The loud boom behind me was accompanied by a wave of heat and debris. Then a beam from the ceiling fell inward, landing on top of the fragments of wall and myself, hammering me into the stone floor with a force that wasn’t quite hard enough to end my pain.
I tried to gather my thoughts but felt a sudden jolt from my manacles. Were they enchanted? I opened my mouth to curse in rage and fury, but then there was another jolt from my manacles. And now they felt even heavier. Underneath my shirt, my good luck charm felt icy cold against my chest. Had I run out of luck? Was I dying?
I could hear gunshots, hoofbeats, and shouting. Someone lifted the beam off me, then pulled me loose from the debris. They said something, but my ears were ringing and my eyes unfocused. Then they shook me again, and their shouting started to make sense.
“Where is Ilya?” A blur resolved into the red-headed sharpshooter. What was her name? She continued. “Ilya! You must know where he is!” She shook me harder.
A voice spoke, deep and emotionless. “Ilya is dead,” the voice said. I couldn’t place it, but it sounded familiar. It was a little like my father’s, only with less warmth, more depth, and a sense of distance. My manacles let loose another jolt and grew yet heavier. The statement made sense, in light of the misunderstandings the rebels had about me. If they had Ilya to question as well, willing or not, their questions should have been shaped by his responses. They would have had different questions to ask as they compared Ilya’s answers to mine.
The sharpshooter let go of me, and I fell back to the ground face-first, weighted down by my manacles. “You lie!” she said, and her boots stepped out of my field of view. I heard her voice calling Ilya’s name, growing fainter with each repetition.
“Please,” I said to the floor in front of my face, “come back and get me out of these manacles. Don’t leave me here.”
Neither the floor nor the sharpshooter seemed to take notice, but a minute later I heard Vitold’s voice. “Wake up, Mikolai, let’s get you out of here.”
I groaned. “I can’t move, the manacles are too heavy,” I said. I experimentally tried to shift one. It felt like I was trying to lift a cow.
“Nonsense,” Vitold said. He picked up one of my arms off the ground, shook it, and then let go. It crashed back down to the ground, the weight of the manacle overwhelming the feeble force of my resistance. “Hm. I guess I better get them off you, though. You must be weak as a kitten.” A few moments of fiddling and a few muttered curses about fancy locks later, the weight was gone, and I felt a rush of energy.
Vitold helped me to my feet. I toed the pieces of runed metal on the ground experimentally. They shifted easily. Either they had changed weight, or I had gained strength.
“Come on, Mikolai, we have got to get out of here. The rest of them could come back at any moment.” Vitold seemed impatient.
Looking around, I could see that I had been in a small wooden house. One wall and half of the ceiling had collapsed entirely in the explosion. Two horses stood next to the wall. The old man and Murgu were lying on the ground in pools of blood. An inert imperial steam knight suit was lying in the debris, access panels open to reveal the machinery inside. I could still hear the red-headed sharpshooter’s voice calling Ilya’s name.
I wobbled towards the horses. With a little difficulty, we managed to get on a horse; that is to say, I managed to climb up behind Vitold with his help. The red-headed woman returned and mounted the other horse.
“He’s not here,” she told us. “I looked under the beds and in the cupboards. They must have taken him to another place to hold him. We ride now!”
This last, I dimly perceived, was an order with some haste behind it, as I could hear voices shouting in Romanian from the woods. We were going to have company if we lingered any longer. Vitold leaned forward to urge the horse on, and as the horse accelerated forward, I slid bonelessly off its back, crunching to the ground with the grace of paralytic exhaustion. I may have had some of my energy back, but after my time confined to a cell with only a little bread and water to eat, I was not particularly strong and my reflexes were diminished.
Ahead, I could see Vitold look back, and start to work on slowing his horse. The returning rebels would catch him if he turned around now. This would not do. But there was the ‘Ilya’ mech, not more than ten yards from me. If only it were turned on. I stared at it longingly, and it burst into life, boiler bursting into full steam from a cold start. The access panels closed, and the mech turned to face me.
I commanded it to come get me as Vitold fought to turn his horse around, and it thundered into motion, scooping me off the ground like a shepherd would with a lamed lamb. The sharpshooter looked pleased and pulled her horse to a halt, slowing to let the mech catch up. I could hear her congratulating Ilya for retrieving valuable equipment and heroically rescuing me, and berating Vitold for saying that Ilya had deserted.
When Vitold started to say “But Katya -” she told him to shut up and that she recognized Ilya’s armor.
Katya. That was her name. I made a mental note to myself. The mech helped me down into a standing position. I had a clear head and my feet beneath me, and I decided to clear up the confusion.
