Accidental War Mage

I held up the letter that had arrived from the second would-be bishop (the one with the small army camped outside the upper fort) while we had been entertaining an envoy from the first would-be bishop (the one holding the upper fort). “The real question is, can I trust him at his word?”

Quentin swayed back in his seat. “Of course,” he said. “He’s a priest and from a high noble family. It would be an insult not to take him at his word.”

I suppressed a derisive snort. My experiences with being under the command of nobles and priests had not given me great respect for either. The baron we had last worked for had wanted to dissolve our contract after someone (possibly the baron himself) had arranged for a noblewoman to be found in my bed after a night of drinking too much.

The last priest placed over me had been, if anything, worse. Major Alexei Pavlov, the chaplain who had been – at least nominally – my last immediate superior in the chain of command in the army of the Golden Empire. Supposedly, he had been an alchemist, but I had never seen any evidence of that, and the only devotion he exhibited was to alcoholism. He had managed to disappear entirely during a battle – presumably fleeing in cowardice – leaving me in command of a detached portion of General Spitignov’s task force in the middle of winter in hostile Avaria.

“I can understand that he will take offense if we accuse him of lying,” I said. “But I was asking what might happen if we did take him up on his offer.”

Ragnar cleared his throat. “The man is suggesting subterfuge, and all but accused us of employing subterfuge likewise. We don’t even know that he really is a priest, or that he really has a warrant from Rome to succeed to the bishopric.”

Quentin shook his head stubbornly. “He has a force of steam-knights and a small army,” Quentin said. “And an arcane-powered mech. Those don’t grow freely on trees. Nor is pretending kinship to a duke something a man can do lightly, at least here in the civilized parts of Europe. I don’t know what it’s like in the Union of Kalmar.”

Ragnar bristled at the implication that Scandinavia wasn’t a civilized part of Europe. He was about to voice some kind of angry objection, but I held up a hand and he held his tongue.

Quentin continued, ignoring or not noticing the silent exchange between Ragnar and me. “I don’t doubt that he’s come with the backing of Burgundy, and that means he can’t possibly be pretending to have a warrant from Rome. The duke’s position has been quite precarious from the start – just five years ago, Leon stripped his predecessor of half of his French possessions. Backing a brother’s false claim to have a warrant from Rome would be devastating for the duke.”

Felix rubbed his nose. The older Rimehammer cousin had a sour look on his face but was nodding reluctantly. “I’m convinced,” he said. “Honor is currency between nobles and their vassals. If it came out that this would-be bishop lied to us to stab us in the back after we let him into the lower fort, it’d cost him dearly while gaining him … almost nothing, really, even if he thinks he can defeat us without too many losses. Betrayal for the sake of betrayal is the stuff of fairy tales. I say we take him at his word.”

I looked around the room. “But … isn’t that also true of the other one?”

Quentin hesitated. “Well, yes,” he said.

“And don’t they both claim that they have a superior right to be bishop?” I asked. “One of them has to be lying about that, at least.”

Felix nodded; Quentin shook his head. Both opened their mouths to speak, talking over one another. After a moment, I waved Quentin to silence, letting the more senior officer go first. Felix thought that it was the kind of lie that one could get away with, meaning that it was no real harm to reputation. It was like the difference between a priest visiting a brothel or having a secret mistress, he added, a comparison that provoked a muffled feminine snort from behind a painting depicting thirteen men enjoying a meal together.

As Yuri and I stared at the painting wondering who else might be listening to the conversation, Quentin explained that he thought both of them had good reasons to claim the title, making the dispute a matter of one of them having a flawed opinion about church law, or imperial law, or about how the two of them interacted with one another.

“Very well,” I said, standing up. “If we can take both of them at their word, we send a message to the duke’s brother accepting his offer. He has the better bid, so the lower fort is his for the taking. We have to leave it sooner or later, and tonight is none too soon for me.”

There was a sound of muffled footsteps from the direction of the painting, which faded rapidly at a running pace. Whoever had been listening was gone. I wrote and sealed a quick note signaling my acceptance of the plan; Felix delegated the delivery of the message to Georg.

In anticipation of the need for rest, I took a nap that afternoon, waking up a little bit after sunset and then standing watch on the wall as darkness fell. It was a cloudy night, diffusing the moonlight to the point where shadows were blurry instead of being as sharp as they usually would be with a moon in the first quarter. The clouds stayed high in the sky, however, and no fog fell to truly obscure

When the duke’s brother and his soldiers made their move, there were still men vigilantly pacing back and forth along the walls of the upper fort; those men surely would be able to easily see the duke’s brother’s men as they left their campfires. The army traveled in single file, heading straight down the hill away from the upper fort before reaching the towpath beside the river and turning to march east along the river to the lower fort.

As if they weren’t already obvious enough, every sixth man in the column carried a shuttered lantern with one shutter opened, creating a splotch of brighter light ahead of him along the towpath. The boilers of the eight-legged steam-horses gurgled softly, throttled down to a minimum slow walking speed but clearly audible to my ears, a clear contrast to the crickets and the faint sound of music echoing across the water from the taverns of Batavis.

