by Scott Lynch
THE EFFIGY ENGINE
A Tale of the Red Hats
by Scott Lynch
© 2018 Scott Lynch
All Rights Reserved
Distributed by Smashwords
ISBN 978-0-9863735-5-8 (ebook)
Designed by: Scott Lynch
Cover Background: Dmitry Sosenushkin (Used Under License)
Original Cover Art: Miles Äijälä
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
The Effigy Engine
About the Author
Other Short Works by Scott Lynch
Novels by Scott Lynch
Author’s Note
“Through the mud and the blood to the green fields beyond.” That’s the unofficial motto of the Royal Tank Regiment, coined when the tank was a fresh, strange experiment on the ugly battlefields of the Great War, a device as awkward as it was terrifying. That motto gave me the seed of what I wanted to write about in this story- one of those moments when a long-settled way of doing things is swept away by a harsh new reality.
That’s a really dignified way of saying: “Gosh, what if wizards invented tanks?”
Even in a world where wild sorcery is commonplace, I thought the advent of mobile armor would come as a terrible shock, and I wanted the protagonists of this story to have the challenge of somehow dealing with it on the shortest possible notice.
“The Effigy Engine” is the first in what I hope will eventually be a chain of chronicles concerning the Honorable Company of Red Hats, a band of misfit mercenaries in a war-torn age. Their primary antagonists are an aggressive, industrially advanced nation called the Iron Ring. Their primary asset (and their primary weakness) is that the Red Hats fight with a conscience, taking up quixotic challenges against long odds for reasons other than excellent pay or ease of survival.
The second tale of the Red Hats is entitled “Cash Poor, Temple Rich.” I don’t know what its final destination will be, but as of this writing I hope to find it a good home with a loving editor before the new year.
This story originally appeared in the anthology Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy, edited by Jonathan Strahan, in May 2013. I have made a few very minor edits, mostly for reasons of grammar or clarity, but the text otherwise remains substantially unchanged.
This new digital edition of “The Effigy Engine” is dedicated to Glen Cook, author of the inimitable chronicles of the Black Company.
Against the mighty, for the weak.
Scott Lynch
South Hadley, Massachusetts
August 2018
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The Effigy Engine
Scott Lynch
11th of Mithune, 1186
Painted Sky Pass, North Elara
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"I took up the study of magic because I wanted to live in the beauty of transfinite mathematical truths," said Rumstandel. He gestured curtly. In the canyon below us, an enemy soldier shuddered, clutched at his throat, and began vomiting live snakes.
“If my indifference were money you’d be the master of my own personal mint,” I muttered. Of course Rumstandel heard me despite the pop, crackle, and roar of musketry echoing around the walls of the pass. There was sorcery at play between us to carry our voices, so we could bitch and digress and annoy ourselves like a pair of inebriates trading commentary in a theater balcony.
The day’s show was an ambush of a company of Iron Ring legionaries on behalf of our employers, the North Elarans, who were blazing away with arquebus and harsh language from the heights around us. The harsh language seemed to be having greater effect. The black-coated ranks of the Iron Ring jostled in consternation, but there ought to have been more bodies strewn among the striated sunset-orange rocks that gave the pass its name. Hot lead was leaving the barrels of our guns, but it was landing like kitten farts and some sly magical bastard down there was responsible.
Oh, for the days of six months past, when the Iron Ring had crossed the Elaran border marches, their battle wizards proud and laughing in full regalia. Their can’t-miss-me-at-a-mile wolf skull helmets, their set-me-on-fire carnelian cloaks, their shoot-me-in-the-face silver masks.
Six months with us for playmates had taught them to be less obvious. Counter-thaumaturgy was our mission and our meal ticket: coax them into visibility and make them regret it. Now they dressed like common officers or soldiers, and some even carried prop muskets or pikes. Like this one, clearly.
