The War in the Dark

by Nick Setchfield

  Winter felt a familiar shudder, rooted in his bones. He had experienced the same sensation confronting the Widow of Kursk on the train. A sense of certainties collapsing. We are the Half-Claimed Man…

  ‘Did you really think that was your life?’ pressed Malcolm, openly taunting him now. ‘Buried away in suburbia? That neat semi-detached in Croydon? Mantovani and a tipple of sherry to soothe away the blood of the men we sent you to kill? The fragrant wife by your side?’

  Winter saw her body on the bathroom floor. ‘Joyce?’ he murmured, only half in the moment.

  ‘Joyce,’ smiled Malcolm. ‘Dear, loyal, dead Joyce. Do you know, it’s been so long I’ve quite forgotten that girl’s real name. Louise, I think. Or was it Lucy? She was dedicated, I’ll give you that. She kept that cover immaculately. And for such an astonishing length of time. I imagine the poor girl could have eventually died of boredom before you put a bullet in her stomach.’

  Winter sent a fist across Malcolm’s face. Two commandos immediately moved to restrain him, seizing his arms. Malcolm took a moment to wipe the blood from his mouth. He smirked at the sight of his bloodied knuckles.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry. Were you expecting a card of condolence, dear heart? It was rather awkward. I did just so happen to be dead.’

  Winter lunged again. Once again the commandos wrestled him back.

  ‘You were human wreckage when we found you in Africa,’ stated Malcolm. ‘A ruin of the man you had been. No more than a husk. A marvellous blank, in a way. Pure potential. From that day on I sculpted you. I created the perfect instrument for our purpose.’

  Winter thrashed as the commandos held him. ‘What are you talking about, Malcolm…?’

  ‘There was always a chance your memories might surface, of course. Luckily we had a chemical solution. We applied it on a regular basis. And then post-hypnotic instruction kept you equally in check. The mind can be such a malleable thing. Especially if it’s not entirely intact in the first place.’

  Winter remembered the syringe of orange liquid he had seen in the debrief room, the phial of the same bright, viscous fluid he had found in his bathroom cabinet, hidden in Joyce’s toiletry bag. He saw the hot white light of the interrogation lamp, felt his thoughts being burned away by its glare.

  ‘Why did you do this to me?’ His voice was small now. ‘Tell me why you’ve done this, Malcolm…’

  ‘I keep telling you. I needed an instrument: wilful, resourceful but ultimately obedient. Someone I could hone. Who trusted me implicitly. A friend. Someone who would one day lead me to this place, to this moment. To fulfil their destiny, I suppose you’d say.’

  ‘I’m a bloody assassin!’ protested Winter. ‘I kill people! I don’t have a destiny!’

  Malcolm stepped closer. ‘Each kill you made was for me. All part of the greater ritual. Every assassination I sanctioned was also a blood sacrifice. Every shabby little traitor, every wretched defector. Every death I ordered in Her Majesty’s name. Their blood fed the cause and we became stronger.’

  Winter stopped struggling. He felt a cold jolt of realisation. Blood? Sacrifice? Ritual? Now it began to make sense. Malcolm Hands was no better than those demon-worshipping bastards who had murdered Griggs in Vienna.

  ‘You’re part of it,’ he said, half smiling as the truth hit him. ‘You’ve always been part of it, haven’t you, Malcolm? This bloody war of magic…’

  ‘Tradecraft,’ corrected Malcolm. ‘Indivisible from magecraft. The British intelligence service was built upon it. We are all of us magicians, in a way. Some of us simply stand a little closer to our founding principles. John Dee would understand.’

  ‘You killed Hatherly. You killed my echo man.’

  ‘And I brought him back to life, after a fashion. I’m only a dabbler, after all. I’m no magus.’

  Winter battled to process it all. ‘Why? Why would you do that, Malcolm?’

  ‘The more you saw of the power of this world the more you believed. The more you believed the stronger you were. I knew what I was doing. Pity, I know. I rather liked Hatherly. He was reliable.’

  ‘You’ve betrayed me,’ said Winter. ‘You’ve betrayed everyone.’

