Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (30 page)

“Don’t!”

Will paused, halfway to the sideboard. The tone of Marsh’s voice prickled his scalp. Beneath the ruined croak, there was a hint of desperation. Warning.

“You shouldn’t,” he said. “You have … I mean, he had…” Marsh sighed. Collected his thoughts. Nodded toward the bottle. “The Will I knew had problems.”

“Oh dear.” Will sat. “Well, then. Perhaps you should start at the beginning.”

Commander Liddell-Stewart melted away while Marsh told his tale. With the help of a generous amount of sherry, the stiff, abrasive mannerisms became the maudlin storytelling of an old university chum. The burden of being somebody else had been lifted from Marsh’s shoulders. With no small amount of relief, evidently. By the time he concluded his long, incredible exegesis of future history, he’d become Marsh again. Older, sadder, and lonelier, but still the same man.

“For what it’s worth,” Marsh said, “you were right, and I should have listened. I’m sorry I didn’t. And I’m sorry I hit you in the park.”

No. Perhaps not quite the same man after all.

Will sensed that Marsh had skipped or simplified great swaths of his story. In places, his storytelling became vague, and they stood out because he told the rest of his story with such passion. But mostly Will suspected he was omitting details because his own name barely entered the story until the end. What was Marsh not telling him? He’d have to get the full story someday.

“Why the charade, Pip? You know you could have come to me in confidence.”

Marsh laughed. A looser, more relaxed laughter than earlier. The alcohol had done its job. “I mean no offense by this, honestly, but telling you a secret is a bit like printing it in
The Times
.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“I was there at the police station. I heard you hinting around about Milkweed.”

Will wished he could deny it. But this was the truth. “I suppose that’s fair. But if not me, why not tell your younger self?”

Marsh leveled a flat gaze at him. “You know me. You know him. How would we handle something like that?”

Will thought aloud. “I suppose you’d suspect it for a Jerry trick.” He chuckled. “Yes, I can see it now. First you’d fly into a rage. Then you’d attack yourself. And then, after you’d beaten each other silly, you’d have yourself arrested.” He paused to wipe his eyes. “I’d like to see which one of you would win that fight.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” Marsh frowned. “I didn’t expect it to take this long. Not with Gretel helping him.”

“We tried to find him, using the Eidolons. But—” Will’s eyes grew wide. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

“Ah. Look. About that—”

“I knew it!”

“Listen. If Stephenson had learned that my younger self was in Germany, he’d have no choice but to blame it either on abduction or defection. He’d see both as a grave threat to Milkweed. I know him. He’d have ordered the warlocks to find a way to silence my counterpart.”

“I can’t believe he’d do that to you.”

“He’s a hard man, Will. But this is beside the point. Didn’t matter what you fellows were doing. I had to sabotage that negotiation to undermine Whitehall’s faith in the warlocks. They must never become an instrument of foreign policy.”

“It’s hard to argue with your point about the warlocks,” said Will, “given what you’ve told me about the future.” He stood, stretched his legs, and crossed to the sideboard. His shirt stuck to his back; the tale of Marsh’s plight had him sweating. Pouring himself a tonic water, he continued, “But I can’t help but notice that I’m still drawing breath. As are the others, or so they were until quite recently. And that seems out of character for you.” He swished the water in his mouth, swallowed. “If the warlocks are such a threat, there’s a very simple way to counter it. So I can’t help but wonder why we haven’t expired yet.”

A truck rumbled down the street with a detachment of Home Guard volunteers. It backfired, loud enough to rattle the china in Will’s kitchen. Marsh waited until it had receded into the distance.

He said, “Unless and until the younger me has completed his task on the Continent, I don’t dare do anything permanent to the warlocks.”

“You’re trying to have it both ways. Saving the world, but only on your terms.” Will took another swallow. “It’s good to know you’re the same old Pip. Stubborn as always.”

“What would you do in my situation?”

“I’m not saying I disapprove.”

“Good. Because I need your help.”

Will set the empty glass down, then held up his hands. “We still have quite a lot to talk about. But I, for one, am famished. When is the last time you had a real meal?”

Marsh shrugged. “I’m not sure.” He looked away. “Not so long. Sometimes Liv invites me…”

It was hard to tell if the man could still blush, under the beard and scars.

