Accidental War Mage

The fair maiden at the center of our little drama was hiding in a wagon. Specifically, the wagon that Katya and I had been traveling in and using for a tent. (It is a good idea to keep wounded persons elevated above the ground while they recover, lest they catch an infection.) She was in the process of moving the little locked box (the one with the old lady’s rock in it) out of her way in order to better conceal herself when we came across her, returning to drop off some of Katya’s excess firepower. (I had strongly encouraged Katya to take it a little easier on herself.)

A clicking sound to my left announced that Katya had cocked the striker hammer of the blunderbuss. One small twitch of the trigger, and the hammer would strike the phoenix stone, sparking off an alchemical reaction energetic enough to perforate the acolyte with a full load of shot. The acolyte – the maiden fair, if you will – froze on her hands and knees, the locked box in one hand.

“I know I told them that she might not be with us for long,” I told Katya, referring back to our recent conversation with the fair maiden’s two suitors. “However, that was not a suggestion that you kill her.”

Katya gave me a strange look. While she was doing that, the young weather-witch put the box down and began slowly edging her way back out of the wagon, looking somewhat fearful and guilty.

Poor girl. She was still worried about Quentin and Fyodor. “Don’t worry,” I told her in my most reassuring voice. “They’re both still alive. I talked some sense into them. It’s all fixed now.” I made shooing motions with my left hand, and the weather-witch obeyed both me and her natural instinct for self-preservation by running off.

“Thief,” grumbled Katya. “You should have let me shoot her. She’ll steal it sooner or later.”

“Steal what?” As the words left my mouth, I remembered what was in the box, and what I had been told about it. The old lady had told me that someone would probably try to steal the rock. She’d also said that the rock looked like the sort of rock that people want to steal. I had ignored it as being more likely the product of senility than knowledge, but perhaps that hunk of crystal did look like something that was somehow valuable.

“The magic glowing rock,” Katya said. “Big round thing the size of a baby’s head, glitters like Koschei’s treasure, throbs like it has a heartbeat when you hold it up in the sunlight?”

I unlocked and opened the box and looked at the vaguely-rectangular rough hunk of quartz crystal, holding it up to the sunlight. While the rough quartz did arguably glitter a bit and it was about half the size of a baby’s head, it failed to glow at all – let alone with a pulsing heartbeat. Maybe she meant a different rock. “What rock?” I asked, cautiously.

She pointed at the one in my hand, giving me a puzzled look.

I tightened my lips in worry. While Katya had seemed to be recovering well, she was clearly out of her head with pain and beginning to hallucinate. I was lucky that she hadn’t shot anyone yet (aside, at least, from the undead attackers who had come to assassinate me). I put the rock away, felt Katya’s forehead to check for fever (if she had one, it was mild) and urged her to take it easy on herself. I wrapped her back up in blankets over her protestations that she was perfectly fine, and tucked her in with the pillows.

“I could ask the surgeon,” I told her. “I’m sure he would say exactly the same thing: Stop pretending you aren’t hurt, so you don’t pop your stitches and need more attention from him. Rest as much as you can until you’re all the way better.”

Her protests subsided. She knew as well as I did that the surgeon was still astonished at her continued survival and expected her to drop dead at any minute. I promised to fetch her breakfast, then went off to fulfill that promise. While I was fetching breakfast, Vitold and I talked more about the mysterious death. It was unsettling; bad for morale. Someone had murdered one man in a most foul fashion; and someone had caused another to disappear entirely. I brought the matter up with Katya as we ate breakfast.

“Maybe one of the Loegrian mages shot someone in the camp,” she said. “Magically silenced pistol.”

“Pistol?” I frowned. “Why not a rifle?”

“They say a rifle is too hard to muffle, I asked Banneret Teushpa and he said he could not do much to make mine quieter even if he had the time and orichalcum to do a proper try of it,” Katya said.

I frowned. “Are you suggesting that the Loegrians snuck into our camp while their officers supped with us? They wanted to hire us, not kill us.”

Katya looked at me, dumbfounded. “The Loegrian captain was a thaumaturge. So was one of her lieutenants. Either could have silenced their pistols with magic. And everybody knows that Loegrians are savages that kill for fun.” Seeing my puzzled look, she took pity on me and explained further. “She had metal cartridges.” She waited patiently for me to make the connection.

I looked back blankly at her, baffled. Why would metal cartridges be significant? I didn’t understand. Little brass containers to hold the charge and ball of a gun seemed extravagant, but nobles often engaged in extravagance.

“Metal cartridges are very expensive and silly,” she explained. “Thaumaturges need special cartridges so they can do magic things to the powder and shot right before they drop it out of the cartridge and down the barrel. Normal people do not use metal cartridges to hold their ammunition because if they are just a little too small, you might drop them into the barrel and then they become stuck to the barrel with the blast. Silk or paper just burn up and go away.”

She made a strange gesture, holding one arm across her chest, which I later realized was her trying to cross her arms across her chest to display her exasperation with my ignorance. It is difficult to cross your arms in exasperation when you only have one of them.

“Oh.” I filed away the useful piece of information for future reference. I hadn’t noticed that they were carrying metal cartridges, nor would I have known what that meant. “Anything else I should know?”

“If that ranger officer comes back, and we kill him, I want his gun,” she told me, a dreamy expression flitting onto her face, all thoughts of murder mysteries displaced by the discussion of guns.

“It is a very nice gun. Triple phoenix stones, resistant iron receiver, royal walnut stock, Damascus steel barrel. I once saw a boyar with a pistol like it, it was from a master-smith in Cyprus.” She let out an intimate sound, about halfway between a sigh and a moan, her eyes glazed over with desire.

