Ro’moloristen answered, “Sometimes, my lord, one can be powerful on the Path of Fury, and yet fail because there is one more powerful still.” The young God King touched a claw to the screen. “Here. Here is the place. The home of the gray-clad thresh. The place which puts into the shadow the threshkreen of France and of Poland. The place for which we must prepare an assault such as the People have never seen.”
“And what is this fearsome place called, puppy?”
“My lord, the local thresh call their home, ‘Deutschland.’ ”
Chapter 1
Fredericksburg, VA, 11 November 2004
Snow flecked the cheeks and eyebrows, falling softly to cover a scene of horror with a clean white blanket. White snow fell upon, melded into, the hair of a man gone white himself. He was stooped, that man. Bent over with the care of ages and the weight of his people resting on his old, worn back.
The Bundeskanzler
Yet, as badly and as plainly as he trembled, the nausea of his disgust was in every way worse.
Fearing to look at his aide, the Kanzler whispered, “It’s the bones, Günter. It’s the little piles of gnawed bones.”
Günter, the aide — though he was really rather more than that, heard the whisper and grimaced. “I know, mein Herr. It’s disgusting. We… we have done terrible things in the past. Horrible, awful, damnable things. But this? This goes beyond anything…”
“Do not fool yourself,” corrected the Kanzler. “We have been worse, Günter, far worse. We were worse because what we did, we did to our own. Cities burned away. Lampshades. Soap. Dental gold. Einsatzgruppen. Gas chambers and ovens. A whole gamut of horror visited upon the innocent by our ancestors… and ourselves.”