I have trouble crediting that an entire week passed in the blink of an eye with my hand on the ancient larch keel that had once been a liachiad’s tree; I know that tales have a way of growing. However, from the depth of my hunger and thirst afterward, I reasoned that it had been much longer than the trance I had fallen into when I picked up my sword after my battle with the Magyar war mage. The time was also long enough to effect a change in attitude of the authorities of the city of Venice, which had been hostile before I touched the ship. In truth, I must say I found Venice to be a generous city in the end.
In addition to the sail and mast that my voice had demanded, the city of Venice – as the leading manufacturer of galleys – also kindly donated oars, and a second smaller mast and sail; they had realized, as I had not, that my sunken galley had been originally built to accommodate two sails. I did not have the three hundred oarsmen the ship needed for its three banks of oars and the city of Venice was rather tight on skilled oarsmen at the moment, but they were willing to donate the required hundred eighty oars plus spares.1
It was up to me and my men to install the masts and sails; while the Venetians accounted themselves skilled shipbuilders, most of their skilled carpenters and shipwrights were superstitious, unwilling to approach the new spit of land closely in fear that it might cause an earthquake. Their superstition derived from an odd coincidence that, if one is familiar with natural philosophy, may be well explained. It is known via consultation with elemental spirits of the deeper earth that earthquakes are the result of small slips of great masses of rock stuck together by friction, and this slips are not precise, leading to aftershocks as the great masses make smaller and smaller shifts until they once more settle into place.
Evidently, not long after the sudden earthquake that lifted the ship out of the water (and caused some damage elsewhere), the Venetian gentleman who had originally attempted my arrest was reinforced with a pair of mages and another dozen regular guards. As the first of them set foot on the newly-arisen muddy spit, a perfectly ordinary aftershock hit and knocked most of them off their feet; as even the mages were a bit superstitious about earthquakes, they promptly fled the scene.
As a result, the men of Venice were as a whole quite reluctant to come closer than a hundred paces from my newly salvaged vessel and the muddy spit of new land it was beached on. Close to half of my battalion was housed nearby, though, brought on fishing boats. Once the heated emotions of our confrontation had died down, the city’s authorities must have been swayed by the fact that I had been wronged: They not only invited my soldiers to join me, but performed an extensive investigation, reporting that the siren who had stolen a squad of my soldiers was a notorious Turkish agent working for the Sultanate, one with a long history of stealing good Venetian men away to slave away on boats secretly owned by the Sultan and his omnipresent agents.
Upon reviewing their report, I asked why she did not look or sound Turkish; they told me she was born of a Wallachian woman who had converted to Turkish ways, citing as evidence the fact that she had spoken some in a dialect that sounded much like the dialect of Dalmatian pirates. While I decided not to argue the point further, I privately remained skeptical of the quality of their investigation. The Romanian tongue spoken by Wallachians is much more closely related to Venetian than to Dalmatian, the latter being more similar to Slavonic.
With assistance from the acolyte (who was familiar with tree magic) and Johann (who was at passingly familiar with enchanted boats), we were able to graft the new masts cleanly onto the stumps of the old one and hang the sails, both the small one and the little one. At the insistence of Ragnar, I handed a princely sum of coin to a heavily-cloaked Bianca in a boat laden with our sails. Ragnar claimed that the Venetians had special secret processes that they performed on sails for the ships of their navy; we had gotten untreated sails, but Bianca could fix it for us.
I was skeptical; but the sails returned marked with the design of a black raven and felt subtly different to the touch. They had been alchemically or magically treated, perhaps both. Once we had hung the sails, the few of our number with sailing experience speaking to the other, I announced we would leave with the next high tide, calling for all my soldiers to come aboard by then. I spent several hours negotiating with dolphins for help getting us off the muddy spit; they seemed to dislike the idea of showing up to a particular spot at a particular time to work, and I had to promise to dump two barrels of pickled fish overboard in order to get them interested.
Pickled fish do not often swim in the sea, but they have a distinctive and interesting taste that one dolphin particularly liked and the others were curious about. As high tide approached, a strong wind blew in from the sea. Gainfully employed adult Venetians mostly went about their business after only a few amused glances; drunks, prostitutes, and children proved a more attentive audience. The crowd that gathered to watch us leave was small and motley
Once I felt reasonably confident we had everyone aboard and the acolyte had finished feeding her infant, I gave the signal to the dolphins to pull and asked the acolyte if she would kindly assist. Many of the watching Venetians lost their hats to the lagoon that day, as the swift reversal of the direction of the wind came as a surprise to them. In one case, the hat revealed a gloriously long stream of blonde hair, which blew wildly in front of a black mouthless mask – Bianca had come to see us off.
