by J. F. Holmes
Randall refused to allow reality to dampen his mood. He shook the pouch, pleased to his core to hear the perfect tinkle of jingling gold coins. “Jeff, I have the utmost faith in my loyal and capable master blacksmith! We have funds for the first time in months. Make me a list, and I’ll hitch up the oxen, take the cart into town, and get whatever you need!”
“Ha!” Even Older Jenn cackled. “Ya been eatin’ the oxen all week, dearie. Sold three, slaughtered one. Had to. Didja think they were just out foragin’ like sheep?”
Reality damped a portion of Randall’s mood despite his will. “Fine. I’ll ride a mule into town to get repair stock and a new team of oxen. But we will hit this job in the Gilt Valley in seven days. How you do it, those are details. Your details, Jeff. Figure it out.”
Looking away from the road the nobleman and his team of swords had disappeared down, Randall turned toward their stack knight in the center of camp. Sir Potbelly was a house-sized behemoth of rusty iron, dusty green copper, chipped stone, and dry-rotted timber, limbs sprawled akimbo atop a heavy-duty (but notably oxen-less) oxcart. The war machine was well past its prime…but it remained an object of obsession for the young mechanistic mage. It had been far too long since his stack knight had swung a mighty sword or danced nimbly away from a counterstrike, but that was over now.
Sir Potbelly would give glorious battle once more.
Randall nodded and gathered his things for the hike. “We need to get everyone back and ready too. Where is Melodya? What about Sir Garrick?”
Old Jeff chuckled unpleasantly. “Ya mean yer demonic whore? And tha Knight o’ Cups hisself? Wheah do ya think?”
***
She danced, and in so doing, she became the most beautiful thing in all the world.
Or so Sir Garrick Azeros believed. But even in his low state, he imagined it would have been a singular opinion. The rapid drums and cymbals struck out an intoxicating rhythm, matching his own hard-won intoxication beat for beat. Upon the stage Melodya spun round and round, lithe limbs stretching, veils flailing, and her dusky-red skin flashing…enthralling him, enticing him. Had he the sobriety to stand, he would have risen, taken her hand, and swept her into his arms, punctuating her dance with a kiss.
Her status would not matter.
Her race would not matter.
Her scars would not matter.
Not to him. Not in his secret dreams.
But he did not have the sobriety. And while the drink made him honest, he admitted he did not have the courage, either. On the battlefield, in his distant youth, he had proven to all he had the courage of lions. But that was long, long ago, and that degree of bravery had fled, along with his youth, his vitality, and his surefootedness, leaving behind only a gray beard, shaking knees, and a gut to rival that of Sir Potbelly himself.
So he just sat and drank, and watched the lovely, talented, ravaged Melodya dance.
“Ha! Demon-bitch!” The cruel jeer from the crowded tavern cut through the rhythmic drums, causing both the musicians and Melodya to falter and pause. All eyes turned, and a massive, filthy farm-hand stepped out of the shadows to climb boldly onto the stage. The callow drunk reached out one beefy hand and took Melodya’s arm, arresting her near-instant escape to the stage’s opposite side.
He looked her over, appraising. “You move good for a half-breed djinnae. You wanna show me how you move fully bred?”
Melodya said nothing, but her golden eyes flashed, her reddish skin darkened, and a sound halfway between a growl and a rumbling purr sounded from beneath her black and crimson embroidered veil.
The idiot took this as encouragement rather than the intended warning. He chuckled and reached forward, drawing her veil away from the lower half of her face. The chuckle died in his throat at the ravages of her scars, at what was missing, and he shuddered. The youth looked back at his fellows, his eyes pleading for encouragement.
More than a couple of those who watched gasped at the sight of her revealed face, but another hand—an older, more gone-to-seed version of Melodya’s captor—brayed a laugh. “Bring her, boy! We got a bag for what’s left of her face.”
Lust and confidence restored by that logic, the young hand drew her forward, off the stage, and presumably toward wherever they laid their bedrolls. Melodya struggled against his grip and grunted, but no one did anything to stop him. The townsfolk might drum up enough chivalry to defend a maiden or a bar-wench, but not for a disfigured half-djinnae girl, and a camp dancer to boot. To most of them, she was barely a person at all.
