Zeitgeist 1919

Dramatis Personae

Rory Donnelly … a teenaged American cannoneer

Nora Donnelly … Rory’s pregnant sister-in-law

Evangeline Donnelly … an American technomancer

Silke … a young German spy

Konrad von Elbing … a German drachenwolf rider

George Kohlberg … a German-American technomancer

Delphyne … a mysterious mountain dweller

August Frazier … an American sorcerer-botanist

Lazare Viger … a young Québécois smuggler

Josephine Sibley … an American schoolteacher and fortune teller

Oscar Roth … a wealthy American magician

Stefan Lang … a German U-boat commander

Baptiste Leopold … a Haitian-German vodouist

Imperialer Zaubersänger Sigmund Gramlich … chief sorcerer to the Kaiser

Prelude

The North Atlantic punished U-188. Frozen curtains of sleet lashed the unterseeboot’s hull. Black waves crashed across her bow to explode against the conning tower and deck guns. In what passed for the privacy of the commander’s cabin below, Kapitänleutnant Stefan Lang sat on a narrow bunk and stared at the pistol in his hands.

He turned the weapon over, studying the play of green light on its polished surfaces. The rumble and clatter of the submarine’s diesel engines masked the sound of the storm above, but the din was not enough to drown out the chanting of the zaubersänger. No amount of noise could.

The warlocks’ song wormed into Stefan’s ears and bones, chilling his blood, leaving an oily residue on his sweat-damp skin. Stefan shivered and kept his eyes on the gun, fearing that if he lifted them the glowing green symbols on the bulkhead would capture his gaze and not let go. He could feel them waiting for him to look, crawling across the dull metal, dripping to the deck and swirling around his feet, slipping into every dank corner of his boat.

Stefan’s finger brushed the trigger guard, and the graceful curl of metal reminded him of the limbs of the girl. He swallowed uncomfortably. The girl had been unconscious for the entire journey, confined to the zaubersängers’ cabin. But though trapped in sleep, she continued to move, writhing and twitching as if she were swimming.

Or dancing.

Bile bit at the edges of Stefan’s tongue. The girl made him think of his wife, Magdalena. Dancing in their garden to music only she could hear. Peeking at him shyly from the changing tent at the beach. Waving to him from the shore, her dress rippling in the wind coming off the water, her body turned to shelter their son Josef from the sea spray.

How had it come to this?

His finger slipped past the guard to rest on the cold trigger. He was such a long way from Ingolstadt, from university and the job that waited for him at his father’s factory. But Stefan did not regret fleeing north, following the drums of war and the siren call of the sea, because he had found Magdalena there.

The sea-salt taste of blood flooded his mouth as he bit through the scars on the inside of his lip.

Stefan hoped Magdalena and Josef were both dead now. Or rather, he prayed that they remained dead, unstirred by Russian necromancy. How could he live knowing they staggered alongside the rest of the Armiya Mertvykh, mindlessly pursuing the living?

Stefan shuddered.

The Army of the Dead.

The Kaiser had ordered Königsberg burned to halt the spread of the Russian necromancers’ plague. Every prayer that had passed Stefan’s lips in the months since the city’s fall included a fervent wish that the purifying flames had consumed his wife and child. He had not seen Königsberg burn, but U-188 had delivered zaubersänger to Danzig for a similar purge. Watching the dockyards through the periscope, Stefan had seen the shambling legions of the dead in their thousands. How many were Russian soldiers given unlife by desperate necromancers trying to slow the Kaiser’s march east? How many were German shopkeepers or housewives or children?

Touched by the plague.

Added to the ranks of the Armiya Mertvykh.

Having devoured the Russian Empire that birthed it, the Army of the Dead was now gnawing westward into the Kaiser’s domains. Only the warmer months slowed its progress, the decaying corpses rotting in the heat. But every winter saw the plague spread further. Rumor held that Berlin would fall before the thaw this year. Not that such news meant much to Stefan. The Armiya Mertvykh had already reached Königsberg, had already taken everything that mattered to him.

Stefan watched the barrel of the pistol with curious detachment, the yawning black hole at the end winking and widening until he stared into a vacant, deadly eye.

How easy it would be.

But what if the priests were right? If he took his own life, would heaven be lost to him? Would he face eternal separation from his wife and child?

Or were they lost already?

Stefan groaned. Sweat dripped down his chest. Had the inferno granted Magdalena and Josef their final rest, or had the Armiya Mertvykh polluted their souls forever, barring them from paradise?

Footsteps approached, and Stefan slipped the pistol beneath his pillow.

Herr Kapitän.

Stefan rose as far as he could in the cramped conditions and nodded at Lehmann. The young crewman stared past his captain’s shoulder, body rigid and cheek twitching.

The zaubersänger requests your presence, Kapitän.

Zaubersänger. Spellsinger. Hexenmeister.

