Accidental War Mage

It would be overstating matters to say that Vitold surprised me. I gradually became aware of his presence; and his reproachful look. Evidently, someone needed to bring the steam knight armor suits inside, and he didn’t trust the fumble-fingered. I wondered how well Vitold’s thin fiction about Ilya, Misha, and Gregor’s continued existence would hold up now that half our command had witnessed them having holes shot in their suits that would kill a living man. Not to mention that Vitold was supposed to be my squadmate, too, and he had been in the workshop the whole time that his suit had been fighting.

I waved the three functional steam knight armor suits to work; Vitold’s own former suit helped me walk back to the workshop, while Gregor’s and Ilya’s carried Misha’s between them. Vitold walked with us openly, looking over the damage and commenting. He didn’t like how slow I was limping, and when I said that I hadn’t broken my leg, he decided to stop for a minute to examine my suit.

“Oh, I see. Yeah, can’t just patch that until we get this thing pulled apart, and I don’t want to do that until we’re back in the workshop. Do you think she was aiming for that?” Vitold said, indicating the puncture in my back.

“I don’t think she knew the machinery well enough to know what she was aiming for,” I said, “but I think she was aiming for that little spot. Scary woman. I hope I don’t meet her again.”

Vitold snorted. “I thought you liked the spooky women, Mikolai.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” I shook my head, puzzled. “I wouldn’t want anything to do with her even if she weren’t trying to shoot me. Did you feel the sheer hate she puts out?”

Belatedly, it occurred to me that the sheer presence of hate I’d felt from her might have been something that only I, as another wizard, could feel. I knew wizards could sense each other, and I’d started to sense other wizards myself; maybe that sense extended a little further than knowing who was and was not a wizard. All Vitold would have seen would be a woman in armor, directing the enemy troops. I concentrated, closing my eyes, consciously trying to feel around for the beacon of hate; but she must have been too far away. I could feel neither her burning hate nor her.

“Mikolai? Are you listening to me?” Vitold waved his hand in front of my face. “You’re a bit spooky yourself, too.” Evidently, he had continued the conversation about me and scary women; after turning my attention inward, though, his words had just blended in with the noise of the boilers around me and the cawing of the crows as they scavenged.

“Sorry. Tired after all this.” I waved my hand at a nearby corpse. “I don’t like it.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. One of the things. Speak of the devil,” he said as a familiar woman on horseback approached and dismounted next to us. Her horse was breathing heavily. What did Katya’s approach have to do with infernal beings? Vitold’s statements didn’t make much sense to me, likely because I hadn’t been paying attention to what he’d said earlier.

“Should I put together some men and go after them, sir?” Katya was crisp and formal. “I counted twenty-one of them, sharing nineteen horses. It should not be hard to catch them up in a few days of riding.”

I thought for a moment. The enemy wizard could return later, with more troops. On the other hand, she had a head start and was likely on friendly terms with the Avar authorities. Possibilities whirled through my head and I jumped to a decision. There were other things we could be doing, aside from trying to chase down a defeated rebel wizard who had raised a force of Wallachian sympathizers in the Romanian-speaking part of Avaria.

“No,” I said, then explained the reason for my rejection. “Even if she had noticed your gesture of mercy, which I doubt, she’s not the surrendering type, and any force we can move quickly enough to catch her and the other survivors at this point will be too small to deal with any reserves she may have refrained from committing to this battle.” I hadn’t seen any wagons or mules loaded up with coal at the battle; logic suggested it was unlikely she left her supply train unguarded.

“Gesture of mercy? Sir?” She seemed genuinely puzzled. Had she not heard me over the noise of the boilers?

“When you refrained from shooting her?” I mimed raising a rifle and then lowering it without shooting.

“I forgot I had not reloaded, sir.” She looked down and patted the empty bag at her hip. “My ammunition was out. I killed eleven men today,” she added, a note in her voice that could be taken as hopeful or pleading. She stood there expectantly, the noise of four active boilers filling the space between us.

