Bitter Seeds

eight

31 August 1940

Paddington, London, England

An air of white-knuckled desperation had settled over the platforms at n Paddington Station. It put Marsh in mind of Barcelona. But there the mass of refugees swarming the port had comprised entire families fleeing the Nationalist victory. Here the atmosphere was charged with heartache as parents said good-bye to their children.

It simply wasn't possible to evacuate all of London. A long, hard summer had put billet space in the countryside at a premium.

Marsh carried Agnes, wedging gaps in the crowd for Liv, who maneuvered Agnes's pram. Every child at the station wore a pasteboard tag clipped to his or her clothing. Sunlight fell on Agnes's tag and illuminated her evacuee number: 21417. She'd drawn a high number in the evacuation lottery. Her parents had suffered several sleepless weeks waiting to see if they would send their baby girl away before the relentless Blitz caught up with them. The long bellows of their daughter's anti-gas helmet dangled over the side of the pram as Liv navigated the crowd.

Every child had a gas mask. Many carried, or dragged, canvas duffel bags brimming with blankets and clothes. Rag dolls peeked from a few sacks. A box of lead soldiers spilled onto the platform when one boy dropped his bag. Marsh fended off the throng and helped him gather his toys.

Marsh hated crowds. He hated the prickly feeling that took root between his shoulder blades when Liv and Agnes went out. It had been that way for months, ever since he'd come to suspect the Jerries were watching his family. And now they were about to send Agnes from the city. She'd be away from the bombs, but she'd also be where Jerry could watch her and her father couldn't.

A man lost his footing and lurched out of the throng. He approached too closely, too quickly, and nearly crashed into Agnes. Simmering resentment, something Marsh had carried for weeks without fully realizing it, boiled over. Months of frustration at being unable to do anything sought release. Marsh's elbow caught the man under the jaw and snapped his head back.

“Guhh—”

Marsh glared into the widened eyes of the coughing man. “You need to step back, friend.”

The man did, clutching his neck as he did so. His companion, most likely his wife, glared at Liv as she wheeled past the pair. Marsh raised his arms to fend off others rushing to claim the spot he cleared for Liv on the platform. He hip-checked a woman who tried to barge in with her own pram.

The assisted private-evacuation program had taken on a frantic quality after the Luftwaffe had systematically destroyed the Chain Home radar stations lining Britain's coast. With that electronic fence out of commission, the Luftwaffe had been free to obliterate the RAF Fighter Command sector stations in the southeast. The ops rooms had fallen even more quickly than the radar masts. The methodical dismantling of Britain's air defenses had proceeded with such inexorable logic that it seemed directed by a higher intelligence. Now the bombs fell on London day and night, and two months into this Blitz, the evacuations to the country couldn't proceed quickly enough.

The overseas evacuation scheme was a failure. Less than a fortnight ago, a U-boat had torpedoed the City of Benares and killed ninety-plus children bound for Canada.

The smell of wet paint mingled with the stink of panic and sweat on the train platform. Marsh kept it all at bay with the scent of Agnes. When the invaders came—and they would, everyone knew, just as soon as the odd weather in the Channel cleared up—they would be hard-pressed to find a single signpost, milepost, or placard that might help them gain their bearings. More than a few pubs whose names might have provided a clue to geography had been repainted and rechristened in the process. Every train platform in the nation had likewise received new coats of paint. Only the schedules printed in tiny lettering and posted in glass cases at select locations within the station offered any useful information at all.

All of which had made finding the proper train rather difficult. But now here they were, waiting to meet the lady from the Women's Voluntary Services who would escort Agnes to the countryside.

Liv's aunt Margaret was a billeting officer in Williton, and had reluctantly agreed to care for Agnes herself. The most recent, and therefore most stringent, regulations governing the evacuation forbade mothers from accompanying their children, even infants. Evacuation space was reserved strictly for children and pregnant women.

Marsh nudged his wife. “Look,” he said, pointing at a row of expectant mothers. All were clearly in the final months of their pregnancies. He had to speak up so she could hear him. “That must be the Williton Balloon Barrage.”

Liv grimaced, but the play on words didn't ease the tightness at the corners of her eyes. “You've been spending too much time with Will.” Her gaze flitted over the crowd. “How will we find her in this mess?”

“I'd hoped she'd find us instead.”

“I can take Agnes if you want to have a look about.”

“No,” said Marsh, shaking his head. “Let's not split up. Not yet.”

