“The House of the Seventeenth Heir-son requires your support, man; snap out of it,” said a gruff, angry voice, muffled but clearly audible. “With the Minister of Harbor Security under arrest, you are the only ones who can order the harbor cannons trained upon the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”

  The junior officer shook the mirror, ignoring the faint conversation echoing out of the silvery surface. “Sir? What’s going on? Sir?”

  The conversation on the other side of the mirror concluded with one more quiet statement, which the junior officer likewise ignored as he stared down at the image of a desk with nobody seated in it: “Very well.”

  Then there was the distinctive sound of a door shutting, and the image in the mirror began to fade, slowly replaced by the image of the junior officer’s own face reflected back at him. He looked up from the mirror.

  “My apologies, captain; I’m sure the underminister or his delegate will be back shortly to continue the conversation.” The junior officer gave me a brief, perfunctory bow, a nervous look on his face as he pretended not to know the cause of the underminister’s absence, which seemed clear enough from the quiet conversation that had occurred perhaps fifteen or twenty feet away from the other mirror. “If your, um, demonstration landed somewhere in the city, he may have been obliged to investigate the damages to put on your account.”

  “We have traveled for a considerable length of time,” I said. “We can patiently wait an hour or two longer while he considers the balance of his obligations and reputation against his greed.”

  The imperial officer flushed, at once both insulted and embarrassed, but had no rebuttal.

  I could see the red haze in front of my ship beginning to fade, and through the fading haze, I could also see the little distant figures of men and mechs rushing to the harbor cannons, the former speaking to one another in hushed tones and the latter rumbling mechanically. One laggardly pair of artillerists made a bet with each other over whether or not the House of the Seventeenth Heir-Son would still exist at the end of the week.

  If the underminister was busy arranging an artillery bombardment of part of his own city, then the only people who knew I did not have permission to enter the city were the junior officer standing in front of me and the enlisted man still sitting in the little brass submersible boat that was tied up alongside us. In a moment, I knew what I needed to do.

  “Hold him and don’t let him reactivate his mirror,” I said in Latin before I rushed to the edge of the ship, trusting that the junior officer in front of me was likely as ignorant of the language as most of my fellow Ruthenians had been at the start of our voyage—but that someone near me would take the order.

  Behind me, I could hear the junior officer’s saber scrape against its sheath and hear him suck air into his lungs in preparation for a shout, revealing that he, unlike the large majority of Ruthenian soldiers I had known, understood Latin well enough, but I was past him and at the edge of the ship. I firmly grasped a thick rope in one hand as I stepped onto the railing, leaning out; my other hand flickered through the motion of tying a knot, and then I tossed a line of turquoise force down, a wide loop slipping around the hull of the boat.

  The glass top of the submersible swung shut with a bang as I pulled the line of force tight, the Corsican brass of my gauntlets gripped against immaterial magic, and I wished I had the assistance of flux-powered actuators as the weight of the boat resisted my efforts. Unfortunately, my old armor’s flux gates had been repurposed into an automated oaring system for my boat; my new armor was slim-fit enchanted Corsican brass with no powered systems at all.

  The enlisted man inside looked up, startled, as I pulled the brass boat out of the water. The bottom of the boat showed a significant amount of verdigris, illustrating that it was not manufactured out of corrosion-resistant Corsican brass. It was not overly large, perhaps twelve feet long from tip to tip and three feet across in the middle. While I was in a position with considerably better leverage, I do not think it was any heavier than a traveling circus’s giraffe, at least with the ballast tanks empty. I think my task might have been impossible if the ballast tanks had been full. However, the line of force contracted its length by the exercise of my will, so I did not need to pull hand over hand. All I needed to do was hold the line of force with one hand and the rope with the other as the boat rose, which was mainly an exercise in grip strength and in the security of my shoulders within their sockets.

