Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych)

by Ian Tregillis

  The skin along his gashes pulled apart when he swung the sack again. Rivulets of blood ran down his arms, joining into tributaries that coated his hands. The neck of the cloth sack slid through his fingers, widening the arc of the journals and pulling him off balance. Heike rammed the toe of her boot into the small of Marsh’s bad knee. The explosion of agony blew out his ability to stand. He hit the ground, and tried to roll away from the inevitable kicks. He failed. His ribs, already sore from Kammler, flared with new pain. Breathing became difficult.

  But as long as Heike kicked him, he knew where she was. He slowed, gritting his teeth against the pain but hoping to present an irresistible target. Heike knew better than to attack from the same spot for more than a few seconds. But he was defenseless, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, on the ground … Thud. Thud. Thud.

  But Marsh grabbed the phantom boot with one hand and flung the sack at Heike with the other. A knife appeared in midair, where it tumbled into the brush. Marsh yanked on her foot with as much strength as he could muster. The strength that hadn’t trickled away through his open flesh.

  “Oof.” Heike’s breath sparkled in the moonlight.

  He half scrabbled, half leapt on the spot where she’d fallen. His blood disappeared when it touched her. Heike jammed stiffened fingers into his throat, his gashes, his eye. He saw stars; the pain loosened his grip. She wriggled out from beneath him.

  Concentrating on the ground, eyes searching for any signs of movement, he said, “Gretel, we ha—”

  Something snapped tight against his throat, cutting off his windpipe. Heike was taller than Marsh. His feet left the ground when she heaved. Her muscular forearms pressed against his shoulders, her breasts against his back. Her belt dug into the soft flesh around his throat. He kicked at nothing, tried to slam his head against Heike’s face, but the belt was too tight. Cartilage creaked in his trachea.

  “I’m homeless because of you,” said Heike.

  Her hot breath steamed against the back of his neck. It smelled of the sauerbraten she had eaten for dinner. The burning farm receded down a long, dark tunnel.

  Heike shrieked. The belt slackened. Marsh fell to the ground, wheezing.

  The invisible woman had released her Willenskräfte. No—her wires had been severed. And a dark stain spread across the back of her shirt, just above her waist, near the kidney. Gretel had recovered the knife.

  Agony twisted Heike’s face into a parody of itself. Falling to her knees, she managed to land a fist square on Gretel’s face. The blow snapped Gretel’s head back and bloodied her nose.

  Gretel touched a fingertip to the blood streaming from her nose, then licked it.

  “No,” she said. “That won’t be sufficient.”

  She stepped behind Heike. The other woman tried to pivot on her knees, but with one hand pressed against her stab wound, she lost her balance. Gretel unplugged her own wires and flipped them around Heike’s neck. She pulled. Heike arched her back.

  Gretel whispered in the other woman’s ear.

  Heike jammed an elbow into Gretel. The crack carried to Marsh’s ears and made him wince. But the smaller woman didn’t lose her grip.

  Heike’s eyes, wider and bluer than a summer sky, followed Marsh as he staggered to his feet. He pulled von Westarp’s Luger from his belt. But no fear shone through the look on her face, only hatred, as he pressed the gun to her temple. Whether it was for him, or Gretel, or both, he couldn’t say.

  Bullet to the brain. The commander had been very specific about that. Something about autopsies, and not leaving their brain matter intact.

  Gretel released Heike’s body. It slumped to the ground. Marsh put a second round into the dead woman’s forehead for good measure. Then he crossed over to Kammler, and emptied von Westarp’s gun with two more shots.

  Every breath became a white-hot marlinespike prizing his ribs apart. Heike had broken at least one. Maybe more. His cuts opened and closed like little mouths when he moved.

  They headed into the forest, toward the car he’d stashed that morning. He had to lean on Gretel. She was limping, too.

  She said, “I’ll drive.” Marsh slumped into the passenger seat, already succumbing to pain and exhaustion.

  “That could have gone better,” he mumbled.

  *

  The cacophony of destruction followed us far into the country. We ran out of petrol an hour before sunrise.

