Accidental War Mage

The strange thing about rumors is the way in which people work hard to turn them into fact. I anticipated being hard-pressed to explain why Ilya, Gregor, and Misha had not shown themselves in person or as corpses during the battle; and that Vitold’s web of lies would fall apart. I spent some effort preparing myself to explain everything; and found that my thoughts turned with inevitability to fleeing very far away and assuming a new identity.

What I did not anticipate was that the other surviving steam knight from the battle with the Magyar soldiers would swear up and down that Gregor Petrovich had initiated him into the special society that my squad had formed; and that a dozen steam knight troopers would likewise join him and put themselves ceremoniously into the state of avowed silence and isolation that most of my squad appeared to be practicing.

They refused to speak with anyone except myself and the fellow members of their squads except as required by duty. They isolated themselves in constant drill; when required to stand watch, they did so in full armor; and they spent a great deal of time meditating when they were not pestering me with questions I could not answer. I had mixed feelings about that, but if I didn’t answer a question, I would simply later hear that Gregor (or, a little more rarely, one of the other two dead men from my squad, Ilya or Misha) had offered some answer to them.

Since some of the fabricated answers were outlandish, I resolved to address questions if I could, in spite of my ignorance. The absence of my three dead squadmates (and therefore their idleness) and the occasional appearances of their purely mechanical replacements (surely such could not be always mistaken for having human occupants?) proved not to be an issue. Instead, the issue was the way in which they seemed to be getting into a remarkable amount of mischief. My dead and absent squad members were overworking themselves by proxy, somehow held responsible for the scheduling of inconveniently timed or placed steam knight drills, interfering with normal disciplinary procedures, and passing on assorted words of questionable wisdom to their more junior brethren.

Instead of searching for ways to keep idle soldiers busy, we had a real labor shortage; the men were busy cutting firewood and burning charcoal to keep up with the fuel demand. Charcoal is much lighter than coal; but burns just as hot, with if anything less ash; using only charcoal for drills let us save our limited coal reserves.

Instead of having to deflect questions about where my squad members went, I had to answer a pointed question from an infantry officer about why Ilya had led two squads of steam knight troopers in drills early one morning. Katya gave me a strange, hopeful look when the officer asked that question.

I sighed and turned back to the officer who was complaining to me about Ilya. I neither confirmed nor denied the existence of Ilya to the officer, simply stating that I would talk to those responsible for scheduling a rather noisy rock-breaking exercise an hour before dawn on the grounds immediately outside and below the room the officer had claimed for her own. In the meantime, if she felt too tired to be the duty officer tonight, she was hereby excused to take a nap.

***

The rest of that particular day dragged on. The fresh-falling snow, reports on the rat extermination project … there were a few precious hours I managed to salvage for myself in the workshop we’d set up, working on the mechs and my heavily modified steam suit. Once I felt too tired to do any more work, I ate a late cold dinner and dragged myself off to bed.

As I was just getting settled, I heard a knock at my door. Yuri looked up, sniffed, then put his head back down. I made up for his lack of growls by grumbling to myself as I lifted myself out of bed and to the door. Opening the door, I found Katya on the other side of it. What was Katya doing at my door? I waved her in and closed the door. There was no need to feed the rumor mill by having her standing around outside my door for any longer than necessary.

“Did Ilya come back?” She had that look on her face again. Pleading. Hoping. Worrying.

“No, Katya. I don’t know who was pretending to be Ilya. Maybe Vitold? Maybe someone just wanted to put the blame on one of my troops and figured Ilya wouldn’t have a good alibi.” I patted her shoulder gently. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure that he is …” She caught herself and looked into my eyes for a moment. She faltered and looked down. Her shoulders hunched; and she made a small choking noise, her face straining into a stoic blank.

I gave her a hug and she returned it, hard enough to hurt a little. She buried her face in my chest, breathing irregularly. I felt sure she was sobbing, though she was too proud and stoic to show her tears. I didn’t ask her what was wrong or what I could do to fix it; I just held her.

Her grip around my abdomen eased from painful to merely firm after a minute. I started gently stroking her hair, from the crown of her head down to her shoulders, in what I hoped was a reassuring and calming way. Her breathing slowly settled back into a regular pattern; and once it achieved complete regularity, she rubbed her face on my shirt. Then she loosened her grip on me and stepped back to look up into my face. Her eyes were red and puffy.

“Just … hold me?” she asked in a very small voice. “For now?”

I did; and after a time, fell asleep holding her. She may have fallen asleep first, though I didn’t want to disturb her to check.

A knock sounded from the other side of the door. Three heavy raps, imperious. I woke to find myself alone in my bed. Casting my gaze around the room, the only other living thing I saw was Yuri. The dog was sitting next to the bed, silently looking at me.

“Just a minute,” I said.

The door was locked from the inside. I had made sure of that last night, and the bolt could only be operated from the inside. Logically, then, Katya had not left the room, yet she was nowhere to be seen. This was curious, though fortuitous given that I had company banging at my door. I unbolted the door and opened it; it was the colonel in charge of supply, and he wanted to talk over a few things before breakfast. Fairly boring things. I had trouble focusing my attention on what he was saying.

