Comrade Joseph Stalin, in a spartan uniform complete with long olive drab coat, strode forth, his movements sure but unhurried.
A pace behind him walked a pair of living effigies, a man and a woman, both statuesque and muscular, their bodies smeared in greasepaint so their skin glistened like polished ironwork and their hair seemed to be cast from bronze. The man was dressed in a worker’s coveralls and held a hammer over his head. The woman wore a bare-shouldered blouse and a peasant skirt, and over her head, she held a sickle.
Comrade Stalin approached the microphone and stood for a moment, untroubled at the weight of so many eyes upon him. The pair marching behind him came to a stop a stride or two behind, where they promptly crossed the hammer and sickle in the air over their glorious leader’s head. Neither showed the slightest discomfort or strain at maintaining the position.
Every eye, soldier or conscript, was upon the short mustachioed man before the microphone.
“Welcome, my countrymen,” Stalin began, his voice soft, bordering on nasal, his Russian shot through with a strong Georgian accent. “Welcome, sons and daughters of my beloved homeland.”
There was a subtle but distinct ripple across the conscripts, and Stalin acknowledged it with an easy nod.
“I know many of you are confused, or frightened, or even angry,” he continued, nodding again with conciliatory grace. “Not so long ago, you’d almost forgotten me, I think—the wayward son gone north. Then suddenly I returned, at the head of an army none dared challenge.”
More than a few of those in the square looked at the soldiers watching Stalin raptly, and their question was plain: what army?
“It seems I am to do what so many others have done in our embattled land: claim rule as a tyrant,” he said, and this was not a ripple but a wave of men and women drawing back, their expressions souring. “You would not be unjust to curse me and shake your fists at me. Even strike me down if such were the case.”
Here and there amongst the conscripts, men and women voiced their agreement, at first in whispers but then in growls and finally in shouts. Soon enraged knots formed in the ranks, as voices were raised with growing fury.
Stalin let it all wash over him, neither burdened nor smug. For all the world, he might have been a man waiting for his morning bus to work.
“Except I’ve not come as a conquering tyrant. I was elected to my current position in a special session proposed by former Prime Minister Zhordania.”
For a moment there was silence, if for nothing but the sheer audacity of the claim. Why would the prime minister do anything of the sort? Did he expect them to believe this?
“Many of you may not remember this, but Zhordania and I are both cut from the same cloth. Both of us long for the fulfillment of the long-denied Glorious Revolution, and it is with his blessing that I now assume the mantle of leadership here.”
The spell was broken, and the rows of unwilling conscripts began to collapse into mobs.
“I did not convince him with argument, but the reminder of a song,” Stalin said, his amplified voice nearly lost to the cacophony of the crowd. “Now I offer the same to you.”
Comrade Stalin turned ever so slightly and nodded at the dwarf, who laid a hand on the monstrous street organ’s crank. The mobs forming in the city square had begun to surge toward the thin line of soldiers standing transfixed before their leader. From within the organ came clanging, grinding noises, and then like a record player finding its way to a friendly groove, a blast of sound emerged. Trumpets, drums, and less recognizable instruments thundered across the square, slowing the advancing horde.
Then a choir a hundred, a thousand, a million strong seemed to rise out of the machine. In Russian, yet striking every ear as the mother tongue, strong voices, male and female, were raised in thunderous outcry.
Stand up, ones who are branded by the curse,
All the world's starving and enslaved!
Our outraged minds are boiling,
Ready to lead us into a deadly fight
The riotous herd of conscripts slowed until many were only shuffling forward if they moved at all. Each one heard the words and felt them too. The words bore down on them, pressing through to their bones and then deeper still. In a way that even religious aesthetics could not relate to, the lyrics spoke to their souls in a ruthlessly potent and undeniably compelling voice.
The dwarf continued to turn the crank and so continued the anthem, a hand-turned tidal wave of sound.
We will destroy this world of violence
Down to the foundations, and then
We will build our new world.
