Shattered Shields - eARC (7 page)

Rising Above

Sarah A. Hoyt

Freiherr Manfred von Richthofen knew he’d fallen into a trap when he came out of the lake with the boar in his jaws.

There was no moon. This far within the forest La Chaussee no artificial light intruded. But the vision of his dragon form was keen.

Several men waited in the shadows around the lake, stepping out of cover in the underbrush as Manfred rose out of the lake with his prey. The scant light of the distant moon was enough to establish that they wore the black uniforms of the
Zauberkunstniederwerfungsdienst
, commonly referred to as the ZND, the police that guarded against magical infractions in the ranks—and out.

He swallowed, a human gesture in this reptilian form. His mouth filled with the taste of the boar’s blood. For days he’d dreamed of blood. For months he’d longed for the freedom of his shifted self, for wings to the sky, for freedom and flight. While working as a courier in the trenches, surrounded by humans on all sides, smelling them, almost tasting them, he’d worked hard to discipline the dragon and convince it that the humans weren’t prey. But he longed to let go.

I could kill them all
, went through his head, as he rose farther out of the lake, his leathery red wings streaming water. It was followed by
I could fly away
.

Both were the dragon’s thoughts, instinctual. Manfred’s human mind knew the meaning of the wide-belled, sil weapons in the hands of the ZND. His late father’s voice rose in his memory. “Do not go imagining you’re invincible in your monstrous form, young sir. Do not go dreaming that nothing can overturn you. The ZND have weapons aplenty to deal with your kind, weapons that fire rays of magic poisonous to shifters, weapons that reduce you to your human form and worse.”

He swallowed again. The boar’s blood was like intoxicating wine to the dragon’s senses. He’d lain in wait for the animal in the shrubs around the lake, seen her go across the lake to the potato field, and back again, for three nights, before gratifying his desire.

“Freiherr von Richthofen,” a voice called, somewhere against the taller shadows of the centuries-old trees. Scents of pine and oak, of moss and growing grass played in the dragon’s nostrils, ineffective against the symphony of taste and the smell of blood in his mouth. Were it not for the blood he might have been able to tell how many ZND agents there were, and exactly where, by smell alone.

“You are under arrest for being a shape-shifter, a violation of the laws of Aethelbert,” the voice came again. “You are surrounded by men armed with weapons that are effective against your kind. You cannot take them all at once. Attempt nothing. Do not worsen your case.”

How can I make it worse? Under the law, being a shifter is a capital crime
. But Manfred knew well it could be worse.
It was one thing for his mother to read a dispatch saying her first born had been taken for a shifter and executed. Another for her to read newspaper reports of how Manfred, in dragon form, had killed fifty men before being brought to ground. One was a shame, but endurable. The other was Mama knowing all her moral teachings had failed.

Even if there were few enough ZND agents that a full-throated flaming would get them all, the commander’s voice from beyond the trees indicated there were men farther on. If they were armed with magical weapons, they could still hit him. He knew that the dragon recovered from wounds with miraculous capacity, but these weapons were designed against magical beings.

“Freiherr Manfred Albrecht von Richthofen!”

He took a deep breath. He closed his teeth hard on the boar’s body. Blood squirted down his throat and around his face. He opened his jaws and dropped the animal. It fell into the water with a splash. Men stepped back. The front row aimed weapons at him. From the sounds, another two rows stepped back and, likely, also aimed weapons at him.

There was nothing for it. He’d have to face his fate with what dignity he could muster. If they left him any dignity. He searched his mind for stories of shifter executions. Such things were usually done in secret and published only, if at all, as Herr so and so, executed at such and such a place for violation 46 of the laws of magic of Aethelbert—the oldest set of Germanic law codes in existence that dealt with magical violations. Manfred suspected few non-lawyers even knew what violation 46 was.

He forced his body to change. It was neither easy nor pleasant. Shifting into the dragon felt like when you turn in bed in your sleep, and take your ease, and spread yourself, finding your most comfortable place. Becoming human again always felt like shrinking in, like forcing oneself into an unnaturally small space.

