I blinked, then looked around wildly. Yes, it had become dark all of a sudden. A slim waxing crescent moon shone gently through the ruined village, and the stars were shining. Who had stolen the sun from the sky and turned it into night? I went to the barn where I had told my comrades to put the wounded, finding Vitold napping just inside the door in a chair. I woke him with a shake.
“I’m awake, I’m awake!” he protested. “Oh, it’s you, Mikolai.” He put down his pistol. “You scared me for a moment there.”
I asked him what had happened, and why everyone was asleep; he informed me that he had intended to keep a watch, but must have dozed off, and he was very sorry, but he didn’t think we’d be attacked again so soon, especially what with me standing there like a terrifying gargoyle. I had never realized Vitold thought I was ugly, so I felt the need to ask further.
“Vitold, I don’t think my face is so terrifying as to scare off an army, and while you are right about -" I stopped myself, connecting the facts in front of me. “Vitold? How long was I standing there?"
He told me that I had been standing there for the entire day, holding up the sword and surrounded by an eerie glow. I’d scowled at the sword for the entire day, and at least some of the night, before he’d fallen asleep, anyway. Like a statue, he added, the sort those fancy types tend to put on their buildings – fierce expression, martial stance, and all. Did I know what he meant? Was gargoyle not the right word for that?
I reassured Vitold he had indeed remembered correctly what a gargoyle was, and that I did, as well. His mention of the sword reminded me that I was still holding it. I remembered that the hilt had been shaped like a pair of serpents twined together, their heads curled apart to form a crossguard, a pale pearlescent stone anchoring the pommel between the curled tips of their tails.
However, when I looked down at the handle in my grasp, it looked instead like a crow, the blade emerging from the crow’s head. The crow’s spread wings formed the crosspiece and its grasping talons the pommel.
Strange. Had someone else switched out the old man’s sword for another one? That seemed unlikely. I didn’t remember seeing any other swords so finely decorated, much less ones with such an oddly-shaped bronze blade; the enemy wizard hadn’t even had a sword, though much of his gear had been decorated with orichalcum or gilded with gold. It had to be the same sword I’d picked up from the corpse of the old man.
The enemy wizard leader had confirmed my status as a wizard, in a way that nobody else could: Seeing me command my mechs, through his own senses as a magically gifted individual, perhaps even a proper war mage. I had felt, too, that he was a wizard just by looking at him. And if he had indeed been a war mage, I probably was, too; war mages had no peers on the battlefield.
Whatever had just happened with the sword probably also had to do with my newly-discovered magical gifts, but I didn’t want to think on those matters for too long or too hard. It was late, every muscle in my body was sore, and I was exhausted. I went to sleep with the sword still clutched in my hand.
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The next day, the messenger returned (along with the well-bred horse that had once belonged to Colonel Ivan Ivanovich Romanov). He was escorted by Katya and a dog wearing little snow boots and an armored harness that identified him as an honorary sergeant of the Imperial Army. The messenger had a sealed message tube, which he handed me without delay. I eyed the personal seal of Ognyan Spitignov with trepidation for a moment, then broke the seal open. There was a small dried-up scrap of hide (pulled and twisted into a rod) and a rolled-up piece of paper. I tucked the twisted piece of hide into a pocket and pulled the paper out of the tube, unrolling it.
Hopefully, the general was in an understanding mood and willing to forgive my lateness to rendezvous with him at the manor considering that we’d been attacked by Avarian soldiers. They may not have had new-model French muskets, but they’d been quite deadly enough with their older arquebuses.
“Dear Comrade Wizard Mikolai Stepanovich Yagin," it began, a form of address that puzzled me mightily.
Everything except the “Mikolai Stepanovich" part was rather startling, in fact. Wizard? Yagin? Dear Comrade? This was the same General Ognyan who thought that being diplomatic involved waiting to behead people until after he had finished enunciating his demands, rather than swinging immediately. We were neither peers nor friends.
