Involuntarily, I shut my eyes, blinking. The railing vibrated, and I heard a splash in front of me. Somehow, they had missed. I opened my eyes, my peripheral vision still filled with turquoise flashes. The offending cannon had rolled back with the recoil from its shot, but was still visible – and a short bandy-legged man was swabbing the barrel in the first step of preparing to reload it. I felt unaccountably tired, but I knew that they were unlikely to miss twice in a row.

My fingers twitched, tying an invisible knot, and I lashed out with a line of magical force. The cannon resisted the motion for a moment before lurching forward. I pulled harder with my arm and my mind, and it plummeted down, landing in the courtyard of the lower fort with a sound like a giant hammer striking an anvil.

I heard that sound clearly because silence had fallen over the soldiers on top of the wall. For a minute, the only other sound was the dying hiss of the steam engine as the boat slowly crept ahead in the direction of the fort. Then an enemy soldier raised his arquebus vertically, a white cloth tied to the end. The other enemy soldiers were laying down their guns and holding their hands high.

“A surrender!” he shouted, the early morning light illuminating his impromptu white flag from behind. “We surrender! Mercy!”

Some tell a different version of the tale, but it is not true that I broke the Batavis fort without firing a single shot. At least a dozen of my men had returned fire before my order to the contrary. Nor is it true that I took it without any losses; I had two wounded and one missing, likely dead and fallen overboard and two of the defenders died, one by return fire and the other slipping off the edge of the wall by accident.

Nevertheless, it is true that the lower fort surrendered to me before I had even reached its walls. It was miraculous that there had been so few injuries; true, the first volley had been offered at a great range, but we had been well within killing range after that. In truth, I think the same fear that had led them to start shooting desperately at a boat full of unfamiliar soldiers had left them with unsteady arms, ready to surrender once they had an excuse to do so.

***

Having taken the lower fort, we sent one of the surrendered soldiers to the upper fort as a messenger. Of the others, we released any who were willing to give their parole and promise not to promptly take up arms against us again, though we didn’t give them back their arquebuses. This proved to be most of them, though some preferred to take a launch across one of the rivers rather than travel up the causeway to the upper fort.

When I wrote my message, I didn’t know how to explain that I hadn’t intended to take the lower fort, so I did not try. Knowing that the audience was a member of both the nobility and the clergy, I wrote the message in the most flowery Latin I could come up with while saying as little as possible: I had possession of the lower fort and was willing to consider any reasonable terms that the would-be bishop cared to offer.

As far as I was concerned, I was a neutral party in their conflict in spite of having been unjustly attacked. A mercenary ought to be pragmatic about such things. Pragmatically, I also sent one of my own men as a messenger to the force arrayed outside of the upper fort, indicating my willingness to discuss matters with them. In the best case, I might provoke a bidding war.

In my thoughts, it seemed better to sell possession of the fort than to sell my services. The fort seemed valuable, and I had been freshly reminded that mercenaries earn coins with their own blood. One missing (likely dead) and two wounded was a distasteful price to pay for having approached a prospective employer too closely, and possession of the lower fort seemed like something that either party would be willing to pay for.

***

The first replies from both parties were belligerent, so I put Felix and Georg to work making an inventory of the fort’s potentially salable contents. Fyodor, Ragnar, and the infantry captain were put in command of emplacing artillery and planning defenses. The upper fort held the advantage of height on us in any exchange of hostilities, but the range was not terribly far in either direction.

I sat in the tower and stared at a sheet of blank paper for a while, uncertain how to reply. After the candle burned down a full mark, I put the would-be bishops’ accusations of banditry to the side and worked on my Slavonic translation of the alchemy text for a while. Alchemy seemed far simpler than figuring out how to deal with nobles.

The breakthrough was when I realized that for someone who had seen my approach to the fort as a bold attack, I was a bandit as long as I wasn’t working for either one of them. However, if I was working for the other, then I was a simple mercenary. Inspired, I jotted down my notes and sent for Quentin.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Here’s what I’m thinking of telling them,” I told Quentin, waving the paper.

“Your holiness,” Quentin started, then paused. “That should be excellence, not holiness,” he said, then looked back down at the page. “Various pleasantries – I can rewrite this part for you...”

“Yes, please do,” I said. “But do go on.”

Quentin moved his finger down the page and then cleared his throat. “Perhaps I failed to make it clear that the pretender has, unfortunately, failed to pay me. My services are not cheap, and I will not serve a master beyond his breach of contract, which places me in an awkward position following my arrival,” he said. “Really? We’re going to just lie to them?”

