Accidental War Mage

Using the self-propelled charcoal kiln as an impromptu cooking stove, Vitold prepared me a quick meal of thick fluffy pancakes. Katya insisted on serving them to me, which demonstrated her practiced familiarity with her mechanical hand. (She even straightened the dinner fork afterward.) When I suggested that I was perfectly well and wanted to check to see who was steering the barge and talk about our plans with our client, Katya refused to leave my lap, wrapping the blanket more tightly around us.

“You need to rest,” Katya said, loosening my belt to a point where standing up would become cause for embarrassment. “You are now full of pancakes and warm. Sleep.”

Reluctantly, I allowed myself to be pushed back down in the cart by the warm weight of Katya. It was less comfortable than usual since she had not taken off her arm; her metal chest plate that served to brace her mechanical arm was hard.

The river was flowing well with snowmelt, and Tridentum had passed well out of sight. The trident, however, remained with us. I had slept in well past sunrise and the change of shifts between those who had stayed awake as night crew and those who had slept. As other officers had matters well in hand at the changing of the shifts, there was little for me to do but worry.

The gilded and painted trident was a reminder of the city we’d left behind; hopefully, the artist had seen his statue installed without breaking the carved trident which was the most delicate part of his work. Also, I hoped I had not become a wanted fugitive across the Gothic Empire; I knew that within the Golden Empire, notices sometimes circulated from the capital regarding fugitive persons who had offended the pride of the Undying Emperor. An accusation of lese majeste was a serious matter.

Under my fretful handling (and perhaps two or three throws at a practice target after I decided I liked the balance of it), the gold leaf began to wear off the points of the trident, showing verdigris beneath. Recalling what I had read about bronze, verdigris, copper, and gold in the alchemical text, I had an idea, which I then discussed with Vitold. For my part, I set a fishing line while Vitold disconnected the charcoal kiln’s engine and went to work.

Two hours later, the kiln was functioning as a high-temperature furnace fueled by some of our precious coal, Vitold had a pot of a muddy-looking brown paste prepared, and I had caught seven bream. Six I laid off to the side; it had taken me that long to find one large enough for what I wanted to do. The fish was sliced almost (but not wholly) in half, the brown paste evenly applied to both sides as Johann watched with growing curiosity, and then I sandwiched the head of the trident inside the fish. Vitold, armed with needle and thread, stitched the fish shut around the head of the trident while I held the haft.

I wore a thick pair of double-layered leather gloves, mechanic’s coveralls, and the protective mask of my old trade, a translucent layer of hard resin blurring my vision. We had rarely worn the masks past training; they protected one’s face from high-pressure steam venting unexpectedly, but they distorted vision horribly and the rigid things sat uncomfortably on the face of anyone with a normally-sized nose. Vitold opened the door to the kiln and I shoved the trident deep in, praying that alchemy really did work as mundanely as the book seemed to describe.

Heat, then steam, then steam and smoke poured out of the kiln door, but I held the trident firmly. The haft warmed in my grip, paint peeling off of it. The air smelled of burned fish; I still waited until my hands were uncomfortably warm, then pulled the trident’s head out of the kiln. The fish had become an unrecognizable lump of black charcoal; Vitold helped knock it loose with the flat side of a three-quarter-inch wrench.

“Orichalcum!” Johann seemed to suddenly find alchemy considerably more interesting now that he was faced with its product. “You’ve turned it into solid orichalcum!”

“Well done, Vitold,” I said, holding up the trident to the sky. If I understood the alchemical process correctly, the trident had only a very thin layer of orichalcum on its head.

“You will mage-temper it next?” Johann asked, leaning forward.

I paused, bringing the trident horizontal. “How would I do that?” I paused.

Nervously but eagerly, Johann stepped forward, a small knife appearing in his hand, then hesitated. “You are sure you wish me to…”

I nodded.

Johann swallowed, then slashed his left arm and squeezed, chanting in bookish Latin as his blood dripped hissing onto the trident’s head. He stepped back.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“Well, it’s blood-seasoned but not quenched. Then it would go back in for the time that the smith thinks is right,” he said. When I didn’t say anything, he hastily spoke again, with a questioning air. “If it’s not burned all away, it will remain connected to me? Then the process is repeated, sometimes?” He looked at me, swallowing nervously. When I stuck the head of the trident back into the kiln, he breathed out a sigh of relief.

When I pulled it out again, I slipped off one glove, then pricked my fingers on the sharp tines, repeating his incantation under my breath. Then I turned back to the kiln again to put the trident’s head back in a third time, but I had not put my glove back on. When my bare hand touched the haft, I realized how hot it was to the touch and dropped the trident with a shout of pain. There was a hiss as it landed on the damp deck of the barge.

