Accidental War Mage

I never received a message from the pockmarked woman; I waited for two days, and then the course of events turned in an unexpected direction one evening when I was out at a taverna with the infantry captain and a squad of our soldiers. After the barmaid’s third delivery of wine pitchers to our table, a strange woman squeezed her way in between two soldiers to sit down with us. I thought at first that she might be a messenger and then wondered if she might be a prostitute; groups of soldiers in drinking establishments seem to inevitably attract practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.

The woman opened her cloak and leaned forward. Through a combination of curiosity, admiration, and jealousy, her daring decolletage drew the eyes of nearly everyone around her. The good-luck stone around my own neck grew cold as the delicate tracery of her necklace glimmered briefly, its amber beads casting a yellow light. She spoke softly with a musical voice that cut through the noise of the taverna, but I had trouble attending to her words as my attention was drawn elsewhere.

What drew my attention was a sharp yank on my arm as Georg suddenly stood and bolted for the door of the taverna, her eyes wide in panic. I turned away from the spectacle of glimmering amber beads resting atop a generous expanse of feminine flesh, then shook my head. The infantry captain and her men could handle themselves while I dealt with whatever concern Georg had.

I caught up to her on the walkway next to the canal.

“Enchantress,” she blurted out. “That woman was casting a charm.”

I frowned, closing my eyes and extending my other senses. “She doesn’t feel like a mage,” I said. “The old man in the corner, two people upstairs, and to a much lesser degree the barkeeper, yes,” I added. “But she doesn’t feel any more like a wizard than you do.”

Georg frowned. “Right. You would have the aura sense. You can pick up strong or active mages, especially ones that can invoke lots of power, but wizards with more subtle types of magic or people with lesser talents just don’t have the same sort of power radiating out of them. Master wizards can mask themselves, too, but in her case, I really doubt she’s powerful enough to really register on her own. She was using a focus,” Georg said, by way of explanation.

Her hand briefly and unconsciously touched her own necklace before rising to pinch the air in front of her chin, as if she was stroking an invisible beard, and then she continued. “People who have just the smallest bit of magical talent don’t have the kind of power you need to cast spells, but if they’ve had the training, they can trigger and shape a spell from a focus that’s been enchanted by someone more powerful. And that necklace of hers – those thirteen amber beads, the septagram with the golden point leading to her throat – that’s a spell focus.”

“Really? Hm,” I said, then looked down at her. She seemed to know quite a lot about this subject. The most logical explanation was that she had been trained, which meant that either she or the baron’s daughter was a focus wizard. “Can you use a spell focus?”

Georg looked at me for a long moment. “Yes,” she said, her voice guarded. “I thought you knew that from the start,” she added. “Since you recognized me right away. All I can really do on my own is feel certain types of magic – I can feel them on my skin, it’s like … dry wool in wintertime, just before it sparks on you? Like how Fyodor can read the winds just by looking up into the sky.”

“Fyodor can read the wind?” I asked. “Really?”

“Yes,” Georg said. “He’s a little embarrassed that it’s all he can do, his grandfather was a mage capable of actual spellcasting. I understand why he might not have opened up about it to you.” She paused, gathering her courage. She raised her hand up, her palm hovering a few inches away from my arm. “You are scary,” she said very quietly.

“Huh,” I said. We talked for a while longer by the canal, as I was curious about how she had received her training.

Georg had been trained along with her mistress, who had inherited the talents of both of her grandmothers. The baron’s daughter had a real talent for both enchantment and illusion. Not strong enough to cast a spell with a few words and a gesture, but with a few hours to spare and a clean surface to draw out a chalk circle, it was a different matter. For the baron’s daughter, working around the limitations of her limited power meant learning how to make spell foci (which required more power than Georg had) and learning how to use them (which required almost no power at all).

After my curiosity had been satisfied, we returned to the taverna, but there was no sign of the woman with the daring decolletage, my infantry captain, or her men. The enchantress had absconded with an entire squad of soldiers while I had been trying to figure out what was going on. Where had they gone? I went upstairs, pushing past the objections of the bouncer with a shove that left a dent in the wall. They were not gambling; nor were they in the businesslike bedrooms that lined the next floor up from the gaming rooms.

