Book 5 Chapter 1: Booming Business

++The golden age of the mercenary is long in the past, but modernity, and the painful sensibilities of abolitionists and de-colonial advocates, have brought on a new use for them in doing the deeds that would be too controversial for even an army.++

- From ‘The Selling of Swords’, a historical overview of the role of hired arms in warfare and politics.

Douglas Fern didn’t like jungles.

It was an unfortunate fact of his career path that he ended up slogging his way through a lot of them, so he’d certainly had the chance to make a wide study of the things and truly decide, with an educated insight, what his opinion was. He hadn’t wavered in his hatred for about ten years.

He didn’t like jungles, and jungles didn’t like him.

The air was first on the list, always oven-hot, but clammy too. With a normal sort of heat, like that in a desert, you’d feel the sweat building on yourself and know it was snatching away what heat it could. Not in a jungle. Fern’s sweat barely made a dent on his body’s moisture now, the damned atmosphere around him was so sodden with moisture that it seemed every leaf he passed was as wet as he was.

Then there were the bugs. Jungle bugs were the nastiest critters in Arwyna, both suicidally determined to get at you and apparently infinite in numbers. Fern was a Highmage, and it wasn’t too great of an effort for him to coat himself in a surrounding shield that’d fend off most attacks.

But not jungle bugs. Shielding wasn’t his forte, and he still needed air-holes. The bugs found those airholes, then they found him. Worse, they actually seemed attracted to the magic, like something about the arcane struck them as smelling like food. Every one of the several hundred men sailing down the river on their barge was beset by bugs, and for once Fern’s magic made him no exception.

Then there were the bloody rashes. The parasites. The constant disease that saw Fern’s mana perpetually hovering around two-thirds-full just stopping himself and his comrades from shitting themselves to death. Any one of a thousand other things that all contributed to make the damned place as hostile to pale men as could be imagined.

If Fern were an Archmage, as he so often was in his dreams, he would like to visit every jungle in the world and firebomb the damned things from the air. Watch the stupid fucking trees go up in screaming blazes, hear all the insects cook, know all the bacteria were dying.

Alas, he was not an Archmage, and if he wanted to start any major deforesting efforts it’d take him a lot longer than one who was. So Fern gritted his teeth and did his best to tolerate the jungle. The heat. The damp. The insects. The parasites. The flux. The fucking rashes.

He looked around, trying to find some distraction from his growing discontent in the faces of his comrades. It wasn’t a big barge they were sailing on, though the Gatun River was big and wide, it had a tendency to narrow unexpectedly around parts where the water already flowed far stronger than normal, and was known for its tendency to kill larger vessels.

It was also, Fern knew, utterly infested with crocodiles. Both the normal kind and a special breed that he’d been told were similar in nature to human warriors.

Except, of course, that they were fucking crocodiles. Best to keep their ship afloat.

The men were all as miserable as Fern, though they weren’t about to go mutineer. They were professionals. He’d been hanging with this band for the past six, maybe seven years. They weren’t exactly elite, but as far as mercenaries went they knew their business and did it well.

Hell, they were smart enough to fork over the extra for a Highmage instead of an ordinary magician, and Fern himself knew just how much he’d done to vindicate that decision. The rest of the men were not quite a match for his talent, but most of them were somewhere above competent. Of the two hundred or so, a good thirty were warriors and the rest were veterans even prior to signing on.

The Captain, apparently, used to be a Major in Garamon’s army. Veterancy was one thing, but it was rather rare to find a high-ranking officer turn mercenary. It was also the reason Fern had even signed up. He’d figured the Captain would only have taken that career path because he reckoned he stood to make more money in the hired-gun business than he did off a simple Major’s commission.

So far, as far as Fern could tell, he’d been right. They’d had an especially good year, making a pretty penny back in West Asyran with that slave smuggling business, and enjoying similar but smaller successes almost bi-monthly before and after.

Two years. He hoped that in two years he’d have the stored wealth to just hire some accountant to start investing his money in land and retire.

“Thinking deep thoughts?”

NovelPhoenix is the page where the author publishes this chapter, yet this version was copied without approval; reading there supports the author.

Fern turned at the question, and wasn’t wholly surprised to find the Captain was asking it.

“I was just thinking about you,” he grunted.

“And here I was not knowing how much you cared,” the Captain shot back as he leaned against the barge’s railing beside him. The Captain was the most mercenary-looking mercenary Fern had ever seen. He had a few impressive looking facial scars that did nothing for his looks but everything for his intimidation factor, with one eye partially closed by a burn and the rest of his skin leathery and tight like it’d been pulled across a skull just slightly too big for it. Not a big man, he still managed to radiate a sense of danger. It was a skill Fern himself had never quite mastered; when he wanted to seem dangerous, it took him a light show.

