by Sean Wallace
With an earsplitting howl, the cyklop fell, blood seeping from its single eye. Watching the monster die, Raseed felt more relief than pride.
* * *
Adoulla charged Zoud, making sure that his robed shoulder was his opponent’s most prominent target. A sneer flashed on Zoud’s face. The fool thought Adoulla was blundering into his dagger-path.
The silver-handled blade came down.
And glanced off the blessed kaftan, as surely as if Adoulla were wearing mail. Zoud got in one more useless stab before Adoulla let loose the right hook that had once made him the best street-fighter on Dead Donkey Lane. With a girlish cry, the magus crumpled into a heap. Somewhere behind Adoulla, the cyklop howled its death-howl.
His tricks gone and his nose broken, Zoud lay bleeding at Adoulla’s feet. The magus whimpered to himself like a child yanked from a good dream. Before Adoulla knew what was happening, Raseed was at his side.
“Magus!” the dervish said. “You have stolen and slain women. You dared demand an oath before God to cover your foulness. For you, there can be no forgiveness!” Raseed sent his blade diving for Zoud’s heart. In a breathspace, the forked sword found it. The magus’s eyes went wide as he gurgled and died.
Adoulla felt ill.
“What is wrong with you, boy? We had the man at our—” He fell silent, seeing the boy’s firevine wounds.
Raseed narrowed his tilted eyes. “With apologies, Doctor, I expected Adoulla Makhslood to be a man who struck swiftly and righteously.”
“And instead you’ve found some pastry-stuffed old fart who isn’t fond of killing. Poor child! God must weep at your cruel fate.”
“Doctor! To take God’s name in mock is imper—”
“Enough, boy! Do you hear me? Fight monsters for forty years as I have – cross the seas and sands of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms serving God – then you can tell me what is ‘impermissible’. By then, Almighty God willing, I’ll be dead and gone, my ears untroubled by the peeps of holy men’s mouths!” The tirade silenced the dervish, who stood looking down at the magus’s bleeding corpse.
The problem was, Adoulla feared that the boy’s way might be right. Adoulla thought of the girl, Ushra. And of Raseed’s pain as the firevine had tortured him. And of Zoud’s dead “wives”. He sighed.
“Oh, God damn it all. Fine, boy. You’re right. Just as you were about the blower-on-knots.” Adoulla sat down with a grunt, right there on the bloody floorboards. He had fought a dozen battles more difficult than this over the decades, but he did not think he’d ever felt so weary.
Raseed spoke slowly. “No, Doctor. You were right. About Ushra, at least. She did what she did from weakness and fear of a wicked man. Yet I would’ve killed her.” The dervish was quiet for a long moment. “It was her, Doctor. Ushra. She poisoned the firevine. She freed Hafi’s wife. I’m ashamed to say it, but I must speak true – I wouldn’t have escaped if not for her.”
Adoulla was too tired to respond with words. He grunted again and clambered to his feet.
Yehyeh’s teahouse buzzed with chattering customers. Raseed tried to ignore the lewd music and banter. Hafi and his tall, raven-haired wife sat with her grateful parents on a pile of cushions in the far corner. At a table near the entrance, Raseed sat with the Doctor, who was nursing what he had called a “God-damned gruesome tracking spell headache.” Lifting his head from his hands slowly, the Doctor fixed a droopy eye on Raseed.
“How many men have you killed, boy?”
Raseed was confused – why did that matter now? “Two. No . . . the highwaymen . . . five? After this villain last night, six.”
“So many?” the Doctor said.
Raseed did not know what to say, so he said nothing.
Adoulla sighed. “You’re a fine warrior, Raseed bas Raseed. If you’re to study with me, though, you must know your number and never forget it. You took a man’s life yesterday. Weigh that fact! Make it harder than it is for you now. Remember that a man, even a foul man, is not a ghul.”
Again, Raseed was confused. “‘Harder’, Doctor? I’ve trained all my life to kill swiftly.”
