The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds

by Ian Tregillis

  He found the officer overseeing the packing procedure in a cavernous room carved directly from the bedrock beneath the building. Lightbulbs hung from cables affixed to the ceiling overhead, tossing harsh shadows between the vaulted brick archways and casting the deepest niches into shadow. The hotel had once boasted an extensive wine cellar, but the casks and wine bottles had been replaced with row upon row of filing cabinets and metal shelving. Approximately two-thirds of the shelves were bare; many of the cabinets stood with their drawers open and empty. Doubtless the wine had long ago disappeared into the personal collections of high-ranking SS officers.

  The officer was tall, much taller than Marsh, perhaps even taller than Will. His long, thin face and large round eyeglasses made him look more like a librarian than like a soldier. Which might not have been far from the truth, Marsh realized.

  He carried a clipboard upon which two high metal loops impaled a sheaf of papers. He walked among the empty crates, inspecting the shelves and cabinets that hadn’t been packed yet, pausing to compare each label with something in his papers. He’d nod, make a note on his clipboard, and jot a six-digit number on the box or cabinet drawer with a grease pencil. The numbers corresponded to crates, showing the packing men which files went in which containers.

  The archivist saw Marsh. He scowled. “Don’t stand there,” he said. “Grab a crate”—he pointed to a stack in one of the shadowy niches—“and get to work. But be certain to label your crate with the proper catalog numbers,” he added, pointing to the numbers on the file boxes. His attention turned back to his work.

  Marsh cleared his throat. He stepped closer to the other man. He tried to keep his fake battery harness in plain view, but the shelves, low ceilings, and archways cast irregular shadows in all directions. “I’m here for the Reichsbehörde files. Have they been moved yet?”

  The other man shrugged, still studying his clipboard. “Everything’s getting moved today.”

  “I don’t care about everything else,” said Marsh. He stepped closer still. “My orders are to escort the Reichsbehörde records. Where are they?”

  The other man looked up, frowning. His eyebrows pulled together in puzzlement. “I wasn’t informed about this.”

  “Of course not.” Marsh rested his hand on the battery at his waist, silently praying it would again make his point for him. “The Reichsführer and the Führer themselves have a deep personal interest in our work. I’m here to escort the records. It’s a special task, not something entrusted to merely anybody.”

  “Still—” The archivist paused when he saw Marsh’s battery. “Oh, I see.” His gaze darted from the battery to the wires snaking up Marsh’s neck. When it reached the collar of Marsh’s uniform, his brows came together, and his mouth formed another frown. The sweat dampening Marsh’s shirt felt clammy.

  He studied Marsh’s face. “You’re from the Götterelektrongruppe, then?”

  “Yes, and I’ve told you why I’m here. Now, have the records been moved or not?”

  “Let me check.” The archivist flipped through several pages on his clipboard until he found the one he sought. He tapped the page with one slender finger and looked up again. He took another look at Marsh’s battery, then another at the polished siegrunen on his collar. Again, the furrowed brow.

  Marsh didn’t like the way this fellow was studying his uniform. He appeared to be looking for something, a patch or insigne that wasn’t present. “Is there a problem?”

  “No,” said the archivist distantly. But then his demeanor brightened, and he tapped the clipboard again. He said, “You’re in luck. They’re still here.” He ushered Marsh deeper into the cellar, toward shelves that hadn’t yet been packed. “That way.”

  Marsh motioned the other man ahead of him. “Show me.”

  The archivist hesitated for the briefest moment, then cocked his head in a halfhearted nod. Marsh reached into his pocket as soon as his guide turned his back. He pulled out the garrote a second before the man reached for his pistol. With wrists crossed and arms outstretched, Marsh leapt forward to get the wire over the taller man’s head. It caught briefly on the tip of the archivist’s nose as he pitched forward, giving him time to drop the clipboard and get one hand up to protect his throat as Marsh frantically flipped the wire loop under his jaw and around his neck.

