Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych)

by Ian Tregillis

  Nobody knows I’m here.

  But if she had sent him here for the Reichsbehörde files, how long did she expect him to wait for his opportunity? Nothing short of a miracle would enable him to deal with the files and get out of Berlin.

  Nobody in Britain knows I’m here.

  Yes. That was true. Manifestly true. Commander Liddell-Stewart didn’t know. John Stephenson didn’t know. Will didn’t know; Lorimer didn’t know.

  Liv didn’t know.

  An icy fist gripped his heart. He couldn’t breathe. Panic heavier than a mountain settled over him, forced the air from his lungs. Guilt seared like acid in his veins. Liv would spend the rest of her days wondering what had happened to her lost husband. Agnes would grow up without ever knowing her father.

  Iron bands of despair constricted around his chest like straps of wet canvas drying and shrinking in the sun. He cast about for something strong, something bright.

  He remembered the last morning he’d had with his wife and daughter. Liv and he had made breakfast together: a recipe with dried egg powder. They’d had no toast. But they’d laughed at the absurdity of the wretched austerity food, fed each other, reveled in togetherness. A single shining memory, etched in diamond and set in gold.

  Tears burned trails down his face. He resolved to keep that breakfast firmly in mind when they finally came for him. He’d make it his dying thought.

  26 July 1940

  Milkweed Headquarters, London, England

  “Our task,” said Will, “is to find Raybould Marsh.”

  The warlocks sat with the world spread at their feet. Will’s blood had stained the floorboards here, though now the rusty blotch lay hidden beneath a sprawl of overlapping maps. Several depicted the Continent in great detail; Ireland and the UK had similar coverage. Slightly less detailed were the maps of Mediterranean Africa and the western Soviet Union. Lorimer had brought a map of North America, which had been added to the mix on the off chance that Marsh had been telling the truth when he told Liv he was off to America. They’d also taken the Mercator world map from the wall in Stephenson’s office.

  Each warlock held a copy of the master lexicon. Stephenson had insisted on attending. He leaned against the closed door, looking grim. Lorimer was busy in his workshop.

  Will stood beside a low table, upon which rested a maritime binnacle compass. The gimbaled compass was well over a century old and, back in the days of Nelson, had adorned the deck of a 104-gun ship of the line. In more recent decades, it had adorned a pedestal outside the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty. Until Stephenson liberated it for, as he’d said, “Purposes related to security of the Crown.” The binnacle itself was a tall dome of polished brass, smooth and round except where a slanted pane of glass provided a view of the compass rose.

  Another table, across the room, held a miscellaneous assortment of objects: a doorknob, a frying pan from Lorimer’s kitchen, a box of tenpenny nails. It was the best they could do on short notice; pure iron had become hard to find these days, as more and more of it went into foundries to make weapons and equipment for the war effort. Even the ornamental railings in city parks had disappeared.

  In Nelson’s day, the compass would have been flanked by a pair of iron correcting spheres. The spheres compensated for compass deflections caused by the iron in the nails used to build the ship. Today, the odds and ends would be used to realign the compass after the Eidolon arrived.

  The warlocks had been over the essentials and had come to an agreement on how they’d phrase their request. Will briefly reviewed the situation regarding Marsh. Then he rubbed his hands together. “Shall we begin?”

  *

  I returned to the Admiralty in civilian clothes. One side benefit of the weeks I’d spent shadowing the warlocks was that I easily knew enough to pass as one of them. I already looked and sounded like the old bastards. Today I carried a carpetbag.

  Easy enough, as long as Will didn’t see me. Stephenson and Lorimer, too, for that matter, since they’d have recognized me based on Will’s description from our encounter in the park.

  But, if I knew John Stephenson, he’d be with Will and the others. He’d want to be there when the Eidolons located my doppelgänger. Lorimer, on the other hand, wouldn’t come within a quarter mile of the negotiations if he could help it. Lucky bloke.

  I went to the room where I’d landed during my arrival. The warlocks were next door. I closed the door and set the carpetbag on a filing cabinet. I pulled a drinking glass from the bag, held it to the wall, and listened.

