Cinders of Magic

Chapter 7-3

“Be sure that I will just as soon as we are done here.” Eladrine returned to his seat with a glass of water. “You’ll be glad to hear that your soldiers are adjusting well to the 800th. None put up more argument about the fresh recruits that I filled the ranks of the new six-seventy with than that man Roan. He was also the first to take command of them and try to whip them into something usable.”

“That sounds about right. Roan was never a man that could forgive stupidity.” Elias replied. “I expect the rest will be glad to see this mountain of yours. Some of the soldiers were harboring the perception that living in the mud wasn’t the best assignment that you could get.”

“Not quite the best.” Eladrine smiled. “I’m glad I was able to give them the six-seventy designator. Wouldn’t want everyone to have to get new patches made. I know how much the enlisted men are fond of their squad patches.”

“You might have had a fight there,” Elias agreed.

“Though I think that some of the new soldiers you gave me would jump at the opportunity. We managed to pull a good many young men and women out of the countryside when we came marching east. My father always said, ‘A passing army is always good for dragging away youth that has too much wanderlust in them.’”

“How are they, sir?”

“Untempered, eager, and far too excited.”

“After they see combat a time or two, most of that will be gone, and we might be able to make some good soldiers out of them,” Elias said with a sigh. It was always the way with unblooded infantrymen to jitter at the chance to see combat for the first time. “I wish it didn’t take seeing that to harden them right.”

“That’s what I wanted to speak with you about,” Eladrine said. He set his drink aside, and the smiling demeanor disappeared from the young captain’s face. “Do you have any experience with rear-guard duty?”

“None. We’ve been face to face with the Sloanish long enough we could pick out individuals to aim for at the start of each day.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Eladrine pulled himself back in his seat. “That being so, most of the soldiers you have now are fresh and untested. This assault needs to be carried out quickly and with as few mistakes as possible. I know you to be a capable man from our adventure into the Sloanish line. I don’t doubt you will be able to guard the guns easily enough. You’ll need to have a tight rein on the jitterings of your new squad, and you only have just under a day to get it.”

Elias sat a long time in the following silence, and the captain allowed it to drag on without interruption. Elias studied the map that he had pulled over once more, narrowing his gaze on the ridgeline that the rearguard would be protecting. The artillery had already been moved a few hundred feet from the ridge and was set to besieging the Sloanish. “Making soldiers stay put might be easier than you imagine it to be,” Elias said after a long while.

“Maybe. Unfortunately, educating myself that closely with what is and isn’t easy to make a soldier do will have to wait until we return to Caladera. For now, I can only offer you my assistance and orders.”

Elias pushed the map away and stood from his chair. “I will, of course, follow orders, sir. If you want us to be your rearguard, then we will do so with all seriousness. Even only basically trained recruits can shoot at a flanking charge.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. Not that I expect it to come to that.” Eladrine stood from his chair as well, and the two exchanged a salute. “You are dismissed.”

“One last thing, sir. How did you manage to get me out of detainment? There was more than one demoted officer among us in the cell. I didn’t think anyone under a colonel would be able to order someone’s release.”

Eladrine smiled. “I have some pull despite my rank. Maybe we’ll talk more about it sometime, but right now, I think I will get some of that rest you advised me to.”

Elias left the tent and the weary captain behind--not needing to be dismissed a second time--and headed for the edge of the tent line. He felt tempted to first find his men, gather the troops, make an inspection of the mostly unknown faces in a vain hope to acquaint himself with them in the one night he had before the march, and to relay the orders handed to him. He headed east out of the encampment, back towards Orailse proper, knowing full well that his immediate sergeants would likely be well into their day in one of the local pubs. Elias considered joining them, but something else nagged at his curiosity.

Finding the right kind of men to help in the search he was starting was an easy thing. The Fiorian armies pulled together all kinds of people from throughout the liege lands of the lords each served. With such a mass merging of strangers, some talents that one man in three hundred might possess came to the fore, and when those talents recognized the same in each other, a pooling together started to happen. As it so happened, Elias needed a man that could point him in the right direction of another man with just a description, and the place to find such men would be near the guard fort. There were always those among the guard that busied themselves with the going-ons of each person they encountered, not for any nefarious reason, but simply because they liked to know the lives of each person they could fit name-to-face. In their small towns, they might once have been local gossips, busybodies, or burgomasters--Elias saw little difference between the three--in the army, they were an asset, and such men knew it.

“I’ve seen that fellow,” a gangly man in his mid-fifties told Elias as he gave the description. “Might even recall where you might find him. If you’re not out to beat the poor man into the ground, he wasn’t in the best shape when I seen him. Looked like his head had been split open like a melon.”

“Just some questions.” Elias pressed a few iron notes into the hand the man held open on the table next to him. He pretended not to notice.

“Questions are always good. Lead to answers in my experience,” The older man thumbed his earlobe and looked at the hand with half a gold mark in it, weighing the value of the information he held. “You’ll find him in the camp, west side. He lives in a traveling cart of sorts. You’ll know it by the strange green painting across it and the laundry hung outside of it. Seen his wife once, a pretty thing young enough to be his daughter.”

