Accidental War Mage

As a general rule, soldiers serve three commanders: Their superior in the military chain of command, their cause (country, coin, sense of self-preservation, religion, et cetera), and – last but not least – boredom. Boredom, unfortunately, has an assortment of lieutenants to delegate to, e.g., “mischief,” “alcoholism,” “gambling,” and “inappropriate behavior involving livestock.” (I am not sure whether my soldiers were boastful, or if the story about the pony had preceded us by other means, but I overheard one of the baron’s machinists re-telling the story to one of the baron’s clerks.)

For the most part, I felt I was contending with General Boredom for my soldiers’ attention. Besides being senior to me in both rank and experience, General Boredom has a particular knack for commanding soldiers during assignments of this sort. Guarding an industrial compound located a deliberately inconvenient distance from any town is not a terribly exciting activity.

I could, and did, set soldiers to the task of surveying the local geography, and some handful to watching the walls, but there was not a lot to do that did not feel like make-work. For that matter, the whole job had that feeling to me in particular, since I knew that our employers’ worries had been generated by Katya. There was one large labor-intensive project I wanted to undertake to keep them busy: Building up the walls. Unfortunately, baron’s castellan dug his heels in and insisted that I must clear detailed plans with not only him, but the baron’s architect and a representative of the margrave, whose permission was evidently required before constructing any fortifications higher than a man’s shoulder.

The older captain took charge of drawing up the detailed plans because he had far more experience than the rest of us with such things. Quentin Gavreau was kept quite busy with the project of making very good maps and, as the maps developed, responding to the older captain’s demands. Captain Rimehammer was involved with protracted discussions with the baron’s own logistical personnel (suppliers, cooks, inventory clerks, and accountants) and generally documenting everything that was going on. Katya was busy trying very hard to stay in character for her role as Leontina Odobescu while glued possessively to my side.

For those of you counting officers, that accounted for three out of four of the captains of Colonel Raven’s Battalion, as Quentin was only a lieutenant. The remaining fourth captain, once a proud captain of the infantry on the fast track for rapid promotion, and now the captain of the infantry division of Colonel Raven’s Battalion (officially “The Raven’s Claws,” or “4th Company, Raven Battalion,” on the paperwork) had set up a watch schedule and then gotten thoroughly drunk, which state she returned to as frequently as she could arrange it.

I did not remember her having been a very heavy drinker before, but she was now drinking heavily enough to be in competition with our surgeons, whose profession gave them easy access to liquor for medicinal purposes. After the second time she had to be bodily carried out of the pub, I decided this was a problem.

***

I assigned the job of keeping an eye on her (and, not incidentally, carrying her back to her guest room in the baron’s mansion if it became necessary yet again) to a reliable corporal, by which I mean the physically largest of her subordinates. The man looked like he could be quarter-ogre. I figured that his imposing bulk, in addition to giving him the muscles to make hauling a non-cooperative adult woman up the stairs easier, would render him resistant to getting drunk himself, and discourage any unwanted trouble from the baron’s workers. (The Loegrian captain’s own massive bodyguard may have influenced my thoughts on the matter.)

Second, I sat her down for a private talk. (Truly private. I sent Katya off to go pay her respects to the baron’s daughter, asking that she try to mend fences, and sent Yuri off with Katya, giving him strict instructions to not to bite any noblewomen even if they bit him first.) Being drunk may not be a crime, but excessive drinking is still unwise in an officer, and I had some stern words to give to her. They would be hard enough for her to swallow without anyone else listening in on them. I asked her to set a better example, told her I was assigning her an aide to help her avoid future embarrassments, and asked her if she knew what her men had gotten up to the previous night.

When she told me that she didn’t know (having woken up with a very thick head and not much recall), I may have clucked my tongue, shaken my head, and sighed, much as my mother had done when I (or one of my siblings) misbehaved, waiting for her to guess her way towards scolding herself. I realize now that my mother had been quite clever; we were much more likely to believe we had misbehaved if we had to prosecute and judge ourselves than if she had simply piled accusations on us and left us to defend ourselves from them.

She soon realized that if she was drinking heavily every night, she would find herself in the position of having to punish her soldiers for their mischief after the fact and make amends to offended civilians (in this case, the baron’s workers), while if she was in charge of her own faculties most of the time, she could pre-empt at least some of the mischief that would otherwise occur. The captain berated herself quite effectively on the topic, and stayed apologetic even after I told her no serious mischief had come to my attention the other night, aside from having to carry one of my officers out of the compound’s pub.

After the conversation had ended, I realized the supply colonel, that old alcoholic I had demoted to the position of a lieutenant, was no longer with us. I hadn’t noticed his departure. Consulting Captain Rimehammer’s records (which I was suddenly thankful for) showed that he hadn’t signed any of the new paperwork. I couldn’t even remember if he had still been with us when we marched into Dab in the first place. He had been a disagreeable souse, but he had also been (in terms of genuine official rank) the highest-ranking surviving officer. I felt a little twinge of conscience realizing that I didn’t know where he was now. Then the guilt was replaced by alarm as I imagined how much influence a colonel might have back in Tanais and how much trouble he could cause for us if he found his way home on his own.

