I told Gregor to keep quiet about Ilya’s absence. I also told him that Vitold and I would see if we could find where Ilya had gotten off to without getting either of them in trouble; in the meantime, he should assume that Ilya had just managed to stagger down the stairs and had gone off to sleep in the wrong building.

Gregor told me that Ilya had been drinking with him. Before Gregor had passed out, the two of them had a lengthy conversation about women and life outside of the army; and Gregor retold me such a maudlin tale about his own life that it would wash a clown’s smile off his face. I thought to myself that if Ilya hadn’t been considering desertion before hearing of Gregor’s woes, he should have been sorely tempted afterwards.

What I told Gregor, instead, was that surely Gregor’s story would have put Ilya off the idea of women entirely as too much trouble for a soldier. To my surprise, Gregor agreed with me, though I didn’t believe it myself. I would have bet a whole grivna of pure silver on Ilya having snuck off for a little fun in town with that Wallachian girl, if I’d had that much to bet with. And if Vitold was willing to take the other end of the wager, which he probably wasn’t.

That debriefing done, I spent a few minutes pacing back and forth behind the mess hall, trying to get my thoughts in order. Vitold brought out a tray piled up with toast and hard-boiled eggs and a full samovar and suggested that I should retire to somewhere less public to fret. He informed me that the regular soldiers found it unnerving and demoralizing when an officer started pacing nervously, and worse, were the captain to see me, he might find it curious and start asking questions.

We went down to the workshop, and I sat down for a few minutes to wolf down two breakfasts worth of food. Vitold had brought enough out for both the absent Ilya and myself, under the excuse that he was bringing back breakfast for the remaining members of Squad Three. The eggs lacked salt; the tea lacked sugar; but the food soon vanished from the tray and the samovar was emptied of hot water.

It was at this point, staring down at the last cup of tea, that I saw the solution to our problems. Ilya was not, as far as I knew, a woodsman; so we would have a fair chance of tracking him down before he got anywhere. Especially as the crows had been paying such keen attention to us. The carrion-feeders make large predators easy to follow in any woods. We certainly qualified, with the number of corpses we’d left in our wake.

Crows made tracking errant mechs easy, I recalled, having been freshly reminded of my summers with the little grandmother. Something about shiny bits of metal excites birds, and I was always able to rely on the crows to help me find where the old lady’s mech had decided to hide. The elemental spirit had been bound long enough to develop quirks of personality, and it was prone to lying in wait in the oddest places while I chopped up a pile of wood, as if it didn’t want to have to carry bundles of wood.

Mechs. That was the other piece of the puzzle, I decided. We had to wait until nightfall to slip out of camp. If I went off for a patrol during the day, especially without my steam suit, the captain would ask me why, and I would have trouble telling him that and coming up with an excuse for why Ilya wasn’t going on patrol with me. If I left at night, the captain would be asleep, and I would only have to deal with an enlisted soldier on watch duty, who wouldn’t question a superior officer heading off at night on a patrol. He wouldn’t even question my taking a horse or two with me.

In the meantime, I had to cover for Ilya’s absence during drills, and I had an idea: The mech parts in the workshop were newly manufactured and unused, and I had the diary of the man who was hoping to train a fledgling wizard to use them. He had documented everything – including his musings on what kind of security protocols and binding enchantments would be best to ensure that the mechs stayed in the hands of the Resistance rather than being expropriated by mercenaries or captured and re-used by the Imperial Army. He’d already summoned and bound spirits to the elemental cages. The only thing he hadn’t done was assemble the mechs.

A steam suit is very nearly a mech. With a little work on the internals, I could get Ilya’s suit to come out onto the field with the rest of us, even if Ilya was temporarily absent. I just had to make sure the spirits would respond to my orders, and somewhere in the diary were the recognition passcodes I needed to get one of the spirits to respond to my orders.

And they did. The spirit in the first elemental cage I selected responded to my very first attempt at a passcode. It had been bound to recognize a treasonous little quatrain:

A blood-red dawn breaks over Roman soil,The Dragon’s son with us will come and rise, A purple crown returned through blood and toil,Let Koschei’s greed stay in distant Tanais.

