Shadows of Falling Night (21 page)

“Whose idea was it to put your
sister
next to us?” Ellen asked, jamming her thumbs into her ears and trying not to think of a series of memories that were unpleasant in a whole galaxy of ways, many less than straightforward.

Adrian grinned at her. “Any of my family who wish to do us harm, which is to say, any of them,” he said. “Starting with her, and working on out to Great-uncle Arnaud, who I think did some of the scheduling for this trip.”

Then he concentrated and began to mutter. Ellen felt a sensation like a fierce itch
inside
her skull. The sounds from next door dulled, until they were fainter than the droning whine of steel on steel from the wheels and the distant chuffing of the engine.

“You know,” Ellen said, with a slow smile, “I was telling the truth about your hands and my bottom.”

Hours later a scream of an entirely different nature woke her from a drowsing sleep, so loud she couldn’t tell if it was psychic or physical or both. The muffling feel of the Wreakings clanging shut in her head was nearly as startling. She sat up in the comfortable but slightly narrow bunk. Across the compartment Adrian was crouched on his, alert and tensile as a great cat, the yellow flecks in his eyes glittering in the dim light.

“What was that?” Ellen said quietly.

“Death, I think,” he said. “The Final Death. A nightwalker, a post-corporeal perhaps, in sudden agony and great fear. And close, close.”

A fist thumped at the door. “Open!”

The rolling shutters were down over the lounge’s windows, and the post-corporeals were there despite the fact that the sun was up outside and the train still in motion. They were also all within arm’s length of the armored boxes held by their most trusted renfields, and they were snarling-angry.

“Arnaud Brézé was under my protection,” Étienne-Maurice said. “It
was made clear before we left Paris that all feuds were in abeyance until we arrived in Tbilisi, and we are not yet even in Istanbul!”

Ellen was uneasily conscious that they were snarling-angry at
her
, and at Adrian, as well as simply pissed off at having to be active in daytime away from their carefully arranged and usually underground home lairs. The renfields were coldly furious too; Arnaud’s valet had been found dead face-down on the floor of the compartment too.

“Am I supposed to have killed my Great-uncle Arnaud?” Adrian said, reclining gracefully and lighting a thin brown cigarette. “And if I did…what objection would any of you have?”

He blew smoke towards the ceiling in that offensively arrogant way that only someone who’d spent a lot of time in France in the twentieth century could master.

Étienne-Maurice crossed his arms. “Because this train is under my protection,” he said with deadly calm. “I would take any such action as…how shall I express it…a
personal affront
. Even a challenge.”

He didn’t have to add how many challenges he’d faced in over a century of existence, and how few of those challengers had survived.

“Then we should determine who
did
commit such a solecism, sire,” Adrian said. “For it was not me.”

One of the Tōkairin clan surged to his feet, hand going to the katana thrust through his sash. “You are a Brotherhood terrorist!”

“Well, yes,” Adrian said with a slight smile. “But that is not relevant to the issue.
Your
motivation is obvious. Your cousin invaded my home territory and I—my wife, actually—killed her. Would anyone here have done differently?”

That brought unwilling nods. Ellen shivered a little inwardly, behind the shields that made it difficult to read her emotions. To Shadowspawn, that argument made perfect sense, which was an illustration of why
hanging out with them was like swimming with sharks. The Brotherhood operatives who had a large share of that with blood made her nervous; these…

“Is this supposed to be a motivation for
me
to have killed
your
great-uncle?” the Tōkairin said.

Adrian shrugged expressively. “It is if you persist in trying to pin the blame on
me
. In any case, I have no motivation…well, I would have killed him if I had an opportunity in the normal course of events, he tried to kill me last year in Paris…but I have no motivation to do so
now
and
here.
Unlike my late great-uncle, I am not an impulsive or reckless man. I am attending the meeting in Tbilisi to make an argument; this would not have increased my credibility. And I fear my great-grandfather’s anger…as who does not?”

There were nods, and a few smiles and laughs. Ellen became conscious of how sweat was trickling down her flanks as the ratcheting tension eased back a notch.

“
Ach
, so,” the man in the SS uniform said. “But you might have had other motives…concealing a secret, perhaps?”

Adrienne spoke. “Arnaud was scarcely likely to confide in my brother. Insofar as he had a political position, he was aligned with
me
. Does anyone suggest that
I
killed him?”

“It is not impossible,” von Trupp said thoughtfully.

“Well, any one of us
could
have killed him,” she pointed out cheerfully, nibbling on a biscuit. “Is there anyone here who
doesn’t
enjoy the process, other things being equal? Apart from you, Ellen.”

Ellen shivered invisibly again.
Yeah, Adrian apart, who? And when he gets his blood up…How do you figure out a murder when
everyone
around cheerfully owns up to being a murderer?

“Let us examine the…site,” Adrian said.

No point in saying
body
because there isn’t one,
Ellen thought.

“Oh, I don’t really think that’s necessary—” Adrienne said.

The conversation became harder to follow after that, partly because some of it was telepathic, and more because the Shadowspawn started dropping into and out of languages she didn’t speak. One of the many vile unfairnesses of their genetic heritage was that they could pick up languages with full fluency in a week or two simply by interacting with native speakers. The enlarged language centers of their brain, the part that handled telepathy, just
absorbed
it. Adrian spoke dozens. He claimed that he had the same faint accent in all of them…

When the dialogue started to include hissing snarls she slipped out unnoticed. Whenever she started getting too envious, she reflected that were advantages to
not
having the Power.

