Accidental War Mage

There is something relaxing about rain. It can make life a great deal more complicated for you if you rely on the ground being firm, powder being dry, your clothes warm, and your iron rust-free, but the plants generally like as much of it as they can get. The feel of rain is relaxing, and the sound of rain upon a well-made roof is a sort of music. Faced with the prospect of standing around in a light rain and the threat of a coming storm, the hunting party hurried inside the baron's manor quickly, and with almost no argument.

After I dismounted and helped Carmen to her feet, I told her to go straight to whatever room she was staying in and straight to bed. She obeyed on wobbly legs, with wide eyes and a tightly sealed mouth. I didn't think I'd ever seen her simply do what anyone asked of her in such an obedient manner, and was confounded by the sudden change in personality. I had barely laid one hand on her, and not at all violently. (She was not that heavy, and her hunting outfit had included a sort of study over-corset thing that made for a convenient handle, making the use of a second hand unnecessary in removing her from her saddle and placing her across mine.)

It was as if the startled squeak she had emitted on that instance had been an exhalation of her entire store of willful rebellion, a physical exhausting of a psychic quantity. I will not pretend to understand noblewomen.

In the foyer, I spared a moment to watch her on her way upstairs before proceeding to the drawing room. The baron, Lieutenant Gavreau, the baron's surviving business partners, and company had collected there, at the end of a trail of mud-spattered coats, jackets, and boots. Servants had already begun to erase the trail as best as they could, but that was not so quickly that it prevented me from tracking it to its end. I squeezed past a horrified maid coming to grips with the realization of why the “mud” on the cloak she was gingerly folding was sticky and red and found the discussion in progress.

The baron's daughter was present, sitting next to her father. She showed no interest in leaving his side to go upstairs and join Carmen; she clung to the baron’s arm in reassurance. I am not sure if she was intending to reassure him or herself that way, but it probably worked both ways. They were not, as a general rule, given to displaying filial affection in any but the most formal ways, though as far as I knew the two of them did hold deep love for one another as father and daughter.

Lieutenant Gavreau was trying to similarly reassure (or perhaps console) a certain Wallachian girl, who was having none of it. She showed little sign of distress to start with. Her face was like a mask carved on a glacier: Cold, rigid, and with a measure of implacable purpose behind it. She had faced far worse horrors in the past, I recalled, than a near-miss from a bullet. Being buried alive in a pile of corpses, for one. Experience had hardened her.

Quentin Gavreau was having trouble recognizing that his reassurances were neither necessary nor welcomed. When I noticed the girl fingering the handle of her knife, I sent the lieutenant to go provide a detailed briefing to my captains. (Something I ought to have done at the start of the meeting; better late than never, however.)

Of course, while experience hardens some, it shatters others. I gathered that the white-haired man rocking back and forth had been a soldier once; now that the heat of the moment had passed, he was reliving past horrors.

At several points, I wished that Katya had been with me, not just for the emotional reassurance of having a loved one cling to my arm but for her expertise. She would have insights into the techniques of assassination and of the ballistics of rifle shots, useful wisdom to have on hand. My nerves had grown harder by then, and my main source of distress was not the no-longer-immediate threat of an assassin in the forest, but the anger and suspicion from the baron and his business partners.

After the third time Yuri growled at someone on my behalf, I sent him upstairs and told him to go keep an eye on Carmen. The mood around the room didn't improve. The baron's butler, anxiously, soon arranged for finger food to show up; a while later, we retired to a drawing room. (The baron used this as an excuse to send his daughter to bed; the Wallachian girl followed her upstairs without attracting comment, even though the baron's daughter's room was quite far separated from the guests quarters used by the baron's business partners.)

If you are not in the habit of drinking tea and liquor in close succession, I will offer four pieces of advice. The first is that tea has stimulant effects while alcohol has a disinhibiting effect; this combines in some cases to produce a sort of manic mood. The second is that manic moods aside, most people still only have two hands with which to juggle a teacup and a glass, which means that one ought to set them down carefully before trying to light incense or sketch out an idea. The third is that angry persons in manic moods are prone to starting fights. The fourth is that for exceptional liquor of sufficient strength, it is flammable enough that striking a matchstick across your teeth before swallowing your drink is ill-advised.

These four pieces of advice being offered out of experience (in addition to being explicable through sound medical and alchemical theory) will suffice to explain why I was so close-mouthed the next day, in addition to the purple decorations on the faces of two of the baron's business partners and the baron's grimly-worded declaration that his surviving business partners would sit through a demonstration of his cannons, or otherwise prove themselves guilty of complicity in the attacks and thereby earn themselves a running demonstration of said cannon.

The baron did not repeat that statement in the morning, nor the mangled Latin phrase he'd muttered after I'd learned my fourth lesson of the night – something about vines being useful divining implements. (I was too busy comparing the pain in my mouth to the pain of ignorance to sort out what an ablative declension might mean for a leafy plant and revelations of divine truth. I think it was traditional, in olden days, to read entrails for omens; but if he was referring to that practice, I have no idea how the baron might have mixed up vines and entrails, I don't know.) Nor did he need to; while some were sullen and others hungover, his visitors were all ready and waiting before my artillery lieutenant.

