Shadows of Falling Night (26 page)

Eric suppressed an instinctive
ya think
? Instead he said: “Who’s doing this?”

“Immediately, I would say the von Trupps. Perhaps some of the more crazed members; there are some quite old post-corporeals in that clan, some still haunting the old castle occasionally, though they retain enough reason to go far before they feed for the most part.”

“Not the Tōkairin?” Ellen said.

“Possibly both; the Tōkairin might…will…be supplying information, and then a little telepathic hint from the active head of the von Trupp clan to their ruin-haunting ancestors would suffice…”

“Not Adrienne?”

“Not directly. It does not have the marks of any adept she uses, those who are her close allies. But…In a way, yes, she and those like her are indirectly responsible. Just as she was for Peter’s anomalous readings at Los Alamos. It is the way she affects, that the Council affects, that the nature of the Power itself affects the world. That feeling you get from the ancient stories, from the Odyssey or from fairy tales as they were before the Victorians had their way with them? The quality of arbitrary menace, malignant fate…As their sway in it grows, and they use the Power with growing recklessness, so the world becomes more as they would have it. Chaotic, fluid, a place where chance rules, and in turn is ruled by will.”

His yellow-flecked dark eyes turned from contemplating something impossible to see and focused on Eric again. “I am very much afraid that you’ve fallen into…How shall I put it…A pocket where these new rules, which are very old rules, apply. A hint of what the world might become, if our enemies triumph.”

You know, this mystical crap doesn’t get any more agreeable just because it’s true,
Eric thought; Peter had said something similar, though with a more techy slant.
Very much the other way around, in fact.

“This is God damned informative,” he said aloud. “But what the hell am I supposed to
do
?”

Adrian nodded, appreciating the point. “You must get out of the area as quickly as possible; you need to get back to where there are more people, because there the…how shall I put it…inertia of things preserves ordinary causality for the present.”

“Is there anything you can do for backup?”

Adrian shook his head. “Not at this distance. All three of you have as many protective Wreakings implanted as can be done without limiting your individuality. Obviously, someone is trying to trap you in that area, just as obviously you must get out. Back to people, but in getting back you must not take the most obvious route.”

A frown. “Quite possibly those who are after you care nothing for the welfare of the children, either, and are not much afraid of me or my sister.”

“Well, that just proves that they’re pretty fucking stupid, doesn’t it?”

Most of the time Eric Salvador and Adrian Brézé didn’t have much in common, except a high degree of mutual respect. Right now their common smile shared worlds. Ellen glanced between them and rolled her eyes slightly.

“And I’ll look after the kids,” Eric said.

He could tell the other man controlled an impulse to let his eyes slide aside:

“I owe you a debt for that, you and the others,” he said. “There is not been enough time for…to use a horrible Californianism…bonding between the children and me. They actually care more for Ellen, because they have spent time with her while she was my sister’s prisoner. But I can tell a good deal from their auras, it is possible that with the right upbringing they could come to be human beings, or at least moral beings, to the extent possible for we purebloods. And in the end, they
are
my children.”

Then Adrian frowned, lifting his head tilted to one side as if catching a distant sound.

“I think you had best return quickly. Here…With your personality matrix a little apart from those damnable machines of Peter’s…I can sense a probability nexus approaching you.”

“I’m in pretty rocky shape back there, but there is where the there is,” Eric said sourly.

He took a deep breath, or rather the immaterial form of him currently dwelling in Adrian Brézé’s mind did.

“Let’s go.”

He could tell it was much later than sunset when he woke in his own body, or at least regained a little consciousness there. Maybe it was the icy draft that did it, or perhaps the voice yammering—screaming—at the back of his head. He forced gummy eyes open, suppressing an impulse to whimper at the inrush of sick physical misery and the contrast to recent memory of perfect health. The window was open, and a little reflected light trickled past the figure that crouched there.

He couldn’t make it out between the fever and the darkness…Except for the yellow eyes.

Am I awake?
he thought, unsure for an instant whether or not he was in the evil dreams of fever.

And a calling hummed through the air, a sultry seductive music, a crooning in his head. It reminded him of something—the feeling you got looking out of a helicopter hatch or the edge of a cliff, telling you to throw yourself off. The voice was distant, as if he had his thumbs in his ears or there was white noise closer. Cheba stood between the beds; then she took a step forward towards the window, then another small step, slow and infinitely reluctant. All he could see was her back; she was wearing a big T-shirt, one that reached nearly to her knees.

Both of them ignored him, the woman and the monster, as if they were moving through some ritual in a place and time endlessly distant. He fought not to let his breath rasp as he made an arm heavier than lead
and weaker than a child’s move towards the nightstand between the beds. His fingers were like stale sausages that belonged to somebody else, every motion needing deliberate thought and an effort of will that made him sweat as chills rippled through his body.

