I reacted to the sound of machinery crashing through the wall by bolting upright and startling awake, though I am not quite sure which order those two things happened in. In either case, I was only briefly upright before Katya yanked me into a tumble off the bed and onto the floor. This was no mean feat for someone half my size with half the number of working limbs, but Katya was willing to fling herself to the floor and yank me on top of herself regardless of incidental bruising.

I rolled off of Katya as she groaned, but stayed low to the ground. Had the bed been a lovely piece of wooden furniture like the one in the manor, I would have rolled underneath it, but my bed in the warehouse was really just a pile of straw padded with blankets. Gunshots rang out, and a mech took down my bedroom door with a heavy smash of its arm, following up on its entry with what I could only assume was a grenade to the center of my bed, sending a cloud of straw and cloth spinning up in the air in a dull explosion.

The mech cast its head back and forth, peering as if it couldn’t see perfectly well through the floating chaff, its boiler growling loudly. The starlight that leaked through the cracks in the wall glittered off the floating bits of straw most distractingly, true, but they were hardly a solid barrier to vision.

It seems difficult to grant a mech ordinary human visual acuity. I had heard that some wizards can learn to see through the eyes of their mechs on occasion, but I had thought I hadn’t yet learned the real trick of it. On the occasions where I had perceived myself to be looking through the eyes of the jury-rigged steam suits, they seemed to have abysmally bad vision.

Past a very short range, things would get very blurry – imagine looking out on a forested hill, and seeing in the distance simply textured green. Not merely being unable to make out the veins of leaves and patterns of bark on the distant trees lining the horizon, but not even being able to distinguish individual leaves, entire trees reduced to little more detail than a smudge of green paint.

However, I have never seen through the eyes of a proper professionally-constructed mech, and it is possible that they have better vision than the jury-rigged machines I had been working with. In that case, the elemental spirit providing the motivating guidance may simply have not been clever enough to process the confusing scene in front of it and compare it with the orders it had been given by its master.

I whispered to Katya that she should ready herself to grab a gun. I would distract the mech, I told her, and counted down from three, leaping up onto the bed waving my arms. As I did so, the mech reeled under the weight of a canine projectile, impacting it at a truly remarkable velocity for a dog only given the space of a small room to accelerate in. Someone behind the mech cursed loudly and ordered the mech to “hurry up and kill them,” the phrase being notably ambiguous and in French.

Katya groaned weakly as she lay there, her moan blending eerily closely with the groan of bending metal as Yuri tried to tear the faceplate off the presumptively French mech with his teeth. He dropped the hot piece of metal with a yowl and the mech thrashed around noisily, trying to connect with its attacker in the darkness as Yuri dashed around the room. The mech seemed to think the ambiguous order included, among the selection of possible targets, the dog that had just attacked it, and was prioritizing what it saw as the dangerous target out of the three in the room.

Unfortunately, the mech seemed to have chosen wisely. Yuri was the only being that seemed likely to threaten it. I was unarmed, and Katya seemed dazed and confused. Looking around the room for a weapon, I spotted Katya’s rifle, but hesitated. Picking up her beloved rifle felt like sacrilege of a sort; she was very particular about the treatment of her rifle, and I had never fired it before.

After overcoming my initial hesitation and picking up her rifle, I started looking around for ammunition. Where did Katya keep her ammunition for her rifle? For that matter, how did one load it? I remembered a mallet was involved somehow, as the rifling made it impossible to simply drop the bullet in. It wasn’t quite the same as the arquebuses Vitold and I had briefly trained on, and now was no time to be fumbling around figuring out how to properly load an unfamiliar weapon. I tossed the rifle away with a flash of guilt for mishandling Katya’s precious weapon, and grabbed a pistol – not as potent a weapon, but at least one I was familiar with.

As soon as I fired, the mech, identifying a more dangerous target than the dog, turned towards the sound. The tube mounted on its shoulder oriented towards a point above my right shoulder and fired, narrowly missing me. Between the loud report and the painful blast of the grenade’s explosion, striking me everywhere from the top of my head to the backs of my ankles, I thought I had been hit, but as I had not yet died, I loaded and fired again, aiming at its boiler.

Steam whistled out as it clattered towards me like an angry teapot. I lashed out with the now-empty pistol, and a line of magical force followed, looping around the mech’s midsection in the shape of a noose and crushing it. Either I had grown to be much stronger in the ways of casting spells, or this mech was more lightly built than the ones I had encountered before.

Thus reminded that I was in some fashion a wizard, I closed my eyes reached out mentally to my familiar jury-rigged mechs, awakening their elemental spirits and commanding them to go forth and fight. Had there been anyone alive inside them, instead of just machinery, they would have cooked in the bath of steam that bled out through the valves during the sudden jump-starts of the boilers; a surge of elemental power consuming a quarter-load of charcoal in seconds is not what those valves had been designed to contain.

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A growl and a bark reminded me that the mech had a controller of some sort nearby (now in rapid retreat from Yuri’s wrath, fortunately) and that my other faithful bodyguard, the human one, had yet to reach her feet. (Foot, I suppose, but you catch my meaning.) I bent to check on her. Lying on the floor next to the bed, she had been spared most of the shrapnel from the grenades fired by the mech, but she seemed dazed, her pupils mismatched in size and not focusing on me as they ordinarily would have. I pushed some of blankets (such as they were – smoking and shredded from the effects of the grenade) off the bed and on top of her, to keep her warm and out of sight between the bed and the wrecked mech.

