by Paula Guran
“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 volunteers 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.”
“Not with any certainty,” said Vorstal, slowly. “But we still have our second line of works, and it’s the chance I’d take over any other, if only it were as you say.”
“For this we’ll need your engineers,” said Millowend. “Your blacksmiths, your carpenters, and work squads of anyone who can hold a shovel or an axe. And we’ll need those volunteers for Montveil’s Wall to screen us, with their lives if need be.”
“What do you have in mind?” said General Alune.
“A trap, as you said, is wasted unless we can guarantee that the Iron Ring machine moves into it.” Millowend mimicked the lurching steps of the machine with her fingers. “Well, what could we possibly set before it that would absolutely guarantee movement in our desired direction? What challenge could we mount on the field that would compel them to advance their machine and engage us as directly as possible?”
After a sufficiently dramatic pause, she told us.
Then the real shouting and argument began.
14th Mithune, 1186
Somewhere near Lake Corlan, North Elara
Just before sunrise, the surviving Elaran skirmishers fell back from Montveil’s Wall, their shot-flasks empty, their ranks scraped thin by musketry, magic, and misadventure in the dark. Yet they had achieved their mission and kept their Iron Ring counterparts out of our lines, away from the evidence of what we were really up to.
Behind them, several regiments of Elaran foot had moved noisily throughout the night, doing their best to create the impression of the pullback that was only logical. A pullback it was, though not to the roads but rather to a fresh line of breastworks, where they measured powder, sharpened bayonets, and slept fitfully in the very positions they would guard at first light.
We slept not at all. Tariel and Caladesh passed hours in conference with the most experienced of the surviving Elaran artillery handlers. Rumstandel, Millowend and I spent every non-working moment we had on devouring anything we could lay our hands on, without a scrap of shame. My mother’s plan was a pie job and a half.
The sun came up like dull brass behind the charcoal bars of the hazy sky. Fresh smoke trails curled from the Iron Ring positions, harbingers of the hot breakfast they would have before they moved out to crush us. General Vorstal had reluctantly sentenced his men and women to a cold camp, to help preserve the illusion that large contingents in Elaran blue had fled south during the night. We sorcerers received our food from Millowend’s indentured culinary imps, their pinched green faces grotesque under their red leather chef’s hats, their ovens conveniently located in another plane of existence.
As the sun crept upward, the Iron Ring lines began to form, regimental pennants fluttering like sails above a dark and creeping sea. A proud flag broke out atop the war machine, blue circle within gray circle on a field of black. The symbol of the Iron Ring cities, the coal-furnace tyrants, whose home dominions girded the shores of vast icy lakes a month’s march north of Elara.
By the tenth hour of the morning, they were coming for us, in the full panoply of their might and artifice.
“I suppose it’s time to find out whether we’re going to be victorious fools, or just fools,” said Millowend. We had taken our ready position together, all five of us, and rising anxiety had banished most of our fatigue. We engaged in our little rituals, chipper or solemn as per our habits, hugging and shaking hands and exchanging good-natured insults. My mother dusted off my coat and straightened my hat.
“Rumstandel,” she said, “are you sure now wouldn’t be an appropriate time to rediscover that chronically misplaced hat of yours?”
“Of course not, captain.” He rubbed his ample abdominal ballast and grinned. “I much prefer to die as I’ve always lived, handsome and insufferable.”
My mother rendered eloquent commentary using nothing but her eyebrows. Then she cast the appropriate signal-spell, and we braced ourselves.
Five hundred Elaran sappers and work-gangers, already drained to the marrow by a night of frantic labor, seized hold of ropes and chains. “HEAVE!” shouted General Alune, who then flung herself into the nearest straining crew and joined them in their toil. Pulleys creaked and guidelines rattled. With halting, lurching, shuddering movements, a fifty-foot wood and metal tripod rose into the sky above the Elaran command pavilion, with the five of us in an oblong wooden box at its apex, feeling rather uncomfortably like catapult stones being winched into position.
