Accidental War Mage

It turns out that a charnel smell is sometimes a metaphorical slaughterhouse, and sometimes a literal one. The western quarter of Dab was specialized in the slaughter of livestock, an area carefully segregated from the more pleasant residential and mercantile quarters. It is a large, modern, and efficient operation, which processes more meat in a week than an ordinary village of farmers might eat all year. Even though there are many other towns clustered nearby, much of it is salted and shipped down the river or west along the railway. It was this that I had smelled from several miles off; and the rest of the army could smell it soon enough as we moved up to the city, paralleling the river.

The open fields and pastures we had traveled through had been pretty but startlingly empty; they would soon fill with lambs and calves brought out from their wintering-place.

I am told the population of Khoryvsk is more than ten times that of Dab. I know that on the rail journey, we passed through Khoryvsk, but we had not stopped there, so that hadn’t afforded me the opportunity to see a bigger city. If one counted the near-adjacent towns that had sprouted up next to it, what I was faced with was easily a hundred times the size of a regular village, and larger than any town I had ever been to before. The density of people living within its walls was impressive. When the guardsmen told me that there were probably rooms enough to spare in inns and common houses to quarter my whole force without displacing anyone, I was dubious; but after I had walked the streets, I believed that claim in full.

My doubts about the resources of the townsfolk met with doubts from the town guards about my purposes and the wisdom of permitting my heavily armed force entry into their city. We were an unwelcome reminder that war was never very far away. Our choice of cover as a mercenary company was a good one; we were not even the first mercenary company to arrive in town.

We set up headquarters in a pair of vacant warehouses, obtained at a reasonable rate through a local factor who had done business with some of the Rimehammers’ kin. The arrangement was a little complicated: We looked around at what was available and told the factor which ones seemed suitable; the factor then purchased the warehouses and leased them to us for use as barracks. This was substantially cheaper than leasing directly from the current owners, especially after considering the issues of credit and profit-sharing arrangements.

I should explain that Captain Felix Rimehammer took the opportunity of working out lodging arrangements via a connection of his to simultaneously re-negotiate his contract with me; we ended up with a relatively complex three-way arrangement between myself, the local factor, and the Rimehammer family as represented by Felix. He pointed out (rightly) that we might need to take on additional jobs as a cover in the course of our mission, and had several interesting, if complicated, proposals as far as financing and profit-sharing went.

After that unexpectedly long meeting concluded and the warehouses were essentially ours to occupy, I told the men and women of the battalion that they were welcome to arrange more comfortable lodging for themselves if they wished; that they were at liberty for a while, but not to misbehave in such a manner as to bring trouble upon us; and, finally, if they wanted to terminate or re-negotiate their contract, now would be a particularly convenient time to do so. I delegated contract negotiations to Captain Felix, the problem of making the barracks habitable to the older captain, discipline to the younger captain (reminding her briefly of my anti-dueling policy), disbursement of payroll to Vitold, and took Katya and Yuri out around town.

As I mentioned, we were not the only nor the first mercenary company to set up shop in Silesia; others could smell which way the winds of war were blowing. Sigismund II had taken ill during the winter, neither of his granddaughters were likely to inherit, and in the borderlands Lithuania loomed dangerously close. The city council was presently considering a resolution to ban the open carriage of arms, uncomfortable with the number of well-armed strangers in town.

The cityfolk compared us with vultures in whispered comments as we passed; a fine example of the pot calling the kettle black, I felt, with the impressive local population of carrion birds attracted by the slaughter operation. I could see crows perched on nearly every building in the city.

Even with the wind blowing most of the stench away from the slaughter yard to the south, the city was dirty and smelled bad. I have since been told that aside from the contributions of the slaughter yard itself in the butchery quarter, Dab is unexceptional among cities in this regard, but at the time, I was unpleasantly surprised. However noisome the urban environment, there was something I thought I could find in Dab; from what I had heard, you can find very nearly anything for sale in a big city, and Dab seemed huge to me. I had something fairly expensive in mind; or at least, usually expensive as a finished product. Two somethings, in fact.

I had made a promise to myself to buy Katya something nice, something that would make up for my having given Lieutenant Gavreau a pair of enchanted pistols and perhaps lift her out of the slough of depression she had become mired in. She had been initially elated at her unexpected survival and occupied with the immediate intense pain, but that rush had worn off by now along with the physical pain, and her awareness of what it meant to deal with missing both a leg and arm had expanded, leading to more than a little bit of pain of a less physical variety.

As crippling as the loss of two limbs is, this is the modern era, and great scientific and medical strides have been made since the days when the best you could expect is a simple peg or hook; these days, there are fully functional mechanical limbs, with joints that bend, with hands capable of grasping and manipulating. I once met an officer with an artificial hand, in fact. In a great city like Dab, perhaps I could find such devices available for sale. They might be expensive (perhaps beyond my means, one reason I had not told Katya of my intentions) but I owed Katya my life several times over, and had a lingering sense of guilt over the way that she had lost her limbs and nearly her life in a chain of events that started out with the two of us having an angry argument.

Something which costs an arm and leg is fairly expensive, and buying them back is almost as dear, but I was hoping for a good deal on limbs; if I could afford the price of an arm and a leg, I would buy both, and failing that, try to at least buy one of them.