  *

  The inhuman syllables of Enochian pierced Will’s throat like caltrops. The shriek of dying stars. The hiss and crackle of a cooling planet. The thunder of creation. The perfect silence of a lightless, lifeless universe. Ur-language ricocheted through the room, a chanting interplay of seven distinct voices.

  Will chanced a quick look at Stephenson. He’d gone rigid, eyes and fists clenched as he withstood the assault.

  The warlocks converged on a single line, a single rhythm. The maelstrom of language scraped reality down to an onionskin veneer.

  “Now,” said Pendennis.

  As one, the warlocks unfolded their pocket knives and slashed their palms. Blood flowed freely.

  *

  The wall flexed, the floor canted. I stumbled. The glass shattered at my feet. And reassembled itself.

  Their Eidolon had arrived.

  *

  An awareness seeped into the room, flowed through cracks in time and space like a vast ocean forcing itself through hairline fractures in a dike. It filled the world with the crushing pressure of an ageless, boundless intellect. The heartbeat of the universe pulsed with malignance.

  The clock stopped. Ticked forward, back, sideways. Tocked in directions unknowable to human minds. The compass slewed, the floor shifted underfoot. The air tasted of diamonds and daffodils, gangrene and starlight. Somewhere, a thousand eons ago, a glass shattered.

  Eidolons were intelligent manifestations of the malevolent universe. Milkweed’s warlocks had successfully caught the attention of one.

  Pendennis pointed at Will. The others fell silent while Will took up the line of Enochian laboriously transcribed during a long, contentious afternoon. Will had been present when the Eidolons first noticed Marsh, and so he was the one to express the desire to know his whereabouts.

  He stammered twice, each misstep more jagged than a mouthful of broken glass. Something warm and wet ripped inside his throat. The final syllables of his declaration tasted of hot salted iron.

  The Eidolon responded, a century or millisecond later, declaring a blood price for the humans’ request. Pendennis, Hargreaves, Webber, Shapley, White, and Grafton engaged the Eidolon with a round-robin chant, the call and response of supernatural negotiation. Refusal, counteroffer, refusal, counter-counteroffer, refusal.

  Will saw, in the part of his mind that could still think rationally, how the experts struggled to reduce the blood price for such a simple act. Left on his own, this negotiation would have cost far more than a fingertip. What would happen when they asked for more than simple information? When they started fighting a war?

  Agreement: A single blood map, but new and unknown.

  Will beckoned to Stephenson. He coughed. “It must see new blood.” To his credit, Stephenson extended his arm without hesitation or question. Will hefted his pocketknife. He said, “It’s going to look at you. Brace yourself. This won’t be pleasant.”

  He pricked the pad of Stephenson’s thumb. A scarlet bead welled up. Will blotted it with a handkerchief, and then offered John Stephenson’s blood to the Eidolon.

  *

  I couldn’t understand the back-and-forth in Enochian while they negotiated a blood price. But I knew they’d come to an agreement when I felt a shift in the demon’s attention.

  I’d been through this enough times to know what it meant. The Eidolon had focused its attention somewhere. On someone. It was reading his blood like a map, studying t
he entire course of his life from birth to death. Taking him apart, scrutinizing him from deep within every atom of his being. I wondered who got stuck playing Milkweed’s tethered goat, the poor bastard.

  The wall flexed again. The Eidolons had acquired another blood map. And incrementally widened their beachhead within the human scale of reality.

  I banished thoughts of my son, John, and pulled the pocketknife from my carpetbag.

  *

  “Good job, sir.” Will touched the old man’s shoulder. A pale-faced Stephenson returned unsteadily to his corner.

  The price had been paid. Now the Eidolon would extend its volition toward the task at hand.

  Will cleared his throat, swallowed the taste of blood, and repeated his query. A pause, and then the universe within that tiny room rumbled again with the language of creation. Pendennis and Hargreaves glanced at each other in surprise.

  *

  I’d heard that sequence of alien noises frequently enough to recognize it. My name. My Enochian label.

  The Eidolon sought Raybould Marsh.

