I begin this segment of my narrative with a letter, which Katya brought to me when she and the others returned.1 The supply colonel had been concerned with requisitions and had come with a train of mules laden with supplies, but Katya had a letter she wanted to send home, and had collected the mail to bring back with her. This particular letter was addressed to the deceased Colonel Ivan Ivanovich Romanov, and Katya had thought that meant I should have it.
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Dearest old friend,
My apologies for not writing sooner, but the investigation required some additional efforts beyond that which I normally command. Fortuitously, I received news of the recall of a certain general, which should distract him substantially and therefore opens your options considerably. This letter will probably not arrive until after the general has received his recall orders, but if he has not, you should be aware that he has or shortly will receive orders to do so.
This should afford you the opportunity to separate with your trouble-makers – make some sort of logistical excuse to temporarily separate the general from his new favorites and then arrest ’M.S.’ and ’V.S.’ Execute them if they resist, bring them straight to Tanais if they can be chained up without losses – take the fastest horses you can and leave the general in doubt as to what has happened. Do this without delay; do not allow them to send any communications.
’M.S.’ cannot be anything other than an enemy spy and ’V.S.’ his bought man. Subsequent events indicate that members of their cell, or additional cells of their organization, are likely in communication with them; this suggests that they are part of a substantially larger organization. I am alarmed, and I suspect it will be your head and mine if it continues. The post from which they came caught fire the day before I arrived to inspect records in person and conduct interviews. Coincidence? I think not. Coincidences of such kinds simply do not happen.
My investigations demonstrate that there is no record of ’M.S.’ or ’V.S.’ enlisting in the steam knight corps anywhere. Neither is recorded as being commissioned as officers per records in Khoryvsk, Tanais, or Kazan. I went as far as to check through training records at the military academy. While there are several ’M.S.’s in the various records, unsurprisingly – common given name, common patronymic – I have eliminated all of them from consideration based on age, physical description, or their location being clearly accounted for.
’V.S.’ I have just identified in spite of his absence from regular Army enlistment records. He is from Lviv in eastern Ruthenia, not far from the border with Lithuania. Records indicate he disappeared from his hometown at the age of fourteen under suspicion of a string of petty thefts and a couple of more serious burglaries. The fourth son of a baker, he was apprenticed to a local machinist for several years before running into trouble with the law. The machinist provided positive identification based on the sketch you provided, as did several other locals. His association with a spy marks him as a traitor to the realm, but if his loyalty is simply to coin, it may be possible to convince him to exchange testimony for leniency in sentencing.
As a bonus, old friend, you should be out of Wallachia fast enough to miss the fireworks. You will probably hear rumors about the prince being alive after all – I cannot confirm this, but half of Yalita was set on fire and the Sultan may decide that the undying emperor has betrayed him.
-I. V. T.
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I looked up at Katya. “No, I’m afraid it doesn’t say anything about commendations or promotions.”
Her face fell. She bit her lip and glanced over at the colonel in charge of supply, who was impatiently giving the both of us the hairy eyeball.
“Well? What does it say?” he asked, an edge of belligerence in his voice.
I couldn’t blame him for being in a sour mood. Here he was, rightfully of rank to command a battalion of troops himself; and I was, as far as he was concerned, a jumped-up squad leader with delusions of grandeur. On the other hand, while I sympathized with his anger, I couldn’t exactly show him a letter that demanded my immediate arrest and recommended a prompt execution.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” I said, folding the letter back up.
The colonel blustered for several minutes about how it wasn’t right that an impudent sniper would have denied his request to open the letter immediately, that he had a right to know what the letter said, that he wanted Katya flogged for insubordination. Maybe even shot, but he was a merciful fellow, flogging should be good enough. The woman needed to be taught her place and to respect rank, didn’t she? And wasn’t he a colonel? The blustering continued, meandering onto a few more subjects before dying out. Throughout his entire tirade, I kept my face completely still. At the end, I raised one eyebrow.
“Is that all?” I asked, a sharp edge on my voice.
Katya was trembling and turning white. The colonel shrank in on himself under my stare and nodded very slowly and gingerly.
“Is your name Ivan Ivanovich Romanov?” I asked.
He shook his head. Obviously not.
