by Scott Lynch
They hadn’t been on the roads when we’d rattled out the previous week. They’d been nervous but guardedly content, keeping to their villages and camps behind the bulk of the Elaran army and the clever fieldworks that held the Iron Ring legions in stalemate. Now their mood had gone south and they meant to follow.
I rolled from the cart, sore where I wasn’t numb. Elaran pennants fluttered wanly over the pavilion, and there were bad signs abounding. The smell of gangrene and freshly amputated limbs mingled with that of smoke and animal droppings. The command tents were now pitched about three miles south of where they’d been when I’d left.
I settled my red slouch on my head for identification, as the sentries all looked quite nervous. Tariel did the same. I glanced back at Rumstandel and found him still in loud repose. I called up one of my familiars with a particular set of finger-snaps and set the little creature on him in the form of a night-black squirrel with raven’s wings. It hopped up and down on Rumstandel’s stomach, singing:
“Rouse, Rumstandel, and see what passes!
Kindle some zest, you laziest of asses!
Even sluggard Red Hats are called to war
So rouse yourself and slumber no more!”
Some sort of defensive spell crept up from Rumstandel’s coat like a silver mist, but the raven-squirrel fluttered above the grasping tendrils and pelted him with conjured acorns, while singing a new song about the various odors of his flatulence.
“My farts do not smell like glue!” shouted Rumstandel, up at last, swatting at my familiar. “What does that even mean, you wit-deficient pseudo-rodent?”
“Ahem,” said a woman as she stepped out of the largest tent, and there was more authority in that clearing of her throat than there are in the loaded cannons of many earthly princes. My familiar, though as inept at rhyme as Rumstandel alleged, had a fine sense of when to vanish and did so.
“I thought I heard squirrel doggerel,” our captain, the sorceress Millowend, continued. “We must get you a better sort of creature one of these days.”
It is perhaps beyond my powers to write objectively of Millowend, but in the essentials she is a short, solid, ashen-haired woman of middle years and innate rather than affected dignity. Her red hat, the iconic and original red hat, is battered and singed from years of campaigning despite the surfeit of magical protections bound into its warp and weft.
“Slack hours have been in short supply, ma’am.”
“Well, I am at least glad to have you back in one piece, Watchdog,” said my mother. “And you, Tariel, and even you, Rumstandel, though I wonder what’s become of your hat.”
“A heroic loss.” Rumstandel heaved himself out of the cart, brushed assorted crumbs from his coat, and stretched in the manner of a rotund cat vacating a sunbeam. “I wore it through a fusillade of steel and sorcery. It was torn asunder, pierced by a dozen enemy balls and at least one culverin stone. We buried it with full military honors after the action.”
“A grief easily assuaged.” My mother conjured a fresh red hat and spun it toward the blue-bearded sorcerer’s naked head. Just as deftly, he blasted it to motes with a gout of fire.
“Come along,” said Millowend, unperturbed. This was the merest passing skirmish in the Affair of the Hat, possibly the longest sustained campaign in the history of our company. “We’re all here now. I’ll put you in the picture on horseback.”
“Horseback?” said Rumstandel. “Freshly uncarted and now astride the spines of hoofed torture devices! Oh, hello, Caladesh.”
The man tending the horses was one of us. Lean as a miser’s alms-purse, mustaches oiled, carrying a brace of pistols so large I suspect they reproduce at night, Caladesh never changes. His hat is as red as cherry wine and has no magical protections at all save his improbable luck. Cal is worth four men in a fight and six in a drinking contest, but I was surprised to see him alone, minding exactly five horses.
“We’re it,” Millowend, as though reading my thoughts, which was not out of the question. “I sent the others off with a coastal raid. They can’t possibly return in time to help.”
“And that’s a fair pity,” said Caladesh as he swung himself up into his saddle with easy grace. “There’s fresh pie wrapped up in your saddlebags.”
“A pie job!” cried Rumstandel. “Horses and a pie job! A constellation of miserable omens!”
His misgivings didn’t prevent him, once saddled, from attacking the pie. I unwrapped mine and found it warm, firm, and lightly frosted with pink icing, the best sort my mother’s culinary imps could provide. Alas.
Would-be sorcerers must understand that the art burns fuel as surely as any bonfire, which fuel being the sorcerer’s own body. It’s much like hard manual exercise, save that it banishes flesh even more quickly. During prolonged magical engagements I have felt unhealthy amounts of myself boil away. Profligate or sustained use of the art can leave us with skin hanging in folds, innards cramping, and bodily humors thrown into chaos.
That’s why slender sorcerers are rarer than amiable scorpions, and why Rumstandel and I keep food at hand while plying our trade, and why my mother’s sweet offering was as good as a warning.
