Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych)

by Ian Tregillis

  The internal mechanics of Milkweed were another matter. Marsh lied to the best of his ability when Milkweed became the topic of interest.

  Back in his lightless cell, when he wasn’t mentally reciting the filing numbers and wondering if he’d ever have a chance to make use of them, he spent his days exercising, dreaming about his wife and daughter, and waiting for torture that never came. Even after Himmler had grown impatient, then angry, then enraged with Marsh’s inability to lay out the secret to summoning an Eidolon.

  Still, the physical coercion never materialized. They even gave Marsh a cot. Gretel’s handiwork, no doubt.

  Marsh started his third round of sit-ups of what he guessed was evening. The cold stone floor ground against his spine, almost hard enough to knap chips from his vertebrae. His shirt was cold and slick against his back, dampened by sweat and caked with grime from between the floor stones. The cot’s taut canvas cut into his toes where he’d wedged them for stability. His stomach muscles burned. Sweat salt stung his eyes.

  Thirty-one. Left elbow to right knee. Thirty-two. Right elbow to left knee. He’d long ago stopped noticing the odors of his cell, but now his sweat smelled impossibly of hyacinths and mashed garden slugs.

  The floor shifted on rep thirty-three. Marsh stopped, panting. It shifted again.

  Somewhere in the darkness, somewhen, a vast presence oozed through fissures in reality. Marsh sensed the walls of his cell flexing, genuflecting before the Eidolon.

  The demon enveloped him.

  *

  “He may be in Berlin,” said Will through clenched teeth. “Someplace small. A cell, I think.”

  “Damn.”

  I had to think fast, before Will lost the Eidolon. It had taken him almost a month of surreptitious preparation before we could make this attempt.

  I paced through the shards of a broken compass. A syringe of blood lay atop the map of Europe spread on the floor of my warehouse. When Pendennis’s minders went to rouse him in the morning, they’d find the old codger had died in his sleep. I just hoped they didn’t find the puncture mark. I’d chosen Pendennis because I knew he was likely to kick as soon as things got heavy. He’d died of a heart attack in the original history.

  The Eidolon’s malice swirled around me like a cold draft from the Thames. Somewhere in Germany my younger counterpart was feeling something similar, because to the Eidolons we were two aspects of the same blood map.

  “Two things,” I said. “Tell it to let him out. Then it must stay with him. Surround him.”

  “One or the other,” Will managed. “Our secret negotiation bought us a single action. No more.”

  Damn. If the Eidolon let him out of his cell, but then disappeared, my doppelgänger had no chance of leaving Berlin without the distracting shroud of the Eidolon’s presence. But if it stayed with him in the cell, would it warp things enough for him to escape? It depended on so many things we didn’t know, not least of which his physical state.

  How bad was he? Could he move? Was he shackled? Broken?

  “Pip—”

  “All right! Tell it to focus on him. Stay with him for”—I thought about my experience swanning through the Admiralty building with an Eidolon in tow, and did some quick arithmetic—“seven thousand heartbeats.” I reckoned that was more than an hour of elevated heart rate.

  Will didn’t seem to like it, but he couldn’t spare the extra effort to argue. The only other time he’d dealt with an Eidolon by himself had cost a fingertip. From his open mouth came an impossible basso profundo rumble. The Eidolon responded with the static hiss of a moribund cosmos.

  *

  The unrelenting scrutiny of something immense and unknowable threatened to drive Marsh mad. He’d been through this once before, and so far that experience inured him to the worst of it, but back then he’d only held the Eidolon’s attention for a few moments. The small part of his mind that could still function cowered from the overpowering maleficence. The Eidolon’s presence became a chisel on the mortar of space and time. Reality twisted outside-in. The Eidolon swirled about him as though it were a cyclone and he the eye.

  It didn’t speak. It didn’t act. It waited. For what?

  Marsh managed to stand, though the floor continued to sway underfoot. Somewhere, rusty chains rattled in a chill wind that smelled of river water. He approached the door. The bubble of unreality moved with him.

  A prison cell cordoned off a volume of space for long periods of time. In human terms, it created a pocket of here-and-now inaccessible to the rest of the universe. But that distinction was meaningless to an Eidolon.