The Captain was one of the company’s warriors, but that wasn’t why he was useful. He was useful because he simply knew what he was doing.

“There’s work at the end of this river,” the Captain said, like he’d read Fern’s mind and wanted to abate his discomfort with the promise.

“Not saying much, though, is it?” Fern asked. “There’s work everywhere these days.”

Life had been good for mercenaries ever since the disaster that was Garamon’s last push into Estalia. The Empire’s economy was apparently crumbling, and they’d decided that magical artifacts and materials were its only cure.

With Irucci temporarily denied to them, for whatever reason was behind their reluctance to launch another offensive, that left scum like Fern and his band to be commissioned on and pick up the slack.

He was hardly going to complain. It was the best kind of work. Reliable, thanks to the sheer amount of it that needed doing, and for incredibly negotiable fees on account of how load-bearing the influx of magical objects was to Garamon’s economy.

Granted, these last two years had seen a notch taken out of the value. That Vornholt—now Voret—bitch in Gulnira had made magical lighting a good deal less in-demand with her little oil enterprise.

Still, Fern wasn’t complaining, and he knew that if the Captain said there was good work at the end of this little trek, there probably was. A commander as experienced as him wouldn’t have put his men through weeks of scratching, cursing and sweating for anything less than a grand payout.

That didn’t leave his every question answered, though.

“What’s the danger like?” he asked.

The Captain grinned. “You can handle it. Or rather, we can with your support. Shouldn’t be more than a few savages, maybe with Garamon guns but certainly without much knowledge in using them. We’d probably whip them even without you.”

He was trying to hint to Fern that he might be getting cut, probably to motivate a bit more effort on his part. Fern wasn’t stupid enough to fall for it, because he knew the Captain wasn’t stupid enough to go into a fight without magic when he could go into one with it. Even if they won, each wounded man would be taking pay without fighting for a while, and a crippled one would come away with a nice bonus and leave them weakened. Such was the contract they’d all signed when they got into it together.

Unfortunately, that contract was void if they ran off, so Fern was stuck with everyone else just waiting in misery for the trip to end.

His wait was worse than most. The others didn’t exactly hate or fear him, but there was always that instinctive distance that separated any magician from any non-magician. Like trying to converse with a man while you held a loaded gun in your hand.

If Fern went and sat down with some of the lads playing cards, he doubted he’d be told to shove off. No, he’d just be ruining the rest of their nerve.

Better to keep to himself. He’d learned when he was young that it was better for everyone if magicians and munds didn’t mix, and he was no longer young.

“I’ll head below decks,” Fern said, more to himself than anything. “See if I can get some sle—” the explosion interrupted him. It interrupted everyone. The whole barge just rocked, tilted, began to scream as metal strained against gravity and men went flying all over the place. Something thundered down to land on the deck, and before Fern knew it his hands were up and his magic flowing.

If he’d been an instant slower, he would’ve died without ever feeling it. As things were, his shield barely held as something hit him and exploded with the force of a breaching mine, hurling him off his feet, off the barge, across the river and into a tree hard enough to leave a crater wider than he was in the wood of its trunk. A second blow came, smashing him clean through the remainder of it.

Fern’s shield cracked open, and his vision went blurry as he fell dozens of feet down to the jungle floor with an impact that suddenly wasn’t being absorbed nearly as much as the previous ones. He couldn’t have lost consciousness for more than a moment, but when he came to there was someone already standing over him.

A young man. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with the darkest black hair Fern had ever seen and green eyes that seemed to pierce right through him. Despite the carnage going on everywhere, the sinking barge behind him, the man didn’t seem even hurt. A shield hummed just over his skin, and the raw power imbued in it made Fern realise in an instant that, despite being nearly twice the boy’s age, he didn’t stand a chance against him in a contest of magic.

“Stay down,” the stranger told him. Like Fern needed telling. He held stiller than he’d ever been in his life and just watched at the violence still unfolding over on the barge.

Or what was left of it. The vessel was already half sunk, with several chunks of hull larger than a shed blown free and sent to rain down across the jungle. The remnant, still sliding down into the river, was a giant bonfire littered by the crack of rifles and the scream of dying men. Fern felt mana like he’d never felt before emanating off from it. What the fuck was this. One of the Professors of the Winzorth Institute? Some elite Mage-Hunter?

“Looks like my sister’s finishing up,” the black haired man noted dryly.

And then everything snapped into place within Fern’s brain at once. The young man’s appearance, his power, the intensity of magic ravaging that boat. The final piece came when he caught sight of his sister and recognised her by description even more readily.

Agrian Vornholt and the newly-married Isabel Voret had turned their attention to his band, and the band had not survived.