Lehmann didn’t need to specify which warlock had made the request. Though three of the Kaiser’s pet sorcerers were aboard U-188, only one would give such a command. The one who kept his features hidden. The one the others called master. Stefan wondered if what the crew whispered was true. Was the hooded man the Imperialer Zaubersänger, the sorcerer that had bewitched both the Kaiser and Ludendorff, who brought about the disgrace and death of Feldmarschall Hindenburg? Stefan probed his throbbing lip with his tongue, tasting salt and thinking of secret currents moving in forgotten oceanic depths.

Of course, he said to Lehmann, and waved a hand in dismissal, trying to ignore the relieved slump of the seaman’s shoulders as he turned away. Stefan choked back a sigh.

The walk to the zaubersängers’ cabin was not long. There were no long walks aboard the unterseeboot. Stefan kept his eyes forward, ignoring the water dripping on his shoulders and hair, ignoring the runes dancing along the bulkhead. He stepped through the hatch without bothering to announce himself. This was his boat, his command. Besides, the spellsingers were aware of his presence. He felt the chill of their regard as he approached.

Two of the sorcerers, their heads uncovered and eyes closed, sat outside a chalked circle of runes, lips forming shapes that did not match the chant dripping from their tongues. The third, the master, remained hooded, sitting alone in the middle of the circle. Stefan tried to keep his imagination from painting all manner of disfigurement on the shadowed features. There were rumors of terrible injuries, of a body sacrificed to the whims of demons…

The hooded zaubersänger coughed—a sound like rocks shifting in a wet sack— and a mottled hand darted beneath the hood. When it emerged, the long fingers danced and twisted in inhuman shapes. Stefan thought he saw flecks of blood on the skin though he could not be sure in the dim light.

Coordinates, the hooded zaubersänger rasped.

Stefan suppressed a shudder as symbols bled together on the floor of the cabin. He stared at the numbers, then glanced up at the sorcerer. Two spots of faint green glinted in the shadows beneath the hood.

And your orders when we arrive? he asked.

Stefan knew better than to assume his orders would come from the Kaiser or the War Cabinet. They would come from this eldritch creature.

There will be a ship, Kapitän. You will sink it without warning. You will not surface or take prisoners. There will be no survivors. All must perish to feed the sea’s hunger.

Stefan ground his teeth. He was a killer. The war and the Kaiserliche Marine had made him so. He had long since accepted this, even if the guilt weighed terribly on him. Still, his immediate reflex was to refuse the order, to deny this demon’s authority.

The hood twitched, light catching on something that wasn’t a nose. The shape was all wrong…

Is there a problem, Kapitän?

Fingers of ice brushed Stefan’s spine. He tried to block out the chanting and the runes cavorting across the hull of his ship. Tendrils of shadow twisted around him. Without knowing how, Stefan understood that the tendrils penetrated all of U-188, touching every member of his crew and holding them in a dangerous embrace. His crew. His responsibility.

No, Zaubersänger, Stefan answered, heels clicking together, back rigid. There is no problem.

Stefan turned and put one leg through the hatch. Then he paused. He felt the pressure of the sorcerer’s eyes upon him.

If I may ask…

The words trailed off, the request dying on his lips. Did he really want to know? Did it matter in the grand scheme of the war who he sent to a watery grave? Thousands of souls already burdened Stefan’s conscience, crying out to him when he tried to sleep, dancing before his eyes when he closed them. They were an army of ghosts fit to match the ghouls unleashed by the Russians. He should have stayed in Bavaria, should have been a scholar or joined his father in the safe but boring ranks of the merchant class.

A sound trapped somewhere between laughter and choking came from the hooded sorcerer.

The vessel will fly an American flag, Kapitän Lang.

Stefan closed his eyes.

No rest for the wicked. Europe had fallen to the Empire, but the Kaiser and his creatures were not done with war. Was an entire continent not enough to sate their desire for conquest? Or did they seek an escape from the Russian corpse-plague?

Whatever the cause, they were taking the conflict across the ocean.

They were bringing war to the unspoiled shores of America.

Part I

The Sack of Gotham

Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Homer, The Iliad

Chapter 1

Gotham glowed beneath an orange and gray dusk, her myriad Edison lamps pushing back the encroaching gloom. The city’s streets hummed with tales of industry and magic, with rumors of the war kept at bay by the mighty Atlantic and the arcane machines of American technomancy. Rory Donnelly walked those streets in a daze. He ran his hands through the dark tangle of his hair and then lowered his fingers to stare at them, wondering that they were not still tingling.

I touched it, he muttered.

His fingers strayed to the brass pin affixed to his collar, a stylized lightning bolt atop a disk. He remembered the pulse of the imprisoned energies, his skin itching and crawling as the great machine hummed to itself.

A Tesla cannon.

I touched it, he repeated, still in disbelief.

