Accidental War Mage

To my eye, the paintings that lined the room were remarkable – far more accurate and detailed to the human form and the scenery that surrounded them than what I had seen in the baron’s study. Quentin had suggested that they likely had come up from the south, through the capital, but it could be that the previous bishop had brought the artist to Batavis to work for him as well. Wealthy noblemen were often patrons of the arts.

Other than the paintings, the room was arranged with seating around the edges and small tables, a sociable sitting room rather than a working office with a desk. I’d picked the most ornate chair to sit in; Quentin was seated to my right and Yuri on my left, the latter sitting on the woven carpet that covered most of the floor of the small room. I was unarmed; I felt Quentin’s three pistols and officer’s sword were more than sufficient.

When the bishop’s envoy arrived, escorted by the infantry captain, I rose to my feet, bowed, and addressed him in Latin.

“Please take a seat.” I gestured to a chair near the door and then followed the gesture by seating myself. “I am sorry for any misunderstandings that may have arisen in the course of my correspondence with his excellency. I really hadn’t planned on taking this keep at all, nobody actually hired me to, but in truth, I felt provoked by the actions of his excellency’s soldiers when they fired upon us unprovoked.”

Quentin gave me an incredulous look, his eyes widening. This was exactly what he hadn’t wanted me to say.

“I is good meet you,” the man said in Latin. “I am good meet you,” he corrected, sighing heavily. “Good you am … you are sorry.” He shook his head, switching to the local Gothic dialect. “Do you speak Gothic? Latin conjugation is not my strongest skill.”

“Yes,” I said. I waited for him to speak, and my eyes drifted, distracted, to a painting of a partially clothed woman with a severed head on a plate.

After a moment, the envoy spoke. “It pleases me, and will likewise please his excellency, that you have offered an apology for your unprovoked attack on the rightful bishop’s property,” he said. “While the man who hired you may have offered you riches, he is in no position to provide access to the bishopric’s treasury, and the upper fortress is impregnable.”

As he continued, I felt confused. Hadn’t I told him that nobody had hired me and that the bishop’s men had fired first? I exchanged a quick look with Quentin. Either he was reciting a memorized speech given to them by the bishop or his understanding of Latin was very rudimentary. After a moment of reflection during which I decided it was unlikely that he had feigned his difficulty in conversing in the language, I became aware of an expectant silence.

The envoy looked at me nervously, his hands clasped behind his back as he waited for my reply.

“What did you just offer me?” I asked. “Perhaps my Gothic is not so good, after all.”

“Indulgentia plenaria,” Quentin said, giving the proper Latin name to clarify. Seeing the puzzled look on my face, he explained further, switching to Magyar. “In the Roman church – perhaps the eastern church is different? – it is a sort of special grant. He is saying he will grant that you will not be punished in purgatory for your sins of transgression against the church by occupying the lower keep, provided you leave it.”

It is sometimes accounted rude to converse in front of someone in a language they do not know, but I did not want the bishop’s envoy to know that I was a Mikolai rather than a Marcus, and answering Quentin’s question in Gothic would have taught that lesson to the envoy. “There is a similar practice in the eastern church, they call them permissive letters,” I said. “He offered nothing else?”

“No,” Quentin said. “I think his master must not have very much money to spare, but maybe this is just the opening offer.”

While the envoy fumed quietly, I scratched Yuri’s head, staring at a painting where a crowd of naked people huddled among flames, one being lifted up towards sunny clouds. If there was punishment accounting for sins in the hereafter, I had far worse things to worry about than taking a fort in an action that left only a handful of men dead. I could vividly picture a woman stating uncertainly that the rebels had stolen sheep from the village, her voice rising to turn the statement into a question moments before an enchanted sword swiped through her neck and sent her head rolling in my direction. The destruction of the village and the slaughter of nearly all of its inhabitants was something that still haunted my dreams at least once in every month.

Yuri whined, nuzzling my hand. I brought my attention back to the present, scratching under his muzzle. “I appreciate his excellency’s concern for the well-being of my soul,” I said, my voice tightly controlled. “Quentin, please show the gentleman around. I wish his excellency to know that we are taking good care of his property during the absence of his soldiers.”

Quentin stood. “Yes, Lord Marcus Corvus,” he said, granting me a title I had even less claim to than “colonel.”

After he and the envoy left, I stood, pacing in a small circle around the room as memories flashed back in front of me and I tried to account for each drop of blood that had stained my hands either literally or metaphorically. After a few circuits, Yuri decided it was a fun game and started trying to trip me up by running back and forth around my legs. I was angry for a moment, but it’s hard to stay angry at a dog who just wants to play.

After I rubbed his belly, he told me I was a wonderful person and licked my face. Then there was a knock on the door, and I opened it.

“The other bishop has sent a message, sir,” the infantry captain told me, holding up a sealed letter in her hand.

