Shadows of Falling Night Read online

  “Right, if they weren’t we’d strangle them instead. But maybe Shadowspawn kids are more like kids than kids are. To push our buttons, you know?”

  Cheba shook her head. “I like them anyway. Even if that is true, they are not pretending to be good children. They are doing it by really being that way.”

  Leon and Leila came back, holding up a box in triumph. “Here, you should have some too!” Leila said; Leon nodded emphatically while he chewed.

  Thing is, Adrian also told me that the human foster parents…A lot of the time, they’re the first ones kids kill when they hit puberty. Because that’s when they stop being naturally inclined to get along with anybody.

  He took one of the candies from the box the girl offered. The shell was a dark, slightly bitter chocolate, while the interior had a creamy filling of hazelnut praline.

  “Thanks,” he said; it really was good chocolate.

  Damn, he thought. And they really are cute kids.

  “And Adrian wants me in Vienna,” he said to Cheba. “You too, and Peter.”

  “Why? Me to look after the children and guard them, and Peter because he understands these machines…You because you were a soldier, and he needs you to fight?”

  “A little. But also because I was a detective, and he wants me to detect. Let’s get going, it’s a long drive.”

  “How far?” Cheba said.

  Peter glanced at his tablet. “About eleven hundred kilometers, call it six hundred miles, about the same as the distance between Santa Fe and Dallas. One long day’s drive. In Europe that’s a long way, just like in America a hundred years is a long time.”

  “Call it twice that distance, the way we’re going to be driving, but we can take it relays,” Eric said. Peter groaned slightly, and Eric went on: “Consider it the scenic route, professor.”

  “Talk about bad luck!”

  Peter stopped talking abruptly and looked up at Eric and Cheba. The three were grouped around the Citroën seven-seater car by the side of the road, peering under the raised hood. Leon and Leila were happily engaged in snowballing each other, but the same anxiety showed on the faces of all the adults.

  “I thought your machine would hide us, Peter?” Cheba said.

  They were all carrying one of the little pseudo-tablets that concealed the wearer from the Power and they’d gotten fairly paranoid about making sure they were working. Even the children were wearing them, and had stopped complaining about it.

  Peter was wearing a black Astrakhan wool hat with ear flaps. He ran his fingers under it and rubbed at his forehead. His explanations tended to emphasize the limitations of the equipment.

  “Sure, what we’ve got will hide us,” he said. “But I didn’t say it would protect us, did I? Because it won’t. Protect the car? Even more not. It doesn’t make us invisible, either. Not to ordinary regular eyes.”

  “Or it could just be common or garden-variety bad luck,” Eric said, taking a closer look the engine. “Christ, the fuel injector on this thing is shot seven ways, we might as well have been running wet cement through it. So much for high-end rentals and the synthetic crap they use for gas here. Shit.”

  “Do you want to bet on it?” Peter said. “Bet on this being luck instead of, you know, luck?”

  “Normally, I might.”

  Eric looked around. It was as cold as you would expect in the run-up to Christmas, and they were in a world of black and white and gray. The white snow lay knee-deep across the lumpy fields of the little valley they were in; he’d been avoiding the autobahn and sticking to rural back roads on general principles, and much good it had done them. The asphalt of the little two-lane was black, flanked by banks of off-white snow where the plow had gone through; the ranks of pine trees on the ridges that flanked them to either side looked black in the dim light. The sky overhead was the color of a wet manhole cover, and the air had the damp mealy smell that made you expect snow.

  “But here in Hansel and Gretel land, maybe not,” Eric said. “I keep expecting to see a gingerbread house and a little old lady with a taste for veal.”

  Cheba looked at him, frowning in puzzlement.

  It must be a major pain in the ass, he thought. Not just having to work in another language, but not knowing all the references everyone else learned when they were kids. Like everyone else was speaking a different language, and in code. I guess that accounts for a little of the way she snaps at times, that and everything else she’s gone through.

  “A children’s story about wicked witches,” Peter said, filling in for her. “A story that comes from around here.”