  Marsh yanked backwards as hard as he could, straining until his shoulders groaned. His opponent made a wheezing, gurgling sound as his head was pulled back. But air still trickled into his throat because he’d gotten a few fingers under the garrote. And shorter Marsh couldn’t get the leverage he needed to close off the man’s trachea.

  He backed into Marsh, using his greater weight to shove him bodily against a brick archway. The wire bundle taped to Marsh’s scalp came loose. Pain ripped up his side. His ribs ached, but he kept pulling until it felt he’d sever the man’s fingers.

  Blood trickled from the wire-thin cut on the man’s neck, making the garrote slippery. The wire and the blood together mingled into a hot, metallic, salty smell.

  The man pitched forward again, lifting Marsh off the ground. They brushed a lightbulb. It swung wildly, casting kaleidoscopic shadows that danced around them. The archivist launched himself backwards, landing heavily atop Marsh. Air whooshed out of Marsh’s lungs, leaving his chest painfully hollow. His ribs creaked almost to the point of snapping. A dark tunnel consumed his field of vision; he struggled to force air back into his lungs, but the weight of the larger man atop him made it difficult. The tension in the garrote loosened.

  The man’s gurgling, Marsh’s gasping, and the hammering of Marsh’s heartbeat together sounded loud enough to alert the entire building. He could hear the scuffing of boots, the rattle of hand trucks, and men talking in another part of the cellar not far away.

  As the man atop him thrashed, Marsh worked one knee up against the base of the taller man’s leg and dug his opposite elbow into the man’s lower back, near the kidney. Then he flexed his body, using those two contact points like fulcra. His opponent arched his back, scrabbling at his throat with his free hand. The gurgling trailed off. Marsh, quivering with too much adrenaline to loosen his grip on the wooden handles of the garrote, struggled to roll the archivist off him.

  He kneeled over the man he’d just killed, panting as though he’d run a steeplechase. It couldn’t have lasted beyond a minute, but the fight felt as though it had gone for hours. Marsh’s ribs ached, and his hands shook violently. He wrinkled his nose at the mélange of sweat, blood, and panic.

  Different parts of his mind followed disparate threads of thought as he struggled to get his body under control. Hide the body. Watch out for blood. Something’s wrong with my disguise. Find the clipboard.

  First things first. Marsh reaffixed the loose wires to the tape under his hair. It took two tries because his hands trembled so badly and his scalp was damp with sweat from his exertion. But he managed to repair the gravest damage to his imperfect disguise.

  Marsh heaved the dead man over his shoulder, careful not to smear blood on his uniform. The man was thin but tall, and a damn sight heavier than he looked. Marsh staggered into an abandoned wing of the cellar, where the shelves stood empty and where, he hoped, nobody would have reason to venture. He propped the body in a niche behind one of the brickwork arches, where the light didn’t reach. He retrieved the garrote in case he needed it again. The wire made a wet slicing sound as Marsh pulled it out of the thin gash in the dead man’s throat. After coiling the wire and putting it back in his pocket, he wiped his hands clean on the archivist’s uniform. He listened for several long moments, to see if anybody in the cellar had heard the struggle. No shouts; no alarms.

  The archivist had dropped the clipboard where Marsh jumped him. Marsh retrieved it. He scanned through half the pages before he found a sequence of entries marked “REGP.” The Reichsbehörde records comprised a sequence of thirteen consecutive catalog numbers. He tore the sheet from the clipboard and folded the catalog page in his pocke
t. It took another fifteen minutes of searching the cellar before he found the cabinets marked with the same catalog numbers. They were empty, meaning the records in question had already been loaded on one of the trucks.

  He rushed back outside, but was relieved to find the trucks still queued up. Marsh again scanned the supervising officers’ cargo manifest—their replacements had arrived, while Marsh was inside—and traced his quarry to the fourth truck from the end of the queue. The lieutenant behind the wheel saluted when Marsh climbed in.

  Marsh said, “I’ll be escorting our cargo to its new destination.”