“Open your helmet,” I told the mech built from Ilya’s armor. The helmet popped open, revealing an empty space above the elemental cage, and Katya’s mouth dropped open.
“The real Ilya walked off while on a night watch. The rebels had contact with him, and it seems to have been their agent in the town who enticed him to desert. Rationally speaking, he is most likely either dead or cooperating with insurgent forces.” Probably dead, I thought to myself, remembering what the cold voice had said.
Katya’s saddened face looked like that of a child whose puppy had been trampled to a pulp under the hooves of the horses pulling a nobleman’s carriage. I took pity on her, holding up a hand while I tried to think of something to say that would be honest and ease her pain. “I’ll promise you this, Katya. If you’re right, and Ilya is simply held somewhere, and we find out where, I will help you rescue him, just as you and Vitold rescued me.”
A deep cold voice continued, loud and resonant in my ears. “However, Ilya is dead. When he walked out into the woods, he did so in the dark of night with no decent woodscraft at his disposal. He didn’t even make his rendezvous with his rebel lover, but died alone, lost in the woods.”
And I again felt certain that the voice spoke truth. But as I looked about us in the woods, I saw no other people – only myself, Vitold, and Katya.
Who had spoken?
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It had grown dark and the mech was low on fuel when we saw an abandoned hut, so we decided to stop to rest. Katya was sulking and refusing to talk to me, so it fell on Vitold to fill me in on what had happened after I got shot with an enchanted crossbow bolt. First, he started a fire and made tea, and then he began his account.
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Katya’s timely arrival had put fear into the hearts of the rebels, who must have assumed she was the vanguard of a larger force. They’d retreated cautiously but in good order, taking their wounded with them along with the captured mech and me. My squad had one additional casualty: Gregor Petrovich had suffered a heart attack. He was still gasping for breath when they popped his helmet off, but he died shortly afterwards. The rebels’ claim that shooting me had stopped two mechs in their tracks made sense now.
Neither of the other members of my squad had been shot through their heavy steam knight armor, but the regular infantry weren’t so fortunate. Half of them died during or soon after the battle, including their sergeant; half the remainder were injured, two quite severely. One had lost a leg and another had blown his hand off while trying to reload the platoon’s volley gun.
Steam Knight Squad Two, who had charged into the midst of the rebel force in the wake of my jury-rigged mech and then been scattered by the angry crows, died to a man. Most died from bullets fired at close enough range to pierce through the weaker parts of their armor. One was killed by an enchanted armor-piercing crossbow bolt like the one that had nearly killed me, and another from an exploding boiler. His one working safety valve had been jammed by a divebombing crow, a freakish consequence of the birds’ unnatural behavior combined with a lack of proper maintenance of his equipment.
Katya had orders for Captain Egorov bearing the general’s seal. Given that Captain Egorov was clearly unable to receive them, she’d consented to have them opened and read by the corporal of the regular infantry squad, who claimed to be the ranking survivor and therefore in charge. Unfortunately, they were written in some kind of code and were therefore of little use.
Katya immediately went about organizing a rescue mission for Ilya. Vitold had been unable to convince her that Ilya had already deserted, but was able to convince her to go to town to search for clues. The two of them went back into town in civilian clothes, leaving Misha and half a dozen injured soldiers to watch over the rebel base.
They did manage to find the establishment of ill repute at which Ilya had met his charming rebel girlfriend. Katya, with all the subtlety of an ox let loose in a shop of laboratory glassware, walked straight in, asked to see the proprietor, and then asked him, point blank, where the rebels were keeping the “handsome Ruthenian prisoner.”
The proprietor started, looked down at her chest for a long moment, then back up at her, and told her that the Ruthenian prisoner was being kept in Doctor Onofrei’s old cabin, and would she keep her voice down? People could overhear.
At this point in his story, Vitold chuckled and said that he didn’t think a good glance at Katya’s breasts was worth betraying your comrades for. Besides, didn’t a man in his occupation have ready access to better ones? The house of ill repute had been quite well staffed.
Katya gave him an angry glare, and I looked over at Katya’s chest to see what Vitold was talking about, after which she gave me a glare as well. She was still wearing the necklace. While I wasn’t sure I agreed with Vitold’s assessment of Katya’s more permanent features in the area of her chest, it seemed rude to comment openly on them, so I didn’t. Instead, I commented on a temporary feature that seemed important.
“Katya," I said, pointing at the necklace, “Were you wearing that necklace when you visited the town?"
She nodded.
“Ah. I see,” I said. “He thought you were a rebel, because of the necklace.”
Katya stopped, put down her teacup, and began to fiddle with the catch of the necklace to take it off, a look of disgust on her face.