In her train we rode north through the camp, past stands of muskets like sinister haystacks. These weren’t the usual collections with soldiers lounging nearby ready to snatch them, but haphazard piles obviously waiting to be cleaned and sorted. Many Elaran militia and second-liners would soon be trading in their grandfatherly arquebuses for flintlocks pried from the hands of the dead.
“I’m sorry to reward you for a successful engagement by thrusting you into a bigger mess,” said Millowend, “but the bigger mess is all that’s on offer. Three days ago, the Iron Ring brought some sort of mechanical engine against our employers’ previous forward position and kicked them out of it.
“It’s an armored box, like the hull of a ship,” she continued. “Balanced on mechanical legs, motive power unknown. Quick-steps over trenches and obstacles. The hull protects several cannon and an unknown number of sorcerers. Cal witnessed part of the battle from a distance.”
“Wouldn’t call it a battle,” said Caladesh. “Battle implies some give and take, and this thing did nothing but give. The Elarans fed it cannonade, massed musketry, and spells. Then they tried all three at once. For that, their infantry got minced, their artillery no longer exists in a practical sense, and every single one of their magicians that engaged the thing is getting measured for a wooden box.”
“They had fifteen sorcerers attached to their line regiments!” said Tariel.
“Now they’ve got assorted bits of fifteen sorcerers,” said Caladesh.
“Blessed pie provisioner,” said Rumstandel, “I’m as keen to put my head on the anvil as anyone in this association of oathbound lunatics. But when you say that musketry and sorcery were ineffective against this device, did it escape your notice that our tactical abilities span the narrow range from musketry to sorcery?”
“There’s nothing uncanny about musket balls bouncing off wood and iron planking,” said Millowend. “And there’s nothing inherently counter-magical to the device. The Iron Ring have crammed a lot of wizards into it, is all. We need to devise some means to peel them out of that shell.”
Under the gray sky we rode ever closer to the edge of the action, past field hospitals and trenches, past artillery caissons looking lonely without their guns, past nervous horses, nervous officers, and very nervous infantry. We left our mounts a few minutes later and moved on foot up the grassy ridgeline called Montveil’s Wall, now the farthest limit of the dubious safety of ‘friendly’ territory.
There the thing stood, half a mile away, beyond the churned and smoldering landscape of fieldworks vacated by the Elaran army. It was the height of a fortress wall, perhaps fifty or sixty feet, and its irregular, bulbous hull rested on four splayed and ungainly metal legs. On campaign years ago in the Alcor Valley, north of the Skull Sands, I became familiar with the dust-brown desert spiders famous for th
eir threat displays. The scuttling creatures would raise up on their rear legs, spread their forward legs to create an illusion of bodily height, and brandish their fangs. I fancied there was something of that in the aspect of the Iron Ring machine.
“Watchdog,” said Millowend, “did you bring your spyflask?”
I took a tarnished, dented flask from my coat and unscrewed the cap. Clear liquid bubbled into the air like slow steam, then coalesced into a flat disc about a yard in diameter. I directed this with waves of my hands until it framed our view of the Iron Ring machine, and we all pressed in upon one another like gawkers at a carnival puppet-show.
The magic of the spyflask acted as a refracting lens, and after a moment of blurred confusion the image within the disk resolved to a sharp, clear magnification of the war machine. It was bold and ugly, pure threat without elegance. Its overlapping iron plates were draped in netting-bound hides, which I presumed were meant to defeat the use of flaming projectiles or magic. The black barrels of two cannon jutted from ports in the forward hull, lending even more credence to my earlier impression of a rearing spider.
“Those are eight-pounder demi-culverins,” said Caladesh, gesturing at the cannon. “I pulled a ball out of the turf. Not the heaviest they’ve got, but elevated and shielded, they might as well be the only guns on the field. They did for the Elaran batteries at leisure, careful as calligraphers.”
“I’m curious about the Elaran sorcerers,” said Rumstandel, twirling fingers in the azure strands of his beard and scattering little white ships. “What exactly did they do to invite such a disaster?”
“I don’t think they were prepared for the sheer volume of counter-thaumaturgy the Iron Ringers could mount from that device,” said Millowend. “The Iron Ring wizards stayed cautious and let the artillery chop up our Elaran counterparts. Guided, of course, by spotters atop that infernal machine. It would seem the Iron Ring is learning to be the sort of opponent we least desire… a flexible one.”
“I did like them much better when they were thick as oak posts,” sighed Rumstandel.
“The essential question remains,” I said. “How do we punch through what fifteen Elaran wizards couldn’t?”
“You’re thinking too much on the matter of the armored box,” said Tariel. “When you hunt big game with ordinary muskets, you don’t try to pierce the thickest bone and hide. You make crippling shots. Subdue it in steps, leg by leg. Lock those up somehow, all the Iron Ring will have is an awkward fortress tower rooted in place.”
