The Coldest War

by Ian Tregillis

  He chewed, studying the photographs tacked on the wall. These he’d taken of his own accord, from the comfort of his own car, rather than from some miserable hiding spot in a rainy park. Pembroke leaving his house. Pembroke hailing a taxicab. Pembroke and his wife arriving at the theater.

  Reinhardt didn’t know who this man was, nor why he was so important to Gretel. He didn’t care.

  nine

  2 June 1963

  Croydon, London, England

  “It’s the children,” said Pethick. “They’re acting strangely.”

  Gwendolyn used the interruption as an excuse to sidestep another stillborn conversation. After Marsh had revealed Will’s secret dealings with Cherkashin, it didn’t seem possible Gwendolyn could have become any cooler, any more distant. He felt no warmth when her gaze touched him, read no affection in her body language. But she’d been forced to leave their home, by men she did not know. Will hadn’t even been present for that. Another earthquake, widening the chasm between them.

  Of course, they left it to him to tell her their house had been destroyed, along with most of their belongings. If before her demeanor had been cool, now it was frosty. Eye contact hurt like grabbing an iron railing on the coldest January night. Her body language had been rewritten in an indecipherable script. The chasm grew wider still.

  The forced proximity made things so much worse. The crowded safe house didn’t lend itself to the private, heartfelt conversations for which Will yearned; neither did it offer the physical separation that Gwendolyn needed. The closer he approached—physically, emotionally—the harder she pushed away. Like a pair of magnets, constantly repulsing one another.

  And yet for all of that, she had adapted to the new circumstances with remarkable aplomb. Far better than Will had. She’d gone from weekly whist games and regular dinners with a duke to sharing a bathroom with the insane and somewhat disturbing product of a defunct Nazi experiment. Will knew his wife well enough to know the imperturbable grace was affected. But that was Gwendolyn. British to the very bottom of her soul.

  Will watched as she retreated through the kitchen and out the back door to the garden. Klaus stood near the sundial with watercolors and an easel. Gwendolyn settled on a bench shaded by thick clumps of ivy carpeting the brick wall. A breeze rustled the ivy, teased her hair. Klaus nodded at her; she returned the greeting. Will wondered what they found in common, what point of conversational reference they shared.

  Pethick cleared his throat. He had begun to run his tongue along the inside of his upper lip, looking bored. Will frowned at him. Ah, yes. The children. “And I’m to check on the poor demonic waifs. Is that so?”

  This had been inevitable. He’d known that sooner or later Milkweed would make him their intermediary with the children in the Admiralty cellar. He’d known it from the moment Marsh had taken him downstairs.

  “It would be a help. I’m headed there, to work with them a bit. We need your expert opinion.”

  Will raised an eyebrow. “Work with them?” Pethick didn’t elaborate. “Very well, I’ll tag along and take a peek into your cabinet of horrors. Would this be Pip’s idea? Another punishment for me?”

  Pethick shook his head. “He hasn’t awoken yet. Still touch and go, from what I’ve heard.”

  That worried Will. For some reason unclear to him, he found he didn’t want Raybould Marsh’s name on the long list of people who had died because of him. He didn’t even like Marsh, or the man he had become. But Will already had innocent British blood on his hands.

  Will studied them. He flexed his fingers. Sometimes it amazed him that they should appear so clean. They ought to be mottled crimson, the nails caked and black. Stained down to the bone after all these years.

  Out damned spot, and the rest.

  And there was new blood as well, to Gwendolyn’s point of view. Where he saw justice, she saw … Well, if not exactly murder, something equally reprehensible.

  Will’s memory of the escape was spotty. He’d been close to blacking out, unable to breathe while Klaus held the van insubstantial. The resulting headache, a low-level throb behind his eyeballs, had lingered for two days. Pembroke and Klaus had explained the details of his death after he had been reunited with Gwendolyn at the safe house. Will had read his own obituary in the previous morning’s Times. It was longer than he’d expected, but generally favorable.

