Accidental War Mage

I decided to send several of the new recruits home after a third day of training. Georg wasn’t one of them; I issued her a blunderbuss and made her Felix’s assistant (as far as he was concerned) and bodyguard (as far as I was concerned). She had been a good personal servant to the baron’s daughter, and being a good personal servant requires attentiveness more than anything else.

The fact that her loyalties lay at least partially with the baron or his daughter didn’t bother me. Perhaps she technically was a spy, but I didn’t consider the baron a threat. He had no reason to want us dead – not once we had passed on his letters of credit to someone else, at least, and I intended to do so as soon as it was practical. Besides, it was hard for me to take seriously a spy who looked like a child dressed in her father’s clothes, much less one who had confessed her status so quickly.

As spies went, she had too many nervous habits that drew attention. She tended to grip a pendant of some kind whenever too many people looked at her, sometimes muttering nonsense phrases in mangled Latin. Superstitious charms someone had taught her, or prayers, perhaps. She wiggled her fingers in front of her chin as if stroking an imaginary beard.

I hadn’t thought about my good luck charm much since I had discovered I had magic of my own. Georg clearly didn’t have any magic, so she needed a good luck charm of her own, I suppose. We’d also picked up a couple more recruits – or at least fellow travelers – in Vindobona, one of whom did have magic. Johann was a student thaumaturge who had run out of tuition money. Or, more precisely, he had run out of tuition money in a different quarter of the city from the university and needed to address his finances before returning to Vindobona. He arrived wearing a large hat that covered much of his face.

I wanted to ask Johann if he could teach me about magic; but at the same time, I wanted to learn more about magic, but I didn’t want to display my level of ignorance and reveal that Colonel Marcus Corvus had no formal training in wizardry.

The flat-bottomed boat that took us upstream on the Istros was powered by an elderly firebox driving a paddlewheel, assisted by a coal boiler. If we’d been going downstream, the boat captain told me, he wouldn’t have bothered with burning coal, but the arcane engine frequently gave out. A leaky chimney lifted most of the smoke above my line of sight.

I frowned. “We just picked up a thaumaturge,” I said. “Perhaps he could look at it.”

Captain Felix Rimehammer turned to his new assistant. “Fetch Johann. Tell him to bring his equipment with him.”

Georg clicked her heels together and saluted before dashing off. She was wearing better-fitting boots now, though still wearing ill-fitting men’s clothing.

“Bright young man,” Felix said, watching the blonde woman trot off. “Officer material.”

I shrugged. It was good if he thought Johann was officer material, but a moot point since the student had been brought in at the rank of banneret. We could hardly do otherwise; he was well-born and had a proven magical talent, making him every bit the social equal of the Cimmerian who kept pretending to be an illusionist.

Johann wouldn’t open up the firebox until it had been turned off and cooled back down, the barge anchored in place. Opening up the firebox revealed a glittering array of orichalcum bands, fused into place on the cast iron shell. The bottom was plated with a layer of silver, originally polished to a mirror shine and now dusty with soot.

Johann muttered under his breath, light briefly flickering from his fingers. “I see,” he said. “You have two problems. The first is that it’s dirty. You could get a little more heat if you cleaned it out and polished the base plate. The elemental portal opens flush on the reflection, and the soot can’t fall through, it’s material.”

“Polished it?” The boat captain looked puzzled. “My father never polished it.”

“I can see that,” Johann said dryly. “I’ve never seen this much accumulation. Has this boat been running since King Koschei’s coronation?”

“No,” the boat captain said. “My great-grandfather commissioned this engine especially.”

“Well, that’s your other problem,” Johann said, stepping back from the open firebox. “The enchantment is wearing off, and it’s old enough that it’s not a standard inscription. I can tell that it starts here, on this band, but the runes are so worn I can’t read them. Boosting the enchantment is impossible without knowing the original spells used in the process, which takes it from a journeyman task to a master’s work. You need the inlay stripped and relaid with a new enchantment, and that’s a bit beyond me.”

Curious to take a look at the firebox, I poked my head inside. Once I wiped the soot away, I could see my reflection clearly as if in a mirror. The inscriptions seemed legible to me; perhaps Johann simply didn’t want to risk messing up a difficult task in public, I thought to myself as I followed the orichalcum bands with my eyes, mouthing the words under my breath. They seemed familiar; it was dactylic hexameter, at least, even if I couldn’t place where I might have seen something similar.

There was a flash of orange light. Surprised, I flinched, banging my head against cast iron. That hurt. I blinked a few times to bring the boat captain and Johann back into focus. Johann’s eyes were wide.

“Well, I cleared out the soot, at least, so maybe we’ll make up the time from the stop,” I said. “Hopefully, the enchantment won’t wear off entirely before we reach the Oen.”

Johann and the boat captain closed the firebox back up, tucking it into place on its boiler. I leaned over the back rail, waiting as the boat lurched back into motion and watching as Vindobona slowly disappeared into the distance. The boat captain didn’t start the coal burner back up, so the rest of our slow trip upriver was smoke-free; I presumed that he was worried about pinching pennies to afford a replacement firebox once the boat’s old firebox gave out.

I understood that sentiment. As a mage with no education in wizardry and a mercenary commander who’d never been trained as an officer, I felt like I was riding on an engine that could give out at any moment. Then I heard a crow cawing. A piece of paper was fluttering down from the sky. I grabbed it before it could flutter off the back of the boat.

I looked up; more pages were falling, and a murder of crows was loudly demanding that I give them payment in exchange for their bounty.

After some negotiation involving as many brass bits and copper pennies as I could scrounge up, I came up with enough of a payment to satisfy the crows. While I wasn’t sure why they had chosen to deliver a collection of papers to me, they seemed to think they were doing my bidding, and I thought that was an attitude worth encouraging.

Especially since the alternative would be annoying them. As I mentioned earlier, crows gossip; they can be vindictive and petty when slighted. Politeness seemed the best course of action, and if it cost me a double handful of pennies, that was a price I could afford to pay.

It was a book about magic – or more specifically, about alchemy and the regulations governing it within the Gothic Empire. The author meandered from techniques for partitioning powder to the legal status of love potions without interruption. What was delivered to us started partway through the second chapter, and ended mid-sentence partway through the ninth chapter. With no table of contents, it wasn’t clear if the ninth chapter was the last chapter.

Piecing it together in order occupied most of my attention during the trip up the Istros from Vindobona to Batavis. The firebox never gave out, and I found that if I stared out at the river, my thoughts turned to Katya. From Katya, my thoughts would turn to sadness, and then time would pass dimly until someone had the nerve to disturb the brooding Colonel Corvus.

How the crows had gotten their beaks on the alchemy text, or where they had taken it from, I didn’t know. The obvious possibility was that they’d stolen it from somewhere in Vindobona, quite possibly from one of Johann’s former classmates or teachers. Johann claimed not to have any familiarity with the book; it was mostly well outside of his specialty. He worked with materials created, purified, and treated by alchemists but had little idea of how the alchemists accomplished such things.

His lack of interest bothered me. Johann was a student; he’d had a chance to learn this material, and he had the education that let him make sense of it, yet he was incurious. Vitold showed more interest in the subject, even though Vitold couldn’t read the Latin the book was written in and hadn’t an ounce of magical talent.

I quietly decided to start writing out a translation of it in Slavonic. It would keep me busy during dull periods of our trip and would help me learn the material better. If nothing else, I could pass the Slavonic version on to Vitold and give my friend the gift of dreaming about alchemy. Also, if the original owner returned demanding his stolen book, I could return it without any loss of knowledge.