  I coasted the Mulliner to the side of a country lane, then fetched the spare canister and dumped its contents into the tank. Spilled petrol all over myself. My hands hadn’t stopped shaking after the close call in Stoke Aldermoor.

  Liv stepped out of the car. She stretched, yawned. The harrowing night had left her shaken, too. We hadn’t spoken for the entire drive. Neither of us could come to terms with the situation. I couldn’t believe my girls were truly safe. Hadn’t Gretel foreseen this, too? Had she stationed a sniper up the road? What surprises awaited us back in London? And as for Liv …

  “Thank you,” she said. “I know I’ll never fully understand what happened tonight, but thank you.” She wiped her eyes. “I feel like you were sent here to protect us.”

  I was. And I started to tell her so, but she laid a hand on my lips. I tasted salt.

  “Thank you. For everything.”

  She put her arms around me. I held her. She whispered, “I feel safe with you, Jonathan. I want my daughter to grow up feeling that way.”

  And there it was: the lifeline I’d prayed for. The second chance I’d strived for. All it took was traveling decades into the past, sending her husband on a suicidal errand, and facing down the Luftwaffe. I’d have done it all over without hesitation, just to hear again the offer implicit in Liv’s simple words. My heart felt too big for my chest.

  Liv looked up at me. Her lips parted. My knees sagged under the weight of my swollen heart.

  How could it be infidelity to kiss my wife?

  Her husband didn’t deserve her. I knew her better. I’d learned from my mistakes. He never would. I leaned into her.

  But what if our places were reversed, and I learned of this moment between Liv and another man? Learned that she had held up her heart, offered it to another? It would shatter me.

  Her husband might still be alive. It wasn’t fair to saddle him with mistakes he’d never made. Maybe he didn’t deserve Liv, but he did deserve the chance to be a better man than I. Liv deserved a good man. A great man. It was too late for me to become that person. The fact I stood there, trembling with desire and crumbling resolve, proved it. But it wasn’t too late for him.

  I turned away. She kissed my cheek.

  It was the one and only thing I’d ever done right in my life. And it left me wanting to die.

  You’d better get it right this time, I told my younger self.

  thirteen

  1 December 1940

  Admiralty Citadel, London, England

  Will’s footsteps echoed through a long concrete passageway. The odor of drying paint cascaded down the stairwells, where it lay like a fog at the lowest level of the bunker. Every breath stung the back of his throat with fumes. The ventilation system hadn’t been activated yet; Will had overheard a couple of men from the Royal Engineers discussing some problem with the charcoal filters. A metal conduit ran along the walls and ceiling. The conduit contained telephone and telegraph lines. Every fifteen feet, an olive-drab stencil mark read COG. This stood for “Continuity of Government.” Will supposed a similar conduit ran through the PM’s war rooms, which were situated nearby, at the southeast corner of St. James’.

  Webber handed his identification papers to a Royal Marine sentry. Will did likewise. The sentry checked their names against an access list. The photographs of both men received careful scrutiny before the sentry permitted them to pass the checkpoint. Will followed the other warlock through a sequence of interlocked doors, like the airlock on a submersible or the sally port in a medieval fortress. Behind him, an iron-banded door clanged shut with e
nough force to rattle the conduits. The air here had been touched by the Eidolons, whose most recent visit had imbued it with a greasy texture akin to rancid butter. The rubber bladder taped to Will’s arm, under his shirt, sloshed against the crook of his elbow. Pretending to scratch an itch, he double-checked the stopcock hidden just above his wrist.

  As far as the public knew, the Admiralty Citadel—with its loopholed firing positions and reinforced, twenty-foot-thick walls—was intended as an impregnable bastion in case of Jerry invasion. It could, supposedly, withstand a direct hit from the Luftwaffe. This had yet to be tested.

  The elaborate security meant Marsh had no chance of sabotaging another negotiation. It also meant Will had no chance of escape if the other warlocks detected his subterfuge. Pig’s blood did not wash out easily; Will had thus far ruined two shirts in the course of practicing his sleight of hand. Marsh was a demanding taskmaster.