“Wait. Don’t throw it away. It may be useful, and a good patriotic soldier never throws away a useful tool. Besides, it sets off your eyes nicely,” I added hastily.
I’m not sure if it was the appeal to patriotism, the compliment, or simply the fact that I was giving her orders as if I knew what I was doing, but that did the trick. She picked her teacup back up, took a sip, and then nodded. The disgust on her face had cleared away, replaced by a steady lack of any emotional expression at all.
Vitold rushed through the rest of the story quickly – figuring out the location of the cabin, getting explosives, and then planning the attack. Mentally, I added up days, and estimated I had spent ten days in captivity.
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In the morning, we rigged up a sling for the mech, carrying it between the two horses while the rest of us walked; it was nearly out of fuel. While we nearly encountered rebels in the woods, it was very easy to tell when they were coming, and we simply hid until they passed. With the mech’s boiler quiet, the signs were clear as day – to me, anyway. Vitold (being a city boy) was clueless, and while Katya as a woods-wise sharpshooter surely noticed, she kept quiet, preferring not to talk to me at all if she could avoid it.
We returned to find the base still in imperial hands. The small number of soldiers still occupying it hadn’t even made any attempt at keeping a watch; Vitold and I had to go looking from building to building. The corporal seemed shocked to see me.
Misha was nowhere in evidence. When I remarked on this fact, the corporal informed me that Misha had gone off to town to fetch supplies, leaving his steam suit behind. Satisfied with this explanation, I told the corporal he should probably arrange for someone to keep watch, and then retreated to the workshop.
It turned out that Vitold had, on his own initiative, started working on duplicating my work on Gregor’s suit and his own suit. Vitold wasn’t very keen on going into battle in a giant metal target that people tended to shoot magical armor-piercing crossbow bolts at and thought it might be better if he just made himself scarce when battle came around.
The job was only partially complete and he couldn’t seem to get anywhere with the elemental spirits, but how could I say no to my comrade wanting to stay out of trouble? So I set to work unlocking two more elemental cages and rigging steam knight suits into mechs.
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After a few days of frenzied work, during which I didn’t leave the workshop for more than a minute at a time, Katya showed up one afternoon with a pot of tea. When I asked her what brought her over, she asked me if I would do a reading for her. Evidently, word that I could read tea leaves had gotten around, and Katya was bored enough to ask me to perform parlor tricks for her amusement.
She looked uncomfortable inside the workshop. After a minute, I remembered I had been working nearly non-stop for several days, and probably smelled like an old sock.
“Let’s go outside for some fresh air and good light, then. It’s time I took the boys here out for a walk,” I waved at the trio of steam knight armor suits. It was past time to test how good their leg controls were, I’d had to jury-rig the hip joints and I was a bit worried about their stability.
We went out the back of the complex, where there was a target range large enough to allow for the mechs to walk through their paces. We sat, sipped tea, and talked about Katya’s life. That is to say that, when Katya asked me shyly if I would read the tea leaves for her, I stalled by asking her a leading question or two and let her do the talking.
She had grown up in a small town near the river Izh, a northeastern tributary of the great eastern Kama River, one of the three great rivers of the Golden Empire. Two great rivers, arguably; the Kama and the Slavutich are greater than the Tanais, though the imperial capital that gives its name to the river has given it a presence greater than its size. The vast length of the Kama and its dazzling array of tributaries are less important than the central jewel of Koschei’s Golden Empire, the city he dubbed a third Rome when he married the princess from Trebizond.
But that is a story I am sure you all know well, and I was telling you Katya’s story. She grew up as the younger child of her father’s second wife, just five years older than her oldest nephew and her father’s third wife’s eldest son. Both of those younger boys regularly received new outfits and toys, with hardly ever a hand-me-down, and their birthdays were always celebrated and never forgotten.
Katya had volunteered for the army out of a sense of patriotism and desire for glory, hoping to distinguish herself against the Sultan’s soldiers in Wallachia. She was promptly shipped the whole length of the empire to a garrison unit in the small town of Muzga, near the Lithuanian border. For the duration of the war against the Sultan, she was equally far from her home and from glory, but she trained diligently.
And that is all that I can say, for at that moment, I heard distant noises. Katya’s voice blended into a relaxing but meaningless babble as I tuned her voice out and concentrated, bringing the distant noises into focus. The rumble of boilers; the steady beats of hooves and boots; and voices, most of them speaking Slavonic. “Katya, do you hear that?” I asked, cutting into her monologue.
She looked annoyed, then stopped, cocking her head to the side a little bit. “I do hear it! Mechs, somewhere near. The general must be back!” Tea leaves forgotten, she dashed off, and I followed behind her. If the general had returned, then I should be there to greet him.