We leveled off, wavering disconcertingly, but more or less upright. Cheers erupted from thousands of throats across the Elaran camp, and musketeers came to their feet in breastworks and redoubts, loosing their regimental colors from hiding. Our North Elaran war machine stood high in the morning light, and even those who’d been told what we were up to waved their hats and screamed like they could hardly believe it.
It was all a thoroughly shambolic hoax, of course. The Iron Ring machine was the product of months of work, cold metal plates fitted to purpose-built legs, rugged and roomy, weighed down with real armor. Ours was a gimcrack, upjumped watch-tower, shorter, narrower, and wobbly as a drunk at a ballroom dance. Our wooden construction was braced in a few crucial places with joints and nail-plates improvised by Elaran blacksmiths. Our hull was armored with nothing but logs, and our only gun was a cast-iron six-pounder in a specially rigged recoil harness, tended by Caladesh and Tariel.
“Let’s secure their undivided attention,” said Millowend. “Charge and load!”
Tariel and Caladesh rammed home a triple-sized powder charge, augmented with the greenish flecks of substances carefully chosen from our precious alchemical supply. Rumstandel handed over a six-pound ball, laboriously prepared by us with pale ideograms of spells designed to ensure long, straight flight. Caladesh drove it down the barrel with the rammer while Tariel looked out the forward window and consulted an improvised sight made from a few pieces of wood and wire.
“Lay it as you like, then fire at will,” said Millowend.
Our gunners didn’t dally. They sighted their piece on the distant Iron Ring machine, and Tariel whistled up her salamander, which was taking a brief vacation from its usual home. The fire-spirit danced around the touchhole, and the six-pounder erupted with a bang that was much too loud even with our noise-suppression spells deadening the air.
Ears ringing, nostrils stinging from the strange smoke of the blast, I jumped to a window and followed the glowing green arc of the magically enhanced shot as it sped toward the enemy. There was a flash and a flat puff of yellowish smoke atop the target machine’s canopy.
“Dead on!” I shouted.
We had just ruined a cannon barrel and expended a great deal of careful sorcery, all for the sake of one accurate shot at an improbable distance. It hadn’t been expected to do any damage, even if it caught their magicians by surprise. It was just a good old-fashioned gauntlet across the face.
“They’re moving,” said Caladesh. “Straight for us.”
The Iron Ringers answered our challenge, all right. It was precisely the sort of affair that would appeal to them, machine against machine like mad bulls for the fate of North Elara. Hell, it was just the sort of thing that might have appealed to us, if only our “machine” hadn’t been a shoddy counterfeit.
“Forward march,” said my mother, and I resumed my place at her side along with Rumstandel. This part was going to hurt. We joined hands and concentrated.
We hadn’t had time to devise any sort of body harness for the control and movement of our device. Instead we had an accurate wooden model about two feet tall, secured to the floor in front of us. On this we could focus our sorcerous energies, however inefficiently, to move corresponding pieces of the real structure. Ours was, in a sense, a true effigy engine.
Imagine pulling a twenty-pound weight along a chain in hair-fine increments by jerking your eyebrow muscles. Imagine trying to push your prone, insensate body along the ground using nothing but the movements of your toes. This was the sort of nightmarish, concentrated effort required to send our device creaking along, step by step, shaking like a bar-stool with delusions of grandeur.
The energy poured out of us like a vital fluid. We moaned, we shuddered, we screamed and swore in the most undignified fashion. Caladesh and Tariel clung to the walls in earnest, for our passage was anything but smooth. It was a bit like being trapped inside a madman’s feverish delusion of a carriage ride, some fifty feet above the ground, while a powerful enemy approached with cannons booming.
We had to hope that our Elaran employers had strictly obeyed our edict to clear our intended movement path. There was no chance to look down and halt if some unfortunate soul was about to play the role of insect to our boot-heel.
