I was bone tired after yet another long day working on the fortifications, one in which I had successfully avoided engaging in anything resembling reading tea leaves. Unfortunately, I had overestimated my growing rapport with a certain elemental spirit and wound up getting hit dead-on by a giant shovel-full of dirt. Then the weather turned cold, and I’d wished I was reading tea leaves inside in the warmth and comfort of the baron’s parlor instead.

While I was busy feeling sorry for myself, a vise-like grip clamped onto my shoulder, digging in painfully.

“It is time for dinner,” Katya told me. She was becoming more comfortable with her mechanical arm, and beginning to think of it more as if it were part of her own body rather than a tool she was using. I think she would have been wearing it to bed if she slept alone, metal plate and all.

“I take it we are invited up to the baron's table again?” While the baron and his daughter were both in the compound, formal dining was a frequent if not completely regular occurrence.

She nodded assent. “He asked what was taking you so long, so I came down.”

I frowned, then directed the mech to see itself to the stables and hastened to the baron's mansion, stopping briefly at our chambers to quickly change with Katya's help. Either Katya or one of the servants had already laid out something resembling attire suitable for a high officer or minor nobleman. The servants were taking away the remains of the soup course when I finally arrived in the dining hall, arm-in-arm with Katya and out of breath.

Katya sat next to the baron's daughter, who dimpled at me briefly. I sat next to the baron's accountant, who afforded me a very cool glance before staring into his cup. The baron was talking about the price of copper. Somehow, this was related to the health and welfare of sheep this season; I listened with a polite minimum of attention and comprehension as the servants brought out finely slivered bits of something drizzled with a bright yellow sauce.

After several tries, I determined that attempting to spear the slivers with the fork that had been provided by a servant was a losing strategy, but they could be scooped with the tines if you were careful and didn't mind eating slowly. I was, I discovered after my first few bites, quite hungry, and I cleared my plate with a speed that bordered on indecorous. (I'm not quite sure which side of that border I was on, but I did at least manage to refrain from using anything except the fork for the course.)

The wait for the next course was long, and while I had been concentrating on clearing my plate, the subject had somehow moved from the relationship between wool and copper to the effect of the growing season on next season's fashion, and in particular on the recent trends in matrimonial gowns. Katya later informed me that the intermediate topics had been textiles and dyes, with a new alchemically-synthesized dye called cerulean being all the rage in France. It was in limited supply outside of Paris and Corsica, making the price hideous.

By this turn of topic I inferred that either the baron's daughters or one of her friends had managed to wrest control of the conversation from the baron. What I didn't know was that the baron himself had brought up the topic. This was the baron's way of trying to subtly remind his daughter that she should start thinking about helping herself into a marriage and helping her father make some advantageous connection while doing so.

Katya restricted herself to terse comments, nervous about her ability to pretend to be Leontina Odobescu when the subject turned to something noblewomen were supposed to know a great deal about. Even if she had been one to follow fashion trends before volunteering for the Imperial Army, she’d been posted in Muzga before being transferred south to join General Spitignov’s task force. Muzga was a tiny backwater town near the Lithuanian border, far from Emperor Koschei’s court in what the Golden Emperor insisted on referring to as Rome-upon-Tanais and impossibly remote from Emperor Leon I’s winter palace in Corsica.

I restricted myself to listening with interest until the next course arrived. I do not quite remember what it was, but it was solid, delicious, accompanied by rolls … and most importantly, the maidservant who brought out the course on a rolling cart placed one of her baskets of rolls right next to where I was sitting, with a wink and a grin that let me know the proximal placement was deliberate.

I concentrated hard on not eating too indecorously, but I was applying myself methodically enough to the task of eating that my concentration was on table etiquette rather than following the conversation.

“Well, what of that, Marcus?” The baron mentioning my name brought my attention sharply back to the conversation.

I chewed and swallowed a mouthful of fresh-baked buttered roll, as soft and fluffy as a cloud and utterly delicious. “My apologies, your excellency, I was slightly distracted.” I tapped my ear. “What was it that you said?”

“I said, I thought you said we weren't going to see much rain this season, but I hear thunder,” said the baron, a little loudly but not seeming to be offended. A muffled snicker from somewhere down the table suggested someone else thought I was supposed to feel mortified for paying insufficient attention to the conversation and too much to the food. Quentin’s lessons on noble dining etiquette hadn’t focused sufficiently on pretending to ignore the truly delightful efforts of cooks and bakers that went onto the baron’s table in favor of boring conversations.

I cocked my head. A distant rumble caught my ears (thunder, indeed), and then a closer sharper clap of noise (not thunder). The hairs on the back of my neck raised up. That was a gun being fired. From the pitch, timbre and volume, it had to be a relatively small gun, fired somewhere nearby.

“Sounded close,” remarked the baron's accountant, staring out at a leaded window, the small diamond panes affording a blurry view of the sky. “Though I suppose we'd know better if we'd seen a flash to count from,” he added, as if to show off his command of natural philosophy.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

I looked around the table. Could they really not tell the difference? “Excuse me, your excellency, but I really should go see who is shooting and why.” I stood up, and stepped around my chair. “It may be nothing to be concerned about, but I would rather make sure.” I reached out, reconnecting with my recent digging partner and jump-starting its engine, just in case. Coal is cheaper than blood, I reasoned, and it was better to burn coal foolishly than lose blood carelessly.

The baron looked puzzled for one moment, and then gave a worried nod the next. “I hope your concern is mislaid,” he said. His expression was carefully neutral.