Cheba stopped, and her head tilted back.

—and the yellow eyes moved forward—

—and Cheba’s hand whipped out from where she’d held the knife behind her back—

—and slashed like a glint of moonlight—

There was an appalling scream, a squalling cry of rage. A shriek from Cheba too, as something struck her and she spun aside in a tangle of limbs and a spray of blood. That put her out of the line between his bed and the window. Thick and clumsy and distant, he still made his finger tighten on the trigger.

Thump!

Recoil wrenched the coach gun out of his hand like a blow from a hammer. Silvered shot cracked into plaster and shattered glass, and he sank back shivering and retching. There was another squalling scream, trailing away into the distance. Voices, feet pounding, anxious faces. He let it all trail away.

“If you call the authorities it is the same as killing us,” Eric managed to say the next morning. “And we have to get out of this place, now.”

He was conscious, just, and coherent, just, though there was a temptation just to look at the snow falling outside the window. A local doctor, an elderly man with white side whiskers that at home Eric would’ve classified as a ’60s hangover, had waded through the snow to deal with Cheba’s injuries and had been persuaded to cough up some medication
for Eric as well. That he had anything for malaria was a stroke of luck, for once good.

Cheba’s injuries consisted of four parallel slashes across her shoulder and back, the unmistakable mark of a cat’s paw…But it would have to be a very large cat indeed. That was the biggest thing they had going for them, and they needed everything they could get. These were the most fanatically law-abiding people he ever
met
, and he could see it set a twisting in their guts to even think about not following proper procedures. Peter was in a quiet state of despair; if they were sent to jail or even just detained they’d undoubtedly have their shielding devices taken away, and that would be the end. Cheba was defiant, and fiercely stoic about the pain of her wounds, but she was also completely out of her depth here.

And so am I,
Eric thought.
My brain feels like it was stuffed with red-hot Brillo pads.

Leon and Leila were huddled in one corner of the room; they could be remarkably inconspicuous when they wanted to be. Now they quietly crawled under the bed and came up beside Gerta, the old matriarch of the family. She gave them a fond but distracted look, and then frowned as they started whispering urgently in her ears. She started to shake her head, then looked at Cheba again where the doctor was bandaging and swabbing. Her faded blue eyes grew metallic.

Suddenly she surged upright like a whale broaching, crossed her arms and began to speak. Her son and grandson tried to brush her off, failed, and then looked astonished when the grandson’s wife joined in on her side. The doctor stood up, clicked his bag closed and went to the door, saying something alliterative with a lot of
ich
and
nicht
while looking at the lintel before going through.

Peter leaned close and whispered in Eric’s ear: “He said,
I know nothing and I saw nothing and I heard nothing
.”

The argument went on for a little longer, with the old lady throwing around words like
drucksmulle
—which evidently meant something fairly dismaying—until the older man threw up his hands.

“We will do it,” he said in English. “It will be a disaster of course, but we will do it.”

His son nodded, also looking glum…but both of them looked a bit relieved as well.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Vienna

“V
ienna is one of my favorite cities,” Étienne-Maurice Brézé said.

The Orient Express halted a little after sunset in the
Westbahnhoff
, in a squeal of steel and a deep
shush-shush
of water vapor. Ellen hated to think how much it had cost, cost other people, to let this steampunk dinosaur fantasy function in the contemporary station, or the rail network as a whole. Where were the water and coal coming from? Not to mention clearances and the effects of the smoke; it had probably left a trail of at least minor disaster across Europe, turning people’s lives upside-down…not that that would matter to the people who’d done it.

Sorta people. And maybe it
would
matter; they’d view the video of people scrambling desperately to cope and not knowing what’s going on and
laugh themselves silly. Yeah, you would like Vienna,
she thought.
It went into a deep depression in 1918 and didn’t come out for generations. So it’s still basically the city of the Habsburg emperors. You remember it from when you had a body, not just a quantum-field imitation put together by memory.

There was a bit of a crowd, drawn by the exotic antique technology, exclaiming and pointing behind a ring of policemen. The disembarking Shadowspawn and their retainers generally ignored them, apart from a few lingering glances that were probably hunting reflex and the audience probably interpreted as hauteur. They vanished in a cloud of flunkies, heading for their limousines and dispersing to palaces and guest suites and in a few cases top-end hotels across the city.

Humans have problems adapting to the modern age, because we evolved for the Old Stone Age,
Ellen thought.
Shadowspawn do too, maybe more so because they’re more specialized. They evolved when humans were scarce—I think that’s why they have that addictive quality. It kept the blood source around…and willing to give them other stuff they needed, too. But now they’ve recreated themselves and they’re in a world with
billions
of humans instead of just a few scattered through a wilderness, humans who don’t know about them and are lousy at dodging or fighting them. They’re like leopards dumped into a sheep farm.