Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

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 offensi ttle 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 Mithune, 1186

Montveil’s Wall, North Elara

One Hour Later

CANNON ABOVE US, cannon 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 might 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 direction 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. “Someday 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.

The war machine lurched on, cannons booming, the shot falling so far beyond us I didn’t see them land. So long as the device was in motion, I wagered its gunners would have a vexed time laying their pieces. That would change in a matter of minutes, when the thing reached spell and musket range and could halt to crush us at leisure.

“We have to get the hell out of here!” I cried, somewhat suborning the authority of my mother, who was still caught in the trance of seed-surveillance. That was when a familiar emerald phosphorescence burst around us, a vivid green light that lit the churned grass for a thirty-yard circle with us at the center.

“SHOT-FALL IMPS,” bellowed Caladesh, which is just what they were; each of the five of us was now beset by a cavorting green figure dancing in the air above our heads, grinning evilly and pointing at us, while blazing with enough light to make our position clear from miles away.

“Here! Here! Over here!” yelled the green imps. The reader may assume they continued to yell this throughout the engagement, for they certainly did. I cannot find the will to scrawl it over and over again in this journal.

Shot-fall imps are intangible (so we couldn’t shoot them) and notoriously slippery to banish. I have the wherewithal to do it, but it takes several patient minutes of trial and error, and those I did not possess.

Fire flashed in the distance, the long-range batteries again, this time sighting on the conspicuous green glow. It was no particular surprise that they were now more accurate, their balls parting the air just above our heads or plowing furrows within twenty yards. This is where we came in after the last intermission, with the enemy bombardment, the scrambling, and the general sense of a catastrophically unfolding cock-up.

Rumstandel hurled occult abuse at the penitents, his darkening mood evident in his choice of spells. He transmuted boot leather to caustic silver slime, seeded the ground with flesh-hungry glass shards, turned eyeballs to solid ice and cracked them within their sockets. All this, plus Tariel’s steady, murderous attention, and still the Iron Ringers came on, fierce and honor-mad, bayonets fixed, leaving their stricken comrades in the mud.

“Get to the horses!” I yelled, no longer concerned about bruising Millowend’s chain of command. It was my job to ward us all from harm, and the best possible safeguard would be for us to scurry, leaving our dignity on the field like a trampled tent.

The surviving penitents came charging up a nearby defile to the top of Montveil’s Wall. Caladesh met them, standing tall, his favorite over-and-under double flintlocks barking smoke. Those pistols threw .60 caliber balls, and at such close range the effect was… well, you’ve squeezed fruit before, haven’t you?

The world became a tumbling confusion of incident. Iron Ring penitents falling down the slope, tangled in the heavy bodies of dead comrades, imps dancing in green light, cannonballs ripping holes in the air, a lurching war machine—all this while I frantically tried to spot our horses, revive my mother, and layer us in what protections I could muster.

They weren’t sufficient. A swarm of small water elementals burst upon us, translucent blobs the color of gutter-silt, smelling like the edge of a summer storm. They poured themselves into the barrels and touch-holes of Caladesh’s pistols, leaving him cursing. A line of them surged up and down the barrel of Tariel’s musket, and the salamander faced them with steaming red blades in its hands like the captain of a boarded vessel. The situation required more than my spells could give it, so I resolved at last to surrender an advantage I was loath to part with.

On my left wrist I wore a bracelet woven from the tail-hairs of an Iron Unicorn, bound with a spell given to me by the Thinking Sharks of the Jewelwine Sea, for which I had traded documents whose contents are still the state secrets of one of our former clients. I tore it off, snapped it in half, and threw it to the ground.

It’s dangerous arrogance for any sorcerer to think of a fifth-order demon as a familiar; at best such beings can be indentured to a very limited span of time or errands, and against even the most ironclad terms of service they will scheme and clamor with exhausting persistence. However, if you can convince them to shut up and take orders…

“Felderasticus Sixth-Quickened, Baronet of the Flayed Skulls of Faithless Dogs, Princeling of the House of Recurring Shame,” I bellowed, pausing to take a breath, “get up here and get your ass to work!”

“I deem that an irretrievably non-specific request,” said a voice like fingernails on desert-dry bones. “I shall therefore return to my customary place and assume my indenture to be dissolved by mutual—”

“Stuff that, you second-rate legal fantasist! When you spend three months questing for spells to bind me into jewelry, then you can start assuming things! Get rid of these shot-fall imps!”

