The Armorer's Wish

Another sunrise had pried its way through the barn windows before Theobald Stoneson realized that he’d been at it all night. Again. 

Bleary-eyed, he found his workbench and put each of his tools in its place: widger, raffler, lift-em-upper. No tinker nor gadgeteer in the realm could’ve guessed at their names nor their functions, because Theobald had invented them himself.

The burgeoning fruit of his long labor stood there in its ugly beauty, gleaming from the night’s polishing, almost as tall and broad as the barn itself. Theo’s joints ached, but he stood proudly on weary legs, admiring the latest additions. His magnum opus would someday have its moment, even if he had to wear his back down to the gristle in the effort.

The barn door groaned open, and the tall shadow that fell across the straw-strewn floor seemed to admonish him even before he turned to meet the eyes of the man to whom it belonged. His older brother – the great warrior, the captain, the one whom Father had doted upon so proudly.

“Theo,” the voice came as it always had: mighty, mirthless, and utterly devoid of patience. “Still you waste your time with this? We need you sharp today. The invasion might come at any time, and Oakenstead needs more weapons yet.”

“I’ve told you,” Theo said, “I’ll weave the gambesons and mend the mail, but I’ll not spend my days crafting weapons to kill the Serrosi, or anyone else. Your men need armor as well as arms, and I’ll happily provide the former.”

“We’ve armor enough already,” Henryk said, approaching. His features curdled into an expression of disgusted bafflement as he surveyed the enormous frame of Theo’s project. “The garrison has willing men. Brave men. But their bravery will serve them naught if they’ve nothing in their hands but sweat when the enemy charges the gate.”

Theo sighed. He was already so tired, and the old argument always managed to drain the last of him. “You have your talents, and I have mine. You’ve trained your archers well enough. Your business is killing our enemies. Mine is keeping our men alive. Leave me to it, and I’ll do the same.”

The withering look that Henryk gave him was as familiar as it was scathing. Henryk exhaled heavily, shaking his head. “Father never knew what to do with you. I’d hoped that I might. But he was right: You have a mighty gift, but you can’t see how to help your people when they need you. And now you’ve wasted weapons on that damned thing. Blunted or no, we may find need of them soon enough, since you refuse to turn your efforts toward replacing them. Think on whether one of those old blades might’ve held off a Serossi berserker when they next scale the walls, and whether we’ll be burying one of our own while the sword that might’ve saved his life decorates this monstrosity of yours.” Henryk marched out and the barn doors banged shut behind him, leaving Theo and his hulking metal companion standing silent in the dusty half-light of the morning.

The founders of Oakenstead had planted her roots in the rich soil of a fertile river valley, and the plains and woodlands of her acres provided bountiful crops and strong timber. Where her people saw the means to grow and thrive, the Serrosi jarls saw fodder to feed their insatiable war machine. Over the years, the Serrosi had been repelled time and again, but their new warchief, Redwyn the Cruel, would not be denied. It was said that Redwyn had claimed the title by slaying his predecessor in single combat, and that the former warchief’s scalp now decorated his pauldron.

Redwyn’s unctuous envoy had been conveyed to the gates of Oakenstead in a palanquin borne by slaves of conquered peoples. The wretched bearers were naked but for loin cloths, each of their bodies painted in the colors of their homeland’s banner. The envoy had offered simple terms: relinquish the lands of the river valley, submit to Serrosi rule, and provide slaves annually as tribute, or be utterly destroyed. Henryk had responded that he would be looking for the warchief on the field to answer him personally, with steel. Theobald and his apprentices had been weaving gambesons and riveting brigandines ever since.

***

Exhausted after another long day at the forge, Theo stepped into the Sleeping Swine tavern, and looked for one particular face among the many.

Theobald was a meek sort, small-framed and pock-faced, but he had the hands and arms of a smith, palms and fingers calloused, muscles hard and wiry. It was perhaps this last that often drew flirtatious glances from his childhood friend, Gwendolin the tavern maid, who placed a mug of ale before him now.

“Hail, good sir,” she said with mock formality, curtseying and then taking a seat beside him. “How farest thou, O sleepless one?”

“A bit better now,” he smiled. “I don’t know. Henryk is at me again about arming the men. Sometimes I wonder if he’s right.” He sipped at his ale and grimaced.

“Not to your liking?”

“It never is. I come here for the tavern maid’s company, not the swill.”

“Why, Theo. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were flirting with me.”

“Oh, I meant Susanna,” Theo said, peering over her shoulder. “Is she working tonight?”

Gwendolin threw a light punch at his shoulder, then her hand found his, and she squeezed. “Let the others do their work. The apprentices can make weapons. Your brother means well, but you’re a principled man, Theo. Don’t let him or anyone else take that away from you.”

The comfort that Theo found in her eyes was what he imagined drove other men to drink, that they might find such comfort at the bottom of a tankard. Theo himself was never much for drinking; Gwen was intoxicating enough. “I’ve been working on something else,” he said. “I want to show you.”

She brightened, eager. “Well now, here’s a bit of excitement! Is this the great mystery that’s been keeping you up at night and leaving me to fend off the leering sots around here?”