After a moment of wondering what she was waiting for, I fumbled out a useful order for her. “Tell the men I want the dead stripped of everything. And I mean everything. Take the clothes as intact as possible.” I looked down at a corpse. “And have them washed. The clothes, not the bodies. The bodies, I want burned. I’ll be in the workshop.”

She looked crestfallen for a moment, then mounted back up and rode off to relay my orders to the men scrounging around the battlefield. I watched her with some interest, then took note of the blade at her side. Sharpshooters, like officers but unlike regular arquebusiers, were issued swords as a matter of course. Perhaps she could instruct me in the use of swords, and how to care for them properly. They seemed quite different from axes. I was reasonably sure that an axe blade would have needed cleaning at this point, but an axe blade would also be caked with drying blood; the bronze sword wasn’t.

I looked over at Vitold. He was shaking his head.

“Spooky women like you, too,” Vitold said, leaning in close so as to be heard without being overheard.

The pieces came together in my mind: Vitold thought Katya was spooky. When he said ‘speak of the devil,’ he had been employing metaphor, much as my aunt in town refused to talk about the little old lady I chopped wood for in the summertime or even tell me if she had a name other than “Grandmother,” on the superstitious grounds that naming her might cause her to show up. The attention of demons and devils and the like are supposedly drawn by mention of their names. It’s a silly peasant superstition, really – as any educated person ought to know, the rituals for summoning demons are a little more complex than that.1

Aside from all that, the basic point that I came to understand then and there was that Vitold didn’t like Katya, and in fact was a bit frightened of her. Just because I was friends with both of them did not mean they liked each other; this would later prove important. I didn’t really know how to respond to Vitold saying that Katya was spooky, or suggesting that Katya had a particular liking for me. She was of course my friend, and I counted her as having saved my life, but Vitold seemed to think there was something more there.

As the two of us finished our hike back into the workshop, I noticed that other soldiers were taking note of the serious damage to Misha’s old suit as it was carried in – it was halfway crushed and full of bullet holes. I thought they were taking note of the lack of tell-tale blood dripping out, but then I notice the respectful looks sent Vitold’s way, and the murmured congratulations and wide eyes.

They were, it turned out, most impressed by how Vitold had managed to survive his suit being so thoroughly wrecked, having somehow mistaken Misha’s suit for his. One steam knight even joked that Vitold was tougher than a steam suit and that the suit should wear him for protection in the future.

It is amazing how far men will go to bend reality to fit a lie.

On my way into the workshop, I left an assortment of instructions. In addition to repeating the instructions I had given Katya (strip the bodies of the dead of everything, including clothing, burn the dead, wash the clothes), I left instructions that steam knight squads were to be in armor in shifts for the night. This was so we would have a quicker response if the enemy proved to have immediate reinforcements; I did not suspect this would happen, but those orders, orders for the watch to be doubled, orders to take care of the wounded, et cetera all served to reassure the troops and officers under my command that I had a good grip on the situation.

By the time I reached the workshop, I was thoroughly tired of it; and left instructions that I was not to be bothered short of the resumption of hostilities. I wanted to put blood and war out of my mind for a while. I wanted to work with metal and machines constructively, rather than destructively. I also wanted to get a good look at this weapon of mine. There were too many puzzles about it.

When I outlined my ideas to Vitold, he went enthusiastically to work disassembling the least damaged mech (his original suit, as it so happened).

He didn’t ask to help with the sword, nor did I ask him to; his discomfort was obvious. On close inspection of the weapon, I myself became uneasy. I carefully laid it on a workbench and inspected the blade. There was some writing on it; remembering my black-out on the day I had found the weapon, I stepped back, retrieved a looking glass, and examined the lettering at a greater distance, making sure not to touch the weapon. The words that were written in orichalcum inlay on the bronze blade were crude and cryptic:

By willful light and wrath has slaved he me,

With blood and prayer aimless in him.

Thus bound my hunger fast to raven grim;

For I am chained to feast and fight with glee.

