Accidental War Mage

Final arrangements were made in Dab. We cleared out the pair of warehouses we’d converted into barracks and rented out from a local factor, selling some supplies and buying others, mostly based on what Felix thought was advisable. We even bought some more Krukov salt. To keep relations sound with the local factor (he’d done business with the Rimehammer family before), we had some of the men doing carpentry, trying to ensure the buildings were in better shape than when we’d first rented them out.

Though he did not say directly, my impression was that the factor intended to subdivide the barracks further into tenements. Dab was a great big bustling and rapidly growing city, or so it seemed to me at the time; I had seen only a brief night-time glance of the much greater city of Khoryvsk, and I had not yet laid eyes on Vindabona.

If Katya had been with me, I am sure she would have wanted to send a letter home from Dab. For myself, I missed home, but I did not want any high-ranking officers or ministers to take notice of my continued existence. General Ognyan Spitignov might yet believe I was doing his bidding; no sane official of the Golden Empire could possibly believe likewise. Not when I planned to go west up the Istros, not east through Avaria and back to the Golden Empire through its newest province – Wallachia.

After I collected a few letters to be sent home, including one from the aging captain who had stayed behind to join the baron’s service permanently, I asked Felix where I would find a messenger willing to take them east. Felix bluntly told me to hang onto the letters until we reached Vindabona. Post would travel far faster and more reliably going downstream on the Istros than by land across Lithuania and the hinterlands of the Golden Empire.

As the train pulled into its station, I felt as though something was wrong with it. Something was off, unfamiliar; it took me a while to realize it was the fact that the locomotive wasn’t presently burning any coal. Intellectually, I’d known that fireboxes alone could provide motive power; but on the trains of the Golden Empire, fireboxes were treated as strictly auxiliary, supplemental power that helped save a little fuel here and there or allowed a stranded locomotive to creep back to station after running out of fuel – surely leaving its cargo cars behind in the process.

This locomotive was a triple-firebox model with an auxiliary coal engine, the coal burners being brought online for express high-speed trips, unusually heavy loads, or steep mountain grades. Any arcane engine was worth a fortune, even the simplest fireboxes. Lightning flux engines, hydraulic circulator engines, and wind engines were in another league; the lightning flux engine that powered my own rebuilt steam suit was at least as expensive as an elemental cage.

This, in turn, meant that the chief engineer of the train was himself a wizard; he gave me an uneasy look as he dismounted his steel horse to direct us to the cars we were supposed to load onto. When our eyes met, I gave the friendliest smile I could. He was likely a thaumaturge, even if not the same one who had built the fireboxes in the first place. Remembering what Katya had said about the Loegrian captain, I wondered if the gun at his side was loaded with a metal cartridge; I could not see any spare ammunition, and the barrel was fully tucked into a thick leather holster.

It might not even be loaded at all; I didn’t know how often he might have to worry about bandits attacking a train, or if he was expected to risk himself in the defense of the train and its cargo as part of his duties.

Though I’d been hoping to take a closer look at the engine, the engineer and his assistants directed us to a string of flatcars and boxcars near the very end of the train. An extra caboose was attached in front of our cars; on reflection, that seemed a sign of distrust that went deeper than the engineer’s nervousness at sensing my magic. They were clearly prepared to cut us loose. I decided to load the self-propelled charcoal kiln in our first flatcar along with my armor.

Wordlessly, the mechs I’d built, along with their living steam knight brethren, started boarding the next two flatcars. This wasn’t part of our original plan or my freshly revised one, and while it seemed ill-advised, I limited my criticism to pointing out that they ought to secure their steam suits well if they were to ride a flatcar instead of a boxcar.

There were almost as many human steam knights standing behind me as there had been in the Wallachian wintertime, in spite of the fact that half a dozen steam knights had died since then. Only two suits had proven beyond repair, taken apart for spare parts, but there always seemed to be another man willing to step up and take whatever secret vows bound them together. This fact reminded me of something that puzzled me about the steam knights.

We’d sold two functional heavy mechs for credit to the baron, all that he was willing to pay for even with a delayed letter of credit; I’d taken a third apart for practice, releasing the elemental spirit from its cage and binding a new one to prove to myself that I really knew how; then I rebuilt it as a smaller machine, using parts from the two destroyed suits to build another mech that looked little different from the steam suits of the knights around it.

With a Ruthenian elemental cage at its heart, it had fewer and cruder controls for its motion than the more sophisticated cages we’d found in Wallachia, but I had learned more about how mechs worked and did a better job at connecting control rods and joints together. It was still a little clumsier than its predecessors overall. Strangely – according to Vitold, I did not ask them directly – the human steam knights called it Peter. That had been the name of a steam knight crushed under the foot of a three-headed dragon. For my part, I struggled to believe Vitold’s claim; surely they understood that it was a mech rather than a man, a steam suit animated by an elemental spirit with no flesh.

