Shadows of Falling Night Read online

  “Precisely.”

  He looked at the menu. “Hmmm. Le filet de boeuf en salaison à l’aneth…fillet pickled in coarse salt, sliced with dill and coriander berries…and a bordelaise sauce…I would suggest the Château Latour 1998 with this…”

  Ellen paused in the middle of breaking a roll. He could feel a roil of emotions in her aura; love, and something like…exasperation.

  “You just told me we were even more likely to be horribly killed than we thought, if we don’t manage to get ourselves vaporized by that damned nuke, and you’re certain which Bordeaux we should have?”

  The sommelier opened the bottle. Adrian rolled and sniffed the cork, tilted the glass to look at the candle flame through the swirl of dark intense red, sniffed and breathed in a sip. Something like bitter chocolate and graphite…just now reaching its peak. Not quite infanticide, but still a bit young, though the grapes had been harvested in the year Ellen was born.

  “But of course. One would be mortified to die with the wrong wine upon the tongue.”

  She sighed. “I’m worried about the kids. Do you think Eric can get everyone to Vienna?”

  He considered. It felt right, but of course…

  “We must do what we can, and hope for luck. He is a very capable man. Unfortunately…now…Harvey is too. We are racing against time.”

  Eastern Turkey

  “The first thing we need is a truck,” Harvey Ledbetter said.

  “How are we going to get one?” Farmer asked.

  “Steal it, as usual,” Anjali said dryly. “How else?”

  “Take a look at this place, Guha. Steal an oxcart, maybe.”

  It was a cold bleak dawn, with a sad dry smell and. Harvey absently chewed on some fresh flatbread as they walked back towards the wreck of his vehicle. The nameless village rose as early as any farming settlement, but the locals pointedly ignored them, which was for the best when all was considered. They passed the burned-out van the two Brotherhood operatives had been driving back when they were chasing him, still smelling faintly in the chilly morning.

  “That must have been just a bit lively,” Harvey said; they’d been trapped inside a suddenly burning car with no obvious way to get out. “Closer to bein’ unsalted cracklings than was comfortable, I’d say.”

  “No fucking shit, if I hadn’t felt it coming maybe two, three seconds in advance we’d have been fried,” Farmer replied.

  Anjali was almost pouting. “And we lost our weapons, mostly. And our luggage. I do not like not having a toothbrush or clean underwear in the morning!”

  “You could get something local,” Harvey said.

  Anjali threw her hands up. “Have you seen any woman here over thirteen whose backside is not a bloody yard across? And none of it would be clean, washed or not.”

  “Yeah, and if you’re going to smell, your own smell’s always better.” Harvey chuckled.

  Anjali shuddered, looking as if she would like to climb out of her skin. She wasn’t a high-caste Hindu except in a cultural-descent sense—wasn’t teetotal or a vegetarian, for instance—but…

  You can take the girl out of India, but you can’t take all the Brahmin out of the girl, he thought, not for the first time. Fastidious ain’t the word, ditto about feeling unclean even if she doesn’t take ritual purity literally. Still, she keeps going even if she grumbles and you can’t expect more.

  Nothing was moving east. Harvey wasn’t surprised; that curse probably had traffic knotted up back a hundred miles from here, with minds boggling and refusing to accept it even as things broke down, blew up or caught on fire. If you tried to travel in that direction by anything more modern than a donkey, anything that could go wrong would, every single microsecond the quantum foam bubbled. Like fate, if Fate was a malicious child grinning and poking you with a stick. So…

  “Okay, but there’s probably going to be something traveling the other way. Get us to a seaport, then find us a ship.”

  “A lot harder to hit a stretch of sea the same way,” Farmer agreed. “Those generalized curses tend to bounce and shatter if you try them over open water. You can get a nasty backlash, too.”

  “A water surface is already chaotic,” Anjali said, a little pedantically; she’d always been strong on theory, and had been an instructor down at the new Brotherhood HQ in Ecuador for a while. “That makes it easier to affect in detail but harder to maintain a standing effect.”

  They passed a herd of sheep with two attendants in coats about as hairy as those of their charges, and more of the big Anatolian sheepdogs. Their masters called them back from a barking, growling frenzy and passed the foreigners with wary nods. The three halted at Harvey’s truck.