“I’m a profound disappointment to myself,” sighed Rumstandel, big round florid Rumstandel, who didn’t share my appreciation for sorcerous anonymity. This week he’d turned his belly-scraping beard blue and caused it to spring out in flaring forks like the sculpture of a river and its tributaries. Little simulacra of ships sailed up and down those beard strands even now, their hulls the size of rice grains, dodging crumbs like rocks and shoals. Crumbs there were aplenty, since Rumstandel always ate while he killed and soliloquized. One hand was full of the sticky Elaran ration bread we called corpsecake for its pallor and suspected seasoning.
“I should be redefining the vocabulary of arcane geometry somewhere safe and cultured, not playing silly buggers with village fish-charmers wearing wolf skulls.” He silenced himself with a mouthful of cake and gestured again. Down on the valley floor his victim writhed his last. The snakes came out slick with blood, eyes gleaming like garnets in firelight, nostrils trailing strands of pale caustic vapor.
I couldn’t really pick out the minute details at seventy yards, but I’d seen the spell before. In the closed ranks of the Iron Ring the serpents wrought the havoc that arquebus fire couldn’t, and legionaries clubbed desperately at them with musket-butts.
As I peered into the mess, the forward portion of the legionary column exploded in white smoke. Sparks and chips flew from nearby rocks, and I felt a burning pressure between my eyes, a sharp tug on the strands of my own magic. The practical range of sorcery is about that of musketry, and a fresh reminder of the fact hung dead in the air a yard from my face. I plucked the ball down and slipped it into my pocket.
Somewhere safe and cultured? Well, there was nowhere safer for Rumstandel than three feet to my left. I was doing for him what the troublemaker on the ground was doing for the legionaries. Close protection, subtle and otherwise, my military and theoretical specialty.
Wizards working offensively in battle have a bad tendency to get caught up in their glory-hounding and part their already tenuous ties to prudence. Distracted and excited, they pile flourish on flourish, spell on spell until some stray musket ball happens along and elects to take up permanent residence.
Our little company’s answer is to work in teams, one sorcerer working harm and the second diligently protecting them both. Rumstandel didn’t have the temperament to be that second sorcerer, but I’ve been at it so long now everyone calls me Watchdog. Even my mother.
I heard a rattling sound just behind us, and turned in time to see Tariel hop down into our rocky niche, musket held before her like an acrobat’s pole. Red-gray dust was caked in sweaty spirals along her bare ebony arms, and the dozens of wooden powder flasks dangling from her bandolier knocked together like a musical instrument.
“Mind if I crouch in your shadow, Watchdog? They’re keeping up those volleys in good order.” She knelt between me and Rumstandel, laid her musket carefully in the crook of her left arm, and whispered, “Touch.” The piece went off with the customary flash and bang, which my speech-sorcery dampened to a more tolerable pop.
Hers was a salamandrine musket. Where the flintlock or wheel mechanism might ordinarily be was instead a miniature metal sculpture of a manor house, jutting from the weapon’s side as though perched atop a cliff. I could see the tiny fire elemental that lived in there peering
out one of the windows. It was always curious to see how a job was going. Tariel could force a spark from it by pulling the trigger, but she claimed polite requests led to smoother firing.
“Damn. I seem to be getting no value for money today, gents.” She began the laborious process of recharging and loading.
“We’re working on it,” I said. Another line of white smoke erupted below, followed by another cacophony of ricochets and rock chips. An Elaran soldier screamed. “Aren’t we working on it, Rumstandel? And by ‘we’ I do in fact mean—“
“Yes, yes, bullet-catcher, do let an artist stretch his own canvas.” Rumstandel clenched his fists and something like a hot breeze blew past me, thick with power. This would be a vulgar display.
Down on the canyon floor, an Iron Ring legionary in the process of reloading was interrupted by the cold explosion of his musket. The stock shivered into splinters and the barrel peeled itself open backward like a sinister metal flower. Quick as thought, the burst barrel enveloped the man’s arm, twisted, and—well, you’ve squeezed fruit before, haven’t you? Then the powder charges in his bandolier flew out in burning constellations, a cloud of fire that made life immediately interesting for everyone around him.