  *

  The compass spun. Will readied a handful of nails, but the damnable thing wouldn’t stop.

  The Eidolon spoke too quickly for him to catch it all. Something about broken, something about reflection, locality, presence. Two halves.

  *

  Marsh jerked violently awake. He panicked, thinking they’d taken him for interrogation while he slept. His pulse hammered in his throat.

  But he was alone. No, not alone. Something else was here. Something other. Something that studied him from the inside out.

  He’d felt this once before. These were the first tendrils of an Eidolon’s attention.

  Milkweed had come to the rescue.

  Marsh staggered to his feet. God bless you, Will.

  *

  “Here I am.”

  I cut myself and extended my bleeding hand toward the Eidolon’s sphere of influence.

  *

  The compass rose shattered.

  It is here, said the Eidolon. It is far away.

  *

  The Eidolon withdrew. Marsh’s prison cell snapped back to the illusion of reality. It left him reeling. Confused.

  Very well. It had seen him. What now?

  *

  The Eidolon saw me.

  The floor underfoot canted as though the earth had popped off its foundation. I could smell starlight and taste the cooling sizzle of a primordial universe not our own.

  It repeated my name. Oh, yes. I had its complete and utter attention. I stood at the center of my own personal bubble of unreality.

  I tightened the bandage on my hand, gathered the carpetbag, and walked into the corridor. I hurried past the room where Will and the others had convened. But after that, I took the long route through the busiest, most populated parts of the Admiralty.

  The Eidolon’s attention followed me. And, like earthly tides obeying the pull of moon and sun, the warp in reality flowed around me.

  *

  Hargreaves, Pendennis, and two of the others jumped from their seats. “Oh, no,” said Will.

  Stephenson shouted above the chaos, “What happened?”

  The Eidolon didn’t retreat to the crawl spaces of the universe. It merely … turned its attention elsewhere.

  “It isn’t leaving!” Will cried.

  *

  I stumbled through wood-paneled corridors, wearing the Eidolon’s fascination like an albatross. Panic followed in my wake. The world rippled around my footsteps.

  *

  The Eidolon maintained its extension into the human scale of space and time, but it was no longer interested in the warlocks. The room snapped back to reality, ephemeral and quiet as a candle flame.

  Until Will heard the screaming.

  *

  It followed me outside. The sentries huddled behind their sandbags, eyes clenched and knees hugged to their chests. Nobody would remember seeing me. They’d remember the fleeting touch of something other.

  And to Stephenson’s point of view, it would look like the warlocks had lost control of an Eidolon and sent it roaming about London. Their credibility had just taken a torpedo below the waterline.

  I was halfway to Westminster Underground station when the Eidolon withdrew.

  *

  Marsh waited, counting heartbeats in the darkness. Nothing happened. He sank to his knees. Come back, he wept. Please.

  But the Eidolon didn’t return. It abandoned him, just as Gretel had, in the dungeons of the SS.

  ten

  7 Sept 1940

  Walworth, London, England

  History continued to change throughout the summer.

  My sabotage of the warlocks’ first negotiation threw their abilities into doubt, but not without consequences. I knew, from Will’s reports, that news of the “disturbance” in the Admiralty building had reached the PM. The bulldog had turned round to take a bite out of Stephenson. Stephenson had taken it out on the warlocks. Furthermore, there was a general befuddlement among the warlocks themselves about how the negotiation had gone so severely wrong. I gathered they were a bit gun-shy now. All to the good.

  The bad news was that Milkweed still intended to use the warlocks, and planned to isolate them lest another Eidolon got loose. Several Admiralty staffers had been driven mad by the roaming demon; one marine sentry had shot himself. So construction had begun on a new structure that bordered the Old Admiralty, Horse Guards Parade, and St. James’ Park. Right where I’d clocked Will, in fact. The public believed the Admiralty Citadel to be a bunker for government functionaries, particularly in event of invasion. Doubtless it would be used for that. Primarily, however, it would house the warlocks during negotiations. An unwelcome complication, from my point of view.