Iron Ring cannonballs shrieked past. One of them peeled away part of our roof, giving us a ragged new skylight. Closer and closer we stumbled, featherweight frauds. Closer and closer the enemy machine pounded in dread sincerity. Even fat and well-fed sorcerers were not meant to do what we were doing for long; our magic grew taut and strained as an overfilled water-sack. It was impossible to tell tears from sweat, for it was all running out of us in a torrent. The expressions on the faces of Tariel and Caladesh struck me in my preoccupation as extremely funny, and then I realized it was because I had never before seen those consummate stalwarts look truly horrified. Another round of fire boomed from the charging Iron Ring machine. Our vessel shuddered, rocked by a hit somewhere below. I tried to subdue my urge to cower or hide. There was nothing to be done now; a shot through our bow would likely fill the entire cabin with splinters and scythe us all down in an instant. In moments, we must also come within range of the wizards huddled inside the enemy machine, and we were in no shape to resist them. Luck was our only shield now. Luck, and a few seconds or yards in either direction.
“They’re going,” cried Tariel. “THEY’RE GOING!”
There was a sound like the world coming apart at the seams, a juddering drum-hammer noise, sharpened by the screams of men and metal alike. Everything shook around us and beneath us, and for a moment I was certain that Tariel was wrong, that it was we who’d been mortally struck at last, that we were on our way to the ground and into the history books as a farcical footnote to the rise of the Iron Ring empire.
The thing about my mother’s plans, though, is that they tend to work, more often than not.
Given luck, and a few seconds or yards in either direction.
I didn’t witness it personally, but I can well imagine the scene based on the dozens of descriptions I collected afterward. We had barely thirty more yards of safe space to move when the Iron Ring machine hit the edge of the trap, the modified classic pitfall scraped out of the earth by General Alune’s sappers, then concealed with panels of canvas and wicker and even a few tents. A thousand-strong draft had labored all night to move and conceal the dirt, aided here and there by our sorcery. It wasn’t quite a ready-made grave for the war machine. More of a good hard stumble of about thirty feet.
Whatever it was, it was sufficient. In clear view of every Iron Ring soldier on the field, the greatest feat of ferro-thaumaturgical engineering in the history of the world charged toward its feeble-looking rival, only to stumble and plunge in a deadly arc, smashing its armored cupola like a crustacean dropped from the sky by a hungry seabird. A shroud of dust and smoke settled around it, and none of its occupants were left in any shape to ever crawl out of it.
Millowend, Rumstandel and I fell to our knees in the cabin of our hoax ma
chine, gasping as though we’d been fished from the water ten seconds shy of drowning. Everything felt loose and light and wrong, so much flesh had literally cooked away from the three of us. It was a strange and selfish scene for many moments, as we had no idea whether to celebrate a close-run tactical triumph, or the simple fact of our continued existence. We shamelessly did both, until the noise of battle outside reminded us that the day’s work was only begun. Sore and giddy, we let Rumstandel conjure a variation of his kites to lower us safely to the ground, where we joined the mess already in progress.
It was no easy fight. The Iron Ringers were appalled by the loss of their war machine, and they had deployed poorly, expecting to scourge an already-depleted camp in the wake of their invincible iron talisman. They were also massed in the open, facing troops in breastworks. Still, they were hard fighters and well-led, and so many Elarans were second-line militia or already exhausted by the long labors of the night.
I’ll leave it to other historians to weigh the causes and the cruxes of true victory in the Battle of Lake Corlan. We were in it everywhere, rattling about the field via horses and sorcery and very tired feet, for many Iron Ring magicians remained alive and dangerous. In the shadow of our abandoned joke of an effigy engine, we fought for our pay and our oath, and as the sun finally turned red behind its veils of powder smoke, we and 10,000 Elarans watched in exhausted exaltation as the Iron Ring army finally broke like a wave on our shores, a wave that parted and sank and ran into the darkness.
After six months of raids and minor successes and placeholder, proxy victories, six months of stalemate capped by the terror of a brand-new way of warfare, the Elarans had flung an army twice the size of their own back in confusion and defeat at last.