Accidental War Mage

We spent the next three days after the battle in our camp resting, repairing, and burning wood into charcoal in large batches. Tree-felling parties went heavily escorted in case the locals returned, but the only locals we saw were those few we were holding as prisoners. What, exactly, we were to do with our prisoners was unclear. I found myself in the grips of a dilemma.

I wasn’t inclined to execute prisoners in cold blood, however savage and unprovoked their attack on us had been. Nor could we dispatch them to some convenient fortress to be held there; nor were they of any use to us out here in the field, simply an inconvenient encumbrance. I wasn’t ready to hand them bows or guns and ask them to go hunting, though the idea had occurred to me. Simply letting them loose would reinforce the enemies that attacked us.

Food was rapidly becoming an issue of some concern. Very few people were willing to set out on hunting expeditions deeper into the dark forest filled with hostile bear-men, weather-wizards, and great serpents; most of our scouts were kept busy keeping an eye out for the enemy. Katya and I were familiar with a few edible plants, but teaching others to identify them correctly was a time-consuming process.

Captain Rimehammer jokingly suggested that we should have butchered the dead instead of burying them. (At least, I think he was joking.) The food supply situation wasn’t that bad – yet – but careful rationing was needed if we couldn’t locate supplies inside the forest. Spring may have been on the way, but we could not count on some springtime bounty of edible plants and animals emerging in the next week.

Katya was of the opinion that we should simply slit all the prisoners’ throats and be done with it; most of the rest of the soldiers I heard expressing opinions on the subject more or less agreed with her. They were savages, who barely spoke any words of any civilized language. According to rumor, at least some of them were bears, leaving the humanity of the rest in question.

Earlier, I related that “Colonel Marcus” eventually became “Colonel Marcus Corvus,” and it is time to elaborate on how that came to pass. The arcane acolyte we had taken prisoner, the one with the gray cloak, freely admitted that she was very afraid of “Colonel Raven.” That is to say, “Colonel Corvus.” The first time I heard it come out of her mouth, I wondered if it referred to someone else; the second time, I started to wonder why she was calling me by the name of a bird; and the third time I heard it spoken, I turned around and asked the lieutenant talking with her where the term had come from.

Nobody was willing to take credit for the term, and I wasn’t sure if the acolyte had invented it or if it had been in common circulation behind my back. Our magical prisoner had given up on grandiose threats and insults and focused instead on pleading for mercy, promising that she could be very useful to us if we didn’t kill her, a subject upon which I had failed to be particularly reassuring. Being that the other officers were aware I had not yet made a decision on the disposition of the prisoners, none of the people willing to talk to her had reassured her on the topic, either. In spite of the fact that she was likely the most dangerous prisoner, she was also the best-liked as far as most of my soldiers were concerned.

It was true that she had joined our company in association with an army of howling savages trying their best to kill us. However, unlike the howling savages in question, she could speak clear Polish and Romanian. She was also an attractive young woman. Those were in short supply in the area at the moment. The acolyte was perfectly willing to talk for hours on end with any man assigned a shift as officer of the watch. This was likely more patience from a woman than many of the men had seen since joining the army, and it bred a certain level of fondness for the neophyte weather-witch.

Vitold was at first of the opinion that we should probably let her live, sympathetic to an attractive young woman in duress. On the second day after the battle, I told him that I was very certain she did have magical abilities and had been trying to use them in some subtle ways when she thought she was unobserved. I joked that she might have bewitched him into being friendly. He brought an iron wrench up to his forehead for a moment, then suddenly frowned and told me he wanted to weld her inside a mech’s boiler and fire it up.

Passionate fellow, Vitold. Katya disagreed with him on pragmatic grounds, pointing out that the boiler would need to be unsealed and cleaned out afterwards. She was still of the opinion we should simply slit all the prisoners’ throats (including the witch) and be done with it. After all, it was not as if we could keep a watch on them after letting them go to make sure they wouldn’t cause more trouble, whatever they might promise.

