Accidental War Mage

The village had been abandoned before we got there. This took place long enough before our arrival that the fresh coat of powder blowing across the ground didn’t show tracks, but it can’t have been much longer than that.

It was obvious to me at a glance that nobody was left in the village, but Colonel Romanov ordered a full company of troops detached to conduct a house-to-house search anyway while General Spitignov and the main body of the force continued onward to a fortified manor that was supposed to be nearby.

Major Alexei Pavlov volunteered his two steam suit squads to guard the infantrymen. I am not sure why, but I think he wanted the excuse not to accompany the general into battle. For once in my life, I was grateful to “volunteer,” as my preference was to be as far from the halitosis-infused madman as possible.

The search ended up taking a long time. By the time we were done, it was dark gray out and raining, the sort of indecisive winter rain that meets the snow on the ground and negotiates an agreement somewhere between slush and ice. The sun would be setting soon, at which point it would become pitch black and the thin layer of semi-liquid slush would turn rock-hard and slick while rain turned to sleet.

So we stayed for the night in the village inside various huts. In the hut I picked for my squad, there were stockings hung out to dry by the fire, a platter of half-eaten cookies, and even an ewer of milk on the table, a thin layer of ice over its top, evidence that suggested the villagers had fled the village in great haste. We ate the cookies and milk.

Well, to be more precise, I ate the cookies and drank the milk, while Vitold made an accounting of our fuel. Vitold didn’t trust the cookies (or the milk), and freezing rain had soaked through one of the spare canisters of fuel. Some of our coal was now wet, which would make it hazardous to load and burn. You don’t want steam underneath the boiler, just inside of it, and an untimely explosion of steam could lead to a frightful accident.

After a moment’s consideration, I loaded the damp coals one by one into the stockings. That way, the water would drip away, without leaving the coals frozen to the floor in the morning or risking setting the hut on fire, both of which seemed like possible outcomes if I spread them out to dry in front of the fireplace overnight.

We hunkered down inside our armor for the night, parked next to the fire for extra warmth. The door no longer quite fit over the doorway after we’d marched through with steam suits, which made it a pretty drafty place. The enclosed shells of the armor would stay reasonably warm even if the fire died in the night.

I felt very lucky for my choice in the morning when I awoke to the loud roar of gunfire and the worrying sensation of a bullet pinging off my armor. Through the cracks and fresh holes in the door, I could see mounted arquebusiers with sharply-curved sabers at their sides; they looked like Magyars, their guns smaller and lighter than the heavy French muskets I’d faced earlier. Having loosed their first volley, the arquebusiers were firing in ragged singletons as they reloaded, trying to murder us from safely out of reach.

Behind us, on the other side of the thin walls of the hut, a presence loomed, and I could hear the muffled roar of a heavy mech boiler at work. Not good news. Before I finished taking stock of the situation, half the infantry that Colonel Romanov had detached to search the village were dead, and the other half were cowering in fear and silence behind cover. We were outnumbered two to one in living bodies, caught with our boilers cold, and the enemy had a heavy mech, a great big monster holding a mace meant to batter heavy armor to pieces.

I had, once before, started a cold mech with nothing more than a mental plea, while being rescued from captivity. Remembering that feat, I exerted my will, deliberately reaching and pushing, hoping that whatever talent I had was strong enough to awaken multiple fires at once. The boilers of my three jury-rigged mechs fired into full life with a cough and a roar. They grabbed poleaxes and were soon thundering forward towards the enemy at top speed.

The arcane engine on my own suit woke with a hum, not needing the same kind of warm-up time as a conventional boiler. Muffled swearing to my left and a ragged gurgle indicated Vitold was starting his boiler up by more mundane methods. I picked up a cannon and loaded it, and there was a pause in the gunfire. I walked out of the hut, cannon ready, taking in the scene.

A heavily armored man on horseback caught my eye. His old-fashioned plated mail and that of his horse were inlaid with orichalcum, an old-fashioned style. In one hand, he held a saber; in the other, a leveled double-barreled pistol. At the other end of the leveled pistol Colonel Romanov kneeled, his hands in the air, unarmed and unarmored.