In the common geography of cities, altitude is status. The elites position themselves a-hilltop; the dregs deal with poorly drained swampland, with correspondingly thicker and more pungent air. It was in the wealthier section of town where I hoped to find a doctor or mechanic who might have mechanical limbs on hand. I learned some lessons that day as I attempted to explore the better quarter of town.

First, scruffy foreign mercenaries are generally unwelcome in good neighborhoods. This was made clear to me several times and in several different ways. Second, mechanical limbs must be custom fitted to the recipient, accounting for their size, the amount of natural limb they have remaining, et cetera, and thus are generally not kept in stock, even by doctors and mechanics in great towns the size of Dab. It’s the sort of item generally custom-built and fitted to the user.

After having learned those two lessons, I was holding onto Yuri’s collar with one hand (while wiping my face clean of mud with the other, courtesy of a carriage driven by someone who had swerved through a muddy puddle to underline the first lesson) when I heard a voice greeting Katya in thickly accented Romanian.

“Please! My apologies for my countryman’s poor manners.” The voice had a nervous edge to it, but anticipatory rather than fearful. I would expect fearful were Katya waving her pistol about. “May I introduce myself?”

When I opened my eyes, blinking reflexively (I had perhaps not gotten all of the mud off my face quite yet) I could make out a young man, perhaps in his late teenage years or early twenties. Though he might have been older than I was, he seemed young to me, between the nervous way he was staring down at Katya’s chest and the lack of hard wear on his face. He had better, I thought to myself, apologize for his own poor manners next; and then I took note that he wore an amethyst pin.

Katya was wearing her amethyst pendant, that very distinctive item she had picked up so long ago off of a dead rebel. What the young nobleman was wearing was not the same as her own necklace; but it seemed more likely to me that he had recognized the necklace than that he had ogled her breasts. (That is not to say that I think poorly of Katya’s feminine anatomical features; but her bosom is of the smaller and less eye-catching variety under ordinary circumstances, and months of short military rations had left her chest nearly as flat as a man’s.)

As I processed this, Katya scowled suspiciously. The language of the Wallachians was not a language she associated with trustworthy individuals; and some inner patriotic instinct was aroused, something that told her that this was not a man who toasted to the good health of the deathless Golden Emperor. He had managed to get through his name, title, and lineage when I spoke up.

“I see you have recognized us, but please, let us not draw attention,” I said quietly in Gothic, slipping my arm around Katya’s waist possessively (in the event that he had been staring at more than her necklace), and speaking with what I hoped would sound like a light Romanian accent (in order to further any delusions he might have had as to our origins).

“We are glad to be here in Dab, but you never know who might be listening. Perhaps there is somewhere else we could become more closely acquainted, somewhere less public?” If I could not buy Katya a replacement leg, perhaps I could at least make progress on the mission General Spitignov had assigned to me. The noble’s choice of jewelry, his recognition of Katya’s, and his attempt at trying to welcome us in what he thought to be our native tongue suggested to me that he had some connection to Wallachia. He could be one of those who financed rebellion within Wallachia; and if he wasn’t, he likely had friends who did.

“But of course! Please, call upon me this evening at my manor house.” He paused, and frowned, looking at my mud-spattered clothes. “Though...” He seemed unwilling to finish his sentence, then made a decision, waving at a manservant. “Frederick, I believe I can make it back unattended. Would you see to …” He frowned again. “I am afraid I do not know your names.”

“Colonel Marcus Corvus,” I said, as I shuffled through my memory.

Katya’s false identity that we had prepared paperwork for at the beginning of this venture made her out to be a native of Moravia. This would not pass convincingly in Dab company, and I strained to remember a suitable Romanian surname. “And this is Leontina Odobescu,” I added, choosing the first surname that popped into mind.

Later, I would recall that the name belonged to Radu Odobescu, the man who had chosen to try to kill me rather than sign a contract, a man whose throat Katya had slit as she made sure of his demise.

“Delighted!” The young nobleman seemed to actually be delighted, rather than just pronouncing the completion of the formal ritual of introduction, which made me regret that I hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to his name when he’d introduced himself. “Yes, Frederick, do see to it that Lady Odobescu and the colonel get an appropriate consideration from a good tailor, on my account.”

I mentioned that scruffy foreign mercenaries are generally unwelcome in the better parts of towns. This should be understood to include upper-class tailor’s shops, but it is worth noting that the proprietor’s attitude underwent a remarkable change when he was dealing with scruffy foreign mercenaries in the company of a liveried footman. There were, then, two new lessons for me to learn.

First, it is possible for clothing to fit neatly and snugly yet comfortably. I had never worn clothing fitted to me before; with a few exceptions (always bought large with the expectation that I would grow into them) it was all handed down from older family members, issued by impartial authorities who saw no need to tailor things to fit, or in the case of my “mercenary” garb, scrounged. Second, you can examine every naked inch of a woman’s body without really knowing what she looks like wearing a dress. It made her look younger, somehow.

The tailor even managed to come up with a peg-leg of sorts for Katya to rest her stump on and stand with. It was a far cry from a fully functional artificial leg, lacking even as much as a knee joint; he built it in haste from a walking stick and a shorter peg-leg he’d found in his back room.