The little library was a small windowless room on the first floor. From the empty bookshelves lining the walls, we had deduced that it was a library; there was a larger and grander one up on the third floor, though it, too, lacked books. It had two gorgeous chairs, a small table, a desk, and several lamps; and the chairs were a little too large to fit comfortably through either of the doors to the room. Presumably, some workman had assembled them inside the room, or one of the doors had been removed to facilitate their entry.
The fact that the room was small and had two doors exiting into two different hallways was important for me to stage this correctly. I did not want the prisoners to talk to one another after being interviewed, or even to know what had happened to the previous interviewee. I had seen first-hand what happens when soldiers are filled with ignorance; ignorance had fueled all sorts of whispers about me behind my back. I wasn’t entirely sure what all the rumors were, but they seemed to have generated a great deal of unwarranted fear and respect.
The lieutenant was swaying on his feet a little when he delivered a short stack of papers to me.
“Fyodor, how long have you been awake?”
He stammered something about having gotten a short nap after dinner the previous day. I suggested he get some sleep on his own terms before sleep caught him unawares and set its own terms of engagement.
I passed on orders to bring the prisoners by one at a time, starting with the apparent leaders; and busied myself leafing through the papers and reading about our prisoners. I was out of uniform, wearing a stark but expensive-looking ensemble of black clothes salvaged from a miraculously overlooked closet up on the fourth floor.
I was seated in one of the chairs; Katya stood at my left shoulder, and Yuri sat on my right side. We had loaded the shelves with what books we could find, along with an assortment of other things (weapons, papers, tools, and the like) to give the impression of long occupancy. My sword leaned in one corner – not for any practical purpose, but because it served as a reminder that I was not someone to be trifled with. Also because I didn’t want anyone else to touch the thing and wind up getting caught in a trance, the way I had been the first time I took a serious look at it.
The first prisoner they showed in was one of the foreign mercenaries; purportedly the most senior one.
“You are called Torvald Bauerstein?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Speak up,” I said.
“I am indeed Captain Torvald Bauerstein,” he said. “The ranking officer of the Bauerstein Company.” He muttered something in a Norse dialect under his breath.
Yuri growled dubiously, baring his teeth.
“Ah, you don’t believe he’s telling the truth?” I asked Yuri, and then turned back to the man, switching to my best book-learned Norse to make my point. “Let us speak unpolished truth. Lives lie on the table like coin.”
To illustrate my metaphor, I placed a silver Avar denarius on the table, pushing it forward with my finger. I let him see the coin, and then cocked my finger and flicked it. It chimed musically as it bounced on the floor, spinning unevenly. I waited as the coin wobbled to a complete stop, and let the silence hang over us.
He swallowed. “Junior Lieutenant Ragnar Rimehammer, third-ranking officer of our company before today. Our number two took a mortar shell to the face. I volunteered to pretend to be the captain in case you were going to execute the officers. They said that ... ” He stopped himself.
“I’m sure your cousin appreciates your loyalty,” I said dryly, taking a shot in the dark. The widening of the lieutenant’s eyes was encouraging. “I’m afraid the question isn’t about the disposal of officers alone.” I steepled my fingers, and let him draw his own conclusions about what that statement meant. “I am, however, hiring; and your contract with those amethyst pendant people has collapsed.”
I opened a drawer on the desk. I placed in front of him a small silver bowl, a quill, a penknife, and, after a moment, a sheet of paper. The paper announced, in Norse, that the undersigned individual swore loyalty and secrecy, and would be compensated appropriately at the end of the term of service, not to exceed one year or the completion of the mission. The wording was vague and, I hoped, a little ominous. I dripped several drops of a clear liquid into the bowl from the flask.
“I am not at cross purposes with you or your distant homeland. If you wish, simply nick yourself,” I gestured at the bowl, “and sign.” I gestured at the contract.
“And if I don’t wish?” Ragnar gave me a hard look.
“It is your choice to sign or not sign.” I shrugged nonchalantly.
“What happens if I don’t sign?” His request for details was understandable.
