“Hrrrm… Slowly, sir.” The nasal tones in the voice were sharp enough to engrave themselves into his ear canals. “You’ve almost got it!” The voice went up a full octave at the end, and made Lieutenant Fissal A’Hahn flinch slightly as he, with the utmost care and consideration slowly lowered the stack of fine ceramic cups onto their holding rack at the rear of the Officers’ Mess tent.
Fissal looked back at the Corporal, and raised one delicate eyebrow in his direction. The man had the decency to look abashed, and stepped back to the table that held the newly washed set of colorful plates and fine drinking cups that had been used this morning by the ravenous horde of (otherwise beautifully mannered and behaved) officers.
“Lieutenant '' Fissal nodded, and smiled taking the sting out of his silent rebuke of the grizzled man. “Come along now Corporal Jiodfi! Let's have that last set, and then we can log them all accounted for, as per orders, and then YOU, my good man, can get back to your cooking duties, and I may get back to the Quartermasters tent to see if Mess has yet to receive all of those new pots I ordered last month. HUPhup!” Fissal thought that last bit might have been verging on too cheeky, but some days he just felt good doing this job. It was odd, and not at all what he had expected when he slid into the post, but as the Pride used to say when unexpected things happened “Well, we’re here now. Do it.”
As he delicately placed the last of the service into its holding racks, he sighed and reached up to scratch the top of his head before putting on his officer’s silly, floppy, “slouch hat.” His hand brushed across the vast expanse of skin on top of his head, sloping down to his broad, clean, tan brow.
His hair had only grown in around his ears, as he had planned, leaving his pate as clean as an egg. It worked along with his other alterations to ensure no one looking for Two would see anything in Fissal to wonder about.
Two, now calling himself “Fissal,” had disposed of the Idiot the morning after he had determined his experiments would be successful. It had been shamefully easy to get rid of the body of a man no one had liked enough to learn the name of, much less to check up on him when he failed to turn up for duty two days in a row.
Two, now reclaiming his birth name of Fissal, had liberated a few of the man’s uniforms, and his Orders. With a slight alteration to his own height, and facial features, Fissal then set to work on creatively editing the idiots Orders. He then walked out of the camp in the very early morning, with the Idiot supported on his right arm as though they were two drunken low rankers looking for their unit. Once he was far enough away, Fissal dropped the Idiot naked into a drainage ditch, packing his clothing into his own newly liberated pack, along with the Idiots clean uniforms, and travel kit, and walked another two Lengths from the camp towards the capital along the main road.
Within a span, from his place in the weeds he saw a small cluster of supply wagons headed toward the camp. Stepping out onto the road, he pasted an exhausted look onto his face, and began to trudge toward the camp once again.
A drover in one of the wagons offered him a ride, which he gladly accepted, hopping up. Once in camp he asked directions of the gate guards on duty to the Field Marshal’s tent, and was directed exactly the wrong way by the guards in an attempt to haze a new-to-camp soldier.
He played the game, and faked mild exasperation. Another guard at the posting the first two had sent him to then sent him to the right area.
He then spent the morning standing at ease outside of the tent in question, awaiting his turn to see the general, and taking note of the other people in line around him.
Most were just there to deliver reports, some were there to make requests, and a few, because there are always a few of THOSE kind of people, were there to be seen seeing the general, and his staff.
And Fissal had waited. Finally, just before the midday bell, Fissal had been shown into a tent to speak with Commander Hargris. He was the serving Staff Sergeant to the Quartermasters. Fissal saluted the man, stood at attention, and presented his “Orders.”
Staff Sergeant Liet Hargris stared at the man in front of him, and slowly reached out, taking the forged orders from Fissal, and barely glanced at them before he folded them up and placed them back into Fissal’s hands.
His broad, angular face was as unreadable as a hillside. He then motioned toward a chair and said, simply, “Sit.” in a hard voice, before turning back to his desk and sitting, himself.
“Sergeant …” he looked blank for a moment, before Fissal supplied “A’Hahn, sir.”
“Sergeant A’Hahn… Why are you here?”
