Shortly before midnight on 31 July 1914, while the Black Legion was already moving toward Warsaw, the Russian Second Army was still struggling to discover what remained of itself.
Only four days had passed since Soldau, yet in that brief span an army numbering in the hundreds of thousands had been reduced to something scarcely recognizable. Alexander Samsonov was dead, along with many of the officers who had marched north beneath him. Others had simply vanished into the forests, marshes and confusion of the retreat. Some formations had been destroyed where they stood; others had dissolved so completely that survivors wandered south in groups of five or fifty with rifles on their shoulders and no idea where their regiments had gone. Artillerymen reached Warsaw without guns, officers arrived without soldiers, and entire battalions continued to exist upon staff papers while their men were dead, hiding north of the Vistula or floating in the river after desperate attempts to escape the German encirclement.
Those who survived brought stories with them, and the stories were almost as corrosive as the defeat itself. They spoke of great steel machines crawling upon belts of metal, of armoured motor wagons and motorcycles that appeared behind marching columns before warnings could reach the men ahead. They spoke of German aircraft hunting soldiers along the roads and marksmen waiting patiently for the slightest glimpse of an officer above a trench. Above all, they spoke of the Iron Prince. Some accounts were plainly exaggerated and others contradicted one another, but too many repeated the same impossible details for experienced officers to dismiss them entirely.
At Northwestern Front headquarters, Yakov Zhilinsky had lost meaningful contact with much of the Second Army and for a time received some of his clearest information through Artamonov himself. Someone had to command whatever remained of Samsonov's force, and before the full scale of the catastrophe could even be understood, Zhilinsky was forced to act. After hurried telegrams, endorsements from cavalry officers and surviving commanders, and several bitter objections from men who questioned the choice, General of Infantry Leonid Artamonov was provisionally confirmed as acting commander of the Second Army.
The appointment solved little.
Officers remembered that Artamonov's I Corps had been the first major portion of Samsonov's line to break at Soldau. They remembered his retreat, his wild-eyed return from the battlefield and the stories he had told of German machines and the enormous black-armoured prince who had ridden through Russian infantry. Now that same man sat in Warsaw issuing orders to generals who increasingly questioned whether he was fit to command them at all.
Artamonov answered those doubts by surrounding himself with men he trusted. Many were cavalrymen and Cossack officers who had escaped the encirclement or returned from the raids into Germany. Some suddenly found themselves commanding improvised infantry groups, railway sectors and rear-area formations for which they had little preparation. Much of it could be defended as necessity, but necessity quickly began to resemble favouritism to officers who had spent their entire careers climbing through the formal hierarchy of the Imperial Army. Authority within the shattered Second Army increasingly belonged not to the neat arrangements printed in mobilization schedules, but to whichever man possessed Artamonov's confidence and enough loyal soldiers nearby to make his orders matter.
The army still possessed a commander, a headquarters and maps crowded with unit symbols, but increasingly those were the places where it existed most clearly. By the evening of the thirty-first, roughly fifty-six thousand soldiers, together with local militia and armed volunteers, could be counted around Warsaw, Modlin and the northern approaches as potentially available to Second Army. They included shattered survivors, fortress troops, rear formations, reservists arriving from the interior, local men eager to defend their homes and fresh drafts unloaded from trains whenever damaged tracks and German aircraft allowed them through.
On paper the number looked almost respectable.
In Warsaw it looked like wreckage.
Troop trains arrived from the east while others departed carrying officials, machinery, records and frightened civilians deeper into the Empire. Refugee carts clogged roads desperately needed by the military. Replacement companies stepped onto railway platforms only to discover that the battalion they had been ordered to join had ceased to exist the previous afternoon. Survivors were pushed into whatever formation required bodies. A man from one division might find himself sleeping beside soldiers from three others beneath an officer none of them had ever met. Machine guns appeared without ammunition wagons, field pieces without horse teams, while artillery crews were ordered to prepare positions for guns that had not yet arrived and might never arrive at all.
Few men understood the scale of that collapse better than Lieutenant General Nikolai Alekseyevich Klyuev.
He had escaped the destruction of XIII Corps with only a fraction of the force he had led north. His survivors travelled largely by night, hiding from German aircraft and motor patrols during daylight before reaching the Vistula and searching desperately for anything capable of floating. Fishing boats, ferries, dinghies and crude rafts were packed with men. There were never enough, and many simply entered the river and attempted to swim.
For some, the crossing became another battlefield.
German aircraft descended upon the river, machine guns tearing into crowded boats and rafts before climbing away for another pass. Men died outright or disappeared beneath the water when damaged craft overturned. Even those who could swim were dragged down by boots, ammunition and greatcoats, or by panicking comrades who seized the nearest body in the desperate instinct to stay above the surface.
Klyuev had been among the fortunate ones.
He reached Warsaw alive.
What he found there did little to reassure him.
Artamonov seemed changed by whatever he had experienced at Soldau and during the collapse that followed—nervous, suspicious and too easily angered. Their confrontation lasted less than an hour, but that was more than enough. Klyuev questioned the improvised appointments and the disorder spreading through Warsaw. He questioned reports of soldiers drinking openly, of looting in the streets and of worse crimes committed beneath the protection of military uniforms. He demanded to know why evacuation orders were colliding with military railway movements, why bridges had been destroyed while Russian formations still remained north of them, and why German women and girls captured during the Cossack raids were being held among military property as though they were another category of spoils.
Finally, and most dangerously, Klyuev asked to see the formal orders defining the extent of Artamonov's new authority.
