For a few seconds after the fall, the courtyard held its breath.
Dust rolled over the grass and broken paving. Stone clicked and settled. Above, the hole torn through the tower wall gaped open to the night, while the southwestern tower burned behind it, flames licking from shattered windows and throwing orange light across the pale inner walls.
Moonlight and firelight mixed in the drifting haze.
At the center of it all lay Oskar.
Then his hand moved.
One black gauntlet pressed into the earth. Stone slid from his shoulders as he forced himself onto one knee, then slowly rose from the rubble and from the crushed remains of Colonel Arvid Mikhailovich Kallionen beneath him.
Pain moved through him in dull, heavy pulses.
His armor had held, but the bullets had still struck like hammers. His ribs ached. One shoulder burned. Blood ran from the wound in his neck, dark across the gorget and breastplate. Fresh dents and bright scrapes marked the black plates where Russian rifle rounds had spent themselves against steel.
Oskar rolled his shoulder once.
Then the other.
His neck shifted with a faint metallic creak. He flexed his fingers, drew a slow breath through the skull helm, and straightened to his full height.
Dust slipped away from him.
And then he saw them.
Russian guards were spreading around the courtyard.
They came from doors, passages, and tower entrances, rifles raised, bayonets fixed, boots scraping over stone. None came close. They formed a rough square along the courtyard edges, keeping distance from the black-armored giant who had fallen from their tower and risen from the body of their commander.
More appeared in the galleries above. Others leaned from windows with rifles angled down.
They had expected Germans at the trenches. Aircraft in the sky. Artillery from the south.
Not this.
Not the Iron Prince standing in the heart of Riga Castle before dawn, skull helm lit by moon and fire, blood running from his neck, Kallionen crushed beneath him.
Fear moved through the guards before orders did.
Oskar saw it in their hands, in their rifles, in the way their eyes fixed on him and refused to look away. To them he was no longer quite a man. A demon, perhaps. A punishment. Some black German thing that had come through stone and fire and refused to die.
Oskar only stood there, calm, breathing slowly.
Utterly unconcerned.
That frightened them more than anger would have.
A Russian officer stepped forward from the line, revolver in hand, face pale but voice sharp enough to carry.
"Surrender, Iron Prince!" he called. "You are surrounded."
Oskar did not answer at once.
Above him, soft impacts touched the roof tiles. Harnesses snapped loose. Boots scraped stone. Dark figures landed along the parapets and towers, spreading out in silence.
The Third Company.
His men.
The Russians noticed too late. One parachute drifted across the moon, and a guard glanced up. Then another. Then more.
Oskar turned his skull face back toward the officer.
"No, sir," he said. "You are mistaken."
He lifted one armored hand and pointed directly at him.
"It is you who are surrounded."
The officer frowned.
"What—"
Oskar's voice dropped.
"Die."
The word had barely left him when the officer's head vanished.
A sniper round struck him squarely in the forehead and burst out through the back of his skull, painting the pale courtyard wall with blood, bone, hair, and grey matter. For the smallest fraction of a second, his body remained upright, revolver still hanging uselessly in his hand.
Then he collapsed.
Silence lasted less than a heartbeat.
Then the Third Company opened fire.
The rooftops erupted.
From the parapets and tower edges came the hard, controlled hammering of machine guns. Carbines cracked in rapid rhythm from the upper walls, shorter and sharper, dozens of muzzles flashing in disciplined bursts. Sniper rifles spoke less often, but each shot mattered. A head in a window. An officer turning to shout. A man lifting a rifle toward the roof.
Gone.
The Eternal Guard were not heavily armored tonight, not compared to how they would have dressed for a ground assault. The drop had demanded lighter gear. Yet even in that reduced kit they looked like black modern phantoms above the courtyard, shoulder plates marked with the number three, imperial eagles catching firelight in brief flashes as they moved from angle to angle.
Twelve-man assault squads held the rooflines.
Two-man sniper teams watched the windows.
Machine-gunners swept the courtyard edges.
Grenadiers waited for crowds.
The Russians below had only just begun to understand that the monster in the courtyard had not been trapped.
He had been bait.
Oskar stood in the middle of it all, still as a black statue beneath moon and flame, while the men who had surrounded him were cut apart from above.
The Russian formation dissolved instantly.