It was easier when the dragon had been allowed his way, when the thirst for hunting and killing and for eating his prey had been sated.

Hungry, angry, scared…yet he must shift.

His father had sent him to Wahlstatt, a military academy, at the age of eleven. It was judged a strange choice by people who didn’t know of Manfred’s peculiar difficulties. His lady mother, who did, had cried and tried to dispute with her husband. She’d said that Manfred, surrounded by so many young people, whom his dragon-self would view as prey, would go insane. Constant vigilance would make it impossible for him to have even a moment of freedom. And besides, Wahlstatt trained cavalry officers, and horses shied away from the carnivorous forms of shifters.

“Do you think I don’t know that, Madam?” Richthofen’s father had answered. “The only hope of survival for your wretched son is to learn to control the beast. That is the only hope for his life and our honor. He will learn control or die.”

He had learned control. Other than an escapade when he’d flown to the top of the spire at the school and tied his handkerchief to the lightning rod, he’d never given anyone a chance to suspect his other form. And that one time, he’d passed it off as a daring adventure, claiming he’d climbed the spire. That had inspired punishment from the masters but admiration from the other boys.

Now he called on all his control, on all his strength. His body twisted. The excruciating pain of bone grinding on bone, of flesh and bone compacting, diminishing, made his mind a blank. He coughed, and the dragon’s immense, membranous red wings flapped against the cold water of the river, once, twice, in spasmodic contortions.

When he could command a coherent thought again, he was a man standing up to his neck in cold water. His teeth hurt. His head ached. His own blood flowed in his mouth. He must have caught his tongue in his teeth.

His own eyes, human and not at all dark-adapted, couldn’t see the ZND in the shadows, but he felt them there, in the dark, pointing their weapons at him. His bare feet dug into the pebbled mud of the lake bottom.

“If you’d step out with your hands up, Freiherr,” the commanding voice called from the shadows, seemingly closer to the lake.

They couldn’t think he was armed, could they? Not in water up to his neck, not when he’d just shifted from his dragon form.

But one thing he’d learned early on, from his father’s implacable discipline, long before his father had found out Manfred’s true nature, and then from the various school masters and commanders, it was that no good came of arguing with those who could hurt you.

Besides, he supposed having seen what he was, what he could become, the ZND were scared, and he couldn’t fault them. Fear was not often rational, and scared men can kill because they’re afraid.

Manfred lifted his arms above his head, feeling the night air bite, colder than the water. It made walking forward more difficult, robbing him of balance, but he struggled on. It should have been easier to walk when the water was down to his waist, but it wasn’t. By then the shaking had set in, the reaction-shaking from the shift.

By the time the water was down to his ankles, he could see a dozen men nearby, holding the silver weapons on him, and beyond them an older man, who didn’t need a weapon because he wore the star of the commander of the ZND.

Manfred stepped out of the water. Nausea had set in. Not unusual when the dragon had been hunting and feeding. The taste of blood in his mouth, the boar’s and his combined, made him wish to retch.

The men closed in as though he were still the dragon and terrifying, in military formation, surrounding him.

More than anything, Manfred was conscious of his nudity. Part of his human form, part of his self-control, was in the donning of his uniform. He’d worn a uniform since he was eleven. It was his armor against the world. “
Entschuldigung
!” he said, but his apology came out thin and reedy, shaking with his tremors. He meant to ask for the uniform, which he’d left rolled up and folded beneath a tree to the north of here.

One of the silver guns let loose.

His short blond hair stood on end, and it seemed to him as though he’d been flayed alive.

It was just a second. His senses shut down.

* * *

He woke up feeling bruised and beaten. He woke up midsentence, having just said something and having no idea what it was. He was sitting up on a hard chair. He was still naked and shivering.

It was like waking in the middle of a walking dream, something that had happened a lot when he was nine or so, just before the shifting had started.

Five men watched him intently—two on each side, with the silver, bell-shaped magical weapons trained on him. The other man stood behind a desk, a middle aged man with white hair and dark, suspicious eyes. They wore the uniform of the ZND.