He did not accuse him of usurpation or foul play. Klyuev was too experienced for anything so crude.
He merely asked for the paperwork.
That was enough.
Before sunset, Artamonov sent him back across the Vistula and north to Modlin, known officially to the Russians as Novogeorgievsk.
On paper it was an assignment of great importance. Novogeorgievsk guarded the junction of the Narew and Vistula and commanded the principal northern approaches to Warsaw. Klyuev was ordered to gather what remained of XIII Corps, assume responsibility for the field formations attached to the fortified region and organize the outer defence in cooperation with the permanent fortress command.
Nobody present failed to understand the other purpose.
Artamonov wanted him out of Warsaw—away from headquarters, away from the surviving generals and away from officers who might begin asking whether Klyuev possessed the stronger claim to command what remained of the Second Army.
Klyuev accepted without protest and departed.
By eleven that night he sat inside Novogeorgievsk with three different strength returns spread across the desk before him and confidence in none of them. On paper, nearly twelve thousand men defended the fortress. Hundreds of guns were supposedly distributed among forts, batteries and field positions, supported by magazines, Maxims, barracks, searchlights, telephone exchanges, trenches, concrete and enough earthworks to make Novogeorgievsk one of the strongest defensive complexes in Russian Poland.
The maps made it look almost reassuring: five successive defensive zones wrapped around the junction of the Vistula and Narew. Closest to the rivers lay the old heart of the fortress, layer upon layer of angular earthworks, ditches, brick casemates and fortified barracks whose origins reached back through the nineteenth century to the Napoleonic age—the architecture of muskets, cannon and massed infantry repeatedly strengthened rather than replaced. Farther out stood the detached fort belts, newer concrete strongpoints and artillery positions intended to keep modern siege guns away from the citadel.
Those outer belts were the problem.
Much of the newest construction had never been finished. Concrete shells stood without all the galleries, armoured positions or equipment originally intended for them. Trenches and wire filled some of the gaps, while field batteries had been hurried into positions never designed to become permanent. Worse, German aircraft had been passing over the system almost at will, photographing positions and bombing whatever revealed itself. Several works had already been struck, and Klyuev possessed no convincing answer to the machines overhead.
Reality was considerably less reassuring than the map.
Some fortress guns lacked complete crews. Others were old pieces whose presence looked impressive on a return but meant considerably less against the army now approaching them. Field batteries possessed ammunition but unreliable transport. Machine guns existed, but not in numbers sufficient to cover kilometres of forts, trenches and open intervals continuously. Telephone lines had been cut, repaired and cut again until nobody entirely trusted them. Reinforcements promised from Warsaw existed somewhere between crowded railway platforms, refugee columns and staff offices that occasionally seemed to assign the same men to two different formations.
Of the nearly twelve thousand soldiers supposedly beneath his authority, Klyuev could confidently locate perhaps eight thousand.
Fewer still could be placed immediately in the outer defences.
Twelve thousand men, hundreds of guns and five layers of fortification looked formidable when reduced to ink.
Klyuev knew better.
The fortress was enormous. Its defenders were thinly spread, its newest works unfinished, its oldest works designed for another century, and somewhere beyond the northern darkness an enemy was approaching that had already destroyed an army several times larger than everything Novogeorgievsk presently contained.
He leaned back in his chair, rubbed both hands slowly over his face and listened to the clock.
The hands were creeping toward midnight.
Beyond his office, however, the fortress appeared calm enough. Searchlights swept slowly across the open fields, sentries watched from their trenches, and beyond the forts the dark waters of the Vistula and Narew moved quietly beneath the night.
From a distance, everything still looked prepared and under control.
Yet, several kilometres north of Modlin's outer positions, hidden beneath trees the Russian searchlights had not yet reached, an enormous black horse waited in complete silence.
Some survivors of Soldau knew the animal's name. They whispered it as Shadowmane.
There was no armour upon him tonight. His barding had been removed, his bridle darkened and his harness reduced to little more than what was necessary, leaving the stallion's immense black body to disappear naturally among the trees.
His rider was equally difficult to recognize. The skull helm, black plate and blood-red cloak of the Iron Prince were gone. In their place Oskar wore dark green field clothing, the sleeves cut away to leave his immense arms bare, and over his chest a compact bulletproof vest fitted with light steel plates at the front and back. Mud and charcoal dulled the whole of him, breaking up his shape in the darkness. Modern military boots covered his feet, hardened gloves wrapped his hands, and reinforced knee pads protected him for rough ground and close work. A pack sat tightly against his broad back, filled with food, bandages and medical supplies for those he meant to save. At his side hung a crude short sword, something between a machete and a butcher's blade.
Most striking of all was the cloth around his head. A blood-red bandana wrapped him almost completely, concealing his hair, his face and all but his eyes.
Those eyes alone remained unmistakable.
They shone from the dark like cold fire—icy blue, sleepless and terribly alive.
Behind him the forest was full of Germans. Infantry crouched beneath the branches, engineers waited with cutters and explosives, and marksmen watched the Russian line through field glasses and optics. Farther back, armoured vehicles stood beneath camouflage with their engines cold. Nobody smoked or talked. The entire formation seemed to be holding its breath.
As the searchlight swept across the field and turned away, Oskar flattened himself against Shadowmane's neck. The stallion's legs bunched beneath him, then released, hurling horse and rider from the trees into the darkness.