“The very same. I’ll come and find you after the Swine closes.”

***

When Theo ushered Gwendolin into the barn, she saw it, and gasped. A hulking war machine, vaguely humanoid in form, stood silent and half-shadowed in the rear of the barn. An enormous skeleton of steel rods lashed together with leather straps; its skin a chaotic patchwork of battered shields and breastplates; its flanks skirted with shirts of riven chainmail. Tubes running from a pair of bellows at its sides fed into a huge glass tank on its back, a murky green liquid within. Jumbles of blunted weaponry had been welded into gigantic pincers that tipped the thing’s arms. An Archimedian colossus that might have fought off the cyclopes of myth.

“Theo,” Gwen said, awestruck, “It’s magnificent! It’s… What is it?”

Theo chuckled. “Hopefully it’s something more than a dream. Something that will do some good here, and keep people safer than swords and arrows will.” He disappeared behind the machine and lit a small fire within its belly, then worked vigorously at a crank lever. Gwen made a face at the rapid ratcheting sound that finally slowed when it met enough resistance. Theo climbed the footholds on the machine’s flank and settled himself into the bowl of an enormous cauldron that served as a piloting bay. “Please,” he whispered, and worked the control levers.

With a metallic groan, it began to move. The arms shifted experimentally, and it took one laborious and clanging step forward… then collapsed. A rod gave way in one leg and went pinwheeling off into a corner of the barn, and the colossus fell heavily to a kneel, a penitent before the god of machinekind.

“Theo!” Gwen cried. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Theo sighed. “Let’s hope the same can be said of him.”

***

Gwendolin had departed in a daze, and Theo was redrawing his schematics by candlelight when he noticed it: an iridescent insect of wondrous colors, perched atop his notes. A thing like a dragonfly, but as Theo looked closer, he saw that it had a mane of tiny feathers sprouting from behind its head. Theo stood, and it lit from its perch, flying into the candle flame. A gossamer wing ignited, and it fell and flailed on his parchment.

Panicking, Theo tossed his horn of water onto the creature, ruining his notes. With great care, he scooped the trembling creature into his hands, wondering at its brilliant form. 

“Are you alright, little one?” he said, and stroked it once with his finger.

The world flashed and a thunderclap erupted from his hands. A dizzying swirl of violet smoke oozed to the floor, where it resolved itself by degrees into the shape of a man. His skin was tanzanite blue, long ears pointed and festooned with golden rings. The starry robe he wore seemed to glow with all the colors of all the sunsets that had ever surrendered themselves to the sea. He brushed at one shoulder of his plumed cloak, singed feathers flying and seesawing to the floor.

“Right,” the blue man said, “that was a close one, eh?” 

Theo thought his accent exotic and singular, seemingly born of no place in particular. The man smiled at him, and somehow the conspiratorial joviality there put Theo at ease as might an apothecary’s poppy-milk. 

“It appears that I owe you a favor, my gracious friend!” The man held up one long, sharp-nailed finger. “One wish, and only one.”

Theo stared, mouth agape, and said finally, “I… really need to get more sleep.”

The man laughed. “I assure you that I’m not a dream, but rather a djinn. Set free during the Age of Miracles, and so I let my curiosity guide me now. And you truly are a curiosity, Theobald Stoneson. You may call me Jujuro, if it please you.” He bowed theatrically, one bejeweled hand fanning upward with a flourish.

Theo decided to indulge his hallucination. “A djinn, are you? Then I suppose you’ll prey on my wording and twist this wish into some dreadful curse? Isn’t that the way of it?”

Jujuro grinned, revealing the canines of a savannah predator. "You’ve been busy reading stories, haven't you? Though I can't imagine where you'd find the time,” he said, looking about the place, his glittering eyes surveying Theo’s many half-finished projects. “Yes, I’m afraid that we’ve been much maligned in the minds of men, for they fear any power that they do not understand. But on the contrary, your wish will be exactly what your heart desires. And that is why you must be cautious. Once spoken, the wish will only serve your heart's truest desire.

“And so, beware, and be certain that you want anything at all. For not all men know themselves, and many underestimate their own avarice and the weakness of their resolve.” Jujuro spread his hands expectantly, waiting.

“Alright then,” Theo said. “I wish that Oakenstead need never fear invasion, that we might live in peace forever after this day.”

Jujuro winced. “Ah, a noble wish, no doubt. But I’m afraid I cannot influence what others might do. Free will is a uniquely human magick.”

Theo gazed at his kneeling colossus. “I wish that my sentinel worked as I imagined it could, so as to protect our people.”

Jujuro’s lips spread in a broad and kindly smile. He nodded approvingly. “I thought you might. Then so be it. May you be the worthy steward that I suspect you to be, and may this gift bring you peace.” He clapped his hands, and a deafening flash brought Theo to the floor.

When his vision returned, he thought he spied the tail of a great serpent of violet smoke slither toward his creation and vanish into its frame. A glow from within pulsed once, and the clunky giant’s silhouette shifted wildly in the brief instant of illumination.