  “Oh. I think I saw a movie about that. There were many guns and Gretel wore black leather.”

  “That’s not the original version,” Peter said, wincing slightly.

  “One thing that’s for certain,” Eric said. “I’d feel awfully damn suspicious about anyone who stopped and offered us help about now.”

  Cheba nodded. “Or of la policia. Or of anybody. If this is los brujos, that would be the next thing they did.”

  “Right,” Eric said. “I think I saw a church steeple from that hill back about half a mile, though it’s hard to tell around here with this wet thick air. I’m surprised the people here don’t have moss on their north sides.”

  “A church means a village,” Cheba said. “Do we have time to get there before dark?”

  “We’ll still be closer when dark hits than we would if we stayed here. If it isn’t just normal bad luck somebody wants us to stay here, and doing what an enemy wants you to do is usually a really lousy idea.”

  “And it is only a few hours until the sun goes down,” Cheba said grimly.

  They all glanced at each other again; their enemies were so much stronger at night.

  One of the advantages of traveling on Adrian’s nickel was that he didn’t have to give a damn about the luggage, though the wastefulness of it did make him twinge a little. Cheba cast a wistful look at the flat ostrich-hide case with gold clasps that contained a lot of expensive girl stuff. He couldn’t blame her; this was probably the first time she’d had a chance to accumulate any of her own.

  “Just weapons, money, and our camouflage tablets,” he said. “Incidentally, Peter, how long before we have to recharge ’em?”

  “Oh, not for at least twenty-four hours. And even that ought to leave us a margin, I’ve got some spare battery packs ready charged. It just needs some trickle current, it’s a very economical application.”

  “Right, let’s get going. Walking on this road…not so advisable either but we don’t have much choice.”

  He checked everyone’s clothes with a flick of the eyes; fortunately everybody including the kids had winter boots on, and they all had good parka-and–hood-style coats they’d put on when they got out of the car. They trudged on heading southeast; to the right the land rose into forested heights that probably would’ve turned into mountains if the cloud hadn’t swallowed them. After a quarter-mile a fold in the land showed the ruins of a castle on a hill to the south, probably built long ago to dominate this valley and the passageway through it down to the Danube. Half the tower and the snag of a curtain wall still stood, though the war that blackened and cracked the stones might have happened eighty years ago or eight hundred.

  “Was that a castle I saw back there? Hope to hell Franken-N-furter doesn’t show up,” Peter muttered, and began humming the tune to “Let’s Do the Time Warp” as he walked.

  I was right, Eric thought. This really is Red Riding Hood country. That might’ve been funny a while ago. Now remembering all those old stories feels…different. Too many of them take it for granted the monster has a long career of eating people before they get their comeuppance. When it’s for real, how do you know that you aren’t the one who got the oven treatment before Hansel and Gretel showed up?

  Just about then it started to snow, big soft flakes that stuck to the shoulders and hoods of their coats and then to their eyebrows as the wind shifted into their faces. It
cut visibility to almost nothing, and little rivulets of icy meltwater trickled inside no matter how tight you pulled the lace at the neck. Peter just sighed and dug his hands deeper into his pockets, clearly used to this sort of thing from the grisly winters of his upper Midwestern home. Santa Fe could get cold too and had the odd blizzard, if not as often; it was a skiing resort area in the winter. Plus Eric had seen every possible variety of bad weather at one time or another on his travels for Uncle Sam.

  Christ Jesus, but I seem to make a career out of piling up bad memories to choke on later. The only compensation is the new bad experiences aren’t such a shock when they come along.

  Cheba looked utterly disgusted as she trudged, but then she had grown up in a sugarcane sort of place, and her time in the United States had mostly been in coastal California. She didn’t actually say anything; one of the things he liked about her was that she didn’t bitch and moan about stuff that couldn’t be helped.

  “I’ll never feel the same about the Brothers Grimm again,” Peter said as the wet cold settled into their bones, echoing his first thought.

  “Who?” Cheba said.

