“Stand easy, Corporal,” Grimes ordered, scarcely looking up to acknowledge my salute.
“Sir,” I began, only vaguely aware of the fury in my tone, and thus only vaguely able to manage it, “I wish to register a formal complaint. When my squad were dispatched to meet the German offensive—”
“You were far enough from the drop zone for a reasonable margin of safety,” he interrupted.
“Still, sir, I should have been forewarned of any summoning to—”
“This will wait, Corporal.”
I clicked jaw and heels together. “Yes, sir!”
Finally he stood straight, peering first at me, then at the others. “Corporal, this is Captain Shelby Hunter-Hughes, of his Majesty’s Royal Channeling Corps. Captain, Corporal Peyton Cleary, the chap I was telling you about.”
Royal Channeling Corps. A medium, then. Dead men do tell tales, when the right man—or woman—asks it of them. “Captain,” I offered, saluting again.
“Corporal.” Her voice was deep, rich without becoming masculine.
“This,” Grimes continued, “is Major Ghislain Poulard, seconded to us for this particular operation.”
“Major.” Again, I saluted, though I’m fairly certain I couldn’t keep the question from my tone.
“Bonjour, Corporal.” Either the man had suffered in a gas attack recently, or he smoked enough to shame a foundry.
“The major has undergone all necessary checks and clearances,” Grimes said, perhaps in answer to the question I hadn’t voiced. “You’ll speak clearly in his presence.”
“Understood, sir! Though if I might ask . . . ?”
Grimes frowned, lips pressed together so tightly they all but vanished beneath his mustache. “Cleary, we have a Code Echo Rose.”
It actually required a moment of me to recall what that meant. “My God. The chances against—”
“Are not zero, apparently.”
“No, sir.”
Our foreign guest politely cleared his throat. I cast a questioning glance at Grimes, who grunted an affirmation.
“Our magi,” I told Poulard, “now and again attempt to conjure . . . entities with whom they can actually communicate.”
Call them what you will . . . “Demons,” “spirits.” Use whatever occult or religious framework you like; Goetic, Hermetic, biblical . . . All of it is just even the cleverest of us trying to force ourselves to fathom entities that are unspeakably, incomprehensibly alien. We’re not even certain how sentient they may be; what they are, how they think.
Most can only be commanded in a general fashion, by virtue of the spells or sigils used to bind them. A select few, however, are intelligent enough, and not quite so alien, that a magus can—with some patience, and sufficient nerve to risk madness—commune with them.
The Frenchman nodded. “We do ze same,” he said in heavily accented English. “We preferably use such entities for espionage and intelligence. Divination, far-seeing, and ze like.”
My turn to nod. “We do as well. We also have safeguards woven into our conjurations, meant to alert our magi should one of the demons they’ve summoned—specifically, one capable of direct communication—later be conjured by the enemy.”
Poulard stared at me as though I’d abruptly become such a creature, and I could scarcely blame him. So far as we’ve ever been able to ascertain, the entities are infinite. We’ve no way of discerning one from another, no way to call forth a specific being. The odds against a double-summoning of that sort—especially when limited to specific varieties of entity—were beyond astronomical. Most of the personnel in our occult divisions felt that the safeguards I’d just mentioned were an utter waste of time and effort.
Until perhaps two minutes ago, I’d been one of them.
“Are you saying zis has ’appened?” he demanded incredulously.
“I received both communication and confirmation this morning,” Grimes said. “Even if the entity in question was never exposed directly to any sensitive information . . .”
He hardly needed to finish. Even if nothing else, it would know the name, the true name, of the magus who had conjured it.
“The summoner,” he continued once he knew the severity was lost on none of us, “was one of His Majesty’s Grand Magi.”
God! If the Germans or their allies got hold of that . . .
“Do they know what they’ve got?” Captain Hunter-Hughes asked.
“We don’t believe so, and odds are they’d never think to ask. We cannot, however, rely on ‘odds,’ especially given the circumstances.