“It's only temporary,” she said, repeating their mantra of recent days. By repeating it constantly, Marsh could almost convince himself it was true, as though he could sculpt reality with the force of his belief.

“She'll be safer out of the city.” Another mantra.

Agnes mewled. Marsh bounced her in his arms. “Liv,” he said. “Maybe you should get on the train, too. Margaret will have no choice but to find space if you show up on her doorstep. She's a billeting officer, after all.”

“Oh, heavens, no. No, no, my dears,” said a voice in the crowd.

Marsh and Liv turned to face a wizened little woman. She carried a clipboard in one hand and an infant on her hip. Wisps of graying hair waved under the brim of her hat and from where they had worked loose from her bun. She wore wool socks that had fallen down below the hem of her dress, one higher than the other. Her mouth was full of crooked yellow teeth that looked ready to tumble over, like gravestones in an untended churchyard.

Were they expected to entrust their daughter's well-being to this harridan?

Marsh squeezed his daughter as tightly as he dared without rousing her. This lady from the WVS wouldn't be inclined to do them any more favors if Agnes got cranky even before the ride to Williton.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked.

The woman clucked her tongue. “Terrible, what Hitler's done, making parents say good-bye to their little ones like this.” She shook her head. “But there's no room.”

“Room?” Marsh tensed. Heat flushed through his face. The entire situation was fucking ridiculous. “Sod the room. My girl is only four months old!” The woman's mouth formed a little O as she stepped back.

Liv laid her hand on Marsh's arm. She gave him a reassuring squeeze. More quietly, she said, “You're from WVS? Agnes is going to stay with my aunt in Williton.”

“Yes.” The lady peered at Agnes's tag, then consulted a list, deftly handling the yearling on her hip and the clipboard at the same time. “21417 ... 21417 ... Agnes Marsh?”

Liv nodded.

The woman checked something off on the clipboard. “Don't you worry yourselves one jot. I'll personally deliver little Agnes safe and sound to the waiting arms of your auntie. And what a doll she is, too.”

Reluctantly, Marsh gave one last squeeze and kiss to the bundle in his arms. “I love you, Agnes,” he whispered. He held her close, filling his awareness with her scent, where he intended to hold it until his daughter came home again. Then he handed Agnes to his wife. He asked, “Isn't there any chance at all you could let Liv go along, too?”

“Raybould, we've been through this—”

“I'd feel immeasurably better if I knew she were safe.”

The WVS harridan clucked her tongue. “Oh, my dears, I'm so sorry.”

Marsh pressed the issue while Liv said her own good-bye to Agnes. “You clearly need the help.” He nodded at the yearling on the woman's hip. “How will you care for him and Agnes, not to mention their things?” He indicated the pram and the bulky anti-gas helmet.

The woman laughed. “Oh, my. It's more than just these two.” She pointed across the platform to where a group of children ranging from toddlers to perhaps ten years old received hugs and kisses from weeping parents. A train porter and three more ladies from the WVS watched uncomfortably over the good-byes.

“But there's enough of us to make do,” the WVS woman continued. She smiled, again revealing those graveyard teeth. “Haven't lost one yet.”

“I should bloody well hope not.” The Stukas had been known to strafe trains now and then. Every parent knew it.

The WVS woman's lips moved silently for a moment while she studied Marsh's face, as though searching for some way to reassure him or deflect his irritation. Part of him felt badly. She probably received a great deal of abuse. The billeting officers had it worst, but anybody working in the evacuation program was bound to become the focus of strangers' frustration. Before he could assume a softer tone and apologize, she shrugged slightly and held her free arm out to Liv and Agnes.

“Come, dear, let's introduce Agnes to the rest. And perhaps while we're doing that, your husband can help the porter load little Agnes's things on the train.”

Marsh pushed the pram behind the trio to the group of young evacuees and distraught parents. With a bit of shoving and cursing, he and the porter managed to make room in the luggage car for the pram, helmet, and a suitcase of clothing and diapers for Agnes.

The whistle blew. After a final kiss and hug, Liv handed their one and only daughter over to this group of strangers. The runny-nosed evacuees and their meager group of escorts boarded the train. The WVS lady took a window seat and held Agnes up for Marsh and Liv to see as the engine chuffed away down the tracks.

He put his arm around Liv. She rested her head on his shoulder. They watched the tracks until the train whistle faded in the distance.

