Accidental War Mage

Integrating the mercenaries and my regular soldiers together on the squad level was a task easier described than accomplished. None of the mercenaries were familiar with the operation of steam suits, and I wasn’t interested in getting any of them too curious about how the machines worked. The Swedes, similarly, were reticent about their self-propelled guns and claimed that their swordstaves did not mix well into a formation of pike and shot.

I asked the supply colonel to return surviving mercenaries’ weapons to them and to issue other captured equipment to squads of soldiers on the basis of recommendation by any imperial squad leader or officer. He flatly told me he was too busy with the job of writing up paperwork, and to pass it to someone else.

In the end, I put that job on the shoulders of the highest-ranking surviving infantry officer, a captain. She would be responsible for the issue, or re-issue, of captured mercenary weapons (which, in the case of living mercenaries, should be generally returned to their owners). I gave her a list of names of every non-Swedish mercenary and told her to assign each one to a partner from among her troops. These were to be assigned to duties together, and she was to encourage them to get to know one another somehow.

She accomplished the assignment of partners in an expedient fashion by taking the list of names, pulling out her company roster, and pairing them off down the line. Since her company roster was organized by squad, and her company outnumbered the surviving non-Swedish mercenaries by a factor of two, this meant that only half of the squads were initially assigned mercenary members, and the others were understrength by comparison.

The other part of the job – the part of tracking the issue and re-issue of captured equipment – she delegated to a lieutenant. This turned out to be a particularly unenviable task, as when we had stripped captured mercenaries of their weapons and equipment, we hadn’t kept records of which pieces of equipment belonged to which mercenaries; or, for that matter, which pieces of equipment had been taken off of dead mercenaries in the field and which had been taken from live prisoners. This resulted in some disputes over ownership of equipment.

Having delegated away the task of integrating the mercenaries with the regular troops (at least for the moment), my chief worries were supply and desertion. I was worried about desertion. The mercenaries’ loyalty was questionable, and imperial conscripts had not much more reason to be loyal to the Golden Empire.

The real risk with deserters wasn’t the loss of fighting force; I could barely pay or feed the soldiers I had under my command. Desertion would ease our supply issues. I was equally worried about the Avar army and the imperial one. The letter to Ivan Romanov made it clear that the charade I’d been forced into had attracted enemies inside the Golden Empire.

While deserting might have been a good choice for our rank-and-file soldiers, I was too visible. Too prominent. I couldn’t sneak out if I wanted to, with or without Vitold, my unfortunate comrade in deception; my officers were constantly coming to me with problems and suggestions, and Katya followed me as faithfully as Yuri. Her loyalty to the Golden Empire seemed pure and simple. I felt sure that Katya would track me to the ends of the earth if I managed to slip out – to rescue me again if she thought I was loyal or to shoot me in the head if she thought I was not.

The discerning reader may have put together that, in a certain technical sense, I was deserting, I was simply bringing an entire company of imperial troops with me (or, more precisely, a severely depleted battalion). I was taking initiative well outside of what I would have been permitted even had I been a full general; much less my actual rank. My authorization consisted entirely of a generous interpretation of a letter from a madman - a letter which no longer existed as anything other than a pile of ashes, except in my own memories. I was pinned between my own troops and my lawful superiors.

Katya’s wrath wasn’t the only thing that stayed my hand from the saddle and from abandoning the madman’s mission; I also found myself wanting her good opinion. It was addictive, having this serious and deadly woman beam up at me with a bright smile, hanging on my every word, and faithfully assuming that everything I did was both very clever and for the greater good. She really was a very attractive woman, once you washed the blood off her hands and put a smile on her face.

It is true that as a sharpshooter, Katya had not literally gotten any blood on her hands during the battle or any other battle I had seen, but Radu Odobescu kept living on in my dreams. For several nights in a row after it happened, I watched Katya cut his throat over and over again. Each time, the butchery was messier, and each time I startled awake, I could not help but think of how much more metaphorical blood coated her hands.

