After an excellent dinner and a festive evening – an unusual state of affairs – we were woken up an hour before dawn to march deeper into Wallachia, covering much of the distance between what had been originally built as a border fort and the recently-moved border. I joked that this was so nobody would have had time to find an excuse to stay at the fort. None of my squadmates laughed; they all thought I was dead serious, even Vitold. At the time, I felt irritated, but on reflection, that made an uncomfortable amount of sense given what the train conductor had told us about not stopping in Khoryvsk.

Ognyan’s little army set a hard pace across the countryside – breaking camp before dawn, marching until an hour after sunset. We avoided roads so that informants wouldn’t be able to tell where we had gone. This made for rough going, and we seemed to be going every which way – south one day, east another, then cutting southwest, and after ten days, I was beginning to think that we were lost.

That’s when we found the village. It was a small village, with several dozen little buildings clustered tightly together, with a couple dozen more spread out a bit further. After the scouts reported this, the general called for a halt and dispensed orders.

A messenger would ride ahead of us into the center of the village and order the villagers to all assemble together in the center of the village. The main body of our force was to surround the village at a distance and ensure that no traitors were to escape, while Ognyan himself would personally question the villagers about reports of nearby resistance activity. Were there any questions? No? Good, the general told us, and began walking towards the village, accompanied by the mechs he’d picked up at the border fort and one of his dogs.

Properly built warmechs are like armored steam suits, only without the vulnerable human knight on the inside. Instead, they’re driven by a powerful elemental spirit bound to a control engine – a complex but robust array of hydraulics and gears. War mages can direct those bound spirits with no more than a thought and a gesture, but the spirits can be exceptionally literal and perverse when following a non-magical officer’s spoken orders.

Given that humans have an unfortunate tendency to die if bathed in steam from a ruptured pressurized line, mechs can be more effective than steam knights, but a proper warmech chassis requires more complex and expensive machinery and enchantments than a mere steam suit. Some workmechs are less complex, especially ones specialized for very specific repetitive tasks.

Colonel Romanov told us that he himself would ride ahead to see to it that the villagers were aware of the need to assemble in the village square, and pointed at a captain I didn’t yet know the name of (Nikita Egorov), declaring him in charge of the general’s honor guard. This honor guard turned out to consist of two squads of steam knights (including mine) and a mounted knight. The cavalryman I did know the name of at the time, but have since forgotten, for which I must most sincerely apologize.

The village square was open on one side and boxed in by buildings on the other sides. The general directed us steam knights to stand in a wide half-ring along one end of the square, while his mechs were posted in the gaps between the buildings along the other three sides.

“Partisans have been here." The general spoke with grave certainty, his voice loud and clear. “You will tell me everything you know."

The mayor of the village told the heavily-muscled war mage that partisans having been here was news to him, and that he was a loyal if somewhat new subject of the throne, as were the rest of his darling villagers. Perhaps milord had been mistaken? Whatever milord required, he would be delighted to supply to the best of his humble ability.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The remainder of the conversation between the two was nonverbal. The war mage’s enchanted sword swiftly and wordlessly informed the mayor that General Ognyan Spitignov had doubts about his honesty and loyalty. The mayor responded by having his body fall to the ground in obeisance while his head obediently but separately rolled towards the general’s foot. The large man picked up the head, the strength runes tattooed around his arms flaring, and punted it over the crowd.

This scene was repeated twice more before the next villager to come forward, a young man, tried something different: He told the general that partisans had come by last week and taken food from the village’s stores to feed their troops, and had headed off southeast, and were probably very far away by now.

Chop.

There had been some supporters of the partisans among the villagers, but sir had already decapitated all three of them, and none of the surviving villagers knew any more?

Chop.

The partisans were at this very moment hiding underneath the village in tunnels?

Chop.

The partisans had stolen the village’s sheep?

Chop.

At this point, the captain ordered us to load and ready our guns with shot in case the villagers attempted to attack us, and I screwed up somehow. When I shut the breech of the cannon, it went off, and I stumbled as the gun smacked into me, dropping to my knees. With that, the rest of the steam knights fired into the crowd, with the captain shrilling declaring that the villagers were attacking. To this day, I have nightmares about that moment – closing the breech and watching the cannon immediately buck back against the armored chest plate of my steam suit. When I looked up, it was all blood and smoke and steam, with the captain barking orders at us to load and fire again.

Mechanically, I loaded a handful of grapeshot, I’m not quite sure why, and looked out numbly as the rest of the steam knights fired a second volley. General Ognyan was about to swing at a little old white-haired lady in tattered rags. My stomach churned, and I aimed at the back of his head and fired, hoping that would quell the nausea, but it didn’t help. I hadn’t seen the gray-haired man pull out his knife and lunge at the general’s back, and the poorly-aimed shot from my cannon struck the villager instead.

If any of the villagers had tried to flee past me, I would have just let them, but none did; standing as I was in the center of the line of steam knights firing at them, they were mostly trying to flee directly away from my position, where the warmechs crushed them like beetles. Those few who tried our line went towards one of the edges. It was over in less than a minute. Ognyan Spitignov grimly stood in the center of the square, coated with blood, bodies strewn around the clearing. He waved his hand, and one of the warmechs stepped forward. I noticed that there was a large bundle of standard-issue foldable entrenching tools tied to one of its smokestacks.

“Captain, I am leaving you one of the mechs. It has instructions to help you dig a burial trench. I do not want the crows to give our position away, so work quickly. Send a runner to fetch me if you find any of the tunnels the fifth villager mentioned. Make sure they are all dead – I want none of them to flee to inform the partisans of our presence. The men may loot the bodies if they wish, I do not care; but let me know if any of them find anything that looks to be tied to resistance to Imperial rule."

As soon as the general left, I popped open my helmet, turned around, and vomited until my stomach was empty. Nobody said anything, and it was with a somber mood that we dug the ditch – the war mech doing most of the work of digging, to be honest – and tossed bodies in. I found one body that was still breathing, lying very still, a person pretending to be a corpse; her muscles tensed briefly when I picked her up, a twitch belying consciousness.

“Pretty little thing. Bit of a waste, eh, Mikolai?" When Ilya asked me that, I realized I had been standing stock still for three or four seconds, staring at the limp but not actually dead body in my arms.

“Ilya, shut up," I said, “and get back to work." When I slid her into the ditch, my folding entrenching tool went with her, tucked between her right arm and her torso. Nobody seemed to notice the irregularity, and then Ilya tossed another body down and I lost sight of her entirely.

Crows were beginning to circle in the sky, and they cawed angrily when General Ognyan showed up again. He had with him a few more corpses and a squad of regular infantry, the latter carrying the former. It was not much longer later that we left behind a village square that was mostly churned-up mud and blood, with a long mound of freshly turned earth next to it. We hadn’t found any tunnels.