31 August 1940

Dover, England

The first thing Will noticed was the sunlight. It moved like a living thing.

He stood with Stephenson at the coast, not a dozen strides from where the earth plunged straight down along the famous chalk cliffs of Dover. A gust of wind eddied around Will's legs, rippling the hem of his topcoat, snapping it like a flag. The wind smelled of brine and, impossibly, Mr. Malcolm's shaving lotion.

Will shivered. The stump of his missing finger throbbed with pain. He paced, fidgeting to ward off the chill. Something grabbed his attention, a sense of something odd glimpsed in the corner of his eye. He looked at the long shadow his body carved from the sunrise.

It hadn't moved.

The edges of his shadow rippled, oozed into tendrils of light that choked off the darkness. Will's new shadow grew via the same process in reverse. Repulsion flooded through him while the darkness spread out from his shoes, slithering across the grass before settling into a natural shape.

He shivered again and looked at the sea. The sun hung low in the southeast, round and red like a bullet hole in the sky. The light shone through the English Channel. The Channel was filled with Eidolons. Something unnatural happened to the light inside that non-euclidean fog.

Will glanced at Stephenson. The old man either hadn't noticed the strange light, or somehow managed to not care. His attention was entirely on the Channel, which he studied with binoculars. Weather spotters had reported the disturbance moving closer to shore every day.

Wind hummed through the barricades, pulled a per sis tent thrum from the coils of razor wire. Barricades like these lined the coast from Ramsgate to Plymouth. But this fence wasn't intended for keeping the Germans out. If invasion happened, no fleet would land here; the cliffs were far too high. No. This barricade had been built to keep people in. To prevent them from hurling themselves into the sea.

Three months had passed since the tragedy at Dunkirk. Two months since Milkweed's warlocks had first invoked the Eidolons to warp the weather in the Channel. And a fortnight had passed since the local police lost count of the suicides along the coast.

A uniformed constable waved at Will from up by the road. He didn't approach. The locals kept as far from the shoreline as they could. Will waved back.

“Sir,” he said. Stephenson let the binoculars hang on a leather strap around his neck. The interplay of sunlight and shadow trickled through the grass when he turned to look at Will. Will said, “Our bobby is hailing us.”

“Don't forget,” said Stephenson from the corner of his mouth as they ambled up the gentle slope to the road. “Should anybody ask, we're from the War Office. Got it?”

“War Office. Check.” Will hadn't the slightest idea how to portray himself that way. What did folks from the War Office talk about? Not bloody demons and supermen, that much was certain.

The bobby, a ruddy man with a pug nose, nodded to them as they approached his car. “You see, sirs? Just like I told you. Something strange going on out there.”

“Hmmm,” said Stephenson.

“Do you think it's the Jerries doing this?”

“Hmmm,” said Will. It seemed the safest thing to say. Better than the truth: No, son, we're the ones doing this.

“Just got a call over the blower,” said the officer.

Waves of tension radiated from the poor fellow. Will couldn't help but feel an awed respect for the policeman's resolve. Doing his job day after day, trying to protect people while enduring constant exposure to that wrongness off the coast ... He was a good man. Will wished he could have offered him some perspective, some sense of hope.

The bobby continued, “Sounds like something you should see, if you can spare the time.”

Stephenson asked, “What is it?”

The bobby hesitated. “It's ... well, hard to say. Not rightly sure. Better to see for yourselves.”

Will rode up front while Stephenson rode in back. They drove to a small village east of the Dover port. The sun shed a little of its unnatural taint as it climbed higher, no longer shining through the Eidolons.

They stopped at a primary school. Something cold and hard congealed in the pit of Will's stomach. A frightened teacher ushered them inside. The bobby introduced Stephenson and Will as being “from the government.”

It was a small school, a handful of rooms. Will guessed that it normally accommodated no more than fifty or sixty children. But it was emptier than that owing to the evacuations. The remaining children either had drawn high numbers in the lottery, or their parents had refused to split up the family.

The teacher led them to a playground in back. Four children, three boys and a girl, sat on a swing set. They rocked in the breeze. They didn't blink and they didn't shift, except for their silent constantly moving lips.

“How long have they been like this?” the bobby asked.

“I rang the bell,” she said. “They didn't come in, so I went out to collect them.”

Stephenson and Will shared a look. Will shrugged. Dreading what he'd find, he went over to get a closer look at the children.