In the nearest Russian trench, Ivan and Dmitri were smoking and quietly arguing about which of their villages contained the greater idiots. Ivan claimed his had won years ago when the local dwarf tried to enlist in the cavalry and was rejected because, according to him, "the horse would have to carry the sabre instead."
Dmitri was still laughing when he heard the hoofbeats. The sound was already close.
"What—"
They barely had time to push themselves upright before something enormous rose above the parapet. For one moonlit instant they saw a gigantic black horse clearing the wire and an even larger shape leaving its back.
Oskar fell upon them like a boulder dropped from the night.
Ivan saw only a blood-red face covering, two icy-blue eyes and a blade catching the moonlight.
Dmitri managed one scream, until steel flashed, and then the trench went quiet.
The soldiers sleeping in the dugout behind them heard a heavy thump and something strike the timber overhead. One sat upright, another reached blindly for his rifle, and a third muttered that the sentries were making trouble again.
The door came inward before anyone reached it.
The slab tore partly from its hinges and struck the nearest soldier hard enough to throw him into the bunks behind. In the weak lantern light, the figure filling the entrance seemed scarcely able to fit through it. Mud darkened immense bare forearms, a crimson cloth concealed most of his face, and the short sword in his hand was already wet.
The Russians hesitated for only a moment. Then someone reached for his Mosin.
Oskar moved, and the blade flashed once in the lantern light as he stepped inside.
Then came shouting, overturned bunks and screams from the darkness. A few moments later, those too died away.
Outside, Shadowmane was already moving ahead.
A few hundred metres farther on, another Russian sentry noticed that the neighbouring post had gone strangely dark. He lifted the telephone receiver, listened for several seconds, and heard nothing but static. Behind him, the fortress searchlight continued its slow sweep across the open ground, illuminating nothing.
By the time the beam returned, the sentry was dead.
That became the pattern as Oskar and his great black stallion worked their way deeper into Novogeorgievsk.
The fortress had been built in layers over more than a century: trenches and wire on the approaches, unfinished concrete works farther in, and beyond them the older forts, casemates and angular earthworks surrounding the heart of the complex. In daylight it was an enormous defensive system. At night its layers dissolved into darkness, broken only by searchlights, guard lamps and the occasional silhouette of a sentry upon an embankment.
Then pieces of it began going quiet.
A rifle cracked somewhere beyond the wire and was followed by a short burst of shouting. A telephone post stopped answering. A patrol failed to return. Men heard horses screaming somewhere in the darkness, followed by an abrupt silence. Searchlights completed one sweep, then another failed to come back at all. Occasionally someone glimpsed something enormous crossing a road or disappearing behind an earthwork, but by the time anyone investigated there was usually nothing left except bodies and darkness.
For nearly half an hour nobody understood what was happening. Reports arrived from different directions and contradicted one another almost immediately. One officer insisted the outer belt remained secure while another swore Germans had already appeared behind it. Telephone operators shouted into dead lines. Runners were sent outward and vanished. Somewhere in the distance came a few scattered shots, then silence again.
Behind all of it another sound slowly began to emerge.
Engines.
By the time anyone understood what that meant, the outer defences were already coming apart. Through the gaps left behind Oskar, Black Legion marksmen, engineers and assault troops were slipping forward, widening the path without announcing how deeply the Germans had already penetrated.
Only then did the alarm begin spreading toward the centre of Novogeorgievsk.
Bells rang across the inner works. Telephones rattled in command rooms. Officers came stumbling from their quarters pulling on tunics while sergeants shouted men toward armouries and assembly points. Half-awake soldiers stirred in their bunks, calling out to ask where the Germans were, but no one seemed to know.
In one of the barracks buildings near the inner fortress complex, untouched by the earlier bombardments, a captain who had fortified his nerves with vodka over dinner staggered into a second-floor sleeping room and threw open the door.
"Up! Up, damn you! Germans inside the fortress!"
Rows of men stirred in their double bunks, confused and only half awake. Their rifles were not beside them; regulations kept the weapons secured in the armoury downstairs. For the moment they had only blankets, boots, belts and whatever happened to be within reach.
Before the captain could repeat himself, something enormous appeared behind him.
There was a flash of steel.
The short sword drove through his back with enough force to lift him from the floor, his head striking the upper doorframe as blood burst from his mouth. For one stunned heartbeat the entire room simply stared at their officer hanging upon the blade, his boots twitching uselessly above the boards.
Then Oskar seized him with his free hand and tore him apart across the wound.
The two halves struck the floor separately. Blood splashed the doorway and nearest bunks, and for an instant nobody moved. The sight was too grotesque, too impossible for men only seconds removed from sleep to fit inside reality.
Then the enormous blood-covered figure stepped into the room.
Panic broke at once.
One Russian scrambled from an upper bunk. Oskar caught him by the ankle before he could turn, ripped him free and swung him across the room. A grown soldier became little more than a projectile. His body smashed through one bunk, struck two men climbing from another and carried all three into the next row amid exploding timber, bedding and limbs.
Another Russian rushed Oskar barehanded, perhaps from training, perhaps because there was nothing else to do. He threw a proper punch into Oskar's ribs and immediately recoiled with a cry, clutching a hand that felt as though it had struck stone.
Oskar answered with a kick.
The man left the floor and crashed into a knot of soldiers several metres away, scattering them like pins.
The room dissolved into screams. Some men crowded toward the rear wall while the bravest—or merely the most desperate—charged him. A short backhand caught one across the face and sent him spinning into the bunks with blood and teeth following after him. The blade took another through the middle. A third lost both arms to a single sweeping cut and was still screaming when Oskar's heel struck him and sent him through one of the tall windows.
