by Paula Guran
Between Adoulla and the boy stood Zoud.
The magus was gaunt and bald with a pointed beard. Raseed’s sheathed sword lay at Zoud’s feet, and beside the magus stood an oaf whose size made his purpose obvious—bodyguard. There was no way Adoulla could reach the dervish before those two did.
Zoud, disturbingly unsurprised at Adoulla’s entrance, stopped whistling and gestured toward Raseed. “He is in great pain.”
Adoulla frowned. “Why stage this gruesome show for me?”
Zoud smiled. “Simple. I’m no fool—I know your sort. I don’t want you as an enemy. Hounding me across the Crescent Moon Kingdoms on some revenge-quest. No. All I ask is your oath before God that you’ll leave me in peace. I’d hoped to take the boy with me—the Order has enemies who’d pay well for a live dervish. But if you’ll be reasonable you may walk off this ship, and we’ll put the boy off as well. That’s fair, isn’t it? You’ve taken much from me already. My new wife. Even my first wife.”
Ushra’s not here? And Hafi’s wife is free? How? Adoulla could find out later. What mattered now was that his options had just increased. In the corner behind the magus and his henchman, Adoulla saw a small flicker of blue movement. Impossible!
He smothered a smile and silently thanked God.
“So,” Zoud said. “Do I have your oath, Doctor?”
Adoulla cleared his throat. “My Oath? In the Name of God I swear that you, with your tacky big-room spells, are but a half-dinar magus with a broken face coming to him!”
Everything happened at once.
He heard a snapping noise and the boy was free. It was impossible to snap firevine. But Adoulla adapted quickly to impossibilities. As Raseed leapt to his feet Zoud darted behind his bodyguard and screamed “Babouk! Kill!” The magus clapped twice.
Oh no.
The flash of red light dazzled Adoulla for a moment. But his eyes knew and adjusted to the glamour-glimmer of a dispelled illusion well enough. Adoulla had to give this fool Zoud his due. The big bodyguard was gone. In his place was an eight-foot-tall cyklop.
This is not good.
A blue streak darted at the one-eyed, crimson-scaled creature. Raseed! The dimwitted monster grunted as the dervish barreled into it and knocked the mighty thing off its clawed feet.
Adoulla stood there for a stunned half-moment. Half the monster’s size, yet he topples it! Dervish and furnace-chested cyklop wrestled on the ground until the monster wrapped its massive arms around the boy. Adoulla took a step toward the pair and shouted “Its eye! One sword-stroke through its eye!”
Then he whirled at the familiar sound of blade leaving sheath. Zoud stood before him with a hunted look on his face and a silver-hilted knife in his hand. All out of tricks, huh? And now you think to buy your freedom with a knife? Adoulla cracked his knuckles and took a step toward the magus.
Raseed wriggled free of the cyklop’s crushing hug. The monster pressed him again, closing its clawed hands around Raseed’s fists. His wounds from the firevine burned, but he pushed the pain away.
As part of his training, Raseed had once wrestled a northern bear. This creature was stronger. Still, Raseed thought, as impermissible pride crept in, he would slay it. Then he’d know that he had fought a cyklop and won. He twisted his powerful arms, trying to get the leverage to free himself. But the cyklop held him fast. And the pain in Raseed’s wrists and ankles grew worse.
Then he heard a small sound and his left hand blazed with pain. His little finger was broken. Another sound. His index finger. The rest would follow if he did not get free. But how?
The cyklop decided for him. Shifting, it hoisted Raseed aloft like a doll. The monster tried to dash Raseed’s brains out on the floorboards.
Raseed twisted as he fell, somersaulting across the room. His sword hand was unharmed. He thanked God and forced away the pain of his wounds. He scooped up the blue scabbard, rolled to his feet, drew.
The cyklop grunted. It blinked its teacup-sized eye as Raseed rushed forward. With eagle-speed Raseed leapt, sword extended. He thrust upward.
With an earsplitting howl, the cyklop fell, blood seeping from its single eye. Watching the monster die, Raseed felt more relief than pride.
Adoulla charged Zoud, making sure that his robed shoulder was his opponent’s most prominent target. A sneer flashed on Zoud’s face. The fool thought Adoulla was blundering into his dagger-path.
The silver-handled blade came down.
And glanced off the blessed kaftan, as surely as if Adoulla were wearing mail. Zoud got in one more useless stab before Adoulla let loose the right hook that had once made him the best street fighter on Dead Donkey Lane. With a girlish cry, the magus crumpled into a heap. Somewhere behind Adoulla, the cyklop howled its death-howl.
His tricks gone and his nose broken, Zoud lay bleeding at Adoulla’s feet. The magus whimpered to himself like a child yanked from a good dream. Before Adoulla knew what was happening, Raseed was at his side.
“Magus!” the dervish said. “You have stolen and slain women. You dared demand an oath before God to cover your foulness. For you, there can be no forgiveness!” Raseed sent his blade diving for Zoud’s heart. In a breathspace, the forked sword found it. The magus’s eyes went wide as he gurgled and died.
Adoulla felt ill.