The first thing he realized was that they all faced southeast, toward the coast.

The second thing he realized was that they weren't, in fact, silent. They were babbling. In synch.

He knelt in the sand to better hear them. It was baby talk, nonsense. But Will's trained ears heard something inhuman buried in the quiet prepubescent mumbling.

These children were trying to speak Enochian.

He stood. “We have a problem.”

Stephenson joined him, leaving the constable and the teacher to their speculations about German bombers and chemical warfare.

“I know why the fog is moving inland,” said Will.

“What is it? What are they doing?”

“They're singing to the Eidolons.”

Stephenson mulled this over. He scratched his chin. “Can we use this?”

The question knocked Will so off-kilter, it took a moment to regain his mental footing. “Sir?”

“If they can speak to the Eidolons like you and the others do, perhaps they can participate in the defense.”

Will shook his head, appalled. “Not without many years of training. These kids might have picked up bits and pieces, but they'll never be warlocks.” He frowned. “They'll never be completely normal, either.”

“Hmm. Pity. We could have used the help.”

Will suddenly understood the purpose of this trip. Stephenson wanted a firsthand look at the supernatural blockade not out of concern for the effect it had on the surrounding countryside, but out of a businesslike need to evaluate its staying power.

Stephenson wanted to know how long they had until the warlocks faltered, until unnatural weather no longer kept the Germans at bay. Only survival mattered. Nothing else.

And in that moment, Will knew with a sick certainty that things would only grow worse. Stephenson knew damn well what it cost to make the Channel impassable, and to keep it so. But the old man didn't care. If he could be so callous toward the string of unintentional human tragedies arising along the coast, he could also turn a blind eye toward the very intentional tragedies the warlocks would no doubt commit in order to pay the Eidolons' blood prices.

Will had naively assumed limits had been placed on what the warlocks would be allowed to do. A bud get of sorts, one they didn't dare overspend. But now he understood that the old man didn't care about the prices. If anything, he sanctioned them.

The ride back to London was long, Stephenson's questions exhausting. Will tried to sleep when he returned to his flat, but he couldn't banish the memory of those mumbling children. He didn't want to sleep with that image stuck in his head.

He wished he could have slept. Keeping the Channel blocked meant Milkweed's warlocks were on a tight rotation. And that meant another round of blood prices soon. And all of this had been the case before they'd realized the Eidolons were moving inland. Meaning they'd have to redouble their efforts. Somehow.

Will returned to Milkweed before dawn and spent the day working on the one aspect of the job that didn't fill him with dread. It did, however, leave him feeling lost at sea. After months of intensive study at the feet of some rather formidable fellows, he still couldn't translate the Eidolons' name for Marsh. Couldn't even take a stab at it. Neither could the others.

Will hurled his lexicon across the room. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.” The binding splintered when it hit the wall, erupting into a blizzard of fluttering pages.

It was a copy, of course; none of the warlocks he'd recruited for Milkweed would let go of their invaluable originals. But their greed for new crumbs of Enochian had made them amenable to pooling their knowledge into a single master document. This master lexicon represented the culmination of centuries of Enochian scholarship by generations of Britain's warlocks. Nothing like it had ever been compiled before.

“Buy you a pint to settle your nerves?”

Marsh leaned in the doorway. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he had a look of concern on his face.

A pint? Well. Perhaps ...

But Marsh merely meant it in jest. Of course.

“Ha. Cheeky sod. I'm knackered. I'd kill for a solid night's sleep, to be perfectly honest.”

“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 Y-station 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 light-headedness 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 melange 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 finger-hold 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.”

“My God,” said Marsh. Will knew he was thinking of his daughter.

They were nearing Will's flat, skimming along the south edge of the green expanse of Hyde Park along Kensington Road, when the light traffic slowed to a halt. Marsh idled Stephenson's Rolls into a queue of several other cars.

“Damned Jerries,” said Will. Bomb craters, the rubble of collapsed buildings, and unexploded ordnance were common traffic hazards of late.

They inched forward a bit at a time. Will expected to see a troop of sappers from the Royal Engineers setting up, as was often the case with bomb damage. Instead, a policeman directed the queue around a traffic smashup.

An omnibus on a side street had blasted through the intersection with Kensington and smashed into the Victorian guard house at Alexandra Gate. It had clipped two cars, nearly flipping one, and pinning another to the guard house. The omnibus had ripped a deep furrow through the flowerbeds. Three of the four pillars on the guard house portico had come down, littering the grounds with chunks of granite. Will glimpsed two more policemen carrying a stretcher covered with a sheet away from the site of the pinned car just as Marsh cleared the congestion and sped up again.