Then I jogged off towards the sound of Yuri’s barking, pistol in one hand and an ammunition pouch in the other, the night air cool against my skin. A warehouse, or rather a pair of adjacent warehouses converted into an impromptu military compound, is not a very large place, when you come down to it. In less than a minute I was looking up and down the street, trying to catch sight of enemies. I called back Yuri, then walked back in. There was some shouting going on, a lot of confusion, and as the officers began to put order to the chaos, light from lanterns filled our barracks.

“Sir! Compound two reports all clear, sir!” Lieutenant Rimehammer was among the living. He looked concerned. “Sir, are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” I told him. “Just a little winded.”

I looked down at myself just in case, and remembered two things. First, with the warm spring nights (and warm redheaded bed-companion) I had been sleeping without any sort of night-clothes on. Second, I had experienced a near miss from a grenade. The shrapnel had opened up shallow wounds across my entire exposed backside, including several cuts in my scalp that were bleeding profusely.

“I suppose I should get cleaned up,” I said in as neutral a tone as possible. “And perhaps put on some clothing. I was not expecting an attack.”

I would soon find out that there were very few casualties from the night-time attack; it had been an assassination attempt aimed at me, not an attempt to destroy the company by ambush. Two soldiers on watch duty had been shot and left for dead (one of them was; the other might yet live); there were several injuries, most of them minor, from identification errors in the dark; and one man had broken his leg when he left his bunk a little too quickly in response to the call to action. Katya’s bump on the head and my dose of shrapnel were among the more serious injuries to treat. I pointed the former out when the Swedish lieutenant emphasized the latter. As a compromise, we went to my room together, where I found Katya with her pupils dilated to uneven sizes, a combination of relief and confusion on her face, and otherwise much the same as when I had last seen here.

“There you are! You are not just little bloody scorch marks! What has happened?” She seemed distraught.

I explained, briefly, that we had been attacked and were now putting together the pieces of what had happened.

“There are little bloody scorch marks,” she told me, pointing down at the dirt floor. “I thought you were just little bloody scorch marks.” She paused, staring downwards.

I handed her some clothing, and then told her to put it on; and then tried to follow suit for myself, and then remembered very quickly that my entire back side, from head to foot, had been caught in the blast. Trying to pull a jacket on over the combination of cuts, burns, and shrapnel that one receives from a proximate grenade blast is quite painful, and now that I had reminded myself of that injury by aggravating it, I was having difficulty breathing evenly.

“Sir, you really should come to the infirmary.” The lieutenant sounded concerned. Yuri was also concerned, and licking my leg, as dogs are wont to do to themselves or their wounded companions (usually other dogs, but dogs tend to think of humans as no less worthy than dogs).

“The little bloody scorch marks are bloodier now,” remarked Katya, gesturing at the floor as fresh blood dripped down. She giggled, waving the long coat I’d passed to her in the air for emphasis. “And you are not just little bloody scorch marks!” She dropped the coat and touched me with her fingertips carefully, as if making sure I was corporeal and not some ghost-Mikolai come to haunt her. She gripped me a little more firmly, and the lieutenant looked away, embarrassed.

I imagined staggering, bloody and still naked, into the infirmary. The dirt floor seemed to be a little less steady than usual, and so in light of that, I added the spectacle of my falling over from pain and weakness to that mental image. It went from undignified to downright embarrassing.

“I think it will be better if we have clean bandages and such brought here,” I said, deciding that the less said among the men about me charging off naked to battle, the better, and laid myself face-down on top of the shredded pile of cloth and straw that had previously been a bed.

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant bustled off, muttering something under his breath about gods and idiots.

“Little bloody scorch marks.” Katya paused, then changed the subject. “He is licking you, Mikolai, why is he licking you? Does that mean he wants to eat you? You’re not just little bloody scorch marks.”

“It’s what dogs do to try to clean up an open wound,” I told her. “They don’t have hands to hold a cloth with, so they lick things to clean them off.”

“Does it work?” she asked.

“Well enough for them, I suppose,” I said. Since there was only one dog in the room, the second thing that started licking me must have been Katya. I was still trying to figure out what to say to that when the licking suddenly stopped.

“Ow.” A pause. “I got one of those little sharp pieces in my tongue.”

“You have hands, Katya,” I said. “You don’t need to lick things to clean them off.”

“You are not just little bloody scorch marks,” she replied. “What has happened?”

Hadn’t I already explained that to her? “We were attacked,” I began.

“Where are they?” she asked, interrupting me. She paused. “There are little bloody scorch marks on the floor.” A brief giggle escaped her, then she shifted back to a concerned tone of voice. “Mikolai, you are bleeding.” She gingerly touched me with her fingers.

“Yes, Katya, I’m bleeding. Now go put on the coat.” I pointed in the general direction I remembered her having dropped the coat, and heard a rustling of cloth then heard the door open. I forced myself to raise my head. The lieutenant was back, with clean bandages, vodka, and an alcoholic surgeon. The surgeon pulled each individual piece of shrapnel out with a pair of tweezers. Fortunately, he was of the opinion that vodka should be applied both topically and orally to the patient in generous measure, and I passed out partway through the painful process.