My fears of desertion peaked on the third day of preparations; a pair of mercenaries had gone missing during the night. They were found in the afternoon by a patrol; their dead bodies twisted with agony. They were missing their eyeballs and covered with small scratches. Mystic writing, if you believed the rumors, which I did not. Thorns will scratch up a body in all kinds of funny ways as branches and twigs are bent and snap back into position, and soldiers are a superstitious lot at the best of times.

What I thought most likely was that they had bedded down amidst a clump of holly bushes for cover at night after having made a meal of their berries, which are (in spite of their bright and attractive appearance) somewhat poisonous. They had crawled back out of the clump as they suffered, and scavengers had eaten their eyes after they died, from a combination of poison and exposure to winter weather. There were many other possibilities, too, such as snakebite, spiderbite, or eating some tasty-looking but poisonous mushrooms. The list of ways for people to get themselves killed in the woods that were more likely than death by mystical forces was a very long one.

After dinner that night, Katya told me she feared that someone would try to kill me during the night. The rumors worried her; evidently, there was talk that the only release from the blood oaths binding the mercenaries to my service was death, and she thought someone might try to make that my death as opposed to their own death. This, she pleaded with me, worried her greatly; and she asked to spend the night in my room. On consideration, it seemed like a reasonable request, so I granted it.

As I listened to the supply colonel drone on about the progress he’d made in committing enough acts of forgery to (as he put it) justify leaving him in a cell until the Mongols came back (he was, I gathered, not happy with his assignment), I reflected on my folly.

Sometimes, staging drama for the purpose of impressing people can backfire. How was I to know that a couple of soldiers would wander off in the night and get themselves killed by mysterious means? Whatever natural force had killed them as they blundered around in the woods at night, I was now held to be responsible for it. I had sown seeds of superstitious caution to inhibit betrayal; I was now reaping a whirlwind of superstitious terror and panic.

Even Vitold was giving me strange worried looks. That hurt; we had been friends since our enlistment, buddies through our training, and bunkmates in the garrison we’d been stationed at. I’d helped him into and out of trouble as he’d played pranks on a wide range of victims, from the barmaid in town up to high and mighty colonels lording it over us enlisted peons. We’d learned to operate steam suits together; gotten swept up into this whole affair together because of a too-clever borrowing of dress uniforms; and now he looked at me like I was something not quite natural.

The colonel was looking at me expectantly. He had stopped talking while I was thinking.

“Very well, colonel. I expect you will have finished the remainder of the papers tomorrow, and checked them over personally for any mistakes.”

When he opened his mouth (presumably to resume complaining) I cut him off with a curt wave of my hand and then looked around the table at Vitold, the colonel, and the other officers. They looked back at me.

“This meeting is adjourned,” I said.

I couldn’t take the stares and whispers any longer. I retreated to my bedroom, Yuri dashing ahead of me on the stairs and Katya lingering a respectful several steps behind. I made sure to lock the door behind us, drew tight the curtains, and moved a chair in front of the door.

Katya dragged an end table next to the bed and laid her rifle across it, along with a pistol and her sword, all pointed at the door. She perched on the bed next to the pillows, inspecting her weapons closely for readiness.

I crawled under the covers and lay still with my eyes closed, trying to quiet the thoughts that whirled around each other in my head, an unhelpful and repetitive circling, like a dog chasing its own tail. Even Vitold, I thought to myself. Even Vitold believed the rumors. I opened my eyes, and looked up at the woman sitting next to my head; the woman who had watched the contracts being signed and had seen my totally mundane preparation of them. Did she believe the rumors, too?

“Katya, do you think I caused those men to die?” I asked.

She looked down at me, bit her lip, and hesitated. My heart skipped a beat.

“I do not know how magic works,” she said. She paused.

“If you did, they must have deserved it. And you are good.”

Another pause.

“You are a good man and I like you.”

She was, in her own way, trying to reassure me that she was my friend. And I, for my part, was reassured by that.

“Thank you,” I said, and very soon after fell asleep under her protective watch.