  The machine-gun chatter of a Teletype machine led Will and his escort into a chamber thirty feet belowground. There they joined Grafton and Hargreaves. The Teletype received real-time updates from RAF sector command stations and the Chain Home RDF observation posts. Grafton read the terse situation report spooling from the Teletype and adjusted the position of pins dotting an immense map of southeastern England, the Channel, and northern France.

  The pins represented the RAF’s best guess as to the location and disposition of incoming bomber groups. Innocent Britons would die tonight. Fewer, if Milkweed succeeded in giving the defenders a supernatural advantage. More, if Will managed to scuttle the negotiation.

  “Hurry,” said Hargreaves. He took a mercury thermometer from the table beside the Teletype. If they were to contribute to the night’s defense, they had to achieve an agreement with the Eidolons and see it paid.

  The summoning fell to Grafton and Webber. Will reflected upon the situation while they drew their knives.

  Two weeks ago, after Marsh safely retrieved Liv and Agnes, Will had delivered the first piece of encouraging news since the inception of Milkweed. According to Stephenson, who was hooked into the Ystation listening post network, the forty-eight hours beginning with the Coventry Blitz saw a massive increase in enemy radio traffic pertaining to the REGP. Something big had happened.

  Marsh the Younger had carried out his mission. Or, at the very least, he’d made a game attempt.

  But, in the short term, the new development allowed Marsh the Elder to pursue more freely the second part of his mission from 1963. Until they knew more about the situation in Germany he still wouldn’t attack the warlocks in full. The man wanted to have it both ways. But now he was willing to move more aggressively against the warlocks. He had already eliminated Pendennis, Milkweed’s oldest warlock, so for his second target he chose Shapley.

  The entire situation was steeped in a nauseating moral ambiguity. The elder Marsh had come back with tales of atrocities and murders and yet, to prevent them, he made himself a murderer. And Will his accomplice. The mathematics of salvation said it was a necessary evil for the greater good. But how did the scales weigh cold-blooded murder against sins that existed only in some phantom version of the future?

  Something went wrong the night Marsh slipped into Shapley’s room at the Savoy. He moved gingerly for days after the botched assault. The young warlock didn’t die quietly in his sleep.

  After Shapley was found dead in his hotel room, surrounded by signs of a struggle, Stephenson had demanded the warlocks move out of the Savoy and into the citadel. Will barely avoided the spartan accommodations through vociferous arguments that his brother’s position in the Lords might draw undue attention to the citadel if it became known his younger brother had taken up residence there. Stephenson had relented, but only just.

  As always, the warlocks drew the attention of something other through the use of Enochian, filtered through frail human biology and spilled blood, which carried the promise of eradication. Soon, the small chamber reverberated with a malignance vast as the cosmos. A century passed between each click of the Teletype. The sound burbled to Will’s ears, distorted by its passage through thick, greasy air.

  Hargreaves tackled the negotiation. Will followed the Enochian call-and-response. Once a price was reached, he would have to join in, to supply the blood that sealed their pact, and to later mark their payment of the blood price.

  Salt stung Will’s eyes. He wiped a hand across his forehead. It came away damp with sweat. But the effort to speak Enochian provided a natural cover for his anxiety.

  Hargreaves donned a pair of leather gloves and snapped the thermometer. Quicksilver skittered across the floor.

  Another update bubbled from the Teletype. The Luftwaffe was drawing closer. Hargreaves didn’t have time to stand his ground against the Eidolons’ demands, didn’t have the luxury of carefully worded counteroffers.

  The Eidolons demanded the blood of six new people. Six dead souls. In return, they would create a bank of clouds that just happened to contain trace amounts of mercury. Together, the commingled liquids would dust the enemy airplanes with moisture and metal. At which point the mercury would wreak destructive alchemy upon the aluminum airframes in the Junkers and Messerschmitts approaching Britain.

