Black Sun Reich: The Spear of Destiny: Part One of Three
Page 16
Like Uhrwerk and Der Schädel, Jäger and his storm troopers wore the light olive overcoats, caps, and paraphernalia of Romanian state police officers. They did not wear their Senf masks.
The deception had its limits. The SS men were too proud as soldiers to operate like slinking spies. Under their Romanian coats, they all wore their proper SS uniforms. And no one would mistake the nachtmenn for human, much less Romanian; they were kept leashed in the troop truck. So far, in five other such night raids on Gypsy camps in the past two days, they had not been loosed.
“Haupsturmführer, are your men in position?” Uhrwerk asked.
“Jahwohl, Herr Colonel.”
“Then you will commence the raid on my signal.”
Uhrwerk admired speed and efficiency, and once again Einsatzkommando 2 had shown just that in securing the camp mere minutes after he gave the order. Of course, there were five Gypsies dead—well within acceptable limits and within the range of calculated expectation, given the variables and the state of the camp at the moment of assault.
Now all of the adult Gypsies—thirty-four men and forty-one women—were huddled on their knees in the camp center, with their hands on their heads, while the disguised storm troopers tore violently through their possessions.
Separately, one old Gypsy woman had been assigned by a storm trooper to watch over the twenty-eight adolescents and thirteen infants who were kept separate from the center of the camp. Having them out of the area of activity pacified worried adult prisoners.
Uhrwerk calculated the elapsed time and the total area of the occupied campsite, and allowing for standard deviation and several x variables, calculated the odds of finding the spear in this physical search to the fifth decimal point. Success was unlikely. As he expected.
After the search, Der Schädel would employ his unique gifts to interrogate every likely adult who might have some knowledge of which clan claimed the spear. Der Schädel’s methods were admirably quiet and efficient compared to the methods traditional Gestapo interrogators employed, if more disturbing to onlookers. Then the Gypsies would be bound, blindfolded, and warned to never speak of this under orders from the “Romanian state police.”
“Neither item is here, Herr Colonel,” Jäger reported in due time. The search was finished within just three minutes of Uhrwerk’s predicted calculations.
“Very well, Haupsturmführer. Withdraw your men to encircle the Gypsies at a distance while Der Schädel conducts his own search,” Uhrwerk ordered.
Nine SS storm troopers stood guard over the seventy-five Gypsy adults but at a distance. As hardened and indifferent to human suffering as the troopers were, they wanted as much distance as possible from what Der Schädel would be doing.
The tall, lanky figure approached the neat semicircle of crowded, kneeling Gypsies, who were following the order to stare at the ground. None saw him reach up and remove his gas mask, opening his mind to the chaotic swirl of thoughts. He almost lost himself in the maelstrom of emotion and information. But then his mind, like a raptor soaring above a hive of insects, caught scent of what it so craved. It was the sweet taste of their collective fear. In their minds, each victim felt the chill in their soul of being touched by darkness so alien and wrong, it made them want to flee into the night. They saw in their minds’ eyes the rising silhouette of a many tentacled, formless Otherness, a thing so hideous its very gaze was like tendrils encircling and freezing their hearts. They felt the dark presence grow, enveloping them all in a helplessness and hopelessness beyond all despair.
Der Schädel feasted on their mental screams, gaining the strength to seize control of the vortex of chaotic thought. He focused it on one after another of the sobbing Gypsies. When he fixed on a single subject, their fear was amplified, and he in turn consumed their very essence—his mind growing in dominance. They turned out their minds, revealing all he asked.
One by one he sifted through their minds, demanding to know who was the keeper of the spear, and not finding the answers he sought. His anger only fueled his hunger, and the more he slaked, the more he himself became lost in the terrible ecstasy of their suffering.
Slowly, so as not to traumatize his own grip on reality, Der Schädel withdrew from their collective consciousness. He replaced his mask, severing the final link. Every Gypsy collapsed like bodies on a battlefield..
Uhrwerk knew Der Schädel had found nothing before he even reported. Der Schädel retreated to the field car, his energy spent. Uhrwerk was about to give orders to withdraw from the camp when a new variable arose that he hadn’t factored: a drunken Gypsy man hiding in one of the caravans fell on two of the storm troopers. Faster than the eye could follow, the Gypsy attacker slashed the first soldier’s throat quite cleanly. A fountain of warmth sprayed in the Gypsy’s eyes, and his second attack was therefore sloppy. He ripped open the second soldier’s overcoat before he finally found the jugular. He then picked up one of the dropped machine pistols and turned it on Uhrwerk. The exhausted, drained mass of Gypsies recovered enough to watch what happened next.