Glass burst outward.
The mutilated soldier disappeared into the courtyard two floors below.
Another Russian tried to tackle Oskar from behind, hoping perhaps to hold him long enough for the others to reach the doorway.
Oskar drove an elbow backward without even turning.
The man's face struck it with a sickening crack and he collapsed where he stood.
That ended any idea of fighting. The surviving Russians wanted only to escape.
Men surged toward the doorway, scrambling across broken beds and one another while Oskar moved through them, blade flashing whenever someone came within reach. Then a tremendous equine scream sounded from the corridor outside.
Shadowmane had reached the upper floor.
The passage was barely wide enough for the stallion's immense body, but his head and shoulders filled the doorway behind Oskar, ears pinned flat and teeth bared. One soldier who had almost slipped past the giant stopped dead when the black horse lunged toward him.
The doorway was no longer an escape.
Men turned toward the windows. The first smashed the glass with a stool and climbed through without looking down. He fell two floors into the parade courtyard and struck the stones hard enough that his legs folded beneath him. Others immediately followed. Some jumped willingly, preferring the drop to whatever stood behind them. Others were forced through by the terrified mass pressing from the rear.
Within seconds glass was breaking along the entire side of the barracks and Russian soldiers were spilling into the courtyard below.
That was what finally drew Klyuev from his desk.
For several minutes the general had been receiving reports that made increasingly little sense: telephone stations had stopped answering, Germans were supposedly appearing behind positions that had never reported being attacked, and engines could now be heard somewhere beyond the outer belt. Then came the crash of breaking windows from the square beneath his office.
Klyuev crossed to the large window.
The courtyard below was in chaos. Half-dressed soldiers ran between buildings while men continued falling from the barracks opposite. One struck the paving stones and did not move. Another landed badly and began crawling. A third came through almost horizontally and disappeared into a pile of wounded men already below.
"What in God's name is happening?"
Then something much larger came through the window.
A huge blood-covered figure dropped from the second floor and landed directly upon the heap of fallen Russians, crushing bodies beneath its weight. It remained on one knee for scarcely a second before lifting its head.
Klyuev froze. Pale-blue eyes found him across the courtyard. For a moment neither moved.
Then the figure burst into a run.
Klyuev's mind supplied bear before it supplied man. Whatever was coming toward him seemed too broad, too fast and too massive to belong to ordinary human proportions. Yet Klyuev had heard the stories from Soldau—the impossible size, the pale eyes, the prince whom rifle and machine-gun fire had failed to kill.
The giant reached the wall beneath his office and jumped.
His hands struck decorative masonry above the first-floor windows. Fingers closed upon stone and held. One boot found a shallow ledge, then another, and the enormous body began climbing toward Klyuev with appalling speed. He moved less like a soldier scaling a building than some great ape for whom a vertical wall was merely inconvenient terrain. Chips of masonry broke loose beneath his hands and rattled into the courtyard.
Klyuev stumbled backward from the window and shouted for the guards as he turned toward his desk. The drawer caught for half a second before jerking open. He seized the revolver inside, nearly dropped it, then fumbled cartridges into the cylinder with fingers that suddenly seemed far older and less obedient than they had only minutes before.
Behind him came the scrape of a boot against stone.
Klyuev snapped the cylinder shut and turned just as an enormous palm struck the lower pane. The window burst inward in a glittering storm, glass sweeping across the office and cutting into his cheeks and forehead as he instinctively raised an arm to protect his eyes. The floorboards groaned beneath the weight of something entering the room.
Half blinded, Klyuev fired toward the sound.
He never completed the movement.
A hand closed around his wrist with the crushing certainty of an industrial vice. When Klyuev forced his eyes open, the Iron Prince was already standing over him. Oskar twisted once. The crack of breaking bone came before the pain, and then the fractured end tore through the flesh of Klyuev's forearm.
Klyuev screamed and the revolver clattered onto the floor.
He tried instinctively to clutch the ruined arm, but Oskar held him upright with almost insulting ease. At this distance, the stories brought back from Soldau suddenly seemed inadequate. The Crown Prince was not merely tall; he seemed constructed upon a different scale altogether. His shoulders nearly filled the shattered window behind him, and one hand almost encircled Klyuev's entire forearm.
Above the blood-red bandana, pale blue eyes watched him without visible excitement.
Oskar raised his free hand and rested it lightly against Klyuev's chest.
When he spoke, he did so in Russian.
"Where are the German women your Cossacks took?"
Klyuev was breathing in short, broken gasps, but he understood immediately.
"The palace," he blurted. "The Royal Palace in Warsaw. Please—I had nothing to do with them!"
Oskar said nothing.
"Artamonov's men brought them there," Klyuev continued desperately. "I saw them—women and girls. I don't know what he intends to do with them. I swear to God, I had nothing to do with it. I argued with him. That's why he sent me here."
For several seconds Oskar merely studied him. Blood from the shattered window ran into Klyuev's eyes, leaving little visible through the blur except those cold blue irises above the crimson cloth.
Then Oskar's grip eased slightly.
"So you saw them," he said, "and did nothing."
Klyuev swallowed.
"No—no, it wasn't like that." Panic drove the words out faster now. "I had no authority over Artamonov's men. They were his prisoners. What was I supposed to do?" His voice sharpened with frightened irritation. "Besides, what does it matter? A handful of women and girls? German whores, for all I care. It's war. Such things happen."