Men jerked backward, spun sideways, folded at the knees. One guard lifted his rifle toward the roof and died before the barrel cleared his shoulder. Another stumbled two steps with both hands pressed to his throat, blood pumping between his fingers. A third was struck so hard that his rifle flew from his hands and clattered across the stones.
The machine guns moved in short, professional sweeps.
Not wild fire.
Not panic.
A burst across the northern line. Pause. Correction. Another burst into the men trying to reach the eastern archway. The gunners did not waste ammunition trying to make noise. They cut lanes through bodies and moved on.
Carbines filled the spaces between.
Fast, sharp, constant.
Russian guards who survived the machine-gun bursts tried to run for the doors and passages leading back into the castle. Fear packed them together. Shoulder against shoulder. Boots slipping on dust and blood. Men shoved through the same narrow mouths, suddenly more afraid of the open courtyard than of trampling one another.
That was when the grenade launchers began.
The first round left the rooftop with a deep, ugly thump.
It dropped into a doorway where half a dozen guards had bunched together and detonated in a flash of smoke, splinters, and torn flesh. The archway spat men backward into the courtyard. One body struck the stone face-first and did not move. Another crawled two paces without legs before collapsing.
A second launcher fired from the gallery opposite.
Thump.
The round burst among a cluster trying to force their way into a stairwell. Dust and blood-mist blew outward in a hot cloud. Rifles spun through the air. A bayonet clanged against the paving and skidded to Oskar's feet.
Wherever the Russians crowded, the grenadiers punished them.
Wherever they scattered, the carbines found them.
Wherever they tried to lead, the snipers ended them.
A guard captain appeared at a second-floor window, saber raised, mouth open to rally the men below. A sniper round punched through his cheek and hurled him backward into the room behind him. Another man leaned out from a gallery with a lantern in one hand and a pistol in the other. His eye disappeared before he could fire.
The castle's windows became traps.
The doors became graves.
The courtyard became a killing box.
And Oskar stood at its center.
He did not smile. He did not cheer. He did not take pleasure in it. His gaze moved slowly over the slaughter with the calm of a man confirming that a plan was functioning exactly as designed. The Russians had rushed out to surround him. They had looked down at the beast in the courtyard and forgotten to look up.
That had been enough.
Within moments, the ring was gone.
What remained was ruin.
Bodies lay twisted along the courtyard edges. Blood ran between paving stones and into the grass. Smoke drifted from shattered doorways. Wounded men crawled blindly toward walls, fountains, arches, anything that looked like cover. A few threw down their rifles and fled back into the castle with empty hands, faces white and eyes wide with the kind of fear that would live longer than they did.
The shooting slowed.
Then stopped.
A final carbine cracked from the roof.
A Russian soldier dragging himself toward a fallen rifle went still.
Then there was only echo.
It rolled around the inner walls of Riga Castle, climbed the burning tower, slipped out over the rooftops, and faded into the dark city beyond.
Oskar remained where he was.
Smoke passed around him. Firelight ran along the edges of his armor. His skull helm turned once, slowly, toward the ragged hole in the tower wall from which he had fallen.
A wounded Russian soldier had crawled close enough to look down.
He saw the courtyard.
He saw the bodies.
He saw Oskar standing untouched in the center of the trap while black-armored soldiers with the number three on their shoulders held the rooftops above him.
For one frozen second, the man stared.
Oskar looked back.
The soldier vanished from the hole and ran.
Oskar let him.
Good.
Let him tell them.
Terror moved faster than cavalry.
"Your Highness!"
Captain Carter's voice came down from the parapet.
Oskar lifted his head. Carter crouched above him with several men of Third Company already spreading along the roofline. His face was hidden behind mask and goggles, weapon still in hand, but his voice carried something beneath its discipline.
Concern.
"Your Highness, are you all right?" Carter called. "Are you wounded?"
A pause.
"You fell like a stone. I feared the worst."
Oskar gave a short laugh.
"We know each other too well for that, Captain. I am quite alive. After all, I am the Iron Prince."
Then he touched the side of his neck.
His gauntlet came away dark with blood.
He looked at it for a moment in the firelight and gave a quieter laugh.
"Though it seems I have been reminded, yet again, that I still bleed. Bullets are unpleasant. Bayonets somewhat more so."