Had it been just a week ago that he stood in the shadow of the great wall listening to the buzz and crackle as the cannoneers tested their weapons, dreaming that one day he would be up there with them, preparing to defend the city?

And what of tomorrow?

Tomorrow could not come soon enough for Rory. Tomorrow the new recruits would take part in firing one of the great weapons.

Rory shivered inside the borrowed greatcoat. His wiry frame would never fill it out as James had. He frowned as he pictured his older brother’s burly, athletic build, the black gloss of his hair, the Defense Force pilot’s wings pinned to his collar. Rory unfastened his own cannoneer’s lightning bolt and shoved it deep in his pocket. James would know what the symbol meant. Despite all the strings he pulled on their mother’s behalf to get Rory behind the safety of a desk, somehow his younger brother had been assigned to the Tesla cannon batteries.

Mother would not be happy.

Rory paused beneath the glow of an Edison lamp and tugged his collar up against the evening chill. Now that he was almost home, he wondered if maybe he should have accepted the invitation from his new battery-mates to join them for dinner.

A curtain twitched on the second floor of Aunt Eva’s brownstone, and Rory’s lips compressed in a tight smile. If he’d accepted that invitation, his mother would have sent James to look for him. Worse, she might have come looking herself.

Rory stepped out from beneath the Edison lamp and crossed the street. On the stoop of Aunt Eva’s building he took a deep breath to settle himself and to suppress the excitement the Tesla cannon had smeared all over his face. Then he pushed open the door.

The city glowed on the horizon, a pale finger between dark sky and darker water. Silke stared at it from the rolling deck of the unterseeboot. The black water surrounding the submarine sang to her, but its chant was deep and alien. Not like the cheerful babble of the brook beside her parents’ farmhouse. Not like the weary lament of the Rhine where she and her sisters…

The Rhine? Had she ever seen the Rhine? And what sisters had she been thinking of?

Silke shook her head.

A brother. She had a brother.

But he was dead now, wasn’t he? Hadn’t the Americans killed him? Silke tried to order her thoughts. She couldn’t even remember her brother’s name. But she knew he was younger than her. Surely too young to enlist? And why would he have been fighting Americans? The Russians were closer.

The Russians…

A fleeting image danced through Silke’s head of a wasted and shambling man, skin gray where it was not rubbed raw and pink. Bones protruded from his savaged arm. Worms writhed in empty eye sockets.

Silke twisted a pale strand of hair around equally pale fingers and tugged hard enough that tears filmed her eyes. The vision fled, dragged down by other memories of trucks and trains and cold rooms with steel tables. Men in dark robes—Zaubersänger sorcerers, measuring and whispering, examining her body, testing her intellect. Prodding and probing. Pain and sickness.

Her hair had been darker then, streaked with red and gold. Silke remembered it piled on the floor around her, harvested by unkind shears. She remembered the hissing voices, the hunger for revenge blossoming in the confusion of her mind. Revenge for her slain brother.

And what about her parents? Were they dead as well?

Memories of lumbering gray bodies in the village.

The Russians. And some of her neighbors.

The corpse-army! Coming for her family, coming for her…

The gray bodies in her memory gave way to slender shapes, sinuous and bright beneath the sedate flow of the Rhine. Her sisters, voices raised in chorus for the watching sorcerers. And the zaubersänger, adding their own voices to the song. Her thoughts and memory being pulled apart, woven back together.

And then the long dark.

Why wasn’t she shivering? A bitter wind tugged at Silke’s thin dress, but the cold did not bother her. It was a distant thing. Nothing to worry about.

She lifted her hand. Light from the distant city painted the webbing between her slender fingers a pale pink. Had they always been like that? Why couldn’t she remember? What had the zaubersänger done to her memory, to her body? Were the sisters real? Was her brother? Her parents? The village of her birth? They all felt true. But maybe not. And what of the corpses stalking her…?

Forgive us, the drugs were necessary. They kept you safe.

Silke’s head snapped around. The rumbling engines of the unterseeboot and the insistent song of the sea had masked the arrival of the man standing behind her on the deck. Or at least she assumed it was a man. The robed figure’s features were hidden by the darkness. She made out several indistinct shapes looming behind him, silent and watchful as standing stones.

The confusion will pass. Your mind will settle shortly. The words slithered around her, oily and gritty all at once. The song of the deep ocean during the crossing would have driven you mad.

Zaubersänger, thought Silke. She took an involuntary step back. The dark water called to her. It would be so easy to jump in, to swim away, to put distance between herself and the sorcerer. And water. Water had power against their breed of magic.

Silke hugged herself. How did she know that? What had they done to her? Something flashed beneath the sorcerer’s hood. His teeth?

It calls to you, does it not? he rasped. But remember your mission, maiden. Remember.