“Corporal Cleary!”
Here it was, then. Why I’d been brought in on this. I thought about reminding the major that my occult training was fairly limited, that even countering the battlefield wards of an enemy such as the earlier alchemancer was pushing my limits.
I decided against it. If he’d chosen me, it was because I was better suited than anyone else—or at least anyone else readily available, which amounted to the same thing.
“Your job is to banish or destroy the entity in question,” he said, confirming my suspicion. “Obviously, we can’t tip the Germans off to its importance, so this’ll happen under cover of an assassination attempt against the magus who conjured it. Said magus is, in this case, one of our opposite number in the enemy trenches, not far from here.”
Well, that partly explained why I was the best bet, then. I nodded. “Do we know who or where he—?”
“Captain Hunter-Hughes has already penetrated the postmortem defensive conditioning of several of the raiders killed in last night’s attack. Thanks to her interrogations, we have the magus’s name, his most probable location, and the German sentry pass-phrases currently in use.”
And there was the other reason he’d chosen me. I could pass for, and was fluent in, German.
Ancestry, linguistic skill, and some measure of occult mastery. No wonder he was making do with someone of my education.
I looked first the major’s way— “Guess I’m to report to you, sir, if I make it back.” —and then the captain’s— “And to you if I don’t.”
Gallows humor at its finest, but neither one of them showed so much as a twitch of the lip. They could stand to be a bit less dour about the whole endeavor, after all; it wasn’t as though they were being dispatched on an almost certain suicide mission.
“We’ll be staging an insertion offensive,” Grimes continued, as though I hadn’t spoken, “including your own squad. Am I correct in understanding none of them speak German?”
“Afraid so, sir. Pickens has some fluency, but never enough to pass.”
“Right. Just you, then, while your boys and everyone else keep the front line occupied.”
“Sir, if I may . . . ? I’m afraid I don’t understand Major Poulard’s place in all this. No disrespect, sir,” I added to the man in question.
“None taken. I am wondering about zis myself.”
“The major is a skilled, military-trained magus,” Grimes said. “We have none of our own available nearby, not of sufficient proficiency, anyway. So he’s been seconded to us for the duration.”
This time, the look I directed Poulard’s way was incredulous. He shrugged. “Better to dress to blend in, when ritual garb is unnecessary, oui?”
Sensible, that, but I still was uncertain why we required a magus at all. When I returned my attentions to Major Grimes, though, I saw something. Something in his eyes, something I’d rarely seen there before.
Reluctance.
“Cleary . . . You understand there’s a good chance you won’t live to complete your objective.”
“Always a possibility, sir.”
“Indeed, but this is too vital a task to fail, even if you fall. We’ve . . . This operation has been designated Heavy Sulfur, Corporal.”
“Ah. That’s how it’s to be, then, sir?”
“It is. Cleary, you understand, if it were up to me—”
“No bother, sir.” I hoped I sounded far more confiden
t than I felt. “Just another duty for king and country. We’d best get started then; time’s short enough as it is.”
And now it felt shorter, to me at least, than ever it had.
We began with two separate bombardments of artillery, starting on the target zone and then spreading outward, clearing the path of barbed wire, land mines, and of course German soldiers. Hundreds of us had then charged across the no man’s land between their trenches and ours, foundering and stumbling in the mud, making for the newly weakened position. Flames rose over this way, thrashing tentacles of a hue somehow fleshy pink and rotting gray at once over that. The air was soup-thick with cordite, brimstone, and blood. My left ear still rang; my right had gotten well and truly sick of the whole affair and sat in sulky silence.
And of course, I was still in pain, my entire body chafing under my uniform thanks to the requirements of Heavy Sulfur. It had been well over twenty-four hours since Poulard had completed his part in things, a process which itself had taken almost a whole day; it would be far longer before I no longer felt the discomfort.
Our forces would sweep in, turning left behind the enemy lines and surrounding what had long been a troublesome artillery battery, taking it out before German support could move up from the next row of trenches to secure the breach. Standard infiltration tactics, but in this case, also a diversion.
