I will never forget the day that I met General Ognyan Spitignov, so it is there I shall begin my story.

We were still asleep in the barracks when the colonel came in to tell everybody that we needed to be ready for a surprise inspection on the parade ground and that a very important person was riding out to our outpost. He was waving a sheet of paper as he told us this, then put the paper on a table and rushed off to shake awake the heavier sleepers of our battalion.

I had always been possessed of an extra measure of curiosity, and unlike many of my fellow soldiers I could read very well, and so it was that I was able to catch a glance of the name on the paper: General Ognyan Spitignov. I whispered this to my bunkmate Vitold as we hastily rummaged through our locker looking for our dress uniforms.

“General Ognyan Spitignov? The Butcher of Belz is coming here?" Vitold didn’t seem to believe it at first, but his blurted response was loud enough to draw a glare from the colonel, who told us in terms I would rather not write down that we should avoid calling the esteemed war mage “Butcher” to his face. The barracks burst into noise, the hubbub of many soldiers trying to talk at once, and I busied myself trying to find the boxes with our dress uniforms.

Somewhere beneath our regular mechanics’ pullovers, our stash of vodka, the playing cards, and that extra toolkit I won from Karlov last week were our fancy parade uniforms, the ones we weren’t supposed to touch or get any grease on. We hadn’t even done more than take a quick peek at them still in the boxes when the supply officer issued them to us last month. We’d marveled at the deep red color of the capes while carefully avoiding touching them with our grease-stained fingers.

I found the boxes, but as I pulled out the red cape on top, it turned out that my box contained only the red capes – half a dozen each in my box and, worse, another half dozen in Vitold’s. No fancy coats, no fancy belts, no fancy pants, no fancy hats, just a dozen capes in a mislabeled pair of little wooden boxes. It was now my turn to run through my vocabulary of unprintable epithets, though unlike the colonel, I did so discreetly, under my breath, rather than at the top of my lungs.

Vitold, however, had a practical suggestion.

“Look, Mikolai," he said, “Yuri and Igor have a weekend pass and are passed out drunk somewhere off in town. They will not mind if we borrow their dress uniforms." He gestured with a hairpin at the locker next to ours.

Yuri and Igor were the steam knights who bunked in the next row over from ours; the four of us often played cards together. Between them, they were the thinnest and fattest of the steam knights, which is one reason we knew them so well; they’d gotten new (or rather, newly reconditioned) powered suits issued to them when their unit got rotated to the garrison. Being somewhat non-standard in size, they had both wanted their suits to be adjusted to fit better. The crew chief wouldn’t sign for it without a bribe, so Igor and Yuri decided to cut out the middleman and pay Vitold and me directly.

I thought borrowing our friends’ uniforms seemed like a brilliant idea; and a few minutes later, I was wearing Igor’s too-large dress uniform with the belt looped half an extra turn around my waist, while Vitold, being the smaller of the two of us, was squeezed into Yuri’s too-small dress uniform. I kissed my good-luck stone – the one an old lady living out in the forest had given me for chopping wood for her when I was a young boy – and tucked it under my shirt collar.

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We were nearly the last ones onto the parade ground, hustling to join the rear rank just as General Spitignov stepped out of the carriage. He was a very large and exceedingly ugly man wearing a war mage’s under-armor harness, and as he stumped around, he muttered to himself as much as to anyone else. Every so often, he stopped to look at someone more closely. I kept my eyes straight forward and my arms rigidly at my sides as I strained to try to hear what he was saying.

After what felt like three hours but was probably closer to ten minutes, he reached our rank and stopped right in front of me. He was taller than most men, able to look me in the eyes without peering upwards or downwards, and his rune-tattooed arms were as thick around as my legs. I’d met taller men, like my cousin Konstantin, but I’d never met a man who made me feel small and delicate before. He fingered my collar, poked at my chest, then rasped out a word as I started to sweat nervously.

“Name?"

“Mikolai Stepanovich, sir!" My voice cracked.

He paused and then pointed to my hand. I held it up, looking at it, and then back at him, puzzled.

“Sir?"

He rasped out another word. “Grease?" he asked.

I looked down at my hand and at the stubborn black rims underneath the fingernails.

“Uh, yes, sir."