  His funeral had been held that morning. Closed casket, of course, since the gas main explosion hadn’t left a recognizable body. A pang of sorrow robbed him of breath; he wished he could see his brother again.

  I’m sorry, Aubrey.

  Forcing his thoughts back to Marsh, Will said, “He’ll come around.”

  Pethick said, “Hope so. He’s prickly, but he’s good. Haven’t worked with anyone quite like him.”

  “I’m quite certain that’s true,” said Will. He scratched a sudden itch at the stump of his missing finger. My God. They’ve given you a name.…

  Will shivered. “You say they’re acting strangely. How so?”

  “Nurses say they’re agitated. Excited,” said Pethick. “They’ve been unruly.”

  What constituted normal for a ten-year-old warlock? The world hadn’t seen such a thing in centuries. And doubtless was better for it.

  “Children acting like children?” Will clucked his tongue. “Well, we certainly can’t have that.”

  Pethick glared at him. “I asked politely. I didn’t—”

  “I know, I know,” said Will. “It’s not a request, and you didn’t have to be polite about it. May I tell my wife I’m stepping out?”

  “Of course.”

  Gwendolyn still chatted with Klaus. She broke off when Will leaned out the door.

  He smiled at Klaus. The man had, after all, saved his life. Klaus had even apologized for mistakenly taking Will to the wrong end of the townhouse crescent. Will thought that was very decent of him.

  He said, “You’ll be ready for your own exhibition soon.”

  Klaus gave him a tired nod.

  “Love, I’m stepping out for a bit. I’ll return in an hour or two.” He glanced at Pethick, who nodded.

  “As you must,” she said, each word limned in hoarfrost. And then resumed her conversation with Klaus.

  Will wore green corduroy trousers and a teal shirt for the trip to the Admiralty. Partially because his entire wardrobe had been destroyed, and thus he had to avail himself of the limited selection at the Croydon house, but also because he had to dress as a different person in case anybody glimpsed him getting in or out of the car. He felt naked without his bowler. Strange, the things one misses.

  Pethick drove. The Morris had darkened windows.

  Before they entered the Admiralty basement, Pethick asked if Will were bleeding. (No.) Had he any unhealed wounds? Too many to count.

  The arrangements were much as Will had expected, and no less terrible for it. Milkweed had strived for a veneer of normalcy in its mockery of a primary school classroom. The children’s ages ranged more widely than he had expected. The oldest ones, perhaps in their late teens, might have been among the first to “graduate”; the youngest, the prodigies, were barely more than toddlers. Will’s skin felt ready to crawl straight off his body, slink across the room, and shiver in a dark corner.

  Shades of Dover, Will thought. That trip to the coast with Stephenson, back in the summer of ’40, was where the seeds of this loathsome practice had been sown. Where Will had reluctantly explained the historical relationship between children and Enochian to the old man.

  Quibble as he might over the fates of Hargreaves and those other bastards, there was no denying that the responsibility for this scene lay squarely at Will’s feet. This was abuse. The psychological mutilation of children. And it was his doing.

  He wanted to vomit. Some things were never acceptable under any circumstances.

  Unacceptable, under any circumstances. Gwendolyn had said the same thing to him.

  Will pulled out a chair. He dropped
into it.

  “Oh, Gwendolyn,” he whispered.

  Pethick said, “I beg your pardon?”

  Will shook his head. “Unpleasant thought.”

  At this, Pethick looked alarmed. He thought Will meant the children. “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  There was no excusing what had been done to these children. That was the bare, bald truth. And like a plunge into an icy river, the abrupt change of perspective stole his breath, constricted his chest. Will was no different from the men who had done this. No justification would ever acquit him of the things he’d done. He had to accept responsibility if he ever wanted to redeem himself and regain Gwendolyn’s trust.

  Will watched the children through a partition of one-way glass. They were a rambunctious lot. Running, yelling, playing. Even the oldest kids were part of the chaos, shouting and whirling, contributing to the controlled pandemonium of playtime. One could almost believe they were normal children, if not for the odd timbre to their voices. A layperson might have thought they were the victims of a rare degenerative disease, some strange illness that caused these children to speak with the ruined voices of haggard old men. But to Will’s ears, the disturbing resonances revealed a first language that was not English. Not human.