He stepped close to her, and Silke fought the impulse to dive into the dark water lapping the hull of the submarine. It was deep and alien and forbidding, but no more so than the man—or was he a demon?—standing before her. He leaned in close, and the dim light played across a wasted expanse of dark hollows and scars. Had some disease ravaged his skin? The sorcerer’s eyes burned with a green light that held her motionless, opened windows in the mist of her thoughts.

Shuffling corpses on the farmhouse path, wearing the faces of her parents—

Remember your brother, maiden. Remember who killed him.

The sorcerer’s breath smelled of stone and dirt and decay. Grave-stench.

Whispers chased each other through Silke’s head. Her mouth opened. The zaubersänger raised one finger, bent at an unnatural angle, and touched it to her lips. Heat blossomed. Burned. She could not pull away.

Your parents and your brother. Remember them. Remember what happened to them.

Corpses. Oh dear God, the corpses. The dead should not walk. How could they be walking? Where were her parents? What did her parents look like? There were holes in her memory, holes shaped like brother, like mother, like father. The farmhouse remained. The animals and flowers and gardens remained. But no faces of those she loved, no names even. All forgotten. All stolen.

Remember.

Another finger touched her forehead, tracing a line of fire across her brow. The zaubersänger began to chant in an unfamiliar tongue, and Silke’s mind flooded with images of her brother, his body broken and bloody. But he was not in the garden, torn apart by corpses that might have been her parents. He was on a battlefield, and American soldiers loomed above him, their features twisted and demonic.

The Americans have ways of detecting us, the sorcerer hissed in her ear. The stench was terrible. Machines built by Tesla, Edison, and their technomancer ilk. Defenses the river prevents us from getting close to. But not you, maiden. Magic has shaped you, and yet you have no spellcraft to trigger their alarms. Remember your mission. Remember what you must do.

The rhythm of his words surrounded her, wrapped her in a tight embrace. Silke put her hands to her head, touching skin that was clammy and cool. Had she always been like this? She tugged hair that was almost white, not the gold from the mirrors of her childhood. Shaking her head, she tried to remember that girl.

Go, maiden, the sorcerer hissed. "Open the way so that we may enter, so that we may avenge the fallen. Your fallen."

Image of her parents, ruddy-cheeked and smiling.

Fading.

Now ashen-faced and gaping.

Dead eyes. Gray hands reaching—

The Americans, a voice insisted from inside her head. It was the Americans. Take your vengeance.

Silke shook her head, trying to dislodge the voice, but a second joined in, and they hissed in chorus. And a third. Then a fourth. A whole host of whispering voices.

The sorcerer’s lips brushed her ear, and Silke shuddered.

I can make them go away, he rasped. The voices. The memories. The visions.

His hand touched her shoulder, fever-hot through the fabric of her dress. She did not know what was real and what had been put in her head by sorcery. She did not know who she was. Was Silke even her real name?

Do it and be free.

Silke twisted and dove from the rolling deck with a cry, the dark sea parting to embrace her, icy and warm all at once. For a moment, all she heard was the dull roar of the unterseeboot’s engines. Then, as she put distance between herself and the submarine, other sounds reached out to touch her. First came the bright chorus of small streams singing of mountains and trees and sunshine. Then the languid, steady drone of an old river. Then the deep chanting of the bay.

But there was another song lurking beneath them, an ancient and menacing dirge she had heard before. It had brushed against her mind during the ocean crossing, sending questing fingers through the fog of zaubersänger drugs.

So unfathomably old…

The deep-song chased Silke toward the city as she swam with all the speed the zaubersänger shaping magic had gifted to her. It promised protection, promised safety. And belonging. Just swim to the deeper water, it called. Swim to the cold currents of the sea. Be free.

But the chattering in her head was too loud, too insistent. Could the song of the sea rid her of what haunted her mind? Or was that something only the zaubersänger could do?

Had the sorcerers put the voices there to begin with?

Vaguely, Silke was aware of something making thrashing, violent progress across the surface of the bay, following her with unerring accuracy. But that was only of minor concern to her. The noise paled beside the horror of the voices from her past, beside the ocean-song that told of madness and imprisonment and a yearning to be free.

To touch the air again. To see the stars. To feel the wind. Lost, all lost.

Something in the sea was trapped.

Trapped like the voices in Silke’s head.

And dead. Dead for so many centuries.

Silke swam.

Chapter 2

Rory stood at attention on the wall, conscious of the crowd in Battery Park below. Stiff boots pinched his tingling toes and gripped his calves. His fingers felt like ice inside his gloves. Hundreds of eyes were watching him, maybe thousands. But not him alone. Distantly, above the thundering rush of blood in his ears, he heard the sergeant barking orders, the thunder of boots as the veteran battery crew sprang into action. He kept his eyes fixed forward, staring over the city he was now sworn to defend. He didn’t remember the speeches, barely remembered giving oaths and saluting the dignitaries in the gallery beside the cannon, wreathed in the mist of their own breath.