All for me.
The German uniform, scavenged from the dead, then mended and cleaned, would never have sufficed all on its own. Someone would have spotted me emerging from a British contingent. Nor would my charms of misdirection have worked, not if any of the German sentries had even the slightest training in penetrating such glamours. The both of them together, however, in conjunction with the bedlam of the offensive, was enough to carry me unnoticed behind the forward position. Once there, it was a simple matter of diving into the nearest trench and sheltering with my “fellow” German soldiers.
As we huddled, backs pressed to walls of packed earth, everything roaring and exploding all about us, I couldn’t help but almost feel at home. The world these men occupied was scarcely different from my own. Oh, the precise design of the trench might differ—the shapes and curves more extreme, the walkway of boards layered in the wrong pattern, the buttresses of different widths and materials—but in the end it was still just a trench. A manmade gash in the earth, boasting few comforts save the occasional dugout or other underground chamber. It boasted the same rats, growing ever more bold and contemptuous of us invaders. The same puddles of filthy, stagnant water that would rot boots and even feet if soldiers proved too incautious. The same stench of the latrines, enough to make a dead man wince.
And, though the language differed, the same constant shouts and cries and orders and prayers.
I wound up ensconced between a pair of soldiers; a young man, one Karl Dreesen, who was serving in his first week on the front line, and an older, more hardened fellow called Neubauer. (I never did get his Christian name.) After I’d identified myself as a runner from the nearby Infanterie-Regiment 49, we spent the next hours in idle chat while waiting for the bombardment to ease. I told them a bit about a fiancée in Stuttgart—only after confirming that neither was from there, of course, it turning out that Dreesen was from Graudenz and Neubauer from Berlin—and while my entire life’s story was spun from whole cloth, neither seemed to note anything amiss with it.
I hoped they were equally oblivious to my discomfort as I leaned against the walls, my inability to find a comfortable posture—or at least, if they noticed, that they thought it the effect of a nervous disposition.
The barrage finally ended as darkness neared, as I’d known it would. I excused myself to the latrine, both as cover for my departure and because I needed the facilities, such as they were. The other soldiers I passed by on my way tossed the occasional salute or nodded greetings, but otherwise paid me no heed at all. And why should they? I looked as though I belonged.
Frankly, and all things considered, this had been remarkably easy. If any operation that requires a frontal military assault by an entire battalion, to serve as a diversion, can be considered “easy,” I suppose.
At which point—after I completed my necessary ablutions at the edge of a pit, at the end of a short side-trench, that could as easily have stunk of English piss as German—I discovered that it wasn’t to be quite so easy as all that.
“A moment,” Neubauer said in German from behind me. I felt a grip on my arm, turned to see a young soldier who was, had I to guess, probably on sanitary duty for this latrine. Neubauer stood behind him. “Roll up your sleeve, please.”
As God is my witness, I’ve no idea how he’d discovered me. My uniform coat had remained on and buttoned up at all times while we were together. Had the cuff slipped back at some point? Had I at some moment bent or hunched in such a way as to allow the collar to gape? I’ve no idea.
Clearly he’d seen something, and a look at my bare arms would only confirm it. The fresh tattooing—Poulard’s esoteric work, intricate patterns and hair-thin swirls, still enflamed and seeping—covered my entire body from wrists to neck to ankles.
Thank heaven he’d caught me while the day shift stood their watch against a dusk assault, and the night hadn’t yet been awakened. In the latrine, there were only the three of us.
A quick blow with one hand to the young soldier’s throat, ensuring he could not call out, while I drew a heavy trench knife with the other. Neubauer was good, experienced, but—though generally suspicious of me—had not recognized me as an immediate threat. I was able to lunge in under his guard, my knife taking him in the solar plexus. An ugly warmth drenched my hand.