  A ghostly odor wafted through the viewing gallery just then. Hot sand; wet pasteboard; grapes left too long in the sun. A phantom mélange.

  Pethick nodded at the children. “You see?”

  “I see children playing. Deeply damaged children, but at least they’re still able to play now and again.”

  “This isn’t normal. They’re typically quiet.”

  “Seen but not heard. That’s how it should be, eh?”

  Pethick leveled a hard stare at Will. “They do not,” he said, “frolic.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but it appears they do,” said Will, pointing at the window. Pethick glanced at his wounded hand. Will hid it away in a pocket, feeling self-conscious. He continued, “Nobody has performed this barbarous experiment for hundreds of years. Because it is barbarous. But leaving that aside for the moment, there’s no way for you to know what’s normal for these children. There are no records. Only scant hearsay.”

  “I have a new tasking for the children. Normally I would do this over the intercom—” He pointed at a microphone, and a speaker grille above the windowpane. “—but I think it would be best if you met the children directly. To take a closer look.”

  Tasking? That was a euphemism Will had hoped to never hear again. He tried to swallow the lump in his throat. It wouldn’t move. A rivulet of sweat tickled the underside of his arm. “I will never,” he managed, “participate in another negotiation.”

  Pethick didn’t acknowledge this. He unlocked the door separating the viewing gallery from the “classroom.” Will took a deep breath before following.

  Will had never in his life felt at ease around tykes and tots. Gwendolyn said he had a knack for it, but he’d never seen any such indication. He didn’t know how to converse with regular children. And he hadn’t the faintest of inklings how to approach these.

  He needn’t have worried. The children ignored them.

  Pethick frowned. He stepped around a pair of children who twirled in a circle—arms linked and caterwauling—to approach the maps hanging across from the one-way mirror.

  Will followed him. The maps depicted the entire globe, although the emphasis was clearly on the Soviet Union. He inferred that the pushpins represented locations targeted by various “taskings.” They were mostly confined to the sprawling USSR. But a handful of additional pins were scattered elsewhere, seemingly at random: Tanganyika Territory, the American Southwest, Nepal … even the Midlands—not far from Bestwood, in fact. On the wall above the maps, somebody had taped a spread of pages from an American magazine, Life, containing an effusive article about the Soviet moon program. A handful of artist’s renderings of the space station in orbit accompanied the article (rather well-done, though the artist’s name, Bonestell, was a tad morbid). These, too, had pins.

  “You’ve certainly kept them busy,” said Will.

  “This is odd,” said Pethick. “The children have been moving pins about.” He pointed at the pin in the United States. It was stuck firmly in the “x” of NEW MEXICO. “We’ve never done any taskings in America.” He pointed at a few other pins. “Or here. Or here.”

  “Children play. Even I know that.”

  Pethick clapped, twice. “Hello, children,” he said. That got their attention. The worst of the playtime chaos subsided after a few moments. The children turned to look at Pethick.

  “Hello, Samuel,” said one of the older boys. He stretched the word into three distinct syllables. Sam-you-ell. He looked at Will. “You are not alone, Samuel.”

  The boy spoke with an odd cadence. Random, like the flickering of starlight.

  “This is William.”

  Will donned the bravest, most deceitful smile he could manage. He waved to the children.

  The boy glanced at the network of thin white scars spiderwebbing Will’s hand. He tipped his head, looking at Will sideways. “Are you one of us?”

  Pethick said, “William is a friend. He’s here to watch us today. Are you ready to work, children?”

  They gathered around Pethick like fidgety ducklings. Will fell out of their worldview as quickly as he’d entered it. He backed away and slouched against a far wall. Partially to put more distance between himself and those horrible children, and partially to observe the process more clearly. Dread became a cannonball in his stomach.

  Pethick fished around in the breast pocket of his suit coat and produced a pin. “Now,” said Pethick, “whose turn is it today?”