But not to everyone.
With a roar, Garrick staggered to his feet, set his stance, and drew his backsword. “Unhand her, knave!”
The gigantic youth stopped and turned a dubious gaze on the old man, whose once-fine tunic had grown unfashionable and threadbare, and now strained to conceal a waistline grown wide from drink and rich food. Seeing the doubt on the idiot’s face, Garrick growled in warning and swung his sword with a lightning-fast flick of his wrist, along with a small word of power beneath his breath. The backsword’s single edge flashed bright blue and sliced straight through the heavy oak table where he had been sitting. Both halves tumbled over, flames briefly licking up from each side of the cut. Garrick spared not a glance. Instead, his gaze stayed glued upon the young man, his sword back in perfect guard position, its edge-glow faded now to a dull amber.
The youth relaxed his grip and stood back in momentary shock. The whole tavern rang with utter silence.
Garrick had the momentum of the encounter and only needed to press his advantage. He stepped forward to free Melodya…and at last remembered how old and drunk he was. One foot came down on the leg of the sliced-in-half table and slid. He hopped on his other foot to regain his balance, but then the weak, old ankle rolled, and Sir Garrick Azeros—the strong right and left arms of a noble and powerful stack knight—crashed down, sprawling on his back upon the beer-stained tavern floor.
The tavern switched from shocked, respectful silence to the most derisive laughter possible. The place roared with mirth, including the idiot youth. He released Melodya to point and laugh at Garrick.
And then he found out what the strong and nimble legs of a powerful stack knight could do.
Melodya dropped low, spun, and swept her leg out. Her kick knocked the youth’s feet from beneath him and sent him down, face-first, into the floorboards. Leaping back up, she kicked high and brought her bare heel crashing down on the back of the youth’s head, smashing his face into the floorboards again. She could have killed him, but she did not need to add to the troubles this encounter would already be bringing. Thus, she pulled the full strength of her blow at the last instant, settling for unconsciousness and a ruined nose.
Garrick struggled up to a sitting position and used his heated backsword as a brace with which to stand. Shame and exertion both turned his face a brighter red than Melodya’s normal hue.
The tavern patrons and the youth’s fellows did not know whether to keep laughing or to seek vengeance for their young man, so Melodya used the moment of confusion to make good their escape. She pulled Garrick’s arm across her shoulders and half lifted, half-staggered him toward the rear exit.
After a few steps, Garrick’s other arm lifted, and a new face thrust out from the other side of the elderly knight’s chest. Randall smiled ruefully as he helped her carry the heavy old man out faster. “You know, I appreciate you dancing to help support the company, Melodya—and Garrick, I’m glad you’re always here at the tavern to watch over her—but it would help if you two could actually make it to the end of the evening and get paid.”
“T’wasn’t my fault or hers this time, boy. But honor demanded action!” Garrick slurred.
Melodya nodded emphatically.
“Fine,” Randall allowed. “For now, though, honor and action both demand we get out of here and on the road. Potbelly’s got a job.”
His earlier embarrassment now forgotten, Garrick got his own feet beneath him and relieved them
of most of his considerable weight. He walked faster, only relying upon them to steer his awkward steps. “At last!”
Melodya growled/purred her own assent.
Randall smiled at them both.
***
The road devoured the next six days. Both the weather and the various paths and tracks remained passable, such that a journey to the Gilt Valley’s gemstone- and metal-rich streams might normally take half that time, but that was for traveling as a group of riders. The slow, plodding pace of teams of oxen and mules, heavily laden with a stack knight, a portable smithy, supplies, and all the accoutrements of a party of six conspired to extend their travel time a bit. They used the time well, however.