  The driver acknowledged this but otherwise said nothing. They passed the next half hour in silence broken only by shouts of the men loading the trucks. It took an effort of will not to fidget, not to inspect himself in the mirrors. The truck occasionally bobbed up and down on its suspension as more crates were loaded on the cargo bed. It rocked Marsh into half sleep; the adrenaline rush evaporated, leaving him wearier than before. But fear that the dead archivist would be discovered too soon kept him jolting back to wakefulness.

  Eventually, the stream of men filing in and out of the SS Haus slowed to a trickle. One of the supervisors walked down the line of trucks, loudly pounding his fist on each. One by one the trucks belched exhaust. Marsh’s driver turned the ignition, and their own truck grumbled to life.

  When the driver reached for the gearshift, Marsh said, “Wait.” Marsh watched the trucks in front pull away, and checked the side mirror until the trucks in the rear had pulled around them. When they had fallen to the end of the line, he said, “Now. Proceed, slowly.”

  The lieutenant obeyed him without question. He didn’t object when Marsh directed him to take turns that separated them from the rest of the convoy. They wove through Berlin, heading roughly west.

  Marsh waited until they were well outside the city before ordering his driver to pull to the side of the road.

  “Roll down your window, Obersturmführer.”

  The driver hesitated. “Sir?”

  “Lower your window,” said Marsh. “That’s an order.”

  Cold weather had left the window crank stiff and unresponsive. The driver struggled with it, but managed to lower the window glass.

  Marsh pulled out his sidearm, pressed the barrel to the driver’s temple, and pulled the trigger. Blood, bone, and brain matter exploded through the open window.

  He dumped the driver’s body under an ash tree, in a shallow grave of snow.

  He parked the truck on a disused back road kilometers from the nearest town. The lingering glow of a late springtime sunset paled the sky while Marsh, working by the light of an electric torch, rearranged the cargo bed to free up the crates he sought.

  His ploy had worked. Marsh had stolen the operational records of the REGP stretching back at least to the early 1930s. As he’d suspected, the project had used the Spanish Civil War as a playground for field-testing and training Doctor von Westarp’s subjects.

  Marsh skimmed through the files in roughly chronological order. He learned of a pair of psychic twins, rendered mute by the process that had forged them into bonded empaths, each seeing and feeling everything the other did. He learned that the ghostly man who walked through walls was named Klaus, and that Gretel was his sister. (Interesting: Klaus wasn’t the first person to manifest the ability, but he was the only one to survive it longer than a few days.) Marsh also learned of a flying man named Rudolf, who had been killed in an accident weeks before the conclusion of the Spanish war. That fact was annotated with a footnote that led Marsh, after more searching, to a very thick folder: Gretel’s file.

  This last thing he read until the batteries in his torch died. Which was how he learned that Gretel had been roughly five years old when von Westarp had acquired her and her brother for his “orphanage.” And how Marsh learned that through years of random experimentation, the mad doctor had created a mad seer, imbuing her with a godlike prescience.

  Marsh sat up. “Bugger me.”

  He set the file down, absently, on the crate where he’d made his perch. He cracked his knuckles, staring into the distance while the cogs of his mind turned.

  That single piece of information—the girl’s a bloody oracle—was like a fingertip nudging the first in a long chain of dominoes. So many things fell into place.

  That’s how she knew me in Spain, though we’d never met. That’s how she knew when Agnes was born. That’s how she escaped so easily; they probably had the entire operation planned before I captured her. That’s why they were ready for us, why our December raid never achieved the element of surprise. We never had a chance.

  Click, click, click, fell the dominoes.

  He remembered little things. Her tone of voice:

  Try anything, anything at all, and I’ll put a bullet in your gut.

  No, you won’t.

  And the daisy: For later.

  He took up the file again. As the years dragged on, the men who ran the IMV, and later the Reichsbehörde, had come to realize they could not control her. She was immune to their coercive tactics. Yet they tolerated her because her advice, when she deigned to give it, was invaluable. Marsh let out a long, slow whistle: Gretel had guided the Luftwaffe through the systematic destruction of Britain’s air defenses.

