Oskar watched the bodies drift past.
The Vistula carried them south beneath the clear August sun, turning them slowly in the current as though the river had accepted the dead as simply another burden to bear. Most were Russians. Oskar could tell even where uniforms were gone, for many of the soldiers had been stripped almost naked before being thrown into the water. Boots, tunics, belts, ammunition pouches, rifles—anything the Black Legion could clean, repair or use again had been taken. There was no reason to bury equipment with a dead enemy when another rifle might arm an auxiliary later and another cartridge might still kill.
The militia were easier to distinguish. Many remained in civilian coats, work clothes or whatever they had worn when someone handed them a weapon and told them Warsaw had to be defended. There had been little worth recovering from them once the rifles were removed, and so their clothes remained upon their bodies as the river carried them away.
Not every corpse had been placed there by German hands. Many had drowned during the collapse around Warsaw and Modlin, trying to cross rivers already choked with frightened men. Oskar could imagine the panic easily enough: boots filling with water, equipment dragging men down, wounded soldiers clinging to boats already too crowded to float. Some had probably died without ever being struck by a German bullet.
Others had reached the Vistula only after they were dead.
The Black Legion had thousands of corpses to remove and too little time to treat every enemy body with ceremony. German dead were identified and buried properly. Russians were dealt with according to necessity. Mass graves where convenient, lime where required, and when neither was practical, the river.
A body took seconds to throw into the current.
Then there was another.
Oskar understood the reasoning because it was his own kind of reasoning. Warsaw had to be cleared before disease followed battle. Roads had to reopen. Men digging graves could instead be repairing bridges, moving ammunition or building the airfields upon which the next advance depended. The dead no longer cared what became of them. Perhaps the river would carry some toward families who could recognize them. Perhaps fish and birds would feed upon others. Perhaps they would sink into mud and become part of the soil beneath Poland.
War wasted enough.
There was little purpose in wasting the dead as well.
Yet understanding it did not make the sight easier.
A young Russian soldier drifted past on his back, stripped to his underclothes, one pale arm trailing beneath the surface. Oskar wondered what had brought him here. Perhaps he had believed sincerely in the Tsar and Russia. Perhaps he had been conscripted and obeyed because refusing meant punishment. The militia troubled him differently. A Polish labourer defending his street might have hated Russia and Germany equally. A father might have taken a rifle simply because his wife and children were somewhere behind him. A boy might have fought because everyone around him was fighting and terror had made the decision before reason ever could.
There were too many reasons men killed one another, and some of them were painfully understandable.
That was the tragedy.
Oskar could sympathize with them and still know that his soldiers had been required to kill them. They had stood between the Black Legion and its objective. They had fired rifles, manned barricades and chosen—or been forced—to become part of the battle. Once that happened, sympathy changed nothing.
He looked down at his reflection between the passing bodies. Something about all of it was wrong in a way deeper than death itself. Not merely immoral. Not merely tragic.
Wrong.
He had spent more than a decade carrying memories of another history inside his head. He knew where armies had once marched, which cities had fallen and when, which men were supposed to live long enough to make decisions years from now.
This was not that world anymore.
Warsaw was not supposed to belong to Germany in August 1914.
He remembered the date too clearly. In the history from which he had come, German troops entered Warsaw in August 1915, after another year of slaughter had exhausted Russia's position in Poland. The Second Army had been destroyed at Tannenberg, certainly, but the Eastern Front had not disintegrated like this. German armour had not driven toward the Vistula. Aircraft had not hunted Russian armies from the sky. Warsaw had not become a battlefield while Europe was still barely learning how large the war would become.
Everything was moving too quickly.
Every victory Oskar achieved tore another page from the history he remembered.
Until now, memory had remained perhaps his greatest strategic weapon. Tanks and aircraft could be destroyed. Factories could burn. Generals could misunderstand him. But Oskar knew what governments had once done, which men had risen, where armies had moved and which disasters had waited beyond decisions that seemed reasonable at the time.
Now that certainty was bleeding away.
He still understood Russia in broad strokes. Ten field armies existed or were being formed across the Empire, with still greater numbers waiting behind mobilisation. The Second was gone as a coherent force. Rennenkampf's First remained battered and deprived of much of the artillery with which it had begun the campaign. The Sixth protected Saint Petersburg and the Baltic approaches, while the Seventh watched Odessa and the southern coast. The Ninth and Tenth would eventually become dangerous, but they were still assembling, still drawing men from railway stations and equipment from depots, still becoming armies rather than merely names written on mobilisation schedules.
The southern Russian armies concerned him next. Warsaw had opened a wound above them, and eventually they would understand what it meant. If the Black Legion drove southeast, their communications and northern flank might become impossible to defend. They would have to retreat or risk being cut apart.
Indeed, they were already beginning to retreat.
Oskar could read that much in the smoke.
Russia had fallen back upon something ancient and terrible: trading land and people for time. The retreating authorities were stripping the country before them, taking livestock, machinery, railwaymen, workers and military-age men eastward while burning whatever could not be moved. Bridges disappeared. Railways were torn apart. Grain stores became smoke. Generations of labour were being sacrificed because Russian generals would rather inherit ashes themselves than leave Germany a functioning province.