The long burst from the Schmeisser and better than average aim put twenty of the thirty-two rounds fired into Uhrwerk’s upper body, groin, and head. The bolt fell on the empty chamber after the last bullet.
Every soul—even the storm troopers—froze. Uhrwerk stood his ground, examining the impact points in his body with casual curiosity. The Gypsies began whispering in their Romi tongue about the devil walking among men. Then, almost too quick for the human eye, Uhrwerk stepped forward and stabbed his hand through the drunken Gypsy’s sternum, seizing and crushing the man’s heart. His other hand grabbed the top of the Gypsy’s skull and spun the head 180 degrees with a sickening crackle that sounded like a dry bundle of twigs being broken.
The Gypsies screamed. Some tried to crawl away in abject terror, only to be kicked by the remaining storm troopers. One Gypsy man pointed at both the dead storm trooper and Uhrwerk, where the Romanian police overcoats were torn, revealing their unmistakable foreign pedigree. The word “Nazi” spread through the clan immediately.
Uhrwerk was disappointed in what had to happen next. Not because he had any emotion about killing all the adults in the village. It was because of the waste of the time it would take to eliminate the evidence.
“Haupsturmführer Jäger, you know what must be done. Release the nachtmenn,” Uhrwerk ordered. He strode calmly over to where Der Schädel was resting.
There was a snarl and a howl as the nachtmenn leapt from the truck, bounding like panthers across the open ground. They tore into the band of Gypsies with tooth, claw, and tusk. Bones crunched between teeth and the nachtmenn fed as their victims still cried out. Even the most hardened of storm troopers found something else to look at.
Ignoring the carnage, Uhrwerk gave orders to Der Schädel.
“Take care of the children,” he said dispassionately.
Der Schädel nodded. Taking a labored breath, he removed his mask, revealing his true countenance. The mask shielded his mind from the outside world. There was only so much he could take, but the harder the illusion he had to cast, the more direct his mind had to be.
Der Schädel reached out to the mind of the old Gypsy crone the storm trooper sergeant had put in charge of the children and infants. He saw through her eyes the children gathered in the tent at the edge of the camp. They were all huddled together and crying in fear at the sound of the nearby gunfire. The old woman’s mind was tired and weak, but her innate protective instinct toward the kinder was remarkably strong. Der Schädel used that very instinct against her. He reached out and spoke, his words becoming her thoughts.
The old woman, cradling one of the children and squeezing her eyes shut, opened her eyes and was horrified. Spiders. Giant spiders all about her and the child, crawling about on hairy arms toward them.
She reached into the folds of her dress and pulled her dagger. The spiders crawled all about the tent, but they were too slow to escape her blade. She went about the tent methodicall
y stabbing each one,.. She found the last spider climbing on her chest, plunged her dagger into it and collapsed. It was a mercy that she died not knowing that what she’d seen as spiders were the children.
Der Schädel’s head rolled back. If he’d possessed anything like lips on his disfigured face, they would have peeled back into a smile. His body tensed for a long moment and he let out a heaving cry of passionate release. Taking a few deep breaths, he replaced his rubber mask, shutting out the chaos of thoughts from his mind.
“It is done,” he said.
Uhrwerk returned to where the storm troopers had assembled. The men had leashed the nachtmenn.
“Haupsturmführer, detail your men to—”
It came crashing out of the brush, a giant creature shaped like a man. Only its body was malformed, one arm freakishly too large and the other too short. It was formed of clay and hatred, its head only half sculpted. Its mouth moved, silently screaming the rage of its creator.
Before any of the soldiers could react, it grabbed one of the storm troopers and lifted him above its head. The man’s screams did not mask the sickening sound of wet canvas being ripped as he was pulled apart by the arms and legs, nor did the screams stop even as his insides spilled all over the clay creature. The creature took the dead man’s legs in its strong arm and grabbed the next soldier with its small hand. Using the legs as a club, he bashed the man’s helmet and skull in.
By the time it turned to its third victim, the storm troopers had recovered from their shock and opened fire on the thing. It absorbed their shots into its body, but the sheer force of hundreds of submachine-gun rounds began to tell, rending apart its midsection. It struggled against the tide of bullets but could barely stand its ground. The nachtmenn were released, and by force of numbers dragged the creature down. Their razor-sharp claws tore the thing to shreds of now motionless river clay. They didn’t stop until no piece of clay remaining was larger than a fist.
