Accidental War Mage

With Katya sleeping fairly peacefully, I entertained myself with the daydream that I was simply going for a ride through the countryside, some landed farmer taking his wife, dog, and horse out for a short (and peaceful!) trip to town. The dark and dangerous woods were behind us; I could see fields and farms. My daydream was interrupted when I went temporarily deaf in my right ear, the right side of my face hot from the muzzle flash of Katya’s pistol, the sharp crack of her gun shattering any illusions. A ghastly shriek responded.

When I turned, I saw a skull-faced wraith hanging onto the side of the wagon, a hole torn straight through its middle; then, remarkably, there was a second shot from Katya. It collapsed, leaving behind a fading patch of glimmering darkness and a scattering of disconnected bones. Several scraps of fabrics suggested a shirt; a real but heavily rusted saber rolled away.

“Man down on the left flank! They’re on both sides of us!” Katya’s voice was oddly muddled as if she was eating, and her cry was followed by a loud thump; turning, I saw she had fallen off the cot. A ring-shaped burn over her lips and several distinct round bulges in her left cheek showed how she had reloaded the pistol one-handed so quickly and why she was having trouble articulating consonants clearly. As I set the hunk of crystal back down in the box and rushed for the back of the wagon, she rolled underneath the cot, beginning the awkward process of reloading again. She had dropped deliberately to seek cover, rather than lurching accidentally off.

I flung myself into my open armor, reaching out with my mind to jump-start my mechs as I closed the armor around myself. As I reached out with my mind, I sensed a pair of unfamiliar presences to the north (to our right, that is), heading towards us under the cover of an orchard of apple trees. A riderless horse bolted off back towards the woods, panicked by the loss of its rider but not having the good sense to stay near the friendly humans who had been feeding and caring for it for the past several months. I made a quick calculation of the speed of our column, its size, and the probability that we would be able to escape the ambush intact by trying to ride past it. It was a depressingly easy calculation.

“To arms! We fight where we stand!” With that order shouted, I snapped my helmet shut, hoping that the protective magic of my armor was good against the dead.

Partially armored and armed phantom warriors, skull-faced and deadly, armed with everything from rusted pistols to bearded axes, floated towards our wagon from the south in ranks as the draft horse stopped in his tracks, obeying half of my command to the army. He nickered nervously, not particularly interested in the “fight” part of “fight while we stand.” That was okay; I and Ilya’s old steam suit were ready to greet their charge. The inside of my helmet flickered with turquoise light as they slammed into us with force out of proportion to their weight, and the shrieking of venting steam beside me announced that the mech next to me had taken a blow that would have been lethal to a human inhabitant of that metal humanoid. Their axes dented my shield and ripped at my armor even through the protective power field.

I held, and fought back conservatively, chopping in short sharp sweeps. The cough of a self-propelled gun from the east announced that the Swedes in the pair of wagons behind mine had been ready for action; the deeper roar from the west let me know that the van of our force had taken notice and that the heavy mech that had been leading the column at the moment would soon enter the fray. Hopefully, it had nearly a full load of charcoal, or it would not be able to fight for long.

Their numbers were small. They must have meant to slay the unwary, or grab and swiftly make off with treasure; I simply had to hold out long enough. The other three of my personal mechs had been already on their way to my position. Feeling confident now that my armor was tested and was holding, I directed two of them to the north, readying them against the presences I had felt in that direction. The third, the mech that had once been Misha’s steam suit, dove into the ranks of warriors in a manner much like an ox whose tail had been tied with an oil-soaked rag and then lit afire barging into a dance hall.

Yuri’s barking and the cawing of crows added to the sense of animalistic panic; we, the living, had come unwelcome into the dance of the dead, and the dead were gripped by a frenzied determination to set our heartbeats to their tune.

Much like the father of a bride at a certain wedding whose reception had been disrupted by a flaming bovine, each of the skull-faced warriors seemed to be in the mood to murder me (as much as they could be said to have a mood). Unlike said gentleman, however, the motives leading to that sentiment were wholly unclear. What had I done to offend these undead warriors? I knew I had offended an undead king not too recently, but I doubted there was any direct connection.

These undead warriors had arms and armor that seemed much too modern in style to be of a piece with the king whose rest I had disturbed. The wraith-like skirmishers had steel sabers or pistols, gone only a little bit to rust; the bearded axes looked little different in style from the smaller ones that some of the Swedes favored; and lurching out of the apple orchard was a six-limbed semi-mechanical monstrosity with a billowing smokestack, strangely unheeded by the soldiers who rushed by it. It had, for reasons that defied rational engineering choices, been constructed largely of bone, the bones glowing a dull orange barely visible in the bright cheerful sunlight.