Old Jeff and his young apprentice Bertram did what work they could while they moved, but mostly they slept during the day and worked at night, between stopping each afternoon and breaking camp each morning. The others made do with intermittent sleep while the pair of them stoked fires, pounded copper and steel, and set to restoring Sir Potbelly to fighting trim, despite decades of neglect and hard use. And Jeff accomplished it all to an amelodic accompaniment of complaint, cursing about the journey, about his own work schedule, about his share of the profit, about all the work that still needed to be done on the stack knight that surely would not get done.
He even harangued Garrick for a full day about ruining the heat temper of his backsword. “Yeah, to you is j’st a word o’ pow’r, an’ lo, look-a-that, ‘Ah’ve got a flamin’ sword, Ah do!’ Not ta say it’ll hold a fackin’ edge after, will it!? No, no! Ol’ Jeff’ll fix it, never ya mind, ya drunk bastard. Ach!”
Even Older Jenn drove the ox team during the day and then cooked up a monotonous but tasty ox-meat stew at night, still working through the leftovers of the last team. Randall wondered if the current oxen recognized the smell of a former member of their species, and thus pulled just a little bit harder in order to stay off the menu.
Melodya could not drive the teams, given the way the draft animals reacted to her half-djinnae nature, so she helped in other ways. The slender red woman clambered about Sir Potbelly and leapt from oxcart to mule wagon as the need arose, assisting with repairs and focusing primarily upon the non-smith work, such as mending and preparing the ropes used in each torsion spindle.
The stack knight was a complex war machine, comprised of gears, rods, pulleys, stays, pressure vessels, fireboxes, pipes, moment arms, and windlasses, all wrapped within barrel-stave limbs and a metallic skin. It was essentially a live boiler surrounded by multiple, linked, “onager” torsion catapults. When wound and at the boil, the outer layers of the old walking siege engine concealed a tremendous amount of potential energy, ready to release, explode, and kill them all if they did not respect it. Many tasks could not be accomplished except by someone capable of the most bizarre contortions and no fear of enclosed spaces or the deadly machinery surrounding them. Melodya did all that without complaint, and not just because she was mute. She threw herself into the tasks because it was her nature, and because the Company of Sir Potbelly had accepted her as no other group might or ever had before.
Throughout all her movements over, in, to, and fro, Sir Garrick kept a not-quite-paternal, not-quite-lecherous eye upon her. His feelings toward Melodya shifted throughout the day as he set to his own tasks, checking and preparing Potbelly’s many weapons and launchers. Whether that was because his unexpressed but still chivalrous desires for her were more complicated than he was prepared to admit, or because his desires ebbed and flowed with however much ale he drank to ease the aches of his bones, no one could truly say.
The old man had been many things in the long decades since his youth, knighted upon a bloody field. He had led cohorts in battle. He had made cavalry charges against both pike infantry and opposing lines of heavy horse. He had performed in the lists with resounding mediocrity. And eventually, as ale and age got the better of him and his legs could no longer carry him in full armor with authority, he had looked back upon a life wasted, with no children to carry on for him, no land to tend, no love to warm him in his waning years. Thus he, like Melodya and all these misfits, had found a home in the Company of Sir Potbelly.
Randall, watching over all of them, set to his own tasks as well. With no one else available, he drove the mule wagon and ran down the continual list of things to be done before they reached the end of their journey. He not only had to concern himself with getting there on time and according to Lord Teague’s schedule, he had to ensure that everyone performed to their utmost to ready Sir Potbelly for battle, not to mention his own specialized tasks that only a mechanistic mage could accomplish.
Each evening, after a full day on the road driving a cantankerous team of ill-tempered mules, while Jeff worked metal with an endless rhythm of hammering rings, and when Randall should have been getting rest, he instead meditated, concentrated, and reached out through arcane arts to other strands of reality to change their own. Old dry-rotted timber and cracked barrel staves grew new, green, and fresh. Components were linked, not just with physical connections, but by a nebulous bond that could transfer motion, energy, and intent. Potbelly’s mass vanished off into some pocket dimension, while the strength of its limbs grew and grew, no longer bound by the limiting relationships between surface area and volume.
Randall allowed himself little rest. If any one of them failed to do their best, the entire enterprise would end in violence, fury, and immolation. The kind of foe they were facing would give them no leeway, and no quarter.