  No amount of reinforced concrete could bar the Eidolons, should they choose to go roaming again. But Churchill had demanded changes, and so changes were made.

  All through the summer, the Royal Air Force gave the Jerries hell while barrage balloons sprouted like toadstools. In mid-August, the Luftwaffe started attacking RAF airfields. There were places in the south where picnickers could watch the aerial ballet of Hurricanes and Junkers, Spitfires and Messerschmitts; a hot hail of spent casings rained upon flower shows and tennis courts. Late August and early September saw attacks on Fighter Command air bases. Both sides lost planes and pilots every day, but so far, at least, and by a slim margin, the numbers held in our favor. The Luftwaffe strategy to achieve air dominance over Britain sorely lacked precision. It lacked Gretel. And any fool could see that control of the skies was a necessary precursor to invasion. Thus far there was no need for supernatural defensive measures.

  Or so I’d thought, until Whitehall issued a precautionary invasion warning on the morning of September 7. And so I was sitting in the kitchen, listening to the peal of church bells, wondering what I had missed, when the banshee wail of air-raid sirens shattered my concentration. The cacophony launched me from my seat and sent my thudding heart into my throat.

  This had to be a mistake. It was the middle of the day. Liv’s house was miles from the nearest RAF base. But even before my thoughts settled, I felt in my gut the crump of explosions to the east of us. A milk-bottle flower vase rattled on the windowsill above the sink.

  Liv had stepped out to change Agnes. Now she ran into the kitchen, baby clutched to her chest. Our crying daughter’s nappy dangled half unpinned. She wailed, too.

  “Agnes’s bag,” I said, “is it still in the shelter?”

  Liv nodded. I laid my hand on her shoulder and chivvied her out the back door, through the garden, to the Anderson shelter. Little puffs of gray smoke pimpled the eastern sky. More smoke blossomed while I watched. It looked like every ack-ack battery between London and the Thames estuary was filling the sky with flak. I couldn’t see the bombers, but there was no doubting their presence. Only as we descended into the shelter did I realize my mistake. I hoped that in the confusion Liv hadn’t noticed my poor
choice of wording.

  Heat pulsed through my palm in time with my heartbeat, the skin moist where it had touched hers. But Liv didn’t flinch away from my touch. I yanked my hand away from her shoulder. Hard enough to rap my knuckles on the Anderson’s steel arch. Hoped she didn’t notice that as well.

  She’s not your wife, I reminded myself. She belongs to somebody else.

  I slammed the door behind us. The summer heat hadn’t yet broken; the stifling Anderson reeked of mildew. Liv stood in the darkness, consoling our child, while I scooped up the oil lamp from the nail by the door. In moments I had a bit of light going. Liv had taken to growing courgettes in the layer of earth atop the Anderson, so now the soil and plants overhead muffled the sirens, but the rumble of distant explosions drew steadily closer.

  Somebody else who may never return.

  Liv laid Agnes on the cot and fixed her nappy. Then she sat, facing me, humming and dandling the baby on her lap. The cot hung low over the damp earthen floor. The hem of her dress rode up, revealing smooth calves, lustrous in the dim lamplight.

  The heat in my hand washed through the rest of my body. Breath hitched in my chest like cockleburs in a wool sweater. I turned away to coax more light from the lamp. In spite of the mildew and faint odor of the lamp oil, all I could smell was Liv. I couldn’t get away from it. Her scent surrounded me. Infused me. The smell of her hair, her glowing skin.

  I checked the door. Made certain it was solid, that it wouldn’t blow in under the blast from a nearby hit. Next I counted the candles. Checked the charcoal filters in the gas masks. Anything to take my mind from the forced proximity to Liv.

  She watched me fidget, one eyebrow cocked. Faint amusement tugged at her lips. She waited until I’d run out of halfway plausible things to keep me occupied. She caught my eye. Her hand slid down to pat the empty patch of canvas on the cot beside her.

  “Do sit, Commander. We could be here a good while if Hitler’s got his dander up today. It wouldn’t do for you to stand at attention throughout.” Had she noticed the tightness in my trousers? I prayed to God, if there was one, that she hadn’t.