The dead king had come from an age when the worship of Christ was a novel cult. He had been buried long enough to miss the invention of guns, the firebox arcane engine and consequentially steam power, and he’d displayed that unfamiliarity freely during our encounter. The bronze tubes mounted on the monstrosity looked suspiciously like cannons.

So why were we being attacked?

A shriek behind me marked the demise of another wraith, its insubstantial body torn by a bullet fired from a runed pistol. The wraith waved a pistol of its own in the air as it collapsed, the shadowy echo of a bullet passing through the canvas of the cot and leaving a smoking hole behind.

A greater ghostly shadow loomed among the trees, wafting through them like smoke, an insubstantial being that looked like an armored giant wading waist-deep through the earth, wicked arms and head larger than that of any of the ogres we had fought. Most bullets passed through it, but Katya’s shot bounced off its insubstantial armor instead. As ranks of soldiers formed around me, I stepped back, wondering how to deal with the threat. My fingers twitched in the pattern I had learned.

Moments later, I was trying to wrap a rope of magical force around it, but it resisted the pull with an insubstantial mass somehow far greater than my own, fading back into the woods as my heels were dragged forward through the mud. I had done little more than bend one of its limbs a little bit.

“Only a magic weapon will hurt it,” Katya shouted. “Ragnar! Help him!”

I wasn’t sure what Ragnar could do against a ghost-machine, but I thought my bronze sword might have some small magic associated with it. I had, after all, somehow changed its appearance with my abilities; it had been touched by magic at the least. Perhaps that would suffice. Six of us advanced forwards into the woods after the retreating insubstantial hulk; myself, two mechs, Yuri, the Swedish lieutenant, and one of the Swedes’ self-propelled guns, trotting quickly behind Ragnar on stubby legs.

For a little while, I thought I saw glints of solid metal, but as it turned mockingly to meet us it faded to ghostly again, the poleaxes of my mechs swishing through it without contact. My weapon, though, made contact with the massive apparition, tearing through its ghostly armor. The rent in its midsection solidified briefly, and it frantically swung back at me with its massive claws as I followed through with a second strike.

As my armor strained against the impact of myself against a helpless apple tree that had been behind me, I heard a loud ring of metal on metal and the crackling of ice.

There was now a massive dent in its head, ice spiraling outwards, damaged but not destroyed. It raked away angrily with its claws, one catching Ragnar in a glancing blow that nevertheless sent him staggering. Wherever the ice from the hammer touched, black metal came clearly into view. Where the black metal came clearly into view, my mechs’ blows landed solidly. Soon, the untouchable monstrosity was a battered piece of machinery, its inner cage of runed bones smashed, and its actual propulsion system revealed: A pair of wheels. As the wheels turned solid, they dug into the ground more deeply, then cracked under our blows.

What kind of deranged wizard builds a mech that moves on two wheels? Getting it to stay upright alone must have been a difficult challenge.

Ragnar’s timing must have been amazing to strike it just as it was starting to turn solid but before it attacked, I thought to myself; and then considered the possibility that a hammer wrested by force from the hands of a king dead for over two thousand years probably was, if not enchanted, at least made of something that would feel as solid to ectoplasm as flesh. Such a thing would have been very rare and special, especially back then; but it was a royal treasure, after all.

I spent a moment contemplating the play of sunlight on the frost on the fragments of the machine’s head and then brought myself back to the present. My column had been ambushed; I needed to return to it, not chase shadowy monsters through the woods. In the distance, I felt a flare of magic receding; there had been a wizard behind this attack, but a canny one and a cautious one.

We had proven ourselves too deadly, I thought to myself. Looking over at Ragnar, drenched in his own blood and barely standing, I amended my thought: We had seemed too deadly when our actions were viewed at a distance. Had the mechs’ master been brighter and bolder, we might not have survived our reckless rush, but the enemy commander’s nerve had faltered.

***

When we returned to the column, the fighting was all but over. The juniormost of my three cavalry officers was being clapped on the back and celebrated by his peers – evidently the alleged illusionist had found some particularly effective way of harming the phantoms. Perhaps one or more of the weapons in his collection had been enchanted particularly against phantoms.

