I was still processing the significance of this when the fifth passenger, a thin girl with a very serious expression, stepped into view. Her eyes locked on mine, widening with surprise and recognition; she nearly tripped due to the shock of seeing me here.
For over a week, I had been held prisoner by partisans in Wallachia. The girl had brought me food, water, and promises to murder me that she never could quite bring herself to fulfill. Her hatred was understandable because I had been part of the unit that had massacred her village, killing her parents, grandmother, brother, and sister, at the orders of the infamous warmage General Ognyan Spitignov. I had also buried her alive in a mass grave.
In my defense, I had made sure to bury her with a shovel in her hand, an act of gruesome mercy without which she probably would not have survived. In a state of shock, coping with a vivid flashback, I didn't even see the sixth person to step out of the carriage. I know it must have happened because there were six of them standing in front of me when the baron's voice brought me back to the present day.
“And this is Colonel Marcus Raven, who is handling the security for our little project. Marcus?” The baron cleared his throat loudly.
I saluted smartly, or at least saluted in a manner that I hoped came across smartly. “Pleased to meet you, good sirs, I am at your service,” I said, guessing vaguely at an appropriate form of collective address. From Quentin Gavreau's eye-roll, I had chosen poorly. “I believe some of you may have made the acquaintance of Lieutenant Quentin Gavreau, my special liaison officer, who will be seeing to any special requests or concerns you may have,” I added.
Quentin recovered nicely from the surprise of being given the new title of “special liaison officer” and moved into action automatically, years of ingrained training in the social arts of the nobility taking over. I could not cope with this. My efforts were entirely concentrated on retaining my composure and not betraying the fact that I had recognized the fifth occupant of the carriage.
For her part, she didn't say anything, either, nor was she introduced by name. She was simply mentioned as being the ward of one of the men; that introduction complete with the obligatory comment about being pleased to meet the baron, she faded back into obscurity. Standing behind the men, she stared at me quietly.
“And where is Ms. Odobescu?” The question, posed entirely too casually by the unfamiliar man with the amethyst pendant, caught my ear.
Quentin caught my eye. I shook my head in what I hoped was a subtle enough fashion not to be noticed. The girl was staring right at me. “I'm afraid she's feeling indisposed at the moment,” Quentin said.
I muttered something about double-checking security arrangements and fled the scene with as much combined decorum and speed as I could muster. I could feel that girl's eyes burning a hole in the back of my head the entire way.
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As the saying goes, whether you're trying to cheat death or trying to cheat the taxman, you are liable to end up both penniless and dead in the end. I say this to justify why I apparently had no sense of self-preservation left, and thus decided to give death a free pawn and put myself in check in the same move. That is to say, after fleeing the girl and the uncomfortable memories she brought up, I climbed on top of the roof of the main factory compound and up the side of its tallest smokestack.
I had already been on the roof but had given climbing all the way up the smokestack a pass before because the maintenance ladder bolted to its side looked rickety. I had met the factory's chimneysweeps, the men who used those ladders regularly. They were all quite small; short bandy-legged men comfortable with tight spaces and lacking any sensible fear of heights. The state of the maintenance ladders didn't bother them, but I feared I might weigh as much as any two of them put together.
This was, of course, not the only danger. I recalled that a Katya in distress, or a Katya waiting for a good shot, was often found in a high position. She was likely up a tree, on a rooftop, or something of that sort. I do not know if it was her training as a sniper or some deeper-seeded habit involving her childhood, but I had found Katya hidden up above too often for it to be a coincidence. If she was anywhere nearby, it was probably somewhere high, with a view of her surroundings.
With her deep affection for firearms, she likely was cuddling her favorite rifle, though I had not seen whether or not she was carrying it when she fled from me. I had just called her an insane psychotic woman likely to shoot me in the head. This left me with one thought in mind as I carefully ascended the ladder:
She might be inclined to prove me right.
I half hoped to find her at the top of the smokestack, in spite of the unlikeliness of it as a hiding spot. but she wasn't there. I walked carefully around the top of the smokestack, avoiding stepping on the grate that was intended to dissuade birds from flying in during down periods; I wasn't sure if it would take the load of my weight. I circled the top of the smokestack four times, each time casting my gaze a little bit further, before pausing to consider. The main factory building roof; the main production centers; the outer buildings; and then the fortifications we had built.
