by Al Ewing
The blades rang as Stahl circled around like a hawk sighting a mouse. He grinned. At this angle it would be simplicity itself to thrust his sword into the masked man's back. The most beautiful thought of all to him was the knowledge that he would finally be able to kill - to spill blood, take life, stop the heart - and there would be no consequence. If anything, he would receive a commendation for a noble action in battle.
He was salivating at the thought as he swooped.
Marcel Renoux was sweating - his sword flashed and rang as his every blow was expertly parried and driven back by the man in the bloody mask. He was going about this the wrong way, he knew - treating it as a duel on the ground, hovering in close, barely a foot above the wood of the stage, not using the natural advantage flight gave him. Time to cut and run, recover his breath and then circle in for the kill... but then his eyes were drawn over the masked man's shoulder, to Hugo Stahl, diving, his sword up and ready to drive in, to kill.
Marcel Renoux allowed himself a tight smile as he suddenly pressed back his attack. In addition to the glance over the shoulder, it was too much of a signal.
The man in the mask suddenly flattened and spun, pirouetting out of the path of the plunging blade while deflecting Renoux's thrust from the front, leaving the Frenchman wide open. Stahl cursed as the point of his blade missed the masked man by inches, to pierce Marcel Renoux's breastbone - and then his heart.
The masked man grinned and swung. If Hugo Stahl had been any less of a fighter, he might have stayed still, wasting precious moments attempting fruitlessly to tug his blade from Renoux's chest, even as the killing blow cleaved the base of his neck. But Hugo Stahl was not a man who wasted moments. The moment his sword burst Renoux's heart, he let go, cursing once again, and flew out of reach of his enemy's sword-strike. The masked man's blade passed through the air where Stahl had been and buried in Marcel Renoux's neck.
It had taken less than half a second. The tight smile was still frozen on Renoux's face, as the second, bloody smile gaped wide beneath his chin, spilling blood down his chest. His eyes glazed as his knees buckled and he crumpled to the stage, his blood pooling and seeping between the wooden boards. Neither the masked man nor Hugo Stahl gave him a second glance.
Instead, they watched each other, Stahl circling, weaponless, the masked man with sword in hand but tied to the ground. Those few stragglers who'd remained in the square watched them. They held their breath. The whole battle had taken... three minutes? Four? Backup would be on the way at any moment, and then the masked man would be torn apart and killed. A flock of wingmen would descend on him, or a rush of ground troops armed with machine-guns. He was only one man.
One man who had killed five wingmen without breaking a sweat.
Some in the crowd held their breath in anticipation. One or two held it in wonder. These would be the ones who would begin to spread the legend.
Stahl circled, wings beating slowly, creaking in the still air. Then he swooped down. Not towards the masked man, but towards the Luger. Wolfgang Rader's Luger, lying on the dusty ground where it had fallen. One bullet had killed Zumwald, but there were seven shots still in the magazine. He could keep out of range and pick the masked man off at his leisure.
The man in the bloodstained mask dropped the whip and reached forward to take Stahl's sword from Renoux's chest. It did not come easily, but it slid out quickly enough, in the time it took Stahl to swoop down to the ground and grab the pistol.
A gun versus a sword.
Underneath the stage, Alexis blinked. The pain in his head was abominable - a hot, stabbing, throbbing pain, that threatened to make him vomit. There was something he had to remember to do. Someone he had to murder.
His eyes focussed on Jesus Santiago.
Hugo Stahl smiled. His aim with a bullet was not quite as perfect as his aim with a sword, but still, he was as proficient with a Luger in his hand as any man in the Luftwaffe. This time he would take into account his foe's seeming ability to dodge bullets. He would lead his pigeon, aim to wound. Perhaps one of the legs, or the gut, and then a shot to the head when the quarry was downed... Stahl's finger's closed around the pistol. He whirled, aiming carefully, watching to see which way his enemy would break.
The masked man's arm moved like lightning as Stahl's sword left his hand.
Stahl blinked, reflected light flashing into his eyes, spoiling his aim. Light reflected from something arcing towards him - a sword, his own sword. The sword he had polished and sharpened that very morning, flying towards him as straight and true as an arrow, thrown like a javelin -
- and then he was lying on the ground and his left side wouldn't move and there was pain right through him and blood in his eyes. His right hand reached up and touched the length of steel jutting from his forehead. He tried to remember what had happened and he couldn't think of the words. He couldn't think of anything but grey. Grey turning to black.
Hugo Stahl's body began to convulse, so hard that his sword began to teeter. It was lodged firmly between his eyes, in the folds of his ruptured brain, but its weight slowly turned his head to the side, as if he was settling to sleep.
The masked man smiled.
It had really been an excellent throw.
Alexis narrowed his eyes and snarled, like an animal ready to pounce. His head was clearing and the agony was subsiding somewhat, but the anger still held him in a red fog. He understood what had happened. He had been in control of the situation. He had been showing the worthless subhuman scum who was boss, who was in charge. And then he'd been thrown around like a child's doll by some lunatic caveman and - and this really was the icing on the cake - he'd been brained by the severed head of one of his own men.