Nobody was guarding the compartment that had been Arnaud Brézé’s.

“Why am I not surprised? These people…sorta-kinda people…couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse,” she muttered. “Well, maybe that, but only because of natural talent in that direction, not organizational skills. If it weren’t for their renfields they wouldn’t have clean socks in the mornings and they’d always be running out of toilet paper and toothpaste.”

It wasn’t that Shadowspawn were stupid, though some were, about the same percentage as with normals. Adrian was brilliant…

And Adrienne is too, in that utterly skanky sneaky heh-heh-heh of evil laughter sort of way.

It was just that a lot of them
acted
stupid in this sort of situation. Stalking around each other with their fur bristling rather than getting on with things. Which was fortunate, in its way; if it hadn’t been that way humans would all be in pens.

She slid in and closed the door behind her. The layout was identical to the compartment she and Adrian shared; a couch on either side that folded down into a bed, with an armoire-table between. Just as fancy, too, in a subtly different way. These wagon-lit cars were individual works of art, or at least craftsmanship of the highest order, put together like fine cabinetry.

All right,
she told herself.
You’ve had years of doing Janette Bond stuff in Adrian’s head and some real-world too, and you’re good at seeing patterns anyway, you always were. What do you see here? Where are the details that don’t fit? Pretend it’s a painting and you’re checking to see if it’s a fake or not—you did that at the gallery in Santa Fe often enough. What doesn’t fit? What’s wrong?

There was a sharp unpleasant scent in the air. Not blood; an aetheric body dissolved when it died, and evidently the valet had been killed in some non-leakish way. This would be the stomach contents, since the nightwalking body
did
oxidize food to create energy. Sure enough, there was a stained and damp patch on the sheets beneath the tumbled blanket. Ellen crossed to the window and flipped up the pull-down screen; the glass was sufficiently tinted to let a nightwalker enter the compartment, but most of them would hesitate anyway because you could
see
the sun outside, albeit a pale washed-out variety.

Black leafless trees were passing by, with glimpses of snowy fields and the occasional farmhouse beyond, like Bruegel’s
The Return of the Hunters.
You forgot how
north
Northern Europe was until you were here in winter; because of the Gulf Stream it wasn’t any colder than the mid-Atlantic states she’d grown up in, but it sure as hell was
darker
in this season.

The cause of death seemed obvious; a long double-edged silvered dagger was rammed through the bedding and into the mattress beneath.

And that’s his monogram on the hilt. Someone killed him with his own knife.

She hesitated, then wrapped her hand in a corner of the sheet before she pulled at it—probably nobody was going to take fingerprints, but there was no point in taking chances. At least it was just silver, and not the alternative way of killing a nightwalking Shadowspawn, which was a knife with pre-activated glyphs commanding a Wreaking. Those were a lot more dangerous to the user. Especially a human, because if the nightwalker was strong enough and fast enough he could reverse it, which would be like the blade were running a couple of thousand volts right through
you
.

Then she frowned. There was more than one rent in the bedclothes. More than half a dozen, in fact, as if there had been multiple stabs. And why was the blade plunged deep into the mattress; until the nightwalker died or went impalpable the body would have kept it from going in that deep. And—

She ran a finger through a dry part of the sheet and rubbed thumb and forefingers together. There was some sort of dust or powder on the sheet, well away from what had been the edge, and it glittered. A quick glance aside showed a stack of envelopes, antique things with heavy cream-colored paper, but they’d do well enough. She took one, and used a sheet of the watermarked notepaper beside them to scrape as much of the powder as she could into the envelope and tucked the flap closed.

A first glance around showed only what a rather foppish, wealthy European born in the 1880s would have, with the unexpected addition of a modern Indian-made tablet. She tapped the screen, and found it had been playing Debussy through a set of wireless earphones as an accompaniment to a video file…

She shuddered and turned it off; on second thought she slipped it
into her pocket, feeling as if her hands were dirty. There were the usual weapons, including an 1892 Lebel revolver with silver bullets in the chambers within reach of both the bed and the table, but no indication that any of them had been used. Something pricked at her attention. The pad of notepaper on the little table was
sewn
at the top, with a row of perforations below—just as usable as the adhesive type she was familiar with, but different, and it made it immediately obvious a sheet had been used. There was an elegant Montblanc fountain pen beside it, but no writing.

And exactly one sheet is missing from the top of the otherwise-virgin pad.

“Now, what are the reasons to kill someone? Kicks, with this crowd. Or fear. To stop someone from doing something…did Arnaud
know
something? Was he going to tell someone? It’s right next to our compartment and one over from Adrienne’s.”

She picked up the pad and slipped that into her pocket as well. Another round of the compartment didn’t show any sign of the missing sheet of paper, even when she went through the pockets of all the clothes outside the trunks. At last—reluctantly, and using the fountain pen—she began to lift the sheets. A corner of paper, yellowed from the equivalent of stomach acids—

“What are you doing here,
puta
?”

The words were in a woman’s voice, flat neutral Californian-American, but accompanied by a short metallic
click.
Ellen’s recent education filled in the rest, and she turned very slowly.

She recognized the figure in the doorway; Theresa Villegas, Adrienne’s household manager. A renfield, but a very trusted one, from a family that had served the Brézés for nearly two centuries, since that branch arrived in California not long after the Gold Rush…Back on Rancho Sangre, the Brézé country seat on the central Californian coast
not far from Paso Robles, there was an old story that a rattlesnake had bitten Theresa once.

The story said the
snake
had died.

“Looking around,” Ellen said coolly, keeping her hands in view.