Theo stood slowly, his eyes riveted to the impossible marvel before him. The sentinel gleamed in the candlelight, its shields polished and mended, its haphazard scrum of components reforged into a precisely ordered wonder of engineering. The pincers had transformed into gargantuan, articulating hands. It was a thing out of time, pulled from some frightening and miraculous future. In the hearth at its core, where Theo had kindled his sputtering fires, there raged a mesmerizing blue flame.  

It thrummed with waiting power, and at Theo’s approach, it stood smoothly, then bowed with the djinn’s dramatic flair, one hand winging upward behind it, ingot-fingers gliding on cannonball joints. With a pulse of its blue hearth-flame, the machine emitted a strange noise unlike any that Theo had ever heard. It seemed somehow to carry both the inflection of a greeting and a hint of Jujuro’s laughter.

But there would be no time for wonderment.

The miracle had come not a moment too soon, for when dawn broke, a horde of Serrosi riders crested the hill beyond the fields of Oakenstead. The horns of the garrison blared, and soon the ramparts were alive with shouting and archers.

Shrieking erupted from somewhere within the great line of cavalry, and a steady beating of war drums carried across the hills to crash against the walls of Oakenstead and sink into the marrow of those who manned it. At this, the horde of Serrosi riders poured down the hillside in a thundering wave, the horizon undulating with spears and painted horses.

Alerted by the commotion, Theo ran to his makeshift armory in one corner of the barn, where he strung a gas filter over his face and donned his brigandine and bascinet – his own creations, all – and then flung open the barn doors. He climbed into the sentinel’s command perch, intuiting the levers and switches as smoothly as his fantasies had allowed. They emerged from the barn and marched toward the city gate, machine and rider, drawing shrieks and confounded stares from the townsfolk.

“Out of the way!” Theo shouted, jamming his levers forward. Townsfolk parted and the sentinel sprinted with great, clanging footfalls toward the gate. Theo’s breath ran hot within his helmet, the rooftops of houses blowing past on either side, the portcullis rushing forward to meet them. At the final stretch, the knees of the great machine bent mid-stride and it leapt upward in a tremendous burst. The world seemed to slow, and Theo saw Henryk’s pale face drift past, mouth agape, as he soared over the wall. A breathless moment, and then the sentinel crashed like a meteor onto the road beyond the gate.

Horses brayed and men cried out as the line of riders pulled back in unison, soldiers falling over each other. Many turned their horses and fled, while others steeled themselves and charged forward, screaming.

Theo punched a switch and the machine’s elbows cinched rapidly in and out, depressing the bellows at either side of its torso. His dwale anesthetic gas, acquired in trade from a Menzerrati apothecary, plumed from their nozzles in billowing green clouds. The mounted Serrosi caught in its wake soon collapsed, sleeping as soundly as their horses.

A volley of arrows flew toward Henryk’s position, and Theo leapt the machine to grip the parapet in its steel hand, flinging the other arm overhead to cover the soldiers beneath its broad canopy of shields. Arrows pinged harmlessly off the sentinel’s bulk, and Theo released its grip, dropping back to the road. The sentinel reared and sprinted toward the waiting line of cavalry and archers, where Warchief Redwyn’s antlered headdress and tall banners stood stark against the sunrise. 

Javelins and spears clanged off of the machine as it cleaved a path up the hillside, Serrosi both ahorse and afoot fleeing desperately before it. The warchief’s eyes were huge and terrified as he finally made to turn his horse, but Theo reached an enormous hand and plucked him from his mount. Theo lifted the visor of his bascinet and drew Redwyn toward him, eye to trembling eye, Redwyn floating in his painted armor, feet dangling.

“Oakenstead and its neighbors are under our protection now,” Theo said, and heard Henryk’s unshakable confidence in his own voice. The sentinel barked a noise of assent, the hollow growl of a metal dragon. “Tell your people what happened here, and never darken these lands again, lest we come and find you.” The machine’s hand reached forward and gingerly placed the warchief on his saddle. Sobbing, the warchief pulled on his reins, and horse and rider fled wailing into the brightening horizon, Redwyn’s banner shrinking as it wobbled clumsily across the plain.

Henryk had come down from the battlements to meet Theo upon his return. Theo saw in his eyes the same pride that had so long eluded him in their father’s face. “Theo,” he said, “I’ve no notion what witchery animates that… thing… but that was a show of courage I’ll not soon forget. I was wrong; Father would be very proud of that heart of yours.”

The stablemaster would see to the herd of sleeping horses that had swum into oblivion on Theo’s dwale gas. They would find a new home on the rolling plains along the river, and would never see battle again. The riders who had joined them in their slumber would each be exchanged for the freedom of a Serrosi slave, and those freedmen would be welcomed and given homes in Oakenstead.

Theo was met with boisterous cheers and astonished jubilation by the gathered townsfolk of his beloved city, but he looked for one particular face among the many. Gwendolin stood as bewildered as all the rest, but the kindness that he so cherished was still there in her eyes, as it always was, beaming in the burgeoning sunlight as a new day – and a new age of peace – dawned upon the people Oakenstead.