Aunt Eva was in the gallery. She had arrived with a small pack of her fellow technomancers, hair pulled back in a severe bun, head strangely naked without the goggles she always wore. Odd that he would notice the missing goggles more than the fact that she was wearing a dress. It made her look older. Sadly, the uniform failed to do the same for Rory. Somehow it made his reflection in the mirror look younger, like a child playing at being a soldier.

Was Aunt Eva watching him now, wondering what she had done by getting him assigned to the battery? Not that she was solely to blame. His sister-in-law Nora had helped as well. Together, they conspired to override his brother’s efforts to pin Rory to the boring safety of a desk at Defense HQ. Aunt Eva’s voice carried weight with Defense because she helped maintain the Tesla cannons, and Nora’s father was high in the chain of command. The two women would have to share the blame when his mother found out.

Back rigid, eyes focused blindly on the skyline, Rory’s mind drifted.

Dinner at Aunt Eva’s last night had been predictable. Mother’s birdlike eyes had followed Aunt Eva, no doubt fuming that her sister-in-law claimed the head of the table ahead of her eldest surviving son. Not that James seemed to mind. He was busy regaling the family with yet another story of the Air Wing and their feats of aeronautic daring.

Nora sat beside her husband, trying to mask her worry with a smile. But Rory saw her hand shaking as it held the fork, saw her other hand touching her belly. Pregnancy was supposed to make a woman glow, but Nora seemed to be fading, growing more gray with every passing hour. Her features had always been more stark than beautiful, but there had been life in her eyes before, a playful curl to her lips…

Heat had blossomed on Rory’s cheeks as he looked away. He imagined every set of eyes around the table focusing on his flushed face, aware of the guilty train of his thoughts. Surely if Nora harbored any concern for him, she would try to get him assigned to the relative safety of the general staff. She had made such an effort to protect James, only for her father to turn a deaf ear. General Keane seemed intent on putting the Donnelly boys firmly in the line of fire. Rory on the cannon battery. James in the Air Wing. And Patrick…

Rory’s gaze had been drawn to the framed photo on the sideboard. James and Rory flanking Patrick in his doughboy kit, hat tilted rakishly, the ghost of a smile haunting his face. Patrick had abandoned his apprenticeship at Tesla’s lab to enlist. Off to Europe to take the fight to the Kaiser as part of General Keane’s Expeditionary Forces. In training, he’d met the general’s daughter, Nora, and in the weeks that followed she’d joined the Red Cross in secret so she could accompany the Expeditionary Forces and thus remain near Patrick. But her father had found out and forced her to return home.

Then he assigned Patrick to the first group of Americans destined for the trenches.

Rory remembered his mother’s face when she received the telegram confirming Patrick’s death, the shuttering of her eyes, the way she seemed to shrink in on herself, to age a decade in mere minutes. So much potential lost. Patrick had paired their father’s natural intelligence and talent for magic with charisma that made him stand out in any crowd. Rory and James had worshiped him almost as much as their mother had. They had wanted to be him. Still did. Wasn’t that why James joined the Defense Force? Wasn’t that why he pursued Nora so hard when she returned from Europe? Theirs had been such a short courtship…

James had half-risen from his chair, hands chasing each other as he described some aerial maneuver he’d accomplished in his biplane. His mother watched, a small smile chasing about her thin lips, knife and fork poised over her plate. James turned to Nora, but his wife was looking at the table, her shoulders trembling.

Had she married James just to spite her father, or had something about James reminded her of Patrick? They had married within weeks of her return. Before her father could interfere. Maybe before she could entertain second thoughts…?

Rory watched her push food around her plate. She was obviously terrified that something would happen to James. Was that because she loved him or because she didn’t want to raise their child alone? And why had she helped get Rory assigned to the Tesla Battery? Why wasn’t she afraid of what might happen to him?

James started to reach for her shoulder, but turned and touched his mother instead. She caught his hand, pressing her lips to his palm. Her eyes twitched toward Aunt Eva. Little spots of color dotted her cheeks.

No mystery there. Rory had seen that look often enough since they moved in with Aunt Eva. In that look were all the reasons why Mary Donnelly had encouraged her eldest son to abandon an apprenticeship with Tesla to go fight in the old country, why she now took joy in her middle child risking life and limb in a mechanical, flying death trap rather than a technomancer’s laboratory.

And why she would keep her youngest son, Rory, far from anything that carried even a hint of magic.

Her husband had died in the pursuit of magic. An accident in Tesla’s laboratory had ravaged Eamon Donnelly’s body and mind. It took weeks for him to die. Aunt Eva had not left her brother’s bedside until his last breath. She shouldered the blame for the accident, promising her dying brother that she would care for his family, that she would abandon the recklessness of her youth. Mary Donnelly had not forgiven Aunt Eva or thanked her for her help. Nor had she forgotten the part that magic had played in her husband’s death.