“And now you will train to kill reluctantly. If you still wish an apprenticeship.”
“I do still wish it, Doctor! High Shaykh Aalli spoke of you as—”
“People speak of me, boy, but now you’ve met me. You’ve fought beside me. I eat messily. I ogle girls one-third my age. And I don’t like killing. If you’re going to hunt monsters with me, you must see things as they are.”
Raseed, his broken fingers still stinging, his wrists and ankles still raw, nodded and recalled the High Shaykh’s words about where virtue lives. Strange places indeed.
A quiet settled over the table and Adoulla devoured another of the almond-and-anise rolls that Yehyeh had been gratefully plying him with. As he ate he thought about the boy sitting across from him.
He did not relish the thought of a preachy little dervish in his home. He could only hope the boy was young enough to stretch beyond the smallness that had been beaten into him at the Lodge. Regardless, only a fool would refuse having a decades-younger warrior beside him as he went about his last years of ghul hunting.
Besides, the dervish, with his meticulous grooming, would make a great house-keeper!
He could hear Miri’s jokes about boy-love already.
Miri. God help me.
Raseed lifted his bowl of plain limewater and sipped daintily. Adoulla said nothing to break the silence, but he slurped his sweet cardamom tea. Then he set his teabowl down, belched loudly, and relished the horrified grimace of his virtuous new apprentice.
THE EFFIGY ENGINE: A TALE OF THE RED HATS
Scott Lynch
11th Mithune, 1186
Painted Sky Pass, North Elara
“I took up the study of magic because I wanted to live in the beauty of transfinite mathematical truths,” said Rumstandel. He gestured curtly. In the canyon below us, an enemy soldier shuddered, clutched at his throat, and began vomiting live snakes.
“If my indifference were money you’d be the master of my own personal mint,” I muttered. Of course Rumstandel heard me despite the pop, crackle, and roar of musketry echoing around the walls of the pass. There was sorcery at play between us to carry our voices, so we could bitch and digress and annoy ourselves like a pair of inebriates trading commentary in a theater balcony.
The day’s show was an ambush of a company of Iron Ring legionaries on behalf of our employers, the North Elarans, who were blazing away with arquebus and harsh language from the heights around us. The harsh language seemed to be having greater effect. The black-coated ranks of the Iron Ring jostled in consternation, but there weren’t enough bodies strewn among the striated sunset-orange rocks that gave the pass its name. Hot lead was leaving the barrels of our guns, but it was landing like kitten farts and some sly magical bastard down there was responsible.
Oh, for the days of six months past, when the Iron Ring had crossed the Elaran border marches, their battle wizards proud and laughing in full regalia. Their can’t-miss-me-at-a-mile wolf-skull helmets, their set-me-on-fire carnelian cloaks, their shoot-me-in-the-face silver masks.
Six months with us for playmates had taught them to be less obvious. Counter-thaumaturgy was our mission and our meal ticket: coax them into visibility and make them regret it. Now they dressed like common officers or soldiers, and some even carried prop muskets or pikes. Like this one, clearly.
“I’m a profound disappointment to myself,” sighed Rumstandel, big round florid Rumstandel, who didn’t share my appreciation for sorcerous anonymity. This week he’d turned his belly-scraping beard blue and caused it to spring out in flaring forks like the sculpture of a river and its tributaries. Little simulacra of ships sailed up and down those beard strands even now, their hulls the size of rice grains, dodging crumbs like rocks and shoals. Crumbs there were aplenty, since Rumstandel always ate while he killed and soliloquized. One hand was full of the sticky Elaran ration bread we cal
led corpsecake for its pallor and suspected seasoning.
“I should be redefining the vocabulary of arcane geometry somewhere safe and cultured, not playing silly buggers with village fish-charmers wearing wolf skulls.” He silenced himself with a mouthful of cake and gestured again. Down on the valley floor his victim writhed his last. The snakes came out slick with blood, eyes gleaming like garnets in firelight, nostrils trailing strands of pale caustic vapor.
