The ragged roar of grapeshot, the lighter crackle of arquebus fire, and the pained screams of dying men echoed through the streets of the capital not far away from where we had docked. I had stopped with the intention of allowing a substantial disembarkation of men leaving my company; instead, we had taken aboard sides of beef from the Ministry of Harbor Security, along with some other sundry supplies. The steam cranes were still actively loading when I digested the implications of Georg’s statement.

  If we were not unloading any men, we had no real reason to sit at dock at all, especially not when the fighting was fierce on either side of the main channel of the Tanais River through the imperial city of Rome-upon-Tanais. I turned, filled my lungs, and gave an order at what I believed to be sufficient volume to be heard over the background noise of the steam cranes, gunfire, and dozens of conversations great and small.

  “Make ready to go,” I bellowed over the heads of Gulben and Georg, the latter of whom had dropped the blue ledger and jammed her fingers in her ears the moment she had seen me inhale.

  Gulben flinched as I began to speak, clapping her hands to her ears partway through my order. The gunfire fell silent for a moment, as did all the chatter from my company. A handful of heartbeats later, across the quarter-mile of clear air separating us from the opposite bank of the river, an anchored steam-powered barge’s smokestacks began to billow black smoke.

  I turned to look at Teushpa, ready to repeat the order if it proved necessary, but he was already in motion, running up the ladder with two feet and one hand. His other hand swirled in the air.

  Back ashore on the docks operated by the Ministry of Harbor Security, the ensign’s eyes crossed and then uncrossed, a look of shock and confusion on his face. Then he slowly turned in place and started running headlong towards one of the brass submersibles. His hat fell off in the collision, the gong-like thud drawing the attention of the noblewoman that Teushpa had been trying to entice to join us on our trip upriver.

  At the same time, the noblewoman who had called herself “Cousin Yarka” turned in the general direction of the sound, looking back and forth.

  “Igoryok, was that you? Where did you go? And is this weather magic at your command? I thought you lacked magical talent entirely. Or have you found a fog-binding focus of great power? You should have told your granduncle about that before pressing your suit for my hand…” Her voice trailed off as her confidence that her words were being heard diminished; though Teushpa’s rising backside was still clearly in her field of view less than a dozen yards away, her eyes were still trained on the spot that the man she addressed as “Igoryok” had been standing before my shouted order.

  The aforementioned Teushpa certainly lacked magical talent in spite of Yarka’s vague hope that the fixed and unchanging weather surrounding us was in some way his responsibility, but I did not wish to delay our departure for conversation with her on the subject, turning my attention instead to assisting the helmsman in finding his bearings while Vitold put the flux-powered rowing engine into motion, chains groaning and oars creaking.

  It was still a little puzzling to me how Teushpa had turned away the potentially hostile troops by claiming the identity of the woman’s cousin, and I was left wondering if perhaps Teushpa, who seemed wholly Cimmerian, really did have some family tie to the noble house—and if he had been given the name “Igor” at his christening.

  If Igor’s granduncle was Yarka’s grandfather, as implied by her discussion of whose approval was required for the release of her hand in marriage, the two noble cousins could share as few as one or two great-grandparents and look quite markedly different, even to such a degree as Teushpa’s looks differed from those of the noblewoman.

  Or perhaps the noblewoman was the outlier in appearance. I turned, asking the obvious question aloud to those standing next to me. “Was the Emperor’s seventeenth wife a Cimmerian, by any chance?”

  Gulben cocked her head to the side, brow furrowed, rubbing her ear in a slackjawed look of confusion; disappointing, as I had expected she would know details of the great houses of the empire that had recently checked her brother’s ambitions. Georg’s face showed an unhappy pout as she shrugged; she knew the family trees of Gothic nobility well, but the faraway and exotic Golden Empire was a cipher to her. However, past the two women, I could see a former imperial soldier shaking his head confidently.

  I could not remember his name, but I did remember he was the illegitimate son of a boyar who lived somewhere in the upper basin of one of the western tributaries of the Kama River. It made sense he would know about one of the more important noble bloodlines of the Empire. “Who, or I suppose what, was she?” I asked.

  The answer came quickly, the soldier happy to share long-disused knowledge with his commanding officer. “She was from the far Orient, sent as a tribute from the newly crowned King Hongwu, proving the Undying Emperor could command respect from every end of the earth, even the most distant realms to the east.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  I frowned, distracted from my original line of thought by the memory of a certain Ming account I had read while hiding in the middle of a pile of freshly chopped wood. The book, a brief account of the rise of the Ming Empire, had described an Emperor Hongwu receiving a tribute of a flame-haired princess from the distant Golden Kingdom. The Ming historian had claimed this was a sign that the new emperor, who had just finished the process of usurping the previous imperial order in a brutal multi-sided civil war, commanded respect from every end of the earth, even the most distant realms to the west.

