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