There was a deep crack as the pistol fired, and the colonel fell over, the hole in his forehead as wide as his gaping mouth. The enemy leader looked over at me and spoke quietly to a subordinate, his words barely audible over the noise of battle.

“That one,” he growled. “Mark him. Hidden in that armor, he could be the prince we’ve been hearing rumors about, for all I know. Make sure he does not escape.”

The Magyar words were thick and harsh, and I wondered if I had misunderstood the unfamiliar tongue, my book learning leading me astray. Perhaps what I thought was ‘prince’ meant ‘commander’ or something of that sort, and he had mistaken me for the general.

He raised his voice, switching to crude and badly-accented Romanian – it was not my native tongue, but I had heard enough of it from locals to tell it wasn’t his, either. “Surrender and live, wizard. Keep birds and die.”

Wizard. That meant I was one. Perhaps he was, as well.

He switched back to his native tongue, shouting orders too fast for me to follow, and then singing words that blurred into each other indistinctly. A shot from the other barrel of the wizard’s gun bounced off my armor and the mech lumbered forward, slowly accelerating as the wizard chanted.

I fired at the heavy mech and dropped the cannon as I backed away, grabbing a shield and a pick from the supply cart I had parked next to the hut. The cannonball dented one of its shoulders severely but did not slow it in the least as it barreled forward. I ordered two of my mechs to come back to me while the third helped keep the surviving enemy infantrymen busy.

They weren’t fast enough. I raised my shield desperately as the enemy mech’s mace came swinging down towards me. The sharp shock of the mace rattled me, and I felt the jolt go down from the suit’s arm into mine and on down to the ground beneath me. The runes inside the armor flared brightly, turning the inside of my visor a brilliant shade of turquoise as the protective enchantment cushioned the blow; I was alive, though I was several inches lower to the ground than I had been before. The force of the blow had driven me through the upper crust of snow and frozen ground, and into the soggy mud below.

Rattled but still alive, I swung back with my pick, the heavy point biting into the chest plate but not striking deep enough to damage anything vital to the functioning of the machine.

Ahead of me, the chanting intensified, and the next blow struck my shield hard enough to bring me to my knees. Arquebuses coughed behind me, my surviving comrades having gained the courage to fire blindly from cover.

I risked turning a moment to shout back at the troops behind me.

“Aim for the enemy wizard,” I ordered. Sounding decisive in battle would help them find their nerves; and while the wizard was protected by armor and enchantment, both of those had limits.

The chant reached a peak and ended. Searing yellow light flashed around me, and the crows dispersed, flying away with confused cawing.

“Your magics are no match for mine, Ruthenian,” said the enemy wizard, speaking quietly in his native Magyar dialect. A bullet struck his armor, which held with a flare of yellow light and a sound like a sack of coins dropped on a table. I could hear him as clear as a bell through the noise. One quiet voice among a racket of explosions, the roar of steam engines, and the clangor of metal on armor stands out all the more, does it not?

I replied heatedly, but my words were not as hot as the fire that he called down from the sky with his next chant. Nor were they as hot as the boilers in my own mechs as they crashed into the much larger enemy mech, poleaxes jabbing in with all the momentum they could muster.

The enemy mech, taking full advantage of its greater size and more solid engineering, picked up one of my self-propelled steam suits and threw it not simply into but through a hut. Then it took another sideways swipe at me with its mace that sent me to my knees and jammed the actuators in my left shoulder. It then followed up with a great overhand strike. Unable to move my shield up, I hastily interposed my pick; the shaft of the weapon snapped in two under the force of the blow.

It raised its mace again, and I winced, closing my eyes against oncoming death. When it didn’t come, I looked again. The machine had come to a shuddering halt in a rising cloud of steam, and there was my good friend Vitold, tossing a length of metal tubing into the snow, wrench in hand, climbing down.

I was in the process of congratulating him when there was a crack from a gun, and he dropped to the ground limply. I looked up; there was the enemy wizard, his freshly-reloaded double-barreled pistol smoking as he rode towards me. Fury coursed through me; I rushed forward, shield locked in place by my frozen shoulder actuator.