  ‘I set the snare. I hooked you in, back in London. Portobello, to be precise. And then I placed you on the board, like a good little rook, and the game was on. You fought the Russians on my behalf. You found this godforsaken place for me. And you guided me here, as I knew you would, given a chance, because you’re exceptional. I haven’t betrayed you, Christopher. I’ve wielded you.’

  Another commando had entered the nave as Malcolm was talking. He wore wire-framed lenses and had the preoccupied air of a technician. He wheeled a compact khaki-coloured machine, roughly the size of a small upright cabinet.

  The soldier rested the apparatus against one of the central columns. And then he unfolded a hinged metal plate to expose a copper-fronted display, all illuminated glass and quivering needles. The clutter of dials implied it was some kind of field radio, distinctly more advanced than the Soviet model in the monk’s quarters. The trooper flipped a switch and the machine emitted a high, urgent whine, its array of dials simmering with electricity. It looked utterly incongruous against the ancient stone.

  Malcolm strode over and handed the book to the radio operator. The man began to leaf through it, nodding as Malcolm’s lean, emphatic finger indicated certain of the runes. The soldier slipped on a pair of headphones and pushed a cable jack into the side of the device. He rested the book on top of the unit, its pages splayed.

  Karina watched it all. She flashed a cautioning look to Winter.

  ‘Do you know what Dee called this place?’ asked Malcolm, amiably, returning to Winter. ‘The basilica of the burning star! They did so love their strange portents in the heavens, those chaps. And now, of course, we have placed our own stars in the firmament.’

  Malcolm tilted his jaw, his gaze rising to the vaulted ceiling and, it seemed, the sky beyond.

  ‘Telstar 1. Telstar 2. And, as of this month, Telstar 3, though that one we’ve managed to keep a little more hush-hush. We can do discretion when it suits us. Not everything needs to be a flag-waving opportunity.’

  ‘Telstar? Communications satellites?’ said Winter, nonplussed.

  ‘Exactly. We have forged new stars, Christopher, and cast them into orbit around this planet of ours. The white heat of twentieth-century technology, up there in the heavens, circling over us, higher than the towers of our cities. It’s a rather grand feeling, the future, isn’t it?’ He smiled, ironically. ‘God save the New Elizabethans!’

  The technician unlocked a drawer at the front of the machine. It slid from the cabinet, revealing a keyboard almost like a typewriter’s. There was no alphabet embossed on the brass keys, just an array of shapes – strokes, slashes, curves. Edges of squares, slivers of triangles, broken halves of circles. Mathematical fragments. The operator nudged his glasses to the bridge of his nose, squinting as he studied the runes in the grimoire. And then, meticulously, intently, he began to type.

  Malcolm’s gaze swept the remains of the bone circle, contemptuous.

  ‘They say our empire’s in decline, don’t they? But we’re not the ones playing ju-ju with the bones of saints in 1963. Jesus, they may have nuclear warheads but just look at their magecraft. They’re barely more advanced than witch doctors.’

  There was a chatter of type. A thin strip of copper spooled from the rear of the machine. It was stamped with symbols. Dee and Kelly’s glyphs, enshrined on the ticker-tape. The technician had created a sequence of runes from careful application of the keys, assembling the shapes fragment by fragment.

  The man glanced at Malcolm, clearly reluctant to take his eyes from the device for more than a second.

  ‘Relay bounce commencing, sir,’ he stated, a trace of awe in his voice for all his attempt at terse military professionalism. ‘Kressbronn listening post transmitting to Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall, closed frequency. Telecommand sequence will be rec
eived by helical antennae in approximately two minutes. Signal override will occur in approximately four minutes.’

  Malcolm nodded, satisfied. And then he turned to Winter again. ‘The Elizabethans used obsidian scrying stones to commune with the great beyond. All they were really doing was transmitting and receiving signals. And that’s just what we’re doing, only with infinitely more power. Beaming Dee and Kelly’s runes to the stars. There’s an obsidian-plated transponder at the heart of each satellite. White fire, black glass. The principle’s exactly the same. Only the technology’s changed.’

  He relished his next words. ‘And this time we have the power to truly bring them into our world. Not just as visions, glimpsed by sorcerers. A sacred presence that will stand among us. Naturally we shall welcome them in the name of Her Majesty.’

