“I risked my life to bring you out of here,” she said. “You played me for an idiot. You’re going to pay for that.”
“I must demur on that point; it was Herr Kriene who arranged for your mission into Berlin. As for what I will pay for? I will pay terribly, that is true. In a currency that I doubt you can even imagine.”
Malmagden, she realized, was taking her to see something. Maybe he was taking her to some nice, quiet spot where he could put a bullet in her brain. She was having a hard time getting up the proper attitude of concern.
They stepped up onto a catwalk overlooking huge expanses of darkness. Susan counted two, three rooms the size of small auditoriums. They came upon a final room, barely lit to gloom by a single lamp in the far corner.
She needed a moment before the room came into focus. Her eyes had to adjust to the light. Her mind had to adjust to the images.
She saw a sticky red smear along a wall. She saw a red mess in the center of the floor. She looked a little closer and realized it was a face, someone’s face, ripped from their head. A torso sat, calm and headless against a wall.
“What is this?”
“It was a field hospital,” Malmagden said. “It held over one hundred twenty patients, three doctors, and eight nurses.”
Susan saw parts. As they walked on, she tallied up heads, arms, denuded torsos—no bodies. Every once in a while, she would catch some hint of motion from one of these body parts, just out the corner of her eye. But of course that was ridiculous. When she turned to look, there was nothing but stillness.
She started to ask what happened. Malmagden motioned her on. This wasn’t what he had brought her to see. This was just a little tune-up.
Up ahead, the darkness thickened with the smell of rotten flesh. Susan heard shuffling sounds. She heard garbled-headed talk, nonsense syllables that went from guttural growls on up to hooting screams that put a corkscrew down her spine.
Below their elevated walkway, something moved. She peered through the metal slats at men in German uniforms. But something was wrong.
Two of the men grabbed a third and took him down, leaning into his face. As they came away, she saw chunks of bloody meat in their mouths.
As for the man on the ground, he clutched at the wrist of his nearest assailant, and managed to bite off two fingers. The scent of blood brought together a small knot of soldiers. They converged on the two bleeding men. When they pulled away again, nothing but mess remained.
The smell of death was so overpowering that Susan retched. Her vomit fell through the grate to land on an upturned palm. She saw the man stare at it with dull curiosity. He licked it, and then looked up at her.
At the sight of Susan and Malmagden, a wail of hunger began to pass through the throng. It rolled across the room like the discordant swell of music as an orchestra tunes. Add a high screech of animal bloodlust, the profound basso of rage.
Susan started to back up the way they had come. Malmagden took her and led her on.
“You would die back there,” he explained. “We have to find the Havel River locks. That is where you will reach the surface.”
“This is your Totenstürm,” she managed. “This is your army of the dead.”
“They were my Totenstürm. I fear they are mine no longer,” Malmagden said sadly. “They were supposed to receive a treatment that would have made them pliant to my college of philosophers. But things came up.”
“Your philosophers.” Susan looked back toward her cell. Them?
“My learned colleagues: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Kant.”
“You’re a funny man,” she said. She liked that in a Nazi.
“They are ghouls, actually, from the Vale of Pnath, which is not a place you will find on many maps.” Susan shuddered, dimly recalling some passing mention of this from her early Watermark training. “However, they are scholars of no small talent as well. They worked with the Totenstürm and we had some success. Our army was taking shape. Last night, in the wake of the travesty at Faulkenberg Reservoir, someone came down here and released a battalion of Totenstürm shock troops into the sewers.” Malmagden indicated a giant gate swinging loose on its hinge. Behind it lay a cell the size of the Roman Coliseum, empty now. “It is obvious to me that these are the same people who have tried to use an Allied agent to get me branded a traitor. Subtlety failed them; they decided the only vengeance they could count on was to have me set upon and torn to pieces by my own dead.”
“How could anyone hate you so much?” Susan was maybe even more amazed at the motive for this crime than she was the means. “There are a couple hundred people dead in that hospital. All that suffering was simply to kill you?”