General Ognyan Spitignov. These three words strike fear into the hearts of the Golden Empire’s enemies, as well as into the hearts of many imperial subjects – including me. This was in spite of the fact that I had been expecting (even at a few dark points hoping) to see him.
As Katya and I came around the building, followed by my three modified steam suits, the general was talking with a corporal, the seniormost survivor of the infantry platoon. The corporal’s voice had a pleading quality to it. Vitold was sitting on a rock nearby, looking pensive, along with the other five members of our little impromptu garrison. Colonel Romanov was standing next to his horse and looked like he had a headache. The strike force had a few new faces but was on the whole smaller.
“General, while my squad has suffered heavily, I have suffered no deserters under my command. Mikolai, on the other hand, well, two of his squad members deserted, and another died from terror at the battle.” The corporal’s voice wobbled a little bit.
The general looked over past the squad leader’s shoulder, seeing me. His face twisted into a caricature of fury, and he exploded into a blur of violent action. I was terrified and didn’t know what to say, so I took a step back. I could feel the heat of a trio of steam boilers behind me.
The corporal’s head rolled next to my leg. The mouth was still moving, and his eyes wide with horror. I took another squeamish step to the side. The general spoke softly as he wiped the blood off his sword lovingly with a silk kerchief.
It was easy enough to hear him, the only other sound was the rumbling of steam boilers behind me.
“Lying traitor thinks I’m stupid. I can count to five. One here and one there and three more is five. And five is the number in a full squad of steam knights. Five and two and one is eight, and that is more than a full squad. I can add, I can.” His eyes narrowed, and he looked directly at me, speaking at a volume that made it clear he was now talking to me.
“I am disappointed that you suffered the traitor to live, you are a ten year man and should see the signs, but failing to discover and execute a traitor I can forgive today.” He shook his head somberly.
“If I executed everybody who didn’t execute a traitor...” The general trailed off into silence. His eyes briefly crossed as he sank deep into thought.
I think he was trying to work out what would happen if he executed everybody who failed to find and execute any traitors they had contact with, but after about five seconds of thought, he shook his head as if to clear it and wandered off towards the mess hall. Colonel Romanov trailed at a discreet distance, and the newly-arrived troops began the process of settling in.
Katya chewed on her lip. Looked at me. Looked at the retreating general and colonel. Looked at the dead body on the ground. She looked a little uncertain.
“Vitold? Katya? I’m sure that the colonel has more questions about what’s happened. Why don’t the two of you fill him in on the rescue mission, our findings so far about the Resistance, and talk to him about the general’s misapprehensions?” I turned towards the handful of survivors from the infantry platoon. “We have a few things to talk about.”
It turned out that Misha had departed immediately after Katya and Vitold left to rescue me, telling the others that he wasn’t going to stick around this hole to see if they succeeded and brought back a man-witch or failed and brought back rebel retaliation.
I explained as best as I could that it would probably be a good idea to just avoid talking about anything that had happened while we were separated from the rest of the strike force, and let sleeping dogs lie. If the general had some delusions, they ought to leave those alone, and let me handle it, since he seemed to be inexplicably fond of me. I had no more ill intentions towards them than they did me, and I really hadn’t intended to get the corporal in trouble. He had gotten himself into his own little mess by trying to blame me.
As I was explaining this, I thought I felt a weight settle on one shoulder. I turned to look, and there was a great big raven, looking back at me. I shooed it away and asked the soldiers if they had any questions. They shook their heads as one, their eyes wide.
I supposed it was surprising to them that one of their supposed superiors would admit openly that another one of their superiors was stark raving mad.
When Vitold caught back up on me, he filled me in on how his little debriefing session with Colonel Romanov had gone and filled me up with a sense of dread. Vitold had lied extensively to cover up everything. Katya had apparently mumbled a few things about Ilya and became a little more animated talking about the battles, but mostly let Vitold do the talking.