  ‘Signal encode complete, sir,’ said the radio operator. ‘Pulse modulation commencing.’

  There was a new sound from the transmitter. A shrill, ascending oscillation. A fresh cluster of lights lit up.

  ‘Telstar’s a massive project, Malcolm,’ said Winter. ‘You’re not doing this alone, are you?’

  ‘Of course not. There are plenty of us in government and industry furious at what’s been allowed to happen to our empire. You’ve seen it for yourself, Christopher. Our influence has absolutely corroded since the war. Too many politicians content to put the wishes of other countries first. Independence. Immigration. Every fashionable rallying cry chipping away at our nation’s strength. Soon we’ll be a tiny, frightened island, bullied by the big boys. Is that really how you want this century to play out? I don’t. Today we have an opportunity to correct that course. A chance to ensure the British Empire endures into the next century and beyond.’

  He indulged a seraphic smile. ‘We shall build Jerusalem. A new world, burning and glorious.’

  ‘Telecommand sequence received,’ said the operator, raising his voice above the growing thrum and whistle of the machine. ‘Orbital alignment complete. Two minutes to signal override.’

  ‘And this is the way you build a new world?’ countered Karina. ‘By opening Hell?’

  Malcolm dipped into his jacket pocket, reaching for his hip flask. He took a swig then wiped his mouth, wincing as the whisky stung his split lip.

  ‘They came to me as angels,’ he said, simply.

  ‘The Ascendance are far from angels,’ said Karina, exasperated. ‘Why don’t you try and understand what they really are? What you’re about to do?’

  Malcolm swallowed another swill of whisky before pocketing the flask. ‘I said they came to me as angels. When I was a child. They were beautiful. Their power was beautiful. You know how you can sense power in ice? In a glacier? Something immensely still and clear and old but you know it can reshape a landscape, given time? That’s just how they seemed to me.’

  He smiled again, more fondly this time. ‘They came to William Blake too, you know. They’re quite the inspiration.’

  Malcolm returned his attention to Winter. His voice was lower now, more confidential, as if he was sharing some private understanding between the pair of them. The whisky clung to his breath.

  ‘You knew them too, Tobias.’

  The technician spoke again. ‘Final telemetry authenticated. Signal override confirmed. Telstar 1, Telstar 2, Telstar 3. Transponders locked.’

  Winter fixed his gaze against Malcolm’s. ‘My name is Christopher Winter.’

  ‘I know. I christened you. It seemed appropriate. Winter’s the season that buries everything, after all. The one that makes the world blank and white. But your real name is Tobias Hart.’

  Winter caught a sound then. At first he thought it was a whispering among the stones of the basilica. And then he realised it was coming from beyond the building’s walls, a sibilance loud enough to be heard above the whine and hum of the machine. He stared through the windows of the transept, searching for the source of the noise.

  Outside, the lake itself was hissing. The water was churning, broiling, seething into steam.

  ‘Your name is Tobias Hart,’ repeated Malcolm. ‘You were the single greatest warlock this century has known. Wilful, unpredictable and quite devastatingly powerful. Sometimes magic itself seemed to cower from you. You were a great asset to us in the war. I also counted you as a friend.’

  There was a sudden, oppressive energy in the old church. Everyone assembled in the nave could feel it against their skin. A tangible force, potent as a waiting storm, pushing against the atoms of the air, as if willing them to shatter, to explode, to release it into the world. Something unseen but insistent. Something that demanded existence.

  ‘Naturally we named this project Operation Magus. It was only fitting.’

  As the lake roared and boiled around the basilica great gusts of heat swept the length of the nave. Beads of moisture clung to the stonework before streaming down the high walls. In seconds every surface of the monastery had a slick, weeping gleam, like fast-thawing ice.

  Malcolm quickened his words. ‘In 1947 we found you in Africa, half dead. Technically you were dead. Briefly. A near-death experience, they call it. The great tunnel, the white light. You flatlined. Your soul had been severed from your body. The doctors in that squalid little field hospital managed to revive you. But not all of your soul came back.’