He sucked in a trembling breath.
"Please. Don't kill me. Let me go and I'll tell you anything you want. Troops, positions, officers—anything. I'm a general. I can be useful."
Something changed in Oskar's eyes.
Klyuev saw it too late.
The hand resting against his chest slowly closed into a fist, scarcely an inch from his sternum. There was no backswing and no visible gathering of strength, only the smallest shift through Oskar's legs, hips and shoulder before the fist drove forward.
The impact sounded almost disappointingly dull.
Klyuev felt as though a cannon had fired inside his chest.
The force passed through ribs and muscle in a single violent pulse, driving the breath from his lungs and throwing him backward into the desk hard enough to move it across the floor. Blood burst from his mouth as his knees folded beneath him.
For one confused instant he remained conscious.
His heart hammered once.
It never found another beat.
Klyuev collapsed among the shattered glass and lay still.
When Russian staff officers finally forced their way into the office, they found Lieutenant General Nikolai Alekseyevich Klyuev dead beside his desk. His revolver lay several feet away, one arm twisted grotesquely beneath him, while the shattered window stood open to the night.
There was nobody else in the room.
By the time the fortress clock struck midnight and 1 August began, Oskar and Shadowmane had already left Modlin behind. They entered the dark waters of the Vistula together, Shadowmane swimming powerfully against the current while Oskar moved beside him through the black water, and disappeared toward Warsaw.
Behind them, the corridor they had opened through the fortress was already widening beneath the Black Legion's assault. Infantry poured through the ruptured defensive belt while machine guns and mortars suppressed Russian positions attempting to close it. Engines roared where only silence had existed less than an hour earlier.
Farther west and east along the river, German assault troops had already secured additional crossing points. Engineers worked beneath darkness, assembling pontoon bridges section by section while infantry held the far banks and marksmen searched for anyone attempting to interfere.
Behind those crossings waited Rommel's vehicles.
Their engines were beginning to start.
High above Poland, another arm of the operation was already moving south. H-1 bombers travelled through the darkness in loose formations, but their bays carried no bombs that night. Inside their cramped compartments sat the two hundred men of the Third Company of the Eternal Guard, weapons held close, faces covered and modern nylon parachutes strapped tightly across their backs.
Some prayed. Others waited in silence. None knew exactly what awaited them when the doors opened over Warsaw, for no army had ever attempted what they were about to do.
The Black Legion was moving everywhere at once.
Warsaw, however, had not yet understood that the attack had begun. No general alarm had been raised. After midnight the streets were strangely empty, broken only by occasional Russian patrols, militia detachments and wandering groups of soldiers who had long since ceased behaving like either. In districts abandoned by civilians fleeing east, men broke into shuttered shops and empty houses, searching for food, liquor and anything valuable enough to carry away.
Through that unsettled darkness moved two shapes unlike anything the city had seen before: an enormous black horse and the shadow walking beside him.
Neither Oskar nor Shadowmane had ever been to Warsaw. Somewhere ahead lay the palace, but the unfamiliar streets and parks offered little indication of where.
In one small public garden, two young Russian soldiers sat upon a bench beneath the moonlight. They were brothers, Evenki from the distant Siberian east, and for the moment neither appeared particularly interested in the war. A half-empty bottle of stolen wine stood between them, while a small bag of money taken from an abandoned shop rested beneath the bench. Both still carried rifles, and there was something intoxicating in that alone. For perhaps the first time in their lives they possessed weapons, money and the strange freedom of knowing that nobody nearby seemed capable of telling them what they could or could not do.
They were laughing when the elder brother suddenly stopped.
Something large was moving among the trees.
Branches shifted. A black horse appeared briefly between the trunks, impossibly large even in the uncertain moonlight, then disappeared again behind the foliage.
Both brothers stared.
Before either could reach properly for his rifle, something else came out of the darkness.
It moved with the suddenness of a hunting cat.
Two enormous hands seized them by their collars and lifted both young men clear of the bench as though they weighed almost nothing.
They found themselves staring into pale-blue eyes above a blood-red mask.
"Where is the royal palace?"
The Russian came deep and perfectly clear.
Neither brother attempted heroics. Both pointed frantically in the same direction.
The hands opened, and they dropped back onto the bench hard enough to spill the wine. By the time either had recovered enough to breathe properly, the giant was already gone, branches snapping somewhere deeper in the park as the immense horse followed after him.
For several seconds the brothers merely sat there. One slowly looked at the other. Neither had the slightest idea what had just happened.
At the palace, meanwhile, what remained of Second Army headquarters had become something very different from the institution Samsonov had once tried to command.
Artamonov's favourites filled the lower halls. Cossack officers elevated during the chaos of the previous days drank beside staff men whose loyalty mattered more than their competence. Food appeared in quantities ordinary soldiers outside could only dream of, bottles emptied one after another, and drunken boasting echoed beneath ceilings built for royal receptions rather than military debauchery.
Only the guards still attempted to look disciplined.
Many were young cavalrymen or former conscripts from farms and poor city districts, boys who had never before entered anything remotely resembling a palace. They stood rigidly beside gilded doors and marble staircases, trying desperately to appear worthy of uniforms and responsibilities that had descended upon them far faster than experience.
Inside, their superiors celebrated.
For those men, the war suddenly seemed distant. They convinced themselves that the Cossack raids into Germany had bought time, that Modlin would hold, that the Germans must surely pause after days of fighting.
The captives brought back from Germany added a darker character to the festivities.