Oskar understood the strategy perfectly. What he no longer understood were all the decisions hidden inside it.
There were gaps now, variables. Men making choices no history book had ever recorded because those choices had never existed before.
Lenin was another such gap.
Oskar had watched him for years, understanding better than almost anyone alive what that obscure revolutionary might someday become. Then Lenin had moved from Switzerland into France, and the trail had simply vanished. No reliable sightings, no reports Oskar trusted, nothing. The man had disappeared into a Europe already convulsing beneath changes he could never have anticipated.
Would there still be a Russian Revolution? Would defeat bring it sooner?
Would Russian nationalism instead harden around the Tsar because Germany had humiliated the Empire so brutally? Would Lenin return to Russia at all? Would another revolutionary replace him? Would the entire sequence of February, October, civil war and Bolshevik victory disappear because Oskar had altered too many of the pressures that once created it?
He did not know, and that frightened him more than another million Russian soldiers.
An army could be seen. Aircraft could find it. Railways revealed its movement, radios betrayed orders and supply lines imposed limits even upon empires.
An idea could disappear into a cellar and emerge years later carrying a rifle.
Oskar looked again toward the river.
What was he supposed to do now?
He could resume the advance once the Black Legion was ready and attempt to destroy another Russian army before it properly formed. He could turn south and help Austria-Hungary break the armies in Galicia. He could fortify Warsaw, shorten his own supply lines and let Russia exhaust itself against German firepower. He could seek peace while the shock of Warsaw was still fresh and attempt to end the eastern war before everything became worse.
Every answer contained corpses. Different numbers. Different uniforms. Different rivers. But corpses all the same.
Nor were the dead only Russian.
The Black Legion had buried its own from East Prussia to Warsaw. Men who had trained beneath the institutions Oskar created, trusted the weapons he had given them and followed commanders he had appointed now lay beneath carefully marked German graves. Some had died almost instantly. Others had screamed beneath field surgeons' hands before infection, blood loss or shattered organs finished what Russian bullets had begun.
They had believed in him, and that thought hurt more than the Russian dead.
Oskar had spent days moving at the edge of the fighting with the Eternal Guard, crossing villages, forts and streets until killing became a repeated physical act rather than an abstraction. He had opened doors and found armed men behind them. He had broken strongpoints. He had watched homes burn and civilians flee while artillery shook the ground beneath their feet.
And he had killed, again and again.
Now Germany celebrated while the Vistula carried bodies beneath the banners of victory. This, Oskar thought, was what triumph looked like after the photographers had gone home.
He lowered his eyes to his hands and realized they were trembling.
At first he blamed exhaustion, but he knew better. Memories came instead: the feel of resistance giving way beneath his grip, the terrible lightness of men against his strength, the way his sword had sometimes passed through flesh with scarcely more than a tremor through the hilt. Human beings had once seemed solid to him. War had taught him how easily they came apart.
That frightened him more than the killing itself. Not that he had been capable of it. That he had grown accustomed to it.
For several seconds Oskar simply stared at his hands. They were enormous, stained with blood and grime, and suddenly seemed less like parts of a man than tools fashioned for violence. His mind supplied images he did not ask for: bodies falling, bones breaking, faces disappearing beneath armour and steel.
His heart began to pound.
Beneath its ordinary rhythm came the second pulse he had first truly understood at Soldau.
The Heart of Light.
He could find it easily now. Crimson burned through him with strength and aggression. Gold lay beneath it, dense and enduring, reinforcing flesh and bone beyond anything nature should have allowed. At the centre remained that small white radiance, warm and strangely gentle, repairing what the others strained and calming something deeper inside him.
Oskar closed his eyes.
What was it doing to him?
He had grown stronger for years, larger and harder until ordinary men increasingly looked fragile beside him. Bullets failed to stop him. Wounds healed too quickly. He could perform acts on a battlefield that frightened even soldiers hardened to death.
For one ugly moment he wondered whether the Russians were right.
Perhaps there really was something monstrous about him.
His fingers curled around his opposite wrist until the pressure hurt. The pain helped. It was simple and familiar, something belonging to flesh rather than myth. He breathed slowly until the trembling began to fade.
He could not allow himself to disappear into that thought.
Hundreds of thousands of men were depending upon his decisions. Germany was celebrating because they believed he knew where he was leading them. His family waited for him to come home. Soldiers who had already buried friends would follow him again the moment he gave the order.
He was allowed to doubt himself. He was allowed to hate what he had done. But he could not permit either feeling to make him useless.
A heavy snort sounded behind him.
Oskar opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder.
Shadowmane lay in the grass with all the dignity of an overturned artillery piece, rolling lazily onto his back before dropping onto his side again. The enormous stallion rubbed his neck through the grass, utterly unconcerned with the dead passing down the river.
Oskar stared at him.
"Oh, shut up."
Shadowmane raised his head from the grass and turned one dark eye toward him, ears flicking forward.