I ignored the question entirely, letting the absence of a reply speak for itself.
He slowly reached for the penknife and contemplated it for a moment. Yuri growled. Katya stiffened. Tension filled the air, but I continued to feign indifference. After a few moments, the Swede sighed and pricked his thumb, squeezing out two drops of blood into the bowl. He set the knife down, picked up the quill, and signed his name in blood.
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Having Ragnar’s real name and rank sitting there on the paper was helpful in dealing with the rest of the Swedish mercenaries. He was second in command and had been trying to pass himself as the captain of that company, after all; the display of his willing cooperation and honesty worked to reassure the rest of them. One by one, they each signed the contracts I prepared for them; and were sent to assemble in the main hall.
The last was their real captain, an older fellow who walked a little unevenly, his surviving foot taking a larger share of his weight, a preference ingrained over the last two years. His name was Felix Rimehammer. He took in the fact that I had signed (perhaps I should say “impressed”) his company out from under him with equanimity and even cracked a brief smile when I asked him to add his title of captain to the front of his signature.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
I told him that I would brief everybody at once on our plans as a unit after I was done dealing with all of the prisoners. He gave me a careful measuring look.
“I look forward to learning more,” he said, “though I wish I were on a kinder side of the puzzle you present.”
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The process of dealing with prisoners got a little trickier after that. The Swedish unit had surrendered as a group and survived largely intact, including two of its three officers; the other surviving soldiers were a mix of at least two different smaller mercenary outfits and an assortment of independent fighters with varying loyalties. Some were from Wallachia; some from Avaria; and others from elsewhere in Western Europe.
The second Romanian-speaking prisoner I met with was a young aristocratic-looking fellow by the name of Radu Odobescu. He had refused to answer any questions about who he was and where he was from beyond giving his name, but his name and his native fluency in Romanian made his origins clear enough. If I knew more about the Wallachian nobility, his name might have been enough for me to know where he was from; but all I know is that he was the first to reject my offer of employment.
“It is your choice to sign or not sign,” I told him, gesturing to the penknife with finality.
He picked it up, looking it over; and then suddenly lunged at me, taking me by surprise. His lunge was stopped short, for as quick as he was, Yuri was faster, a furry blur full of growling teeth bowling him to the ground. A rasp to my left sounded, Katya belatedly pulling out her sword to protect me. Radu stopped struggling, and Yuri stopped biting, content to stand over Radu’s prone form.
“Is he still alive?” I asked.
Katya bent over him for a few moments, then stood back up.
“No,” she told me, beaming with confidence in her answer. She fished a greasy rag out of her pocket and started wiping something red and sticky off her sword.
Radu’s body had gained some additional perforations in several places; a fact that explained both Katya’s confidence in her medical assessment, as well as the state of her blade. Under the circumstances, I could not find a rational fault with Katya’s enthusiasm; the fellow had been trying to kill me, after all.
“Ah,” I said, collecting my wits about me. “Well done,” I said to my protectors, then patted each of them in turn on the head.
A moment later, I remembered that head-patting was not a traditional form of commendation for humans of the army; but Katya looked fit to split her face with her smile. No harm done, I thought to myself, I suppose that she took that in the spirit it was meant rather than as an insult. Then I poked my head into the hallway to call for a couple of soldiers to remove the body.
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The next time one of the prisoners tried to kill me, I was not taken completely by surprise, and jumped back out of the way, knocking my chair over and toppling backwards over it in a most undignified fashion that sent my face into the base of a set of shelves behind. The shelves then buried me in a combination of knick-knacks and books and left me with a cut from the cavalry saber that had been displayed on a stand.
Katya acted more quickly this time, flailing wildly at the would-be assassin with her sword. He put up a remarkable show for a man with limited armament, ducking away from the wilder swings and parrying others with a stool in his left hand, the penknife held low and loose in his right hand as he waited for a good opportunity to counterattack.