According to Vitold, the colonel was now under the impression that I had taken my newer steam knights, shaken them up, and forged them into an elite brotherhood, sworn to silence, obedience, chastity, temperance, faith, poverty, and a rigorous training regime that required they sleep inside their armor. Vitold, of course, had supposedly gone through this routine with me before, but Ilya, Misha, and Yosef had not and were secluding themselves from outside distractions as much as possible.
Yosef, of course, was the man who’d replaced Gregor Petrovich after Gregor’s unfortunate heart attack. I wasn’t sure if he’d borrowed the name from one of the deceased soldiers in the other steam knight squad or invented it out of whole cloth, and I didn’t ask. In addition to burdening me with the lies he’d told the colonel, Vitold brought me some useful information – news from the colonel.
All of us would be leaving the next morning, after setting charges to demolish the complex. It was not especially large or defensible, and now that the rebels knew we had taken it over, its limited utility had come to an end. Vitold and I were of one mind as to what that meant: We needed to clear out all the valuable tools and bits of machinery from the rebels’ well-equipped workshop. Army-issue tools were just not nearly as well made as these.
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Major Alexei Pavlov was nobly-born, a chaplain, and by his insignia a certified alchemist, though his talents as a wizard seemed quite limited. In the time I knew him, he never achieved anything more miraculous than the transmutation of vodka into dilute uric acid, a feat I have seen replicated by many other soldiers of lesser distinction.
Prior to Vitold’s fabrication of vows for a holy order of steam knights, Alexei had not been assigned any troops at all, giving him a ready excuse for skipping Colonel Romanov’s regular meetings. I hesitate to speculate about the colonel’s motives, but after the colonel formally assigned my squad to the chaplain’s command, Alexei suddenly found that he was required to attend meetings instead of communing with the sort of holy spirits one finds in the bottom of a bottle.
Fortunately for me, he was profoundly disinterested in getting to know the soldiers under his command, and it would have been difficult for him to care less about our readiness or the state of our equipment. Vitold and I wasted a considerable amount of time practicing speaking in funny voices so that we would be ready to try to fool Father Pavlov. We were worried that as a priest, he might consider himself to have the authority to release a knight from a vow of silence in order to talk with him.
In fact, I would not be sure that he knew the alleged vows at all except for what happened the night before we left the border fort.
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That night, vodka was flowing freely in the room that had become the officers’ lounge, in celebration of news fresh from the imperial capital: Our fearless leader, the great war mage Ognyan Spitignov, was being promoted from brigadier general to major general. The celebrant himself was nowhere to be seen at the occasion, fortunately, but his little friend Ivan Ivanovich was happy enough to throw a party on his behalf.
The small weasel-faced senior colonel kicked things off by personally handing out a dozen bottles of vodka to the top-ranked officers. Alexei popped the top of his bottle, drank directly from it, briefly gestured my way with the bottle, then said he would need to take a second drink on my behalf due to my monastic vows. I might have protested, but the room was crowded and noisy, and I wanted my wits about me.
If Ognyan was being promoted, then perhaps there would be a chance of reassignment while things were getting reorganized. I accepted a proffered glass of rough plum brandy from a grizzled-looking Cimmerian captain and listened carefully. Mail moves no faster than the man carrying it. If mail from Tanais had arrived accompanied by fresh-faced officers, it stood to reason those officers were also fresh from the capital.
On the other side of the room, a young-looking lieutenant colonel with sandy hair was gesturing dramatically. I focused on his voice.
“And the very next morning I saw a ship headed straight in, sails tattered from the storm. I swear, I saw it crash into the pier with my very own eyes. It was the Ceres, back from Trebizond. The only man still aboard was the helmsman, dead and lashed to the wheel. The prince was gone – swept away by the storm, they say. The Sultan’s silver was still packed in chests in the hold.” The lieutenant colonel lowered his voice to a whisper. “Luckily, the treaty still holds. My cousin says the emperor didn’t care about getting Prince Vladimir for a hostage of his own half as much as the silver. The whole point about the prince was just making sure the Sultan wouldn’t try to use him as a puppet.”