“Are you, by any chance, the commanding officer for the force to which Ivan Ivanovich Romanov is posted?” I asked.
He shook his head again, a little more slowly this time. He may have been, on paper, the senior surviving officer in our little strike force now that the general had left, but he was not in charge.
“I know that you are quite familiar with regulations. Please take a moment to recall the regulations pursuant to messages marked like so, addressed to an officer in the field, that happen to be important dispatches involving state secrets.” I wasn’t sure what those regulations said, but I was guessing they involved dire consequences. I let that hang in the air for a moment.
The colonel said nothing.
“Say ‘thank you’ to Katya for preventing you from making a mistake.” I made a little shooing motion with my hand.
His eyes wide, he stammered out an apology to Katya, and backed out of the room, nearly tripping over the doorway.
Katya had stopped trembling and was returning to her normal color, alabaster rather than ghostly.
“I did insult a superior officer,” she said, very quietly. Uncertainty crept into her voice. “I called him stupid. I called him greedy. I also called him ugly. It was very not respectful.”
She was now looking at me with some confusion. I could see a question floating in her eyes: Wasn’t she supposed to be punished? She had done a bad thing! She clasped her hands behind her back and looked up at me, waiting to be judged.
“It’s okay, Katya,” I said. “You can apologize to him later, after he’s calmed down. But when he wanted to read the letter, you were right to tell him no.”
I shouldn’t have reminded her of the letter. Her eyes snapped to my pocket, full of curiosity. I spoke again, quickly and with some uncertainty of my own.
“It’s better that nobody else knows what’s in that letter. Even you, Katya.” As much as I liked Katya, and wanted to trust her, handing her a letter marked as an urgent military dispatch talking about arresting and executing me didn’t seem like a good idea.
A thought darted across my mind. The locked door. A week ago, I had woken up in this room with my bed smelling of Katya, her hair on my pillow, and a door locked soundly from the inside; a puzzle left unsolved. I trusted Katya – had to trust Katya – to not reveal the death and desertion of my comrades to the general, but I did not understand her very well at all. I did not know how, much less why, she had stolen away quietly in the night.
She was about to shuffle out the door when I asked her to wait, and that we had other things to speak of. I shut the door and locked it, then sat down on the bed, bringing us nearly eye to eye as she stood stiffly.
I needed a few minutes to gather my thoughts, to understand her motives; so to pass a little time while I did so, I asked her to describe the trip from her perspective; I added that I did not entirely trust the colonel’s thoroughness or priorities. The reason was a factual one, but my nods and thoughtful expression lay over the face of a man sifting his memory for clues about a redheaded woman rather than a man paying attention to what she was telling him. After a while of this, I decided that I really needed to ask her very directly if I wanted the answers; so the next time she stopped to sift her own memory, I took action.
I took hold of her hand and squeezed it gently, then spoke up.
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“Katya? I think that’s enough about the trip for now, thank you. I was wondering,” I cleared my throat, still working out how to phrase the question in a way that didn’t sound like an accusation. “If I could ask you a question of a slightly more personal nature.”
She stared blankly back at me for a moment, then opened her mouth to reply. However, she was interrupted by a loudly barking Yuri.
Odd. Yuri was usually very quiet inside. I looked over at him, and he barked again, looking out the window. Strange men had arrived. Looking out the window, I saw the strange men were carrying arquebuses, bows, pikes, and long-bladed spears that looked like someone had stuck a sword on the end of a staff. And there was at least one woman with them; she was clad head to toe in shining steel plate with intricate orichalcum inlay and was pointing her sword, mouthing something I couldn’t hear before closing her helmet. A man who looked similar enough to be a brother or cousin held up a banner of arms.
A purple gem was set in a pearled band wrapped around her helmet, a symbol of her sympathies. I had the sense (how, I did not know) that she was a wizard; feel that there was some kind of link between her and several nearby mechs. The machines were lumbering forward at full speed, camouflage nets falling off as they pounded ahead under full steam, revealing bold blue, yellow, and red paint – what I would later learn were the colors of the House of the Dragon. There were other machines as well, low squat machines that I could only think to describe as walking guns, but those were not linked to her.
