FROM RAGNAR RIMHAMAR, GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER
Vindobona deserves to be known as the City of Books. It is the home of the greatest mage’s college in the Gothic Empire, and today its enchanted fortifications are world famous. I myself was able to stand atop the ramparts as they were being constructed, and listened to one of the city’s future master wizards as he explained to me their plan of defense.
It is a great city, one which I have visited many times since, but that was my first visit, and you never forget your first! My Gothic was passable – it is not so different of a tongue, and I had picked it up readily – and I needed no translator to make myself understood. Vitold, that funny little man, had appointed himself my partner in exploring the city. It was an understandable choice for him; women tended to overlook the man as short, a little rotund, and grimy around the fingernails from his mechanical works.
On the other hand, I as a handsome and exotic Swede (as we are thought of in the lands farther south) would attract enough attention for women for the both of us. Indeed, so popular I was with the women of Vindobona that I had to thank Vitold for his service in distracting some of them.
The man also had an excellent nose for food; out of the ten best pastries I have eaten in my life, seven entered my mouth on that trip. Situated where it is in the middle of the Istros, we paired our pastries with wine from the west, coffee from the east, and crisp golden lager brewed locally. We spent the night in an inn whose sign simply consisted of a golden square, returning in the morning to the Raven’s Battalion in its camp outside the city.
From there, we went west up the Istros aboard a boat driven only by a firebox; while coal was cheap enough locally, my cousin Felix had wanted to make sure we did not get ourselves separated on the river. Some riverboat captains are little better than bandits themselves, pirates of the inner waters eager to slit the throats of outsiders who won’t be missed and take their money, and Felix’s trust was far shallower than the waters of the Istros.
In the space of two days, we sped swiftly up the Istros to Batavis, the famed City of Swords. There was a pretender to the local throne who had claimed the title of prince-bishop without proper authority, a usurper.
The light of the setting sun blinded the defenders of the fort as we approached. Once, twice, three times they fired, crisp volleys of a hundred arquebuses each; Mikolai each time raised his hand, and the bullets dropped into the water. The Batavisites jeered, and then stood aside, for their cannons were loaded now; they had ten of them, and they were aimed straight at us.
We held our nerve, and still did not fire back. Those who had beaten trolls and dragons would not be intimidated into flinching with mere men, and we had our orders. The colonel had told us that even if we were fired upon, we should hold our fire until his signal – for if it was truly needed, he would give the order, and our men would rake the walls with deadly fire.
The cannons roared, and Mikolai waved his hand again, the cannonballs returning straight back at those who had fired them. The cannons were knocked off the wall, landing with a cacophony like a collapsing belfry.
“Mercy!” screamed their leader, waving a white flag. “Mercy, oh God, have mercy on us!”
Mikolai gave me a look, and I know that he wanted – needed – my help for what would come next. So, I gripped Mikolai by the shoulder and nodded, touching my hammer to the water. A stairway of ice erupted from the summery waters of the river, and Mikolai walked up the stairs to accept their surrender. I followed behind him, hammer in hand. It was then that I saw, standing on the roof of the tower, a woman with brilliant blonde hair: Giselle, the would-be bishop’s daughter.
For one magical moment, her distant eyes locked on mine, and from the awestruck look on her face, I knew that I would not sleep alone that night if she had anything to say about it.
We took the soldiers’ surrender (and their arquebuses) from their trembling hands with grace, and then prepared for the next stage of our operation. The colonel, of course, had devised an intricate plan, the details of which he kept close to his chest in case of spies. The lower fort functioned as a toll castle for the river junction; while it was not the site of the bishop’s main treasury, it had its own storehouses containing ample trade goods.
Our own guns were brought up and positioned to cover the causeway connecting the upper fort to a lower fort; the upper fort was within range of those guns in case we wished to start shooting, though the difference in elevation would rob them of some of their force in such a case. However, it was not time to shoot; it was time to wait. We had taken the lower fort without a shot, and a lesson like that does not sink home all at once.
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A LETTER
Dear Abraham,
I am well and so is Sara, thank you for your well-wishes and prayers. It is interesting news you gave us of Constantinople and the Sultan’s projects. Perhaps one day we will travel to visit, or to stay; with Sigismund II in his declining years, the future is uncertain, and there may be some disturbances here in the Empire. The Margrave of the East has decided to invest greatly in improving the fortifications of Vindobona, though whether he is concerned about Avaria rising, Avaria falling, or his fellow princes encroaching is not clear.
