Four little beady eyes were looking down at me. With effort, I focused, my head throbbing, four beady little eyes condensing into two, framed by brown fur and a set of whiskers. Rodent, my memory informed me. I concentrated, trying to figure out more about the brown rodent. A rat. The rat was looking down at me from on top of a shelf, wondering if I was incapacitated enough to serve as a source of food. I did not think I was a suitable source of food and told the rat as much. But what was I? Who was I? I had a name, I sensed, and with the name would come more information.
A few moments passed in concentration. I was Mikolai Stepanovich. Who had received an unfortunate promotion. Wait. Two unfortunate promotions? Three? From a greasemonkey to a steam knight was a promotion of sorts, and I had been a squad leader. There had been a battle, and I had been in charge of it, so I must have been promoted again, in fact if not necessarily in name. I squinted upwards. The rat had gone away during my moments of introspection.
Yes, there had been a battle. And I had … died? I thought about that for a moment. I remembered seeing a crossbow bolt, feeling the sharp pain in my abdomen. I hurt too much to be dead, though. Were the dead hungry? I was hungry, and the stone floor was uncomfortable. I sat up. I was in a small room, I discovered. My wrists and ankles felt heavy. Feeling along my body, I felt bandages wrapped around my middle, and heard the cold clink of metal as I shifted my hands. Manacles. Prodding at the bandages hurt, so I stopped, letting my arms fall back down with the clink of metal on stone.
----------------------------------------
A face appeared at the little grate in the door, briefly. The door opened a moment later, revealing a gaunt young woman with eyes full of rage. She had an Imperial standard-issue entrenching tool tied to her belt, along with a knife. A pistol was tucked in her waistband. She had half a loaf of bread and a tankard, which she carefully set on the floor beside the door. Then she spat on me, kicked me a couple of times, said something rude, and then left, closing the door behind her with a slam.
I clutched my side in pain and digested the new influx of information. Given her accent, I was in Wallachia. Based on her choice of language, she had some reason to believe I was Ruthenian. Her specific choice of words indicated she believed that my parents were not married to each other. I thought about this for a minute. I was indeed Ruthenian, but I felt reasonably certain that my parents were married to each other. It took me a minute to remember them. My father’s iron-colored hair, gray and flecked with rust. My mother’s kindly but perpetually worried face.
Yes, definitely married to each other, and as I was not their oldest child, there was little doubt they had been already married when I was born. First children are sometimes born out of wedlock to scandal, but never a second child. Half of my brothers had started going bald, two were starting to go gray, and the other was at least married, and it stood to reason that they were probably all older than I was, even if I couldn’t quite remember their names.
When I reached for the water, I found that the manacles about my wrists and ankles were chained together through a bolt in the opposite wall. I could barely reach it, the cold steel of the manacles cutting into my wrists painfully while I tickled the tankard into my grasp by my fingertips. I wondered if the girl had meant to place them out of my reach to torment me. The bread was fresh but coarse. The water had a slight acrid tang to it, but I found I was quite thirsty, and drank every last drop of it, sucking greedily at the lip of the tankard.
----------------------------------------
Several hours and one snapped pin later, I had collected most of my wits, was hungry again, and had a new appreciation for Vitold’s talents. He made picking locks seem a lot easier than it really was. I also had company again; an older gentleman with a pair of younger men who looked like they were as well suited to the front of the plow as the back of it. The oldster was wearing a silver pin with an amethyst set in it. He offered me a great big tankard of stale-tasting beer.
I foolishly gulped it down. It may have been flat and a bit sour, but I was hungry, thirsty, and tired. He asked me questions. It started innocuously, asking about how I was feeling, had my wound opened back up, things like that. From there the topic drifted to my background: What was my name? My rank? What did I do when I wasn’t busy burning Wallachian villages to the ground and murdering innocent civilians? The questions ranged from the practical to the accusatory.
I wish I could say I resisted interrogation proudly, but it wasn’t until the left-hand ox-life fellow menaced me with a fire poker to encourage a quicker answer that I even realized I was being interrogated by hostile enemies, and was supposed to give them no answers at all. That sort of stoic heroism was beyond me. Up until then, it seemed like just a conversation, and it would have felt rude to sit there silently. After that point, manners deserted me in favor of trying to get them to stop hurting me.
“I asked how long you’d been apprenticed to the war mage Spitignov,” said the old man. “Don’t lie to me, boy, it was a mage hunter that brought you down; she told us you smelled like magic, and that’s why she shot you. Both of your mechs halted in their tracks after that.”
“Both?” I asked, extremely puzzled. Two mechs? I received another painful jab from the ox-like Wallachian’s fire poker.
“Playing dumb, Mikolai? It doesn’t suit you. We recovered one of them from the scene of the battle. Very cleverly put together, you’d think it was just another steam knight from the outside. You don’t match any of the imperial wizards in our files, but I’m not ignorant. I know that the Imperial Army always pairs new wizards with old ones to show them the ropes in the field.” The old man glared. “You must be Ognyan’s apprentice. They never assigned him one before that I know of.”
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“I didn’t want to have anything to do with the war mage! Look, I’m just a soldier, he picked me to be part of his special force, I didn’t have a choice,” I told him.