As I strained to listen to a voice that was getting quieter and quieter, I noticed someone else was speaking very quietly, barely above a whisper, only halfway across the room. Another senior colonel was talking with Ivan Ivanovich, looking taller and uglier but otherwise quite similar. They could be cousins, I decided, focusing my attention on the pair of colonels as I took a tiny sip of plum brandy, ignoring the loud laughter of the Cimmerian captain next to me.
They were discussing a different ship, one that had arrived in Fiume. This ship, with firebox-powered paddlewheels and a hull clad in the famous Corsican brass, could be nothing other than a French ship of the line. It had carried a treasure far more precious than the silver Emperor Koschei had received from the Sultan: The younger daughter of Leon the Usurper.1
“The emperor is convinced King Janos will launch an invasion right after the wedding,” the unfamiliar senior colonel said. “It is said the princess’s honor guard is an entire regiment, veterans of the Loegrian campaign, and rumor has it that her dowry included a thousand more new model muskets for the king’s own troops. The general’s sealed orders are to strike over the border, so make sure the division is well supplied when it goes out, Ivan.”
The more familiar senior colonel rubbed his forehead and sighed. “Thank you, Dmitri.”
The Cimmerian captain elbowed me in the ribs, and I shook my head, losing track of the senior colonels’ conversation.
“Your drink, you want more?” The man was already pouring, making it impolite to answer in the negative.
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My first thought had been that if we took apart our steam suits for a full maintenance cycle, Vitold and I might be able to avoid General Spitignov’s next forward deployment. However, I couldn’t figure out how to avoid revealing the mechanical nature of the other three steam knights in my squad. If we took those suits apart as well, it would be obvious nobody was inside; but if I didn’t, the mechs would have to accompany the force without my guidance. The ruse would be up by the end of the first day’s travel towards Avaria.
Unfortunately, Wallachian gossip moved considerably faster than an army hauling mechs, steam suits, and many carts laden with fuel. The Magyars sensibly assumed that a division on the move towards the border was likelier to be an attack than a training exercise. Their scouts began harassing us as soon as we started our way into Avaria. Felled trees and rockfalls blocked the road regularly, bridges were washed out or blown up, and it took a long time to cross what had looked like a short distance through the Sarmatian mountains on a map. Our own scouts didn’t always come back from patrol, and sometimes I heard the distant crack of a rifle in the forest.
Days stretched into agonizing weeks. We left some empty fuel carts behind, filled others with wood, stopped three days to make charcoal, and pushed on with only an emergency supply of proper anthracite coal for real battles. Half of the division’s scouts had died or deserted by the time they started to report seeing an enemy army, a force with heavy muskets and light mechs. With a target in sight, General Spitignov pushed us hard.
On the third day, as daylight turned to evening, I could see a flock of starlings swirling irregularly in the air. I looked up at the sky, watching the starlings fly closer, and then hesitate, swirling with collective curiosity on the far side of the long low hill overlooking the road. Somewhere on the other side of that ridge were enough shiny objects to engage the starlings’ collective curiosity. Somewhere in these hills was a Magyar army with muskets and mechs. I put the two facts together and panicked.
“We need to load coal and suit up,” I shouted, waving the oxen pulling our squad’s heavy cart to a halt. “Quickly. The enemy isn’t ahead of us. They’re on the far side of that ridge.”
My authority to give that order was questionable, at least as far as anyone other than Vitold was concerned, but the arguing stopped with a crack of thunder and a cloud of smoke that emerged from a row of innocent-looking bushes only two hundred yards away.
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1 Editor's note: Leon I, Emperor in Paris, High King over Loegria, Lord of the Seven Great Isles, Protector of Jerusalem and Cyprus.