the greater Reich. But what she'd done to Heike ...
When Rudolf had died, back in Spain, Gretel had used her prescience like a blunt instrument. But now she wielded it like one of Doctor von Westarp's scalpels. Heike's suicide had been
Von Westarp muttered to himself, nodded. He made a mark on his map and then set off again through the blowing snow. The tattered hem of a dressing grown dangled beneath his long leather overcoat, tracing snake trails through the snow. Klaus and the others followed.
Wind hissed through bare boughs, as though the oak and ash trees were commenting upon the preparations. It carried a knife-edge chill that pierced the tiniest gaps in Klaus's clothing. The cold slipped through the buttonholes in his coat, sliced through the seams in his uniform, raked his skin with ice. His breath caught, trapped by the constriction in his chest.
He considered using his Willenskrafte, letting the snow and wind pass through him by virtue of the Gotterelektron, but the relief would last only until he rematerialized to breathe. It would waste his battery to no good effect.
No snow landed on Reinhardt, or in the steaming boot prints left by his passage.
Reinhardt the necrophiliac.
He was as arrogant and cocksure as ever, except around Gretel. Reinhardt avoided Klaus and Gretel as much as possible these days.
Klaus kept trying to avoid his sister, too, after Heike's suicide. Though it was somewhat pointless. She always knew where he'd pop up.
Gretel had gone completely off the rails, and nobody knew it except Klaus. And, he supposed, Reinhardt. After all, in the eyes of Doctor von Westarp, Heike had taken her own life because she was weak. A failure. He spoke not of wasted resources, or of the de cades squandered creating the now-deceased invisible woman. He spoke only of the mistakes he'd made with Heike, and how he'd avoid these in the next batch of test subjects.
Pabst cleared his throat. “Respectfully, Herr Oberfuhrer, I would like to reiterate my recommendation that we install gun emplacements. And land mines. The enemy may be more numerous than we expect.”
“No! Save the glory for my children.”
Buhler dug out a cigarette while the two argued. He struggled to light it in the cold wind. After a few moments he gave up, and glared at Reinhardt. Reinhardt smirked; the tip of the cigarette flared a brilliant ruby red.
In the end, von Westarp won. As of course he would. There would be no emplacements, no mines.
The inspection tour continued. Seeing the preparations was almost enough to make Klaus pity the doomed men who planned to attack his home. He'd walked among them; breathed their air. They weren't so monstrous.
On any given evening, the train that passed along these tracks en route to Edinburgh carried perhaps a hundred passengers. One hundred souls: men, women, and children.
Hargreaves recited these details very matter-of-factly, like a physician listing a patient's medical history, while he and Webber fastened an explosive charge to the iron rail. Their breath formed long wispy streamers as they labored in the lengthening shadows of evening. Both men pricked a finger; dribbles of blood froze instantly to the rail.
Will stood a little way off, sheltering from the wind in a stand of fir trees. He would have preferred to stay in the car and avoid the cold, or better yet to have avoided this trip altogether. That, of course, was out of the question. He had necessarily been a participant in the negotiation of the blood price, and as such, here he was, seeing that it be paid.
The cold made him numb, but it wasn't the all-encompassing numbness he yearned for. He'd have hurried that along with drink, but he'd be damn busy in a few hours. Focus was important. He promised himself a treat if he made it through the night in one piece. A doubtful result.
“William!” Hargreaves beckoned to him. “Come.”
“You know, it occurs to me,” said Will, tugging the bowler down over his ears as he stepped into the wind, “that by watching this activity and alerting neither the police nor the Home Guard, I am, legally speaking, an accessory to this deed.” Hargreaves and Webber stared at him blankly. Webber's bad eye, Will noted, matched the color of the fresh snow that dusted the gravel alongside the train tracks. “In other words,” Will continued, “I am, through the agency of my tacit consent, already a participant in the payment of this price.” He looked back and forth between the two. “You see.”
They didn't. Nor did they much care. The greedy bastards would butcher their own mothers if it meant half a chance to see a deed like the one slated for to night.
Will crossed the country lane to where the others knelt. They had chosen this intersection thirty miles outside the city for its seclusion. Their chances of getting caught were quite low. The tall trees lining the road swayed, the wind in their boughs sounding for all the world like crashing surf. It felt like they were funneling the wind straight down the road. It was a suffocating wind.
He loosened the scarf around his neck until the ends flapped like pennants. “In fact,” he added, “you might say that by doing nothing, I've done quite enough.”
The shriveled skin of Hargreaves's face twitched as it often did when the warlock was irritated. “Pull yourself together and do your duty,” he said. “We must head back soon.”
Will sighed, tugged up his trousers, and crouched next to the tracks. He double-checked their work. They'd placed the charge at the seam between two lengths of rail. It was a small thing, not strong enough to topple a train by itself, but more than enough to pry the seam apart. All it needed was a trigger. Webber anticipated him and pushed a leather satchel across the ground with the toe of his boot.
In Will's grandfather's day, a warlock's bag of tricks contained knives, wooden bits, leather cords, and bandages. Will's carpetbag back at the Kensington flat still contained a pair of bloodstained garden shears. But this was not his grandfather's war. Warlocks served the king now—though His Majesty didn't know it—and their tools for spilling blood had grown in sophistication along with their understanding of Enochian.
Will fished inside Webber's satchel until he found a length of cord and a pressure switch. It took several tries to affix the switch to the rail. The ice-cold steel shrugged off the adhesive putty. He layered it on until he could be reasonably sure that vibrations from the train wouldn't dislodge the trigger before the wheels touched it.
Which was exactly the result Stephenson wanted, the charming pragmatist. The warlocks' actions in paying the Eidolons' blood prices could be blamed as the work of fifth columnists. Nazi sympathizers. Jerry saboteurs. It had to be that way. A more direct path would have been to extract the prices from condemned prisoners and the like—so-called undesirables. But that would have required paperwork; it would have left a trail back to the Crown. And, given how expensive things had become, using prisoners to pay the blood prices would have quickly reduced the warlocks to executing people for shoplifting.
Webber and Hargreaves retreated along the road to where Will had parked the car.
He took extra care while arming the charge. He did it just as he'd been trained by the SOE: one wire at a time, taking care to avoid stray static charges.
That finished, he nicked a finger and squeezed out a few drops of blood. They froze to the rail, mingling with the blood Hargreaves and Webber had already shed. The warlocks' blood was a bridge, connecting the negotiated blood price with this act of violence. They'd done their parts. Somewhere in Surrey, Will knew, Shapley, Grafton, and White were doing something similar. Together all six warlocks were conegotiators. Coconspirators, too, if anybody