“Call yourself ‘just a soldier’ again and Murgu will be unhappy,” the old man told me, a gleam in his eye. Too late, I realized that I had just confirmed that one General Ognyan Spitignov was operating a secret strike force in the area. He probably hadn’t been sure of it before I’d told him, but had only been pretending to be sure that Ognyan was my mentor in order to tease a less specific but more accurate piece of information out of me.
The interrogation continued; whenever I went off the topic, Murgu poked me with the fire poker suggestively. If I said something they thought was a lie, Murgu would swing or jab, and that would hurt. The ordeal seemed to last forever, but it was probably only an hour or two, ending when my bandages started to ooze blood, my stomach wound having reopened in spite of the care Murgu took to aim his blows at my limbs. After it was over, I just lay curled up on the floor, crying.
----------------------------------------
I don’t know how much time passed before the girl came back. She didn’t say anything this time, just snorted contemptuously before depositing my meal by the door. And so, the pattern began again, as it would for several days. The girl would bring bread and water and take away my chamberpot; sometimes, though not always, she spat on me, kicked me, or insulted me. The old man would come and ask me questions, accompanied by his brutish bookends. Some of the questions were the same, some were different.
They wanted to know about what made my comrades tick, what I knew about the general, what tactical doctrines we were trained in, how much coal our machines required for daily operations, and so on. Sometimes, I tried to hold out. Sometimes, I just made up answers to questions I didn’t know how to answer.
I wasn’t sure how they knew some things, but then I remembered the visit to town, and the amethyst pendant that one girl in town had been wearing. A chain of memories and logic clicked together. Before I was shot, I’d seen the red-haired sharpshooter, and she still had the amethyst pendant she’d pulled off a dead rebel. This, in turn, meant that Ilya hadn’t won it off her at cards.
This meant that there were two identical pendants to start with, suggesting that the pendant worn by the girl in town wasn’t a present from Ilya. It was something that the girl in town had been wearing all along. Finally, the old man had a pin that looked much like those pendants, a brooch set with a polished amethyst. One amethyst was happenstance; two was coincidence; a third was enemy action, a pattern suggesting a common tie between the old rebel, the dead rebel, and the girl in town.
The girl was a rebel as well. Ilya, then, was their other source of knowledge. His desertion had been engineered by the rebels, via contact with the girl in town, and they had gotten information from him either during his overnight stay in town or subsequent to his desertion.
----------------------------------------
“I should just kill you, Ruthenian,” the girl said, in a conversational tone. “Yes, I think I will kill you.”
I’d been here in my little cell for about a week if I could rely on the cycle of meals to give me clues to the time, maybe a few days longer or shorter. The girl who brought me food and took away my chamberpot had never spoken in a civil tone before; she growled, snarled, cursed, and shouted at me in a varied assortment of rude and hostile ways. This was not the first time she’d expressed murderous intentions, but expressing them in a calm and polite tone sent chills down my spine.
That, and the way that she held a drawn pistol, handling it thoughtfully. Perhaps it was that which caused me to shiver; it was a new sign of sincerity every bit as alarming as her change in attitude.
“Wouldn’t the old man be disappointed if you shot me?” I asked. “He seems to love talking to me.” If I could keep her talking, I thought to myself, maybe she would change her mind.
“I’d be doing the captain a favor if I shot you,” she said. “We can’t let you go, and keeping you around as a prisoner costs us time, money, and bread. None of those are cheap.”
I thought she was entirely too young to murder someone in cold blood. “I’m helpless here. Chained to the wall. Are you sure you want to become a murderer? What would your parents think of that?”
Her eyes bored into me like drill bits. “They’re dead.”
“I’m sorry-” I said, but she interrupted me.
“You lot killed them. Them, my grandmother, my sister, my brother, everyone in the whole village.” She pointed the pistol directly at me and continued:
“It was a massacre. We weren’t even armed. The soldiers brought us all to the village common and this maniac started chopping off our heads one at a time – then when we tried to run, the soldiers blocked us in and butchered the rest of us like cattle. The only reason I lived is by playing dead, and I was half suffocated by the time I finished digging myself out of a pile of bloody corpses.”
An image flashed up from my memory, involuntarily. I saw in my mind’s eye General Ognyan Spitignov holding his bloody sword high over a little old lady, in the middle of the village square. The square was already spattered with blood, as was the general’s right boot.
“I’m sorry-” I started again, but she would not let me finish.
“But you weren’t the maniac who chopped my grandmother’s head off, so I should let you off the hook? You weren’t even there, you never heard of such a thing, so you’re innocent? Is that what you’re going to say? No. You’re all murderers just the same, whether you’re the horrid emperor, that giant maniac, or just wear his bloody uniform with the rest of them.” She paused to take a breath and aim, her expression settling back down from anger to calm resolve.
“I’m the one who gave you that shovel,” I said, quietly, looking down at the entrenching tool hanging from her belt and then back up into her eyes.
Her finger trembled on the trigger. She inhaled, her finger sliding over the trigger. Exhaled. Inhaled. Then she turned and ran away, making a strangled sound of some kind.
For the next several hours, I worried that she would come back, with a new resolve to kill me; but she did not return at all. As my attention was fixed on the doorway, the thunderous roar of the explosion behind me took me by complete surprise.