That gave me an idea of what to do with the prisoners, though I was hesitant to explain it in case I wasn’t able to pull it off. On the third day after the battle, I went for a ride around in the woods with a handful of shiny copper kopeks, freshly polished in an alchemical solution – the brighter they shone, the better they would work as bribes, as I intended to hire help that didn’t care about the face value, but rather, how shiny the piece was.

I came back from my ride through the woods followed by dozens of crows and ravens of several varieties. The birds waited patiently while I climbed into my armor and went to the enclosure where the prisoners were kept. They waited nervously, some growling savage oaths under their breath to try and put the best face on whatever their final fate was. I told them to be quiet and then stood there staring them down until they complied.

We let the prisoners out one at a time. Each time, I held up a bird; greeted the prisoner in as friendly a fashion as possible given that I was armed and wearing heavy powered armor; and said that it would be best if they chose the path of friendship and of staying out of my way while my army marched through the forest. There was, I told them, nowhere that they could not be seen by the birds.

Then I would release the bird, who would fly up, caw out a few choice threats at the liberated prisoner, and circle them a few times as they walked (or ran) deeper into the forest. I didn’t expect the birds to keep up their watch for long; but given the fear they seemed to inspire, I thought the show would help put the locals in the mind to spread the right rumors about us.

Every time one of them saw a corvid winging through the woods, he would worry he was being watched. I wanted it known that we were merciful, and not here to try to conquer the woods, but simply to pass through. I also wanted it to be known that we were dangerous enough that tangling with us unnecessarily was a poor idea.

Four days earlier, I would simply have preferred to pass through without notice, but having already clashed once with the white-cloaked wizards and the local inhabitants, I thought it certain that the white-cloaked wizards, at least, would be tracing our passage through the forest by magical means. We could not hide from them, but we could try to convince them that another attack would be a very bad idea.

As the last of the other prisoners jogged into the woods, looking over his shoulder every several seconds, Katya rode over, asking if we would kill any of our prisoners at all. She looked pointedly but pessimistically at our remaining prisoner, the acolyte who had called me “Colonel Corvus” to my face. What was I going to do with her?

It was an interesting question; one which I had spent entirely too much time thinking about during the previous night. I looked over to where Vitold was working on a mech. The mech was opened up all the way up for maintenance, the boiler wide open and large enough to fit the acolyte’s slight body.

The acolyte looked at me, looking more like a terrified teenager than a mighty mage. I looked at her. Fyodor swallowed nervously, shifting from foot to foot. Vitold frowned and opened the hatch to the mech’s currently cold furnace, patting it like an old friend. Katya looked around vigilantly at the surroundings instead of at me and the last remaining prisoner, making her perhaps the only person doing their job at the moment. Everybody else was staring at the two of us.

“You are free to go,” I said, affecting a bored tone. “If you really want to go, that is.”

I shrugged, as if not seeing why she might want to leave the people who had taken her captive as a prisoner of war and penned her up for several days.

The weather-witch blinked. Fyodor breathed a giant sigh of relief. Vitold made a sour face. Then Fyodor caught wind of my second statement and looked hard at the woman.

“Of course I want to go!” she said.

She took an experimental step towards the woods, then another, and looked back, pausing. She was clever enough to suspect some kind of trap.

“And no following me.” Her tone was somewhere between a command and a question.

“No need to worry,” I said soothingly. “I don’t care about you any more than your mentor does, and it’s none of my concern if you go tromping back to him empty-handed.”

She crossed her arms. “My master cares about me! He’s a very important man.”

“I am sure,” I said, in my least convincing tone of voice. “Most of you apprentice wizards never make it, but I suppose he could be attached to you. Maybe he’s been waiting anxiously to see if his weakest acolyte has the teeth to chew herself out of a cage or the wits to make herself helpful. Either way, you’re failing his test right now.”

I yawned. “However, if you say he cares about you very deeply as a person, he’ll give you another chance. Just tell him to keep away from our line of march, and convey my apologies in advance for any disruption caused by our passage. Clearly, there are parts of this forest he wants outsiders to stay out of, but I don’t know which. We’ll just blunder on through and destroy anything that gets in our way.”

