It was time for us to deliver the sultan’s reply to the Golden Emperor.

  As we approached the Taurican coast, all lights were shuttered or brought below decks. The engine of the steamship was shut down, and the men cautioned against talking above a whisper. The tow cables were reversed, with the galleys full of untimely rousted but well-rested oarsmen towing the steamship with its cold heavy boilers. To the aft, the paddlewheel turned idly, pushed by the water instead of pushing it.

  I stood high on the gun deck, as it afforded the best view short of climbing the stacks. With my night vision undimmed by lamp or lantern, I could even dimly see shapes bobbing in the water behind the ship that might have been a familiar trio of mermaids.

  Dark cliffs loomed above the crashing waves as the Osman force landed. The galleys beached and unloaded first; of the first wave of men, half advanced up the beach and the other half stayed in place. It took significant and complex work to unload the chase bombards from the galleys; other men sloshed back and forth through the waves to help with lowering cargo from the steamship and guiding or dragging it to shore. The latter included oxen teams and carts, several dozen horses, and the pasha’s contingent of mechs—all had been kept aboard the steamship, as trying to manage one on the deck of a mere galley would have been unwise.

  The mechs were the most difficult to unload successfully. Oxen can swim, in a pinch, and carts generally mostly float. Mechs, however, generally have negative buoyancy—enough to sink a cart if they were lowered on top of one, and indeed enough that even walking through sand or mud can be difficult. Each one needed its boilers stoked before being lowered into the sloshing waves with wide sand shoes attached, and the elemental spirits within were not accustomed to the kind of slow, clumsy waddle needed to make it onto land. One was dropped when a worn rope snapped, and another tripped on its own sand shoes, landing in the waves.

  The pasha himself was lowered down into the water off the side of the steamship in a small boat, which was rowed until it grounded on the beach. I accompanied the pasha. No sooner were we in the water than I took off my boots, holding them up in my hands, which earned me some strange looks from my fellow passengers. When we grounded, I hopped out of the boat. Coarse wet sand sank beneath my feet as I walked up the beach.

  “You’ll have sandy toes,” one of my fellow junior officers muttered, just quietly enough not to be easily overheard. His name was Mevlana; he had a minor knack for fire magic and noble enough breeding that he would have been an officer even if he had no magic. His hopes for glory had been lowered on discovering that he was only the third-best fire mage in the pasha’s force, and he had been engaged in earnest prayer and fasting in the hopes that a dose of piety would improve his miraculous ability to command fire and elemental spirits, which was a divine blessing also shared by his father, brother, uncle, and grandfather.

  “Better than wet boots,” I replied with a friendly grin. I did not hate Mevlana; in spite of our many differences, I felt an odd measure of kinship with him that came to the fore when he worked with fire.

  Mevlana did not return my grin. Instead, he snorted with the conspicuous contempt due to a fellow officer who was credited with neither piety nor magic nor family connections within the inner circles of the Sultanate—and with all the sea-wise experience expected of a cavalry officer who had spent the first three days of the voyage sick from the motion of the waves.

  My feet were still squishing through wetted sand when there was a great crash. A large wave had knocked over a mech, its boiler suddenly chilled and guttering with a hiss of steam just audible over the frothing water shooting up the beach at us. We all broke into a quick jog, but the wave still caught us, splashing all the way up to my knees.

  As the water drew back, Pasha Mustafa turned, squinting at the moonlit mass of metal being splashed by waves, his shoes squirting water out of their seams.

  “That’s a third one down. We will have to leave them behind at first and get them caught up later,” Pasha Mustafa said, counting carts and coming to a decision. “The bombards are a higher priority for the oxen. Mevlana—you will take two squads to get the soaked mechs ashore, dried out, and restarted, and catch up when you can. The rest of you will tell the men to get ready for a double-time march lasting through dawn. Arquebuses are to be carried unloaded; we do not want to wake the city with a misfire if it sleeps.”

  “But surely, the steamship sailors could—” Mevlana looked unhappy with his assignment.

  Pasha Mustafa shook his head. “They have another part to play soon enough. Be off with you.” As the young officer jogged off to gather men, the pasha continued, speaking to the rest of us. “The steamship’s gun deck is a superior firing platform, not that we have enough oxen and carts to unload its battery in any case. But you do not need to know the details of what the steamship shall do—what you do need to know to direct our forces, though, is what we are doing here on Taurica. I have been remiss in not explaining earlier, and I am afraid I must be brief.”

  As he continued, the astrologer nodded along knowingly, having heard it all before; the others looked intent and curious.

