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.
AMETHYST, SHADOW, AND LIGHT
SALADIN AHMED
“I JUST THINK it’s a bad idea,” Zok Ironeyes said as he sat down to a hilltop meal of oatcakes and pigeon eggs with Hai Hai. Below them, across a vast expanse of the greygrass that gave Greygrass Barrows its name, stood the small manor house under discussion. Zok popped a pickled egg into his mouth and turned his gaze from the bright green house to his partner’s beady black eyes.