Yuri, barred a safe shot at the man’s throat by Katya’s wide swings, lunged at his belly, grabbing a mouthful of flesh and intestines, the latter spooling out as the man staggered away from Katya and dropped his stool. He blocked one more blow with the penknife in his right hand, but no more than that as she chopped into his left shoulder, forehead, and then neck. Katya dragged the body out and then returned with a pistol appropriated from one of my officers, evidently considering her sword insufficiently lethal.
The third would-be assassin also went for the penknife. I tried to grab it back from him, meaning that my left ear was singed by the flash from Katya’s pistol. After that, I resolved that I would sit further back out of the way and let my bodyguards handle it, but no other attempts were forthcoming. In retrospect, I think that most of the troops who had great personal enthusiasm for the Romanian cause had either fled or died rather than surrender.
That, or the bloodstains on my bodyguards and on the floor in the room were obvious enough of a warning that future attempts were likely to fail.
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I had a stack of contracts signed in blood; bloodstained boots; and the coppery tang of blood seemed to follow me into the great hall as I walked to the head of the head table, a position that in the manor’s dining hall was elevated a step above the rest of the head table and two steps above the lower tables.
Katya and Yuri trailed in my wake. The mercenaries waited with evident trepidation, and my imperial comrades with evident anticipation. From the faint whispers I heard, the rumors were flying fierce and fast around the lower tables. I would have blamed Vitold, except he was sitting quietly at the high table with the other officers. A neat row of coins sat in front of him; I was not quite sure why, but whatever the reason, Vitold had a smile on his face as he counted them.
“Our mission has been to track the rebels down; root down to their secret sources of strength; and to destroy them at the source upon their own ground.” This should not surprise anyone, but I wanted to state it carefully in those terms.
“That ground is not here in Avaria.” I raised a hand to still the sudden babble of confused voices, a mixture of consternation and surprise emanating primarily from my imperial comrades.
When silence fell, I continued. “We have gathered crucial intelligence in our operations here; where before we struck at the hands and feet of the rebellion, we may now seek to position ourselves for a strike at its neck. As our commanding officer made sure to impress on you, our mission has always been served by operational security. In order for us to strike at those manipulating and supplying the rebels from afar, we must be a hidden blade, one which does not show the Emperor’s undying hand. Our new recruits have already sworn secrecy in the firmest terms.”
Several nervous former prisoners touched the fresh knife pricks on their hands or arms nervously, looking around. One looked ready to vomit.
“We will, as far as anyone outside our chain of command is concerned, simply be a band of sell-swords operating together under contract. Each of you will be developing a cover identity. To the degree that our supplies allow,” by that I meant the salvage from our last battle, “you will be afforded new arms and armor; new uniforms; or at least modified ones. Everything must look foreign, salvaged, or both. This will be most difficult for the steam knights.”
Vitold frowned sourly. So did the steam knights. I continued my speech.
“We have a number of experts in the use of our new armaments; and in the deportment, habits, and hobbies of mercenary soldiers. They will be accompanying us, and will be integrated into our force until such time as their contracts expire. Integrated completely, I might add, at the level of the smallest squads. I am satisfied with their guarantees of loyalty.”
I waved at the clumps of mercenaries, sitting in tight little groups together around the hall. I was not actually so sure of their loyalty, but the more confident I seemed in my ruse about blood oaths, the more effective it would be. It would be enough if they believed they were bound by magically binding contracts.
“We will depart this location within a week to continue our mission elsewhere. I expect by that time that each of you has a cover identity that will hold up under scrutiny, clothing that does not look like it was issued to you by order of the Emperor, and at least one new friend with whom you feel honored to fight back to back with against great odds. Your officers will have further and more specific orders for you later.”
Over the din of dismissed soldiers taking their leave, I heard the soft sound of metal sliding on wood, and a musical clinking – Vitold pushing two coins across the table to a smiling lieutenant, and pocketing the rest with a broad grin of his own. The supply colonel had a sour look on his face, an expression that grew even sourer when I told him I needed him to arrange to produce good forgeries of various documents and that he was responsible for putting together the necessary sewing circles to re-tailor our imperial uniforms into less regular garb that could pass for private issue.