“What is wrong with you, boy? We had the man at our -” He fell silent, seeing the boy’s firevine wounds.
Raseed narrowed his tilted eyes. “With apologies, Doctor, I expected Adoulla Makhslood to be a man who struck swiftly and righteously.”
“And instead you’ve found some pastry-stuffed old fart who isn’t fond of killing. Poor child! God must weep at your cruel fate.”
“Doctor! To take God’s name in mock is imper—”
“Enough, boy! Do you hear me? Fight monsters for forty years as I have—cross the seas and sands of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms serving God—then you can tell me what is ‘impermissible.’ By then, Almighty God willing, I’ll be dead and gone, my ears untroubled by the peeps of holy men’s mouths!” The tirade silenced the dervish, who stood looking down at the magus’s bleeding corpse.
The problem was, Adoulla feared that the boy’s way might be right. Adoulla thought of the girl, Ushra. And of Raseed’s pain as the firevine had tortured him. And of Zoud’s dead “wives.” He sighed.
“Oh, God damn it all. Fine, boy. You’re right. Just as you were about the blower-on-knots.” Adoulla sat down with a grunt, right there on the bloody floorboards. He had fought a dozen battles more difficult than this over the decades, but he did not think he’d ever felt so weary.
Raseed spoke slowly. “No, Doctor. You were right. About Ushra, at least. She did what she did from weakness and fear of a wicked man. Yet I would’ve killed her.” The dervish was quiet for a long moment. “It was her, Doctor. Ushra. She poisoned the firevine. She freed Hafi’s wife. I’m ashamed to say it, but I must speak true—I wouldn’t have escaped if not for her.”
Adoulla was too tired to respond with words. He grunted again and clambered to his feet.
Yehyeh’s teahouse buzzed with chattering customers. Raseed tried to ignore the lewd music and banter. Hafi and his tall, raven-haired wife sat with her grateful parents on a pile of cushions in the far corner. At a table near the entrance, Raseed sat with the Doctor, who was nursing what he had called a “God damned gruesome tracking spell headache”. Lifting his head from his hands slowly, the Doctor fixed a droopy eye on Raseed.
“How many men have you killed, boy?”
Raseed was confused—why did that matter now? “Two. No . . . the highwaymen . . . five? After this villain last night, six.”
“So many?” the Doctor said.
Raseed did not know what to say, so he said nothing.
Adoulla sighed. “You’re a fine warrior, Raseed bas Raseed. If you’re to study with me, though, you must know your number and never forget it. You took a man’s life yesterday. Weigh that fact! Make it harder than it is for you now. Remember that a
man, even a foul man, is not a ghul.”
Again, Raseed was confused. “ ‘Harder,’ Doctor? I’ve trained all my life to kill swiftly.”
“And now you will train to kill reluctantly. If you still wish an apprenticeship.”
“I do still wish it, Doctor! High Shaykh Aalli spoke of you as—”
“People speak of me, boy, but now you’ve met me. You’ve fought beside me. I eat messily. I ogle girls one-third my age. And I don’t like killing. If you’re going to hunt monsters with me, you must see things as they are.”
Raseed, his broken fingers still stinging, his wrists and ankles still raw, nodded and recalled the High Shaykh’s words about where virtue lives. Strange places indeed.
A quiet settled over the table and Adoulla devoured another of the almond-and-anise rolls that Yehyeh had been gratefully plying him with. As he ate he thought about the boy sitting across from him.
He did not relish the thought of a preachy little dervish in his home. He could only hope the boy was young enough to stretch beyond the smallness that had been beaten into him at the Lodge. Regardless, only a fool would refuse having a decades-younger warrior beside him as he went about his last years of ghul hunting.
Besides, the dervish, with his meticulous grooming, would make a great house-keeper!
He could hear Miri’s jokes about boy-love already.
Miri. God help me.
Raseed lifted his bowl of plain limewater and sipped daintily. Adoulla said nothing to break the silence, but he slurped his sweet cardamom tea. Then he set his teabowl down, belched loudly, and relished the horrified grimace of his virtuous new apprentice.
The novels of Scott Lynch’s The Gentleman Bastard series—starting with The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006)—combine crime with sword and sorcery. The “Gentle Bastard” protagonists are a pair of thieves, rogues who use elaborate cons to swindle the rich. (Think: a swashbuckling Oceans Eleven fantasy.) A seven-book series, we are still awaiting the fourth volume, but I’m confident the wait will be worth it. In “The Effigy Engine” Lynch introduces the Red Hats, “a tight-knit pack of lunatics, misfits, and idealists, [that] somehow always manage to find themselves in the service of the smaller, weaker party in any given disagreement”—according to the author—and wars are waged with musketry and magic. (Lynch’s even more S&S-ish novelette “In the Stacks” will be reprinted next month in my anthology Ex Libris: Stories of Librarians, Libraries, and Lore.)
The Effigy Engine: A Tale of the Red Hats
Scott Lynch
11th Mithune, 1186
Painted Sky Pass, North Elara
“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 weren’t enough 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 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 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 ricoche
ts 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 anymore 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. 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.