“Ah! That’s got his attention at last,” said Rumstandel. A gray-blue cloud of mist boiled up from the ground around the stricken legionaries, swallowing and dousing the flaming powder before it could do further harm. Our Iron Ring friend was no longer willing to tolerate Rumstandel’s contributions to the battle, and so inevitably…
“I see him,” I shouted, “gesturing down there on the left! Look, he just dropped a pike!”
“Out from under the rock! Say your prayers, my man. Another village up north has lost its second-best fish-charmer!” said Rumstandel, moving his arms now like a priest in ecstatic sermon (recall my earlier warning about distraction and excitement). The Iron Ring sorcerer was hoisted into the air, black coat flaring, and as Rumstandel chanted his target began to spin.
The fellow must have realized that he couldn’t possibly get any more obvious, and he had some nerve. Bright blue fire arced up at us, a death-sending screaming with ghostly fury. My business. I took a clay effigy out of my pocket and held it up. The screaming blue fire poured itself into the little statuette, which leapt out of my hands and exploded harmlessly ten yards above us. Dust rained on our heads.
The Iron Ring sorcerer kept rising and whirling like a top. One soldier, improbably brave or stupid, leapt and caught the wizard’s boot. He held on for a few rotations before he was heaved off into some of his comrades.
Still that wizard lashed out. First came lightning like a white pillar from the sky. I dropped an iron chain from a coat sleeve to bleed its energy into the earth, though it made my hair stand on end and my teeth chatter. Then came a sending of bad luck I could feel pressing in like a congealing of the air itself; the next volley that erupted from the Iron Ring lines would doubtless make cutlets of us. I barely managed to unweave the sending, using an unseemly eruption of power that left me feeling as though the air had been punched out of my lungs. An instant later musket balls sparked and screamed on the rocks around us, and we all flinched. My previous spell of protection had lapsed while I was beset.
“Rumstandel,” I yelled, “quit stretching the bloody canvas and paint the picture already!”
“He’s quite unusually adept, this illiterate pot-healer!” Rumstandel’s beard-boats rocked and tumbled as the blue hair in which they swam rolled like ocean waves. “The illicit toucher of sheep! He probably burns books to keep warm at home! And I’m only just managing to hold him— Tariel, please don’t wait for my invitation to collaborate in this business!”
Our musketeer calmly set her weapon into her shoulder, whispered to her elemental, and gave fire. The spinning sorcerer shook with the impact. An instant later, his will no longer constraining Rumstandel’s, he whirled off into the air like a child’s rag doll flung in a tantrum. Where the body landed, I didn’t see. My sigh of relief was loud and shameless.
“Yes, that was competent opposition for a change, wasn’t it?” Tariel was already calmly recharging her musket. “Incidentally, it was a woman.”
“Are you sure?” I said once I’d caught my breath. “I thought the Iron Ringers didn’t let their precious daughters into their war-wizard lodges.”
“I’d guess they’re up against the choice between female support and no support at all,” she said. “Almost as though someone’s been subtracting wizards from their muster rolls this past half-year.”
The rest of the engagement soon played out. Deprived of sorcerous protection, the legionaries began to fall to arquebus fire in the traditional manner. Tariel kept busy, knocking hats from heads and heads from under hats. Rumstandel threw down just a few subtle spells of maiming and ill-coincidence, and I returned to my sober vigil, Watchdog once more. It wasn’t in our contract to scourge the Iron Ringers from the field with sorcery. We wanted them to feel they’d been, in the main, fairly bested by their outnumbered Elaran neighbors, line to line and gun to gun, rather than cheated by magic of foreign hire.