I made little shooing motions with my hands, the sort a genteel young woman might make to unsuccessfully discourage a goat from testing the edibility of laundry on the line.

She took it in much the same manner as a goat in such a situation, and bit down hard on the bait, if anything encouraged by the shooing motions telling her to run along.

“You wouldn’t! You shouldn’t!” She was angry and fearful.

“Well, I’d rather not, to be honest,” I said. “I’d rather detour around any rituals he has in progress, the lairs of the great serpents, and so on, but I don’t know these woods too well. I just want to pass through here and make my way to the Gothic Empire. But you don’t want to stay with us, you’re distraught from your confinement, and you probably don’t even know the woods well enough to guide us through, so just run along. I’m sure you’ll grow up to make a fine weather-witch some day.”

I let bored contempt drip off my voice. I decided against another shooing motion as being a little too over the top, and simply turned away, walking purposefully back towards the camp.

“Wait!” Thumping footsteps behind me announced that the acolyte was hastily following.

Katya unslung her rifle, and I winced inwardly.

“I changed my mind,” the acolyte said. “Please let me come with you.”

I held back a smile. We had a guide to help us find our way through the forest. One who probably thought that she was spying on us on behalf of her superiors (which she certainly would be doing). She might betray us or try to lead us into a trap if she got to thinking she was especially clever, but I would deal with that if it came up.

“Fyodor,” I said, signaling to the artillery lieutenant. “Escort the young lady here to the command tent.”

My voice hardened a little, and I looked him in the eye.

“Try to make sure she doesn’t cause any trouble for us humble mercenaries.”

My statement was intended to be a reminder that our cover was to be maintained at all times. I wasn’t worried about the weather-wizards knowing half of us were regularly enlisted in the army of the Golden Empire, but practice makes the master, and we were not yet masters of acting like a mercenary battalion.

Lieutenant Fyodor Kransky saluted sharply and hastened to obey. He was unquestionably fond of the young witch, something which I had worried about a little while making my decision the previous night. Then I had looked down at Katya, clinging affectionately to me through the unconsciousness of sleep, and was reminded it cut both ways. Adolescent girls often have a fondness for handsome young men.

After the two of them left, I climbed onto a wagon and climbed out of my armor, letting the boiler cool, and went off to find the would-be thief we’d enlisted earlier – his name was Ehrhart. As I came up to him, he hurriedly hid his diary. The man was an avid diarist; when he thought nobody else was looking, he’d often sit there, gazing thoughtfully into the distance, writing in his little journal. I had a suspicion that he was writing poetry, and didn’t want to be thought unmanly.

Pretending I didn’t see the bound leather diary he had just jammed into a toolkit, I discussed with him a small favor he could do for me. I would have asked Vitold, except for the hostility he exhibited towards her. He might flatly refuse, drive her off, or even arrange for an “accident” to take care of her. (I did not think him a murderer by inclination, but the taking of life had become less exotic to both of us.)

I wanted someone to help keep an eye on the acolyte. Fyodor couldn’t keep an eye on her all the time, and while I thought him a loyal and talented officer, it would be unwise to trust him to report anything I needed to be aware of. Ehrhart, on the other hand, was the sort of fellow who didn’t trust easily – and he was on the smaller side, sneaky and a keen observer. He also never had to stand watches; Captain Rimehammer didn’t trust him enough.

This made Ehrhart a perfect choice for spying on the acolyte while she was around the camp. To my surprise, he found the idea agreeable, even to the point of volunteering to help step in and distract the young acolyte if she seemed to be engaged in some subtle mischief and I was busy. He knew enough about complex machinery to invent a credible claim to need an extra pair of small but steady hands to complete some routine maintenance task.

He looked a bit nervous during our conversation, probably because Yuri kept growling at him. Yuri’s love for Ehrhart rivaled Vitold’s love for the acolyte.