mean what it used to, Will.”
“I'm bloody well aware of that. But I didn't say they
Marsh risked a sidelong glance at Will. “Why?”
“We're surrounded with language, human language, from the moment we're born. Earlier, in fact, if you believe sound penetrates the womb. It ... corrupts us. But Enochian is the true universal language, truer and more pure than anything remotely human. Getting a finger-hold on it requires a certain amount of purity.”
“But you're learning from the others. Why isn't that impossible?”
“You can always widen or deepen a fingerhold, once you have that. The trick is getting that hold in the first place. And that can only be done as a child. I'll never amount to anything more than a journeyman, myself. Though I'm improving, thanks to the others. Grandfather started my lessons when I was eight—far too old. It's a miracle I absorbed any of it.”
“Stephenson told me about the children on the coast.”
Will nodded sadly. “Proximity to Eidolons has been rumored to do that. But don't get your hopes up, Pip. Those children have been surrounded by human language. They're too tainted to learn Enochian without guidance. We don't have fifteen or twenty years to raise them into warlocks. And if you're considering stopgap measures, as I know you are, forget it.” He held up his hand, wiggled the stump of his missing finger. “I will
They drove in silence for a few minutes. London had become a foreign city to Will. It was the collective effect of many little things, like the way ornamental wrought-iron railings around stairwells and gardens had disappeared into the foundries, and the X's taped across windowpanes. Not to mention the blocks where the Blitz had rendered homes and businesses into scrap heaps of construction debris.
“Will, there's something I don't understand.” Marsh maneuvered the Rolls through the narrow opening in a makeshift barricade of fence posts and sewer piping. Barricades like these would be closed off when the invasion came. Two middle-aged men, volunteers for the Home Guard, stood on either side of the barrier. Their denim overalls were too long; too-small steel helmets sat on their heads like forage caps; their rifles predated the Great War.
After they accelerated again, Marsh continued. “If only children can learn Enochian, where did the lexicons come from? I know they're passed down the generations, but how did that begin? How did anything ever get transcribed?”
“Ah. You've grasped the very root of the matter. As I knew you would.”
“Tell me.”
“Well. The story goes that at some point in the Middle Ages—nobody can say exactly when—certain Church scholars and intellectuals of the day decided to trace the history of humanity back to its origin in the Garden of Eden. And so they sought the Adamical, pre-Deluge language.”
Marsh nodded. His eyes didn't leave the road, but Will knew he had Marsh's complete attention.
“Setting aside the medieval metaphysics for a moment, they reasoned that the oldest language would also be the most natural. Which is to say that in the absence of other influences, a person would naturally speak this language.”
“The absence of other influences?”
“Yes. So they did the obvious thing. They rounded up as many newborns as they could—it's best not to ask how—and raised them in strict isolation from all human contact and interaction.”
“Good Lord. That's barbaric.”
“Quite. But it worked. The only flaw in their experiment, of course, is that the ur-language isn't a human language at all.”
“My God,” said Marsh. Will knew he was thinking of his daughter.
They were nearing Will's flat, skimming along the south edge of the green expanse of Hyde Park along Kensington Road, when the light traffic slowed to a halt. Marsh idled Stephenson's Rolls into a queue of several other cars.
“Damned Jerries,” said Will. Bomb craters, the rubble of collapsed buildings, and unexploded ordnance were common traffic hazards of late.
They inched forward a bit at a time. Will expected to see a troop of sappers from the Royal Engineers setting up, as was often the case with bomb damage. Instead, a policeman directed the queue around a traffic smashup.
An omnibus on a side street had blasted through the intersection with Kensington and smashed into the Victorian guard house at Alexandra Gate. It had clipped two cars, nearly flipping one, and pinning another to the guard house. The omnibus had ripped a deep furrow through the flowerbeds. Three of the four pillars on the guard house portico had come down, littering the grounds with chunks of granite. Will glimpsed two more policemen carrying a stretcher covered with a sheet away from the site of the pinned car just as Marsh cleared the congestion and sped up again.
Will wondered who had arranged this one. He clawed at his necktie. He yanked his collar open, too. A shirt button
“Not far from your doorstep,” said Marsh. “Perhaps it's for the best that you haven't driven the Snipe down from Bestwood.”
Will concentrated on breathing, the ebb and flow of air through his lungs. He wasn't drowning just yet. Not yet.
“You know, Pip ... I rather think I will take you up on that pint.”
Marsh looked at him sidewise. “Honestly?”
“Please.”
Will didn't say anything else until Marsh found a pub with PLENTY OF BEER, BOTTLE & DRAUGHT chalked on the door. Marsh had to point it out twice. Will didn't hear him the first time, because he was too distracted by the crash of surf and an advancing tide.
On Sundays, Klaus took breakfast with Doctor von Westarp.
His parlor on the third floor of the farmhouse overlooked the grounds of the REGP. The treetops of the distant forest shimmered green, yellow, and red in an early autumn breeze. Over the susurration of leaves, one could hear the stutter of a machine gun, the
It was quieter inside. The doctor demanded strict silence during meals. Extraneous noise caused indigestion, he insisted. Silence during the meal, followed by a symphony and one cup (precisely eight ounces) of coffee. That was the doctor's recipe for a vigorous constitution. But now Mahler's Sixth had ended, and the gramophone hissed while the needle skipped around the center of the disc. Klaus used a toast point to mop up the last of his breakfast. Today it had been quail eggs, salty Dutch bacon, lemon curd, and bitter coffee mixed with real cream.
The doctor commanded such esteem in the eyes of the Reich's leadership that he enjoyed the first pick of many spoils of war. And Klaus, having single-handedly rescued Gretel from enemy territory (therefore making possible the chain of successes that had inflated the doctor's prestige over the summer) enjoyed von Westarp's favor.
“I have a new task for you,” he said.
Emboldened by his success in May, Klaus had been agitating for another mission to England. Gretel's report regarding her experiences in enemy custody—though hard to believe at first—pointed the way to the conquest of