Blood prices.

Will wondered who had arranged this one. He clawed at his necktie. He yanked his collar open, too. A shirt button plinked into his lap.

“Not far from your doorstep,” said Marsh. “Perhaps it's for the best that you haven't driven the Snipe down from Bestwood.”

Will concentrated on breathing, the ebb and flow of air through his lungs. He wasn't drowning just yet. Not yet.

“You know, Pip ... I rather think I will take you up on that pint.”

Marsh looked at him sidewise. “Honestly?”

“Please.”

Will didn't say anything else until Marsh found a pub with PLENTY OF BEER, BOTTLE & DRAUGHT chalked on the door. Marsh had to point it out twice. Will didn't hear him the first time, because he was too distracted by the crash of surf and an advancing tide.

1 September 1940

Reichsbehorde fur die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

On Sundays, Klaus took breakfast with Doctor von Westarp.

His parlor on the third floor of the farmhouse overlooked the grounds of the REGP. The treetops of the distant forest shimmered green, yellow, and red in an early autumn breeze. Over the susurration of leaves, one could hear the stutter of a machine gun, the whoosh and crackle of fire, the whumpf of muffled land mine detonations, Buhler barking orders off in the distance. Gravel pattered against the windowpanes. It came from the immense sand pit that had been constructed on the west side of the complex.

It was quieter inside. The doctor demanded strict silence during meals. Extraneous noise caused indigestion, he insisted. Silence during the meal, followed by a symphony and one cup (precisely eight ounces) of coffee. That was the doctor's recipe for a vigorous constitution. But now Mahler's Sixth had ended, and the gramophone hissed while the needle skipped around the center of the disc. Klaus used a toast point to mop up the last of his breakfast. Today it had been quail eggs, salty Dutch bacon, lemon curd, and bitter coffee mixed with real cream.

The doctor commanded such esteem in the eyes of the Reich's leadership that he enjoyed the first pick of many spoils of war. And Klaus, having single-handedly rescued Gretel from enemy territory (therefore making possible the chain of successes that had inflated the doctor's prestige over the summer) enjoyed von Westarp's favor.

Skrreep. Von Westarp raised the gramophone needle, put the arm on its cradle, and gently lifted the disc with his fingertips. He tilted it this way and that, peering at it through his thick eyeglasses, inspecting it for dust and scratches with the same concentration he applied to subjects in his laboratory.

“I have a new task for you,” he said.

At last. A frisson of excitement ricocheted through Klaus, banishing the usual lethargy brought on by a fulfilling meal. He sat up. “I'm ready.”

Emboldened by his success in May, Klaus had been agitating for another mission to England. Gretel's report regarding her experiences in enemy custody—though hard to believe at first—pointed the way to the conquest of Great Britain. Kill the sorcerers, and the island would fall. Klaus could do that easily.

But the high command had disregarded his suggestion. Gretel's advice had guided the Luftwaffe through the systematic elimination of Britain's air defenses. The island nation faced a deficit of fighting men, armaments, and morale. The OKW felt that Britain's final defenses would collapse under a sustained bombing campaign.

It was slow and inefficient. Klaus could fix the problem in a matter of days.

Von Westarp exhaled forcefully in short little bursts, clearing the gramophone disc of dust. The motes danced in the sunlight slanting through the tall windows. Between exhalations he added, almost as an afterthought, “You must do this, or my reputation will suffer.”

“I would die to prevent that,” said Klaus. He was pleased with how genuine it sounded. Perhaps it was true.

“You will oversee the construction of new incubators.”

Incubators. The excitement disintegrated. Cold panic filled the void it left behind, as though Klaus had been stabbed with an icicle. The buzz of the Gotterelektron filled his head. Klaus wanted to dematerialize, to become ephemeral so that he couldn't be imprisoned.

He had tried it once, years ago. His battery had lasted just long enough to whip the doctor into a frenzied rage. Two days later, Klaus had emerged from his box feeble with dehydration and sobbing for clemency.

A moment passed while the rest of the doctor's statement sank in. Klaus released the Gotterelektron, ashamed of his weakness. He hoped the doctor hadn't noticed the way the dust had eddied through the space occupied by Klaus's body.