Rory had stifled the urge to brush the cannoneer’s pin in his pocket. If his mother found out…

Rory’s scalp prickled, bringing him back to the present. The Tesla cannon’s accumulator was beginning to whine, and the wall vibrated beneath him, shaking his boots and rattling his bones. He sensed the heads of his battery-mates turning, discipline amongst the volunteers breaking down as their excitement built. Rory fought to keep his gaze fixed forward. Nobody would be watching him. All eyes would be on the great cannon. Nobody would see. Just a brief glimpse.

His gaze flickered past the gallery to devour the gleaming metal surfaces of the gun. His father had helped Tesla design it. Rory’s heart thudded against his ribs.

Most of the cannon’s workings were hidden from view. The only exposed portion was the large cylinder cradled by the mechanism that connected it to the wall. Cables thicker than a man’s thigh carried vryl current from concealed accumulators in the wall. The battery crew swarmed around the cannon, checking the cables for leaks, cranking the massive gears that brought the weapon’s barrel to bear. The sergeant, still shouting through a bristling mustache, stared at the indicators monitoring power levels and targeting information. There was no specific target today. The firing itself would provide ample demonstration of the weapon’s potency.

The wall grumbled, transmitting the steady thrum of the hidden accumulator coils as they pulled vryl energy from the air. Every hair on Rory’s body stood at sharp attention. His skin crawled as if spider webs were being drawn across it. Arcs of pale lightning flickered around the cannon’s barrel, and the sergeant’s voice became impossible to hear as the weapon shrieked and growled.

The firing rocked the wall.

It shook the city and rippled the bay for half a mile in every direction.

Rory spread his feet to maintain his balance. His jaw went slack as the air in front of the barrel shimmered with the passage of thaumaturgic energy bound to super-heated particles. The fact that the beam was only faintly visible did not make it any less destructive or deadly. Rory had never been this close to a firing, had never seen the beam as anything more than a faint line stretching off into the infinite distance. He had heard the boom when the firing ceased of course. Nobody with ears in the city could have claimed otherwise over the past eighteen months. But this was different. It was one thing to read about the fell energies harnessed by technomancy in dime novels, but witnessing the real thing shifted his fascination to terror. He stared with wide eyes, every hair on his body trying to pull free from his skin. A warm breeze caressed his face.

He became aware of a commotion.

Near the cannon.

Rory turned, astonished to see Aunt Eva racing from the gallery, arms waving. The cannon’s crew could not see her. They were focused on the destructive passage of their weapon’s energy beam. Rory saw faces in the gallery behind her, some looking with horrified expressions at the horizon. Evangeline Donnelly tumbled into the battery crew, shouldered the sergeant aside, and tugged fiercely at the massive firing lever.

Thunder jolted the wall as air rushed in to fill the vacuum left in the deadly beam’s wake. Rory clapped his hands over his ears.

Too late.

The beam was supposed to be stepped down gradually in a test firing, so the new recruits hadn’t been issued the helmets with ear protection that the battery crew wore. In ringing silence, Rory watched the sergeant struggle to decide if he would strike the woman who had manhandled his cannon’s controls. The sergeant loomed, his face purple behind the straw bristles of his mustache as members of the gallery rushed forward. He was shouting, but Aunt Eva had both ears covered. She took one hand from her ear and pointed at the horizon.

Rory twisted around. Distant shapes wheeled in loose formation above Brooklyn, producing flashes of color—yellow and blue, red and green. Painted wings.

The Air Wing.

Biplanes swooped and dove as they came across the water. They passed just over the wall, the pilots’ scarves flapping as they waved to the spectators below. The wood and fabric bodies of their machines were garish with color, and James’s yellow-winged fighter was in the lead.

Chapter 3

The zeppelin’s cabin was thick with abhorrent chanting. Slick, oily fingers of ensorcelled air ran over Konrad’s skin, encircling his limbs and torso. He shuddered and pushed his way through the robed zaubersänger and their miasma of song, conscious of the maimed leg he dragged behind him, conscious of the hooded eyes staring at his cane, topped with a stylized silver eagle.

Damnable sorcerers, he muttered, gripping the handle of the door to the exterior walkway. Rain painted the window set in the door, rippling the darkness beyond. The door shivered with the cold violence raging outside. Konrad drew a breath and yanked the door open.

Wind and rain lashed into the cabin, drawing cries of outrage from the assembled warlocks. Konrad hid a smile behind his collar as he lurched out into the storm and dragged the door shut behind him. His hands found the metal railing in the near darkness, the light from the cabin doing little to push back the pall of the storm. Gone was the glimmer of the moon on white-capped waves below. Gone were the shimmering stars.

Good.

The bluster of the storm suited Konrad’s mood. He tugged up the collar of his greatcoat and leaned into the wind, pushing his way aft, nursing his disgust for the Kaiser’s spellsingers. Wretched little men grasping for power, usurping the influence of the Junker nobility.

