MARCH 14TH

A monstrous abomination attacked this morning. That is to say, a monster was sighted east and a little south of our camp, heading south by southwest, and Jacob, having taken this heading as being for our camp while on watch in the pre-dawn gray, opened fire. (Alan checked over the tracks later, he thinks it wasn’t coming any closer than a hundred paces; it was making a path as straight as an arrow.) The blighted eyeless horror, whatever it was, went down quick enough once the mechs were up in action, but when Caleb cut apart the body trying to find something worth taking as a trophy, we found a handful of metal artifacts - belt buckle, coins, buttons, boot clasps, and a locket - that strongly suggest that the rider we sent was eaten without delivering his message.

I dearly hope that was a pure and foul coincidence. If it is someone trying to prevent word of Colonel Raven’s battalion from reaching the margrave…

I have made the command decision that we ride back to the margrave’s castle post haste to report our findings, all of them. I have a bad feeling about this whole business. Maybe it’s just Caleb’s paranoia rubbing off on me - he thinks, of all things, that their latrine ditches were too well dug for them to be real mercenaries - but I think there’s something more to it all. And whether or not Colonel Raven is right about Koschei and his minions being too busy holding Wallachia to make mischief for Leon, we’re better off keeping close by with our patrols.

MARCH 15TH

I have always disliked special agents of the crown a little. Every one I have met has little respect for rank or property, whether military or social. I’ve worked very hard on my etiquette and my properly Parisian court French.

I am hardly one to shoot peasants for sport, as a cousin’s friend claimed he’d seen done at a country resort once. That said, I very much want to shoot one particular Silesian peasant. Let him go running, get a little head start, and then BANG, shoot him. Maybe first shoot him in the arm, to make him think he might get away, then a leg next, to see him quail in fear and crawl sobbing for cover, then BLAM, shot to the head. SPLAT.

And now that I want to, I won’t, because the man is supposedly a special agent in the Lion’s service, and that might even be the truth. It turns out that Colonel Marcus Raven is called “General Mikolai” by his bedmate when the two of them are talking over a pillow, and that they have some greater mission they’re urgently trying to carry out. The agent has written notes on that and a thousand more things, a journal full of his notes investigating Marcus Raven! I took them away from him over Jacob and Alan’s objections, and read through them by lamplight late last night. He just didn’t want to let me know until he felt like he was a safe distance away from Colonel Raven. And then the little coward demanded I give over a horse to him, because he wasn’t going back to within a day’s ride of Colonel Raven.

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I refused, of course, saying I couldn’t possibly let military property into the hands of a civilian specialist without supervision, and then Jacob nobly gave over his own horse, which of course is his own personal property rather than a military horse, and the agent was off like that.

He’s made me look a fool. Christ, forgive me, but I want to kill him. Painfully. Even if he has done us a service...

Addendum: And even though his notes are painstakingly detailed. At times, luridly fascinating, for which I feel a little guilty. When he had a chance to set up undetected with a good pen and surface, his notes will describe every word, every sound, every act, no matter if a normal person would have stopped transcribing out of a sense of personal decency and modesty. I am embarrassed enough by what I read that I cannot bear to share it aloud with the others, and have refused to share the journal lest I have to hear too many coarse jokes.

I should only admire his thoroughness and dedication, to keep recording even then. But I still detest him with all my heart...

MARCH 17TH

After a hard day and a half of riding, we have come to the end of the trail. We came across signs of battle first; dried blood, uprooted trees, fragments of metal, cloth, and bone, freshly turned mounds of earth; but whatever they fought in these dark woods did not stop them, for the trail continued and led to a camp. As we inspected this camp for clues, Jacob came up to me to announce proudly he had worked out the mathematics of it, and that based on how long we had taken to reach their camp, we might catch them by the night after the following night.

Alan was skeptical about that, and we soon all became downright pessimistic. Roughly a mile from where they set camp, their trail ends. It does not stop with a halt, so much as simply fade into unbroken brush, the medley of deep ruts, hoofprints, broken vegetation, and mech prints fading to a scattered handful. The last fifteen yards show only a single set of hoofprints and wheels, growing lighter with each step. Alan has taken his pessimism being proven particularly hard. He is right now sitting on the ground, staring at a hoofprint. I think he wants to cry, but refuses to cry while the rest of us are watching.

We have sent men out in a search pattern to find anything.

Addendum: They have found no signs, and it is getting dark. We will set up camp here. I am looking back over the spy’s notes to see if I can shed any light on the matter. Christ preserve us from whatever evil that lurks in these woods, I feel a chill in my bones.