I reassured him that I was confident in his ability to keep us well-fed and that I would look into sending out a shopping expedition. When that didn’t seem to end his litany of complaints, I suggested pointedly that he should probably be supervising the serving of breakfast, lest the portioning be improperly managed. I ushered him out of the room, and then firmly re-locked the door. I took a long deep breath, looking out the window to the snowy landscape below. The master bedroom of the manor was on the highest floor and I had a very good view of the surroundings.

The window had metal shutters, but those I had left open; they were positioned outside the lovely glass window. The first two floors simply had shuttered arrow slits, but up on the highest floor there were glazed windows, affording a view without a draft. Decadence had its points, I had to confess. Being inside a toasty warm building while gazing out upon the lovely snowy fields was a novel experience and a pleasant one. We’d been there for three weeks, and I still found the contrast between warmth and winter landscape fascinating.

Exasperation put aside, I had still the puzzle in mind: Where was Katya? I checked under the bed, in the closet, and then inside several pieces of furniture I doubted were large enough to conceal a full-grown man but might have been small enough for Katya’s petite frame. No Katya.

“Katya?” I asked, experimentally, and thought to check the canopy of the bed. No Katya hiding on top of the canopy, or in it. Had I dreamed her entire visit?

I stared at the bed. It would make sense, I thought to myself, and then spied several long red strands of hair on a pillow. These were the wrong color and length to belong to me or to Yuri. I picked one up, gently, and held it up to the dog.

“Do you know where she is?”

The dog sniffed at my hand experimentally, then jumped up on me, putting his paws up on my shoulders and leaning on me.

“Yes, the girl who was lying on top of me last night.”

I sometimes wished Yuri was a lot more talkative. Ognyan, or whoever Ognyan trusted the training of his dogs to, preferred that they keep quiet, especially while indoors. This pantomime routine was less than ideal.

“Where is she, boy?” I said.

The dog spent some time sniffing around the room, making a great show out of being thorough to try to impress me. I went back to the window and turned my back to him. I knew better than to encourage his theatrics by paying attention to them.

After a minute, Yuri joined me at the window, putting his paws up on the sill. He made a quiet sort of whuffling noise, a softly mumbled statement that the lady had gone out. Wherever “out” was.

He then pressed his nose up on the glass, then yelped in an undignified fashion when he discovered how cold the surface of the glass was. He looked at me, worried about being punished for making a loud noise. (Or, I realized, possibly for talking aloud in the first place.) I chuckled and scratched him behind the ears, reassuring him that I wouldn’t punish him.

“Let’s go get some breakfast,” I said.

After some weak tea, rubbery eggs, and gritty toast, I was both more awake and more understanding of the colonel’s complaints. I called together an officers’ meeting with the addition of Vitold, who decided that he could trade on my friendship to poke his nose into the meeting in spite of his lack of formal rank. At the meeting, I discovered that in addition to the developing shortage of edible foodstuffs, there was some grumbling in the ranks about pay and leave.

We spent the whole morning hammering out a list of problems and trying to figure out the relationships between the various problems. One central problem was that we had no money; the general had taken the pay chests with him when he’d left. Money could solve other problems. With enough money, we might be able to acquire supplies locally on a more informal basis. Morale would improve substantially if soldiers were paid.

Another issue was that while nobody was eager to question the general’s orders, our mission was at best difficult and at worst illegal. The part where he expected us to hole up at the manor and deal with wounded soldiers and damaged equipment seemed reasonable. However, the general had been recalled, and imperial authorities might have expected his troops to come with him.

The solution was to send a handful of men on fast horses back across the mountains. If we were lucky, we would get orders to make our way back to imperial territory. If we were less lucky, we might still get money to deal with our other problems. The supply colonel sat down with me and drew up the appropriate pay requisition forms, forging the deceased Colonel Romanov’s signature in several places on the theory that it improved the odds of success.

I spent the afternoon down in the workshop while Vitold and the officers ran about putting together the expedition and sending it out. Vitold had started the process of turning my old suit – his new suit – into a fourth mech, and it was up to me to finish the job. Katya, contrary to what had become her usual practice, didn’t come watch me at work. As she was not an officer, I had not been alarmed by her absence from the officers’ meeting. As the afternoon wore on into evening, though, I developed a measure of concern. When Vitold came down to tell me dinner was shortly to be served, I brought the subject up with him.

Vitold told me that she’d ridden off with the supply colonel and a handful of other skilled scouts. He’d thought nothing of it. She was a good rider and had spent a good deal of time scouting out the surrounding countryside, making her a natural choice for the mission. Two other sharpshooters had gone, along with a well-born scout who was supposed to be something of an illusionist.

I’d never seen the alleged illusionist succeed at making anything appear or disappear, so I personally doubted he was any more magical than Major Pavlov. Where, I asked him, had Katya been? I hadn’t seen her this morning at breakfast.

“Don’t know when she set out, but she came riding back in just after lunch,” he said with a shrug. “Didn’t ask her neither. She was in a foul mood after I passed her the orders. You’d think she’d be happy to be going back across the border, but I know not to throw rocks at a hornets’ nest. Especially a hornet’s nest that I’ve seen shoot a man in the head without a crack in that poker face of hers.”

“Ah. What’s for dinner?” I asked, tactfully changing the subject; a wise choice, as Vitold was decidedly pessimistic about how edible dinner would be with the departure of the supply colonel. His griping ended up costing him a kopek when I took the other side of the inevitable wager; dinner turned out to be much more edible than breakfast, in spite of the absence of high-level supervision.