by Paula Guran
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 away 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 mid-afternoon 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 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, and she wants you back at the central front with all haste at any hazard.”
“Central front?” That explained the rings under her eyes. Even with mount changes, that was a full day in the saddle. 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.”
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
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 they were no particular 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
13th Mithune, 1186
Somewhere near Lake Corlan, North Elara
Rumstandel, big red florid garlic-smelling Rumstandel, that bilious reservoir of unlovability, 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.
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 y
ourself 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 their 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 disc 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 a
t 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.”