Accidental War Mage

Katya surprised me by insisting I needed another guard to watch over "the wagon" (i.e., over me) while she rested. Looking back on it now, I think it might have been she felt that if she was going to be put to bed like a child, I would suffer through being watched like one, but it’s also possible that she understood the danger I was in better than I did. I find it similarly difficult to look back on that day and credit Katya with having had either great foresight or, alternately, to credit her with the capacity for acts of small petty revenge. Perhaps it was simply intuition at work.

I had Quentin come over to drive the wagon, reasoning that if he was well enough to attempt a duel, he was well enough to sit, watch, and fight. Besides, his new pistols were proven effective against ghosts, and by requesting his aid in this manner, I helped ensure that he would stick to the terms of our agreement. Like striking two birds with a single stone, only without the part where you risk having two angry birds twittering avian obscenities at you and knocking your mother’s second-best blouse off the drying line because you only clipped the both of them.

I had a great deal to read through, and at the request of Captain Rimehammer, several reports to write. I never thought of the post of commanding officer as a literary one, but sifting through written reports, accounts of supplies, et cetera takes a surprising amount of time if you’re trying to understand everything that’s going on and improve upon it, especially when your second in command has a seemingly endless supply of paper. (Did I mention he had a paper press put together? I believe I did.)

There was also the issue of trying to figure out where we were; I was having trouble believing the distance we had supposedly covered the previous day, but we seemed to be coming close to a major habitation. After a while studying the map, I guessed we were probably headed downhill towards Starezamky. (I was wrong.)

Around noon, I took the rock out to see if Katya had stopped hallucinating yet. She again described it as having a pulsing glow. Increasingly worried for her mental stability, I coaxed her into taking another dose of our vanishing supply of laudanum. Then, just as she began to lay back down and relax, I heard shouts of alarm. We were, this time, ready for the attackers; though we had not expected them to come from above. One dove down at me (or so I thought) but I had already stepped into my ready armor, and both Katya and Quentin shot it in the head before it reached the wagon. It was already dying when I ducked away from its claws and speared it through with a hastily borrowed swordstaff. Katya was staring quizzically at the blunderbuss in her hand, muttering something under her breath, the laudanum already taking effect.

The beast flopped around in the wagon, knocking tools off of crates with abandon. In the sky, it had looked like a dragon; up close, it looked more pathetically human, its pallid skin tattooed with faint runes. It was not one of the great serpents we had fought earlier; though it had looked enormous on its approach, the bronze collar hung around the base of a neck no thicker than my own, and the wagon’s axle wasn’t the slightest bit strained at its man-like weight. I suspected it had at some point been a man.

In its death throes, it scrabbled blindly in the general direction of the dull hunk of crystal. My heart sank, and I remembered again what the little grandmother had said. She’d told me that it looked like an important rock, and looked like the sort of rock that people would want to steal, and the weather-witch had looked like she had been trying to steal it. I reminded myself that the old woman also said something else I had better keep in mind:

“It’s not a very important rock, so don’t kill yourself over it.”

My memory flashed back to the wraiths, ghostly forms barely visible in the sunlight, making a line straight for the wagon I was in, which was also the wagon the rock had been in. This rock was a magnet for death. It was something not only that people wanted to steal, but that people would kill to possess. I dropped my polearm, grabbed the rock, and jumped out of the wagon, running back towards the wagons used by the artillerists. Fyodor was there, trying to figure out the right length of fuse to get a rocket to explode neatly.

“I need a mortar set up and loaded with a double charge of powder but no shell,” I said, shouting at the top of my lungs to be heard. I could see the face of a not-quite-human monster turn to track me, weathered brown skin forming the webbing of its wings. “Now!”

All the crows in the woods had come out to see the battle and were now tearing at the unnatural creatures, delaying them for the moment. I could hear, from somewhere out of my sight, an angry voice cursing the birds in Greek, a language I had not heard for at least a full year. Fyodor hastened to obey my order, directing the set-up of a mortar and personally packing it with a dangerous quantity of powder. I shoved the dull hunk of crystal into the barrel, and the rest of the soldiers stepped back. Afraid, presumably, of what might happen with an overloaded mortar.

“What am I shooting that at, sir?” Fyodor shouted back at me, his voice just audible through the racket.

“You’re shooting it away!” I said, matching gestures to my words. “Far away!”

He tipped the mortar up to an angle halfway between vertical and horizontal, then adjusted the tiniest fraction downwards to correct for the resistance of the wind. Artillerists know their trigonometry far better than horses. Then he set it off. There was a loud bang. A woman screamed; at least I think it was a woman. The high-pitched shriek managed to be audible in the wake of the mortar firing next to me, and through the cawing of the crows.