Konrad’s family was old and honorable. The von Elbing clan had been fighting beneath Prussian banners for centuries. What were these robed troglodytes with their hexes and curses, their myths and monsters? Konrad paused, staring over the railing into the storm-lashed darkness, searching for the shadowy forms he knew lurked there.

Monsters in the dark.

He caught himself rubbing his deformed leg and jerked his hand away as if burned.

They had done this to him, the miserable hexemeister. They came without being summoned in the wake of the accident, whispering to his father as he lay abed in the hospital, his leg a white flame where the horse had fallen on it. Days, they had claimed. Three days, not the months the doctors said they would need to heal him. The warlocks promised to repair his leg in time for Konrad to assume his commission with the cavalry. They could make the leg better, they said. Stronger. Konrad would not have to wait, would not have to chance missing the appointment he craved.

His place in the cavalry.

Where a scion of the von Elbing family belonged.

Konrad slammed his cane against the railing, sending sparks of numbing pain arcing across his fingers and palm. Why had his father listened to the low-born witch-spawn? Why had he indebted the von Elbing family to sorcerers and let them work their treacherous arts on Konrad’s leg? It went against every tenet of thrift and godliness he had taught Konrad to value. What about fortitude? What about self-denial?

Lerne leiden ohne zu klagen, Konrad hissed, echoing his father’s favorite expression.

Learn to suffer without complaining.

Konrad snorted. He wondered if his father really understood suffering. The zaubersänger magic festered in bone and tendon and muscle, a slow and insidious poison that caused Konrad constant pain. He wondered, given the events that followed, if healing had ever been the warlocks’ true intent.

Movement in the darkness below was followed by a snuffling sound, barely audible above the roar of wind and rain. The grimace that twisted Konrad’s features loosened its hold, and he whistled. A vast shadow rose above the level of the railing, pushing toward him with a whine and the stench of leather and wet fur.

Guten Abend, mein Freund.

Ungodly monsters they might be, but they were his monsters.

The drachenwolf pressed its snout into Konrad’s chest, shoving him back against the cabin’s curved metal exterior. Konrad chuckled and scratched the creature’s chin. Freiheit had always been his favorite, the mount Konrad considered his own.

The smile that threatened to claim his lips died stillborn. Freiheit was no proper mount, no cavalry horse. Leutnant Konrad von Elbing would never ride into battle in the fashion of his ancestors.

Because the hexenmeister had failed.

Because their sorcery had mutilated and ruined him.

Because their so-called miracles were lies and bargains with the devil. Lies that left him maimed and humiliated. He had wanted nothing more than to carry the von Elbing standard into battle, to add another chapter to their long and honorable family history. But with a ruined leg, there was only one way for him to get to the front lines. Die Fliegertruppen. Or at least that was what the Kapitän who broached the option of a Flying Corps commission had claimed.

Konrad sniffed. Had that officer been pressured to direct him to Die Fliegertruppen? Who would have the motivation to do so? Who would have the influence? Konrad had his suspicions.

He did not turn, but he sensed the foulness of spellsong seeping through the walls of the cabin behind him. There were times he swore he could smell sorcery. Konrad’s leg ached in sympathy, prompting a fresh flush of anger and resentment.

He remembered his father’s response when he presented his orders. Die Fliegertruppen? Why should a von Elbing serve alongside glorified mechanics, butchers’ boys, and farmers? What glory was there in flying over battles, dropping bombs on the real warriors below? What honor and courage was there in dueling when you could not see the blood or the eyes of your enemy?

As if his father had any right to judge after giving his only son into the care of sorcerers. Hours of pain and chanting bleeding into days of agony. The unclean thoughts of robed figures brushing against his own as they prodded and tugged, reshaping bone and muscle.

And for what?

A half-healed leg, permanently twisted. His every limping step bringing fresh torment.

And something else.

The zaubersängers’ spells had changed something inside him. He first felt it when his father’s favorite dog, Fritz, had come snuffling around Konrad as he sat in his wheelchair in the garden. There was an opening, a window through which he could perceive the hound’s mind. Konrad had known intuitively that he could form a connection with the animal.

And the dog had sensed it as well.

Curse the hexenmeister and their machinations.

Freiheit growled as Konrad’s hands clenched into fists, tugging hard on the fur of the drachenwolf’s neck. How many others had suffered the same fate? How many broken youths from Junker families had the sorcerers healed in order to create their riders?

Konrad forced his fingers to relax, to stroke Freiheit’s chin.

It had all been so promising at first. So many young men from proud bloodlines joining Die Fliegertruppen. Stirring speeches from General Ludendorff himself. Personal messages to their training cadre from the Kaiser. It had almost been enough to convince Konrad that they would be the basis of a new breed of warrior, knights of the modern age.