  Moreover, unlike even the most agreeable of circus giraffes being raised by rope and harness, it could not and did not kick in reflexive panic as it found itself raised into the air. With the top shut, the only moving parts were the craft’s external propulsion units, a pair of tubular pumps in the style of Archimedes, mounted to either side of the rear of the craft. They could only spin in place with a spray of water as the soldier within frantically pedaled. This lightened the craft somewhat, and it wobbled as I set it down on the deck.

  Several stalwart Swedes surrounded it with swordstaves as I dissolved the spell, let go of the rope, hopped off the railing, and flexed my aching hands. “Don’t kill him if you don’t have to,” I told them before turning back to look at the junior officer who had served as the little brass boat’s commander.

  The officer was staring blankly, one hand limply laying on the hilt of his saber, his jaw slack. Katya, with an expression as fiery as the red of her hair, stood with her wolf-mark sword at the ready in her right hand, her mechanical left arm raised and ready to block a blow—except that instead of the tip of her Batavian blade being pointed at the imperial officer, it was pointed at the auburn-haired woman standing next to him.

  Gulben. The favored youngest sister of the sultan. A dim red glow danced in her blue eyes; her hands were raised in front of her, one open and the other gripping the small silver mirror that the imperial officer had been using to communicate with his superior.

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  “She used her magic,” Katya told me. “I saw her enchant his wits away from him. I thought she could not use her magic. She made a blood oath.”

  “You ordered me to enchant him and take away his mirror, Colonel Corvus,” Gulben said, her voice soft but growing louder. “My oath permitted—no, required—that I obey.”

  “How was my asking him to be held an order for you to use your magic to enchant him?” I frowned. “For that matter, how was it an order directed to you at all?”

  “In the terminology preferred by the wizards of the Roman church, a holding spell is an enchantment that captivates the mind,” Gulben said, interjecting the Latin word for ‘holding’ into a sentence otherwise spoken in strongly accented Ruthenian. “Other than yourself, I do not think anyone else on this ship is capable of enchanting a full-grown man with such a spell, not without the assistance of an empowered focus.”

  Suddenly, Gulben flinched with pain. “Except for Teushpa,” she hurriedly added in a fast monotone, then sighed with relief before continuing. “Teushpa clearly has the strength for such a spell, though I do not know if his skills and talents extend into the domain of mental compulsions, and I don’t think he was near enough to have heard your order.”

  “Teushpa’s magical skills are limited to convincing others that he has magical skills,” I growled under my breath, then shook my head. Gulben’s lies about Teushpa being magically potent and also outside of earshot were equally absurd, given that he was barely eighty feet away and had yet to show me a single feat of magical ability in the years we had journeyed together, but I regretted complaining about the latter lie aloud.

  After all, in spite of the dishonest charade he put on to convince others that he had a talent for illusion magic with a mixture of bluffs, suggestions, and sleight of hand, the well-born Cimmerian scout was a skilled officer and soldier, competent enough that he had thoroughly earned his promotion from banneret to lieutenant. I trusted him—liked him, even—and I regretted speaking my frustrations about his lone frustrating habit aloud. Those with noble blood were often proud to have magical talents, as it spoke to the quality of their bloodlines, and to fail to inherit a family talent was a grave embarrassment. Especially if the talent was one that seemed to carry along a paternal line.

  “Never mind,” I said. “How long will this hold last?”

  “As long as I continue my grip,” Gulben said, ruddy highlights dancing in her blue eyes as they flickered over to Katya’s slim, jeweled sword with its frightfully sharp, enchanted blade. “It is an active hold, and I must maintain the stronger of our two wills.”

  “Hold him for a few moments longer, then. Katya, put away your sword, and take this gentleman’s saber,” I said, pointing at the slack-jawed officer. “Along with any other weapons he is carrying,” I added, suddenly cognizant of the short-barreled pistol balancing the sword on his opposite hip.

  Katya’s search of the man was quick, rough, and intrusive. A knife, a short wooden rod that could be a wand of some kind, and a letter opener joined the pistol and saber in a pile on the deck. I positioned myself between the naval officer and his weapons and nodded to Gulben.

