The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (25 page)

“You look like you could sleep for days,” said Marsh.

“It’s all these damnable air raid alerts. Getting so that a fellow can’t get a night’s rest any longer. You’d think the Luftwaffe had declared a war on sleep. You’re looking a bit ragged yourself.”

“We sent Agnes away yesterday.”

“Oh, dear. It won’t be forever.”

“Wondering what von Westarp’s brood will do next, that’s what keeps
me
awake at night.”

“We’ll find out soon enough, Pip.”

“If we ever encounter them again.”

After those spectacular few days in May, their enemies had disappeared into the Reich. Since then, the listening posts of the Ystation network had turned up nothing pertaining to von Westarp’s project. They’d all but vanished. It was nerve-racking.

“We will. And we’ll have some surprises for them next time round, eh?”

“So I hope. Clever chap, that Lorimer,” said Marsh.

“He says the same of you, you know.”

Lorimer’s team of engineers had spent the summer poring over Gretel’s battery. They had a few ideas.

Will didn’t understand any of it, but he didn’t much care. He was doing his own bit for the war. He’d long ago abandoned any worry that he wasn’t doing his share.

Marsh stopped leaning in the doorframe and entered. He picked up a few of the pages that had scattered across the floor. “Can you slip away right now, or are you on board to relieve the next shift?”

“I’m not back on negotiations for another few days. In the meantime, I’m working on, ah, other things.”

“Lucky you, then. I’m sure that’s a relief.”

Will held his tongue for a moment, searching for a diplomatic reply. “Of sorts, I suppose. There are worse things than negotiations.” He experienced a momentary bout of lightheadedness when he stood. Dizziness plagued him these days, as though he were perpetually stepping off a carousel.
And, oh, what a carnival life has become.

He had to catch his balance on the edge of the desk when he tried to gather up a few of the pages.

“Are you quite sure you’re well?” Marsh asked.

“Stood too quickly,” Will lied.

Marsh helped him gather up the loose papers. They worked in silence for a few moments, broken only by the rumblings of Enochian from the next room and a few measures of music. Something orchestral. Phantoms had become commonplace in the Old Admiralty building. At present things were relatively sedate, but for the illusory slant to the floor and the ghostly music. Often it was worse, such as those two days in August when the corridors had been filled with a peculiar mélange of wet sheepdog and overripe bananas. The week before that, a ghostly Siamese had stalked the corridors, occasionally pausing to cough up a phantom hairball.

And there wasn’t a clock in the entire wing that ran properly, which was something of a nuisance.

But luckily for Milkweed, many of the Admiralty’s offices and much of its personnel had been relocated to safer locales. This was the case with many government entities, even the BBC.

Marsh glanced at the writing on a few pages. “This is the master lexicon.”

“Indeed.”

“Did it offend you?”

Will took the jumbled pile of papers that Marsh offered him and sighed. “Frustrated, perhaps.” He shook off the maudlin sentiment. In what he hoped was a lighter tone, he asked, “No matter. Did you have a question for me, Pip?”

The music became a percussive thrumming that rattled the floorboards like a giant heartbeat. Marsh said, “Can we talk about it somewhere else?”

“Yes, please, by all means, let’s.” Will glanced at his wristwatch out of habit, even though it was a useless gesture. “I think I’m done for the day.” He set the jumble of papers on the desk and snatched his coat and bowler from the hooks behind the door.

“I’ll give you a lift home.”

“Brilliant. Cheers.”

On their way out, Marsh paused outside the room where a triad of warlocks chanted at a shimmering column of smoke. The air in this room coated Will’s tongue with the taste of mothballs. Two more warlocks sat in the corner, ready to join in immediately if the strain overcame one of the negotiators. Milkweed had already lost one warlock to heart attack. The hoary legends of master warlocks’ immunity to death had proved untrue.

Will could identify the negotiators based on their scars: Hargreaves, White, and Grafton. One side of Hargreaves’s face had the rough pink texture of extensive burn scarring; White had long ago lost much of his nose; pockmarks covered every inch of Grafton’s skin above the collar, including his bald scalp. Shapley, a journeyman warlock like Will with scarred hands to match, sat in the corner next to Webber, who stared at the pair in the corridor with one blue and one milky eye.

Marsh shivered. Farther down the corridor, and out of earshot of the others, he asked, “Will, how long can they keep it up?”

“Those chaps? They’re the experts.”

“I mean all of them, together. All of you.”

“We’ll hold on as long as we can.”

“But how long is that? Stephenson told me what you found in Dover. That the barricade is moving inland.”

It wasn’t a topic the warlocks discussed openly amongst themselves. But there was no denying they had exhausted their ability to keep the cost of intervention low. The Eidolons’ price grew with each renewal of the pact, like a tide rushing up the beach, quickly, terribly, and Will couldn’t see the tide line. They were drowning, an inch at a time, and he was running up and down the beach with a child’s toy spade and bucket.

Will remembered the suicides, the damaged children. Ancillary blood prices. Enochian realpolitik.

Will yanked at his tie to loosen the knot squeezing his throat. “Another week. Perhaps ten days.”

They exited the Admiralty, passed the marine sentries and revetments. They crossed the courtyard beneath a cloudless ice-blue sky.

Marsh turned up the street. “This way,” he said. Then he asked, “What happens after that?”

“The Eidolons leave. The Channel reverts to its natural state.”

“Will, it could be weeks before the natural weather makes invasion impossible.”

“I know.” Will followed Marsh to a cream-colored Rolls. “This is Stephenson’s car.”

“He’s up-country right now. Why let his petrol ration go to waste?”

Will indulged himself with an exhausted grin. “You devil, you. He’ll have your head for a chamber pot.”

“It was his idea.”