Our little village continues to grow thanks to the fact that the margrave considers building a rail bridge into Vindobona proper a lower priority than expanding those fortifications, and our permanent lodgers have by this time moved out into new homes. The spur line ends this side of the river well outside of the flood plain, and it brings bustling business in commerce. The rooms we have put to good use as an informal boarding-house for travelers arriving by rail; it is a better class of traveler than those who arrive by foot, and we have seen all manner of persons pass through our halls.
Two weeks ago, we played host to the officers of a mercenary company, which did not have any business in the city itself but sought to travel upriver – there have been heavy rains to the west and their options were scarce. They paid well, but were such a motley assortment of foreigners that I fear the north must be coming apart in the Emperor’s old age; once relaxed on their own terms, the officers conversed among each other in at least three different languages, none of them Gothic.
The oldest one was a polite man with faded blond hair and a red beard running to gray, who spoke Gothic very fluidly but with a heavy accent; I thought he was the commander, until a taller man with dark hair and a very odd air about him arrived. They called him the Raven or Colonel Crow; he had with him a most odd-looking sword, a bird for a handle and the end bent in a forward-facing crescent. I do not mean it looked like a Turkish scimitar; it looked halfway like a sickle. And it was bronze!
I am not so sure he is a man if he carries a bronze sword instead of a steel one. Perhaps he is something allergic to cold iron, rather than just a man. The village was positively aswarm with crows for three days. He is supposed to be some sort of wizard, but some things that are not human may seem as such, and some wizards become something other than human when they dive deeply into the magic.
Between the birds and the more ordinary frictions and fears associated with the presence of soldiers in a small village, we were all pleased when they took a chance on an aging paddlewheel barge – that is the barge belonging to Captain Odelbrand that I mentioned in my last letter, the one who had a load of barley go to mold before he could make it upriver. They are supposed to be going all the way to the capital, though with Odelbrand’s boat and the height of the river, it would probably take them two or three weeks to get to Batavis – they will have to burn coal the whole way, and that will mean stopping to load coal at least half a dozen places or giving up on steam power and getting a tow.
A week later, I had another unusual lodger, this one a woman traveling by herself who had purchased a passenger ticket. She had two artificial limbs and a rifle; she didn’t say what business she had carrying a rifle about, but I assume she was a hunter. Her hair was bright red, the color of a raging fire. She didn’t talk very much with me because she couldn’t speak Gothic very well. She sent a letter downstream and took passage on a boat upstream.
We are all hoping that the margrave’s fortification project is pure wasteful folly and war does not arrive in Vindobona – though we do not wish the Sultan overrun by the French and their allies either, now that King Janos has married Princess Marie.
-Joachim
A LETTER
Dear Fritz,
If my land-lord has been pestering you about my whereabouts, tell him not to expect me back – I have departed Vindobona forever, and there is nothing for him to do but sell my things – the only thing left in my room of any value is the mage-lock I put upon the door, but I am sure he will enjoy the brief fantasy of recouping back rent.
If Margelein asks, tell her I am journeying with a powerful thaumaturge and will return to Vindobona a rich man. Yes, I know, I told you to lie and tell her I was traveling by invitation of a master thaumaturge who wished to take me on, but what I thought was a jumped-up land-knight with some kind of affinity for charming birds is no such thing.
Also, if my aunt asks, I have decided to flee sinful Vindobona to study diligently at the Batavis monastery, having become very pious. She can be disappointed later, but at least she won’t try to visit me there. But yes, I have found a master thaumaturge to learn from, if I can convince him I’m a worthy student.
He fixed a steamboat’s dying firebox, an antique with unreadable inscriptions, without so much as a preparatory circle, and no, before you ask, not a blood sacrifice either, you must stop listening to those dreadful lectures where Herr Doktor Von Stetten dredges up every rumor he’s heard of alternative practices from Lithuania or Tripoli or Mandaria or wherever his latest purchase comes from.
Well, he did bloody his nose when he slipped, but that was after he let loose, and the firebox is like new now. The river is running fast and high and we’re still steaming ahead! We’ll likely make Batavis soon – we may be there before this letter reaches you, in fact, even if it is going down the easy direction of the river.
- J.v.Z.