I watched the upper fort nervously. At any moment it could break out into a bustle of violent activity; if that happened I would have to run for shelter, as I wasn’t wearing my armor. For all I knew, preparations were already quietly in motion from behind the concealment of the walls. From the upper fort to the lower fort, the range was short enough for arquebuses to have deadly effect (especially with the advantage of elevation), let alone mortars and cannons.

On the other hand, they might be waiting for orders from the presumptive bishop himself, or they might simply not be paying attention. I shook my head. There was no point in speculating; I had orders to give. “Go tell the men at the western gate to start opening it already,” I said. “I don’t want the Burgundians waiting outside.” Not, I thought to myself, when they could be waiting under artillery fire.

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said, turning his face away from the distant campfires and pointing it at a spot about two feet to my left. He walked to the stairs carefully, running his hand along the top of the wall. He was so distracted that he nearly tripped on the first step, catching himself along the wall. It was good that I’d told the men on watch not to bring lanterns up to the top of the wall tonight; if he’d been carrying one, he surely would have dropped it, and that would have risked starting an accidental fire.

I watched the file of men and machines slowly approach, the steam knights near the head of the column and the lone mech bringing up the rear. The column stopped about ten yards from the gate, and the man at the head of the column took a deep breath, cupping his hands around his mouth just as the gate began to open. He stood there for a moment, a puzzled expression flashing across his shadowed face as he watched the portcullis rise.

“Hello the castle?” he asked in heavily accented Gothic.

I leaned out, both hands resting on the wall. “Well met,” I called out, sparing a quick glance up the hill. I didn’t see any signs of attack from the upper fort yet, but that could change at any moment. “Come on in,” I added, hoping they would hurry up.

The man peered upwards, his eyes scanning back and forth across the wall for a moment. Then he looked back to the column, shouting in an unfamiliar French dialect; should they go in?

A voice shouted back yes and the column moved forward, eight-legged steam-horses in the lead. I drew back from the edge of the wall and hastened down the stairs to greet them on the inside of the wall, watching my step carefully so that I would not stumble like the soldier I had sent down before.

When I met him by lantern light, the would-be bishop seemed surprisingly young for his appointed office – perhaps in his thirties. His name was Raphael and he spoke excellent Latin, though his Gothic was less than fluent. Later, I would learn that he also had a very good command of Greek and Hebrew and that – in spite of first impressions – he was usually very good at keeping his seat on a steam horse.

As it was, the first thing I said to him was an inquiry about how many fingers I was holding up. This was because moments after he laid eyes on me in the courtyard, he fell off the steam-horse with a sudden start, his eyes widening in shock even before he started to overbalance. Fortunately for me, Raphael’s first response to my question was to shout “Stand down!” to his men in French, or there might have been real trouble.

I had every logical reason to trust the Burgundians, as Felix and Quentin had told me, but they had plenty of reasons to distrust a motley crew of foreign mercenaries who were wrongfully in possession of a bishop’s toll castle. My men might have outnumbered them, but the Burgundian knights had fine mage-tempered armor. They also had a more experienced war mage with them – not Raphael himself, who required the use of a ritual circle and a calm environment to exercise anything other than his particular talent for reading auras, but the other priest in their party, a retired abbot who was Raphael’s chief advisor.

The abbot was something of a specialist in the invocation of elemental power, accounted a master of four elements. His control of fire was deft enough to light arrows on fire in flight. He could summon what I thought of as fire-imps (he called them “cherubs of light”), small manifest spirits that, if unchecked, could wreak chaos on any force reliant on gunpowder. But it was his claimed mastery of earth and water that impressed Felix the most; the abbot said he could instantly drain water out of an earthen tunnel and then reinforce it against collapse … or cause it to collapse.

Much of war is siegecraft, and in a late-night six-way conversation involving myself, Raphael, the abbot, Raphael’s knight-captain, and a very quiet Georg, the experienced Captain Rimehammer was happy to explain at length how many sieges had been decided by tunnel action and how. Perhaps the numbers were becoming fewer now, he speculated, with the rise of the great bombards and smaller cannons, highly effective against the older fortifications that protected most of Europe’s castles and walled cities; perhaps more sieges would be decided by tunnel-work in the near future, as star forts with great cannon-proof earthworks became common.

We settled payment, though Raphael said he was in no hurry for us to leave the lower fort. His aura-reading talent had settled his worries about my intentions. The payment he’d offered me amounted to the last of his coin on hand, and he had been nervous about trusting a man he was certain had misrepresented himself.

“You certainly don’t have to rush out on a dark and moonless night like this one,” Raphael said. “The river can be tricky enough in fully daylight when you’re trying to ferry heavy equipment across. I feel like I was lucky not to have anyone or anything slip off the edge of the towpath. We can talk more in the morning.”

I nodded. “Georg, pass word to the men to stand down and tell them they can bed down,” I said. “All but the most minimal of watches. They could still send a force down the causeway – I want men watching it at all times.”

Georg’s salute was passable this time as she scampered out of the room.

“Oh, to be a young man with that sort of energy at this time of night,” groaned the knight-captain, the solid iron-gray bar of his joined eyebrows briefly furrowing with jealousy under the wrinkled bald dome of his forehead.

Raphael tried and failed to hold back a short laugh as he glanced at the door in the direction of the departed Georg. “Ah, well, never mind that,” he said.