“Good. Not afraid to get your hands dirty." His eyes unfocused a bit. “I like that in a steam knight. Ten year service badge," he waved at my borrowed jacket. “Maintains his own suit personally and regularly even out here. Loyal, diligent and willing to get his hands dirty. That’s the sort of steam knight I like." He focused again, glanced over at Vitold, looked down at his grease-spotted hand, up at his collar, and then back to me.

“You two are good comrades?"

I didn’t know how to correct the misapprehensions of the large ugly man in front of me without getting into trouble, didn’t like him talking about me as if to some invisible third person, and didn’t want to endure his halitosis any longer, so I gave the simple answer.

“Yes, sir."

This was, apparently, a satisfactory answer, as the general nodded, and moved down along the line. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, and watched out of the corner of my eye as the general worked his way down the rest of the line, then circled back up around to the front of the parade ground. He spent a couple of minutes talking quietly to a small weasel-faced man. The lot of us stood nervously as he pointed up and down the line while muttering inaudible, and then demonstrated that he could speak above a mutter by dismissing us.

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After changing back out of our borrowed parade uniforms and having a late – and cold – breakfast of porridge, we were sent to go work on the battalion’s heavy equipment. Apparently, the general was going to take a platoon or so of hand-picked volunteers with him for some hush-hush mission, and the train would be leaving tonight.

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I didn’t know who exactly was dumb enough to volunteer to leave a nice garrison post in one of the quieter areas of Ruthenia to go off on some hush-hush mission with a war mage of questionable sanity – that sounded like a recipe for getting dead in a hurry – but could they at least have chosen to kill themselves in a way that didn’t leave me working for ten straight hours on steam knight boilers?

Well, at least we got done in time for dinner. Vitold and I were looking forward to this, and had a bet to settle: I was hoping that with a very important visitor present, the officers would have rounded up the best cooks in the battalion for mess hall duty, while Vitold was hoping I would owe him ten kopeks for being wrong.

The borscht looked and smelled familiar. Two days ago, one of the new conscripts dropped the mess sergeant's prized box of turmeric into the cookpot while making borscht, turning it a bright yellow-orange color and imparting a strange and exotic flavor to it. It showed up yesterday again since nobody with a lick of sense had eaten any, and its repeat appearance today was accompanied by a brusque order announcing that borscht was not an optional part of our meal today. It goes without saying Vitold, who would eat nearly anything, had already had seconds at dinner both yesterday and the day before – he loved complaining, and it gave him a good excuse.

The bread looked like it had been baked today. I say that not because it looked or smelled particularly appealing, but because never before had I seen rye bread so dense and hard – it looked strange and unfamiliar (unlike yesterday’s borscht) and wasn’t the least bit moldy (unlike most of the bread we had seen this week). As we headed for our seats, Vitold – who grew up in a bakery – cheerfully informed me that he had made bread so dense and hard once, when he forgot to add yeast.

When I asked him how he could be so cheerful about the matter, he reminded me that I now owed him ten kopeks. I was fishing through my pockets when a hand placed itself on my shoulder in a comradely way, accompanied by a familiar booming voice congratulating me on my bravery and patriotism. I turned to greet the owner of the hand with a sense of trepidation.

“Colonel Illinich! What can I do for you today, sir?" I eyed the colonel warily. He was smiling entirely too widely.

“For me? Ah, I am afraid there is nothing you can do for me. I just wished to congratulate you on volunteering, and wish you luck on your glorious mission.” The colonel leaned forward.

“Volunteering, sir?" I shot a look at Vitold, who shook his head in wide-eyed innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about."

“General Spitignov was very impressed with you. You have volunteered to accompany him on his mission, since the war mage specifically requested you. By name – and there are no other Mikolai Stepanoviches in the battalion." The colonel gave me a stern look.

Odd, the colonel didn’t look delusional. Had I volunteered for something without realizing it? I opened my mouth to object and then looked around the dining hall. No small number of heads were turned to look at the two of us, some sympathetic, and some gleeful. I shut my mouth as the real meaning of his statement filtered through my head. That kind of volunteering. As someone who enlisted in order to avoid being conscripted, I understood that kind of volunteering all too well.

The colonel placed a pair of papers on the table and spoke more quietly. “These are the official orders attaching you two jokers to Spitignov’s command. The train leaves two hours from now. Good luck."