Fissal sat in silence for a moment. And then another as his brows, traitorous caterpillars that they were, converged above his nose in confusion. “Uhm… Orders sent me here, sir.”
“A’Hahn, I mean why were you given orders to come out here? Why did Bemaki, Peace be upon his very soul, send you to the front?”
He knew General Bemanki by reputation only, and so went with what he felt might make the most sense. “Ah. Yes, Sir. The post I held in Aurel, it was found, in review, could be better served by installing an Officer with a more diverse talent pool to that illustrious position, and I was a resource that might more fully serve the needs of His Highness’ here at this Posting.” He used all the phrases he had heard in the past used to describe a move by a privileged child of a prosperous House, who might benefit from a military career, without ever being forced to go to war, or to even do anything more “military” than to wear a uniform.
“Rich man wanted a cushy seat for his kid’s ass?” Hargris had grinned as he said it.
Fissal looked slightly frustrated as he said, “My seat in Aurel was an unpadded bench in the Southern Army Supply Office. To some that may look …cushy… but, I wonder how long that seat will be filled by someone appointed to it rather than one who earned it.”
Hargris laughed. And then took out his quill and ink, and tore off a note. Standing, which made Fissal stand, he handed him the note, and told Fissal “Here is your camp allotment. Get yourself set up, and your tent square. At first light tomorrow, be in the Officers’s mess, and I will have your assignment ready, and an old hand you can shadow for a few days before we cut you loose to manage your own sphere of responsibilities. You’ll report to me once a ten day, I suggest you get here early. Otherwise, any immediate needs pop up, you either deal with them yourself, or you come tell me how you would like me to deal with them. If I like your suggestions, you will do well. If I don’t, you will be retrained until I do. Questions?”
He had then looked expectantly at the newly minted Sergeant Fissal A’Hahn.
Fissal shot a crisp salute, turned, and marched from the tent, reclaiming his pack at the door, and making his way to the supply tent with his requisition orders, ready to set up his tent, and his new life.
Within a week, Fissal was working with the Weapons Quartermasters Division.
A month later saw him in charge of Reprovisioning Forward Positions. On one reprovisioning run that he had personally supervised, a practice Hargris loved to see his Officers doing as often as they could, the Velspe Arm broke through the line. They were overrunning the Hamurian position with a vigor they had not witnessed in the enemy in a season.
Without thinking, Fissal had taken up a sword and grabbed a shield from a fallen captain, and dove headlong into the battle. His skin was unbreakable, he was stronger than any ten soldiers combined, and he struck faster than a serpent.
Hour after hour, Fissal and the forward legion fought the Velspe. Hour after hour, Fissal saw men around him dropping to their knees, their bodies sprouting arrows, and blood flowing from a thousand wounds. In the earliest moments of the fighting, Fissal had found the Circle of Velspe mages who were leading the slaughter. He waded through their ranks as their fire and lightning danced around him. When he had almost completely culled them from the face of Thatch, one of their rank, a small man in ornate robes wearing a look of terror swatted Fissal aside with a bolder flung with force.
Fissal had gone down under the impact of the giant stone, causing the Velspian army to cheer his supposed demise. From under the rock, Fissal could hear the Velspian’s begin to sing as they pushed forward around where he lay. Body straining to lift the stone from atop him and rejoin the fight, he found himself instead shoved further down into the soil beneath the unyielding surface of…granite? He wondered...basalt, maybe… Five would have known.
Panic began to set in as the darkness and dirt closed in around him. While his body might be strong enough to move this rock, he had no purchase. No solid base existed for him to push against the stone. I may as well, he thought, be floating in a river, trying to hold up a bridge.
And that was the moment that Fissal knew he needed to “swim” out from under the weight of the stone rather than try to heave the thing up and off.
Pushing himself through the soil, grit and grime plastering itself to him as he slowly moved through the earth. He had no perception of up as he might in water, no bubbles ran up his cheeks as he moved and exhaled. But he started by moving along the bottom edges of the bould under which he labored; it was a good enough indicator of “up” as any at the moment.
