Henri leaned in, looking alarmed. “What? What is this?”
“Der Schwarze Ritter, the invulnerable knight of the Reich, will be contributing his powers one by one to our subject.” He smiled.
“You can do that with powers, too?”
“Herr Gӧering believes so. We have tested it with others. It should suffice.”
“Now why would you do that? Take powers away from a perfectly good metahuman?” I mused. “From what Henri said, der Schwarze Ritter’s been the lynchipin of your army in the Eastern Front.”
Mitternacht clamped his lips together.
Bryson’s cane came down on his knee, and Mitternacht screamed.
“Talk!” Bryson roared, grabbing his collar with his free hand. “Talk or I'll break your legs!”
“Oh Gott, oh Gott! Mein Gott!”
“Yes?” Loge asked, smiling. “You have something to say?”
“We’re wasting time!” I snarled. “Fuck torture, let the man answer.”
“It’s all scum like this deserve!” Bryson’s voice was cold, and his eyes were narrow and flint-like as he watched Mitternacht writhe in pain. “They’ve done worse and won’t hesitate to do worse until they’re stopped.”
In his scowl I saw the man he would be, decades later. I saw Morgenstern, in all his bitter, remorseless glory.
Would we fail here? Would Tesla die or be crippled here, and was that the reason that he turned into Aegon Morgenstern?
Well.
Best to succeed, then. Maybe he’d be less mopey when I got back to my present.
“Answer the man, and save yourself some pain.” I told Mitternacht. “Why strip away Schwarze Ritter’s powers?”
“He’s fighting his binding!” Mitternacht screamed. “He’s less and less reliable as time goes on, and if he gets free entirely we are fucked!”
Oh. Oh my.
I looked to Bryson, he looked to me, and the two of us shared gleaming grins that put Loge’s to shame.
“Now how would we unbind him?” I wondered aloud. “Who bound him in the first place?”
“That fucking Greek, Black Sabbas. Good luck with that, he’s vanished into Istanbul.” Mitternacht snarled.
“But that’s not the only way.” Loge whispered.
“No.” Mitternacht sighed. “If you had some blood from when he was unbound, you could perhaps undo the binding.”
Sounded like we had a mission, then. “Alright, where do we find Schwarze Ritter’s blood? Who’s got some of that?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t high enough on the council to be privy to that. Mein Gott, I’m not even sure we have any more. If we did it would be in Burg Wallenstein. That’s where the transference is taking place, so good luck trying to find it there.” He laughed, a hysterical note rising in his voice. “The finest of the Reich, gathered there to see History done. The most well-trained and equipped guards, to protect the process and all involved. Ja, good luck with that.”
“Where do the Jews factor in?” I wondered. “You said they would be donors. Donors of what?”
“They are not just any Jews. They are eighteen of the Tzadikim.”
Bryson’s breath whooshed from his lungs in amazement. Henri’s face looked as puzzled as I felt.
“What the hell are you thinking, man?” Bryson spluttered. “What, what kind of idiotic, asinine, ludicrous... I can’t understand what in the name of reason made you think this a good idea?”
“Missing something here,” I said, snapping my fingers to get his attention. “Who or what are the Tzadikim?”
“The Tzadikim Nistarim, hidden saints of Jewish lore.” Bryson stood, hands behind his back, pacing as he thought. “Each one of them exemplifying humility, unaware of their goodness. Thirty-six of them, anchoring the world, giving Jehovah the faith in humanity to keep the world going. There’s more to that, and a Talmudic scholar would doubtless take me to the cleaners with angry academic arguing, but, well, that’s enough for a layman to comprehend.”
“Anchoring the world?” That didn’t sound good.
“If even one of them is missing, Jehovah ends the world. Or the world ends. Or...well, suffice it to say, playing about with them is a bad, bad idea.”
“Which is why none of them will be missing.” Mitternacht sighed. “Would be missing. But well, here we are.”
“Then what would the ritual do to them?” I asked.