A weak light shone above the desk. The walls were made of stone, and Manfred had the impression he was underground. They were probably afraid he’d shift and flame. Stupid. There wasn’t enough room for the dragon in here. To shift would be a complex way of committing suicide. Not that it didn’t have its temptations.

He ran his tongue inside his teeth. It felt as though he’d been gargling with blood, and he suspected he’d vomited, too, in the time before full consciousness. His mouth tasted like the gutters of hell. He was dying of thirst.

Before he could rasp out that he couldn’t remember the question, the older man’s eyes changed expression, and something almost a smile twisted the corner of his lips. “Ah,” he said. “I see you’re full awake now.”

“Yes,” Manfred said. “I beg your pardon. I don’t remember the question?” He lifted his head. He was not tall, but he was a muscular and well-formed man. He could be imposing.

He wished to heavens they’d give him his uniform back, but he supposed prisoners who’d revealed themselves half-beast and therefore not worthy of human dignity weren’t allowed to dishonor a uniform by wearing it.

The commander smiled. There was something like understanding in his eyes. “Freiherr,” he said, reasonably. “You know what the end of this is.”

“Yes,” Manfred said. “You execute me. I don’t understand this pleasant little excursion on the way there.” He turned, in a desperate gambit, and spoke to the nearest man holding a gun, as though he were one of his servants in the ancestral estates at Schweidnitz. “You. Get me a glass of water.”

By the corner of his eye, Manfred saw the commander nod. The man shrugged, holstered his weapon, and left through a door somewhere behind Manfred. Manfred heard the door open and close, but didn’t turn. He didn’t need the dragon’s senses to tell him there were more men back there, all armed.

The door opened and closed again, and the man returned. He proffered a tall glass of water to Manfred at the end of an outstretched arm, then jumped back to stand with his comrade, gun at the ready.

The commander waited until Manfred drank, which Manfred forced himself to do in small, disciplined swallows, and not in the wild gulp he wished to.

“Come now,” the commander said. “You know the law doesn’t just punish those who shift shapes into dangerous forms, but also those who willfully hide them.”

“My father knew,” Manfred said, and then bluntly, “He is dead.”

“So you told us,” the man said. “And…no one else? Your mother, your sister, your brothers—all ignorant of your true nature? How is that possible, in the closeness of family life?”

“I don’t know,
Herr
Commander.” He bent and set the glass near the leg of his chair. Wild images ran through his head, of throwing it at the commander, of disarming the man nearest him, of—

Of getting shot and eventually beheaded. A purpose that would shortly be accomplished without exertion on his part. At least he hadn’t given the rest of his family away. Better not tempt them to hit him with the magic discharge again. Clearly he could talk while out of his mind. Instead, he said, “You must tell me all about a close family life, Commander. My father sent me to Wahlstatt when I was eleven.”

The commander frowned at Manfred. It was clear this was not the answer he’d expected, nor one he knew how to respond to.

“No one at Wahlstatt suspected—” he began, in tones of disbelief.

“If anyone did, they didn’t tell me,” Manfred snapped. “Unfortunately, being a shapeshifter doesn’t give me the ability to read minds,
Herr
Commander. Or I would not be in this position.”

The commander made a click of his tongue on the roof of his mouth, then stared at Manfred. “You did not spend your seven years there without shifting shapes.”

“No.”

“And no one saw you?”

Manfred shrugged.

“You commanded a cavalry detachment,
Rittmeister
?”

“On the Eastern front, yes.”

“And not one of your subordinates suspected? And you managed the horse without its going mad with fright?”

Manfred sighed. “Obviously,” he said. “I managed the horses at Wahlstatt, too.”

The commander glared disapprovingly at Manfred. “I don’t believe you,
Freiherr
. There is nothing you can say to make me believe you. I know there is a group of you, a conspiracy of shifters, probably all dragon shifters, all known to each other. We found you because we detected the magic given off by changing shapes—but there was far more than yours in that area of the trenches. Our instruments detected it.”

Manfred shrugged. “And what has that to do with me? Perhaps I give off more magic than normal. My shifted form is large.”