The next night, I had four unsettling conversations. The first happened at dinner – Captain Nikita Egorov clapped me on the shoulder and told me that Ognyan had noticed me taking aim on the battlefield.
“Really?” I said, trying to sound casual. I poked a piece of charred mutton with my camp knife, scooting it around my plate. If the general had noticed me trying to shoot him, why was I still alive? Was he just waiting to execute me until a more convenient time? Maybe the captain was warning me so I had a chance to escape the camp before getting shot.
“Well, I had to tell him which of you it was – he’s a very observant fellow, the general, but there’s not much to distinguish one steam knight suit from another.” The captain lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, and I listened intently, hoping that instructions on how to escape a war mage’s wrath would follow. “He’s quite impressed. Not many steam knights would have the presence of mind to pick an armed threat out of a crowd of mostly unarmed civilians, or the confidence in their shooting to try to pick off a would-be assassin in close quarters with his target.”
The bowl of food in my hand suddenly looked much less appetizing. I muttered something about duty and humility, the captain buggered off to wherever captains go when they’re not ruining appetites, and I mechanically went through the motions of eating dinner until the bowl was empty.
The second unsettling conversation happened after dinner. Colonel Romanov wanted to have a little private chat with the squad leaders in his tent.
“I realize that there is some unhappiness among the men at the measures required by General Spitignov, but it is vital that you maintain your troops’ loyalty through the end of this mission. The penalty for desertion is decapitation. I would like to remind you that you are each responsible for four other men, and that each of you has four intact limbs other than your head.” The colonel’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “The coincidence of these two counts is one which Ognyan had occasion to remark upon as we were disembarking from the train.”
So that’s why he had been staring so thoughtfully at the amputees at the depot? I shuddered involuntarily.
“In the effort to maintain morale, I am contributing certain items from the officers’ commissary supply that you can use to reward your men for their loyalty and steadfastness today.” He handed each of us a paper bag. “It is not much, but to be seen giving encouragement and reward is far more valuable than the reward itself.”
Inside my paper bag were a bottle of brandy, some round pieces of maple sugar candy, a long candy bar, a tin of caviar, some crackers, and a round piece of red wax. Presumably, there was cheese inside the wax somewhere. I stowed them in various pockets, folded up the brown bag carefully, and set out to go forth and raise morale.
Ilya was already busy at work trying to raise his own morale elsewhere in the camp, Gregor had found himself a full bottle of vodka and was already unconscious, and I didn’t feel like trying to start a conversation with Misha, so I waved Vitold and the cavalryman (the one I still can’t remember the name of) over for a game of cards by the fire.
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Good imported brandy, shared over cards, crackers, and caviar, makes for loose conversation, though we kept it quiet – no need to be overheard. The talk turned inevitably to the topic of the village. I felt like unburdening my guilty feelings.
“I didn’t mean to shoot, it just went off, and caused all that confusion,” I said. “I wish I didn’t.”
“Look, Mikolai,” said the cavalryman, “Even if you hadn’t fired off right then, they were all dead anyway.”
“Really?” I frowned and tried to take a swig of brandy. The bottle was empty. I frowned more deeply.
“Did you see that bundle of shovels on that one mech? He had to have packed those before he even decided to go into the village. The general has issued us standing orders to kill anybody who might report our movements to the Resistance – do you think he was going to let a whole village of ’potential informers’ live to warn them?” The cavalryman shook his head. “You might have hurried it up a few minutes, but he was going to kill them all anyway.”
There was a bit of silence as I digested this datum. It was both encouraging and unsettling – the second of my unsettling conversations for the night.
“I hope we don’t have to stop to ask for directions like that again,” Vitold said glumly. “Any of that brandy left?”
After a while more of playing cards, the cavalryman declared he was ready to call it a night, and left the two of us to tidy up. No sooner than we were alone than I heard a faint noise, a jumbled group of clanks like someone kicking a tinker’s cart.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Vitold.