He gripped the hilt of his hunting knife hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He would be revenged for this humiliation, and revenged now. The masked madman could wait - wait for backup to arrive and blow him into gobbets with sustained bursts of machine-gun fire, and never mind any workers who happened to get in the way. But the priest - the trembling, mewling Father Jesus Santiago - he would die now. He would die now and die in the ugliest manner. By the knife.
The snarl became a smile. Alexis crept forward.
Father Santiago was trembling, shaking like a leaf, a shell of a man, a wreck. His back was agony and his vision was beginning to grey at the edges through loss of blood. All he could do as Alexis closed in for the kill was try not to look into his eyes. If he didn't look, perhaps he could let himself believe in a quick death. He mumbled a soft, desperate prayer under his breath, for the strength to face what was about to happen.
There was a noise like a gunshot as the bullwhip cracked through the air. The leather tail laid itself on Alexis' face, snapping harshly, cutting it open down the cheek. Alexis screamed and fell back, clutching at his face with both hands, trying to stem the blood. His face had been broken. The film-star looks were gone in an instant, scarred, imperfect, ruined, gone. To Alexis it was worse than death. It tore through him on a level deeper than thought, and instantly his legs began to pump and work, scrambling him back, rolling him to his feet, carrying him away from that place. Tears and blood mixed on his cheek. When thought returned to him, he would feel worse than shame. And that would come to coalesce into a cold, hard, righteous anger, burning with freezing fire.
In time.
Now, he ran, and cried, and behind their windows and through their curtains, the town watched.
The man in the bloody mask dropped from the stage, sword coming down towards Alexis in a killing stroke, but he was already gone. In the distance, there was the sound of creaking, cracking steam-powered wings. A flock of predators.
Father Santiago looked up at the masked man, his vision blurring. He had seen him before somewhere... the day of the wedding... he knew if he could only remember who it was, then maybe he could ask him to help. His lips were moving but no sound came out. If he could only remember the name...
Slowly, everything went black.
Jesus S
antiago collapsed.
Jesus Santiago sat up in his bed.
He was back in his little house, a tumbledown shack that looked abandoned from the outside - an illusion he'd carefully created to avoid detection. The shack had a large basement and it was here that Santiago slept. He often spent whole days down here, working by the light of one of the hundreds of old mass candles which he'd carefully stored and kept and rationed for nine years.
The shack was part of a long-abandoned satellite town of Pasito, a tiny knot of buildings nestled between cliffs two miles from the town itself. Even before the invasion, Santiago had been the only one who still lived there. Once it had been a thriving offshoot, a half-dozen strong new dwellings that might one day have become a town in their own right. But that was more than a century ago, and the cutting had failed to take root. Over a hundred years, families had moved back across the desert to Pasito, one by one, taking their belongings and often stripping their houses for wood until not even the frame was left. Even the old Santiago family home was in disrepair, so much so that it became a source of endless amusement to the townspeople. Indeed, Father Jesus very often began his covert sermons with a digression about how he really had to get around to fixing his roof or mending his windows or a hundred and one other small tasks that he never performed, drawing a little gentle mockery from his congregation before he moved onto more serious topics. Of course, they all knew the truth of the matter - Father Jesus Santiago was the most conscientious man you would ever meet, but he kept himself so busy with church and charity that he never had time to look after his dilapidated shack. It was only a place to get his head down for a few hours each night before he went back to the business of tending to his people. More often than not, he had spent his nights sleeping in the church.
The invaders had no way of knowing any of that. The one time they had bothered to search through the place, having stumbled across it while mapping a new patrol route through the desert, he had hidden in the basement, not moving, barely breathing, and they had missed the trapdoor that led down, underneath the rug. He had listened to them as they stood on top of it, discussing whether or not to burn the houses. Eventually they had decided to leave them be - it would be a waste of fuel and controlling the blaze would take away vital resources from the rest of the occupation. After four years of occupation, and with resistance at an all-time low, the scouting party had not even bothered to record the tumbledown shack on their map of the area.
And so Father Santiago's hovel became his hiding place, the base from which he conducted his own private war, without weapons or tactics - with nothing but his faith. It had turned his hair grey and driven deep wrinkles into the flesh of his face, and now it had carved throbbing scars into the muscles of his back.
His eyes focussed slowly, and he saw the stranger in the red mask looking at him with his head cocked.
"You've been out nearly two days, amigo. I thought you were a dead man."
Jesus swallowed, closing his eyes. He felt dead himself. The scars on his back still pulsed with heat. He reached to the bandages that had been wound carefully around his body. The wound had been dressed expertly. Where had the masked man learned that?
"How did..." he coughed hard, grimacing, as the swordsman handed him a cup of water. He drank in sips.
"How did I get you back? I remember where you used to live, Father Santiago. It's been a long time, but I still remember your battered old house."
"No, no... how did you know how to apply these bandages? The Djego I knew..." The stranger flinched as though he'd been struck. For a moment the only sound was the sound of the night wind in the desert above their heads. The priest was the first to speak again. "How did you know?"
The stranger rubbed the back of his head. "I forget. I forget so much, but it's all there for when I need it. I... I think I picked it up somewhere."