  A girl stepped forward. Her hair, wild and wavy corn silk, just brushed the ruffled shoulders of a lacy pink frock. The top of her head wouldn’t have reached Will’s waist, were they to stand together. Her round face still carried a hint of baby fat.

  Will rubbed his eyes, wishing he could leave. But Pethick held the keys to the sally port at the bottom of the stairwell. Will dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief.

  The girl offered her hand to Pethick. She made no sound, showed no discomfort, when he poked her index finger with the needle. He released her. She squeezed her fingertip until a crimson drop stained her pale skin.

  Pethick wiped the pin clean. “And who remembers where Baikonur Cosmodrome is located?”

  A handful of children went to the map of the south-central Soviet Union. They pointed to a bare section of the Kazakh SSR, a bit east of the Aral Sea.

  “Well done,” Pethick said. He assumed a more somber tone. “Now, children. The evil men, the ones who seek to harm us, they intend to launch another rocket soon.” He pointed to the Life magazine illustrations. “It must fail.”

  “Rocket fail,” said the boy who had greeted Pethick.

  “Rocket fail,” said the bleeding girl.

  “Rocket fail,” said the rest.

  Another rivulet of sweat dripped from Will’s underarm. It trickled down his side, hot like ice.

  The boy repeated himself. The others responded, each child with a different cadence and intonation. But each in a manner that accentuated his or her unnatural accent. Brought it to the fore. The chorus continued with slowly increasing tempo until the children converged upon a single rhythm. They switched to Enochian in midchant.

  Will was buffeted by a howling maelstrom of inhuman language. The rumbles, the gurgles, the fury of newborn stars and the death cries of galaxies ancient beyond knowing … everything an echo of his old life.

  And all incomprehensible. It made no sense. Granted, his Enochian was rusty. More than that: cursed and abandoned. Yet he found himself struggling to attain even a fingerhold on this eldritch grammar of intent.

  One facet of the problem was old and familiar. Enochian was far too ancient to encompass a concept like “rocket.” During the war, Milkweed’s warlocks had spent countless hours devising workable ci
rcumlocutions in order to express the things they needed. It was difficult, dangerous work. These children had been at this long enough—judging from the maps and pushpins—that they’d devised their own shorthand. An Enochian creole.

  Will strained to make sense of the pandemonium. It was as though these children spoke a different dialect of Enochian, although he knew that was impossible. Dialects were a human construct. Part of it, he realized, was that these children spoke Enochian without inhibition. They were raised on it; perhaps they even thought in Enochian. But if they held the grammar in their minds, stored it in brains pulsing with human blood—

  His train of thought progressed no further. Shadows cast by the fluorescents in the ceiling writhed and shuddered; the floor canted. The air assumed the cloy of rot and tingle of aftershave, making it a chore to breathe. A vast consciousness filled the room. Cold and crushing, darker than the bottom of the sea.

  The children had called forth an Eidolon almost as easily as they might have called for their mothers. Which perhaps, in a way, they had. Another terrifying thought.

  The Eidolon spoke. Its voice was the thunder of creation and the silence of a lifeless universe. Even the children could produce only a pale imitation of pure Enochian. They were, after all, merely flesh. But that wasn’t all. The Eidolon sounded different from every other negotiation he’d attended. Beyond the enormity of its presence, beyond the ever-present undercurrent of malice, it sounded … agitated. If he hadn’t known better, he might have said it was excited. Impatient. He trembled.

  Will turned his back on the Enochian call-and-response of the negotiation. He staggered into the viewing gallery, closed the door behind him, and huddled in a chair. After a moment he reached up and ripped the wire out of the speaker above the one-way glass. Killing the speaker did nothing to keep out the Eidolon, didn’t insulate the gallery from the fact of its presence. There was no insulating oneself from something that brushed the world through cracks in time and space.

  One part of the negotiation came across clearly. The blood price: three souls. Milkweed would buy this act of sabotage with the blood of three innocent civilians. Poor, unsuspecting sods chosen at random by Pethick and his team of killers.