Vitold and I looked at each other blankly for a moment, shocked. When I looked back at the colonel, he was gone. I broke off a piece of rye brick, dipped it in the yellow-orange stew (I could hardly bring myself to think of the odd-flavored stew as “borscht”), and chewed mechanically. It tasted like ashes in my mouth.

“Why me? He didn’t ask for my name and didn’t talk to me, it was all just you," my formerly inseparable buddy said. “Maybe I can get out of this. I could be sick from food poisoning," he said hopefully, spooning bright yellow-orange borscht into his mouth with renewed vigor.

I read the papers. “Your name is right there on these. Maybe the colonel wants to get rid of you. You did put itching powder in his boots, after all." I pushed my plate away, my appetite having disappeared at the last minute. “Do you want to chance having the Butcher of Belz himself mark you down as a deserter?"

Vitold shook his head as he chewed.

“Yeah, me neither. I’ll go pack our gear. This one’s yours, this one’s mine," I passed him one of the sheets and left the dining hall.

My first stop was the mechanics’ workshop, where I packed up our toolkits and a few useful extra bits, and then hustled back to the barracks. I was surprised I didn’t see Vitold there waiting for me – was he still eating? What was taking him so long?

I packed away what I could into our locker, and in a couple of minutes Vitold came in through the door, carrying a bag.

“Vitold, we’re nearly late," I said. He informed me that he had procured a cart for us to ride in style to the train depot, and that we would not possibly be late. I carried the locker out to the cart; shortly thereafter changing places with Vitold, as the mule wasn’t particularly inclined to listen to him. Vitold grew up in a bakery, rather than a farm, and didn’t really have much experience with talking to mules. I politely asked the mule if he would kindly hurry on his way, and he did.

We very nearly were late, in spite of the borrowed cart. The gray sky of late summer’s eve was punctuated with a line of smoke and ash drawing near even as we crested the last hill before the depot. At the depot, I could see the giant ugly man standing and scowling as the train pulled up. Most of the soldiers had gotten on when the two of us finished making it down the hill to the train, where a rodent-like fellow with a clipboard accosted us.

Being a bright fellow, he evidently figured out that we were mechanics from our grease-stained coveralls and the toolkits we unloaded from our cart, and directed us to the task of loading a pile of disassembled steam knight suits into a boxcar. When that was done, we ourselves made as if to climb into a passenger car, at which point he informed us that we didn’t need to come along, though he appreciated our enthusiasm. After all, they only had enough space in the sleeping compartments for the two last steam knights, who should be showing up at any minute, and our commanding officer wouldn’t appreciate our unexpected departure from his battalion.

I told him I had orders to go on that train. He rolled his eyes at me in disbelief and informed me that General Spitignov didn’t need any more mechanics, and if my name wasn’t on his list, I was not getting on the train to hitch a free ride south to Khoryvsk at the expense of the Imperial Army. I pulled out my orders, waved them in his general direction, and told him that Ognyan himself had personally requested my presence on this mission. He checked the paper against the one on his clipboard, sighed, and waved me and Vitold aboard.

“What was that all about?" Vitold asked me, looking at me suspiciously. “Did you just pass up an opportunity to get us out of this? He didn’t seem to want to let us on."

“He wanted to make sure our names were on the list. Which they are, he just didn’t realize we’re mechanics. We’d get in a lot of trouble if we stayed behind." I sighed. “Let’s get settled in and claim those last two bunks before the steam knights show up. It’s going to be a very long ride, and I’d like to get some sleep." Finding the last open pair of bunks proved to be easy – they were right next to the door. We were stowing our gear (or rather, I was stowing our gear while Vitold stared unhappily out a window) when the train lurched into motion.

“I thought there were two more steam knights coming," Vitold said. “Nobody else done came down the hill. Guess we’re leaving without them."

“Good for us, bad for them," I said. “We don’t have to fight anybody for the bunk, and they’re on the general’s bad side now. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes the next time he sees them."

Vitold rummaged in his mysterious bag and pulled out a flaky pastry of some sort. It looked like something you’d see in a French bakery. “Eat, Mikolai, I raided the officers’ pantry on my way out of the mess hall. You look like you’re about to fall over."

“Vitold, you’re a good comrade," I told him, gratefully, and tore into it. It was fluffy, buttery, and had some kind of wonderful sweet filling.