Klaus drained the last drops of coffee from his cup to wash away the taste of copper. He set it back on its saucer with the characteristic clink of fine Dresden porcelain.

“I don't understand.” Also genuine. Also true.

Von Westarp turned his attention to Klaus, eyes narrowed in irritation. “The continuation of my work requires new incubators. You will see they are constructed promptly. You do remember your incubator, don't you?”

The doctor called it that because it incubated the Willenskrafte, willpower. Klaus called it a coffin box.

“Yes.”

“Tell the shop to build several of each type,” said the doctor. “You have firsthand experience, so you will instruct them on the proper methods.” He slid the music disc into its sleeve. “And note their progress closely.”

Klaus's incubator had been filled with hydraulic plates for squeezing the occupant. Reinhardt's incubator had been fitted with compressors, pumps, and coils of liquid refrigerant. Heike's incubator had been made of window glass, and ringed with lamps, mirrors, and lenses. Kammler's had been the largest, lined with knives and needles, with a single lever out of reach of the restraints.

Von Westarp shuffled across the room in the threadbare dressing gown he'd taken to calling his “uniform.” He poured a new cup from the porcelain carafe on the table and scooped six heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee. He took the coffee to the bay window overlooking the empire he'd built.

“They envy my success. They covet my standing with the Fuhrer. You must watch them, lest my enemies sabotage me. You're the only one I trust.”

It was common for the doctor to change subjects like this. Such was the mark of a great mind, seeing connections that others found opaque. Common wisdom at the REGP.

But seeing him there at the window ... Klaus wondered if many great men shuffled around in their dressing gowns and obsessed over their bowel movements.

He was silent for too long as he considered this.

“Does this please you?” snapped von Westarp. “The plotting of my enemies?”

“No, Herr Doctor!” The words came automatically. “They won't dare act against you. I'll see to it.”

“Good. See the work is completed quickly.”

“It will be.” Klaus stood. He saluted. “Thank you for breakfast, Herr Doctor.”

“Fetch your sister before you speak to the machinists,” said von Westarp, still gazing outside. Klaus recognized the black Mercedes coming up the long crushed-gravel drive. It belonged to General Field Marshal Keitel, the Fuhrer's chief of staff on the OKW.

“At once.”

Von Westarp slurped at his coffee, waving him away with an impatient flutter of his free hand.

Klaus took his leave of the doctor and went downstairs. He passed the debriefing rooms on his way outside. From one of the rooms came a rhythmic panting and the squeak of wooden table legs across a tile floor as Pabst “interrogated” one of the Twins. Her sister had been deployed to the Baltic states. Everything she learned about the Soviet occupation there would go straight to her double, unimpeded by the threat of Allied and Soviet listening posts intercepting the transmission.

The autumnal smell of wet leaves wafted across the training grounds. It would rain to night. The grounds also smelled of diesel fuel and hot sand, from where Reinhardt trained for his mission to North Africa.

Britain's piddling deployments in Egypt and Sudan would fall quickly now that the Italians were on the move; their reinforcements had perished on the beaches of France, after all. But an Italian North Africa would put the Mediterranean in Mussolini's control. Reinhardt's talents—perfectly suited to the desert—would go a long way toward ensuring that didn't happen. He would also spearhead the inevitable advances into the oil fields of the Middle East.

News of the assignment had eased the foul mood that had enveloped Reinhardt since Klaus's elevation to von Westarp's favorite. For months, random objects had developed a tendency to erupt into flames in Klaus's presence.

Reinhardt's new boast was that he had learned how to reverse his ability, to pull heat out of something. It meant he could vitrify a swath of sand and cool it into a crude but passable roadbed in moments. Klaus watched. First, the air above the sandpit shimmered. Then the sand turned dark as the individual grains lost their cohesion and relaxed into slag. Dust and debris skittered along the ground past Reinhardt's boots, pulled along by the updraft. The furnace heat felt like sunburn on Klaus's face. The liquefied sand fractured and buckled as Reinhardt willed it cool. It made a hideous noise like the shattering of a million dinner plates.

The entire process took seconds. A Sonderkraftfahrzeug half track plowed forward, crossing from the solid earth of the training ground onto the simulated desert. The makeshift roadbed held. Without the benefit of Reinhardt's alchemy, the heavy armored vehicle would have sunk to its front axle.

But the result was akin to driving over a road paved with shards of glass. The front tires shredded explosively.