"Advanced first aid. Enough to save my life, and you 'picked it up somewhere'? What's happened to you, Djego?" Another flinch. Every mention of that name was a stab of a knife in his heart, a twist of a blade deep inside a wound that had scabbed and scarred over a thousand years ago. But the priest kept on. "I know who you are, Djego. What happened to you? What did you become?"
"Djego..." the masked man forced the word from his lip. "Djego is dead, Father Santiago. He was useless and stupid and pathetic. And he died and left good flesh behind. So I took his place." The eyes behind the mask met Santiago's then, and the priest breathed in sharply. There was nothing of Djego in them.
There was nothing human in them.
Something bigger had lodged there, something stronger and faster than a man, something with a laugh that could shake mountains and a spirit like hot iron and fire. Something better.
"I am his shadow. El Sombra."
This time the silence did not even have the benefit of the roaring desert wind to fill it.
Slowly, the priest began to smile.
"El Sombra. As good a name as any. All right, my friend, go and get us some coffee. We have a lot of work in front of us, you know?"
El Sombra relaxed, allowed himself a smile - one that promised great deeds and greater vengeance on the men who had stolen his life from him.
"Oh yes, amigo. A lot of work."
CHAPTER THREE
The Engine
Eisenberg was startled by the sound of the red telephone.
He had been leaning back in his creaking leather chair and watching the ceiling fan turn around and around. It seemed to him like four swords, cleaving the air with a regular slicing motion. He couldn't let go of the thought - the thought of the masked man, that bearded savage with his swords and his idiot grin and his terrible laughter, as though there was no finer thing to be doing on a hot summer's day than slaughtering good National Socialists. The masked man had killed his men, insulted his son and humiliated him. And now the red telephone. The red telephone that had never rung once, not in all the time he had been here, not until now.
Eisenberg took a morbid satisfaction in the thought that the ringing tone was as he had always imagined - like the rattling of metal bones, the jangling of some obscene talisman. He stared at the receiver as it vibrated in its cradle and considered ignoring it, but of course he could not. He might as well take the dagger from his belt and cut his own throat.
His arm seemed to reach on its own as he answered.
"Berlin calling, Generaloberst."
"Yes." His mouth was dry, his tongue like paper. There was silence at the other end of the line for a very long time.
"Generaloberst. Guten abend."
The sound.
A terrible chorus of clicking and crackling and buzzing, like some great mechanical insect from a child's nightmare slowly crawling up the telephone line to spit its venom. The scraping of metal on metal and glass on glass. And forever in the background the noise of the pistons, of hammers beating down in the foundries of Hell, the grotesque music of the machine.
This was the voice of his Führer.
"G-guten abend, Mein Führer." He swallowed. His temples throbbed. Fear took him. Perhaps he could bluff it out. The Führer surely would not yet know of -
"I understand there has been a disturbance of sorts."
There was no bluffing. He was a fool to even think it. The Führer knew, as he knew everything. The lightning strikes the tall trees and not the blades of grass, he thought bitterly. Which of the bastards had sold him out? Master Plus, perhaps, the fat little jailer, so aware of the precariousness of his position, so desperate to do anything to cement it. Or Master Minus, the sadistic little freak. The image of his son's face rose in his mind. Alexis, with his angel face, Alexis who left dead girls for the room service to pick up. The obedient second in command. Did he not have the most to gain? Would his own son be so ruthless as to - ?
"I am not used to being kept waiting, Generaloberst."
"I - I am sorry, Mein Führer. I was merely - merely gathering my thoughts so as to..."
The metal and glass mad
e the approximation of a chuckle.
"You are afraid that this afternoon's little display will be the end for you."
Eisenberg closed his eyes, trying to ignore the whine and scream of the machine. "Jawohl, Mein Führer. Just so."
"Allow me to tell you a story, Herr Generaloberst. For a short time in Vienna, I had a room in a cheap boarding house. There were rats that came in the night to steal food and creep over my bedding. And so I put down poison. In the morning, I woke to find four or five dead around the skirting board, but there was one - as big as a cat. It was on its haunches, nibbling away at a lump of the poison - the same poison that had killed its brothers! Is it not a curious thing, Herr Generaloberst?"
Eisenberg's knuckles were white against the red of the phone. "Yes, Mein Führer. Very curious."
"I beat that rat to death with the heel of my boot, Herr Generaloberst. The poison had worked so well on so many, but there will always be one for whom it does not work. I learned that in my cold little room in Vienna, and many times since. You are learning it now. It is a fact of life, Mein Herr. There is always one."
Eisenberg could not breathe. The Führer was not relieving him of his post. There had been no order to return to Berlin. The great man understood. He sympathised! "I will crush him, Mein Führer. My men will not rest until he is in pieces!"
"Projekt Uhrwerk has come too far now to be allowed to falter, Generaloberst. By all means, make the attempt. But should the poison fail, do not feel offended if I provide you with the heel of a boot."
"Do you mean...?"
"Der Zinnsoldat is being readied for use."
"Mein Führer! I do not deserve such..."
"That will be all. Guten Abend, Generaloberst."
"Guten Abend, Mein Führer!"