Women were kept in rooms throughout the palace, some still in travel-stained clothing, others stripped of possessions and dignity by drunken men who treated them as spoils rather than civilians. Laughter and music travelled through the corridors alongside muffled crying and occasional sounds of resistance. In several rooms the drinking had already descended into abuse sufficiently obvious that even the young guards outside stared determinedly ahead and pretended not to hear.
The officers inside believed themselves untouchable.
Outside, beneath the second-floor balcony, the stone terrace still bore the dark stain where Samsonov had struck the ground days earlier. His body had been removed and someone had made a half-hearted attempt to wash the stones, but the mark remained. Nobody had cared enough to finish the job.
Above it, warm light shone behind the tall glass doors of the palace's largest bedroom.
Inside stood Leonid Artamonov.
The general wore little more than a loose bathrobe, hanging carelessly open as he stood before the balcony doors with a bottle of vodka in one hand. Beyond the glass Warsaw stretched dark beneath the moon, while occasional distant flashes marked artillery somewhere toward the north.
Artamonov smiled.
Let the Germans come.
Modlin stood between them and Warsaw, and in his increasingly confident imagination even the Black Legion would spend weeks battering itself against those forts. There would be time for reinforcements. Time for Russia to gather itself. Time for the disaster of Soldau to become merely one ugly chapter in a much larger war.
He drank again. The distant explosions scarcely interested him. What interested him were the three shapes reflected in the glass behind him.
Three young German women stood together beside the bed, pale and trembling, watching him in terrified silence. Sisters, he remembered, from what little he had understood of their broken speech. Only days earlier they had lived on a farm with their parents and grandfather. His raiders had found them there.
The men of the family had been killed. Their mother had suffered longer. She had fought back fiercely enough to anger the Cossacks, and eventually they had killed her as well.
A tragic little story.
Made tiresome, in Artamonov's opinion, by all the crying that had followed.
Fortunately, a few hard slaps had eventually taught the sisters that begging accomplished nothing.
Artamonov studied their reflections and smiled. They had cried themselves quiet now. Better. He preferred them that way: frightened, exhausted, utterly aware that there was nobody left to protect them.
Power, he had discovered, felt extraordinarily good when it belonged to him.
Perhaps now he understood something of what the Iron Prince must have felt at Soldau, cutting through men who could do nothing to stop him. Artamonov had spent days remembering that humiliation, remembering the black-armoured monster tearing his soldiers apart and reducing generals to frightened animals.
Tonight, at least, the power belonged to someone else.
Tonight it was Germans who were helpless.
For the moment he had no intention of looking north again. He was tired of thinking about Oskar, about destroyed corps and impossible machines, about the army disintegrating around him. Here there were no tanks, aircraft or skull-faced princes.
Here there was only him.
Even past fifty, with grey threading through his beard and the accumulated weight of years settling into his shoulders, Artamonov felt strangely invigorated. Authority had restored something in him that Soldau had nearly broken. The vodka helped as well, warming his blood and dulling whatever hesitation might otherwise have remained.
He turned from the glass.
For a moment his gaze settled upon the sisters properly.
One looked roughly his daughter's age.
The thought came and went.
The other two were perhaps the most beautiful women he had ever seen at such close quarters—more beautiful, he decided drunkenly, than his wife had ever been, more striking than the elegant women he had glimpsed in Petersburg salons wrapped in silk and perfume. In another mood he might even have compared them to the Tsar's daughters, those distant embodiments of imperial grace he had seen only from afar.
Yet these women possessed none of that protection now.
They were captives.
Spoils, according to the uglier logic that had begun spreading among the surviving Cossacks.
That was how some of Artamonov's officers already spoke of the women brought back from Germany: compensation for dead comrades and ruined regiments, prizes taken from the enemy when the raids had produced little else of lasting value. Horses had been killed, weapons abandoned, riders lost by the hundreds, but jewellery, money and captives had returned east with the survivors.
Some men had begun speaking of the captives with an even colder practicality. Young German women could be absorbed into Russian households, kept by soldiers, perhaps eventually forced into families and made to bear children beneath Russian names.
Artamonov had heard the talk.
Tonight, drunk and embittered, he found nothing in it that offended him.
The thought broadened his smile.
He lifted the vodka bottle and drank deeply, feeling the harsh burn travel down his throat and spread warmth through his chest.
Then he began walking toward them.
The sisters immediately drew closer together. Their arms crossed instinctively over themselves, each trying to protect the others as much as herself. The more they retreated, however, the more obvious their helplessness became. Their breathing quickened. Their faces were pale with fear.
But their eyes remained fixed upon him. Blue angry eyes. That anger pleased him almost as much as their fear. They hated him. And there was nothing they could do about it.
He was nearly upon them when the tallest sister suddenly stood. Long blonde hair fell loose around her shoulders. Her hands trembled as she clutched a thin blanket around herself, but there was unexpected strength in the way she straightened. Without seeming to think about it, she stepped between Artamonov and her sisters.
Then, to his surprise, she spoke in Russian.
"You know this is illegal."
Artamonov stopped. Her voice trembled, but her Russian was clear enough.
"Under the Hague Convention you have no right—"
Artamonov laughed. The sound rolled through the dim room like distant thunder as he stepped closer. She had to tilt her head upward to look into his eyes, his shadow falling across her body and swallowing the little light that reached her.
Despite herself, she stepped back. Her legs struck the edge of the bed, and she lost her balance and dropped backward onto it. Artamonov smiled slowly. Seeing her resistance crumble, even slightly, filled him with a warm, ugly satisfaction. Power. He reached forward and cupped her face in one large hand.