This little poem was repeated several times in the little book, and I guessed that the owner of the book was fond of reciting it from memory, making it a natural choice for a passcode. Fortunately, I did not have to speak loudly where some other imperial soldier might overhear and misunderstand my reasons for calling the emperor greedy; my first mumbled recitation worked just fine.

Getting the elemental spirit to respond was only the start. It turned out that linking the cage together with the mechanisms to control the suit was the hard part; I ended up cutting down to size a smaller metal skeleton that the cortex controlled directly, and stuffing that inside of the suit. I couldn’t figure out how to put together finer controls to simulate fingers in time, so I just locked the hands in a permanent grasp on the poleaxe for drills. Vitold was very helpful, I wouldn’t have gotten the rushed project done on time without his assistance.

When “Ilya” and I marched onto the field to join the rest of our squad in parade rest, Captain Egorov clucked his tongue at us. We were clumsy, he told us, and terribly shameful excuses for soldiers. Who had taught Ilya to hold a poleaxe like that? Mikolai should be ashamed of himself for letting such an incompetent soldier in his squad, and Ilya should be very deeply embarrassed.

Or was Ilya still drunk from last night? He knocked on the helmet belonging to “Ilya” loudly with his baton, asking the jury-rigged mech if it was regretting being woolly-headed from how much it had drunk on duty the other night.This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Too late, I figured out the problem: My replacement Ilya needed to be able to say “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir.” I recalled there was some trick of throwing your voice, that puppeteers do with their puppets, and wished I had learned that particular charlatan’s art instead of the more useless charlatan’s art of reading tea leaves. It might work if “Ilya” bowed his head as if in shame. That was almost as good as a “yes, sir,” and a mumbled response from a hungover soldier would be inaudible anyway above the noise of the boilers.

“Bow,” I muttered, then kicked myself, realizing there was no way I could be heard above the boilers without raising my voice, at which point the captain would surely hear. The mech nonetheless obeyed my command in spite of its inaudibility.

When I looked back at the captain’s face to gauge his reaction, I found something else to worry about.

There was a little piece of wood sticking out of the middle of the captain’s forehead. His eyes were crossed as if trying to look at the feathered fins attached to it. (There were four of them; triangular little fins, meant to guide it straight through the air.) Red blood welled up around the edges as his head rolled lifelessly back, and his own steam suit began to tilt backward as the body inside it slumped limply.

We were under attack.

Captain Egorov had, in his diligence executing one duty, ensuring that his troops stayed sharp and ready for action, neglected another. If we were all assembled together for exercises, nobody was posted to keep an eye out for the enemy. Perhaps he had assumed anybody trying to sneak up on us wouldn’t try an attack when all the steam knights were suited up and ready for action. In either case, he had been negligent, and we were now facing the consequences of that negligence.

I heard a gasp from Gregor as if he had been about to shout something and then stopped himself. This reminded me I was, thanks to my entirely fictitious seniority of service, now the proud commander of our little detachment; I was supposed to give the orders, even if Gregor was by far more qualified to know what was going on. I spoke the order I was supposed to give, struggling to keep my voice calm and level:

“All knights, form line of battle.”

The act of speaking clarified my own emotions. From empty shock I went straight to a burning sense of rage; my voice may have been calm, but my vision was tinged with red. This rage must have leaked through to the elemental spirit somehow, because the mech charged straight towards the woods, steam engine whistling as it opened its throttle to full, breaking away from our line as it formed.

Squad Two either couldn’t hear my order over the noise or didn’t think it was meant for them. When they saw the brave steam knight charging past them towards their enemy, they took their cue from him, charging after it with much patriotic shouting and a painfully loud clatter of pistols.

I hadn’t addressed the regular infantry in my new command, but as experienced soldiers (something I was not), they’d already hastily taken cover and had started returning fire into the woods. I say returning fire because the crossbow bolt that downed the captain had been followed by a volley of bullets, arrows, and other projectiles.