  Winter wanted to run, to push this all away. But there was an inescapable weight of truth to what Malcolm was saying. He knew that now.

  ‘Part of you was left behind. Part of you – perhaps the best part – has been missing ever since.’

  Winter simply stared at Malcolm. The same bloody words rumbled inside his skull, triumphant. We are the Half-Claimed Man…

  Beyond the window the lake erupted, throwing scalding funnels of water into the sky. The furious heat filled the church.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ said Malcolm. ‘This isn’t life that you have now, Tobias. It’s taxidermy.’

  In the centre of the nave a whirl of white flame tore into existence, the light at its heart as bleak as ice, as brilliant as a sun. The circle of fire revolved, carving itself out of the air. Winter stared at it. It looked like a rupture in the skin of the world.

  ‘I think it’s high time you met the man you were,’ said Malcolm. ‘He’s waiting for you.’

  There was a scream that bled into an electric shriek of overwhelmed circuitry. The transmitter had exploded, its dials shattering. Winter turned and saw the operator’s charred body, the man’s limbs spasming as life burned out of them. His uniform was shredded, his spectacles cracked and blackened. It was as if some immense surge of energy had filled him, channelled by the machine. It wasn’t any kind of earthly voltage, Winter knew.

  The book, too, was smouldering, wreathed in thick, dark smoke.

  Malcolm didn’t flinch. ‘Ignore it!’

  The halo of white fire widened, deepened, blazing even more fiercely now as it eclipsed the altar. It was an opening, Winter realised, staring into the bright, blank abyss. A portal. A gateway.

  He had seen it before. It was the white light that lay beyond life.

  Malcolm gave a crisp snap of his fingers. Winter was thrust closer to the ring of flame. The commandos forced him down by the shoulders until he was on his knees, his body buckling. He raised his eyes, the heat of the uncanny fire on his face. There were shapes emerging. Figures were forming, coalescing out of the rage of light, their bodies sculpted from the pure white flame. They were dazzling, incandescent. Winter had to tear his eyes away. It hurt even to glimpse them.

  They shone like the first morning.

  And then, his eyes smarting with sweat, he forced himself to look. His eyelids were slits, screwed tight against the brilliance, but he tried to focus on the central figure, the one who stood in front of the others. He felt sick with dread but he let his eyes open, the lids trembling as they widened.

  He saw Tobias Hart. He saw himself.

  ‘Oh dear lord,’ said the man with his face, smirking broadly. ‘We’ve rather
let ourselves go, haven’t we?’

  32

  Winter wanted to recoil but the blazing figure transfixed him.

  ‘My God,’ he whispered, incredulous.

  It was like gazing into a mirror only to find a memory staring back. A dim, nebulous memory, but one that became sharper the more he looked at it. It was his own face but it was as strange as it was familiar.

  He knew his face. He knew the creases in the skin, the telltale grooves, the contour lines of experience accrued across the decades. This shimmering, phantasmic reflection had none of that detail, nothing of the forty-six-year-old man he had become. The features were his own, yes, but younger, smoother, not quite so hard around the jawline. He saw a bright boyishness he couldn’t imagine he’d ever possessed.

  The smile, too, belonged to a different man. There was a curl at the edges of the mouth, a hint of something arrogant, potentially cruel, as if the muscles were animated by altogether darker impulses. Winter had seen that smile before, he realised. The faded black-and-white photo that Harzner had shown him in Krabbehaus, the one he had no memory of ever being taken. The two of them together, smiling hugely.

  He had sudden, absolute recall of the moment captured in that picture. Aschaffenburg, 1946. A grand party beneath a high summer moon. It was vivid enough to taste, to feel, to inhale: the sour trace of Goldwasser liqueur on Harzner’s breath, the swampy clutch of his handshake, the final, agonised scream of that evening’s entertainment…

  Winter shook himself free of the memory, repulsed by what he remembered. Just what kind of man had he been?

  ‘A man who was never afraid to trade morality for strength.’

  Tobias Hart had spoken again. The voice was Winter’s own, only lighter, more sardonic, almost playful. Winter heard it just as much inside his skull as echoing around the nave.

  ‘I mean, do come on. A squeamish assassin? I’ve never heard of such a thing.’