  “Eighteen hours,” Harvey said. “I am not going to lose this opportunity to hammer the Council’s nuts. Probably nothing like it will come along again. Eighteen hours, and this lights up like a Christmas tree.”

  “Or Diwali lights,” Anjali said, sounding pleased that he’d used one of her favorite activities as a metaphor. “Hmmm.”

  She and Farmer knelt. He drew a circle in the dirt and inscribed the glyphs with quick practiced motions of a wooden stylus; they looked vaguely Egyptian, but were much older. A memory of them had lingered when the first Egyptian scribes wrote.

  Though they also had a distinct touch of Belle Époque Art Nouveau, legacy of the adepts who had re-created them by fishing with the Power into the depths of time. She began flipping a coin…what looked like a coin at first glance…into the circle as they both muttered in Mhabrogast, an antiphonal chorus like rats scratching in the walls of the world. Nobody had ever been able to prove whether the lingua demonica was objectively necessary to Wreaking or simply served as a focusing device, but like the glyphs it worked.

  After a moment, breathing deeply and wiping her face, Anjali went on: “Hard to be absolutely certain indeed, but I’d say the odds are good.”

  She frowned; they both gulped a sports drink. It didn’t really help all that much, but it soothed some of the feelings Wreaking gave you, like sucking on a candy when you were trying to quit smoking.

  “The odds of getting a truck are good. Better here than anywhere else within reach. But the fall…it does not seem very good somehow, overall. There are blackpath hints to the reading.”

  Harvey nodded. “We’re goin’ on the next thing to a suicide mission with a nuke to blow up a whole city,” he said. “You expect goodness? As opposed to visions of bane and ruin?”

  “A point, indeed, a point.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Farmer said, fishing out a pair of Ray-Bans and leaning back against the bulk of Harvey’s MAN diesel, moving carefully to avoid jarring the fading post-Wreaking headache.

  “Hell, none of us does good, much,” he said, sounding less angry than usual. “We do what’s necessary. Other people get the goodness. We get the satisfaction of knowing we’d feel even worse about everything starting with ourselves if we did anything else.”

  “Seems that way, sometimes,” Harvey agreed.

  Not long after a trail of dust showed to the east; he squinted into it and the rising sun. It was considerably less fancy than the MAN rig he’d organized back in Austria, but then, this wasn’t Austria. Or even Slovenia, or for that matter western Turkey, which had been getting almost offensively modern in recent decades. His practiced eye took it in as a Seddon Atkinson Strato 350 hauling a cargo container; ten axles all up. The make meant it had seen its best days in the 1990s, which come to think of it had been his best days too—in your thirties you were past being a dick with legs without being too creaking—but you used what you had on hand.

  “Anjali, you flag him down,” he said. “Take off your jacket. We’ll persuade him of the error of his ways.”

  “Sexist banchut,” she grumbled, but complied.

  “Me no, the driver of that rig, pretty much guaranteed,” Harvey said. “Jack, don’t kill him.”

  The two men crouched behind the cab of the disabled truck; they could both sense th
e sudden spike of interest in the bored competence of the man’s aura. She stood in the road, waving the jacket and looking distressed. The big vehicle slowed, with a hiss and squeal that made Harvey wince a little; someone had been neglecting the brakes. It crept past them, putting them a little behind the cab. The door opened and the driver jumped down, putting on his best would-be dashing grin.

  “You need helping?” he said, in thick almost-English.

  Which showed an unusual degree of perception—he’d noticed at once that she couldn’t possibly be local and hadn’t tried Turkish and Kurdish first. The driver was midway between wiry and burly, with a short black beard and bristle-cut hair and dark-olive skin; with the nondescript sweater and pants and battered shoes he could have been from anywhere between Bosnia and Afghanistan, though Harvey would have guessed at Iranian Azerbaijan from the accent and body-language and aura. The two Americans stepped forward without unnecessary haste or words, their movements sliding smoothly between the driver’s first sight of them and the possibility of reaction. The younger grabbed the man’s left elbow and wrist, twisted and locked and pushed upward.