“I thought so,” said Will. “At some point we’ll have to talk about Liv, as well. But later. Because right now I’m buying you dinner. I happen to know a fine little place that serves—”

“Circus animals. I remember the joke, Will.”

“Your younger counterpart found it amusing.”

“I know. I was there.” Marsh tossed back the last traces of his sherry, then set the empty glass on a side table. He gritted his teeth and winced as he rose to his feet, but waved off the hand Will offered.

“Just my knee. My advice? Don’t get old.”

“It must beat the alternative.”

13 November 1940

Berlin, Germany

Himmler questioned Marsh three more times in the months after his first encounter with the Reichsführer-SS. The head of the Schutzstaffel liked things neat and orderly, and he did not care for offensive odors, so Marsh was cleaned and groomed before each session. Marsh kept his eyes downcast while being questioned, as expected of any obedient prisoner. He memorized a dozen filing numbers.

Himmler had read the report from Gretel’s debriefing after her escape from Milkweed custody, and so, to a certain extent, Marsh had to play it straight. Himmler’s eyes shone at the thought of eldritch powers and dark summonings. He wanted to see an Eidolon, yearned to witness its power. But Marsh didn’t know how the warlocks had come by their lexicons, nor could he speak a single word of Enochian. There was little to say about the warlocks that Himmler didn’t already know or suspect based on Gretel’s report.

The internal mechanics of Milkweed were another matter. Marsh lied to the best of his ability when Milkweed became the topic of interest.

Back in his lightless cell, when he wasn’t mentally reciting the filing numbers and wondering if he’d ever have a chance to make use of them, he spent his days exercising, dreaming about his wife and daughter, and waiting for torture that never came. Even after Himmler had grown impatient, then angry, then enraged with Marsh’s inability to lay out the secret to summoning an Eidolon.

Still, the physical coercion never materialized. They even gave Marsh a cot. Gretel’s handiwork, no doubt.

Marsh started his third round of sit-ups of what he guessed was evening. The cold stone floor ground against his spine, almost hard enough to knap chips from his vertebrae. His shirt was cold and slick against his back, dampened by sweat and caked with grime from between the floor stones. The cot’s taut canvas cut into his toes where he’d wedged them for stability. His stomach muscles burned. Sweat salt stung his eyes.

Thirty-one. Left elbow to right knee. Thirty-two. Right elbow to left knee. He’d long ago stopped noticing the odors of his cell, but now his sweat smelled impossibly of hyacinths and mashed garden slugs.

The floor shifted on rep thirty-three. Marsh stopped, panting. It shifted again.

Somewhere in the darkness, somewhen, a vast presence oozed through fissures in reality. Marsh sensed the walls of his cell flexing, genuflecting before the Eidolon.

The demon enveloped him.

*

“He may be in Berlin,” said Will through clenched teeth. “Someplace small. A cell, I think.”

“Damn.”

I had to think fast, before Will lost the Eidolon. It had taken him almost a month of surreptitious preparation before we could make this attempt.

I paced through the shards of a broken compass. A syringe of blood lay atop the map of Europe spread on the floor of my warehouse. When Pendennis’s minders went to rouse him in the morning, they’d find the old codger had died in his sleep. I just hoped they didn’t find the puncture mark. I’d chosen Pendennis because I knew he was likely to kick as soon as things got heavy. He’d died of a heart attack in the original history.

The Eidolon’s malice swirled around me like a cold draft from the Thames. Somewhere in Germany my younger counterpart was feeling something similar, because to the Eidolons we were two aspects of the same blood map.

“Two things,” I said. “Tell it to let him out. Then it must stay with him. Surround him.”

“One or the other,” Will managed. “Our secret negotiation bought us a single action. No more.”

Damn.
If the Eidolon let him out of his cell, but then disappeared, my doppelgänger had no chance of leaving Berlin without the distracting shroud of the Eidolon’s presence. But if it stayed with him in the cell, would it warp things enough for him to escape? It depended on so many things we didn’t know, not least of which his physical state.

How bad was he? Could he move? Was he shackled? Broken?