Elias wasted no time in finding the wagon he’d been told of, but searching through the entirety of the rows and rows of tents that half-encircled the city of Orailse took until the morning light had begun to peek over the horizon. He knew the cart as soon as he laid eyes on it, a green wagon that was big enough to hold the living space for a man and his wife parked on the edge of the camp with enough guards around he might have mistaken it for where a general was living. There were three other wagons attached to the first, all of the same covered nature and green markings, and Elias did find a line of laundry stretched out from the first to the second.

People had just begun to stir with the coming light. Those that had been on duty headed off to bed, those ready to replace them started to come out still shaking off the last clingings of the previous night’s sleep, and those with no duty to keep them from it returned from a night of carousing in the city. Except for the last wagon, which had a weak flamelight licking at the brass panels of its sole window, the grounds ahead of Elias lay still as a bone. Five sets of eyes watched him stride across the grassy enclave that surrounded the strange wagons, but no one moved to stop him. He headed for the last wagon, the one with the light, and found there to be a brass knocker set into the door. The shape of the brass sheep’s head perplexed him for a moment, but he seized the ring in its mouth and rapped it against the door three times. Elias did not hear the slight murmuring on the other side of the door until it stopped at his knocking. A moment later, a face he recognized, except now there was a bound white strip of gauze where he remembered blood, peered down at him around the half-opened edge of the door.

“Ah,” Elias said. Suddenly, he found himself at a loss for words.

The man, who wore spectacles set with two different kinds of glass in the frame bisecting the middle, scrutinized Elias. The man’s eyes ran over his squadron patch that was affixed on the left breast pocket of his uniform, and he seemed to recognize it. “You must be Elias Rook,” the man said, face remaining hard.

“I am. How do you know my name? I still haven’t been able to find out yours.”

“I suppose a man should know the name of those he saves. Come in, come in, Mr. Rook. Otto Denegin stays in no man’s debt for long.” The man whose name was Otto gesticulated wildly as he spoke. “No man"s!” Proclamation made, Otto stepped back from the door and hurried out of sight.

Feeling uneasy at the nature of the man, Elias urged himself up the three steps that lead into the wagon. The wagon gave the feeling of being more spacious on the inside than it appeared from outside, but Elias still found himself stooping to avoid hitting his head on the cross-hatched ceiling. One long shelf ran the length of the wagon, piled high with glass chemistry and various instruments that would no doubt be of some use in the science. Elias knew enough of the sciences that he could identify that one of the glasses, one that held a green liquid and marked with symbols he couldn’t recognize, was being a beaker of some sort.

“A man, he told me his name was Biddy, but that couldn’t possibly be a real name, came by the day before last.” Otto dug around in a box near the back of the wagon, the tinkling of glass following every probe of his hand into the thing. Still with his back turned to Elias, he tossed his free hand about to emphasize his words. “He said he was part of some fated rescue mission that’d been sent after me when...I had my misfortune...and that he wanted to check in on me. He had a limp, but I’d wager that was just to earn some sympathy. The man certainly wouldn’t have been running very far with it. The rest, though, seemed true, and when I pressed him, he gave me an impressive figure for how many Sloanish he had killed. It is worth rewarding such a man. The number he estimated for you was far greater.”

“I only came to make certain that you made it out of the fighting safely, and were recovering,” Elias said. There was a canister of some kind, made of a hard metal he thought to likely be steel, that leaned against the wall near where Otto stood searching through his box. Four identical canisters laid next to it, but the thing that drew Elias’s eye was the pink mist swirling inside the metal tube behind a glass window in its side. There was a light to the mist that was all its own, and it seemed to sparkle in a way that reminded Elias of stars.

“That’s what the other man said.” As quick as a flash, Otto was in Elias’s face and pressing something cold into his hands. “Though not with the same words. Or the same intention. I think he just said he wanted to see if I was dead or not.”

Elias looked down at the object pressed into his hand. It was a silver figurine, as big as his fist and in the shape of a serpent’s head. The fangs of the snake’s head were made of silver as well, but with veins of gold running through them like veins of the metal in the earth.

“What’s this,” Elias breathed.

“Compensation.” Otto put a hand on Elias’s shoulder and started ushering him towards the door. “I’d love to have more time to talk, but I’m afraid I don’t. You saved my life, and now I gift you with something I’m sure is worth more than anything you’ve known before. You look like a country boy to me.

“Anyways, the woman’s machinations have put me far behind in my work, and I can’t spare a second for even life savers. I appreciate the good work you men do with your arms so that we others might apply our minds to the task. I hope you have a good day, Sergeant, and may you kill more of our enemy when you are set loose against them again. Remember, if ever you need a favor, I’m sure a man with the engineer’s guild will take kindly to knowing that you saved Otto Denegin from torture at Sloanish hands.”

Before Elias could blink, he found himself bungled out of the doorway as it was shut, quickly though not slammed, just in front of his nose. He tried to parse the words on the steps of the man’s wagon. Elias caught sight of a young woman that was maybe in her late twenties moving between the first and second wagon pulling laundry down from the line. She gave him a sympathetic look before turning back to pulling a checkered shirt down from its pins. Elias shook his head, not knowing what to make of the strange interaction, and left the silver serpent’s head on the stairs as he set off. He wagered that with the sun coming up the men he would be looking for wouldn’t be at their local pub any longer. If he was lucky, he might locate them before midday.