Forcing the dirt, worms, and roots aside, he finally broke the surface of the battlefield with a gasped inhale that sounded like a screech from a dying horse. Quickly as he could, Fissal took a few short, quick moments to orient himself. Breathing is nice… I like breathing.
The last bits of his rich, brown and gold uniform had been torn from his body as he “swam” back to the surface, and he now stood naked under the midday sun, breathing hard, and blinking the sand and grit from his eyes. Most of the viscous blood that had coated him before was now scraped clean away by the abrasive earth, existing only in minute muddy patches in the recessed areas of his skin. Regaining his sense of calm, Fissal looked at the undulating wave of violence that had passed his position while he dealt with being trapped underground.
Looking around, he found a pair of pants and a sword on a Hamurian man who would be needing neither anymore. Seeing the wizard who had buried him, he found another sword to tuck into his belt, and picked a stone slightly larger than his fist. A sword in one hand, and a stone in the other.
Fissal began to run toward the back line of the Velspe soldiers, and their remaining wizard. He threw the stone as hard as his body would allow. The jagged semi-spheroid of limestone flew in a flat trajectory towards the wizard, with Fissal running as quickly after the stone as he could, following closely in its wake. Hoping the stone would knock the gesticulating robed man senseless, or just kill him, Fissal drew the other sword from the belt at his waist between one incredible ground-eating stride and the next.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The throw was not as accurate as he had hoped, and took the wizard in the shoulder with a resounding crack. The man spun in place with a yowl of pain, and incomprehension on his face as Fissal descended upon him.
More hours passed, the sun baking the dead and the dying alike.
More lives taken, more lives saved; it was the arithmetic of war. Fissal knew he would not die here today, though, there were just not enough wizards left in the Velspe ranks, and now that he had killed most of the wizards amongst them, their soldiers did not have the equipment necessary to stop him.
As an academic exercise, he and Five had worked out what it would have taken for regular soldiers to kill him; these Velspians hadn’t come prepared for this singular need.
By the last arc to pass before sunset, they had driven off the Velspians, but the Hamurians had lost most of their own soldiers at this forward post.
When reinforcements finally arrived, while Fissal wore yet a third uniform, now also torn to shreds of blood soaked cloth, he had been hailed as a hero.
It was unfortunate, and ran counter to his long term plans, but there was nothing to do now but accept the accolades. Fissal had needed to fake a set of injuries to sell the story of having fought in pitched battles all day, but in this respect, being covered in the ruins of a torn and sliced uniform and splattered with blood aided in the fiction as he made minor adjustments to his body from within. And, apparently to frustrate Fissal even further, he and two other officers who had survived the onslaught were all to be given field promotions by General Imralla to the rank of Lieutenant. Those surviving common foot soldiers would be given liberty for the next three days.
A very vexed Fissal now, unfortunately, outranked the vast majority of the Quartermaster Command in camp. He had been asked if he would like a position on the General Staff, but had refused, telling General Imralla that he didn’t know half of what he needed to know to serve in that capacity, and he would like to continue as a QM officer, and make sure the troops were well fed, and well armed.
Imralla looked at the man skeptically, but assented, He even smiled as he told Fissal to go get looked at by the Leeches, and then take a day off to rest before resuming his duties.
Faking a limp, and not faking exhaustion, Fissal made his way to the medical corps. He knew his lack of injury, ANY injury, would be beyond suspect. While the survivors were being seen to, he centered himself, and concentrated further, hissing under his breath like a rabid tea kettle as he forced slashing and piercing wounds into his flesh. A few verging on severe, but nothing that would need more than cleaning, stitches, and bandages.
It wasn't quite enough, though, he knew.
With a final heaving effort, his forearm twisted, and creaked like a ship’s hawser in a high wind. It was a minor fracture, but would look much worse.
Fissal spent the next day sweating in anxiety over possibly having blown his cover, and considering new plans to run from the army as far and as fast as his siblings had.