“Pip—”

“All right! Tell it to focus on him. Stay with him for”—I thought about my experience swanning through the Admiralty building with an Eidolon in tow, and did some quick arithmetic—“seven thousand heartbeats.” I reckoned that was more than an hour of elevated heart rate.

Will didn’t seem to like it, but he couldn’t spare the extra effort to argue. The only other time he’d dealt with an Eidolon by himself had cost a fingertip. From his open mouth came an impossible basso profundo rumble. The Eidolon responded with the static hiss of a moribund cosmos.

*

The unrelenting scrutiny of something immense and unknowable threatened to drive Marsh mad. He’d been through this once before, and so far that experience inured him to the worst of it, but back then he’d only held the Eidolon’s attention for a few moments. The small part of his mind that could still function cowered from the overpowering maleficence. The Eidolon’s presence became a chisel on the mortar of space and time. Reality twisted outside-in. The Eidolon swirled about him as though it were a cyclone and he the eye.

It didn’t speak. It didn’t act. It waited. For what?

Marsh managed to stand, though the floor continued to sway underfoot. Somewhere, rusty chains rattled in a chill wind that smelled of river water. He approached the door. The bubble of unreality moved with him.

A prison cell cordoned off a volume of space for long periods of time. In human terms, it created a pocket of here-and-now inaccessible to the rest of the universe. But that distinction was meaningless to an Eidolon.

He laid his hands upon the cold steel of the door. When seen through the prism of an Eidolon, the darkness in Marsh’s cell became a blinding glow compared to the perfect dark of a lightless universe. Marsh peered through streamers of melted here-and-now, past the pigeons cooing on the Champs-Elysées, past the molten seas of a primordial planet, to the shattered spacetime where the lock mechanism had been.

Please,
he thought.
Please work.

He pushed. The door opened.

*

Will said, “He’s moving.”

“Thank God.”

*

Marsh emerged from his cell into a long corridor. He concentrated on two things: filing numbers, and not going mad. His dark-adapted eyes felt no flare of pain from the corridor lights, because when passing through his Eidolonic shroud the shining bulbs became distant starlight. The smell of chlorine burned his sinuses. A phantom chorus called to him in a dozen dead languages.

A guard shouted. Marsh looked to where an SS-Schütze, a private, stood drawing his pistol. Narrow corridor. Easy shot. Marsh didn’t know what would happen to a bullet as it passed through the region of warped reality, but there was no guarantee it would protect him. He charged the guard, veering drunkenly across the swaying, uneven floor.

The private didn’t shout a second warning. His arms snapped up, putting his Walther at the tip of a triangle, just as he’d been trained. Too close. No way he’d miss. The guard frowned. Marsh gritted his teeth and dived for the floor. The Eidolon’s malign presence swept over the guard. His eyes went wide. Marsh bowled him down.

The soldier curled up in a ball, screaming. He clapped his hands over his ears, one still holding the pistol. Just for an instant, his flesh hissed and shifted like loose sand, then became solid again. He didn’t struggle when Marsh wrenched the gun away. Marsh smashed it against his temple before the screaming summoned an entire battalion into the cellar.

He listened, but it was difficult to know what was happening outside the Eidolon’s sphere of influence. Nobody came to investigate. The men down here were accustomed to screaming prisoners.

Marsh tried to lift the unconscious guard. He couldn’t. The boy wasn’t very large, but Marsh had lost more strength than he’d realized during the long months of his incarceration. He settled for dragging the unconscious soldier back to his cell. Once there, he stripped the guard of his uniform and piled the clothing on the cot, away from possible blood spatter, before shooting him.

He pulled the trigger. Warm, wet droplets dusted his face. Marsh’s fingers came away from his upper lip glistening red.

The Eidolon unleashed an onslaught of Enochian. It redoubled its scrutiny of Marsh, turned him inside-out. He collapsed. The cell reverberated with inhuman howls, shrieks, and rumbles. All the fury in the universe was focused on the specks of a stranger’s blood on Marsh’s face and hand. The rest of the world disintegrated.

Marsh remembered the way Will had cut himself before summoning the Eidolon that studied Gretel, and the way he’d shown a drop of her blood to the Eidolon. He remembered how her fingernails had drawn his blood, too, and the way the Eidolon had reacted to it.