But we were, I supposed, in the same army, even if we did not share the same sense of purpose. And if wizards can sense each other, the general might have known I was a wizard, even if I hadn’t. So “Dear Comrade Wizard" made some sense. I had no idea who the Yagins were or why the general thought I might belong to that family. My family didn’t even have a surname.
I forced myself to read onwards. The general proceeded to congratulate me for my unswerving loyalty to the state and my “dedication to maintaining Secrets of State in Tightest Confidence." He praised me for having “surprising mental flexibility and quick learning for a Man of your advanced Age and long Years in the Steam Knight Corps." He apologized for having to cut my training short. My what? Training? The general thought he was training me? I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.
Evidently, he was being recalled elsewhere by “orders of the Highest Security of State.” As those orders did not explicitly require him to bring his task force with him, he was leaving behind the wounded and anyone else who would slow down his travel plans. In accordance with his travel plans, he had “a Mission which my most puissant Facility of Intelligence divined was Necessary for me to take Initiative to order you to embark upon at whatever Cost in Blood is Necessary.”
I was to join with the wounded he had left behind at the manor, and after repairing or disposing of disabled soldiers and damaged war material, take all steps possible to root out and destroy support for Wallachian rebels among their close ethnic kin in the eastern part of Avaria – not, he clarified, to conquer and subjugate Avaria, as “such is Unfortunately Forbidden.”
He would, he finished, leave me one of his dogs, named Yuri. This was, the letter assured me, a singular honor, a token of his appreciation for my loyal service to “the Imperial Cause and State Security." The last line on the page was a string of nonsense words written in runes, which flared as I read them. It was a latent spell, one activated by the simple act of silently reading the letters.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
For a moment, I thought I smelled the general’s distinctive whiff of halitosis; and then there was a burst of fire. I flinched, closing my eyes; and when I opened them, I was holding only ash, and my gloves were singed. The messenger was looking at me with wide eyes, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to form words, unsure of what to say. Katya also looked surprised but was biting her lip, holding in her own questions. Vitold and the other soldiers busied themselves, conspicuously looking in every other direction but towards me.
As for me, my anger and frustration were as warm as the smoldering ashes in my hands, and it was plain on my face.
I heard a snuffling sort of noise, then looked down. There was the dog, sitting on its haunches at my feet. Unusually for a dog, he didn’t seem concerned by the pyrotechnics that had just taken place less than a yard away; he was looking up at me, a doggy sort of smile on his face. He thought I had something he wanted. After a moment, I remembered the twisted-up piece of hide and fished it back out of my pocket.
“Yuri?" The dog barked again, recognizing his name. I tossed him the scrap of hide. It’s hard to be angry at a dog, and my mood eased.
The messenger was surprised when I told him General Ognyan Spitignov had assigned me command of the mission; particularly since he hadn’t known that the illustrious General Spitignov had received orders requiring that general’s imminent removal from our vicinity. The messenger was also surprised at my field promotion. Evidently, that was something the general had felt was important and therefore deserved to be kept secret.
The messenger swallowed nervously and glanced quickly over at Katya, who was busy biting her lip and looking at me intently. As she was intent on me, she ignored the messenger’s questioning look completely, neither confirming nor denying this shocking piece of information. Yuri interpreted the messenger’s fretfulness as a sign of impending treachery and advanced, growling menacingly.
“Yuri, heel,” I told the dog. It gave me a mournful look and padded back to my side. “Good dog,” I said, patting it on the head. I drew myself straight and looked the messenger straight in the eye. “If I’m not accurately representing the contents of that message, I’m sure the general will take a personal interest in correcting the error when he finds out. Do I look like I want to pick a bone with the general?”
Behind me, I could hear cawing, and the light of day dimmed a little. The crows were back in force to come pester us. Obnoxious birds. The messenger shifted uneasily as if he wasn’t sure how to answer my rhetorical question. Flighty fellow. I took a deep breath, and made my first command decision: We would move out immediately, or as quickly as we could get everything on the road.