  He laid his hands upon the cold steel of the door. When seen through the prism of an Eidolon, the darkness in Marsh’s cell became a blinding glow compared to the perfect dark of a lightless universe. Marsh peered through streamers of melted here-and-now, past the pigeons cooing on the Champs-Elysées, past the molten seas of a primordial planet, to the shattered spacetime where the lock mechanism had been.

  Please, he thought. Please work.

  He pushed. The door opened.

  *

  Will said, “He’s moving.”

  “Thank God.”

  *

  Marsh emerged from his cell into a long corridor. He concentrated on two things: filing numbers, and not going mad. His dark-adapted eyes felt no flare of pain from the corridor lights, because when passing through his Eidolonic shroud the shining bulbs became distant starlight. The smell of chlorine burned his sinuses. A phantom chorus called to him in a dozen dead languages.

  A guard shouted. Marsh looked to where an SS-Schütze, a private, stood drawing his pistol. Narrow corridor. Easy shot. Marsh didn’t know what would happen to a bullet as it passed through the region of warped reality, but there was no guarantee it would protect him. He charged the guard, veering drunkenly across the swaying, uneven floor.

  The private didn’t shout a second warning. His arms snapped up, putting his Walther at the tip of a triangle, just as he’d been trained. Too close. No way he’d miss. The guard frowned. Marsh gritted his teeth and dived for the floor. The Eidolon’s malign presence swept over the guard. His eyes went wide. Marsh bowled him down.

  The soldier curled up in a ball, screaming. He clapped his hands over his ears, one still holding the pistol. Just for an instant, his flesh hissed and shifted like loose sand, then became solid again. He didn’t struggle when Marsh wrenched the gun away. Marsh smashed it against his temple before the screaming summoned an entire battalion into the cellar.

  He listened, but it was difficult to know what was happening outside the Eidolon’s sphere of influence. Nobody came to investigate. The men down here were accustomed to screaming prisoners.

  Marsh tried to lift the unconscious guard. He couldn’t. The boy wasn’t very large, but Marsh had lost more strength than he’d realized during the long months of his incarceration. He settled for dragging the unconscious soldier back to his cell. Once there, he stripped the guard of his uniform and piled the clothing on the cot, away from possible blood spatter, before shooting him.

  He pulled the trigger. Warm, wet droplets dusted his face. Marsh’s fingers came away from his upper lip glistening red.

  The Eidolon unleashed an onslaught of Enochian. It redoubled its scrutiny of Marsh, turned him inside-out. He collapsed. The cell reverberated with inhuman howls, shrieks, and rumbles. All the fury in the universe was focused on the specks of a stranger’s blood on Marsh’s face and hand. The rest of the world disintegrated.

  Marsh remembered the way Will had cut himself before summoning the Eidolon that studied Gretel, and the way he’d shown a drop of her blood to the Eidolon. He remembered how her fingernails had drawn his blood, too, and the way the Eidolon had reacted to it.

  Time lost all meaning inside the Eidolon’s bubble. Marsh was incapacitated while it scanned him and the blood of the man he’d killed, but when he returned to himself the sheath of unreality hadn’t dissipated. He staggered to his feet under another volley
of Enochian.

  Blood. It wanted more blood.

  The dead guard’s uniform didn’t fit. The boy was too small. Marsh couldn’t even pull the trousers on. His hands hardly fit through the wrists of the jacket. The pockets contained a knife, a few coins, three cigarettes, and a packet of safety matches. He kept the knife, the Walther, and the matches, but abandoned everything else.

  Back in the cellar, he headed toward the archives, retracing the route he’d memorized on his first summoning to Himmler’s office. The Eidolon’s attention kept pace with him. Ripples of impossibility followed in his wake.

  He couldn’t tell how long it took to reach the filing cabinets in the former laundry. A millisecond, perhaps, or a millennium. Marsh had to dodge the ghosts of former washerwomen in order to read the labels on the cabinets. He followed the sequence of filing numbers as though it were a trail of bread crumbs. It led him to the wine cellar.

