Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

by Jonathan Strahan

“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. I
lliterate 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 in
stant 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.”