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When I had been placed in charge of a small detachment of men by circumstance, digging in with the wounded men and broken machines and asking for someone else to come sort it out seemed like a brilliant way of dealing with being put on the spot. Now I was the someone else who needed to sort it out, and there was nothing to be done but to move the wounded and broken and connect up with the rest of the strike force as quickly as possible. There were three reasons.
First, this was the site of a pitched battle. Many of the enemy had escaped, and word of our presence was surely spreading. If more soldiers were in the area, they might gather a greater force and strike again. For that matter, the carrion birds had announced our presence to any other interested parties. Rebels, bandits, scavengers – everyone within miles surely knew a bloody battle had happened here. Our mission was one that would be most easily accomplished if we kept the balance of information on our side.
Second, I wasn’t sure our mission was entirely legal, or that my command status would stand up as legitimate in front of a board of inquiry. The message implied that the general had assigned himself the mission, and their recall of him might have been intended to prevent serious retaliation from Avaria. I needed more information, and I wasn’t going to get it sitting around in the ruins of the village.
Third, if the general hadn’t seen fit to inform the messenger delivering my orders that I was to assume command of the force, he might not have seen fit to inform the men he’d left behind at the manor, either. If I didn’t move now, the rest of the strike force could very well decide to move on without me. If I was in fact in legal command of the strike force, I could be held responsible for anything they did, in which case I needed to get there before they did anything precipitous.
My mind made up, I strode around, pointing my sword around this way and that as I gave orders. I never realized before what a useful thing it is to have a bright shiny stick to gesture with when ordering about men and heavy machinery. Perhaps this is why officers often have shiny swords. Katya followed in my wake, trailing behind me with an uncertain expression on her face and an unasked question on her lips.
I asked her about it, once, and she said that she could wait until we were alone to talk. There wasn’t really any privacy to be had while moving around heavy machinery and wounded men and getting them all moving along the road in approximately the same direction, and so we didn’t talk about whatever it was at all.
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Once we got on the road, I asked Katya if she would do me the favor of making sure we didn’t have anyone following on our trail. She gave me a salute, mounted up on a horse, and rode off. I didn’t see her again until after we arrived at the manor, rejoining the main body of the strike force. I had meant for her to simply ride a circuit of the battleground making one last check, but I had not been specific.
When I sighted the manor, I was pleasantly surprised to find it largely intact. Vitold had a low opinion of the building. He remarked to me that he thought it looked like a bordello, that the walls looked too thin to keep the wind out, and that the entire thing looked like it was about to collapse from a lethal combination of dry rot and sheer ugliness. It was, he finished, a death trap, and a single volley of fireworks would quickly transform the whole thing into a collapsing pile of flaming wood.
How the man could grow up in a town full of buildings and not see the solid stonework beneath the garish mauve and crimson veneer, I don’t know. The windows on the first two levels clearly had been designed as arrow slits originally. The building was perched on top of a hill and surrounded by mostly-open fields, though shrubs were creeping up on it and vines had grown up the sides of the building.
This was as defensible a building as I could hope to find, in other words. Militarily, if not necessarily aesthetically, anyway. I couldn’t contest its ugliness and said as much to Vitold. Over time, the building’s garish look would grow on me, but on first encountering it, I thought it was inexcusably hideous.
When I met with the officers who had been left behind, I discovered that word of Colonel Romanov’s death had apparently not spread; they asked me for his whereabouts and seemed very surprised to find that I was claiming to have been given command by order of the general.
Given that some of the officers substantially outranked me, this surprise wasn’t unreasonable; nor was it unreasonable for them to ask to see personally what the general had written. I told them as much, apologizing for the unfortunate way in which the note self-destructed. I tried to gloss over the margin by which they outranked me in the normal chain of command and spent most of my time reminding them of precisely how unreasonable General Ognyan Spitignov actually was.
After a short discussion of the folly of provoking the infamous war mage needlessly, the officers appeared to come to a shared conclusion: Each of them had no desire to be placed in the position of ultimate responsibility, where they would be held accountable to both the general’s whims as well as to the official regulations of the army. This was even more true when the general’s whims stood in contrast to standard doctrine.