  Barrel vaults had long ago been carved into the bedrock. But filing cabinets and freestanding metal shelves now occupied the spaces where wooden racks had once held countless dusty bottles of wine and port. Bare brass fixtures revealed the spots where gas lamps had lighted the hotel’s early days. But the Schutzstaffel had affixed electrical cables to the ceiling, providing power for the bare light bulbs that now cast shadows through the archives.

  When Will had shown Gretel to the Eidolon, the entire ordeal hadn’t taken very long. But now the Eidolon’s prolonged presence distorted reality in ways Marsh had never imagined. Inanimate objects hissed at him, the Eidolon’s loathing made incarnate. Shadows writhed like angry tentacles in Marsh’s wake.

  One of the slithering shadows whipped a tendril at his ankle bone. A stab of pain shot through his bare foot. The tendril left a ring-shaped burn and the odor of burnt flesh. The shadow bulged and undulated like the silhouette of a python swallowing a rat. Marsh kept to the light.

  He found an unoccupied desk. The archivist wasn’t on duty. He didn’t know if that meant it was later at night than he’d realized, or because the man had heard the commotion and gone to investigate. Judging from the dates on the topmost paperwork, it was mid-November. He’d lost track of the days. Felt like a century since he’d seen Liv.

  She probably thinks I’m dead. Might have even come to terms with it by now. Has she moved on? She has Agnes to care for; she needs a husband.

  If he let them, he knew, the fear and sorrow would cripple him. This was his only chance to see Agnes and Liv again; he had to move quickly. There would be time for mourning later.

  He forced the tears aside and concentrated on rifling through the desk. He found more cigarettes, more matches, more money, and a flask. When he unscrewed the cap, the fumes numbed his nose and made his eyes water. It smelled like the loneliness of a medieval scholar. But there was something else, too, beneath the Eidolonic distortion.

  Homebrewed schnapps. Apricot? He prayed to God, if there was one, that the schnapps was genuine.

  Marsh dumped out the rubbish bin. He placed all of his matches and the flask inside it, then set off again in search of the files. Another century passed while Marsh found the operational records of the REGP, and the IMV before that, and the privately funded orphanage before that. An entire niche of the former wine cellar had been dedicated to von Westarp’s work. There were other records back at the farm, records of that madman’s research, but the Schutzstaffel kept the only operational records close at hand.

  The shelving kept the paper files packed too tightly for adequate airflow. He couldn’t simply touch a match to the lot. Carelessly dumping the files on the floor wouldn’t help. He had no choice but to be patient and feed the fire slowly until it built up enough heat to generate a suitable draft. He had to do it right. This was his only opportunity. How long would the Eidolon stay with him?

  Marsh splashed a bit of schnapps into the rubbish bin. The fumes burned with a pale blue flame. Precious centuries ticked away while he fed the first of thousands of pages of documentation into the bin. The flames turned from blue to orange to yellow, growing above the lip of the bin as he fed the fire with doses of paper and schnapps. Soon, the niche smelled of ash and apricots.

  He couldn’t watch the fire. It hurt his mind. The Eidolon’s proximity transformed the flames into serrated saw teeth that grated past one another while crystalline spindles whirled through the troughs.

  The fire grew brighter and hotter, casting more shadows into the archives. Marsh had to keep circling the fire, practically dancing about it like a pagan loon on Midsummer’s morning, lest his bare feet get melted off by acidic tendrils. Sidestepping the angriest shadows and nursing the fire kept him occupied.

  He didn’t hear the shot.

  A thumb-tip-sized portion of the limestone arch exploded into chips that nicked Marsh’s face, hands, and feet. He hit the floor. Shadows burned his feet and hands. The Eidolon repeated the mad-making gibberish that Will had once claimed was a name.

  *

  I clamped my hands over my ears. There it went with my wretched name again. Your map is a circle. A broken spiral.

  “Why is it doing this?”

  “I think he’s bleeding,” said Will.

  *

  Marsh pulled the Walther, but shelves obstructed his view in every direction. He couldn’t peer past the rippling interplay of light and shadow. But the angle of the shot constrained the shooter’s location.