I couldn’t really pick out the minute details at seventy yards, but I’d seen the spell before. In the closed ranks of the Iron Ring the serpents wrought the havoc that arquebus fire couldn’t, and legionaries clubbed desperately at them with musket-butts.
As I peered into the mess, the forward portion of the legionary column exploded in white smoke. Sparks and chips flew from nearby rocks, and I felt a burning pressure between my eyes, a sharp tug on the strands of my own magic. The practical range of sorcery is about that of musketry, and a fresh reminder of the fact hung dead in the air a yard from my face. I plucked the ball down and slipped it into my pocket.
Somewhere safe and cultured? Well, there was nowhere safer for Rumstandel than three feet to my left. I was doing for him what the troublemaker on the ground was doing for the legionaries. Close protection, subtle and otherwise, my military and theoretical specialty.
Wizards working offensively in battle have a bad tendency to get caught up in their glory-hounding and part their already tenuous ties to prudence. Distracted and excited, they pile flourish on flourish, spell on spell until some stray musket ball happens along and elects to take up residence.
Our little company’s answer is to work in teams, one sorcerer working harm and the second diligently protecting them both. Rumstandel didn’t have the temperament to be that second sorcerer, but I’ve been at it so long now everyone calls me Watchdog. Even my mother.
I heard a rattling sound behind us, and turned in time to see Tariel hop down into our rocky niche, musket held before her like an acrobat’s pole. Red-gray dust was caked in sweaty spirals along her bare ebony arms, and the dozens of wooden powder flasks dangling from her bandolier knocked together like a musical instrument.
“Mind if I crouch in your shadow, Watchdog? They’re keeping up those volleys in good order.” She knelt between me and Rumstandel, laid her musket carefully in the crook of her left arm, and whispered, “Touch.” The piece went off with the customary flash and bang, which my speech-sorcery dampened to a more tolerable pop.
Hers was a salamandrine musket. Where the flintlock or wheel mechanism might ordinarily be was instead a miniature metal sculpture of a manor house, jutting from the weapon’s side as though perched atop a cliff. I could see the tiny fire elemental that lived in there peering out one of the windows. It was always curious to see how a job was going. Tariel could force a spark from it by pulling the trigger, but she claimed polite requests led to smoother firing.
“Damn. I seem to be getting no value for money today, gents.” She began the laborious process of recharging and loading.
“We’re working on it,” I said. Another line of white smoke erupted below, followed by another cacophony of ricochets and rock chips. An Elaran soldier screamed. “Aren’t we working on it, Rumstandel? And by ‘we’ I do in fact mean—”
“Yes, yes, bullet-catcher, do let an artist stretch his own canvas.” Rumstandel clenched his fists and something like a hot breeze blew past me, thick with powder. This would be a vulgar display.
Down on the canyon floor, an Iron Ring legionary in the process of reloading was interrupted by the cold explosion of his musket. The stock shivered into splinters and the barrel peeled itself open backward like a sinister metal flower. Quick as thought, the burst barrel enveloped the man’s arm, twisted, and – well, you’ve squeezed fruit before, haven’t you? Then the powder charges in his bandolier flew out in burning constellations, a cloud of fire that made life immediately interesting for everyone around him.
“Ah! That’s got his attention at last,” said Rumstandel. A gray-blue cloud of mist boiled up from the ground around the stricken legionaries, swallowing and dousing the flaming powder before it could do further harm. Our Iron Ring friend was no longer willing to tolerate Rumstandel’s contributions to the battle, and so inevitably . . .
“I see him,” I shouted, “gesturing down there on the left! Look, he just dropped a pike!”
“Out from under the rock! Say your prayers, my man. Another village up north has lost its second-best fish-charmer!” said Rumstandel, moving his arms now like a priest in ecstatic sermon (recall my earlier warning about distraction and excitement). The Iron Ring sorcerer was hoisted into the air, black coat flaring, and as Rumstandel chanted his target began to spin.