She flinched, but she did not pull away. His thumb moved slowly across her lips. That pleased him. He pressed his thumb there again, testing her. After a moment she closed her eyes and allowed him to test her tongue and make her taste his thumb. Behind her, the other two sisters gasped quietly.
Artamonov watched the conflict inside her—the stubborn defiance fighting against fear. It excited him. The mention of the Hague Convention made him chuckle again. A girl who knew international law. That amused him. Most of his soldiers had never heard of such things; they barely even knew how to read, and many officers barely cared about them. Treaties were written by diplomats in quiet rooms. Battlefields did not care about paper.
"And what about that law?" he said, his voice thick with drink.
He lifted the bottle again. Vodka spilled slowly over her hair as he poured it onto her head. She gasped as the cold liquid ran down her face, along her neck and shoulders, trailing down her skin. Artamonov watched with open amusement as it continued down her body.
"Law," he repeated lazily. "It's just letters on paper."
He tilted the bottle again. "Paper only matters when someone has the power to enforce it."
Then he pressed the bottle against her lips. "Drink."
She closed her eyes and swallowed as the alcohol burned down her throat. Behind her, the other two women watched in silent terror.
"You speak of rules," Artamonov continued, gesturing slowly around the room. "But where are your rules now?" His voice hardened. "I have soldiers. I have power. That is the only law that exists here tonight."
He leaned closer, his presence looming over her. "And if I tell you to obey me… you will."
The bottle lowered. For a moment, the room was completely silent.
Then, to his surprise, she spat the vodka directly into his face. The alcohol ran down through his mustache and beard. Artamonov blinked, then laughed—a deep, harsh laugh which cut off suddenly as the hand holding the bottle rose as if he might strike her with it.
Seeing this, she cried out and instinctively recoiled, falling backward onto the bed. Fear took over where defiance had stood moments earlier. Artamonov smiled slowly.
"Good girl."
He tossed the bottle aside and dropped his robes completely. "Don't worry," he said with a crooked grin. "You'll learn soon enough that this isn't such a bad thing."
His body was now clear to the women, his hard manhood and all. Age had made him wrinkled but rougher, and grey hair spread across his chest, but beneath it the muscle of a lifetime soldier remained.
The women gasped softly, repulsed by the sight and the meaning of it. But the defiant one did not resist as he pushed her down and leaned toward her. His large hands gripped her waist firmly and began spreading her legs. His mustache brushed against her toned, flat stomach as he pressed his lips there, moving slowly upward with kisses, feeling her skin and softness as he did. She whimpered under his touch.
He forced her wrists above her head and pinned them against the mattress. In the dim lamplight her body was laid bare before him. Her form was toned and youthful, her breasts firm and full enough to fit nicely in his hands and round as well, rising and falling rapidly with every strained breath. Her pale skin gleamed against the dark sheets. She turned her face away from him, jaw clenched tight, refusing to meet his gaze, while behind her the two sisters sat frozen in horror, unable to move, unable even to speak.
Her chest rose and fell faster now as she struggled to steady her breathing. The tension between them felt like combat—two wills colliding in a space too small to contain them. Artamonov loomed above her like a predator over prey, but even as she trembled beneath him she did not cry out. She bit down hard, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her break.
Still, her body betrayed her. A small, helpless whimper escaped her lips as he caught one of her breasts with his rough hand.
Then, to her surprise, Artamonov lowered his head against her chest with the grotesque contentment of some oversized child settling down to sleep. He lingered there shamelessly, savoring the sense of possession more than anything else, a dark smile spreading across his face as though her fear existed only for his amusement.
Then the moment shattered when a dull, heavy thump sounded from the balcony behind Artamonov.
The three sisters gasped and turned toward the tall glass doors. Artamonov followed their gaze and immediately went still.
Something enormous stood beyond the glass, almost filling the doorway. A blood-red bandana concealed the figure's head and face, leaving only two pale-blue eyes visible through the darkness.
Artamonov knew those eyes.
Every trace of drunken confidence vanished.
"No," he whispered. "Not you again…"
The eldest sister seized the moment and scrambled away from him, dragging herself across the bed toward the others. They pulled her between them and clutched the blankets tightly around themselves as Artamonov staggered backward.
"Guards!" he screamed. "Guards! He's here!"
The bedroom doors flew open almost immediately. Two Cossacks rushed inside with rifles raised, saw the enormous figure beyond the balcony and swung their weapons toward him.
Oskar struck first.
His palm drove into the glass with one short, explosive movement. The pane burst inward in a storm of fragments. Both guards recoiled instinctively as glass tore across their faces and exposed hands. One stumbled backward clutching his eyes while the other staggered through the doorway with blood running down his throat. Their rifles struck the floor, and in the confusion both men crashed into the gallery railing outside. One went over first and pulled the other with him.
Two heavy impacts sounded from the marble floor below.
The palace erupted.
Doors opened along the galleries. Men shouted from staircases and corridors. Boots hammered over polished floors as guards tried to understand what had happened.
Oskar stepped through the shattered balcony doors.
Artamonov ran.
He managed scarcely two strides before Oskar crossed the room and caught him behind the neck. One enormous hand lifted the general completely from the floor. Artamonov kicked helplessly and clawed at the wrist holding him while the pale eyes above the crimson mask regarded him without emotion.
"Time to die, General."
Artamonov tried to scream.
Oskar tightened his hand.