He who was nothing will become everything!
Stalin's smile deepened into that of a man well content with his labors.
“You see, with a few words, I remind you of the truth you knew all along.” He beamed as the crash of symbols and rumble of drums heralded the refrain.
This is our final
And decisive battle;
Under the guardians
Man will serve in truth!
“Understand now that you are part of something grander and greater than you could have ever hoped for. Something much higher.”
Stalin’s words were not the rantings of a zealot or the bellows of a demagogue. Even as they rose over the anthem booming across the bewitched crowd, there was a quiet, reasonable conviction that infiltrated every ear and every mind before him.
“Listen to the song and remember—”
A piercing wail, wild and discordant, tore through the air, and Comrade Stalin faltered.
The organ crank turned, but for an instant, the anthem’s choir stalled as though the legion of voices was momentarily distracted, even as the instrumental chords played on. Stalin turned to look at the dwarf with a scowl, but the creature was glaring at the northernmost entrance to the square. The voices returned strong as ever, but in their absence, some of the conscripts had begun to look around, clutching their heads or drawing hands across their faces.
No one will grant us deliverance,
Not god, nor tsar, nor hero.
Pressure began to build in the air like the herald of a storm. In the dragging current of the anthem, it hadn’t been noticeable before the first cry, but now all felt it, though only one understood it.
We will win our liberation,
With our very own ha—
The ripping scream came again, and once again, the chorus lost time. The screech was quickly followed by its own feral choir, the sound of which seemed to unravel the chords of the anthem.
More conscripts began to shake awake, reaching out to glassy-eyed friends and neighbors beside them. Some they shook out of their stupor, some they didn’t. Some responded violently to the intrusion. Shouts, blows, and confusion began to erupt across the plaza, and the thin line of soldiers could no longer ignore the growing pandemonium. They waded in with the butts of their rifles and curses. A few opened fire.
The anthem surged back, instruments and chorus launching ahead as though trying to make up for lost time.
—up the furnace and hammer boldly,
While the iron is still hot!
And then all hell broke loose in the heart of Tiflis as an armored Rolls-Royce roared into the square, trailing a storm of shimmering, shrieking horrors.
24
The Red
“Was this what you had in mind?” Ambrose shouted as he cranked the newly christened “Rollsy” hard to the right to avoid a brawling knot of men.
“No,” Milo shouted as his will was taxed by maintaining the horde of spectral horrors, sweat beading his forehead. “Not exactly.”
Lapping around the Rollsy and forming in a wave behind them were ghostly apparitions. Some were skeletal horrors dangling etheric wisps of tattered garments and grave wrappings, their grinning face sending up wild, piercing cackles. Others were akin to the malformed shades of Milo’s experience, sloughing features drooping around moaning, hungry mouths. Like a tide of terror, they plunged in
to the square.
The people in the square, already unsettled, erupted into utter pandemonium.
Conscripts, soldiers, and the phantoms Milo and Rihyani had summoned fought, chased, raved, and generally created chaos. Milo caught fleeting glimpses of violence and madness as Ambrose sawed his way through the churning bodies like a sailor tacking a sailboat through unfriendly waters. More than once, a body thumped against their flank as stray bullets sang off their hood, and a few times, there was a crunching thump-thump as the Rollsy gave a small two-stage jump.
The reality of what was going on might have provoked a greater reaction from Milo, except so much of him was pressed outward that sparing time for his physical senses was hardly worth the effort. He could feel the magical power of Zlydzen attempting to smother what he and Rihyani were doing, and dear God, was he strong. Milo recognized that his magic was different from anything he’d experienced thus far, a brutal, mechanical sort of magic. Necromist magic was uniquely chemical, exciting elements and letting them do as the formula dictated, while the Art was singularly psychological, bending and shaping impulse and determination into reality. This magic, perhaps all dwarrow magic, was intensely mechanical, a grinding and relentless force that would carry on like tides rolling in and out to batter at them as long as someone kept turning the crank on that machine. He and Rihyani could keep pressing their wills, like two travelers leaning into a headwind, but if they didn’t find shelter soon, the wind would exhaust them.