  But slowly, her handlers began to speculate that highly intelligent Gretel had her own agenda. Their speculations reached a crisis point after the destruction of the invasion fleet bound for Britain. Gretel’s very existence should have rendered such a loss impossible.

  Why would she let that happen? Marsh wondered.

  And eventually they realized, however reluctantly and with no small amount of trepidation, that von Westarp had created a precognitive sociopath. The Reich’s greatest weapon was a monster feared even by the Schutzstaffel.

  “Jesus bloody Christ.”

  But there was more. Marsh read further.

  He discovered that the woman who had winked at him in Spain, who had become his willing prisoner in France, and who had first congratulated him on Agnes’s birth, had also convinced the German High Command to obliterate Williton.

  Gretel had looked through time and, for reasons known only to her, had orchestrated the death of his daughter.

  The files offered no explanation as to why. In justifying the bombing raid, the OKW said only that their source—Gretel—had deemed the matter urgent and vital. They didn’t know why she wanted Williton destroyed; the file made no mention of Marsh or Liv or Agnes.

  She said we’d meet again, he remembered. At the time, during her escape from the Admiralty building, Marsh had assumed she was taunting him. But now he knew that wasn’t it at all. She’d meant it as a statement of fact.

  They’d meet again. He’d find her, and she’d explain herself. She’d explain herself, and then he’d kill her.

  If the woman truly was what the records claimed, she already knew Marsh’s intent. But he imagined a bullet would kill her dead just the same.

  fourteen

  23 May 1941

  Swansea, Wales

  Mrs. Weeks objected to the term funk hole. Her establishment was an exclusive boarding hotel, nothing more.

  She also disapproved of people who arrived unannounced, with no ration books to share and, most uncouth of all, with no cash and no checks on hand.

  And she did not like Will. Not at first. But that changed quickly when she experienced his charm and, more to the point, learned his brother was a duke. From then on, Will enjoyed unlimited credit and boundless goodwill. He had the run of the place. Or would have, had he chosen to venture from his small but acceptably well-appointed room.

  After the first several days, he started taking meals upstairs. He’d met the other residents and found them dreadful. Posh hypocrites who’d done nothing for the war but criticize it. They had no appreciation of the dirty reality, no conception of what it took to keep the island safe. He knew, in that corner of his mind that could still form a thought, that their view
of him was likewise dim: exceedingly wealthy, embarrassingly unkempt, a drunken lout at all hours of the day. Even here, where the rich and cowardly convened, there were standards to uphold. And Will was letting the side down.

  He abandoned sartorial conceits a week into his residence. After all, if he wasn’t to venture past the threshold of his room, what point in clawing out of his bedclothes for a few hours each day? Far better to lounge beside the open window in his dressing gown. Breezes whispered through stands of hazel in the garden and rubbed his skin with warm silk. He dozed in the sunlight, inhaling the scent of hyacinths and listening to the occasional clack-and-murmur of a croquet game down in the garden. The smell of hyacinths made him think of weddings and the happier world of a lifetime ago.

  His appetite disappeared not long after that. It was, he imagined, the bravest part of him, preceding him unto death. Will dozed, dimly aware of a quiet tapping and the clink of a dinner tray set outside his door. Time passed. It grew dark outside, then light, and over again. Will lost count. More dishes rattled in the corridor outside his room. He lost count of that, too.

  And through it all, he floated in a pool of molten gold, drowning himself in a tide of his own design.

  Yelling. Crashing. Splintered wood.

  Will dreamt he was back in the glade on his grandfather’s estate. Where a natural spring gurgled up through earth and stone, where no birds sang. Grandfather was there, yelling at him with juniper-berry breath while he and Aubrey kicked down the trees. Crack. Smash.

  Then he floated. Out the window. Down a hole into the dark earth, because the faeries had come to spirit him away. Into cold, damp warrens, where all the lost children went. Will shivered. The faeries sang to him, but he didn’t like their language.

  Mr. Malcolm found him. Craggy-faced Mr. Malcolm, who had died long ago. He tore into the faerie mound with rough, strong hands. He lifted Will and carried him away, to hide him from grandfather, just as he used to do.