“It would transfer their status of Tzadikim to a single vessel. Repeated eighteen times, it would pool whatever spark of divinity and shielding they possess. What is righteous, in the end?” He smiled, weakly. “Jehovah does not attend to the world, anymore. Cannot or will not, the difference is slight. And when they are pooled into the staunchest pillar of the Reich, is it not his true Aryan ideals that are righteous? If the Tzadikim are the embodiment all that is righteous, and one man is made the embodiment of the majority of the Tzadikim, then how can he be anything but righteous?”
I nodded. “So you’re trying to get another enemy god’s power on your side.”
“And with it, the power of the Jewish tradition.” Mitternacht nodded. “The Jewish mystics have incredible magical potential, but most of it is tied up in ensuring Judaism continues. Years we’ve been trying to exterminate the bastards, and we’re not even halfway done. The only way to finish the job is to strip them of their protection.”
The venom in his voice. The question that had been clawing at my mind burst forth. “Why? Why go to all this trouble to kill them? You’re in the middle of fighting against the rest of the world, and you stop to commit genocide? Where’s the sense in this?” My voice rose, high and shrill. I was tired and angry and hurting from a ton of minor aches and fatigues, and this made no sense to me.
Mitternacht laughed, winced as his broken knee shifted. “You would not understand. They have been a sickness within Germany for centuries! We are finally excising them by the only way possible. Casting out their weakness, their faithlessness, their sabotage. All this is necessary. It is them or us.”
“You just said their protections are strong. How are they weak?”
He glared. “Not strong enough to save those we have killed so far.”
“You’ve got nearly twenty of their saints in the next room, so how are they faithless? You’re literally trying to capitalize on their faith!”
“Not faith in their worthless god, per se, but faith in the Fatherland! They are the reason we lost years ago, and now—”
Henri was shaking his head. “Do not try to look for sense in this. There is only hatred and foolishness. Hitler made the Jewish people a scapegoat to unite the scared and scattered German majority. He used them for his own ambition. That is all.”
I closed my eyes for a bit, tried to focus on regaining composure. And with increased control came clarity, and a question I hadn’t asked yet.
“This vessel of the Reich... who are we talking about, here?”
He stared at me like I’d asked an idiotic question.
“Who else? Der Füehrer himself, of course!”
The sound of Bryson’s palm hitting his own forehead echoed in the cavern like a gunshot. “They’re trying to turn Hitler into a proper Übermensch.”
“More like perfecting an already superior stock.” Mitternacht clarified. “The mind of Tesla! The powers of der Schwarze Ritter! The divine sanction of eighteen living saints! A means to the Reich eternal.”
“And if you fail,” Bryson whispered, “the end of the world.”
Mitternacht’s smile died. “We had no choice. We had to start this.”
My voice could have drawn blood if it was any sharper. “Oh, this will be rich. Do tell, why did you have to do this?”
“We’ve been trying to secure Tesla for months, but the actual ritual would have awaited der Schwarze Ritter’s victory in the East. A few more weeks at most, you see.”
“He’s that much of a factor?”
Henri nodded. “He is the reason the Germans took Stalingrad. Without
him, the war would be very different.”
“So why kick things off early?”
Mitternacht snorted. “The reason for that sits in a cell among the Tzadikim. Your companion.”
Oh boy... “He tried to kill Hitler.”
“Swarms of him. Waves of him. Desperate and foolish, but brave and unending. Berlin is in a state of martial law because of him. If his bodies hadn’t disappeared upon death, we would be heaping his bodies high in trenches around the city right now.”
Of course Timetripper had fucked things up.
“But do you see what it means?” He grinned. “Why would a time traveler, such a powerful time traveler come back to stop us now? Clearly, we succeed! Clearly, the ritual succeeds, and he has come back under some delusion that he can stop destiny itself! This is the only explanation that fits.”
A colossal mistake. Or was it?
Timetripper said that Hitler lived through this time period, and no other Time Traveler could alter that. He’d broken time— but what if he hadn’t been the reason for it breaking? Hitler being pumped full of divine essence might be enough to prevent his destiny from being altered. And the combination of supergenius mental capabilities with powers that rendered him unstoppable...