When Fyodor Kransky finally arrived to put his teams of artillerists in order, he was wearing somewhat unseasonable earmuffs and moving stiffly and deliberately, shading his eyes with his hat protectively. I chalked this optimistically down to a case of nerves and a desire for caution in working with a large number of artillery pieces at close range. (More pessimistically, those practices could also have been explained by the after-effects of having drunk a large quantity of alcohol the previous night.)

A proofing charge, as it is called, is used to test a cannon. The uninformed reader might presume that this is a lesser charge than a full combat load, perhaps a series of such put in at once. Instead, it is a significant overcharge, the aim being to cause the cannon to fail catastrophically during testing, if at all possible. Note that with this greater charge comes a correspondingly greater recoil, which can be particularly impressive if the ground is slick and muddy. Rather than trying to build better bracing contraptions, Fyodor had mechs backstop the cannons with superior mass and strength.

The Wallachian girl excused herself with some haste as soon as the demonstration began.

As a demonstration of the baron's products, it was largely a success: The cannons themselves did not burst. As a demonstration of the capabilities of Colonel Raven's Battalion, it was an embarrassment. As a method of providing a distraction to the baron's business partners, it was a success; but the rifts of suspicion were too deep to paper over.

To accuse one another of treachery and murder most foul tends to create deep breaches; for when someone accuses someone else, it is only natural to air one's private grievances, suspicions, and dislikes to justify that accusation. I think that the search for evidence in favor of the accusations caused more harm to those relationships than the accusations themselves.

While the demonstration was a successful distraction, it was not a particularly impressive display of orderly competence on the part of Colonel Raven's Battalion. I heard one of the baron's business partners, a noble with shipping interests, comment under his breath that if this was how well Colonel Raven could plan a simple demonstration, I could be excused from any accusations of skullduggery by virtue of sheer incompetence.

This put a fire in my belly, as the saying goes. I had a discussion with the captain of the infantry, who filled me in on some of the details (and added some lurid speculations) about Kransky and the acolyte. In the interests of keeping him out of mischief, the captain suggested putting him in charge of a search party to locate Katya, which, she said, would keep him busy and out of the way. She had, in fact, a list for the search team already drawn up; I told her she could go ahead and make it happen.

Regrettably, I did not look closely at the list, even after she told me it mostly contained troops who hadn't served under Kransky, either recently or back during the days that she and Kransky had been regular imperial soldiers rather than deserters posing as mercenaries.

Soon enough, it was time for one more interminable formal dinner. Most of the baron's business partners left mid-afternoon, escaping before it began; the dining hall felt cavernous. With the sudden shift in the number of guests, the portion sizes shifted from artfully small to pleasantly ordinary. I enjoyed the food perhaps more than any other formal dinner I had yet attended. In their confusion in the wake of the sudden changes in plan, the baron's servants accidentally gave me medicated wine, which I returned to them - I guessed that one of the older men among the baron's business partners had difficulty with sleeping, and they had prepared it a bottle of medicated wine for him before discovering he wasn't staying for dinner, and replaced it among their supply without taking care to mark it as adulterated.

The scent was painfully obvious to me, but the servants seemed unable to tell the difference when I quite pointedly confronted them, waved it under their noses, and suggested they taste it. (I would not have been so rude, except this was the fourth time I was handed a medicated glass of wine). After that, the baron apologized for their ineptness and gave them a blunt order directing to bring a fresh set of bottles out of the cellar for “the Colonel‘s discerning palate.”

The baron, it seemed, took it in his head that if I had a discerning nose, I ought to give my opinion of some of the various vintages he had available. He had the servant pour himself the first glass of each bottle, pronounced it good and unadulterated, and then asked my opinion. After being directed to pay close attention, I started to realize in how many subtle ways different wines differ. Even wines from the same place of different ages had marked differences, once I knew to look for them.

As we were discussing some of the finer points of those differences, I watched with curiosity as the line of nine empty wine bottles blurred into eighteen, each bottle next to an identical mate, and then the floor jumped up to give my head a solid knock. After a brief grappling match with that particular hardwood assailant, I closed my eyes to get my bearings, and then woke up with a headache that was being made no better by the sunlight streaming through the window.

I was, I noted, abed, the curtains of the canopy bed left wide open instead of closed against the encroaching sunlight. Yuri was not in the room (unusual) and my boots had been placed neatly as a pair by the side of my bed, my clothes folded on the bedside table. Carmen, smelling faintly of the medicated wine that the baron's servants had been so sloppy with the other night, was snoring next to me. The second unusual scent that I identified (other than the medication from the medicated wine) was less explicable: Sheep's blood, mostly dried, spotted the sheets.

There was a perfunctory knock on the door, and the click of the handle opening.