The fellow must have realized that he couldn’t possibly get any more obvious, and he had some nerve. Bright-blue fire arced up at us, a death-sending screaming with ghostly fury. My business. I took a clay effigy out of my pocket and held it up. The screaming blue fire poured itself into the little statuette, which leapt out of my hands and exploded harmlessly ten yards above. Dust rained on our heads.
The Iron Ring sorcerer kept rising and whirling like a top. One soldier, improbably brave or stupid, leapt and caught the wizard’s boot. He held on for a few rotations before he was heaved off into some of his comrades.
Still that wizard lashed out. First came lightning like a white pillar from the sky. I dropped an iron chain from a coat sleeve to bleed its energy into the earth, though it made my hair stand on end and my teeth chatter. Then came a sending of bad luck I could feel pressing in like a congealing of the air itself; the next volley that erupted from the Iron Ring lines would doubtless make cutlets of us. I barely managed to unweave the sending, using an unseemly eruption of power that left me feeling as though the air had been punched out of my lungs. An instant later musket balls sparked and screamed on the rocks around us, and we all flinched. My previous spell of protection had lapsed while I was beset.
“Rumstandel,” I yelled, “quit stretching the bloody canvas and paint the picture already!”
“He’s quite unusually adept, this illiterate pot-healer!” Rumstandel’s beard-boats rocked and tumbled as the blue hair in which they swam rolled like ocean waves. “The illicit toucher of sheep! He probably burns books to keep warm at home! And I’m only just managing to hold him – Tariel, please don’t wait for my invitation to collaborate in this business!”
Our musketeer calmly set her weapon into her shoulder, whispered to her elemental, and gave fire. The spinning sorcerer shook with the impact. An instant later, his will no longer constraining Rumstandel’s, he whirled away like a child’s rag doll flung in a tantrum. Where the body landed, I didn’t see. My sigh of relief was loud and shameless.
“Yes, that was competent opposition for a change, wasn’t it?” Tariel was already calmly recharging her musket. “Incidentally, it was a woman.”
“Are you sure?” I said once I’d caught my breath. “I thought the Iron Ringers didn’t let their precious daughters into their war-wizard lodges.”
“I’d guess they’re up against the choice between female support and no support at all,” she said. “Almost as though someone’s been subtracting wizards from their muster rolls this past half-year.”
The rest of the engagement soon played out. Deprived of sorcerous protection, the legionaries began to fall to arquebus fire in the traditional manner. Tariel kept busy, knocking hats from heads and heads from under hats. Rumstandel threw down just a few subtle spells of maiming and ill-coincidence, and I returned to my sober vigil, Watchdog once more. It wasn’t in our contract to scourge the Iron Ringers from the field with sorcery. We wanted them to feel they’d been, in the main, fairly bested by their outnumbered Elaran neighbors, line to line and gun to gun, rather than cheated by magic of foreign hire.
After the black-clad column had retreated down the pass and the echo of musketry was fading, Rumstandel and I basked like lizards in the mid-afternoon
sun and stuffed ourselves on corpsecake and cold chicken, the latter wrapped in fly-killing spells of Rumstandel’s devising. No sooner would the little nuisances alight on our lunch than they would vanish in puffs of green fire.
Tariel busied herself cleaning out her musket barrel with worm and fouling scraper. When she’d finished, the fire elemental, in the form of a scarlet salamander that could hide under the nail of my smallest finger, went down the barrel to check her work.
“Excuse me, are you the – that is, I’m looking for the Red Hats.”
A young Elaran in a dark-blue officer’s coat appeared from the rocks above us, brown ringlets askew, uniform scorched and holed from obvious proximity to trouble. I didn’t recognize her from the company we’d been attached to. I reached into a pocket, drew out my rumpled red slouch hat, and waved it.
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.”