A few Eternal Guard descending into the courtyard by rope and stair gave the faintest reaction.
Not laughter exactly.
Close enough.
Oskar lowered his hand.
"But the mission remains the mission."
His voice hardened.
"Secure the castle. Secure the bridge. Find the demolition charges and disarm them. Establish the perimeter."
The men were already moving.
"If Russians flee without weapons, do not waste time chasing them. Let them run. Let them carry what they have seen through the city. Fear is a weapon too, and tonight we shall use it."
Carter struck one fist to his chest.
"Your will be done, Your Highness."
Around him, the others answered with the same gesture.
Then the Third Company split apart.
Some went for the stairwells and inner corridors. Others secured the galleries, doors, and windows overlooking the courtyard. Two teams moved at once toward the bridge approach, demolitions men among them. A signalman dropped to one knee and began uncoiling his set. A medic looked once at Oskar's neck wound, clearly considering whether duty required him to insist.
Oskar turned his skull face toward him.
The medic chose wisely and moved on.
Oskar bent and took up his sword.
The great blade rose from the paving, wet and dark from the tower fight. He slid it back into the sheath beneath the sweep of his red cape, leaving only the massive hilt visible above his shoulder.
Then he struck one steel fist into the other.
The clang cut through smoke, fire, and the distant alarm beginning to rise beyond the castle walls.
Oskar turned toward the interior.
And went back inside.
The attack was spreading.
Not all of Third Company had landed on Riga Castle itself. Across the dark district around the bridge, more parachutes dropped through the moonlit sky—onto roofs, into alleys, across courtyards, against garden walls, onto cobbled streets, and near both ends of the stone bridge.
Some landed cleanly and were fighting within seconds.
Others landed badly.
One man struck a wall shoulder-first, rolled hard over the cobbles, then dragged himself upright with a curse and waved off help. Another caught on a lamppost and hung there in muffled fury until two comrades cut him down. A third clipped the edge of a roof, bounced into a wagon, broke half the planks beneath him, and still crawled out reaching for his carbine.
They were elite troops.
Not circus performers.
So they adapted.
Two-man sniper teams claimed rooftops and upper windows overlooking the river, bridge, and nearby streets. The shooters settled in. The spotters searched the darkness. Russian patrols began dying before they knew where the Germans had landed.
Twelve-man assault squads formed below.
They stacked against walls, checked corners, crossed alleys in pairs, and moved from doorway to doorway with controlled speed. Carbines up. Machine guns covering. Grenade launchers held low until needed. Some squads occupied apartment buildings with views over the bridge approaches. Others took warehouses, street corners, and stairwells around the castle, building overlapping pockets of control in the dark.
Riga around them was strangely hollow.
The civilian population in this district had been evacuated weeks before, leaving behind shuttered windows, barred doors, empty courtyards, and rooms where furniture still sat but no voices remained. No carts. No children. No drunken late-night singing. No market noise. No life.
Only soldiers.
And now, gunfire.
Small Russian patrols died in ones and twos.
A pair rounding a warehouse corner fell beneath a sniper team before either man saw the roof above. A squad of six running toward the castle was cut apart from a second-floor window. Another group tried to regroup behind a low wall and was torn open by a machine gun hidden in a doorway shadow.
The alarm spread faster than the fighting.
"The castle!"
"The Germans are here!"
"Paratroops!"
"The bridge!"
Men began running from every direction—sentries, harbor detachments, reserve squads, messengers, officers half-dressed and furious, soldiers dragged from billets with rifles in hand and no idea where to point them. At first they came in knots. Then in streams.
The fire in the southwestern tower could be seen now.
The shooting could be heard across the district.
And through the streets ran the survivors from the castle, breathless and wild-eyed, shouting that the Black Legion had fallen from the sky and that the Iron Prince was already inside Riga.
All of it drew the Russians inward.
Toward the bridge.
Toward the castle.
Toward the trap Oskar meant to hold until the army arrived.
Then, before the swelling Russian response could fully crash against the scattered spearheads of Third Company, a flare went up.
It hissed from near Riga Castle and climbed into the night, burning fierce, bright, and red.
Up past the rooftops.
Up past the towers.
Up past the river mist.
Until the whole black district seemed to lift its face toward it.
The flare hung over the sleeping city like a bloody star.
And men stopped where they were and stared.