"Easy for you to say, whatever the hell you are becoming, old friend. Half the Russians probably think you're one of the horses of the Apocalypse by now."
The stallion answered with another heavy snort, louder than the first, and tossed his head as though Oskar had said something profoundly foolish.
Oskar narrowed his eyes. "Don't look at me like that."
Shadowmane merely flicked his tail.
And despite himself, Oskar understood.
Shadowmane had changed as well. At Soldau, Oskar had sensed that same impossible light within him, far weaker than the force burning inside his own heart but unmistakably related to it. Over the years the stallion had become enormous, unnaturally strong and disturbingly intelligent, capable of violence that would have seemed impossible in the animal he had once been.
Yet Shadowmane did not torment himself over what that strength meant.
He protected those he trusted. He destroyed what threatened them. And when the danger was gone, he returned to being exactly what he was—eating, sleeping, rolling shamelessly through the grass and demanding attention whenever it suited him.
Perhaps Oskar had been making the question more complicated than it needed to be.
Strength did not make a monster.
Neither did the capacity for violence.
What mattered was why that violence was used, what stood behind it, and what remained of a man once there was no enemy left in front of him.
Some of the pressure in Oskar's chest finally eased.
"All right," he murmured. "Point taken."
Shadowmane lowered his head again and tore another mouthful of grass from the earth with the calm satisfaction of a creature that had apparently understood this long before Oskar had.
A faint smile touched Oskar's mouth.
He still did not know whether he was becoming something mankind had never been meant to become. He did not know what the Heart of Light wanted, whether it wanted anything at all, or where the road ahead would eventually take him.
But there were people counting on him to walk it. That would have to be enough.
Oskar drew a long breath and pushed himself upright. The broad stone seemed suddenly small beneath him as he rose beside the Vistula, the towel still wrapped around his waist and the sunlight revealing the blood, grime, bruises and scars the campaign had left across his immense body.
Then the towel slipped free and collapsed onto the stone behind him, leaving Oskar completely naked before the Vistula. There was nothing graceful or delicate about the sight. His body possessed the brutal abundance of some old fertility god imagined by soldiers rather than priests, every part of him built according to the same excessive proportions. Between thighs thick with muscle hung a heavy, thick shaft, substantial even in complete repose, its length marked by raised veins that disappeared beneath the surrounding skin before gathering toward a broad, fleshy head. The glans was disproportionately full and blunt, wider than the shaft beneath it and rounded almost like the heavy head of some primitive club, its swollen rim clearly defined even while he stood entirely unaroused. Beneath it hung an equally oversized scrotum, loose with its own weight and containing testicles large enough to make the whole arrangement seem less like ordinary anatomy than another example of whatever strange force had decided moderation had no place in Oskar's body.
Surrounded by death, the sheer vitality of him seemed almost obscene. Here stood a body overflowing with strength, blood and reproductive life while mutilated men drifted past only metres away. His hands, large enough to crush skulls, hung beside the same flesh capable of creating children, and the contrast carried a grimness almost too obvious to ignore. Oskar was heir to an empire and already father many times over, his body seemingly constructed with insulting enthusiasm for continuing his bloodline, yet he had spent the previous week ending other men's bloodlines by the hundreds.
Sunlight caught the veins beneath his pale skin and made the pulse visible in places, blood travelling powerfully through a body that seemed determined to remain alive regardless of how much death surrounded it. The same primitive vitality was visible in his exposed sex: the thick shaft hanging heavily between his legs, the broad head resting beneath its own weight, the heavy sac beneath it shifting faintly with every breath and movement. None of it possessed any awareness of the horror occupying the mind several metres above. Flesh simply lived because living was what flesh had been made to do.
Nature had built him with an almost grotesque capacity for life.
War had taught that body how efficiently it could destroy it.
Oskar himself paid his nakedness no attention. He stepped into the Vistula and felt the warm August water close around his feet before rising gradually over his ankles. With every step the current pressed against calves thicker than many men's thighs, while dried blood began loosening from his skin and trailing behind him in thin red ribbons that quickly vanished into the greater flow of the river.
The water reached his knees and then climbed over his thighs. A few steps farther and the current touched the heavy flesh hanging between them, lifting it slightly before swallowing shaft, broad head and weighted scrotum beneath the surface. The crude abundance of the Hohenzollern bloodline disappeared into the same river carrying broken Russian bodies downstream, life and death separated by little more than a few metres of clear water.
For one bleakly absurd instant, Oskar thought the Vistula seemed more willing to yield before him than the Russian Army had been.
The thought disappeared almost as soon as it formed.
He continued deeper until the water reached his hips and then his abdomen, running through the deep divisions of muscle across his body. Blood washed from his hands and vanished downstream. Soot loosened from his chest. Mud dissolved from his legs, and tiny remnants of other human beings that had dried unnoticed against his skin softened and drifted away.
A corpse floated several metres from him, turning slowly until one pale face briefly looked toward the sky.
Oskar watched it pass.
Then he stepped farther into the same clear river carrying the dead south.