There was a way that this turned into a non-paradoxical situation. If the ritual succeeded and Hitler quietly slipped away at the end of the war, leaving a body double or something else to die in his place, then my timeline would not necessarily change in any way I could measure. This might also explain why Tesla’s inventions slowed after World War Two, and could also explain his eventual disappearance. A Tesla stripped of his genius, brought down to average intellect, well... Bryson would cover for him as long as he could, but eventually he’d have to fade out of sight.
We were on a cusp. The stakes were high, and what happened here would decide how things ended. I’d have to tread lightly.
But... on the other hand... this was an opportunity. I had a feeling that Timetripper was correct, when he said that killing Hitler was the key to jumpstarting his powers, and returning home.
“The transference, the ritual, all of this. Hitler’s going to be present for that.” I mused.
“Well, ja, his presence is required.” Mitternacht shrugged as much as the ropes would let him.
“And it’s going to happen in a little over a day, you said?”
“Tomorrow, at dawn.”
“At this Burg Wallenstein.”
Comprehension filled his horror-stricken face. “You can’t seriously be thinking of trying to stop it.”
I turned to him and smiled, rows of teeth and not a single drop of mirth. “Trying? No. Doing? Yes. The ritual will not happen.” And I was going to kill Hitler so hard that time itself would scream.
“Bah! The castle is the very lair of von Katzen! He’ll have his machines and guards and good soldiers of the Reich at hand for this, his part in the ultimate triumph!” He laughed, jagged and uneven from his pain. “The upper echelons of the Society of Thule will be there! All sorcerers and scholars, the lowest of them easily my equal! Their servitors will be legion! You have one day, what can you do? Surely, you could free the Tzadikim, but that still leaves Tesla and der Schwarze Ritter. So we’ll miss out on their powers, so what? We can acquire them or their other kin later, and try again!”
“Can you?” Loge wondered. “I hear desperation in your voice, Hulbert.”
Mitternacht shut up. That was fine, we’d gotten more than enough out of him. I had ideas and I had plans and a goal, now. The stakes were higher than I’d thought, but I could work with this.
“Bryson. Use the chloroform and put him out. We might need him later.” Bryson scowled, but complied. Once Mitternacht’s head sagged limp into Bryson’s hands, I stood and smiled at the others.
“Right. Let’s go let those poor people out, head upstairs, and find a quiet place to talk. She’s got the beginnings of a plan...”
CHAPTER 14: DIRE – ONE NIGHT IN BERLIN
“I could not say who these strangers were, who had saved us. But they needed our help, and we could not refuse. A chance to save more lives, and strike back at the Nazis? It was more than our wish, it was our duty.”
--Moishe Burnstein, holocaust survivor, and author of “Unlikely Salvation”
Rain sheeted down outside Schloss Mitternacht. It pattered off of the thick trees of the estate, sluiced from wooden gutters, and rattled against the windows like a horde of scratching animals.
Under different circumstances it would have been soothing. Always something pure about the rain, I’ve found. Something clean about it. Washing away the sins of the world and the weight of my problems, giving me another try at righting what I’d done wrong. I’d made mistakes, more than a few. It hadn’t been a total wash... but I’d lost friends, had innocents die on my watch, and failed to take into account the full situation more than once.
Roy still weighed on my mind. He was alive now, a fresh-faced kid trying to join the army, or he would be in the next year or two. I was uncertain of the timeframe, precisely. How much trouble I could have averted, if I’d spent just a few minutes studying history! I could speed-read like no one’s business, seriously, one afternoon with a gridnet-connected computer and the Giggle search engine, and I’d have been set. But no, no...
Still, all my mistakes, all my troubles, all my regrets were nothing compared to the man behind me.
I turned away from the rain-streaked window, and looked back across the desk to where Timetripper sat, wolfing down a country breakfast. They hadn’t done too much to him, thankfully. As much of an irritant as he’d been, I had no desire to see him tortured any more by evil fucks like the ones we were dealing with here.