They also would not get the second half of their pay.
He had brought the Company of Sir Potbelly together, and kept it together by only the barest of margins. Like the others, he was an outcast, tossed unceremoniously from an industrial magic apprenticeship and into the streets. He had acquired the stack knight as a camp follower, picking over the dregs of battle and stretching his limited resources and magic to the utmost until the war engine could again walk and swing a grand-halberd. And Randall’s drive to make something from nothing had been like a lodestone, drawing the others to him. They each had an undeniable need to become more than they were, more than their circumstances and societies would allow them to be. And they found success and family in the struggle, together.
The pressure on Randall to keep that all from failing swelled tremendously. And as the miles and seconds ticked by, he grew shorter and sharper with the mule-team and his fellows in the Company. To their credit, they took it all in stride. This was not their first battle or their first time dealing with the worried young mage, though it was the first in a long while.
On the fourth day, they passed by the encampment of Lord Teague and a respectably-sized army at the far end of the Gilt Valley, where the mountains were but foothills. Compared to the gleaming ranks, well-appointed mounts, and exacting lines of stark-white tents, the Company and its members looked shabby beyond belief. They each nodded and tried to appear amiable to the sneering soldiers as they slowly trundled by. Randall flashed a confident grin at a distant Teague, whose frown was still evident even across the camp.
An army like that could face down almost any foe. There was not a band of brigands or raiders that could stand up to such well-disciplined martial might. But they were not facing brigands, or raiders, or even a band of trolls. What Teague had hired them to combat could only be fought on equal footing with a stack knight, even a shabby one like Sir Potbelly.
For two days further into the valley…there be dragons.
***
“Wot ah don’ get, boy, is why ain’t we going into th’ town, if’n is the town wot we’s defendin’? Ah been on the road an’ w’rkin’ nights for six bleedin’ days! B’rtram’s asleep atop ‘is feet, he is! Ah wan’ a night in a fackin’ bed, zat too much t’ ask?”
Randall, equally tired and short-tempered, breathed deep and just nodded at Old Jeff. “If we go into Auricshire, we’re exposed, zero element of surprise, zero cover from the air. If the wyrm wakes up before Potbelly’s ready, it c
an roast us with impunity. No, we stay hidden behind the tree line here and draw the dragon to us, not into the town. Besides, Teague specifically told us to stay out of it. The miners living there are very independent-minded. They think their system of sacrifice is enough to appease the beast, but they’re losing too many people over time. Lord Teague’s trying to save them, whether they like it or not.”
“An’ cuz they ain’t payin’ the taxes they could if’n they weren’t sacrificin’ virgins an’ gold to a wyrm.”
Randall stared at him and shrugged. “Yeah. Probably that, too.”
“Faaiigh on ye!” Jeff muttered angrily and then stalked back to Bertram, Jenn, Melodya, and the cart, where they were shifting from “repair” to “prepare”, readying the renewed stack knight for actual use.
The fatigued wizard shook his head and turned in the other direction. He first walked toward the forest’s edge, then crouched, then slowly crept, until he at last matched the subtle stride Sir Garrick had used to close to the tree line. He found the old knight with difficulty, hidden behind a fallen log and concealed beneath a dirty brown and green hooded cloak. Lying down in the damp, half-rotted leaf mulch of the forest duff next to him, Randall whispered, “The others are starting to wind and stoke Potbelly. How do things look here?”
Without a sound, Garrick passed over a spyglass and pointed.
Randall looked where the old man indicated. Auricshire looked to be a handsome town about half a mile off, filled with a haphazard layout of plaster and timber buildings, thatched roof stone cottages, paddocks, and barns. Tilled and tended fields lay both within and just outside a rambling palisade of raw logs hacked into wicked outward-facing points. The tallest stone structure at the center of the village sported a gigantic water wheel, driven by a cold, white stream tumbling down the mountains behind them. A well-traveled trail wound up the near-vertical face of the nearest mount and vanished into a dark maw, the entrance to the mine that had presumably given Auricshire its name and made it the target of a great dragon.