After the black-clad column had retreated down the pass and the echo of musketry was fading, Rumstandel and I basked like lizards in the midafternoon sun and stuffed ourselves on corpsecake and cold chicken, the latter wrapped in fly-killing spells of Rumstandel’s devising. No sooner would the little nuisances alight on our lunch than they would vanish in puffs of green fire.
Tariel busied herself cleaning out her musket barrel with worm and fouling scraper. When she’d finished, the fire elemental, in the form of a scarlet salamander that could hide under the nail of my smallest finger, went down the barrel to check her work.
“Excuse me, are you the— that is, I’m looking for the Red Hats.”
A young Elaran in a dark blue officer’s coat appeared from the rocks above us, brown ringlets askew, uniform scorched and holed from obvious proximity to trouble. I didn’t recognize her from the company we’d been attached to. I reached into a pocket, drew out my rumpled red slouch hat, and waved it.
About the hats, the namesake of our mercenary fellowship: in keeping with the aforementioned and mortality-avoiding principle of anonymity, neither Tariel nor myself usually wore them when the dust was flying. Rumstandel never wore his at all, claiming with much justice that he didn’t need the aid of any particular headgear to slouch.
“Red Hats present and reasonably comfortable,” I said. “Some message for us?”
“Not a message, but a summons,” said the woman. “Compliments from your captain. She wants you back at the central front with all haste, at any hazard.”
“Generalized and nonspecific compliments are hardly an inducement to anything, let alone haste and hazard.”
“Shut up, Rumstandel. Central front?” I studied the messenger. That explained the rings under her eyes, if she hailed from the center. It was a full day in the saddle, changing mounts every few hours and riding them hard. We’d been detached from what passed for our command for a week and hadn’t expected to go back for at least another. “What’s your story, then?”
“Ill news. The Iron Ring have some awful device, something unprecedented. They’re breaking our lines like we weren’t even there. I didn’t get a full report before I was dispatched, but the whole front is collapsing.”
“How delightful,” said Rumstandel. “I do assume you’ve brought a cart for me? I always prefer a good long nap when I’m speeding on my way to a fresh catastrophe.”
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NOTE to those members of this company desirous of an early glimpse into these, our chronicles. As you well know, I’m pleased to read excerpts when we make camp and then invite corrections or additions to my records. I am not, however, amused to find the thumbprints of sticky-fingered interlopers defacing these pages without my consent. BE ADVISED, therefore, that I have with a spotless conscience affixed a dweomer of security to this journal and an attendant minor curse. I think you know the one
I mean. The one with the fire ants. You have only yourself to blame. -WD
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WATCHDOG, you childlike innocent, if you’re going to secure your personal effects with a curse, don’t attach a warning preface. It makes it even easier to enact countermeasures, and your spell was no great impediment in the first place if you take my meaning. Furthermore, the poverty of your observational faculty continues to astound. You wrote that my beard was “LIKE the sculpture of a river and its tributaries,” failing to note that it was in fact a PRECISE and proportional model of the Voraslo Delta, with my face considered as the sea. Posterity awaits your amendments. Also, you might think of a more expensive grade of paper when you buy your next journal. I’ve pushed my quill through this stuff three times already. –R
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13th of Mithune, 1186
Somewhere near Lake Corlan, North Elara
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Rumstandel, big red florid garlic-smelling Rumstandel, that bilious reservoir of unloveability, that human anchor weighing down my happiness, snored in the back of the cart far more peacefully than he deserved as we clattered up to the command pavilion of the North Elaran army. Pillars of black smoke rose north of us, mushrooming under wet gray skies. No campfire smoke, those pillars, but the sigils of rout and disaster.
North Elara is a temperate green place, long-settled, easy on the eyes and heart. It hurt to see it cut up by war like a patient strapped to a chirurgeon’s operating board, straining against the incisions that might kill it as surely as the illness. Our trip along the rutted roads was slowed by traffic in both directions, supply trains moving north and the displaced moving south: farmers, fisherfolk, traders, camp followers, the aged and the young.