“Heard what?” Evidently, he hadn’t.
“That noise,” I said, waving at the dark woods.
“Maybe one of the sentries tripped on something in the dark,” he said, peering out into the darkness.
“Mikolai dearie, you’ve grown so much taller since the last time I saw you!” said the old lady standing where the cavalryman had been sitting a few minutes ago, pinching my cheek. Vitold turned around in surprise so quickly that he fell over. “The army has been good to you. Feeding you well, hm?” It was the old lady I used to chop wood for in the summer. What was she doing here? We were the better part of a thousand miles from my home village, and while I knew she traveled around some, that’s a long way for some old lady to cart her stuff. I was taken aback – unsettled for a third time.
“Grandmother1, it is very good to see you,” I began, standing up – and wasn’t sure what to say next, so my mouth just hung open for a few seconds while I tried to process this problem.
How, exactly, was I supposed to tell a little old lady that she had just walked into a camp full of soldiers with orders to kill any civilians who might give away their position inadvertently? Or that she was in a war zone, and we had just massacred a local village, and the locals might want to even the score by killing imperial subjects such as herself?
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Don’t be so stiff and formal. Give me a hug, Mikolai. Oh, good, you still have your luck-stone, you haven’t gone and lost it somewhere. Have you been practicing? You really should, you know.” She sniffed at my face and made a sour expression. “French brandy?”
“I’ll go wake the sentries up,” said Vitold, looking past me.
It was a good excuse for him to absent himself, and as I looked over my shoulder, I wished I had thought of it first. The old woman had been loud enough to get the attention of a certain exceedingly large, ugly, and bald general.
The image of the general decapitating a little old lady flashed through my mind, along with the cavalryman’s words: “He was going to kill them all anyway.” If we were to leave no witnesses behind, was I about to see this butcher of a man chop off the head of another little old lady?
My stomach tied in a knot as I considered my options. I had a knife; he had an enchanted sword, muscles like an ox, and a lot of practice killing people. I swallowed nervously as he loomed near me, his breath smelling like a rotten battlefield.
“Mikolai, dearie, go make us some tea,” the old woman said, making shooing motions, then looked up at the looming monster and pointed at the ground. “Sit down, boy, I’m not minded to crane my neck looking up at you.”
To my surprise, General Ognyan Spitignov, the Butcher of Belz, a murderous monster, sat down without a word of objection. He nodded to me, and after a moment, I realized he was dismissing me by concurring with the little grandmother. I hurried off to the commissary tent, where I tripped over a dozing colonel and got into a brief argument with him over whether or not I was authorized to be there, which I won by virtue of being more sober and hence able to finish my mission while he was still figuring out how to stand up.
After making tea and shooing some stray crows out of my way, I made my way back towards the general. Mercifully, the little grandmother from my village seemed to still have her head atop her shoulders, without the slightest sign that she had been through a discussion with the general’s enchanted sword. If anything, the war mage seemed to be the nervous one, hunched over and fidgeting with his fingers, eyeing her apprehensively like a child not told the reason he has been called up to the front of the schoolhouse.
Odd. I wondered what they had been talking about – they had stopped when I got close, with the old woman greeting me again, and inviting me to come, sit, and talk. I nerved myself for the inevitable blast of halitosis-infused air when the general took a sip of his tea and politely thanked me, but didn’t smell anything other than the tea, oddly enough.
Ognyan and I followed politely, mostly just listening as the old woman meandered through a range of topics, told a few stories, and then, as our teacups were almost empty, made a little request of me, one that demanded I try to remember what she had taught to me:
“Oh, yes, Mikolai, I taught you how to read tea leaves, didn’t I?” She patted my hand. "Why don’t you show little Oggie your leaf-reading skills? I’m sure he would be happy to have you tell him his fortune.”
I managed to refrain from rolling my eyes or letting out an embarrassed-sounding whine. That would be impolite, and it’s not good to be impolite to little old ladies (or at least, that is what my parents taught me). In spite of my best efforts to forget the peasant superstitions she had taught me in favor of more practical skills, I found it coming back to me as I peered at the damp blotch of plant matter at the bottom of the general’s cup.