  “Sadece sakin, arkadaş,” Harvey said, dropping into Turkish for a moment: “Just keep quiet, friend. No need for anyone to get hurt. Hurt much.”

  The truck driver gave an incoherent grunt and then froze as Harvey laid the barrels of his coach gun beside the right side of his face. The man’s eyes rolled frantically, trying to see them without turning, but Farmer’s hold meant that he’d wrench his arm out of the socket if he did anything but stay uncomfortably still. The unmistakable feel of the gun’s twin barrels in the skin over his cheekbone encouraged this pragmatic attitude. Still, you could never be completely certain. Men under stress sometimes did astoundingly stupid things, even professionals, and he could feel this amateur’s fear and bewilderment.

  Fear had its uses, but encouraging rational thought was not one of them. Harvey reached up with his left hand and placed thumb and forefinger on either side of the man’s head just above the neck; contact made things much easier for his modest command of the Power.

  “No!” he said sharply to Anjali, who was buttoning her coat and also winding up for one of her patented toe-cap ballectomies. “He hasn’t done anything but get unlucky and we’ve got him under control.”

  The woman scowled and shoved her hands into her pockets instead. Harvey took a deep breath, let it out, and adjusted the auras—there was some scientific term about entangling the functions, but that was what it felt like, as if the edges of their personalities had started vibrating in tune. Then he pushed mentally.

  “Szzeee. Mogu, ze ta!”

  Blackness-devouring-thought. Command!

  Farmer released his grip and stepped back as the driver went totally rigid for an instant and then as limp as a set of empty clothes. Anjali stepped forward and grabbed a handful of the sweater, setting herself to guide the fall a little. When the trucker was on his back, they could see trickles of blood running out of his nose.

  Anjali stared at it fixedly for an instant, then turned away, unconsciously licking her lips and swallowing repeatedly. Then the lips curled back from her teeth.

  “Watch it!” Harvey said sharply.

  “I am,” she muttered. “Just leave me alone for a moment.”

  The hands in her pockets clenched and her shields went up like ceramic laminate armor on a tank. She was the highest of the three on the Albermann scale, but well short of the ability to feed. Human blood was nothing but dirty salt water as far as her digestive system was concerned. Unfortunately, the craving for blood hit at a much lower level; without endless and very careful control, that was what produced a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Blood Countess. Housekeeping in Hell as you tried over and over again to reach an itch you couldn’t scratch, tormenting as an insect dancing on your eardrum. He felt only the faintest shadow if it himself, and that was bad enough.

  So you gotta make allowances. It’s no wonder some people are testy a lot of the time.

  “That will hurt more than a kick, yes,” she said shortly.

  Harvey grunted. He was feeling bad himself; you had to ration Wreaking very carefully indeed when it all came out of you.

  “I gave him a dose of short-term amnesia,” he said. “Safer than a concussion, though. Rearranging his man-tackle wouldn’t have made him forget this.”

  “A good thump on the head would,” Farmer observed. “And it takes less out of you than a Wreaking.”

  “Tell me,” Harvey muttered; he was still feeling logy and aching all over. “That’s risky, though. Concussion’s no joke.”

  He looked at the truck. “You’re young and full of beans, Jack. Get this thing backed up to mine. The load’s on rails and I’ve got a good set of tools and a winch. We should be able to transfer it and hook up the power leads in a couple hours.”

  “What about the cargo?” Farmer said.

  “It’s…”

  He hopped up into the bed of the truck and used his knife to rip open a few cartons marked as condensed chicken soup in Georgian. That was Georgian as in the Georgia in the Caucasus, an obscure and isolate language with its own script.

  “…yeah, cigarettes and booze, probably dodgy as hell. We’ll just dump it out and you can be damned sure it’ll all disappear and I know nothing, Officer, nothing! Anjali, give me a hand with this osco. We’ll leave him in my truck’s cab, wrap him up in a foil blanket, there’s a couple of spares. He ought to be all right.”

  It was a little odd taking the trouble, since he was going to blow up an entire city right down to the little girls and their big-eyed kittens. On the other hand, that was necessary.