“We could trip it or sink it down a hole,” mused Rumstandel. “General Alune’s not dead, is she? Why aren’t her sappers digging merrily away?”
“She’s alive,” said Millowend. “It’s a question of where to dig, and how to convince that thing to enter the trap. When it’s moving, it can evade or simply overstep anything resembling ordinary fieldworks.”
“When it’s moving,” I said. “Well, here’s another question—if the Elarans didn’t stop it, why isn’t it moving now?”
“I’d love to think it’s some insoluble difficulty or breakdown,” said Millowend. “But the telling fact is, they haven’t sent over any ultimatums. They haven’t communicated at all. I assume that if the device were now immobilized, they’d be trying to leverage its initial attack for all it was worth. No, they’re waiting for their own reasons, and I’m sure those reasons are suitably unpleasant.”
“So how do you want us to inaugurate this fool’s errand, captain?” said Rumstandel.
“Eat your pie,” said my mother. “Then think subtle thoughts. I want a quiet, invisible reconnaissance of that thing, inch by inch and plate by plate. I want to find all the cracks in its armor, magical and otherwise, and I want the Iron Ring to have no idea we’ve been peeking.”
---
ENCLOSURE: The open oath of the Red Hats, attributed to the Sorceress Millowend.
To take no coin from unjust reign
Despoil no hearth nor righteous fane
Caps red as blood, as bright and bold
In honor paid, as dear as gold
To leave no bondsman wrongly chained
And shirk no odds, for glory’s gain
Against the mighty, for the weak
We by this law our battles seek
ADDENDUM: The tacit marching song of the Red Hats, attributed to the Sorcerer Rumstandel, sometimes called “The Magnificent.”
Where musket balls are thickest flying
Where our employers are quickest dying
Where mortals perish like bacon frying
And horrible things leave grown men crying
To all these places we ride with haste
To get ourselves smeared into paste
Or punctured, scalded, and served on toast
For the financial benefit of our hosts!
---
13th of Mithune, 1186
Montveil’s Wall, North Elara
One Hour Later
---
Cannon flashed above us and cannon flashed over the horizon, all spitting thunder and smoke, all blasting up fountains of wet earth as we stumbled for cover, under the plunging fire of the lurching war machine, under the dancing green light of hostile magic, under the weight of our own confusion and embarrassment.
We had thought we were being subtle.
Millowend had started our reconnaissance by producing a soft white dandelion seedhead, into which she breathed the syllables of a spell. Seeds spun out, featherlike in her conjured breeze, and each carried a fully-realized pollen-sized simulacrum of her, perfect down to a little red hat and a determined expression. One hundred tiny Millowends floated off to cast two hundred tiny eyes over the Iron Ring machine. It was a fine spell, though it would leave her somewhat befuddled as her mind strained to knit those separate views together into one useful picture.
Rumstandel added some admittedly deft magical touches of his own to the floating lens of my spyflask, and in short order we had a sort of intangible apparatus by which we could study the quality and currents of magic around the war machine, as aesthetes might natter about the brushstrokes of a painting. Tariel and Caladesh, less than entranced by our absorption in visual balderdash, crouched near us to keep watch.
“That’s as queer as a six-headed fish,” muttered Rumstandel. “The whole thing’s lively with dynamic flow. That would be a profligate waste of power unless—“
That was when Tariel jumped on his head, shoving him down into the turf, and Caladesh jumped on mine, dragging my dazed mother with him. A split heartbeat later, a pair of cannonballs tore muddy furrows to either side of us, arriving just ahead of the muted thunder of their firing.
“I might forward the hypothesis,” growled Rumstandel, spitting turf, “that the reason the bloody thing hasn’t moved is because it was left out as an enticement for a certain band of interlopers in obvious hats.”
“I thought we were being reasonably subtle!” I yelled, shoving Caladesh less than politely. He is all sharp angles, and very unpleasant to be trapped under.
“Action FRONT,” cried Tariel, who had sprung back on watch with her usual speed. The rest of us scrambled to the rim of Montveil’s Wall beside her. Charging from the nearest trench, not a hundred yards distant, came a column of Iron Ring foot about forty strong, cloaks flying, some still tossing away the planks and debris they’d been using to help conceal themselves. One bore a furled pennant bound tightly to its staff by a scarlet cord. That made them penitents, comrades of a soldier who’d broken some cardinal rule of honor or discipline. The only way they’d be allowed to return to the Iron Ring, or even ordinary service, was to expunge the stain with a death-or-glory mission.
Such as ambushing us.
Also, the six-story metal war machine behind the penitents was now on the move, creaking and growling like a pack of demons set loose in a scrapyard.
And then there were orange flashes and puffs of smoke from the distances beyond the machine, where hidden batteries were presumably taking d
irection on how to deliver fresh gifts of lead to our position.
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 cannon balls 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. “Some day 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.