“In the past, left… no, avoided. Maybe also... betrayed?” Yes, that was the pattern. Peering more closely, I added: “The pattern of a wronged woman is amidst the betrayal and departure, athwart. Her soul’s unrest leads to the present. She would cry if she lived.”
The infamous General Ognyan Spitignov, Butcher of Belz and terrifying war mage, pulled his cup back sharply, looking at it. Evidently, Ognyan was superstitious.
“Little Oggie, let Mikolai finish.” The old woman patted General Spitignov on the arm consolingly, and he reluctantly extended his cup again.
I thought I had read all I could read, but when the general jerked his cup back, the tea leaves had shifted.
“The present. Found in the woods by... a man with a missing heart? It’s the pattern for man, but there is a hole in the leaves, the shape of an egg." The old woman peered over my shoulder. I turned the cup and continued. “There is a loyal following, maintained in spite of mistakes."
The war mage frowned, and then closed his eyes, shaking his cup vigorously and holding it out. “The future. Tell me the future.”
I looked at the leaves crawling up the side of the cup and decided that they looked something like wings. “I see a dragon,” I said. Then I turned my head to the side. “And that your cup is cracked. The dragon is the end.”
Ognyan shuddered.
The old woman clucked her tongue and shook her head, then suggested that I clear away the tea service. I used that as a good excuse to take my leave of the both of them to turn in for the night – clearly, she was in no danger from the general, and I was quite tired. As I was leaving, the old lady said something about unhappy crows to the general.
When I went to turn in, though, I found that Vitold was missing, and slipped off into the woods to go check. I found him and three of our brave sentries from the infantry hiding up a tree. They seemed worried “it" was still around. After listening to Vitold’s description of the “strange chuffing long-legged mech" that had snuck up on him and sent the lot of them into a contagious panic, I told him it sounded like he’d made an honest mistake - the little old lady had a workmech that she took with her traveling to carry her things.
Although it had a mischievous temperament, I informed him, it was harmless, and had doubtless in any event put itself on standby mode by now, what with how long the old lady had been sitting around chatting with our general. I may have made some comments about whether Vitold or the old lady’s workmech looked more like a chicken, and after a little coaxing, I managed to get Vitold to come out of the tree and make the bold climb back down the tree and back into the camp through the frightening workmech-infested woods.
The sentries were less easily persuaded, saying they’d keep watch from the tree for the rest of their watch. They claimed it was a better vantage point for keeping watch anyway, and they ought to have climbed up the tree to keep watch in the first place. I left them to it and sacked out.
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When I woke up, Vitold was shaking me vigorously and telling me that I had slept through breakfast. We put a quick march on. There was no sign of the old lady – when I asked Vitold about that, he said that the only people that had actually talked to the old lady about what she was up to were myself and the general, and nobody had the nerve to ask the general about it.
I told him I hadn’t heard any plans – I had just brought them tea, read some tea leaves for the general at the old woman’s request, and by the way, did you know that the general seemed terrified of her? What a funny thing for a big man like him, but insanity does take odd turns, I told him, and started to tell him a joke I had heard once about a man and his mother-in-law to try and ease his anxiety. Vitold didn’t wait to listen; he rushed off to go round up the rest of the squad before I had gotten more than halfway to the punchline.
When I finally caught up with everybody else, Ilya and Misha apologized profusely to me. I’m not quite sure why, evidently the two of them thought they hadn’t been showing me enough respect. We set off through the woods. Some crows circled overhead, cawing plaintively.
I rolled my eyes, irritated. “Angry we buried the bodies so quick on you, carrion-feeders?" I muttered towards the sky.
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1 Ed.: Particularly in more rural and traditional areas, “Grandmother" is a typical form of address for an old woman. It is most likely that Mikolai was not speaking literally.