I took the letter and opened it, reading it carefully. The other would-be bishop – the one encamped outside of the upper fort with the army – didn’t seem to believe I’d been hired by his rival. He was, however, prepared to offer me a considerable sum for possession of the lower fort, suggesting that the cover of dark night would suffice to conceal this activity from the guns of the upper fort. He was willing to forgive my crime as well as grant me a sum that, based on Felix’s estimates of the value of the first day of tolls, amounted to roughly a week’s income from river traffic.

I didn’t feel confident that the letter was sincere. If he didn’t trust me to tell him the truth (and we really hadn’t – we’d said quite a lot of nothing while implying, suggesting, and insinuating many untruths), wouldn’t he feel justified in deceiving me in return? While his force was small, they could be quite dangerous, particularly if we simply allowed them into the lower fort.

I wanted to discuss the offer with my officers, but the envoy was with several of them, so it had to wait. The Rimehammer cousins were giving him an impromptu tour through the storehouses, with Captain Felix spouting numbers like an accountant and Lieutenant Ragnar asking the envoy questions about the organization of the storehouses, purportedly with the purpose of ensuring that we put the correct goods in the correct place.

The envoy seemed generally unhappy, and Quentin gave me a welcoming look, so I approached. Perhaps it was a good time to try to resume negotiations.

“I hope my officers aren’t boring you too much,” I said. “Have you eaten? I believe I can arrange to feed you lunch. I was beginning to get a little peckish myself.”

“That would be appreciated,” the envoy said.

I waved a hand in the general direction of the envoy. “Come with me back up to the sitting-room, then. My men will see to bringing up food and drink, and we can perhaps resume our conversation.”

Quentin and Georg both gave me a quick military salute – crisply in the former case, and somewhat awkwardly in the latter case – and then dashed off in different directions. Georg was heading in the direction of the kitchen; Quentin was heading elsewhere, which suggested to me that he wasn’t going to be of any help in fetching food.

“Your men are quite quick to obey you, Lord Corvus,” the envoy said. “I look forward to resuming our discussion. Perhaps you have now had time to consider the horrors of purgatory?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps,” I said with a shrug. “But I think I would like to converse about earthly matters instead.”

By the time we reached the room with the paintings again, Quentin was waiting for us with an aperitif of brandy, having fetched a bottle from somewhere (probably the storehouses). He poured each of us a generous serving, handing the envoy his glass first. While the envoy was taking his first sip, I turned the conversation to the paintings; they were very fine and I was curious about who had painted them and what they portrayed.

The artist had come up from Tuscany accompanied by one of his sisters, who had played the part of the model for Salome in the painting of John the Baptist’s beheading. That painting had been the first one purchased by the old bishop back when the old bishop had been a mere priest (albeit one of high birth) before the old bishop had become the artist’s principal patron. The artist was gone now, although his niece Giselle was in charge of the maidservants here in the lower fort.

Quentin had just poured the envoy his second glass of brandy when a trio of maidservants arrived, one bearing a pitcher of wine and the others bearing laden trenchers. The maidservant with the pitcher set it on one small table before moving two other small tables with the practiced air of routine, the feet of the little tables landing almost exactly on barely visible divots worn into the woven carpet.

Evidently, the previous master of the lower fort had enjoyed taking meals with company in this room. The trenchers went onto the tables; the maid with the pitcher poured wine for me, eyed the envoy’s glass of brandy briefly, then set down the pitcher and handed each of us a gilded fork for use on the meal. I thanked the servants (earning myself a surprised look from both Quentin and the envoy); the three of them blushed and curtsied almost as one before hastily departing.

We exchanged polite comments on the food before the envoy worked his way around to making an improved offer. He told me that his master was willing to let us keep the tolls we had collected during our brief occupation of the lower fort, provided we did the would-be bishop the additional favor of driving off the pretender encamped on his doorstep. It was not something he was able to do himself, not without great risk, and the Batavis council had staked out a firmly neutral position in the succession dispute. The indulgence, he added, was worth considerably more.

After exchanging what I hoped were several meaningful glances with Quentin, I told him I would take his offer under advisement, not quite rejecting it but not expressing any great enthusiasm either. I focused most of my attention on appreciating the food, which was not hard as it was good.

This may have been a clever negotiating tactic in other circumstances, but the envoy didn’t offer anything more. As I saw him off on his way, I thought of the letter in my pocket. It seemed, on the face of it, to be a far better offer; but could I trust a man who wanted to sneak his forces into the lower fort by cover of night? At the least, it seemed like a very optimistic strategy, one that relied on inattention.

The distance was not so great between the two forts (only a couple hundred yards) and even if the cloudy weather hid the moon, the clouds were not so thick as to totally block the light. I could imagine that if I held the upper fort, and the rival claimant to my bishopric was moving his forces into the lower fort, it would signal that I no longer had any reason to hold my fire. After all, the mercenary bandits holding the lower fort had chosen sides and would no longer be amenable to negotiations.