After Katya had bandaged my burned hand, Johann asked about the inscription on the haft of the trident, spelled out in a tracery of fine orichalcum wire sunk a fingernail’s width deep.

“It is just how some of the orichalcum melted and ran along the shaft as I handled it,” I said, then paused. “In truth, it does look like the writing of the old people of Cimmeria,” I said, recalling the scratches on an old copper pot long gone to green. “Yes, it is Hleode. Their writing does not quite use an alphabet, each symbol is an icon for a word.” After I’d complained to the little old grandmother about learning the dead language of Latin with its five declensions, only spoken by scholars and mostly badly, she’d insisted I learn the tongue called Hleode and its nine declensions; then made me promise that if she died before me, I would burn her hut, for that was the Hleode tradition – a hut was built when a new generation of a family entered the world and burned when the last of that generation died.

“But what does it say?” Johann leaned forward curiously.

I rotated the trident in my hand, considering several possible directions in which the words might have been meant to be read. “Spear triple-instrument man serves, will man’s follow, direction heart pulls,” I said in Hloede, skipping over one or two symbols I couldn’t recognize. Perhaps I would remember them later. I shook my head, switching to Latin, a language more polished by civilization. “The trident serves the man, following his will and his heart.”

“Oh,” Johann said. “It looks like rather more than that.”

“Hleode writing was abandoned for good reason,” I said. “Each word is a picture broken down to straight lines so that it can be cut into wood with a knife. It takes a long while to write anything, and there is little chance of writing small neat letters legibly.”

We reached Verona in the evening. Some tense negotiations resulted in permission for a few of us to come ashore to purchase provisions before going on down the river; while the city authorities could stop us from passing through by raising a chain anchored on either side by the city wall, they felt the wiser course of action was encouraging us to continue along in haste.

With only a handful of us allowed the liberty of the city for a few brief hours, our employer – the pockmarked woman I presumed to be the daughter of an imperial thaumaturge – insisted that she be among that limited number. I, naturally, had to go with her as her bodyguard, wearing my new armor and – by her insistence – also the cerulean cloak, though I should keep a respectable ten paces behind her once we had cleared the docks. She would signal if she needed more direct assistance.

Verona was alive into the evening, and the pockmarked woman flitted from taverna to taverna, drinking only a few sparing sips and saying only a few sparing words; she was there to prod and to listen, asking about the state of the Venetian Republic’s trading fleet and its spring convoys; of diplomacy between the Sultanate and the Republic; the sea-weather; and what wars might be in stock for the campaign season on the fertile fragmented soil of the peninsula that had been almost entirely Roman for roughly a thousand years.

War is, after all, mostly a warm-weather affair; most warm seasons in my lifetime had seen armies on the march in the Roman peninsula, home of the condottieri. There were outstanding disputes between Milan and Venice, though armies had not yet started marching about. Perhaps once I had delivered my employer to Venice, the Raven’s Battalion would find employment locally.

She kept her hood up, for the most part, but still drew attention; one gentleman followed her out of a taverna with the slightly unsteady gait of a man who lacks sobriety.

“I love you!” he shouted at the pockmarked woman.

She turned, startled; his subsequent explanation that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen seemed cruel, considering her decidedly imperfect features. When she did not respond to the provocation, he doubled down on his sarcastic teasing by announcing that she was fit to marry him – and he was a scion of a great noble house!

Above the street, a young girl, perhaps thirteen, choked off a sob as she slammed her window shut, cursing the man for his fickle cruelty – presumably empathizing with the pockmarked woman. (It just goes to show that not all pretty young girls are cruel to ugly women; some sympathize with them.) His persistence suggesting a threat, I approached from behind, gripping him by the elbow.

“Unhand me,” he cried out, turning to face me.

I released his elbow while thinking of what to say; I settled on a diplomatic statement. “It is not seemly for a nobleman to chase a woman through the street,” I said, echoing something that Quentin had told me by way of an explanation of his own behavior and his failure to speak with the landgravine directly before she had invited me to escort her to the imperial court.

“True,” the man said, adjusting his puffed sleeve. “But that doesn’t give you the right to lay a hand on me! I ought to demand satisfaction.”

I looked down at him silently for a moment as I tried to understand what he meant. A curious pair of ravens fluttered over to investigate, one perching on each of my shoulders while I pondered and then gave up. “What sort of satisfaction do you feel entitled to?” I asked.

“Ah,” the man said. “Nothing, really, I’ll just be heading back into the tavern. Mercutio must be wondering why I ran off.”

A smile quirked on the pockmarked woman’s face after the man had gone; she went up on her tiptoes to deposit a kiss on my cheek by way of thanks, which made me glad that Katya had not come and then immediately worried that perhaps Katya had come. After I had finished looking for rifle barrels on the surrounding rooftops, I found I was more than ten steps behind the pockmarked woman.