That or I change the weather, Milo thought. Sparing what little he could of his awareness to squint through the windscreen of the Rollsy, he saw the shrunken figure at the street organ. Even given the erratic movements of the vehicle, Milo could tell the creature was glaring at him as it continued to turn the crank. Milo spared a further glance to see Comrade Stalin standing in front of the microphone, rigid and attentive, the man and woman behind him holding their positions flawlessly.
“We need to get to that stage,” Milo shouted and gritted his teeth as they slewed to one side hard enough the Rollsy rose on two wheels for one heart-stopping second.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Ambrose shouted before slamming his foot down on the accelerator again. “She’s got some heft, but if I try and plow through, we’ll just get clogged up.”
Milo understood and even thought distantly that they couldn’t just run over people. Not intentionally, anyway, since the majority in the square were prisoners, not enemies, even though some of them were doing a fair job acting like it under the dwarrow’s influence.
“Rihyani!” he shouted, twisting to face the wind-riding fey behind them. “We need to get to the stage.”
Rihyani looked down at him, her face partially twisted into that fearsome, bestial visage, and nodded as she surged forward. One hand reached down and took him by the wrist, her claws digging through the cuff of his sleeve into his flesh. With the miniscule will he had in reserve, Milo tried to wind ride. All he managed was to make himself lighter, but thankfully, it was enough.
“Meet us up there!” Milo shouted as he rose out of the cab and began flying in a low trajectory toward the stage.
He knew that if there had been even a few soldiers assembled near the stage, he’d have been riddled with incoming fire, but as it was, all he had to contend with were the astonished and sullen glares from Stalin and the dwarf respectively. His boots barely skimming the heads and raised fists of the battling souls beneath him, Milo was afraid he wouldn’t clear the stage, but Rihyani, with a feral howl of effort, dragged him upward before her claws detached from his arm. He hurtled onto the stage as Rihyani arched upward gracefully in time to avoid colliding with the canopy.
Milo wasn’t quite ready for his landing, but the lightening of his failed wind riding meant he came down without breaking both his legs. He did leave off the effort of pushing his will outward, and across the square, half of the monstrous specters dissipated. Milo knew he would need all his attention and energies here.
Milo staggered his first few steps but righted himself as he came to a stop, raptor-headed cane raising level with the dwarf. Ghostly green flames licked the sockets.
“That’s quite enough music for one night,” Milo said, straightening to his full height as he did his level best to not look like he’d almost fallen flat on his face.
Up close, the dwarrow was curious and grotesque. Milo had assumed dwarrow might look like those afflicted with dwarfism with some dash of inhumanity, but he struggled to see how anyone could mistake this creature for a human being. The proportions were all wrong, with a huge leathery face squatting on a barrel-like trunk amidst a profusion of wiry gray hair. The feet and hands were disproportionately outsized as well, nearly twice human proportions. Eyes like polished beetle shells watched him over a long, drooping nose that looked like it should have been planted in a garden, not hanging from a face.
“So, this is De Zauber-Schwartz,” Zlydzen crowed in a rasping voice that grated on the nerves like a file. “You are younger than I pictured you.”
With a rush of chill wind, Rihyani settled gracefully next to Milo, clawed fingers curled.
“He told you to stop the music, Zlydzen,” Rihyani growled, a wet, leonine sound.
To Milo’s surprise, the dwarrow ceased turning the crank, though he left a hand resting on the handle defiantly. His wide, parched-lipped mouth spread into a jagged saw-edged grin as he looked them both up and down appraisingly.
“I’d always supposed the Shepherds were working openly with the humans, but now I understand precisely how intimate this partnership is,”
Milo had to fight off the ridiculous impulse to justify himself to the Guardian even as Comrade Stalin stepped away from the microphone and moved toward the dwarrow. His movements were stiff, and he clutched his right hand to his abdomen as though it were wounded.
