stroking the beard that hung from his craggy chin like sable-streaked snow. “What about the mechanisms that propel it?”
“I assure you I had the closest look possible,” said Millowend. “It was the only useful thing I managed to do during our last engagement. The device has no real machinery, no engine, no pulleys or pistons. It’s driven by brute sorcery. A wizard in a harness, mimicking the movements they desire the machine to make, a puppeteer driving a vast puppet. You might call it an effigy engine. It’s exhausting work, and I’m sure they have to swap wizards frequently. However, while harnessed, the driver is still inside the armored shell, still protected by the arts of their fellows. It’s as easy to destroy the machine outright as it is to reach them.”
“How many great guns have we managed to recover since yesterday’s debacle?” said General Vorstal.
“Four,” said General Alune. “Four functional six-pounders, crewed by a few survivors, the mildly injured, and a lot of fresh volunteers.”
“That’s nothing to hang our hopes on,” sighed Vorstal, “a fifth of what wasn’t even adequate before!”
“We could try smoke,” said Rumstandel. While listening to the council of war he’d added flourishes to his beard, tiny gray clouds and twirling water-spouts, plus lithe long-necked sea serpents. Life had become very hard for the little ships of the Rumstandel Delta. “Or anything to render the hull uninhabitable. Flaming caustics, bottled vitriol, sulfurous miasma, air spirits of reeking decay—”
“The Iron Ring sorcerers could nullify any of those before they caused harm,” I said. “You and I certainly could.”
Rumstandel shrugged theatrically. Miniature lightning crackled just below his chin.
“Then it must be withdrawal,” said Vorstal, bitterly but decisively. “If we face that thing again, with the rest of the Iron Ring force at its heels, this army will be destroyed. I have to preserve it. Trade territory for time. I want 100 volunte
ers to demonstrate at Montveil’s Wall while we start pulling the rest out quietly.” He looked around, meeting the eyes of all his staff in turn. “Officers will surrender their horses to hospital wagon duty, myself included.”
“With respect, sir,” said General Alune, “you know how many Iron Ring sympathizers . . . that is, when word of all this reaches parliament they’ll have you dismissed. And they’ll be laying white flags at the feet of that damned machine before we can even get the army reformed, let alone reinforced.”
“Certainly I’ll be recalled,” said Vorstal. “Probably arrested, too. I’ll be counting on you to keep our forces intact and use whatever time I can buy you to think of something I couldn’t. You always were the cleverer one, Luthienne.”
“The Iron Ring won’t want easy accommodations,” said Millowend, and I was surprised to notice her using a very subtle spell of persuasion. Her voice rang a little more clearly to the far corners of the command pavilion, her shadow seemed longer and darker, her eyes more alight with compelling fire. “You’ve bled them and stymied them for months. You’ve defied all their plans. Now their demands will be merciless and unconditional. If this army falls back, they will put your people in chains and feed Elara to the fires of their war-furnaces, until you’re nothing but ashes on the trail to their next conquest! Now, if that war machine were destroyed, could you think to meet the rest of the Iron Ring army with the force you still possess?”
“If it were destroyed?” shouted General Vorstal. “IF! If my cock had scales and another ninety feet it’d be a dragon! IF! Millowend, I’m sorry, you and your company have done us extraordinary service, but I have no more time for interruptions. I’ll see to it that your contract is fully paid off and you’re given letters of safe passage, for what they’re worth.”
“I have a fresh notion,” said my mother. “One that will give us a long and sleepless night, if it’s practicable at all, and the thing I need to hear, right now, is whether or not you can meet the Iron Ring army if that machine is subtracted from the ledger.”