But, up to this point, nothing happened to further set marching his paranoia. He had sweat through the night in the cot they had put him on after treating his wounds. While he had long since turned off his pain receptors, his nerves were, nonetheless, frayed. The upside of this, the extreme sweating was making the medical staff truly believe his discomfort, and solidified his burgeoning reputation as being a solid, brave example of the best sort of Hamurian Soldier. All hail the conquering hero, huzzah…
Early the next day, as he drowsed on that same cot in the medical tent, one of the Maestra came to him. He had begun to sweat as she approached, her purple and red mantle flaring as she walked towards him. The “gold” trim and piping on her Army browns and mantle glinted in the morning light, and looked like it might be actual Thread of Gold.
He lay in uncomfortable silence as she drew nearer, and silently prayed for her to pass him by and visit someone else in the large tent. He cursed his fate as she stopped directly at the foot of his cot, and addressed him in an unexpectedly smooth, light voice.
“You are the quartermaster who saved the south valley defense?”
It was Maestra Hadissa. He remembered her lessons in tactics and strategic spellwork at the Golden Tower. She looked much smaller now than she had all those years ago in the Tower. Here, she looked like a well dressed Ocre woman, rather than the stern, terrifying matron of pain and misery she had been to the students of the Tower. Her dark hair had been held back by a selection of intricate combs then, and now was arranged in a startlingly complex array of braids and twists, highlighted by strands of silvery hairs shining against the much darker twists of her natural color. While he thought she had noticeably aged since last he had seen her at the Golden Tower, Fissal would readily admit that her face and form looked as young as ever, and the silver in her hair looked strikingly lovely, rather than the tired mein most people acquired with added gray hair.
She continued to watch him.
“Uhm… Maestra,” his throat was very dry, and his voice shook slightly as he tried to find a way to answer her that did not lead to his confessing every crime he had committed in the last…thirty…? … years. Or, at least all of those committed in just this last year.
He cleared his throat, and tried again, managing to partially sit up in his cot. “Maestra, my apologies, I was just one lucky fool of a supply sergeant amongst a host of real soldiers…”
She suddenly was at his side. His eyes wide, she sat on the edge of his cot. SAT! ON his cot! He was horrified at the intimacy. He could smell her.
She smelled nice. It was a gingery smell just covering her natural scent that told him she had been sweating not too long ago.
He liked it more than his mind wanted to admit. A lot more.
“You must not blame yourself for not being a..” she grinned as she said it ”’Real Soldier,’ you were there, where you were needed, with sword in hand, I have heard. You are even said to have taken down their Circle all on your own. That is no mean feat for any 20 soldiers.”
The Maestra was staring at him, eyes wide, in a bug eyed sincerity he didn’t know quite how to interpret. Her eyes were lovely.
WHERE IS THAT COMING FROM!? His mind boggled.
His voice-box bobbed in his throat as Fissal tried to master his fears. “Maestra, I…”
“Oh, no, my brave soldier. No. I have read many reports by some of those same ‘Real Soldiers’ and they all agree, YOU are the entire reason they are all alive, or not in a Velspe work camp even now.” Her eyes were so dark, liquid shadow slowly dancing around unfathomable black irises that drew in his gaze and held it tightly. Her supple darkly tanned skin highlighting the subtle slopes and plains of her face, ever drawing his errant gaze back to her eyes… This was the beginning of a Glamour. It wasn't catching hold of him, but he could just feel it scrabbling hectically at the edges of his perception.
Fissal slowed his heart, this would be tricky, he knew, and so concentrated. His breathing steadied. It was an effort to marshal his concentration as he felt her Talent trying to hold him in place.
He gazed fixedly up onto a spot at the bridge of her nose; avoiding the now just the prettily canted brown eyes of an attractive woman, he tried to convince himself.
She smiled then, and sighed. Hadissa then spoke to him in a conversational manner, as a highborn woman might speak to a servant. “Lieutenant A’Hahn, tell me how you killed the Circle.”
He paused for a moment, and then spoke clearly, with as little inflection as he could command into his voice. “With a sword, Maestra. And then with two swords. And then with a rock. And two other swords. I lost my first set of swords. Then I found more near some bodies….”
She looked at him. Stared. And then laughed a throaty, hearty laugh he might expect to hear in a beer hall, but never from a full Wizard of the Golden Tower.
“They were killing men with spells, how did they not kill you, Lieutenant A’Hahn?”