I refrained from commenting on her lust for exotic foreign armaments, and instead simply promised Katya that if, indeed, I had the opportunity to give her that gun as part of the spoils of battle, it would be hers. Her eyes misted as she looked at me, and her passion for the Loegrian’s gun turned to a very convincing demonstration of her gratitude, at which point I, too, forgot about the puzzle of the missing mechanic, at least for the moment.

***

It’s thought that the custom of dueling to resolve disputes dates back indefinitely, but was formalized into law and custom in its current form by none other than the Romans. It remains quite popular in the Romance countries where Rome’s influence persists. This includes Wallachia, as well as much of the coastline of the Axine Sea, in spite of the Emperor’s attempts to outlaw it as wasteful. No less than five separate regulations of the Imperial Army expressly forbid dueling.

Given the pernicious persistence of dueling even to this day, it should come as no surprise that my decision to ban dueling within my army would be received poorly in certain quarters. I expected this; I expected objections from many of the mercenaries hailing from the areas where duels were traditional. What I did not anticipate is just how wholeheartedly otherwise sensible men from the Golden Empire embraced the idea of dueling. Evidently, five separate regulations against dueling were not sufficient to actually eliminate the practice in the Imperial Army.

I suppose there is something of the idea of trial by combat which survives in the mind of the modern soldier; whether you are charged with hacking the enemy limb from limb with an axe or blasting them with shot, you need something to appease your conscience. What is a war if not a duel between nations? There has to be something appealing about saying to yourself that your victory, or at least your continued survival, proves you to be in the right.

This comparison of war and dueling passed through my mind as three of my captains came to speak in its defense. (My fourth captain stayed silent on the subject and quite still, hidden beneath a pile of blankets and pillows which concealed both her and most of the lower half of my body from view. The conference had come upon us unannounced, and she had decided stealth was the better part of discretion.)

None of them made the connection explicitly, but each found excuses for condoning duels so readily that I could not help but suspect it had to do with the profession of soldier more than anything particular to them. Dueling is not a legal method of resolving disputes in the Golden Empire, and I thought I remembered reading that the holmgang, the Norse version of the duel, had been banned in Sweden quite some time ago.

The captain of the armor was the most surprising to me; the man was as traditional as they come and an old veteran of the campaign trail. He advocated for it as a convenient way for us to eliminate disputes and what he referred to obliquely as “troublesome personnel.” Since only unreliable sorts of soldiers would get themselves into a duel against someone liable to kill them, it would weed out weak, undisciplined, and stupid soldiers from our ranks. I had thought that the staid gentleman would have reliably endorsed the official stance of the Imperial Army on dueling; while conservative and cautious, he was more flexible and pragmatic than I had anticipated.

The captain of the infantry, not surprisingly, felt I had undercut her authority when I had come down and canceled the duel that she had helped to arrange. It was bad enough that I caused the problem for her in the first place by enchanting the weather-witch with lust for her subordinate (this was news to me; I had thought only perfectly natural human inclinations had been involved). Then, worse, I had turned around and publicly trampled all over her solution to said problem.

Her complaint was more about status and respect than about the issue of dueling itself. She did, of course, also think that a duel had been an exceptionally suitable method of resolving the particular issue at hand, as well as being perfectly equitable and rewarding virtue; and also added the elder captain’s argument to her own, commenting that she didn’t think we would much miss the French cavalryman, who she presumed would have lost the duel.

The Swedish captain, my second in command, had a slightly different perspective, one with less bloodthirstiness and more nuance. He felt that while dueling was wasteful, it was clearly the local custom, and our troops might get in the habit of disobeying orders if we issued orders they were not inclined to follow. In the interests of keeping our force unified and coherent, we should permit dueling; otherwise, dueling would happen regardless, and doubtless in a messier fashion. Then we would see not only waste, but also insubordination, gambling, and the general growth of vice.

I could see his point about not giving orders that you do not expect to be enforced. I was not convinced of his premise; that is to say, not convinced that a ban on dueling would not be respected by our troops. I tried to keep a calm and level face throughout, sipping my tea. It would not do to look angry, petulant, or interrupt my captains. I did not even argue their points with them, however much I wanted to.

I patiently waited for them to run out of reasons and metaphorical steam, nodded thoughtfully, and then told them that I expected them to try their best to enforce my order and prevent duels between our own soldiers for the time being, and expected them to stand by my decision if I changed my mind. I had complete confidence in their ability to do so effectively and told them I valued their suggestions. In fact, their points on the merits of dueling had some substance, so they ought to write up a detailed proposal as to how we might systematize dueling to resolve not only occasional personal disputes, but perhaps also disputes over promotions and demotions among the officer corps as well as the assignment of more or less desirable duties.

After the other three captains left, the fourth bestirred herself, peeking out of the blankets to ask quietly if I was serious. I told her I thought I hadn’t quite technically lied, but had no intention of changing my mind on dueling, either. I wanted them to think long and hard about the prospect of some subordinate displeased with them challenging them to a duel; one need not be a fan of dueling to be subjected to a challenge.

Dueling made for exciting stories, but was absolutely terrible for military discipline and efficiency, and was wasteful in the extreme. Not to mention unjust; there is no relationship between skill at arms and other virtues. The good may be weak and the evil may be strong.

At the end of my monologue, Katya looked down, and was silent and still for a while. I thought that perhaps she had fallen asleep; then she spoke. “Mikolai, are we good?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question.