  “The heart of the Golden Empire is Cimmeria—that is where the capital lies,” Pasha Mustafa said. “Water trade rules every nation. If we strike here, we can cut off Cimmeria from nine parts out of ten of its trade with the wider world outside the Empire, throttle even some of its commerce with Ruthenia, and prevent them from sending an army anywhere quickly.”

  “What of Koschei’s iron roads?” This was another young officer, one named Iskender (or Alexander if one addressed him in his mother’s tongue), a fighting thaumaturge who had a mid-length harquebus, a pair of light pistols with flared muzzles for easy handling of load, and a bandolier of metal cartridges alternating between large and small, brass with a silver base.

  Pasha Mustafa shook his head. “Koschei’s so-called great iron roads are a curiosity and an extravagance, mimicry of the Gothic Empire’s shorter iron roads without understanding. Not a carriage can ride an iron road but the one made especially for it, and the longer it is, the less frequently that lone carriage will reach any one place and the more easily it will get stuck somewhere far from repair or replacement. All the more often if the governor of an outlying province wishes an excuse to delay sending taxes or tributes. No—trade goods and troops cannot possibly travel that way quickly and in quantity in the way that they do by ship.”

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  Wanting to seem intelligent even if I knew little about railroads—at the time, I had heard of them only as iron roads and had implausibly imagined that they were paved with flat iron sheets—I nodded enthusiastically.

  “You see? The Dragon’s son learned about such things from his father, who was raised in the Gothic court around the time of the construction of their first iron road.” Pasha Mustafa smiled. “While Koschei’s high officials can travel in style in their little steam carriages, the fastest route of commerce between Ruthenia and Cimmeria is the coastwise trade. And as Taurica is not quite an island, and the Putrid Sea not at all navigable, the coastwise trade all passes around Taurica and through this strait, flanked by Pantikapaion and Hermonassa. It is narrow enough to be commanded by bombards from either side. We shall take Pantikapaion and thereby command the strait. Any questions?”

  “Do we even have supply sufficient for a siege?” The question seemed impertinent to me, but it came from Bey Ishak, who—being well respected, of high rank, and therefore in command of the landed force once Pasha Mustafa returned to the steamship—had to be answered.

  “Bey Ishak, I have faith in your ability to avoid a siege of any real length,” Pasha Mustafa said, his words revealing his intention to return to the ship. “Pantikapaion’s walls were not built on a foundation of wards, like Troy—nor have they been rebuilt since before the invention of the bombard,” Pasha Mustafa said. “Indeed, I suspect the imperial governor stationed in Hermonassa would see a substantial increase in their fortifications as a threat to secure the Greek cities’ present factual independence from the Golden Empire. You may scrounge the countryside for requisition for a few days if you find yourself required to reduce their land-facing walls, but it should not take longer than that.”

  The pasha then gave us detailed orders of movement. We would march overland double-time to Pantikapaion while the ships—manned by barely more than skeleton crews—sailed away under the pasha’s personal command to execute the rest of his plan, which he was loath to disclose.

  Due perhaps to the fact that I had the sand dusted off my feet and my boots back on before the rest of the pasha’s hand-picked officers, I was attached to a squad that was to be sent in the vanguard of the force, a group of old-fashioned cavalrymen from the east with bows and lances. I would say I was placed in command of it, but in truth, my responsibility exceeded my actual authority. The men only answered to their bannerman, and their bannerman took my orders as suggestions.

  For example, several, including their bannerman, had pistols, yet they laughed when I relayed the pasha’s demand that firearms be carried unloaded while traveling through the dark of night. Rather than insist in the face of that contempt and look all the more the fool when they denied me a second time, I shrugged, loaded my own pistols, and then sealed them with wax plugs to ensure the ball and shot would not fall out if they were jostled during the ride.

  “Very well. I suppose it is practical,” I said. “But I will want a bow to loose arrows from in case we come into trouble that can be handled more quietly—will one of you lend me his spare?”

  “You have already armed yourself well enough against the pasha’s orders,” said the bannerman in his thick eastern accent, and the men laughed. “You have more gun than any of us.”

  This was an arguable claim; the bannerman had a brace of four pistols and one of the other men had three, while I had only two. However, my pistols were double-barreled beauties from a very good gunsmith, quietly provided by the astrologer—likely, therefore, indirectly by the pasha and at his order. If “more gun” were to be calculated as an amorphous quantity of firepower linked to phoenix stones, metal tubes, powder, and shot, then perhaps I did indeed have “more gun” than any of the rest of them.

  “Very well,” I said. “I shall fire, then, if I need to fight. But let no man fire before me—if he does, I shall surely be obliged to fire after him in order to silence the pasha’s complaint.”

  Re: Cursed.