“It’s not false,” I said. “He hasn’t hired us, but he also hasn’t paid us.”

“Which one is this letter going to?” Quentin asked.

“Both of them?” I looked at Quentin.

Quentin rubbed his forehead. “Hm,” he said. “This is going to be a long night, and I think I want Georg to help with this. He’s clever with a good turn of phrase.”

***

Georg absently twirled a lock of her blonde hair that had come loose from under her cap, biting her lip as she held the quill over the page. “I think that will do it for Hellenbodus, but we really have to start over for the other letter,” she said. “Sending the exact same message would be a mistake. This version is long, flowery, personal, and we’re dropping the hint six different ways.”

“Good man,” Quentin said, clapping the woman on the back.

I drained the last of the tea in my cup, rubbing my eyes sleepily. “I think I’ll take a walk,” I said. “Can you two keep working on this without me?”

“Yes,” Quentin said. “Georg and I have it handled, you can go get some sleep.”

Georg nodded eagerly, unconsciously licking her lips. “Definitely,” she said in the deepest voice she could muster, straightening her shoulders out.

I looked between the two of them. “Alright,” I said with a shrug. “Just try not to lie outright. I’d feel bad about that. See you in the morning, then.”As I walked, I heard Georg’s voice.

“The best lies are mostly the truth,” she said under her breath.

Looking back, I think she was correct. The best lies are truths told very carefully.

For my part, I did go for a walk before turning in, greeting the soldiers on watch and inspecting the placement of our artillery. I had no intention of second-guessing my lieutenants’ choices, as both of them knew more about artillery than I did, but it felt good to familiarize myself with where each gun was placed.

The troops on watch were also happy to see me on the battlements. When I had put myself front and center on the flat deck of the paddlewheel barge, I had worried that my troops might think I was vain. However, my choice also made me a target. Every bullet that was fired at me was one less bullet fired at the troops behind me, and the soldiers didn’t know that I had blinked when the cannon was fired at us. The armor had concealed that, and as far as they were concerned, I had put myself between them and cannon fire without flinching.

One of them called me “Lord Corvus” instead of “Colonel” or “sir.” It was so strange that I didn’t know what to say back to him. While systems of primogeniture vary slightly, all would at least put the surviving half of my father’s older brothers in line ahead of him, and all three of them had children of their own. Even if a title had been bestowed on my father in my absence, I had half a dozen older brothers between me and any paternal inheritance.

Yet “noble” meant “virtuous,” not just born to inherit wealth and authority. To that soldier, I was noble enough that I simply had to be a lord. My actual birth status was irrelevant; I had authority, virtue, and perhaps even divine favor, and that meant I deserved the greatest level of respect he could grant with his words.

After walking the battlements and inspecting guns, I checked on the infirmary, where two of my men and three of my erstwhile enemies were dancing with death. Even a small wound could inflame and lead to death, and those five had all been wounded seriously. I spoke with the two of them who were awake. One was a Khazar arquebusier who had spent five years in the service of the Golden Empire; the other was a local, who in his delirium apologized three times for shooting at me, saying that I looked like I was important.

***

In the morning, we buried three men and sent two messengers. The Khazar was doing better, as was the apologetic local; the rest had not survived the night. During the ad hoc ceremony, the surgeon looked as if he wanted a conversation with me, glancing over my direction often, but then turned and left without saying a word.

Even if nothing the letters said was truly a lie, I felt a twist in my gut as the messengers left. What was I doing trying to bluff myself into some measure of respectability? And what business did I really have taking sides in a local conflict over who was supposed to become the next bishop?

Protecting a factory against bandits and other malefactors seemed morally much simpler. I hadn’t wanted to become a soldier in the first place and hadn’t wanted to murder for the cause of the Golden Empire. Offering to murder for the cause of profit seemed no better. I had another handful of deaths on my conscience as a result of a simple imprudent decision, and now I was offering to add dozens or hundreds more.

Still, it was the path I had chosen – that we had chosen – and stepping off that path had its own risks. With any luck, my intervention in this succession crisis would leave matters no worse than whatever would have happened if I had taken the left fork in the river and gone directly up the Oen without stopping at Batavis.

After seeing off the messengers, I retreated to the tower, returning to my self-assigned task of translating the alchemy text. With the lower fort’s walls being directly on the river, the watch team on top of the tower had a much better view, and working on the top floor of the tower meant that I would be one of the first to hear any news they had. It was a good place to wait.