But then the sorcerers introduced the drachenwölfe.

Konrad remembered the beasts being led out of a hanger, remembered the gasps of horror from his comrades. Giant wolves with wings, products of a demented amalgam of magic and science. Abominations, huge and hideous. And the raw need of the creatures! Konrad sensed their desperation, their openness to bonding. They all did.

Several of the Junker youths were not present when they mustered the next morning. No reason was given for their disappearance, but those who remained knew.

Knew and hated themselves for remaining.

Because as revolting as the drachenwölfe were, they offered a chance at glory, a chance that most of the Junker youths had thought lost to them. Their minds and bodies may have been broken, but the drachenwölfe would allow them to fight.

And the drachenwölfe could fly.

The first time Konrad rode one of the creatures, he hated himself for loving it, for loving them, for embracing the bond that exposed him to their willingness to please and their ferocity in battle. Were the drachenwölfe not victims as well, their bodies and souls polluted by hexenmeister sorcery?

He wanted desperately to reject what the sorcerers offered, what they expected of him.

But he was more desperate to fight.

And for that, Konrad needed the drachenwölfe. Flying machines would have let him fight without the full use of his leg, but with a drachenwolf he could do even more. They all could. A corps of broken young men, carefully prepared to bond with monsters, to become one with them.

To fly and fight.

Soon enough, Freiheit.

The drachenwolf shuddered as he stroked it, and he stared into the creature’s eyes. They glinted in the light coming from the cabin, brown shot through with amber, a sun-dappled forest beneath a distant canopy. Konrad dismissed the momentary thought that the forest was where Freiheit belonged. The drachenwolf was a hunter more suited to ghosting through trees than clinging to the side of a zeppelin as it braved the stormy Atlantic on its way to glory and conquest in America.

If not for its size.

If not for the unnatural wings.

Konrad shook his head. But such is the world we are born into, Freiheit. The natural order no longer applies.

Chanting reverberated against the bulkhead behind Konrad, and he felt it moving, sinuous and malevolent.

The natural order is dead, mein Freund.

The drachenwolf whined, sensing the anger in Konrad, and pulled back. It tilted its great, shaggy head, rain mixed with slaver dripping from massive jaws.

Konrad forced a smile and held out his hand for the creature to sniff. There is nothing left for us in Europe, no honor in fighting and burning the dead Russian hordes. But in America… Rain ran over cheeks hot with blood. In America there will be great battles, opportunities for glory. Even the hexenmeister cannot pervert that.

Rory’s head swam as he and his fellow recruits stumbled out of the dance hall. His arms and legs were distant and numb, attachments he regarded with vague curiosity. Wearing a uniform carried its privileges, and one seemed to be that it rendered bartenders blind to age. Of course, being in a group where half of the men could be his grandfather didn’t hurt. Rory flexed his fingers experimentally and watched, fascinated, as they moved without his feeling them do so.

They’re all mad, those maniacs with their flying machines.

Rory had heard the same sentiment at least a dozen times in the course of the evening. Word of the flyover stunt was on everybody’s lips. He’d yet to say anything to his companions about his brother James being in command of the Air Wing squadron, but he knew it was only a matter of time before alcohol loosened his tongue. For now he was content to float along in their shadow, silent and reveling in the attentions of the citizenry, still buzzing over the test firing of the great cannon.

Corporal Sims, their leader for the evening, leapt onto the base of an Edison lamp and whirled around it, hand shading his eyes as if he were atop the mast of a sailing ship, sighting for land. He paused, leering, and held out an unsteady arm, pointing the way to their next destination. Rory cheered with his comrades as they lifted Corporal Sims down and staggered along the sidewalk in the direction he had pointed.

As they progressed, they gathered followers. Men who wanted to buy them drinks. Women who wanted drinks bought for them. Street hustlers and vagrants, a motley assemblage whose faces flashed before Rory in a blur of glistening flesh and swirling, boozy smoke. The chill evening air had carried a threat of snow, but Rory couldn’t feel it anymore. He couldn’t feel much of anything.

The arrival of the girl jolted him from his good-natured stupor. New faces swam past constantly, but hers demanded attention and received it immediately. And not only from Rory. Eyes like chips of ice peered out from beneath a cloud of pale hair that floated as if she were swimming through the night. She spoke in a soft sing-song, and Rory strained to make out her words, colored with an accent he could not identify. French maybe? Her clothes were too large and at least ten years out of date, but that only added to the exotic strangeness of her. Out of time. Out of place. Classical in a modern world.

Corporal Sims and one of the larger cannoneers swept in on either side of her, arms settling comfortably across her shoulders. She smiled slowly, but Rory saw the confusion in her eyes, the almost drunken distraction. Something urged him to help her, to rescue her from his companions. Was it the drink making him think like this? Rory’s vision swam, and his stomach churned with an evil queasiness. He tried to blink away the pale spots dancing behind the