The enemy wizard paused for a moment, confused as to why an unarmed wizard would charge forward, and then I crashed into his horse. A noble beast it might have been, but even the noblest of steeds will have trouble keeping its footing after a collision with hard steel plate with nearly half a ton of steam suit behind it. Its rider found himself flung about; and then, shortly afterwards, on the underside of the unfortunate horse.

“Surrender and live," I shouted at him, echoing his own words from earlier.

For a moment, I didn’t think he had heard me over the screaming horse and his own pain, but then he shook his head. As the enemy wizard slowly raised his pistol, I turned to interpose the shield held in my locked arm. There was a loud bang. Turning back, I discovered he had chosen to shoot the second barrel of his pistol not at me, but at himself. Looking up, I saw the rapidly vanishing forms of enemy troops fleeing into the distance – and also the approaching form of Vitold, bloody and limping unevenly but alive.

“You’re alive.” In my state of shock, I felt the need to repeat a fact that Vitold certainly already knew.

Vitold informed me that he felt that, after having been shot in the shoulder, it seemed wise to pretend the shot had been lethal, so as not to attract further attention to his easily punctured hide. When I inquired further about his appearance, I gathered that he had felt it would take far too long to start up his suit, which would only serve to make him an obvious target; and that, as he’d attempted to exit the battlefield quietly, he had found himself unnoticed behind the enemy mech. The access panels were unsecured, and it was child’s play to climb up to remove certain key components from the enemy mech without being noticed.

An unarmored man climbing up the side of a hostile mech in the middle of a raging battle to sabotage it is a brave man indeed, and I told him so. He responded by saying that he must have been seized by some variety of temporary madness. Perhaps the enemy wizard had cast a spell on the imperial soldiers to remove their sense of self-preservation. This seemed unlikely to me, but I didn’t press the matter.

Two of my jury-rigged mechs were non-functional, and we had a pile of dead and wounded. With one Colonel Ivan Ivanovich Romanov numbered among the dead, my direct superior nowhere to be seen, I took it upon myself to assume command of the situation. It seemed the natural thing to do. As a leader of a squad of steam knights, I may not have technically outranked the infantry captain who had spent the entire battle hiding in a vegetable cellar, but she didn’t seem inclined to object.

I sent a messenger off on the colonel’s horse and put the rest of the survivors to work. The wounded needed to be moved into warm dry shelter and their wounds treated; the perimeter of the village needed to be fortified and a watch posted; and the battlefield needed to be searched carefully for the wounded and for loot.

I found a survivor from the other steam knight squad, trapped underneath a beam in a barn collapsed by rocket fire. He and his comrades had been sleeping in the loft.

I ordered the arms and armor of the fallen to be gathered into one pile, to be divided fairly and usefully among the survivors; and the bodies of the dead to be brought to the village square and laid out there. Vitold went to work fixing the broken machinery; the infantry officer to assembling the wounded in one place; and I tramped back and forth, carrying things and people hither and thither with the aid of arcane power provided by an advanced lightning flux engine.

A glitter caught my eye – a gilded hilt, there. It was an odd-looking sword I had seen in the hands of a gray-haired enemy soldier, whose body now lay broken in the snow and mud. The blade was straight for a section, and then bowed into a sudden curve, pushing forward and then hooking back. From a distance, the blade had looked like it was fancifully and wastefully gilded along the blade; up close, this was revealed as brilliantly-polished bronze showing some sort of complex patterning.

I picked it up, inspecting it. The hilt was styled as a pair of serpents ready to strike, a pale pearlescent stone anchoring the pommel. It was a weapon worthy of an officer, though the exotic-looking bronze sword was probably destined for a future as a mantle decoration. What soldier in the field would want such an oddly-shaped weapon? Not only was it awkwardly balanced, but if I remembered correctly from my books, bronze weapons were inferior to steel ones.

The blade flickered, and my lucky stone felt warm; were those irregular patterns writing? I held the blade up in my right hand to catch the morning light, inspecting the blade from an angle. My lucky stone suddenly felt as cold as ice; everything went dark quite suddenly.