Bitter Seeds

“Just got a call over the blower,” said the officer.

Waves of tension radiated from the poor fellow. Will couldn't help but feel an awed respect for the policeman's resolve. Doing his job day after day, trying to protect people while enduring constant exposure to that wrongness off the coast ... He was a good man. Will wished he could have offered him some perspective, some sense of hope.

The bobby continued, “Sounds like something you should see, if you can spare the time.”

Stephenson asked, “What is it?”

The bobby hesitated. “It's ... well, hard to say. Not rightly sure. Better to see for yourselves.”

Will rode up front while Stephenson rode in back. They drove to a small village east of the Dover port. The sun shed a little of its unnatural taint as it climbed higher, no longer shining through the Eidolons.

They stopped at a primary school. Something cold and hard congealed in the pit of Will's stomach. A frightened teacher ushered them inside. The bobby introduced Stephenson and Will as being “from the government.”

It was a small school, a handful of rooms. Will guessed that it normally accommodated no more than fifty or sixty children. But it was emptier than that owing to the evacuations. The remaining children either had drawn high numbers in the lottery, or their parents had refused to split up the family.

The teacher led them to a playground in back. Four children, three boys and a girl, sat on a swing set. They rocked in the breeze. They didn't blink and they didn't shift, except for their silent constantly moving lips.

“How long have they been like this?” the bobby asked.

“I rang the bell,” she said. “They didn't come in, so I went out to collect them.”

Stephenson and Will shared a look. Will shrugged. Dreading what he'd find, he went over to get a closer look at the children.

The first thing he realized was that they all faced southeast, toward the coast.

The second thing he realized was that they weren't, in fact, silent. They were babbling. In synch.

He knelt in the sand to better hear them. It was baby talk, nonsense. But Will's trained ears heard something inhuman buried in the quiet prepubescent mumbling.

These children were trying to speak Enochian.

He stood. “We have a problem.”

Stephenson joined him, leaving the constable and the teacher to their speculations about German bombers and chemical warfare.

“I know why the fog is moving inland,” said Will.

“What is it? What are they doing?”

“They're singing to the Eidolons.”

Stephenson mulled this over. He scratched his chin. “Can we use this?”

The question knocked Will so off-kilter, it took a moment to regain his mental footing. “Sir?”

“If they can speak to the Eidolons like you and the others do, perhaps they can participate in the defense.”

Will shook his head, appalled. “Not without many years of training. These kids might have picked up bits and pieces, but they'll never be warlocks.” He frowned. “They'll never be completely normal, either.”

“Hmm. Pity. We could have used the help.”

Will suddenly understood the purpose of this trip. Stephenson wanted a firsthand look at the supernatural blockade not out of concern for the effect it had on the surrounding countryside, but out of a businesslike need to evaluate its staying power.

Stephenson wanted to know how long they had until the warlocks faltered, until unnatural weather no longer kept the Germans at bay. Only survival mattered. Nothing else.

And in that moment, Will knew with a sick certainty that things would only grow worse. Stephenson knew damn well what it cost to make the Channel impassable, and to keep it so. But the old man didn't care. If he could be so callous toward the string of unintentional human tragedies arising along the coast, he could also turn a blind eye toward the very intentional tragedies the warlocks would no doubt commit in order to pay the Eidolons' blood prices.

Will had naively assumed limits had been placed on what the warlocks would be allowed to do. A bud get of sorts, one they didn't dare overspend. But now he understood that the old man didn't care about the prices. If anything, he sanctioned them.

The ride back to London was long, Stephenson's questions exhausting. Will tried to sleep when he returned to his flat, but he couldn't banish the memory of those mumbling children. He didn't want to sleep with that image stuck in his head.

He wished he could have slept. Keeping the Channel blocked meant Milkweed's warlocks were on a tight rotation. And that meant another round of blood prices soon. And all of this had been the case before they'd realized the Eidolons were moving inland. Meaning they'd have to redouble their efforts. Somehow.

Will returned to Milkweed before dawn and spent the day working on the one aspect of the job that didn't fill him with dread. It did, however, leave him feeling lost at sea. After months of intensive study at the feet of some rather formidable fellows, he still couldn't translate the Eidolons' name for Marsh. Couldn't even take a stab at it. Neither could the others.

Will hurled his lexicon across the room. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.” The binding splintered when it hit the wall, erupting into a blizzard of fluttering pages.

It was a copy, of course; none of the warlocks he'd recruited for Milkweed would let go of their invaluable originals. But their greed for new crumbs of Enochian had made them amenable to pooling their knowledge into a single master document. This master lexicon represented the culmination of centuries of Enochian scholarship by generations of Britain's warlocks. Nothing like it had ever been compiled before.

“Buy you a pint to settle your nerves?”

Marsh leaned in the doorway. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he had a look of concern on his face.

A pint? Well. Perhaps ...

But Marsh merely meant it in jest. Of course.

“Ha. Cheeky sod. I'm knackered. I'd kill for a solid night's sleep, to be perfectly honest.”

“You look like you could sleep for days,” said Marsh.

“It's all these damnable air raid alerts. Getting so that a fellow can't get a night's rest any longer. You'd think the Luftwaffe had declared a war on sleep. You're looking a bit ragged yourself.”

“We sent Agnes away yesterday.”

“Oh, dear. It won't be forever.”

“Wondering what von Westarp's brood will do next, that's what keeps me awake at night.”

“We'll find out soon enough, Pip.”

“If we ever encounter them again.”

After those spectacular few days in May, their enemies had disappeared into the Reich. Since then, the listening posts of the Y-station network had turned up nothing pertaining to von Westarp's project. They'd all but vanished. It was nerve-racking.

“We will. And we'll have some surprises for them next time round, eh?”

“So I hope. Clever chap, that Lorimer,” said Marsh.

“He says the same of you, you know.”

Lorimer's team of engineers had spent the summer poring over Gretel's battery. They had a few ideas.

Will didn't understand any of it, but he didn't much care. He was doing his own bit for the war. He'd long ago abandoned any worry that he wasn't doing his share.

Marsh stopped leaning in the doorframe and entered. He picked up a few of the pages that had scattered across the floor. “Can you slip away right now, or are you on board to relieve the next shift?”

“I'm not back on negotiations for another few days. In the meantime, I'm working on, ah, other things.”

“Lucky you, then. I'm sure that's a relief.”

Will held his tongue for a moment, searching for a diplomatic reply. “Of sorts, I suppose. There are worse things than negotiations.” He experienced a momentary bout of light-headedness when he stood. Dizziness plagued