I stopped as I looked at the wall, peering at the spot where Katya's tracks dented the ground. I could still make them out, as I knew where to look for them. They started at the wall itself and went directly to the door of the pub.
On the other side of the wall, where I hadn't looked before, I could make out a set of footprints leading away. It was difficult to tell if they were Katya's prints, softened as they were by light rain and several hours; perhaps if I had been closer, I would have been able to tell for sure, but at a hundred and fifty yards through the deep shadows of a setting sun, I was doing well to spot the shallow depressions in the mud, make out which end of the prints was a little narrower, and note the direction in which the broken and bent foliage pointed.
The tracks led through the cleared fire zone and out into the woods. It was the work of a minute to spot the glint of a spyglass, two-thirds of the way up one of the taller trees. A few seconds more, and I had made out Katya with her rifle, outline broken up by sticks and leaves, face daubed with stripes of something dark.
“I'm sorry, Katya,” I said quietly in her general direction and then climbed back down.
On the ground, I found one of the baron's servants waiting for me, impatient for me to get cleaned up and join the baron and his business partners for dinner. He seemed particularly distressed that “Leontina Odobescu” would not be joining the baron for dinner – to the point of demanding an explanation on the pain of the baron's wrath.
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“She's not even in the compound,” I told him. “That's about as thoroughly indisposed as you can be. I would rather not account for anything more specifically than that – matters are dangerous enough as they stand.”
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I wasn't lying. There was, after all, a very dangerous (and not very happy) sharpshooter out there, perched in an elevated position with a good view of the compound. Granted, she hadn't shot anybody yet, but as Vitold was fond of telling me, she had a lot of practice in shooting people and very little practice with feeling guilty about it. I could not help but agree with Vitold that she was likely to shoot me eventually, once her sense of patriotic duty told her to do so.
That sense of duty had been on my side so far. Her belief that I was a loyal and capable Imperial officer was strong, but that faith was founded in fragile delusions. Love shields delusion, as a wise old woman once told me. If I had lost Katya's affection those delusions could shatter at the slightest blow. Any careful reflection on Katya's part would hammer those delusions repeatedly, with the particular combination of delicacy and volatility that one might associate with an attempt to use a steam-powered shovel to mix unfamiliar and experimental ingredients in an alchemical laboratory.
All of this reasoning expressed itself as a psychosomatic itch between my shoulder blades that only faded once the door was closed behind me and returned each time I passed a window. As I dressed (or, more accurately, was stuffed into what the baron's servants thought was appropriate attire for me for the occasion) I could not help but note that my room had a view of the forest rather than the compound, meaning that it was on the same side of the baron's mansion as Katya's tree. It is fair to say I felt very exposed during that process.
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“The Colonel Marcus Corvus, of the Raven’s Battalion, amicus the family Rimehammer of Sweden.” The butler's pronouncement was halfway between a drone and a bellow – dispassionate and monotone, but somehow also loud and pretentious. I had fobbed off his attempts at prying lineage and additional titles off on Felix; the Swedish captain apparently decided that the most important extra title he could slap on was a statement that I was a “friend” (business partner, really) of his extended family. The stentorian introduction left me unable to avoid notice.
“Please be seated,” the butler said, only slightly less loudly. “The second soup course will be arriving shortly.” He gave me a look as if he was worried I would do something highly inappropriate, only lifting his gaze off his nose once I had taken my seat between the baron's daughter and one of her visiting friends.
This put me directly across from the man with the amethyst pendant. Sitting next to him was a girl. That girl, the one who brought recurring nightmares to mind. We avoided making eye contact with one another as I sat down. I stared intently at my wineglass instead and thought about getting very drunk to numb the mounting feelings of guilt, horror, and fear.