“Piss on Christ's wounds!” yelled Reinhardt.

“Perhaps you can regain the doctor's favor with comedy!” Klaus called.

“Piss on you, too,” said Reinhardt. The air around him started to shimmer again.

Klaus left. He passed the new pump house as he headed for the tree line at the far edge of the training ground.

The ground rumbled beneath his boots. He staggered. Slack-jawed Kammler shambled across a minefield, deflecting each detonation back into the earth with the force mirror of his willpower. His long leash snaked along the ground to where Buhler chanted at him through a megaphone.

Klaus found his sister strolling through the carpet of leaves under the oak and ash trees at the edge of the farm. She walked slowly, studying the ground before taking each step. Little blossoms of blue and white dusted her wild black hair with flower petals.

She went through phases. Back in Spain, it had been the modernist poets. This summer, she'd taken to collecting posies. But the weather was changing; Gretel would have to find a new hobby soon.

“Gretel.” She didn't look up. As usual.

Klaus joined her. Leaves and twigs crackled underfoot.

“Keitel is here. You shouldn't keep him waiting.”

“We have a few minutes.” She stopped and cocked her head, staring at nothing in particular. “He has diarrhea.”

“The doctor will have something to say about that,” said Klaus. He offered his hand to guide her around a thornbush. Gretel took it, shifting the flowers she'd collected from one hand to the other.

“Come. We'll find a vase for those,” he said.

She gazed across the field to where Reinhardt raged.

“Poor junk man,” she said.

Klaus led her around the far side of the farm, toward where Keitel and von Westarp would be waiting. The route took them past the gunnery range that had become Heike's personal training ground. The guns here fired nonlethal wax bullets designed specially at the REGP, back in the days when it had been the IMV, the Human Advancement Institute. They wouldn't kill, but the pain was enough to make one wish they did. Klaus remembered his sessions on this range vividly, and he had the scars on his chest to ensure he'd never forget the lessons learned here.

Most of the others—Klaus, Reinhardt, even Kammler—had graduated beyond this facility years ago. Heike had yet to master it.

But she was getting close. She'd been training like a demon all summer. Ever since Klaus and Gretel had returned triumphantly from England. Reinhardt had been given an assignment even before that, back in Spain. And now one of the Twins had gone to Latvia. Soon even Kammler would be in the field, and Heike would be the last of von Westarp's children to be deemed complete. Nobody wanted to be the sole focus of his disappointment.

Heike stood at the bottom of the obstacle course. The wind teased her hair. Then she disappeared, uniform and all. Reinhardt had been quite upset when she achieved this breakthrough. He'd spent hours watching her train, relishing the moments when her concentration lapsed and he could glimpse, ever so briefly, her naked body.

The gunners opened up, releasing a hail of projectiles across the field every time a bell, chain, or flag indicated the passage of the invisible woman. Most of the bullets splattered harmlessly against the brick wall, but once or twice Klaus heard the “Hoompf” as a round clipped Heike. But she maintained her concentration and didn't reappear.

“She's improving.” She'd be a formidable assassin. Nearly as good as Klaus when she came into her own.

“Don't you think?” he asked, turning back to Gretel.

The corner of Gretel's mouth quirked up, and the shadows returned to that place behind her eyes. Quietly, she said, “Heike has her uses.”

Klaus sighed. There had been a time when that half smile filled him with dread. Now it just made him angry.

Gott. She's going to fuck it up for me.

“Don't do this, Gretel.”

She looked up. She blinked. She turned for the house.

Klaus grabbed her wrist and spun her toward him. Her arm was so thin and his grip so tight that his thumb and forefinger overlapped by more than a knuckle. Her skin was warm to the touch, though she'd spent the entire day outside. She stumbled, bumping into his chest. Her hair smelled of the purple bellflowers dangling from her braids.

“What ever you're thinking, don't. Things are going well now. Don't ruin this.”

“Are they? Are they truly?” She looked him in the eye. “Do you enjoy building coffins, brother?”

He tried to hold her gaze, but flinched away. “I'm tired of getting swept along in your wake.” He let go of her arm. “Do something for me for a change.”

Gretel cocked her head, looking him up and down. Then she linked her arm in his and rested her head on his shoulder as he escorted her back inside.

“Twenty-one thousand. Four hundred. Seventeen,” she whispered.

21,417. Klaus wondered if that was supposed to mean something to him. He didn't ask.