The accountant, meanwhile, gave me a funny look, as if he thought I was crazy, then shrugged, trading looks with the baron.

The balcony or the stairs? The former would afford me a quicker (and better) view, but if there was something wrong, the latter would let me get on the scene more quickly. I headed down the stairs as quickly as was safe in the dress boots I was wearing. Dress boots being like cavalry boots, only with worse traction, this was slower than I would have liked, and I nearly fell down the last flight of stairs in spite of my frustratingly slow descent.

Leaving the mansion, I noticed a light rain was falling.

----------------------------------------

When I arrived I could hear shouting. I stepped quickly, several tons of bipedal war machine following in my wake, the noise of its Imperial-built boiler doing its level best to drown out the noise from ahead. Once I worked my way up the new fortifications, I could see the source of the noises.

A scruffy-looking man, with a hat that looked both expensive and badly worn, was gesturing with a pistol. He was on the wrong side of a ditch on the other side of the earthen rampart, on top of a horse that was eyeing said ditch very dubiously, and he was shouting to make himself heard to the sentries who had challenged him demanding his name and his business.

“We have more guns than you factory slaves,” he was saying. “Just bring out the baron’s money and we'll be on our way without trouble. We know he has at least two full chests of coin. Force us to come climbing over and you’ll regret it.”

He had about two dozen friends. Between them, they did have a considerable number of guns backed up by a wide assortment of other weapons; most had an arquebus and at least one pistol. One particularly vicious-looking fellow had eight, which were hanging on three separate belts along with pouches for ammunition. I wondered how long it took for him to put them all on before setting off on the trail – or did he just sleep with them already on? It was an impressive collection, even if none of the pistols looked to be of impressive size or quality individually.

The sentries shouted back a number of derisive comments about his intelligence, perceptiveness. One particularly creative fellow – originally from Khoryvsk, if I remember correctly – decide to insult first the scruffy fellow's father, and then his mother's husband, using terms I do not care to repeat.

The scruffy-looking fellow waved his pistol menacingly in his direction. “I'll blow your brains out if you don't go running to fetch me the money! This is your last warning!” The fact that he hadn't reloaded his pistol yet robbed the statement of some of its immediate menace, as did the arrival of soldiers by ones and twos on my side of the wall. He was not aware of the latter, but surely was aware of the former; everyone knows that a pistol with a single barrel has but a single shot to fire.

The sentries, I realized, were now looking over at me. I nodded and jerked my thumb back towards the building serving as our barracks, and one of them jogged off to roust those who weren't already awake or investigating the noise.

“This facility is under the protection of Colonel Raven's battalion,” I shouted at the scruffy-looking man. “Go off on your way and we won't have to kill you.”

The scruffy-looking man pointed his empty weapon in my direction and clicked the trigger (doing nothing), then turned back towards his comrades as if he expected them to carry out his threat for him. Seeing as I was not wearing my armor, or even armed, I ducked back down out of the potential line of fire, concentrating instead on the machine behind me, guiding it in what I hoped would be a graceful vault over the wall, consciously directing it to grab the scruffy-looking man.

The part of this maneuver where the mech grabbed onto the top of the palisade with both hands and pulled went just as I envisioned; however, instead of the mech going up and over, that section of the wooden palisade tore loose in one piece and collapsed outward, creating a wooden bridge over the surrounding ditch. The mech continued forward, the logs bending alarmingly under its weight as it staggered across.

Gunfire crackled, and then thunder from above. The rain began to pour in earnest.

“Take prisoners if you can!” I shouted. “I can't question the dead!” It occurred to me that it would be very good to learn more about why these men were here. They sounded like simple bandits, but they also seemed confident in their own knowledge of the target. Who had directed them here? Had they robbed this compound before? The workers were usually paid in paper scrip and only cashed out when they went to town, so why were the bandits so sure that the baron kept an ample supply of cash here?

My thoughts were interrupted by the scream of a horse flying overhead. Its rider was nowhere to be seen. I ducked low and winced when it landed in a tangle of broken limbs behind me. I got up and assessed the situation: The bandits were scattering away from the heavy mech and my men were starting to pursue.

“Alive!” I yelled, jogging forward.

A soldier with a smoking arquebus looked back at me and cringed sheepishly. Then he gingerly stepped over the corpse at his feet and relayed my orders forward.

“Aim low for the legs!” he shouted. “The colonel wants prisoners!”

Hoofbeats from behind and to my left suggested that some of our own mounted troops were entering the fray – or chase, I should say, as the bandits were transitioning from a fighting retreat to a panicked rout. They had not expected serious resistance, and a charging mech backed up by a rapidly increasing number of experienced war-hardened soldiers qualified as serious resistance.

I continued jogging towards the heavy mech, hoping to keep near enough to have some control over the developing situation and the berserk machine. It was not long of a jog before I had counted more than a dozen more bandits down. Some were wounded; some dead. One, I noted, appeared to have bled to death as a result of an injury to the major artery in the leg. None, however, wore the distinctive hat of the bandit leader.

Then there was a distinctive report of a rifle; some shouting; then hoofbeats. One of the mounted scouts was carrying a distinctive-looking hat, with a hole in it; the other carried the scruffy owner of the hat, who looked rather worse for the wear. He had a sucking chest wound. Sucking chest wounds do not flatter the looks of anyone, and the deathly pallor of his face suggested he might not have much longer to live.

After I got back to the mansion, Katya apologized profusely for missing the bandit leader twice. The wind and rain had made it difficult to aim, she said.