The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (39 page)

When he did sleep, Klaus dreamed of blackbirds and a hay wagon.

They performed their first set of demonstrations in Stuttgart on the Schlossplatz, before the New Castle, the next morning. The Neue Schloss, the former residence of the kings of Württemburg, was an expansive construction of late baroque design. It was draped in so many flags that when the wind blew, it seemed the castle had been consumed in a red tide. Banners fluttered overhead (
GREATNESS IS OUR DESTINY! YOU ARE THE FUTURE OF THE FATHERLAND
!) while a gramophone blared the Deutschlandlied and the Horst Wessel song across the plaza. All this in the shadow of Concordia (the Roman goddess of unity, fittingly enough), whose statue watched from a perch high atop the marble Jubilee Column.

The morning smelled of fresh-baked bread from the nearby bakeries. Vendors sold fragrant Mandel-Halbmonde from pushcarts. Klaus tried to buy one, but received it free with the baker’s compliments. Honey, sweet and sticky, coated his fingers.

The spectacle drew a large crowd. Mostly fathers and mothers too old or weak to be of use, or children too young. But here and there, interspersed throughout the throng, teenagers and preteens watched the show with undisguised adoration. The members of the local Hitler Youth had turned out, and they watched the proceedings with expressions of rapture.

The Lord Mayor watched from the wings. His daughter was not in attendance.

The spectators
ooh
ed and
aah
ed appropriately as Kammler levitated an anvil, Klaus walked through it, Reinhardt reduced it to a puddle of slag. They embraced the suggestion that overcoming one’s limitations
was the province of all Germans. They clapped when the men from the Reichsbehörde demonstrated their immunity to small-arms fire, each in his own spectacular fashion. And they cheered the lie: how simple it was, how
pleasant
it was, to become more than human.

Klaus and the others took care to keep their wires hidden. They had learned in Munich that the prospect of brain surgery dampened people’s enthusiasm.

Thirty-four men and women—some little more than boys and girls, others adults who had until now opted to support the war effort in civilian roles—lined up to sign the roster afterwards. They received armbands marking them as cadets of the Götterelektrongruppe while parents smiled and a puddle of iron crackled. Parents and spouses received impressive stipends, plus the assurance that they were doing the Fatherland the greatest possible service.

Thirty-four. Back in the old days, Klaus knew, one or two of them might have survived the first round. He wondered how the reconstructed version of Doctor von Westarp’s accelerated program would work, and if the survival rates would be any higher. But then he remembered the lime pits, and the ovens, and doubted it.

After all, if the procedure had been perfected, they wouldn’t need to recruit civilians. Instead they’d take in trained soldiers. But only if it were reasonably quick, and the attrition rate low.

Spalcke took the roster of new volunteers. He signed it, stamped it, folded it, sealed it into an envelope, then stamped the envelope for special courier back to the Reichsbehörde. The REGP would arrange buses to collect the volunteers and distribute the stipends.

The crowd dispersed while the mundane troops disassembled the risers, pulled down the banners, and struggled with crowbars to pry up the iron slag. Klaus leaned against the base of the Jubilee Column, munching on another almond crescent. He felt disinclined to help speed along their next demonstration, which was scheduled across town at the Wilhelma botanical gardens that afternoon.

“Sir? Herr Officer?”

Klaus turned. A girl of perhaps fourteen or fifteen years stared up at him with wide blue eyes.

“Is it too late? I’d like to sign the roster.”

Klaus looked across the plaza. Spalcke was busy cursing out Kammler. He hadn’t yet handed off the envelope containing the roster.

It would be a trivial matter for Klaus to pluck the roster from inside the sealed envelope, add a name, put it back. Doing so was his duty.

He looked back at the girl. She put him in mind of Heike, staring at nothing with her eyes of Prussian blue while Reinhardt had his way with her body.

“Go home,” he said.

“I want to do something wonderful,” she said. “To make my parents proud.”

“It’s too late. We’re full.”

“I’m a good German.”

He took another glance across the plaza. The others were busy, casting no attention in his direction. Klaus beckoned the girl into the shadow behind the massive marble column. There he opened his coat, kneeled beside her, and tilted his head down.

“Look at me,” he said. “This is what they’ll do to you.”
If you survive.

He watched the brass buckles on her red leather shoes, waiting for her eyes to trace the wires from his waist to his skull, waiting for the quiet gasp, waiting for the girl to stiffen and step back. She retreated again when Klaus climbed to his feet.

“Go home,” he repeated. “The Reichsbehörde is no place for you.” He rebuttoned his coat while she ran away.

Klaus rode with Spalcke and Kammler on the way to the afternoon rally. It took but a trickle of charge from his battery to pluck the roster from the sealed envelope while the hauptsturmführer was distracted.

He destroyed the volunteer roster. Spalcke sent an empty envelope to the REGP.

8 May 1941

Milkweed Headquarters, London, England

H
igh tide had come, long, long ago. It had flooded the beach and rose higher still, a deluge that destroyed everything in its path. Will couldn’t outrun it; it swept him along with the rest of the flotsam. There was no ebb tide. Just a crashing surf that echoed in Enochian.

He’d been the only warlock to attend the December burials. He’d also been the only person from Milkweed to visit the widows, the sons and daughters, to deliver the news of their loss. It started with Lorimer—Will had met the Scot’s family, once. After that, it seemed that every family deserved to put a human face on their tragedy. And Will deserved their scorn. Perhaps not so much as Marsh did, but there was plenty of blame to spread about.

Thirty men went to Germany, and he brought all thirty back. Four of them alive. Three of them sane.

Perhaps only two. He wasn’t his old self these days.

And then there was the soulless child.
That
was entirely his doing.