It didn’t make much sense and it didn’t sound familiar. I thought back again to when I had first seen it, and how I thought it had a handle shaped like two serpents then. Then a gaunt crow; and now a fat one. Perhaps that memory had not been mistaken; perhaps this was a snake-handled sword once, the one I remembered seeing. If that was the case, the sword must have shifted. I wasn’t sure, but even the blade looked larger to me.

It was a puzzle I wanted to spend more time on, but that was time and energy I could not spare. The weapon had served me well today, and that was that. I had work to get done; modifying and rebuilding a steam knight suit and attempting to assemble at least one working elemental cage out of several wrecked ones. Vitold turned in sometime around midnight; I kept working for a while. After I caught myself falling asleep, and nearly planted myself face-first in a coal bin, I decided it was time to call it a night. I staggered upstairs and into my bed.

In the morning, I awoke and noticed three things I hadn’t when staggering already halfway asleep into my bed: First, the shattered window had been boarded up, so it was still fairly dark in the room. Second, there had been a note left on my pillow. This was now adhered to my face; evidently, the ink had not been completely dry when I rolled over onto it. The note was thoroughly illegible, smudged, and smeared beyond any recognition. Third, Yuri wasn’t there; a twice unusual occurrence, as he usually followed me everywhere and, I recalled, I had last seen him here.

I was scrubbing my face clean of ink when a knock at the door sounded. It proved to be the lieutenant who had been directing the mortars in battle the other day. He had dark circles around his eyes.

“Sir?” the lieutenant asked me, “The prisoners have been asking for their clothes back. They have been making quite a racket.”

“Prisoners?” My mind stalled for a moment. It took me a minute to think back and remember that some of the enemy’s troops had surrendered. “Asking for their clothes back?” I repeated his words back to him. “We have a bunch of naked prisoners downstairs.” The tone of my voice was that of a statement, but the meaning carried a question.

“Yes, sir, we were told you wanted the enemy stripped of everything, including clothing, and the clothing washed.” The lieutenant’s tone was measured and even. “We obeyed your orders to the letter, sir.” His eyes were full of questions.

I had ordered the prisoners stripped? I thought back. I had ordered the dead bodies stripped. There had been some creative interpretation somewhere along the chain of command. Perhaps, I reflected, I had made a mistake in leaving orders that I not be bothered.

“Fyodor,” I said, for that was his given name, and I was inclined to be familiar, “Return their clothing to them and give them my apologies for the misunderstanding. Tell them,” I paused for a moment, searching for something diplomatic to say, “That I would simply have intended to offer them the option of having their clothes washed, but a mistake in translation was made.” Translation not from language to language, but from person to person. “It would be very helpful if we could secure their voluntary cooperation for the next phase of our operation.”

“Next phase, sir?” Fyodor apparently couldn’t keep all his questions penned up in his eyes.

“Yes, the next phase.” The prisoners hadn’t played a role in my plan originally, but they could help a great deal with its successful execution.

I had a quick breakfast, during which I met up with Yuri and Katya. The former was bashful, and the latter reproachful, which I thought was strange. I had forgotten Yuri and left him hiding under the bed, and he had every right to look reproachful, but he looked bashful; and Katya was in some fashion responsible for the misinterpretation of my orders, giving her every right to look bashful; but instead, she looked reproachful. I suffered their reproachfulness and bashfulness without comment.

When the lieutenant returned from placating the prisoners, I told him to compile a quick dossier on the prisoners based on what he and the other soldiers had learned while guarding them, and to bring it to me in the little library as soon as possible. I wanted, I told him, to interview the prisoners before lunch.

1 Editor’s note: This comment marks the end of a page in the original manuscript. Mikolai’s manuscript contains marginal notes, which are numbered, either providing addenda (which I have chosen to insert directly into the text) or illustrating a point visually (the limited capital available for printing this publication precluded the use of engravings in this edition of the work, so these have been simply omitted). The last marginal note on this page is numbered 71; the next marginal note is numbered 74, indicating that there is some material missing from the manuscript as I received it.