“They missed me, Maestra. And then they hit the man who was in front of me. And once a little man with a pointed beard threw me with magic. I bounced off a rock he used like a fly swatter to kill many of our men. When I woke from that, I was behind the lines of combat. I stood up, and grabbed a pair of dropped swords, and a rock, and ran at the man with the silly beard from behind. No one stopped me. I threw the rock at his head trying to kill him, but missed his head. The rock hit his arm and made him stop casting the spell he was about to throw… or at least it distracted him from casting spells. Then I used the swords to kill him.”
Maestra Hadissa laughed again. Fissal stared into the patch of skin between her eyes. Eye contact with those under a suggestive Glamour was important; Two didn’t think her gaze could actually capture him, but it was easier to ignore the Glamour if he didn’t look directly into her eyes..
“Many soldiers told me you fought naked. Is that true?”
“I’m sorry, Maestra, I didn’t mean to be out of uniform… my clothes caught fire, and I tore them off. Before I could put them out, more Velspe attacked me. I found some pants later. On another dead man…”
He paused, and looking directly into the space between her eyes said in a lifeless voice, “Please don’t tell my Nanna. She’ll be so disappointed.”
He forced a blush into his cheeks, but continued to stare directly between her eyes, and maintain his even breathing; it was difficult, but not so hard as many of the exercises he had been trained to perform in the Golden Tower.
She watched him for a moment, tapping a long index finger on her lower lip. :Hold out your left arm, Lieutenant A’Hahn.”
He lifted his left arm. It was heavily bandaged, with bloody spots showing through the white cloth here and there. With a gesture, the bandages unwrapped themselves, slithering through the air to fall to the ground beside the cot. She inspected the cuts, slashes, and large puncture wound on his left arm.
She even poked at the large purple-green bulge over the twist fracture.
Maestra Hadissa then inspected the other bandages on his upper chest, and his right arm, and even the wrap on his head that covered his left cheek and left ear.
She dropped his arm, and stood from the bed, and bellowed as shrilly as a lisk in heat for a doctor. A nervous little man, the right side of his robes bright red, ran up to her from where he had obviously been waiting upon her pleasure just outside of the nearest door flap.
“You. Rewrap his arm, and see that he gets every single luxury he needs or wants. And you will report all back to me. Not to my secretary. Not to another of my Order. Not even to another of my Circe. To. Me. Every morning. Second bell. Understood?”
She then looked at Fissal, and smiled, a broad, warm smile. One he would wish ANY other woman in the world would use on him, but as yet never had.
“Sleep.” She said it as a command to him in what she thought was his charmed state, so Fissal just dropped back in his cot, eyes closed, and slowed his breathing and heart rate even further.
He could hear her walking away from his cot, and out from the tent.
A few moments passed, and the nervous little doctor cleared his own throat and called for a nurse, and new bandages.
Two days later, he was back in the Quartermasters’ tents, counting barrels of salted meat recently bought from Kjolte, and sent from Aurel.
A week later, he left the various bandages out of his morning routine, but made sure to keep the wounds looking livid, and bright.
A month passed, and his days had become pretty regular for a supply officer, though his new rank, and rumors of being a “berserker,” now afforded him much more respect around camp, and even some more responsibilities.
Sergeant Hargris sent word that he was to report to daily sword training with the rest of the General’s Staff Officers, for while he was not an actual member of that lofty group, he was “being groomed.”
Hargris, who he had begun to form a loose friendship with, had joked that none of the higher level officers knew exactly who was doing the grooming, but there were apparently ten rumors for every seven blessed officers speaking of them. Hargris advised him to ride the wave of interest as far as it might take him, and accept any posts the Staff might offer him that didn’t involve being a part of a combat unit.
Fissal nodded, and bought the next round as they sat in a small tent “tavern” that was one of many to spring up around the edges of the camp proper. This entire debacle would make his plans move so much more slowly.
Fissal had time. Not all the time in the world, but Fissal knew he did have time. And his new rank and notoriety might even be used to grant him an open and unassuming form of access to places where he would not have been otherwise able to reach.
Time would tell.
Time.