  Or so the boffins said. Will didn’t understand the details, even after he’d asked Lorimer to explain it. Something about “oxide layers” and “amalgams.” But he gathered that mercury could do terrible things to aluminum. The end result being a rain of German aero-scrap over southern England. Not enough to completely wipe out the bomber groups, but enough to give the RAF an edge.

  A bit baroque, perhaps, but the important thing was the Eidolons merely provided the mercury. They didn’t kill the attackers. Gravity would do that. The mercury would eventually fall as rain, and woe to the farmlands and streams below. But that wasn’t the most harrowing sacrifice demanded by this plan.

  Six souls. Hargreaves accepted.

  Webber lifted the telephone alongside the Teletype machine. It had a direct line to Stephenson, who would have a Milkweed escort waiting for the warlocks when they emerged from the citadel to pay the Eidolons’ price.

  All that remained was to seal the pact. In the altered reality of the citadel subbasement, the glow of the incandescent bulbs had become a celestial corpse light, the fading embers of dead stars. It glinted from Hargreaves’s blade. The elder warlock flicked his hand to dust the concrete floor with his own blood.

  Will produced his grandfather’s knife, the one with the handle fashioned from a piece of deer antler, and followed suit with a similar gesture. He added a modest flourish that just happened to swipe the knife handle across his wrist, and thus opened the stopcock. By bending his elbow, he squeezed a good cut’s worth of pig blood into the palm of his hand. The folding pocketknife closed the stopcock again when he snapped it closed.

  Will flicked the contents of his palm onto the floor. And diluted Hargreaves’s offering with useless dross.

  The Eidolon sensed the substitution. Its irritation sent ripples through the reinforced concrete walls. It growled something too quick and harsh for Will to discern. Hargreaves glanced at Grafton and Webber, who returned equally blank looks. Nobody understood it. Everybody looked at Will. He made a mental note to ensure he didn’t go last the next time around. Will shrugged, then made a show of flicking more blood from his fake wound.

  The Eidolon withdrew in a deafening burst of silent malice that knocked the humans to the floor. The concrete walls became fractured glass. The room stank of fossilized bone and newborn starlight.

  The deal, it seemed, had been canceled.

  *

  Will emerged from the citadel around sunrise. He suppressed the urge to sigh with relief as he passed the sentries and stepped onto the frost-slick cobbles of Horse Guards Parade. The failed negotiation had led to hours of postmortem analysis, including several futile attempts to translate the Eidolon’s final declaration. However, by the end of the night, nobody had accused Will of subterfuge.

  S
tephenson would hit the roof, but Will had become accustomed to that. Better to endure a bit of the old man’s temper than to be caught. They executed traitors. Will remembered poor Lieutenant Cattermole.

  Will cut through the park on his walk home. St. James’ at dawn. The rising sun hung below a layer of ashen clouds that looked destined to hide the sun for most of the day. The first rays of sunrise glinted on the lake and from the thin layer of ice along the shore that had coalesced during a recent cold snap. A raven watched Will from the bare boughs of a scarlet oak.

  Will paused on the footbridge that straddled the lake. His breath formed a fog in the still morning air. The pelicans, he noted, were nowhere in sight. Smart beasts. It was chillier by the water. Numbness claimed his cheeks and nose. The sting of pins and needles enveloped his finger stump, as it often did in cold weather.

  But the gentle rise in the center of the bridge afforded him a decent view of the surrounding city. Plumes of smoke rose from the northeast, southeast, and west. They reached all the way to the sky, and brushed the clouds with soot. The smoke cast long shadows over London. Somewhere, a lone siren bemoaned the night’s horrors.

  He wondered how many people had died in the bombing raid. More than six, certainly. He had replaced one atrocity with a greater one. It was a perverse way to go about saving the world. For how long would the war rage, and how many people would it consume in the course of averting Marsh’s ghostly future? His certainty could be unnerving when he spoke so matter-of-factly about a future that was barely hypothetical to Will. The man had seen things no human should see.

  Will opted to walk home rather than try to hail a taxi so early in the morning. He’d played a part in London’s suffering. To follow it up by isolating himself from the city’s woes felt immoral. Evil.