He leaned against the wall, listening to the litany of his colleagues’ entreaties and the Eidolons’ prices. Will’s facility with Enochian had progressed to the point where he no longer needed to consult the master lexicon. Even in his current state, he could hear the strained desperation in the warlocks’ voices. Nuances that would have been lost on him merely a year ago: the undertones of a human throat within the screech of colliding stars; the slightest trace of a heartbeat, of wet biology, within the ripple of starlight through empty space.

Since late winter the warlocks had found only sporadic success in their negotiations with the Eidolons. The ice storms, blizzards, and paralyzing cold never lasted past a fortnight before the Eidolons withdrew and the world snapped back to normal.

The warlocks had blockaded the Channel for months straight during the worst part of the Blitz. Yet now they were lucky to control the weather for more than a week.

Exert your volition in this fashion,
said the warlocks.

Give us more blood maps,
said the Eidolons.
More.

We won’t, said the warlocks.

You will,
said the Eidolons.

The stump of Will’s finger throbbed when he glimpsed the bloodstained floorboards beneath Hargreaves’s seat.
Odd.
He shouldn’t have been able to feel anything.

It was here in this room, almost exactly a year ago, where Marsh had severed Will’s finger. It was here where Will had pleaded with him to do so. Here Milkweed had repelled an invasion, destroyed a fleet. Today the air tasted like the stones at the bottom of a centuries-old well. The bones of the earth steeped in tainted water and the shells of dead snails.

The warlocks tried again. Bartering, wheedling, chipping away at the Eidolons’ demands. One soul. Two. A token reduction. Never enough. Everything cost so damn much these days.

The atmosphere in the room changed. Will caught a whiff of birch wood shattered by the cold that inhabited the void between the stars. This was the lowest blood price the warlocks would see today: fourteen souls, dead by drowning. They’d accept it, see it paid, and hope the Eidolons would hasten the war’s end.

Nothing happened. Silence ricocheted through the broken reality of the room.

Grafton snapped at him. “William!”

“Oh,” Will muttered. “Yes. Of course.”

Correction:
He’d
accept it.
He’d
see it paid.

It was his turn again.
(Already?)

Will braced himself. He called up his Enochian and gave a short, perfunctory response.
Agreement.

It made him an agent of the negotiation; the Eidolons noticed him. They inspected him, poured through the gaps between the atoms of his body, then withdrew, disinterested. They already had his blood map, already knew the trajectory of his particular stain on time and space.

But that was enough. He was part of it now. It wouldn’t work unless he did his part.

The suffocating presence of the Eidolons evaporated. The room returned to normal.

“Get it done quickly,” said Hargreaves. “And take Shapley with you this time.”

Ah. He suspects.
Well, it had always been just a matter of time. Nothing to do for it.

Will said, “I’ll need some time to prepare.” He started to look at his watch, but stopped for worry that the others would notice his tremors. To Shapley, he said, “Give me a few hours.”

Shapley frowned. “What am I to do until then?”

“I don’t care. Say a maritime prayer. Or learn one.”

“And what will you be doing?”

“Preparing,” said Will as he stepped into the corridor, eager to get away, eager to kill the ache in his finger. Why wasn’t he numb?

His voice echoed. This wing of the Admiralty still belonged to Milkweed, though now much of it was empty. But for Marsh, they no longer had field agents. Just the warlocks, and a handful of technicians with nothing to do except tinker with pixies that would never see use.

He returned to his office and locked the door behind him. He didn’t turn on the light. His chair, an ugly gunmetal-gray thing on squeaky casters, rumbled across the floorboards when he collapsed into the seat. The desk was bare but for a dog-eared, wire-bound copy of the master lexicon sitting on one corner. He’d spent much time here, hunched over that desk, compiling it from the disparate notebooks of the warlocks he’d recruited. It seemed eons ago; he hadn’t cracked the lexicon since December.

Quietly, so as not to jangle the keys and announce his presence to passersby in the corridor, he fished the key ring from his vest pocket. He unlocked the bottommost desk drawer. The drawer where he kept his stolen morphine.

The syrette needles twinkled in the half light leaking through the gap under the door. Half-grain dosages of miracle opiate, ready for use
on the battlefield, for snuffing the most incapacitating pain. Yet they didn’t work so well as they had in the past.

Will counted half a dozen left unopened. He counted again. Surely he’d had more than this? They had to last until Aubrey sent him more cash. He couldn’t remember how long that would be. Not long. Not if he asked.

One dose wouldn’t be enough to get him through the night. Not if he and Shapley were to spend it extracting another blood price for the Eidolons. He fished out two syrettes, placed them on the desk, and closed the drawer.

He pulled the hood off the first syrette, pinched the wire loop, and pushed the needle back through the foil seal at the narrow end of the tube. Then he snapped off the loop, exposing the hollow needle.

Will opened his vest and the lowest button on his shirt, just above his waist. A small lump had formed beneath his skin at the spot where he’d been administering the injections. He’d started bleeding there, too, which tended to dilute the dose. An entire dose had been wasted that way. (Yesterday? Three days ago?) He picked a new spot, a few centimeters to the left.

The needle bit into his waist at a shallow angle. Will worked his thumb and forefinger up the flexible tube, dispensing every drop of the precious morphine tartrate into his bloodstream. The injection stung for a few seconds, but then he couldn’t tell if it ached or not.

He tossed the empty syrette back in the drawer. A second dose followed the first. Warmth flowed through him like sunlight, like molten gold. Through his belly, across his chest, into his heart and out to the rest of his body. It washed away the pain in his finger, quelled his shivering. He could breathe again. Even here, underwater.

The second syrette slipped through his fingers. It hit the floor tube-first, bounced, and then
plinked
as the needle wedged itself between the floorboards.

There was something important he had to do.