“So. Do you have any questions?” I asked, watching him tear through half-a-plate of scrambled eggs, scattering crumbs on the hardwood floor. I bristled at the casual littering, but pushed it aside. Wasn’t my floor.
He spoke through his mouthful of food, because of course he did. “Mf. Umf. Um... I don’t think so? We get in there, we like take on a castle full of Nazis and soldiers and magicians and machines and shit, when they’re gearing up for the ritual, and bust up the machine? Kill the inventor and Hitler?”
“Yes. No machine, no transference. No transference, the rituals won’t matter. No inventor, and they won’t be able to build the machine again.” That was the hope. At the very least, combined with everything else they were doing, I figured it would delay them until past the point where they lost the war, and then it wouldn’t matter.
“And this Shoors Ritter guy?”
“Henri’s got his telepathy back, and according to Égalité’s spies, Schwarze Ritter’s behind schedule. If we finish quickly, we’ll be done before he gets there.”
He was the wild card. If he arrived early, before we had beaten the castle’s defenses and defenders, then we were probably dead. If we finished them off in time to search for his blood, we had a chance of breaking his binding. If we couldn’t turn it up we’d complete our objectives and leave... us through time travel, and the others through a hasty exit.
“I still don’t see why we can't just kill Hitler from the get-go, and paradox out of there. Once I’ve got my powers back, we can like, totally fix everything.”
Right, because that’s worked so well for you up to now. I screwed my patience to the sticking point. “We don’t actually know what will happen when you get your powers back. We can’t risk it.”
“Fuck. Yeah, okay. You’re the boss.” He frowned at me over his sausages. “For now.”
Patience or not, I was not in the mood. I leaned in close, and he sunk back in the chair, evading my eyes.
“We’re here because of you.” I said, in the softest voice I could manage. “Every part of this is still your fault. Now we fix it. Then you return her safely to her own time, and go think about what you did. That’s the deal. Or she could put you back in that cell and you can take your chances. Those are your choices, do you understand?
”
“Yeah, yeah, cool it hot mama.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Slang thing.”
I straightened up. “Good. Now let’s—”
Glass shattered below. Timetripper dove under the desk, I drew my gun and burst through the door, looking for trouble. A window? Had to be. Feet pounded on the stairs, as Henri shouted, and shots rang out from the vicinity of the great hall. I took the stairs two at a time, grabbed the railing and swung around one-handed, to find a figure in a Nazi officer’s uniform bobbing and weaving, dodging Bryson’s cane as the dapper inventor laid into him with everything he had. The lighting was bad so I squatted into a shooter’s stance, waited for the proper angle, and put three into the Nazi’s back when I had a reasonably clear shot.
He staggered, but didn’t fall. Bryson clocked him in the face, sending his cap flying, and the light streaming in through the window caught the unknown assailant’s face, highlighting it just right.
“Unstoppable?” I blurted, feeling relief course through me. “How did you— what are you doing here?”
Bryson hesitated, and Unstoppable straightened up, looking around. “Doc!” Footsteps pounded behind me, and that grin grew wider. “Henri! Alright, so do we have a Dottie, too?”
“Ah.” Bryson said, leaning on his cane. “I’m afraid not.”
Unstoppable’s grin died. “Damn it.” He found his way to a couch, and sank into it, soaking the expensive upholstery.
“She’s alive.” I said. “Long story. Explain it later. You first. How did you get here?”
“So it’s pretty weird being a werewolf.” He rubbed the back of his head. “I remember smells so vivid I could see them, like, and the moon tugging on me like a magnet, and the pack running and me just running along with it. I think I fought a few of them. Y’know, to show them who’s boss. I was out in front, I remember that.”
“Running here?” Made sense they’d follow Mitternacht. I seemed to recall that was his plan to begin with, have them come to him once everyone was cursed.
DIRE : TIME (The Dire Saga Book 3) Page 25