“Keep playing, you fool,” he snarled. “What are you doing?”
Zlydzen didn’t stop scrutinizing Milo and Rihyani as he answered with a cringe-inducing titter. Milo was certain that nails and slate going through a meat grinder would have sounded better.
“Oh, I’m preparing to give you up, Ioseb,” the dwarrow declared. “You’ve served your usefulness to the cause—that is, my cause—and now I’m trading you for my escape. After all, you are here for him, aren’t you?”
Stalin balked, but Milo shook his head slowly.
“No deal,” he said as he let a little flame crackle around the outstretched cane. “We’ve got plenty of room for both of you, so I see no need to trade anything. Now, hands off the organ.”
“You vile little—” Stalin snarled as he made to lunge at Zlydzen, dragging a pistol one-handed from his coat. Milo was quicker.
Snapping his cane down to strike the stage, a sheet of ice unfurled like a glassy runner. Stalin’s rushing feet abandoned him in a rush that sent him reeling to land with a heavy grunt on the suddenly frozen floor. The pistol tumbled from his impact-numbed grip, skittering over to the feet of the pair still crossing hammer and sickle without acknowledging the world around them. Before Stalin could recover his breath, much less his weapon, ice began to creep up the back and arms of his coat, binding him to the stage.
Stalin swore and panted, but the ice held fast.
Zlydzen gave a hooting cheer and slapped his swollen hands together with ungainly exuberance, like a young child imitating what clapping looked like.
“Hehe, isn’t that lovely? O-ho-ho, just marvelous.”
This was the mastermind who won you over to the Guardians? Milo thought as he turned back to the dwarrow with narrowed eyes.
Do not underestimate him, the fetish-locked ghul warned. He’s the most dangerous being you’ve ever met.
“Do you have any more?” Zlydzen cooed, looking at Milo with widening wet eyes. “Oh, come now, please show me a little more, at least.”
Milo wasn’t sure whether he was disgusted or amused and decided it was probably both.
“If you like that,”
he said, a smile touching the corner of his face, “you’re going to love this.”
Milo, don—
Milo’s cane twitched toward the street organ, launching a burning lance of witchfire into the machine. He had braced himself for the shriek of metal, the splintering of wood, and even the rocking force of a small explosion. He was ill-prepared, however, for a sudden sonic assault that drove him to his knees. Hammering pulses of auditory stimulation, some heard, some felt, bludgeoned his mind and body. From his knees, he saw Zlydzen cringing as Stalin writhed, unable to raise his frozen arms to cover his ears. Pained gaze sweeping around him, Milo saw Rihyani’s head gripped between her hands as she threw it back and screamed. Beyond her, the scene in the plaza seemed even more frenzied as some went into convulsions while others fought all the harder, eyes and ears bleeding freely.
A burst of amethyst light drew Milo’s eyes back to the erupting organ, and he saw what for all the world looked like a tiny, dying star emerge from the crackling green flames devouring the machine. It pulsed rapidly, sometimes an orb of light, other times symbols, possibly a letter or sigil, and then with a wink, it was gone.
It took Milo a moment to realize that the brutalizing cacophony was over as blood-dampened hands came away from his ears. There was ringing amidst the static of his abused auditory function, but despite this, he still heard the dwarrow’s nerve-shredding voice raised in command.
“Kill them both!” Zlydzen shrieked, stabbing a too-large finger toward Milo and Rihyani.
Almost too late, Milo turned to see the Soviet mascots bearing down on him with hammer and sickle raised.
They moved faster than Milo would have thought possible, their legs pumping like pistons across the stage, splintering wood underfoot as they came. Milo reflexively drew on the augmentative powers of his eagle-skull fetish, but even so enhanced, he had to throw himself to the edge of the stage to avoid being crushed flat and hacked in half.
World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set Page 62