  Leaving the driver to die of exposure would just be convenient. Keeping the distinction in mind was crucial.

  On the mountainside a mile distant, Dmitri Pavlovich Usov watched patiently through the scope of the M82 sniper rifle. It was a .50 weapon, thirty pounds of recoil-operated precision throwing slugs the size of a woman’s thumb fast enough to blast through a quarter inch of armor plate, and the maximum range was two thousand meters. More, if you could do a little Wreaking with aimpoints, and there were few adepts better at that than he was. The range was farther than the usual individual hexes could reach, especially if the target was taken by surprise, so it was hard to defend against with the Power.

  He imagined the sudden distant explosion of terror as the first round hit; those massive bullets could rip limbs off or kill from shock alone. The instant despair as the others died trying to leap for cover…He smiled. He had no intention of killing them, but there was no harm in dreams. He was a happy man, because he often lived his dreams.

  Dmitri looked around thirty and was in his forty-eighth year, a sharp-featured blond man with a long lean body covered in ropy muscle, and currently wearing grey-brown hiking clothes and padded jacket. He watched the three Brotherhood agents as they toiled and sweated at their task. Even now, even at this distance the sheer absence of the cargo was disturbing. He knew it was there, and he could see it with the eyes of the body, but it simply did not affect the balance of the world as the Power perceived it.

  Eerie, he thought. I do not like it.

  There were practical matters to attend to.

  Adrienne…Juliyevna…he thought.

  A sense of awareness, of sharp-edged attention. Damped down behind shields, of course; his emotions were too. You never handed a tool to a potential opponent…which everyone was. Your allies most particularly.

  Dmitri…Pavlovitch…came the reply.

  Normally Adrienne and her fellow Progressives preferred to just text someone if they wanted to communicate; telepathy took energy and had low bandwidth long-range. It was very difficult to tap, though. They also used an obscure dialect once found only in a few villages in Central America. One no Shadowspawn had ever known, except for a peculiar renegade in New York most of a century ago, when things were more free-wheeling. The Council clean-up squad had buried his body and that of his seven odd assoc
iates under the Empire State Building, and killed off the villagers who’d helped him on general principles. Adrienne had come across the handwritten notes taken in the last raid and dumped in an old warehouse by the Council’s mercenaries, liberated them, and had a few of her inner circle learn the language from her. Abstractly he admired her energy, because she had had to do it the slow way from the paper notes and the recordings.

  It made a very good code. Shadowspawn could pull a language out of the brain of a speaker, but it was much harder to do to an adept. Impossible, under most circumstances.

  The…subjects…are…mobile…again…I…did…not…need…to…intervene.

  Good…do…not…underestimate…them.

  He nodded, let agreement flow over the link, and waited. Soon enough they would leave. They had little of the Power, but they used what they had well. He would clean up the site—and of course dispose of the truck driver, which would be amusing—and then follow, cautiously. Things were coming together.

  Another communication: the…situation…in…new mexico…is…confused.

  He acknowledged that without replying; no complex operation came off as planned, even where Dale Shadowblade was involved. Here it was fascinating to watch a major action develop with so little of the Power and prescience involved. The Council and its foes had relied on their abilities for a very long time; there was a curious advantage to limiting it to passive deflection.

  Though even that took some effort. He licked his lips and snarled lightly. He hoped they hurried; he was growing hungry.

  Finish…there…and…join…Shadowblade…in…Santa…Fe…to…exert…control…act…only…with…a…low-risk…opportunity.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  The tunnel ran half a mile from the underground…

  Lair, Eric Salvador thought. Face it, it’s a lair. And we may be walking right towards an ambush…with absolutely no way to go back if things go wrong.

  It didn’t have the spaciousness and smooth interior decor of the rest, though; this was one of the clandestine emergency exits. Cheba could walk upright but he had to stoop a little—it would be just doable for Adrian Brézé, who was a bit of a shrimp. The naked rock was patched here and there with concrete where the tunnelers had run into cracks, sparsely lit by occasional LEDs stapled to the ceiling and smelling of slightly damp stone and the metal of the ventilation ducts. You felt the weight above you here, and he could have sworn he heard it creak in the arch over his head.