“Reluctant apologies, most impatient of spell-dabblers and lore-cheats, softest of cannon-ball targets, but again your lamentably hasty nonspecificity confounds my generous intentions. When you say, ‘get rid of,’ how exactly do you propose—”

“Remove them instantly and absolutely from our presence without harm to ourselves and banish them to their previous plane of habitation!”

A chill wind blew, and it was done. The shot-fall imps with their damned green light and their pointing and shouting were packed off in a cosmic bag, back to their rightful home, where they would most likely be used as light snacks for higher perversities like Felderasticus Sixth-Quickened. I was savagely annoyed. Using Felderasticus to swat them was akin to using a guillotine as a mouse-trap, but you can see the mess we were in.

“Now, I shall withdraw, having satisfied all the terms of our compact,” said the demon.

“Oh, screw yourself!” I snarled.

“Specify physically, metaphysically, or figuratively.”

“Shut it! You know you’re not finished. I need a moment to think.”

Tariel and Caladesh were fending off penitents, inelegantly but emphatically, with their waterlogged weapons. Rumstandel was trying to help them as well as keep life hot for the Iron Ring sorcerer that must have been mixed in with the penitents. I couldn’t see him (or her) from my vantage, but the imps and water elementals proved their proximity. Millowend was stirring, muttering, but not yet herself. I peered at the towering war machine and calculated. No, that was too much of a job for my demon. Too much mass, too much magic, and now it was just two hundred yards distant.

“We require transportation,” I said, “Instantly and—”

“Wait,” cried my mother. She sat up, blinked, and appeared unsurprised as a cannon ball swatted the earth not ten feet away, spattering both of us with mud. “Don’t finish that command, Watchdog! We all need to die!”

“Watchdog,” said Rumstandel, “our good captain is plainly experiencing a vacancy in the upper-story rooms, so please apply something heavy to her skull and get on with that escape you were arranging.”

“No! I’m sorry,” cried Millowend, and now she bounced to her feet with sprightliness that was more than a little unfair in someone her age. “My mind was still a bit at luncheon. You know that flying around being a hundred of myself is a very taxing business. What I mean is, this is a bespoke ambush, and if we vanish safely out of it they’ll just keep expecting us. But if it looks as though we’re snuffed, the Iron Ring might drop their guard enough to let us back in the fight!”

“Ahh!” I cried, chagrined that I hadn’t thought of that myself. In my defense, you have just read my account of the previous few minutes. I cleared my throat.

“Felderasticus, these next-named tasks, once achieved, shall purchase the end of your indenture without further caveat or reservation! NOW! Interpreting my words in the broadest possible spirit of good faith, we, all five of us, must be brought alive with our possessions to a place of safety within the North Elaran encampment just south of here. Furthermore—FURTHERMORE! Upon the instant of our passage, you must create a convincing illusion of our deaths, as though… as though we had been caught by cannon-fire and the subsequent combustion of our powder-flasks and alchemical miscellanies!”

I remain very proud of that last flourish. Wizards, like musketeers, are notorious for carrying all sorts of volatile things on their persons, and if we were seen to explode the Iron Ringers might not bother examining our alleged remains too closely.

“Faithfully shall I work your will and thereby end my indenture,” said the cold voice of the demon.

The world turned gray and spun around me. After a moment of disjointed nausea I found myself once again lying under sharp-elbowed Caladesh, with Rumstandel, Tariel, and my mother into the bargain. Roughly six hundred pounds of Red Hats, all balanced atop my stomach, did something for my freshly-eaten pie that I hesitate to describe. But, ah, you’ve squeezed fruit before, haven’t you?

Moaning, swearing, and retching, we all fell or scrambled apart. Guns, bandoliers, and hats littered the ground around us. When I had managed to wipe my mouth and take in a few breaths, I finally noticed that we were surrounded by a veritable forest of legs, legs wearing the boots and uniform trousers of North Elaran staff officers.

I followed some of those legs upward with my eyes and met the disbelieving gaze of General Arad Vorstal, supreme field commander of the army of North Elara. Beside him stood his general of engineers, the equally surprised Luthienne Alune.

“Generals,” said my mother suavely, dusting herself off and restoring her battered hat to its proper place. “Apologies for the suddenness of our arrival. I’m afraid I have to report that our reconnaissance of the Iron Ring war machine ended somewhat prematurely. And the machine retains its full motive power.”