We were under attack. Taken entirely by surprise, I stood there staring, trying to get a good handle on how many of them there were. The rebels must have followed our people back from their supply mission, launching their attack while my soldiers were busy unpacking cargo. And, to judge by the bottles my soldiers were dropping as they scrambled below, they had been having a little impromptu celebration to mark the return of wine rations to their diet.
Suddenly, I felt myself being roughly jerked away from the window; Katya was diving to the floor, pulling me with her. We landed in between the desk and the wall. There was a crash of shattering glass and breaking wood, and a draft of cold air into the room. When I made as if to rise, confused, she pulled me back down. My heart pounded, and I swear I could nearly hear hers over her fierce whisper.
“Stay down, they have sharpshooters with rifles. One of them spotted you in the window.” Katya’s white-knuckled grip on me eased up when I nodded assent.
Several more bullets pinged into the room, and there was another crash as the lamp on the desk hit the floor. Yuri barked frantically, promising to rip the enemy gunmen to pieces. I smelled smoke. Katya went crawling for her own rifle, left resting against the wall (she never seemed to want to let the thing out of her sight, a habit I was now suddenly glad of); and I crawled towards the door.
The locked door. The very solidly locked door, whose lock was conveniently located at shoulder level. I could see a bullet lodged in the wall lower than the lock. Keeping the rest of my body as low as possible, I slowly reached up the wall towards the lock. I instinctively yanked my hand back at the same time I heard a loud ping; the unseen marksman had fired again. There was a thin red line on the side of my hand, courtesy of a very near miss; a very near miss that had struck the bolt I was reaching for instead of holding my hand.
Lucky me, I thought to myself, and then I looked closely. The bullet had smashed the handle off the bolt, and bent the bolt in its housing; but the Avar aristocrat who had the lock installed had placed a very high value on privacy, and the piece of high-quality workmanship remained securely attached to the wall and door. I would need a hammer and a chisel to open that bolt now.
“Door’s jammed,” I told Katya.
A bullet pinged off the chandelier. Katya popped up and fired back, then ducked back down. She looked back at the door as she reloaded her rifle.
“That was a nice shot,” she said, staring at the damaged bolt. “Lucky for him. Not lucky for us.”
“Unless you know of any other ways out of here,” I told her, “then we’re trapped in here.”
“If we weren’t being shot at,” she said, “we could climb out the window.”
“Is that how you vanished last week?” The question left my mouth before I thought twice. They dripped with accusation and annoyance.
“I needed to go think. Alone.” Katya sounded hurt and defensive. She pounded a new round down the muzzle of her rifle with a bit more force than strictly necessary, the ramming rod bending slightly under the impact.
It sounded like battle was being joined outside. I could hear explosions, the clatter of metal on metal, and the screams of those dying as well as those who wished they were dying. Yuri started barking again.
“I’m not angry at you,” I shouted angrily.
I realize that shouting at someone angrily to tell them that you aren’t angry at them tends not to be terribly convincing, but in my defense, modern warfare is loud, as are barking dogs. As Katya crawled under the window to the other side, working towards a better position, I considered our options as best as I could.
We could climb out the window and get shot at. We could take potshots at the large number of riflemen outside, distracting them a little bit while they fought with my troops, and then get blown up once they thought to pitch a grenade into the large open window. We could hide under the bed, and likely survive the battle that way. However, I doubted I would be lucky enough to survive being captured by Romanians a second time if they won; and if our side won, I would face charges of cowardice and probably get executed. None of these options seemed good; we needed a distraction. I grabbed hold of Katya’s calf to get her attention.
“Wait a minute,” I told her.
I fished through my pockets, coming up with a handful of coins, and lobbed one in a high arc outside the window, hard as I could. The crows would be already gathering in anticipation of carrion; and if I could get them distracted and excited, perhaps they themselves could serve as a decent distraction.
A cawing noise; a lone crow perched on the windowsill. I had the attention of one; others would follow soon.
“Katya, give me all the coin you hold within your possessions.” My voice sounded distant but calm. A feeling of detachment settled on me.
She looked at me warily for a moment, then complied. With both of my hands full of coins, I stood and pitched them upwards and out the window, a bullet whizzing by my head as I did so. A storm of crows dove down from the sky, snagging the coins out of the sky even as they started to fall. Greedily, playfully, they took and traded the shiny pieces with one another. I could barely see the other side of the raucous black cloud of crows. It had worked better than I had hoped, but I could not expect it to last for long. We had to move fast.
