Shadows of Falling Night (15 page)

“You’re
thinking
again, Adrian,” she said, some time later.

He chuckled. “I was thinking how appetizing you smell,” he said. “And how good it is to think that without feeling guilty about it.”

“My conscience-ridden one,” she said.

“You would not like me if I did not have a conscience,” he said soberly.

She chuckled. “I’ve met you without a conscience. Well, without a conscience, without some other things, and with tits. I didn’t like it. Though it was the lack-of-conscience part that was
really
unpleasant.”

“Something else smells a bit appetizing. There are no less than three dining cars on this train, and a lounge as well.”

“Beats stale Amtrack sandwiches all to hell,” she said. “Let’s go!”

They walked down the side-corridor. The lounge was exactly that; a Jazz Age nightspot complete with a musician tinkling the ivories in a white tux, while well-dressed men and women drank highballs and elaborate cocktails and chatted and laughed. If you could ignore the hot yellow eyes of more than half, that is. The dining car beyond was an island of light and fine white linen and tableware—not silverware, of course—with Lalique low-relief panels of frosted glass showing dancing bacchanals and bunches of grapes. He winced slightly as they passed a group in kimonos and took a seat at the far end; they’d recognized both of them, and the wave of hatred was almost palpable.

“Who are they?” Ellen asked.

“Those are the Tōkairin family, including the clan-heads from Japan.”

“Tōkairin as in Tōkairin Michiko of unfond memory? The guys who thought they were ninja magicians.”

“Yes, until the Brézés taught them the truth in a fit of missionary enthusiasm. Michiko’s kindred. I hear that they are feeling extremely aggrieved. After all, they lost their California patriarch
and
their most purebred female still in the body, and at our hands. In fact, I was informed at the Hôtel de Brézé that they have kept Michiko’s body alive. It is being shipped to Tbilisi, in fact.”

Ellen’s brows went up as they sat. “I thought the body died if a nightwalker was killed while they were out of it?”

“Eventually. The physical…plant, as it were…is all there, the autonomic functions continue for a while, but there is no consciousness to use the machinery. While one is nightwalking, there is a link. Quantum entanglement, didn’t Peter Boase call it? Destroying the nightwalking body severs that, the trauma of death instantly transmitted and chaoticizing the…mmmm…software files. The physical form enters a very deep coma. They have kept Michiko’s on life-support machinery so that it does not perish of dehydration or lack of nourishment, I am not sure why.”

“No way to cure it?”

“Not even the Power can cure death. The essence, the person, is
dead
.”

Adrian paused, a thought teasing at him. “I do recall a speculation that it might be possible to…transplant…a personality, as it were…to such an empty shell. By soul-carrying. That’s merely theory, though: I do not think it has ever been done, not in the modern era at least. It would account for some of the legends of possession. Or perhaps they will try to breed the unconscious body. That
might
be possible.”

“Oh, euwww…I seem to say that a lot about Shadowspawn.”

Adrian shrugged. “Spawn of darkness, eh?”

“Or maybe they intend to produce the body at the meeting?”

“That could be so. Shadowspawn tend to be short on empathy, but that is a fate that any nightwalker would fear. We should be cautious about the Tōkairin even beyond the usual, if they are that determined to do us harm. Ah, I see we have reached Germany.”

Another party was entering the dining room. One was—

Ellen blinked, and Adrian sensed her astonishment at the black and silver, the skull and crossbones insignia and the burnished jackboots.

“Is that—”

“Yes, SS dress uniform. Standartenführer Alberich von Trupp, in the flesh…well, not literally in the flesh since 1945. But present anyway.”

“The Council was behind
that
?”

“No, just some individuals, thought Alberich was an enthusiast—he was at the Wannsee Conference, behind the scenes.”

“Why didn’t they win, then?”

“My great-grandfather insisted on an Allied victory. Not for any altruistic reasons, I assure you…Shadowspawn are perfectly capable of maintaining the prejudices of their upbringing. Even my great-grandfather considers him a pig of a Boche. The von Trupps still hold a grudge.”

“Was Hitler…”

“Not enough to nightwalk or feed, but there was a substantial element, yes. Not that he knew it. Most great dictators are at least one-third
Homo nocturnis.
And many saints, too.”

“As a reaction against their impulses?”

“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 the 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.