She cleared her throat.

“And, ah, we’re all probably going to see it again in about half an hour.”

ENCLOSURE: Invoice for sundry items lost or disposed of in Elaran service, 13th instant, Mithune, 1186. Submitted to Quartermaster-Captain Guthrun on behalf of the Honorable Company of Red Hats, countersigned Captain-Paramount Millowend, Sorceress. 28th instant, Mithune, 1186

ITEM VALUATION:

Bracelet, thaumaturgical…1150 Gil. 13 p.

Function (confidential)

Spyflask, thaumaturgical…100 Gil. 5 p.

Function (reconnaissance)

Total Petition…1250 Gil. 18 p.

Please remit as per terms of contract.

WATCHDOG— Actually, I picked up your spyflask when you rather thoughtlessly dropped it that afternoon. I did mean to return it to you eventually. These minor trivialities of camp life do elude me sometimes. I hadn’t realized that the company received a hundred gildmarks as a replacement fee. Do you want me to keep the flask, or shall I write myself up a chit for the hundred gildmarks? I am content with either. —R

13th Mithune, 1186

Somewhere near Lake Corlan, North Elara

BUT THEY DIDN’T come. Not then.

Afternoon wound down into evening. Presumably, the Iron Ring thought it too late in the day to commence a general action, and with all of their sorcerous impediments supposedly ground into the mud, one could hardly blame them for a lack of urgency. The war machine stood guard before Montveil’s Wall, and behind it came the creak and groan of artillery teams, the shouts of orders, and the tramp of boots as line regiments moved into their billets for the night. The light of a thousand fires rose from the captured Elaran fieldworks and joined in an ominous glow, giving the overcast the colors of a banked furnace.

In the Elaran camp, we brooded and argued. The council ran long, in quite inverse proportion to the tempers of those involved.

“It’s not that we can’t dig,” General Alune was saying, her patience shaved down to a perceptibly thin patina on her manner. “For the tenth time, it’s the fact that the bloody machine moves! We can work like mad all night, sink a shaft just about the right size to make a grave for the damn thing, and in the morning it might spot the danger and take five steps to either side. So much for our trap.”

“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 one hundred 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 sea-bird. 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 machine, 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 ten thousand 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.

It was not the end of their war, and the butcher’s bill would be terrible. But it was something. It meant hope, and frankly, when someone hires the Red Hats, that’s precisely what we’re expected to provide.

In the aftermath of the battle I worked some sorcery for the hospital details, then stumbled, spell-drunk and battered, to the edge of the gaping pit now serving as a tomb for the mighty war machine and its occupants.

I have to admit I waxed pitifully philosophical as I studied the wreck. It wouldn’t be an easy thing to duplicate, but it could be done, with enough wizards and enough skilled engineers, and small mountains of steel and gold. Would the Iron Ring try again? Would other nations attempt to build such devices of their own? Was that the future of sorcerers like myself, to become power sources for hulking metal beasts, to drain our lives into their engines?

I, Watchdog, a lump of coal, a fagot for the flames.

I shook my head then and I shake my head now. War is my trade, but it makes me so damned tired sometimes. I don’t have any answers. I keep my oath, I keep my book, I take my pay and I guard my friends from harm. I suppose we are all lumps of coal destined for one furnace or another.

I found the rest of the company in various states of total collapse near the trampled, smoldering remains of General Vorstal’s command pavilion. Our options had been limited when we’d selected a place to build our machine, and unfortunately the trap path had been drawn across all the Elaran high command’s nice things.

Caladesh was unconscious with a shattered wagon wheel for a pillow. Tariel had actually fallen sleep sitting up, arms wrapped around her musket. My mother was sipping coffee and staring at Rumstandel, who was snoring like some sort of cave-beast while miniature coronas of foul weather sparked around his beard. In lieu of a pillow, Rumstandel had enlisted one of his familiars, a tubby little bat-demon that stood silently, holding Rumstandel’s bald head off the ground like an athlete heaving a weight over its shoulders.

“He looks so peaceful, doesn’t he?” whispered Millowend. She muttered and gestured, and a bright new red hat appeared out of thin air, gently lowering itself onto Rumstandel’s brow. He continued snoring.

“There,” she said, with no little satisfaction. “Be sure to record that in your chronicles, will you, Watchdog?”

The reader will note that I have been pleased to comply.