But Vitold insisted and I felt I could trust him on this. He seemed as confounded as I was by the spontaneous generation of a solemn sacred brotherhood of steam knights who addressed mechs as if they were dead brethren. We had been lying to cover for the absence of our comrades when we claimed that my first three steam mechs were devout men who didn’t talk because they had taken vows of silence. At first, we had thought the other steam knights had taken up the joke; yet now they seemed deadly earnest in their spirituality.

Because the brethren had decided to tie themselves down on flatcars instead of going into the shelter of a boxcar (human and mech alike), we ended up leaving behind some wagons that would not fit through the doors of the boxcars. Hopefully, we would have no trouble picking up replacements in Vindobona, I thought to myself; and then realized that if we were simply loading everything onto a riverboat after arriving in Vindobona, we probably wouldn’t need replacement wagons until we reached Oenipons.

Other than leaving behind wagons, the process of loading the train went smoothly. People, guns, machines, horses, mules, et cetera, all were crammed into boxcars or strapped down to flatcars with minimal incident. I kept waiting to hear the roar of a hostile mech’s engine, angry shouting in Loegrian or French or Magyar, the crack of a redhead’s rifle fired from a rooftop, or something, but there was nothing of the sort.

The last to board was the better of our two surgeons, fussing over the proper stowage of his tools and possessions. As the man was also a physician – a very unusual background for a surgeon – he’d come to be quite well-liked as surgeons go. He’d been the one to amputate the ragged part of Katya’s leg. He spoke Venetian like a native; remembering that, I decided I wanted to ask him questions about the imperial capital, reasoning that on the map, Oenipons and Venice had looked much closer together than Oenipons and Dab. Maybe he’d been there.

The less said about the worse of our two surgeons, the better; I was glad he’d decided to stay as a barber in Dab. We’d need a replacement before we went into battle, though. One surgeon could be easily overwhelmed, injured, or might be inconveniently incapacitated by his own anesthetic liquor.

Given my recent experiences with Gothic nobility, I was not in a trusting mood myself. With the loading finished, I perched on the charcoal kiln, where I could keep an eye on the connection between our cars and the rest of the train. If they cut us loose at the most obvious junction, I would have warning, and possibly be in a position to prevent it.

A plume of thick black smoke announced that the auxiliary coal boiler was being put into service to get the laden train into motion. I watched as Dab receded into the distance, and thought about what I was leaving behind. Somewhere in the forests surrounding Dab, there was a redheaded woman with a piece of my heart. I hadn’t been able to talk to her or apologize to her.

There was also an old man, whose loyal and lengthy service to the Golden Empire had just definitively come to an end. I didn’t know what terms the baron had negotiated with those who decided to stay, but I imagined it involved an oath of fealty that amounted to forswearing the one the captain had sworn to Emperor Koschei all those years before.

There was a baron, a Gothic noble who had handed me two letters of credit, one post-dated. He would have to settle matters with Carmen’s extended family, who seemed to believe I had ravaged her and stolen her virtue. That the alleged incident had happened under his roof left him with a share of the responsibility, and I doubted that it would stay secret even if Carmen and her relatives wanted to keep it under wraps rather than pressing for recompense openly. Carmen waking up in my bed also seemed to have destroyed her friendship with the baron’s daughter.

When Vitold came to offer me a kopek for my thoughts – one of the few he’d kept with him since our time in Ruthenia together, before our trip west began – that was the subject I had in mind.

“Once upon a time,” I told him, “I danced with a stranger, a young woman with hair the color of aged cheese. From there, I had failed to keep her father’s clients and business partners alive and then ruined his relationship with one of his few remaining business partners.” I sighed. “I know I’ve done worse,” I added, remembering a whole village rendered into screams and blood. That day still haunted my nightmares. “But … I still feel bad about it.”

Vitold snorted. “He paid for protection, and we delivered. With the troops we’ve left behind, we’re still delivering even after he fired us. Remember the bandits? They would have had the run of the place if we weren’t there to stop them. Not our fault his old accountant robbed him blind. Not our fault that he tried to stab us in the back. You, in particular, though with a knife that winsome I wouldn’t blame you if you’d just let him do it.”

I sighed. “You think he was behind it,” I said.

Vitold nodded. “You’re not practiced in underhanded thinking,” Vitold said. “He probably had his own drunken way with her and then needed to find someone to blame.”

I shook my head. “I told you, it was sheep’s blood. Nobody stole her virtue that night. And the baron hadn’t been in my room, not that Yuri could smell. Just the servants and the cousin. And they seemed to want to keep the incident quiet. The only reason it was all over the compound is that I made such a fuss of it. I should have left the room myself instead of tossing out Carmen.”

“Suit yourself,” Vitold said. “Maybe nothing happened to her that night, but the baron is the one the servants take orders from. I’d bet you if I thought we could ever settle it.”

I held up the kopek and chuckled. “I think you have,” I said. “I’ll just hold onto my winnings until you can fully prove the baron’s guilt. Not that I believe in his innocence.”

Vitold laughed. “You old cheat,” he said. “With Carmen drugged, the only people who would know the baron set you up are him, his servants, and maybe that daughter of his. Not that we’ll see any of them again.”

I pocketed the kopek with a wink.