After the loud report of the mortar rang out, the abominations’ heads raised as one up to the sky, the uncanny unison motion of their motion suggesting they were all under the control of a single master (or mistress) somewhere nearby. It also confirmed my suspicion of why they were here; for the stone, not for us. Or, more precisely, they were here for whatever their controller believed the stone to be. The old woman had simply said it looked like an important stone; she hadn’t said that it actually was one.

Of the abominations, more than half took to the sky after the stone, but not all. One of them spat at me in anger, and I was busy again, hacking, blocking, trying to kill the monsters before they killed too many of my men. The smaller measure flung themselves at us with great passion but little signs of intelligence; they’d been ordered to perform a holding action to keep us occupied, or to punish us for some stone-related transgression. I did not know if our enemy was ruled by logic or emotion, but it served both purposes. Even that lingering fraction of their forces killed ten soldiers and left another seven seriously wounded.

I felt no exhilaration during that battle; no rush of wild sensation as I cut and stabbed the enemy with the swordstaff; I just slowly became more tired and sickened by the carnage. We set a fortified camp early (and not that far from the site of the battle) to gather the mules and horses back in, repair broken wheels, bury the dead, and tend to the wounded. The beasts did not return that night; nor did we see them again as we reached the river and headed downstream.

Katya didn’t hallucinate throbbing glows on any more mundane items like the rock. Our nights since leaving the woods had been full of starts and unreasoned terror. Our sentries sometimes fired into the night, thinking they saw the motion of more horrors. We had been in the field too long, and fought too many fights, with each enemy less human than the last. Fierce local men with bear cloaks, ogres, undead monsters, and then eyeless horrors had us seeing creatures in any passing motion of the dark trees and brush.

The young weather-witch preferred to avoid me as much as she could, including eye contact and conversation. For my part, I thought it was embarrassment or annoyance related to her love life; Katya thought it was a sign of guilt. She was once again in favor of shooting the acolyte, on the grounds that the weather-witch had probably done something to cause the monsters to attack us. She had heard how most of them left when the stone was fired in the air, and felt the circumstantial association between the monsters being interested in the stone and the acolyte being interested in the stone were enough to convict the latter of conspiring with the former.

I took this renewed interest in executions as a sign of improving health, and put her in charge of organizing patrol and sentry schedules.

After doing so, I wished I had done so earlier; people seemed afraid to disappoint her, in a way they were not afraid of disappointing Lieutenant Quentin Gavreau. I am not sure if this was because of her renewed interest in executions, the fact that she was much closer to me, or the interaction between those two properties. It comes to mind that the threats issued by the general’s woman are credible in a way that the threats of other officers are not.

The death of the unknown man, who most still believed must have been Ehrhart, remained a mystery. This did not help morale. As I said, we had been in the field too long; far too long, long enough that had all of us lived, we would have been out of food before we reached the border. As it was, we were hungry and on short rations when we sighted the outskirts of what I would later learn was Dab, named for trees that had mostly been cleared; the eastern outpost of an entire cluster of towns. The glint of rails and distant rumble of an engine spoke of a railroad. The wind was blowing in from the west, bearing with it a faint charnel scent that seemed too familiar to me. How much blood needed to be shed for me to smell it from miles away?

Nobody else seemed to smell the scent until I told them of it, and then only hesitantly and unconvincingly. Perhaps they did smell something; they weren’t quite sure. Caution being the order of the day, I ordered scouts sent out ahead to the city. Katya wanted to go; but I proclaimed her unready for a long ride. Quentin was barely back in the saddle, and his injuries had been less extensive. That left Banneret Teushpa. The Cimmerian junior officer was well-born enough to insist that he had an (as-yet-undemonstrated) magical gift, and that would probably count in his favor when he asked to speak with someone of standing and authority.

It occurred to me that instead of asking our permission to enter the city, he might simply desert. I imagined most of my soldiers would want to.

Still, I was worried about the charnel smell. It was difficult to put the matter out of my mind. I suppose I could have tried drinking myself into a stupor; but I am neither a drunk nor did we have any alcohol left, so I instead fretted, tried to place us on our maps, and tried (largely unsuccessfully) to cheer Katya up.

It is not very easy to convince a woman who has recently lost two limbs that she is not in a sorry state when you have just forbidden her to go on a scouting ride on the basis of her injuries. It is less so when she reasonably expects, based on recent experience, that lethal threats might suddenly emerge from the peaceful fields and farms at any moment. I also had a feeling that there was a force bent on our destruction headed in our direction with all due speed. It was an irrational intuitive feeling, but even having an irrational intuitive sense of impending doom makes cheering someone up a lot harder.