  As a thirteen-year-old boy, the gruesome details of the civil war had been far more interesting than the accounts of courtly tributes, but it was the only time the Golden Empire had been mentioned in the whole text, and that mention had brought it home to me that the account was really a history and not some fantastical confabulation.

  “Everyone in the house today is at least three generations removed from their foremother,” the soldier added, misinterpreting my frown and extended silence. “There are very few of them who have even the least bit of the look of the Ming about them by this point; it is said the Seventeenth Heir-Son misliked his own looks and wished them out of his grandchildren.”

  “No, I was just wondering if Lieutenant Teushpa really was this Yarka woman’s long-lost Igoryok, or at least closely kin to him,” I said.

  “I’m sure the likeness was flawless, sir,” the soldier told me. “But I think I know Teushpa’s true face well enough to say there was no family resemblance.”

  It was my turn to pause in confusion, though unlike Gulben, I did so with a closed mouth—my mother had been particular in her insistence that I should not let flies in while I stopped to think.

  Then there was a loud crunch. As I stood back up, I could see pieces of floating wood and loose barrels clattering against the flux-powered oars as they swept through the debris that had been a river barge before its unfortunate encounter with the bronze ram at the prow of the quinquereme.

  “I heard that,” Gulben shouted, blinking as she looked up at me. “What were you saying earlier?”

  I shook my head, pushing both my own question and Gulben’s out of mind as I went to assess the damage.

  The bronze ram at the prow of our ship was fine; one of the oars in the first bank had been cracked but was easily enough replaced by a spare. The prow was splashed with red, as some barrels of pickled beets had broken in the collision. The less said about the condition of the barge, the better; I would prefer not to dwell on it.

  We continued upstream, Teushpa and I taking turns to help the helmsman sight and avoid barges for the next several hours. The bargemen that worked the river within and near the capital city seemed universally confident that we would be the ones who gave way, completely ignoring our presence until we were within a couple dozen yards. Nor was the helmsman himself any good at spotting the barges; the man seemed to have gotten some gunsmoke stuck in his eyes in the city, as—in spite of the sunny weather—he kept blaming thick fog for his inability to see.

  Then Teushpa begged off from helping me steer, citing exhaustion from overwork and a need for a nap. While I could not see any reason he should be especially exhausted, he had managed quite a trick in turning the harbor security forces from a hazard into a resource, and the man deserved some kind of reward for that. I resigned myself to watching alone, but fortuitously, it happened that the helmsman’s eye cleared of the trapped smoke, and the next barge was piloted by a sensible bargeman who gently adjusted his course as soon as we came into view around the river bend.

  As the barge passed, I glanced one more time at Teushpa’s sleeping face, returning my mind to the question that had been raised by his comrade-in-arms: If this was not his true face, what was? And how had he changed it?

  With no need to continue my own close watch of the river ahead, I went to find Johann, waking him from his own nap. He thought that it was possible that a person’s face could be indefinitely transformed, though a glamour would be considerably easier and would be less painful if the spell was broken or reversed. His knowledge of either possibility was largely theoretical, though I was interested in hearing more when he said an illusion could be either glamour or phantasm while a transformation could be either transmutation or conjuration.

  “A transmutation, as in alchemy?” I asked.

  “Yes—the material is changed in its place from one thing to another,” Johann said. “Transmutation is the older attested magic, though the secrets of the greater transmutations between the animate and the inanimate are not known to modern mages. King Midas with his golden touch, Medusa with her petrifying gaze, or, in the other direction, breathing a golem to life.”

  “So, then, alchemy is the lesser transmutation of the unliving, while lesser transmutations of living to living are…” I paused, hoping Johann would fill in the gap in my vocabulary.

  “Um.” Johann gave me an embarrassed look. “I don’t suppose… Is it necromancy, technically? Oh, I know—healing? Healing is worked on living flesh to living flesh. Maybe a transmutation of living flesh is technically healing.”

  “Not your specialty, then,” I said drily.

  “It’s a long way to go to Lithuania,” he said, defensively. “And I’ve heard the winters there are ghastly. In Vindobona, we had a visiting necromancer once—I went to both of his lectures, but he didn’t meet with the approval of the townsfolk. I don’t know where I would find someone who could explain the finer points of transmutations of living flesh any closer than Lithuania.”

  Katya’s voice sounded from behind me. “We are close to Xarakel and Sharkel,” she said.

  Once I had landed back on my heels and recovered from the surprise, I turned to my redheaded lover. “I see,” I said, unsure why she had spoken but sure that a polite reply was required. I could remember having heard the names before—the Black Tower and the White Tower, respectively. Sharkel, the White Tower, was the point where the great imperial railway left the Tanais River, turning west to reach the Kama River.

  “Xarakel is where dark wizards go,” Katya told me. “The ones they do not want in the capital.”