“Ah. I’ve half a mind to take a car back from Bestwood, to have something in the city. I cut a rather dashing figure in the Snipe, if I do say so myself.” Will concluded, “Aubrey would have another fit, though.”

“I imagine he would.”

“He’s right, I suppose. The best I could do with the Snipe is junk it in the street as an obstacle for Jerry.”

“You could become a tracker,” said Marsh. “Sleep in your car, outside of the city at night.”

Will gave him another tired smile. They climbed in. “Pity Stephenson didn’t lend you his driver as well.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

Marsh made a U-turn there on Whitehall. He drove north, toward Trafalgar. It meant he wanted to talk; it would have been shorter to go south. They passed the strongpoint erected inside Admiralty Arch. The machine gun emplacement guarded the long approach down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace. Will tugged on his tie again.

“We need more time, Will. We need new warlocks.”

After weeks of crisscrossing Great Britain and Ireland, Will had identified and contacted fewer than a dozen warlocks. He’d done everything short of picking up the island and shaking it. Several of the men he’d found had been too far gone, too ruined, to contribute.

“There are no more, Pip. We’ve turned every stone. I even went to the bloody Shetland Isles chasing the rumor of a legend of a folktale, but aside from some particularly bored-looked sheep, I found nothing of interest. I’m sorry, my friend, but there are no more.”

The shadow of a barrage balloon flashed over the Rolls as they rounded the square. The balloons had sprouted up by the thousands across London. They blotted out the sun in places, yet still seemed tiny when the Junkers and Messerschmitts came.

Marsh shook his head. “I didn’t say
more
warlocks. I said
new
warlocks. You and your colleagues need to start teaching Enochian to others.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“I’ve discussed it with Stephenson. We’ll recruit language savants from the other services. Perhaps they’ll pick up just enough to—”

Will slapped his palm against the dashboard. The ever-present ache in the stump of his finger throbbed. “I said it’s not that simple.”

“Tell me.”

Will breathed deeply, fighting against the constriction in his chest. “I had this very same conversation yesterday. Can’t you have the old man
explain it to you? Or one of the others?” By which he meant the warlocks.

“Stephenson won’t understand it nearly so well as you do, and I don’t know the others so well as I know you. I want to hear it from you.”

Do you know me, Pip? Lexicons and negotiations, actions and blood prices, there’s my life for the past few months.

Will marshaled his thoughts. “The problem is this: Learning Enochian requires exposure beginning at an early age. Adults cannot begin to learn Enochian. Only children can. The younger, the better.”

Marsh frowned. On a brief straightaway, he cracked his knuckles against his jaw, taking one hand at a time from the steering wheel. “What happens when somebody does come to it as an adult? ‘Acceptable risk’ doesn’t mean what it used to, Will.”

“I’m bloody well aware of that. But I didn’t say they
shouldn’t
learn it. I said they
can’t.”

Marsh risked a sidelong glance at Will. “Why?”

“We’re surrounded with language, human language, from the moment we’re born. Earlier, in fact, if you believe sound penetrates the womb. It . . . corrupts us. But Enochian is the true universal language, truer and more pure than anything remotely human. Getting a fingerhold on it requires a certain amount of purity.”

“But you’re learning from the others. Why isn’t that impossible?”

“You can always widen or deepen a fingerhold, once you have that. The trick is getting that hold in the first place. And that can only be done as a child. I’ll never amount to anything more than a journeyman, myself. Though I’m improving, thanks to the others. Grandfather started my lessons when I was eight—far too old. It’s a miracle I absorbed any of it.”

“Stephenson told me about the children on the coast.”

Will nodded sadly. “Proximity to Eidolons has been rumored to do that. But don’t get your hopes up, Pip. Those children have been surrounded by human language. They’re too tainted to learn Enochian without guidance. We don’t have fifteen or twenty years to raise them into warlocks. And if you’re considering stopgap measures, as I know
you are, forget it.” He held up his hand, wiggled the stump of his missing finger. “I will
not
expose children to blood prices. Full stop.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes. London had become a foreign city to Will. It was the collective effect of many little things, like the way ornamental wrought-iron railings around stairwells and gardens had disappeared into the foundries, and the X’s taped across windowpanes. Not to mention the blocks where the Blitz had rendered homes and businesses into scrap heaps of construction debris.

“Will, there’s something I don’t understand.” Marsh maneuvered the Rolls through the narrow opening in a makeshift barricade of fence posts and sewer piping. Barricades like these would be closed off when the invasion came. Two middle-aged men, volunteers for the Home Guard, stood on either side of the barrier. Their denim overalls were too long; too-small steel helmets sat on their heads like forage caps; their rifles predated the Great War.

After they accelerated again, Marsh continued. “If only children can learn Enochian, where did the lexicons come from? I know they’re passed down the generations, but how did that begin? How did anything ever get transcribed?”

“Ah. You’ve grasped the very root of the matter. As I knew you would.”

“Tell me.”

“Well. The story goes that at some point in the Middle Ages—nobody can say exactly when—certain Church scholars and intellectuals of the day decided to trace the history of humanity back to its origin in the Garden of Eden. And so they sought the Adamical, pre-Deluge language.”

Marsh nodded. His eyes didn’t leave the road, but Will knew he had Marsh’s complete attention.

“Setting aside the medieval metaphysics for a moment, they reasoned that the oldest language would also be the most natural. Which is to say that in the absence of other influences, a person would naturally speak this language.”

“The absence of other influences?”

“Yes. So they did the obvious thing. They rounded up as many newborns as they could—it’s best not to ask how—and raised them in strict isolation from all human contact and interaction.”

“Good Lord. That’s barbaric.”

“Quite. But it worked. The only flaw in their experiment, of course, is that the ur-language isn’t a human language at all.”