After the baron arrived, approval to construct fortifications went through quickly. Lord Erasmus von Vasco (informally “Asman” if we were in private conversation) also told me that it would be better that the margrave never heard a thing about my battalion's presence; there was “no reason to worry the fellow unnecessary” by contacting one of his representatives. In their relationship, penance was cheaper than indulgence.

Later that afternoon, I got one of the heavier mechs fired up to help with improving the fortifications. There was a surprising lack of complaint from the soldiers about being put to work, something which I attributed (at the moment) to the fact that I was getting my own boots muddy right along with the men. Who can complain about pointless work when your commanding officer is himself working? If anything, the elemental spirit caged in the mech seemed more sullen about the task than my living soldiers.

Sullen and rebellious, I thought to myself, staring it in its gemstone eyes after the fourth time it knocked over one of the wooden frames. I concentrated, moving one of my hands slowly and carefully. “Delicately,” I muttered under my breath. The mech's fist mirrored my own deliberate motions, clutching and unclutching delicately to pick up individual pieces of lumber without crushing them.

I knew that I somehow commanded the allegiance the elemental spirits caged in the mechs I had built from my former comrades’ steam suits, but communicating with the spirit originally bound by some unknown Ruthenian military mage years before and a thousand miles away was a considerably more conscious affair. Fighting certainly is complicated, but it wasn't a thing I liked to think about a lot. I thought instead more about what was going on with everything else, and my mechs simply acted the way I needed them to.

Digging was simpler, in principle, but this mech seemed unfamiliar with the task. I could make it do the work precisely and correctly only if I concentrated on each step, giving it verbal orders and demonstrative gestures. Mechanically, the mech was capable of doing the work; but if I let my concentration slip, mud went everywhere.

The elemental cages built by the thaumaturges of the Golden Empire were less sophisticated than the ones the Wallachian rebels had gotten their hands on. The heavy mech was more robustly engineered than my slapdash efforts, including mechanically devised reflexes that could be tripped by a crude control. In combat, or covering broken ground, those reflexes might have been helpful, but in the construction of earthworks, a rapidly-triggered punch or actuated swing of an arm is frequently less than helpful.

The elemental spirit seemed to want to knock down the wall we were building up, not make it higher, and I had to concentrate quite closely to get it to dig an even trench line. It was like trying to use a knight’s destrier for farm labor instead of a peasant's mule. The destrier may be larger, stronger, and faster, but mules are smarter than most horses, and warhorses have had most of the common sense trained out of them. The worst part, of course, is that their owners frequently take exception to this misuse.

This is true of knights and their horses, and I could not help but consider it was likely also true of the Imperial Army and mechs belonging to them.

The next day at our morning meeting, Vitold told me that some complaining happened in the places where I hadn’t been, but that complainers were swiftly silenced by their own comrades in arms rather than the officers. He also told me that the supply section had gotten swamped with requests for gun oil, cleaning cloths, and ammunition that night.

Apparently, many of the soldiers were convinced that if I was getting my own boots muddy working to improve the fortification, it meant that I had by some supernatural means determined that we were going to be attacked soon. The barracks were alive with activity, and discipline was tightening up of its own accord.

Superstitious beliefs, in other words, were accomplishing what common sense and experienced officers hadn't done. The only drawback was that with the soldiers discussing my alleged skill at divination, the baron's daughter, some of her friends, the maidservants, and once even the baron himself started asking me to read tea leaves for them.

***

I was happier digging than reading tea leaves, even with the frustrations that came along with exploring the curious link between mage and spirit that allowed a war mage to personally command a powerful army of armored steam-powered machines. Being spattered with mud by a clumsy mech seemed somehow a more dignified occupation than handling a barrage of questions around a drawing room table, especially since the tea leaves didn’t provide direct answers.

Tea leaves don't spell out simple answers like “yes” or “no,” they form patterns with a simple symbolic meanings, like “bear,” “livestock,” “dismemberment,” “old woman,” “waxing half-moon,” et cetera, the arrangements of which the tea leaf reader then compiles together into some sort of syntactically sensible sentence like “my aunt's livestock will be ravaged by a bear at the next half-moon.”

Which really is a matter of sheerest guesswork, even if it wasn’t simply peasant superstition that assigned one shape of clump of leaves to “bear” and another similar one to “livestock.” Frustratingly, if you get the prediction right in such a case, your aunt is likely to get mad at you when a bear does happen to kill one of her pigs the next month, as if making the prediction caused the event to happen. (If I had been wrong, she probably would have gotten mad at me for predicting misfortune that failed to materialize. Practicing fortune-telling of any kind often gets you blamed for whatever happens next regardless.)

Sometimes, what the tea leaves say hasn’t the slightest possible relationship with the questions being asked. “Wolf looking over three full moons, rabbit sleeps” can't really answer a question like “Will my true love be a tall handsome man?” or “Can you tell me if next year will have a good wheat crop?”

I suppose I could have lied and just said “yes” to both shouted questions, or asked one of the quieter girls to repeat their questions to see if I could connect it to one of their questions, but I feel guilty enough going through the superstitious claptrap. Mud, on the other hand, just made my boots wet and squishy and sometimes spattered the rest of me a bit. Boots are far more easily cleaned off than dignity or self-respect.