War arrows meant for easier prey rained continuously but harmlessly off my armor as the enemy arquebusiers reloaded. I stood in thought. We had two squads of steam knights, a platoon of regular infantry, one jury-rigged mech pretending to be a steam knight, and one imperial war mech that was leaning against the building, its boiler cold. Evidently, Captain Egorov hadn’t intended for our drills to include it. My men had divided themselves into three groups, one group scattering like sparrows, a second charging in a berserk rage, and the last four steam knights, including myself, taking a line, the standard response to an ambush based on what Gregor had taught me.

The enemy’s disposition was a little more organized. The enemy partisans were armed more uniformly than the dead defenders had been and were mostly in deliberate lines. Front and center were hardened mercenaries, alternating between arquebusiers and halberdiers in pairs. To either side, local rebels alternated between spears and arquebuses, and behind, there were archers, their arrows becoming less accurate as they fired through the rising black smoke. The arquebusiers fired a second volley and then dashed backwards before kneeling to reload, the mercenary halberdiers walking back at a more deliberate pace, the flanking groups of partisans pulling to the sides, preparing to surround the heavily armored steam knights. Somewhere in the woods was the crossbow-wielding sharpshooter who’d downed the colonel, and I could see several mounted rebels shouting orders – officers, surely.

Overhead, the crows circled us all.

A bullet pinged off my helmet as the Wallachian arquebusiers fired a third volley, and someone spoke. Gregor, most likely, though in the moment I didn’t recognize his voice. “Orders, sir? We have formed line.” The combination was enough to nudge me back to reality and the fact that I needed to order the squad to do something. We couldn’t just stand here taking fire while the rebels cut the other squad to pieces in the woods.

“Axes down," I said, trying to put the hard edge of command in my voice. “Get the cannons and load grape. Support Squad Two with close fire. I’ll try to catch up and bring the other knights back here.”

The fury kept welling within me. This wasn’t fair. We hadn’t even seen this coming. Squad Two couldn’t even see the enemy halberds on the other side of the trees. The crows had seen it, and they hadn’t given warning, eager for battle. My face grew hot and sweaty.

“Go ahead and eat your goddamn fill, carrion-feeders, they’re dead already," I muttered under my breath, quietly but intensely, wishing heated words alone could kill as I waved at the birds. “Load and ready!"

We could at least keep Squad Two from being totally encircled – and if they could keep the enemy on the other side of their shields, they stood a chance at surviving long enough. Maybe it wasn’t hopeless, I thought to myself, as the men behind me dropped canvas bags into their cannons, each bag loaded with about half a pound of small metal balls. “Pick shots and fire as seems best,” I said and then started running forward.

Squad Two was already starting to scatter. The crows had come down to feast early and were divebombing both the steam knights and the rebel soldiers. The air was so thick with them that it was hard to see. The crows weren’t trying to divebomb me or my mechanical squadmate, who was in the center of the great swirling flock, but everyone else seemed to be fair game.

Behind me, I could hear two shots, and then a third, followed by a string of shouted epithets. Gregor and Misha must have fired first, then Vitold. I hoped that the heavy armor of the steam knights would protect them from any misdirected fire; the grapeshot wasn’t designed to pierce heavy armor.

The sharp crack of a rifle sounded from off ahead and to my right. A mounted rebel officer’s hat flew into the air. Peering into the woods I spotted a familiar face in the distance – the red-headed sharpshooter that Ilya had befriended on the train ride. She was perched on a horse, with a message tube tied to the saddle, her rifle gripped by the muzzle-end in one hand as she swung a soft mallet in the other, hammering down on the ramrod to force another ball down the barrel of her rifle. She was still wearing the purple crystal pendant I’d seen her take off a dead rebel during the looting, I noted. This seemed somehow important, though I couldn’t quite think of why.

I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen and looked down. The back end of a crossbow bolt looked back up at me. It had gone through the steel plate like butter. The bolt must have been enchanted, I thought to myself. This seemed very unfair, but I had trouble gathering the strength to be angry about the injustice of it. The world tilted, and I tried to concentrate. Everything went black.