A chilly wind swept through the taverna as I stormed back down the stairs. An older man who may have been the proprietor shrieked at me at length while I did so, something about having called the city guard to either jail me or shoot me and toss me into the canal.

“Where did my men go?” I asked, and the man ran up the stairs, a growing wet stain on the inside of one leg of his hose.

Most of the customers of the taverna were making themselves scarce, but a few, more bold than others, told me that the siren had led them out the back entrance. Some further questions revealed that “siren” was local slang for women who worked as recruiters for ship crews, and that my soldiers were most likely in the process of being press-ganged. With the Venetian navy drawing heavily on the Venetian citizenry in their continued conflict with the Sultan, merchant ships and foreign traders alike were desperate for sailors and oarsmen to keep running.

I found this irksome. The building shuddered briefly as I walked out of the mostly-vacant taverna and lines of ice glittered as they formed a hexagonal webwork of lines across the canal. I beckoned to a gondolier, and he paddled quickly in the other direction, past a half-dozen city guardsmen with chattering teeth, breaking through the small lines of ice forming on the surface of the water as he went.

The guardsmen had clearly not dressed warmly enough for the unseasonable cold winds blowing around, I noted to myself. Likely, I needed to prove I was ready to pay above the ordinary rate. Rummaging through my pocket, I found a silver florin and held it out, the bright metal gleaming; the next gondolier passing by hesitated, then paddled forward. I gave the man a brief explanation of my predicament and asked where I would be likely to find and recover my men.

The coin vanished a quick moment after hitting his palm, and the gondolier briefly glanced in the direction of the city guardsmen. The city guardsmen responded by looking away, and then the gondolier told me he had an idea of where I might look. He would be happy to take me there, and to the other ports of the city as well if I had more coin where the florin had come from.

His first guess about which direction my men might have gone was wrong; the florins I spent after the first were silver flashes of futility. Perhaps my men were silently aboard a ship; perhaps they were on a ship that had already left; perhaps they were in one of the grand houses that lined the canals. The enchantress had gotten herself and my men out of sight, and there was no trail to follow on the waters of Venice.

As the night started to give way to early pre-dawn gray, the gondolier’s exhaustion began to war with his greed. Georg’s exhaustion had already won victory over her; she was lying down in the boat wrapped up in her jacket.

“We have nearly circled the city,” he told me. “You will have to find another gondola if you want to keep looking.”

I looked out at the dark ships and sighed. “I am afraid I may as well stop looking,” I told him. “My men have vanished,” I said heavily, trailing my fingers through the water.

A bulbous head poked above the water of the canal. The creature had smooth gray skin and a long nose; I had never seen the like before. In a surprisingly high-pitched voice, it asked me what my problem was, revealing an even row of white conical teeth. The gondolier didn’t seem to be put ill at ease by its presence.

I told it that some of my friends had gotten lured away, probably to a ship, but I didn’t know which. Could it help me? I would be back later, I told it.

The creature giggled and submerged. I turned to the gondolier, who had a worried expression on his face, and told him he ought to pole for home.

After a brief morning nap, I woke, crunched down a handful of roasted coffee beans, and then rushed off to track down the harbormaster or the Venetian equivalent thereof. After questioning several nervous passers-by, I found a well-dressed man familiar with the business of the harbor.

“The convoy just left for Negroponte,” he told me. “If your friends were hired as oarsmen, they’re half a day’s journey out already.”

I made several suggestions for remedying this problem as I lifted the man by his shirt. The fabric was well-made and did not tear, and the man remained surprisingly calm as I shook the finger of my other hand in his elevated face.

“The Serene Republic is at war with the Sultan,” he told me. “Nothing to be done about it. The Venetian navy needs every galley it can get its hands on, and what the navy doesn’t hold left this morning for Negroponte. You’re out of luck – there just aren’t ships to be had, let alone a fast galley, let alone one whose master is willing to deal with a Lithuanian. A fishing boat just won’t get you there.”

“I’m not Lithuanian,” I said, by way of clarification.

“Some distant barbarian foreigner,” he clarified. “Lithuanian, Danish, Mongol, doesn’t really matter. You’re not Venetian or Dalmatian or Greek – you’re not from anywhere near here. Now, would you put me down?”

I returned the man to his feet reluctantly and looked out across the water.