“Climb now,” I told Katya.
She shouldered her rifle and clambered out the window with enviable grace and speed. Yuri jumped up, putting his paws on the windowsill to watch. I yanked back on his collar. Like most young war hounds, he was very excited at the prospect of his first battle and was probably ready to do something foolish, like trying to climb the wall after us. I would rather he didn’t get hit by a stray bullet.
“Yuri! Go under the bed! Stay there until I come back!” I pointed firmly.
The dog whined, disappointed, but slunk slowly towards the bed. I hastened to follow Katya.
I followed her up the wall as best as I could; watching closely to see the handholds and footholds she used. Her admirably well-toned aft end disappeared over the edge of the roof and was replaced by her concerned-looking face as I struggled up the last few feet. She offered me a hand up; familiar with the physical principles of action and reaction, however, I declined to take it. I thoroughly outmassed her, and a drop from this height would do neither of us any good, I reasoned. However, after I pulled myself over the wall surrounding the rooftop garden, I noticed the rope she’d tied around herself and fastened to a dwarf maple and decided against giving her a lesson on the principles of natural philosophy.
I should take a moment to describe the roof of the manor. Originally, the top of the manor was flat, an open area surrounded with crenelated walls about waist-high, intended primarily as a prepared position for defenders to rain arrows or rocks down on any attacking force. Later, a roof was installed on stilts above the walls, so that people walking about on the upper floor would be shielded from the weather.
More recently most (though not all) of the roof had been taken out and replaced with the framework for an enclosed greenhouse garden. This garden was not complete – there was no glass in the wood and metal frame, though there were plants in the garden. It wasn’t clear to me if glass had ever been installed, if it had been removed during the evacuation of the nobility, or simply smashed earlier during the war. Finally, a small dome – an observatory of sorts intended for astronomical or astrological purposes – sat defiantly perched on top of what little remained of the older roof, supported by a combination of iron pillars and truly audacious architectural engineering.
The season being winter, the garden was mostly barren and brown; the dwarf maple tree had no leaves, a sad little skeleton of a tree trapped in a pot. Katya and I did not find the garden empty of life, however; there were a pair of mortars there, diligently lobbing shells towards the army below. The mortars in turn were fed and attended to by a small gang of enlisted men. Presumably, they were doing so by command of the lieutenant currently peering thoughtfully through a looking glass.
There were also some sharpshooters at work, doing their part to reduce the rebel menace a single well-aimed shot at a time as they moved from merlon to merlon around the outer edge of the roof, taking care not to linger in one place overlong. One sniper lay slumped against the wall, missing half his head, a gruesome reminder that the other side had sharpshooters of their own.
Over near the observatory, I could see the supply colonel arguing with a mechanic about something, gesturing up at the dome. I didn’t want to know about what or why. I did, however, want to take stock of the battle, now that I had a chance. It looked grim; taken by surprise, we were struggling to hold back the enemy long enough for the troopers in steam knight suits to get their boilers going. A pair of our mechs had been loaded with charcoal activated to help move the heavy loads from the carts, but they were taking a heavy beating. And then, there was the enemy wizard. She was practically dancing across the battlefield as she directed the rebel army and its war machines against our walls.
“I’m sorry, would you repeat that?” I asked the lieutenant. He’d been asking me something.
“Sir, do you have a plan?” The lieutenant looked ill at ease, though the question was a fair one for him to ask.
I considered. Our strategic choices consisted of trying to hold the manor, fleeing, or throwing ourselves on the mercy of the rebel commander. The second and third options involved putting large quantities of imperial military equipment in rebel hands, just the sort of thing to get me executed for cowardice or dereliction of duty. The third also involved becoming a rebel prisoner, something which I had experienced already. I had no desire to repeat that experience.
“Well,” I said, as a particularly loud crash sounded from below us, several tons of mech collapsing into so many pieces of scrap, “I believe we should fight.”
The lieutenant gave me a funny look.
1 Editor’s note: I was provided with the original envelope and document. Postal markings on the envelope indicate it was mailed from a train station in Lviv; the remains of the seal and the markings appear to verify Mikolai’s claims that this letter was sent labeled as an urgent military dispatch.