Thinking about getting very drunk didn't do very much in and of itself, but staring intently at the wineglass caught the attention of the butler, who took it as a signal of sorts and made a gesture to one of the servants. I did not see the servant fill the wine; my vision was instead filled with flashes of unpleasant memories. The massacre; the aftermath; my time as a prisoner in the hands of Wallachian militants. When the memories faded, I saw a full glass of wine in front of me, which I drained promptly.
I don't know what the first soup course had been, but the second soup course was a very thin lightly peppered broth with some sort of translucent slivers of green, slivers of water chestnuts, and bits of mushroom. I wasn't quite sure what the slivers of green were. This was served in a saucer that was wide, with wide lips, but shallow enough that it was difficult to scoop a full spoonful of soup out.
As a servant leaned over my shoulder to top up my wineglass for the third time, I thought to myself that I had drunk tea that seemed more substantial. If a meal consists of many courses, making them individually small and light made a certain amount of sense. In some ways, this was similar to dancing at a noble party. Nobles danced with little vigor because they could afford to have parties that lasted a long time and didn’t want to tire in the first hour.
The baron cleared his throat noisily. I looked up.
“Colonel, I asked what you thought of wider versus narrower caliber of shot for the same weight of gun,” he said. “As a professional military man, you must have an opinion on the topic.”
“My apologies, I was considering the soup, it's quite interesting.” I shrugged and sipped my wine. “Well, my experience is that you use what you have,” I said, then paused to take another long draw from my glass, choosing my words ahead of time carefully to dance around the inconvenient fact that what I had in terms of cannons mostly consisted of guns issued to General Spitignov by the Imperial Army.
The baron nodded patiently.
“The battalion's gun battery is a little … ah … mix and match. It makes sorting ammunition fairly tricky. Since I wasn't expecting to need to reduce any fortifications to rubble, I left my chief artillery officer back in Dab. I'm sure he would have a lot to say about such matters,” I said. “Weight for weight, a longer and narrower gun can shoot a smaller ball faster, and this is easier to aim with less need to correct for windage. Wider cannons can more easily handle an exploding shell, however. A larger shot from a shorter barrel, such as a mortar, experiences a lesser shock from firing, and can hold more powder.”
I reached into my pocket, intending to take out materials with which to draw diagrams illustrating the nature of the difference, and then realized that all of my pockets were empty, courtesy of my hasty change into dinner-appropriate attire. I frowned.
A light hand patted me on the thigh consolingly underneath the tablecloth. I leaned back in my chair, schooling my expression. The baron's daughter and her friend exchanged looks past me, and then both giggled.
The baron steered the conversation in another direction with more determination than grace, moving the subject to the recent war between the Sultan and Emperor Koschei. One servant reached around me to retrieve the soup saucer; another topped up my wine glass.
The third soup course arrived. This time I recognized the vegetable component: Leeks. Leeks sliced crosswise and then boiled until nearly transparent and nearly (but not quite) flavorless. The shallowness of the saucers used was no longer much of an irritation; while the previous soup had reminded me more of a peppery tea, this one was barely substantial enough to register as more than tepid water, a sort of spacer better used as an excuse to avoid talking.
The wine, of course, served a similar purpose while being considerably more flavorful, and (unlike the soup) was constantly being resupplied by servants. I wondered if the first soup course had been something more hearty, or at least more interesting, but didn't know how to politely broach the topic without reminding everyone present of my failure to arrive punctually.
Then, as my thoughts turned to the topic of missing food and hunger, my eye caught on the amethyst pendant of the man sitting across from me. The pendant he wore was a match for Katya's, and I wondered what Katya was eating. If she was eating anything. The thought of her sitting up in that tree, cold and hungry … I blinked, looking into the bottom of an empty wineglass, one hasty emotional gulp having drained it completely.
The man across the table from me leaned forward, a curious look on his face, but said nothing.
“I'm sorry,” I told him, quietly. I didn't want to draw attention. “I was thinking of...” I paused, deciding to better avoid the subject of Katya, my eyes involuntarily flickering back to the man's amethyst pendant. “I was thinking of an absent friend.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a servant leaning over my shoulder to refill my empty glass.
“Ah. Yes, the war has left many of us with absent friends.” He raised up his glass and drained it. “To absent friends,” he said, in a very uncharacteristically quiet toast.