  There: movement at the end of an aisle. Marsh rolled behind the rubbish bin to line up a shot. But the ruby-tipped flames had retreated to a lowly sizzle. He couldn’t let the fire die. He reached up to slide an armload of files from the nearest shelf. A bullet whistled past his hand, pinged from a nearby strut, and lodged into a stack of reports from late 1938 detailing Kammler’s efficacy against Spanish Republican mortar emplacements.

  Marsh yanked back his hand, and dove. Bloody fuck.

  No chance of charging his attacker this time. Attackers? He’d been lucky in the corridor, but that had been a straight run. Too many obstacles here. He had to be patient, work his way closer one aisle at a time, until either he had a clear shot or the Eidolon drove the Jerries mad. Assuming it lingered that long.

  There had to be more than one of the bastards down here by now. If the shooting hadn’t attracted them, the smoke had, and if the smoke hadn’t, the constant disintegration of reality must have raised a few eyebrows. Marsh splashed more schnapps on the fire. Emerald flames leapt from the rubbish bin. He fired off a covering shot and heaved another armload of papers into the bin. Fire licked at the edges of the new pile. That would buy him a few minutes.

  He crept in the direction of the last shot. Another volley of screeches and chthonic rumbles echoed through the cellar. The Eidolon had made these noises after Marsh shot the first guard. Demands for more blood.

  “If you want it so badly,” said Marsh, under his breath, “kill the bastards yourself. Or feed the fire. Anything. Just help me.” But the Eidolons weren’t listening, even if they had given him a name.

  More movement, in front of him, a few aisles down. And to the right … The goose-steppers were circling around behind him. Cutting him off from the fire.

  Silently cursing Liddell-Stewart, Marsh retreated.

  There was no way to know how many men were in the archives now, loitering outside the range of his gun and the Eidolon’s cyclone of unreality. Probably half the bloody Reich. But they only had three avenues into the Reichsbehörde niche. The arrangement of shelves constrained his attackers as much as they constrained him. More so—they had to take care not to shoot their own men. And they feared to rush him because of the Eidolon. Did they know what was happening? Here’s your chance, Himmler.

  Marsh chose an aisle. He fired two shots into the shadows, then pressed himself behind the limestone arch. Over the whisper of star-driven winds and the chiming of a ghostly trolley, he could just make out yells in German. Return fire carved more chips from the wall. He leapt out, rolled behind the bin, then shot into a different a
isle.

  While jackboots shuffled in the distance, he unsheathed his stolen knife and climbed the shelves. It enabled him to reach the cable bolted to the ceiling. The bare bulbs that provided light for the archives hung at regular intervals from cables like this one. A few moments of frantic sawing were repaid by a jolt hard enough to knock him to the floor and the overwhelming taste of copper.

  Now the only light in and around his section of the archive came from the fire. The very unnatural fire.

  And if the Jerries were playing it safe, their scout would be approaching down the central aisle. Marsh’s gunfire had, he hoped, ensured the other avenues were covered, and there wasn’t room between the stacks of files to fire around a scout.

  Marsh watched through a gap in the shelves as a pair of SS guards came creeping forward. Their boots clicked on the stone floor. Both held their sidearms in shaking hands. They’d entered the Eidolon’s sphere of influence, where the air burned like frostbite, the shadows writhed like serpents, and the archives echoed with the death cries of ancient stars. The play of ghostly firelight made a grotesquerie of their faces.

  Marsh pressed his back to the shelves and heaved. Nothing happened. He’d lost too much strength during his incarceration. He strained. A grunt escaped him. The shelves tilted.

  One scout turned. “What—”

  Slowly, more slowly than the turning of the seasons, the shelving unit toppled, showering the men with crates of files. It didn’t hurt them badly. But it knocked them down.

  Into the writhing, snapping shadows. Tendrils slithered over the men. One soldier dropped his gun, slapped at his bare hands and face. But he couldn’t fend them off. Dark tendrils sizzled against his upper lip. Greasy smoke wafted from the wound. Within moments the shadows enveloped his companion, too.

  The men beat themselves bloody, trying to stave off the assault from an altered reality.

  And the Eidolon pounced.

  *

  I clamped my hands over my ears for the second time that night. “For God’s sake,” I yelled, “what is it now?”