  Peter explained, in a way that had the Mexican girl laughing. The twins joined in, giving bits from their favorite stories—though the way Shadowspawn told them to their kids often had a disturbingly different perspective. Eric would’ve felt mildly jealous if he hadn’t been worried enough to keep his hand close to the hidden grip of his coach gun whether or not that made walking harder. Everybody quieted down after they been on the road an hour or so, but none of them were going to collapse just from a few miles. The fall made it like walking in the middle of a snow globe, visibility cut to ten or twenty yards at most and sometimes only arm’s-length. There was no sound at all except the muted hoot of the wind and the hiss of the flakes; it was quite enough to hear people’s breaths and the scuffing crunch of their feet. The real limiting factor was how fast the kids could move. They were a bit too big to be comfortably carried piggyback.

  As if to echo his thought Cheba caught his eye and inclined her head towards the children, who were tramping along with their heads down now, game little troopers but obviously feeling the strain.

  He shrugged a little and raised a hand in a gesture as if to say I know, but what can we do, stop and wait for it to bury us?

  With the weather thickening and the sun heading towards an early grave he lost track of the vague estimate of distance he’d formed. It was a bit of a shock when the church suddenly showed, a steep-roofed white stucco rectangle with a tall square tower, the black top sloping in and then swelling out again into a bulb before finishing in a long thin spire. Snow hid it again, then revealed a vertical shadow, then turned to a permanent reality, Central European but with a faint trace of Byzantium or Russia somewhere way back in its ancestry.

  Don’t zone out, Eric, he thought, disgusted at himself.

  Around it the lights of the town glowed, blurred through the snow. Eric breathed out a silent sigh of relief. There hadn’t been any traffic until they were almost on top of the place, but a few cars passed them now and a tractor went by pulling a wagon loaded with something under a tarpaulin. The village was a cluster of homes and a few shops with a small river running through it under an arched stone bridge

  If the Santa Fe River back home had ever had any water in it, it would’ve been about the same size, which meant that in most of America it would’ve been described as a medium-sized creek. They got nods and a few calls of “Grüss Gott,” but less inquisitiveness than a similar party could’ve expected in most American towns this far into the boonies.

  There was a big Christmas tree in the town square not far from the church, with the lights twinkling on it already fairly bright as the short afternoon faded. There were a few other decorations spotted around the village, including angels blowing trumpets and pictures of an ethereal-looking blond child handing out gifts. A big Nativity scene wasn’t much different from the ones he grown up with except that a second glance showed that the lambs were real-life breathing lambs, just about to be taken off for the night by a teenage girl with yellow braids.

  He supposed that the statue standing nearby was Santa Claus or St. Nick, from the great curly white beard, but otherwise it was dressed more like the pope and for some reason there was a kid in a black steeple hat, a red waistcoat, and a green leprechaun outfit standing next to him.

  Peter pointed to a sign that hung creaking over the street, too thickly coated with snow to show anything except that there was heraldry and gilt beneath it. The building it marked was well-kept, but looked so old that it was leaning a little to one side. A bit closer and you could see the marks where the ancient black oak timbers had been squared with adze and broadax, and how the patches of white plaster between the beams weren’t quite regular.

  Even a Southwesterner like him could tell the difference between fake half timbering and the real thing this close. For that matter, there were enough really old buildings in Santa Fe to recognize the somehow organic, grown-in-place look that amateurs using hand tools in a strictly local style produced, even if the details of that style had nothing in common.

  “That’s a Gasthaus, which means tavern or small hotel,” Peter said helpfully.

  “Yeah, professor, I have been outside New Mexico once or twice,” Eric replied, with a flash of irritation. “I finished high school too, when I wasn’t pulling my sombrero down over my eyes and sleeping against the adobe wall with a fucking burro standing next to me chewing on a cactus.”

  “Sorry,” Peter said, flushing even more than the cold could account for.

  “Sorry back at you,” Eric said after a moment. “Worried, tired, hungry. Feeling a bit off, like maybe I’ve got a cold coming.”

