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!”