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Moments later, there was a giant slurping sound as the ship, pulled by dolphins below and pushed by wind above, tore loose from the muddy spit. The dolphins let go of the ropes and scattered as the ship shot forward. That is when I discovered that it is difficult to steer a ship with its rudder facing forward and a ram trailing behind it; this makes sense given it is the reverse of the usual arrangement.
I watched as a Bianca shrank into the distance. At one point, she pulled out Ragnar’s favorite silk handkerchief, slipping it under her mask to wipe away a tear; then she pulled her hood over her hair and slunk away. Perhaps she would let the woman with the pockmarked face know that we had left; preoccupied with first my missing men and later the ship, I had not seen the plainer woman since the night of the party. The woman I presumed to be the daughter of an imperial thaumaturge had told me Venice was her destination, but on a certain level I missed her company and wished she had come along with us.
It wasn’t simply that she had more formal training in magic than I did and I desperately wanted to learn more; she had been pleasant company in spite of her lack of beauty, making up for a lack of physical attributes with a very comprehensive education. She spoke half a dozen languages flawlessly; she was well-versed in natural philosophy; and she even had a sort of confident poise about her that is usually reserved for women attractive enough to presume they will usually be the center of attention.
Of course, there was the annoying factor that she seemed to believe herself entitled to order anyone about at any time, but as Venice rapidly receded from sight, I felt like I missed having the direction she gave us. We had entered Venice on a mission; now we were lost. When Katya had been jealous of the pockmarked woman at first glance, I thought she had been unreasonable; but now that I missed her company, I felt Katya must have had some deep intuitive insight into the woman’s intellect and force of personality.
On being questioned, Katya insisted otherwise, though she did not seem to be pleased that the pockmarked woman’s personality had begun to grow on me. She took me belowdecks for two tongue-lashings, one metaphorical and the other a mixed message.
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It took us longer than I would like to admit before we managed to get the ship turned around, sailing southeast to where half of my company waited along with our heavy equipment and livestock. We then spent three days in the swamp planning.
That is to say, Captain Felix Rimehammer saw about purchasing foodstuffs via the fishermen while trying not to think about the fact that we could find employment in neither the Gothic Empire nor the Venetian Republic. Lieutenant Ragnar Rimehammer moped belowdecks packing and repacking inventory, as sullen and distracted as some boys ten years younger than his true age; and if anyone mentioned Venice’s unusually numerous bounty of blonde women or the masks Venetians liked to wear, his mood soured further. Lieutenant Fyodor Kransky’s new wife’s goodwill was too valuable for me to consider trying to pry him away from her side when the two of them had an infant demanding attention.
Lieutenant Vitold Szpak and the other mechanics spent three days taking apart machinery ill-suited to shipboard use and experimenting with the use of gears, ropes, oars, and chains while trying not to think about how a mercenary company might avoid running out of cash with which to continue purchasing fish by the barrel. The casualties of this exercise included the self-propelled charcoal kiln. Katya, as the only other officer with any kind of seniority, excused herself to the crow’s nest after giving me two orders. First, I should for the time being avoid speaking with any beautiful women. Or women I thought were plain-looking with intriguing personalities. Second, I should go back to talking with Georg and Maestro Zilioli and figure out which direction I needed to sail to go home.
I did not ask Katya whether she meant to insult Georg’s appearance or personality; the former lady’s maid was comely enough if one ignored her ill-fitting men’s clothes and generally a skilled conversationalist, though she had been a little less cheerful since our departure from Oenipons. I did, however, take her second request to heart. I had asked to marry Katya; she had told me that I needed to seek her father’s permission. Her father lived in the Izh district, in the eastern part of the Golden Empire.
The Mikolai Stepanovich who had enlisted as a mechanic of the Imperial Army was a very different-looking man. The last two years had shaped me; I had finished my growth, filled out, and learned a great deal about magic and the world. If I returned home, it would be as a different man. Only my old armor could mark me as the alleged steam knight that General Ognyan Spitignov thought I was; but I had new armor made from Corsican brass.
With that, I made two decisions. First, I would head east, back in the direction of the Golden Empire. Perhaps I would have to fight along the way; perhaps not. Along the way I would stop in Negroponte and Constantinople; perhaps my missing men had been taken to one of those ports by the siren’s call, the former if they had been taken aboard a Venetian convoy and the latter if the Venetians' claims about the siren proved correct in spite of their implausibility. Second, I would disassemble my old armor, removing any temptation to wear it and with that any possibility of being identified as being at one point a steam knight of the Golden Empire. The arcane engine at the heart of it – the flux engine – I would repurpose. With Johann’s help, perhaps I could help keep Vitold from setting the ship on fire in his attempt to construct a working rowing-engine.
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1 Editor’s note: The astute reader may note that three hundred does not divide evenly by one hundred and eighty. Fortunately, Mikolai enclosed several helpful diagrams, so I may explain that the ship had three levels of oars on each side, with the lowest (shortest) oars handled by a single man and the upper two handled by two men each.