  Not to mention fighting off a feeling of oh shit here we go again without any concrete reason behind it. I’ve always trusted those feelings, and now I’ve had experts tell me that they’re the real thing.

  Aloud he went on: “You speak any German? We’re a little off the beaten track for much tourist traffic. All I know is some cusswords, from some German snake-eater types I met once.”

  “Only a bit—one of my grandmothers was German and she tried to teach me some when I was a kid. Oh, and I know the physics terminology, enough to help a conversation about that. Probably not much use here. There’s almost always somebody who can speak English in a German town, though, even a small one.”

  The cold damp air was wonderfully enlivened with baking smells, rich with vanilla and buttery-nutty and gingery scents. It was long past lunchtime, and they’d just finished a long cold hike. Despite his general misery, that made part of him perk up.

  “Okay, we need to get the kids warmed up and fed, and see if we can organize some transportation. We may be stuck here tonight from the look of the weather.”

  He let himself shiver, no longer forcing the unpleasant feeling of being core chilled out of his mind by sheer willpower, surprised at how bad it was.

  I may not be twenty-two anymore, but am I an old man already? Can a couple of eight-year-olds run me into the dirt?

  The inn was blessedly warm and bright as they pushed through the door and stamped the snow off their shoes. The common room featured a lot of carved wood that reminded him of Swiss cuckoo clocks, a couple of murals of fairy tales with an unfortunate prevalence of wolves and white teeth, and pine logs crackling in a big fireplace with wrought-iron andirons and a tile surround. It was all presided over right now by a wrinkled crone in a shapeless black dress whose nose nearly met her chin. For a moment he remembered his joke about Hansel and Gretel, but her bright blue eyes looked at them with alert curiosity as she put down her knitting, and then widened in concern at the sight of the cold, snow-soggy children.

  “Ha woesch! Wo’ her?”

  They looked at her blankly; she clucked her tongue and continued into a flow of German, with a broad mooing accent that even he could tell wasn’t anything like the standard form of the language. It sounded
rather like a compassionate and elderly Teutonic cow. Peter looked baffled, but Leon and Leila immediately started chattering back at her in German that was apparently fully fluent—and from the crone’s delighted smile, the same dialect she used. After a moment Leila turned to him:

  “We told her that our car broke down,” she said.

  “She says that we’re lucky it wasn’t any farther away from the village,” her brother added. “This is a lonely place, she says, and that they get snowed in a lot.”

  “And she says that dinner will be ready soon if we want to eat—and there will be Kniadel,” Leila added eagerly.

  “You mean Knödel?” Peter asked.

  “Ja, Kniadel,” the old woman said helpfully, and broke into a new set of moos, evidently asking things like where is your car and what about luggage and do you know these kids are wet and freezing?

  A comedy of languages and dialects followed. Luckily some younger members of the family turned up who spoke reasonable English, albeit apparently somehow learned from Englishmen who spoke a thick and adenoidal version of their own, which was absolutely indescribable on a base of deeply rural Swabian. The grandchildren of the crone had a couple of children of their own around the twins’ age and size who could lend them some dry clothing. A message went off to ask around for someone with a four-wheel-drive vehicle to go fetch the luggage from the stranded car. Apparently with the weather this bad, there was no hope of getting the car itself fixed until after Christmas.

  In the course of all that the ancient, her rather more than middle-aged son, and his son and daughter-in-law, took their coats, set them down in front of the fire to warm up and dry out, brought coffee and cream and plates of crescent-shaped biscuit/cookie things dusted with sugar and full of hazelnuts. Then they waded through a dinner of roast ham hocks done with mustard, horseradish and pickled chilies and accompanied by red cabbage, onion cakes and potato dumplings—which was what Kniadel turned out to be. Or Knödel, according to Peter. A bunch of locals trickled to in to have the same, mostly families, and mostly people who obviously knew each other from childhood; he supposed they were giving the housewives a rest before the big family dinners around Christmas.