I saw movement, twisted desperately away as the other soldier, though rasping for breath, slashed at me with a bayonet. The fabric of my coat sleeve parted, but not the shirt beneath—nor, thank God, my skin! That would have proved a right mess, and no mistake!
As the soldier was off his balance, watching for a thrust of my bloodied knife, I instead put a boot to his gut, kicking him into the foul pit.
He rose, gagging, struggling for a handhold, and I drove my blade down into his skull. Given his predicament, it seemed the only decent thing to do.
I dumped Neubauer’s body in there with him, and then kicked in a bit of mud to cover them. It would stand up to no true observation, but given the fading light and most men’s tendency not to stare too long into a reeking latrine, I hoped they’d go undiscovered for a trice. Time was definitely against me, though, even more now than it had been.
I dashed out into the trench, choosing to make use of—rather than seek to conceal—my urgency. I approached the first soldier I spotted, tossing off a hasty salute.
“Oberstleutnant Erdmann Vossler!” I demanded of him, breathing hard. “Where might I find him?”
“I’m not . . . I believe he’s meeting with the other officers,” came the puzzled response. I nodded my thanks and set off, grateful to Captain Hunter-Hughes that I had at least a working notion of the trench layout.
As I approached the dugout that I believed to be the officers’ command center, however, I was intercepted by a pair of sentries.
Again I inquired after the lieutenant colonel and occultist. “I’ve an urgent message for him only!”
These two, however, were not so readily convinced. “From whom?” the man on the left demanded.
Bugger. I didn’t have the time for this! “For him only,” I repeated.
“I didn’t ask to see it, fool, just to know who it comes from!”
“I’ve been instructed not to say even that much.”
“Then we cannot allow you to pass. Procedure demands—”
I drew myself up straight. “If you would like to register a complaint with the zaubertruppen,” I informed him, referring to the Germans’ own military occult division, “I will be happy to stand and wait with this urgent communiqué while you do so. May I have your name, mein herr, so I may ensure my report is free of inaccuracies?”
Grumbling something about witches, they stood aside for me.
Summoning all my willpower not to fidget with pages of the banishing ritual I carried in my coat, I slipped into the officers’ dugout.
It lacked the chairs to be found in Major Grimes’s “office,” but the table and boards were similar indeed. Of the four officers gathered around that table, I could not be sure which was the magus, Vossler.
There was, however, no doubt whatsoever as to the entity.
It sat at the head of the table, floating, bobbing as if on a gentle sea. I saw angry flesh, such as might result from abrading a hound bald with sandpaper. Limbs that I hesitate to call legs hung, limp and loose, lightly coiling where they reached the floor. Smaller limbs, jointed far too many times and also backwards—again like a dog’s—wobbled as they stretched out over the table. Its head . . . God! I can best describe it as a hound’s or wolf’s snout—just the snout, no eyes or forehead—splitting open to resemble a blossoming flower.
“Yes?” one of the officers barked as they all looked irritably up at me. “What is it you—?”
The thing howled, or maybe hissed; steam through a trumpet, perhaps. It pointed at me with one arm, which unfolded, joint after joint, ever narrower, impossibly long, until it aimed a single gnarled digit at me. And within that unholy sound, a smattering of syllables came together to make a horrid sense.
“Ennng . . . lishhhhhh . . . mannnnnn . . .”
I dove aside, hand darting for the ritual, but I wasn’t remotely fast enough. No man could have been. I heard the crack of pistols, felt agony blossom across my body. The wounds were tiny pits of fire, but the night had gone so very cold.
“Call for a channeler,” I heard one of them say. “We’ll find out why he’s come, what the English thought to achieve . . .”
The voice—indeed all the sounds—faded away. All sounds but one, that is; a faint chorus in my ears, a growing unhallowed chant.
I do not know if you can hear me, Captain Hunter-Hughes. My final thoughts may amount to nothing, this final report shouted uselessly into the void. But I can feel the pain of my injuries turning into something else, the agony falling away even as it grows worse, as though becoming . . . distant.
Operation Arcana Page 19