Uhrwerk surveyed the scene. The remaining troopers were recovering as much as any soldier could, shocked and flushed but holding it together. Even the nachtmenn seemed shaken, like spooked horses. Only Der Schädel seemed unaffected. Two of the storm troopers lay dead—one with barely enough remains to be considered a proper corpse.
“It seems these Gypsies had a protector, for all the good it did them,” Der Schädel said grimly.
Uhrwerk nodded.
“Damned Gypsy magic,” Jäger said. “I thought he was here to protect us from that,” he added, motioning to Der Schädel.
“Haupsturmführer,” Colonel Uhrwerk said to Jäger. “Have the nachtmenn dig a pit. Have your men handle the remains. Every last shred of this entire encampment is to be buried before sunrise, including our own dead. We have a schedule to keep. The next camp is twenty-five kilometers east.”
The rising sun broke the darkness only after the German field car and troop truck rolled out from where the encampment once stood. But another half hour passed before Jaelle Luncă crawled out from the riverside brush where she’d been hiding since the raid commenced, interrupting her moonlight swim.
She’d seen everything.
Her first reaction—despite her instincts—was ingrained in her since birth. She’d cast a spell of cloaking that hid her body, mind, and soul from the invaders. The creatures would not smell her, the men would not see her, and the devil-spawn skeleton man would not sense her. Nor would they sense the Sacred Tshurri she kept with her at all times. The Tshurri enhanced her spell and strengthened her magicks.
Safely hidden—as that was her first responsibility—she then called upon the magic that had been her birthright and her inheritance as one of the Protectors of the Sacred Tshurri. She’d tried to summon a clay guardian from the riverbed itself, but the shock of what transpired—those creatures tearing into her people, the screams of the children being stabbed—threw off her incantations. She could not concentrate, and the golem she’d summoned had been weak and imperfect. It was too weak, too little, and too late.
Now everything she knew—her families, her home, her people, her husband—lay buried in a fresh mass grave. Except for the freshly turned earth, it was as if they’d never existed.
Jaelle knelt at the edge of the grave. With steady hands she ripped a lock of her hair from its roots. The blood trickled down her forehead, mingling with her tears. She had promises to make to the spirits of the dead here, who would not rest until they were avenged.
She stayed where she knelt all through the day and into the night, when the moon rose again. This would be the whole of her pomana—her period of mourning. A day in place of a year.
At midnight Jaelle went back down by the edge of the lake to a cypress tree. The first daughter of the tribe’s drabarni—the spiritual elder—it fell on her to protect the Sacred Tshurri. She’d learned its history, its powers, and the spells the Rom dabnari had written to change its effects on the living and the dead and the inanimate.
This blade—once possessed by her people in the fifteenth century, until it was taken by the Wallachian impaler of the House of Drăculesti, then regained from his clutches in 1888—would now serve as her instrument of vengeance.
When the moon alighted the dew on the white oleander, Jaelle made her pledge of fealty to Martya, the angel of death.
She renounced her three Romani names, cutting deeply with a steel dagger into the flesh of her arm once for each name. She chose a new name as she bathed in the moonlight and blood. She hid this name from God and the tormented muló of her family, so none would see the evil she would do in exacting her vengeance, restoring the balance of kintala.
Then she focused and pictured in her mind’s eye the soldiers, the creatures, and the masked men who extinguished the light of her people.
She spoke her pledge in the tongue of the ancient assassins of her clan.
“Beshel lesko kam.”
Your sun is setting.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
If you enjoyed
Black Sun Reich
Part 1 of Trey Garrison’s The Spear of Destiny series, then don’t miss Part 2
Death’s Head Legion
and Part 3
Shadows Will Fall
COMING SOON!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TREY GARRISON has been a newspaperman, a magazine writer, and a soldier of misfortune. He’s a master in the kitchen, great at the gun range, and decent at Kung Fu. He lives in Texas. This is his first novel.
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By Trey Garrison
The Spear of Destiny
PART 1
Black Sun Reich
And coming soon . . .
PART 2
Death’s Head Legion
PART 3
Shadows Will Fall
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BLACK SUN REICH. Copyright © 2012 by Trey Garrison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062261250
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