Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2) by Aaron Schneider (best color ereader .TXT) 📗

one. The soldiers who had dragged them from their beds, dazed and disoriented, were the only ones present in the city, it seemed. They weren’t being conscripted to join a glorious army so much as to become the army, which now seemed absent. As this realization spread, a question formed in every brain worthy of the name amongst the conscripts:

Wouldn’t it be an easy thing to rush the guards?

The whispers made their rounds as elbows nudged and chins jerked in surreptitious agreement. Another ten minutes, perhaps another five, and they would descend upon their abductors in an avalanche of vengeful bodies.

But then the curtain parted, the lights on the stage came on, and the hidden coterie emerged.

At their head was a squat, waddling figure pushing what might have been a madman’s street organ in front of him. None of them were close enough to the stage to see the dwarf very well, but those who could acknowledged he did not look or move like anything they’d ever seen. Those closest noted his oddly drooping features and voluminous mossy beard and subsequently assumed the truncated man was in a costume to look so repellent. Eyes narrowed as he ambled to the right of the microphone, and those same eyes widened at what came behind the shuffling oddity.

Comrade Joseph Stalin, in a spartan uniform complete with long olive drab coat, strode forth, his movements sure but unhurried.

A pace behind him walked a pair of living effigies, a man and a woman, both statuesque and muscular, their bodies smeared in greasepaint so their skin glistened like polished ironwork and their hair seemed to be cast from bronze. The man was dressed in a worker’s coveralls and held a hammer over his head. The woman wore a bare-shouldered blouse and a peasant skirt, and over her head, she held a sickle.

Comrade Stalin approached the microphone and stood for a moment, untroubled at the weight of so many eyes upon him. The pair marching behind him came to a stop a stride or two behind, where they promptly crossed the hammer and sickle in the air over their glorious leader’s head. Neither showed the slightest discomfort or strain at maintaining the position.

Every eye, soldier or conscript, was upon the short mustachioed man before the microphone.

“Welcome, my countrymen,” Stalin began, his voice soft, bordering on nasal, his Russian shot through with a strong Georgian accent. “Welcome, sons and daughters of my beloved homeland.”

There was a subtle but distinct ripple across the conscripts, and Stalin acknowledged it with an easy nod.

“I know many of you are confused, or frightened, or even angry,” he continued, nodding again with conciliatory grace. “Not so long ago, you’d almost forgotten me, I think—the wayward son gone north. Then suddenly I returned, at the head of an army none dared challenge.”

More than a few of those in the square looked at the soldiers watching Stalin raptly, and their question was plain: what army?

“It seems I am to do what so many others have done in our embattled land: claim rule as a tyrant,” he said, and this was not a ripple but a wave of men and women drawing back, their expressions souring. “You would not be unjust to curse me and shake your fists at me. Even strike me down if such were the case.”

Here and there amongst the conscripts, men and women voiced their agreement, at first in whispers but then in growls and finally in shouts. Soon enraged knots formed in the ranks, as voices were raised with growing fury.

Stalin let it all wash over him, neither burdened nor smug. For all the world, he might have been a man waiting for his morning bus to work.

“Except I’ve not come as a conquering tyrant. I was elected to my current position in a special session proposed by former Prime Minister Zhordania.”

For a moment there was silence, if for nothing but the sheer audacity of the claim. Why would the prime minister do anything of the sort? Did he expect them to believe this?

“Many of you may not remember this, but Zhordania and I are both cut from the same cloth. Both of us long for the fulfillment of the long-denied Glorious Revolution, and it is with his blessing that I now assume the mantle of leadership here.”

The spell was broken, and the rows of unwilling conscripts began to collapse into mobs.

“I did not convince him with argument, but the reminder of a song,” Stalin said, his amplified voice nearly lost to the cacophony of the crowd. “Now I offer the same to you.”

Comrade Stalin turned ever so slightly and nodded at the dwarf, who laid a hand on the monstrous street organ’s crank. The mobs forming in the city square had begun to surge toward the thin line of soldiers standing transfixed before their leader. From within the organ came clanging, grinding noises, and then like a record player finding its way to a friendly groove, a blast of sound emerged. Trumpets, drums, and less recognizable instruments thundered across the square, slowing the advancing horde.

Then a choir a hundred, a thousand, a million strong seemed to rise out of the machine. In Russian, yet striking every ear as the mother tongue, strong voices, male and female, were raised in thunderous outcry.

Stand up, ones who are branded by the curse,

All the world's starving and enslaved!

Our outraged minds are boiling,

Ready to lead us into a deadly fight

The riotous herd of conscripts slowed until many were only shuffling forward if they moved at all. Each one heard the words and felt them too. The words bore down on them, pressing through to their bones and then deeper still. In a way that even religious aesthetics could not relate to, the lyrics spoke to their souls in a ruthlessly potent and undeniably compelling voice.

The dwarf continued to turn the crank and so continued the anthem, a hand-turned tidal wave of sound.

We will destroy this world of violence

Down to the foundations, and then

We will