  Gulben blinked, the red flickering light leaving her eyes a pure, untainted blue as she let out a heavy sigh, swaying on her feet slightly.

  The imperial officer snapped awake with a jolt, stiffening to a ramrod-straight pose, his eyes opened wide. “What have you done?” His voice cracked with fear as he looked at me, hand grasping desperately at the empty air above his scabbard.

  I ignored his question and gestured at the city as I spoke, the red haze now completely gone. “If the underminister had deigned to grant us permission to dock, or perhaps if we had business partners in the city too important for him to irk by demanding bribes, where would we go next?”

  The officer spent a moment looking at the city, and then a cannon boomed, one of the harbor guns firing at a building halfway between it and the main imperial palace. When the echoes of the first shot had faded, the officer spoke. “Well, the main docks are straight ahead, but if you had a patron in one of the city’s great houses or ministries, you would probably go up the mouth of the river and then dock at one of their private slips. More than half of all the ships calling at the capital city do so from north along the river—there are many places to dock along the Tanais River within the city.”

  More cannonfire sounded. I nodded, then raised my voice to catch the attention of Captain Felix Rimehammer, the second in command of my company. “We shall make for the river mouth,” I said. “Though conditions in the city of Tanais are perhaps less than hospitable at the moment, I know many of my fellow imperial citizens have been away from home for a long time. Any men seeking release from service may disembark in the city once we dock, with whatever pay may be due by the end of the week—Felix, I presume you have records?”

  The peg-legged Swedish mercenary nodded. “It will be a few minutes to find accounts,” he said, his gaze drifting away from my face and toward a platoon of arquebusiers marching out of a squat, ugly building. “There may be tactical complications first,” he added with a frown. “I don’t think I want to go delving through files while we may need to respond to cannonfire or boarding actions. Fyodor will also be needed here on deck… Georg, go take down a list of who wants off. Mark them down in the blue ledger. You know which one I mean?”

  A young woman in ill-fitting men’s clothing, her hair tucked tight in a bun underneath her hat, snapped to attention. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll get on it.”

  Felix Rimehammer watched the young woman leave. “Good lad,” he muttered. Then he turned, looking off to the rear of our ship and the rippling waves of the Cimmerian Sea.

  As Georg was not in any way a lad, I assumed that Felix’s thoughts had turned to his cousin Ragnar Rimehammer, who had parted company with us in Constantinople. Ragnar had departed the sultan’s palace at speed on a flying carpet with a basket by his side, nearly catching up with our fleeing quinquereme. Unfortunately, the carpet took some cannonfire and spiraled out of control. While the basket landed on the ship, the carpet and Ragnar had landed in the water.

  The basket had contained a magic rope. Once the rope was extended, down climbed four maidens who had been either liberated, stolen, or kidnapped from the sultan’s palace by Ragnar, depending on which maiden was telling the story. Gulben, who had been happy to live in a palace ruled by her older brother, favored ‘kidnapped.’

  “Ragnar is likely still alive,” I said, trying my best to be reassuring. “As I told you before, one of the mermaids was quite fond of him, and I’m sure she wouldn’t have let him drown.”

  Felix frowned at me. “I’m trying not to think too often of Ragnar,” he said. “I was thinking that if Georg were not such a poor fighter, a promotion would have been in order by now. I’ll see to the details here on deck organized among the men if you wish to go up to the forecastle, where you will have a better view of the things a commander should see.”

  The suggestion had merit. “Come with me,” I said, nodding at the imperial officer. “I have never been to the capital, and I may have further questions for you.”

  I took up my trident, adjusted my brilliant cerulean cape, and made my way to the front of the boat, Corsican brass armor gleaming in the sun. Below me, the ancient bronze ram of the quinquereme split the current of the Tanais River, likely pushing through fresh water for the first time in roughly two thousand years as we headed into the river mouth that served as the imperial city’s original founding anchor.