There was one hard crack.
The acting commander of the Russian Second Army went limp.
Oskar released him and let the body fall beside the bed.
The three sisters shrieked and drew closer together. For several seconds they saw only another terrifying figure: an enormous man soaked from the river, stained with mud and blood, standing above the corpse of the man who had held them prisoner.
Oskar noticed their fear and stopped.
Slowly he reached up and pulled the bandana down from his face.
Recognition transformed the room.
Wet blond hair, streaked with almost platinum strands, clung around his forehead and temples. Without the skull helmet and black armour of the Iron Prince, the nightmare described by Russian survivors disappeared, leaving instead a face the sisters had seen in newspapers, photographs and public celebrations throughout Germany.
Their Crown Prince.
The eldest stared at him.
"Your Highness…"
Oskar gave them the warmest smile he could manage.
"That's me."
The youngest began crying almost immediately.
"And you're safe now."
For the first time since their capture, relief overwhelmed fear. The sisters clung to one another while staring at him as though the whole thing were impossible. After watching their family die, being dragged east and imprisoned in a Russian headquarters, their own prince had somehow crossed armies, rivers and a fortress in the middle of the night and appeared outside their window.
Oskar deliberately softened his expression.
"No one is going to touch you again."
One of the sisters wiped at her face.
"There are others," she said quickly. "More women. Some were taken into other rooms. Our cousin too—we don't know where she is."
Oskar's smile disappeared.
"Then we'll find her."
He collected the rifles dropped by the dead guards and placed them beside the bed.
"Lock the door after me. If anyone comes through who isn't German, use these."
The eldest looked from the rifles back to him.
"You really came for us?"
"Yes."
Nothing more was needed.
Oskar drew the short sword from his belt.
"The Black Legion is coming. Stay here."
Then he stepped into the corridor.
Men were already rushing toward him.
Oskar went to meet them.
Beyond the palace, the operation was unfolding across Warsaw.
High above the city, H-1 bombers crossed the moonlit sky carrying men instead of bombs. Their doors opened over predetermined sectors and dark figures began dropping into the night. Seconds later pale nylon canopies blossomed above the rooftops.
The Third Company of the Eternal Guard was coming down.
Russian soldiers who happened to look upward struggled to understand what they were seeing. Men were falling from aircraft—deliberately—and drifting toward streets, gardens, courtyards and rooftops beneath great white parachutes.
By the time alarm began spreading, the first Germans were already on the ground.
Parachutes were cut away. Weapons came free. Small groups disappeared into alleys and buildings according to plans memorized before takeoff. Telephone exchanges, railway offices, command posts and important intersections became immediate targets. Marksmen climbed to rooftops while assault teams moved toward the government quarter and the palace.
Shots began breaking the quiet.
A telephone exchange stopped answering.
Then another.
A Russian headquarters discovered armed Germans already inside the neighbouring building. A patrol turned into a street it had crossed safely ten minutes earlier and met automatic fire from above.
Confusion spread faster than orders.
Around the royal complex, the Eternal Guard concentrated heavily. Small groups secured streets and entrances while others pushed through nearby buildings, creating a widening perimeter around Oskar's position.
Oskar himself scarcely concerned himself with that battle.
He was looking for prisoners.
With Shadowmane moving through the palace grounds and Eternal Guards beginning to arrive around the complex, Oskar went from room to room, breaking locks, questioning terrified servants and searching quarters occupied by Artamonov's officers. German captives emerged gradually from behind locked doors and guarded chambers—women taken during the Cossack raids, some alone, others crowded together, all bewildered by the sudden appearance of German soldiers inside Warsaw.
Those who could walk were escorted toward secured rooms. The wounded received bandages and whatever treatment the Eternal Guard carried with them. Food and water came from Oskar's own pack until larger supplies could be brought forward.
He kept asking the same question.
"Are there more?"
There always seemed to be.
Outside Warsaw, the rest of the Black Legion was preparing to answer on a far greater scale.
François's I Corps had secured its western bridgeheads. Mackensen's XX Corps was doing the same farther east. Engineers worked through the darkness assembling pontoon crossings while riflemen and machine-gun teams pushed Russian defenders away from the banks.
Behind them waited Rommel's armour.
Tank engines began turning over one after another, their low mechanical growl spreading through the darkness as crews prepared to move the moment the bridges could bear them. Motorcycles and armoured trucks gathered behind the crossings while artillery batteries received their final coordinates.
The Russian defenders still possessed guns, barricades and thousands of men.
What they no longer possessed was time.
Telephone lines were failing. Modlin was already fighting for its life. Germans had appeared inside Warsaw itself. Reports contradicted one another before officers could act upon them, and no one yet understood how many different attacks were actually taking place.
Then the eastern horizon began to pale.
Grey light spread slowly across the sky, thinning the darkness over Warsaw and the Vistula. The night was ending, and with the first light of 1 August 1914, the Black Legion abandoned concealment.
Artillery opened across the river line almost at once. Engines answered from the roads and bridgeheads, their roar swelling as men, guns and vehicles began pouring across the pontoon bridges. François and Mackensen drove their corps south while Rommel's armoured spearheads gathered speed toward Warsaw.
German fighters appeared above the city with the dawn, sweeping across a sky that had belonged to darkness only moments before.
Inside Warsaw, the Eternal Guard tightened its hold upon the positions seized during the night.
And somewhere within the palace, while the battle around the city erupted in full, Oskar continued moving from door to door, searching for the women his enemies had carried away.