I noticed that the blade of my sword was coated with some disgusting fluid. It usually dripped itself clean. In the case of the battle with the ogres, the gore had run so thick and deep that it ran down to cover the crow-like grip, and I had to scrub the grip afterwards (but not the blade, I assumed the gory coating had cracked off after drying while I was preoccupied with riding after Yuri to catch up to Katya). Fighting a necromantic machine, though … whatever fluid had been in its hydraulic tubes, it was not coming off by itself. I had to scrub.

We burned the bodies, theirs and ours, in a great pyre. We had not lost many in the ambush, fortunately. My jury-rigged mechs had absorbed a great deal of the violent effort, as had the heavy mech at the front of the column. It would be some time before any of them were functional again, and there could be no confusing the fact that there had been no bodies inside of them.

I thought the last fact would have shaken the surviving steam knights who had reverently referred to Ilya, Misha, and Gregor as if they were still alive; but they were more bothered by the fact that one of their number had managed to cook himself alive, a casualty of rushing to jump-start the steam engine on his suit without checking all the safety valves first.

They held a strange little memorial service for him, speaking quietly of the departed man (Sergei Popov) and praying his soul might become the spark of wisdom in the machine, whatever that meant. I resolved to check my own safety valves and wondered exactly what strange vein their theology had gone down. I decided to ask Vitold more about the matter; what had begun with a simple deception to keep ourselves in the good graces of General Spitignov had grown into something deeply strange, and Vitold seemed likely to know a bit more about it than I did.

Before I tended to my suit, however, I tended to Katya. She had burst some of her stitches in her dive for cover; I saw to the bleeding and stitched it back up myself (as the surgeons were both very busy with fresher injuries). I spent some time fussing over her, but I could hardly complain of her conduct; for one, she had once again saved my life, and for another, I had poured more laudanum and vodka into her to ease the pain until she was no longer in much of a state to understand any complaints I might have spoken on the subject of not overexerting herself.

Another thing I did before tending to my suit was clean and load the runed pistols. They were clearly blessed with some kind of enchantment, not merely decorative. If one of the insubstantial wraiths returned in the night, I would be ready for it. We posted double watches around our camp that night. After going over my suit, I sat by Katya, propped my feet up on the box containing the rock the old woman had given me, and kept my eyes and ears peeled as I returned to the question of why we had been attacked.

I was already confident that the dead king was not the culprit.

These were freshly equipped dead, with relatively modern weapons, accompanied by advanced necromantic machinery. It pointed to an opponent with machinations in the present and aspirations towards the future; not a fragment of the past stirred up by our passage. So, too, did the fact that my wagon was attacked, rather than the vanguard of the column on its way through. It did not make sense to commit to a full attack against the middle of a column with an inferior force. Perhaps our enemy had underestimated our capabilities, but if they wanted to destroy our army, they would have been better served by striking at our supply wagons first, killing oxen and mules with their skirmisher wraiths.

They had chosen to attack my wagon specifically. What had been in the wagon? Myself, Katya, and some mechanical odds and ends. I lifted the box. The box had formerly contained a large quantity of currency and now contained a worthless hunk of rock. I opened the box and pulled out the rough hunk of crystal, examining the inside closely. I had emptied it completely. No false bottom. I did a few quick mental sums, trying to recall the full value of the currency and papers that had been in the box. Had they perhaps been after money?

I compared that sum to the price of an ordinary mech, and then multiplied by ten to account for the ethereal monstrosity. I didn’t know the cost of an armored skeletal warrior, but that could not be cheap, either. The letters of credit were theoretically quite valuable if they could be redeemed at full face value, but even their full face value did not rationally merit the risk of the resources that had been thrown at us. And that assumed that the attackers had known about the letters of credit, which would require either scrying or spying on their part.

If they were not trying to rob us and weren’t trying to wear down, delay, or destroy our army, then the ambush must have been an assassination mission. I put the rock back in the box and closed it up. As much as I loved Katya, I doubted they were aiming to assassinate her; and neither Yuri nor the draft horse were in a habit of making enemies. As the commander of a mercenary battalion, I was the logical target.

That was the question of “what,” but left behind “who” and “why.” After a long while of thinking, my fingers tracing the decorative patterns on the box, I failed to come up with a single likely suspect, and the only reason I could think of was that someone wanted to have a band of desperate, confused, and leaderless mercenaries wandering around the Gothic countryside in a bad mood. I locked the box, put it back on the floor of the wagon, and laid my hands on Katya instead.

Her breathing was regular. She was warm, but not feverishly so. Impulsively, I gave her a kiss, and told her that I loved her; and then I sat the rest of the night sitting by her side on the cot, waiting to see if the undead would return to kill us in the darkness.