The Council of Shadows (28 page)

“He
will
Wreak first if he comes back,” a woman's voice said.

“He'll be hurting,” the one called Jack replied.

The older man nodded. “Even so. Blades. Guha, you do the walls. Careful about the floor join, there's no crawl space but. . .”

“I know, big boss,” the woman said.

Her voice was singsong, the accent of someone who grew up speaking Hindi along with English, possibly added for emphasis.

They holstered the guns beneath their jackets and took out long curved knives; they looked like they were wearing some sort of body armor under their clothes as well. The woman went to the packs, shrugged one onto her back, and unclipped something that looked like a spraypaint attachment. That turned out to be exactly what it was. She started on the door and worked her way steadily and swiftly around the walls; there was a sharp creosotelike odor in the air, and everything turned a dull silver-gray beneath the nozzle.

Silver,
he thought, and croaked it aloud.

“Yup,” the older man said. “Harvey Ledbetter, Mr. Boase. My friends here are Jack Farmer and Anjali Guha.”

The Indian woman . . . or more probably Indian-American, from the way she moved . . . finished her task. The whole inside of the little room was covered in the silver paint now, and the sharp chemical stink filled the air; the three strangers seemed to relax fractionally.

“We're safe?” he said hoarsely.

Guha handed him a glass of water; he drank it while she checked him over with impersonal skill. He winced and bit back a moan a couple of times. He'd been hurt worse whitewater rafting once, and another time while he was rock climbing, but not lately. Plus he was in generally lousy shape, weak and vulnerable.

“No broken bones, no serious sprains or tears,” she said. “I will fix this bite.”

He stifled another yelp when she ripped back the T-shirt over the red stain and applied antiseptic and a bandage from a kit in one of the knapsacks.

“This . . . this isn't enough to readdict me, is it?”

Harvey looked at him with what he thought was considering respect.

“You went cold turkey? No wonder you look like shit. You don't have to worry about that. Reestablishing the dependency would take a lot more.” A grin. “And since Shadowspawn ain't infectious, like in the stories, you don't need to worry 'bout the next full moon either.”

Peter let out a long breath. Right now, he was more afraid of the addiction than death; that would be preferable to going through withdrawal again.

“So we're safe?” he asked again.

“Safe? Yeah, you might say so. Unless our snaky friend has an RPG—”

At his puzzled look, the man clarified: “Rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Or somethin' of that order. Not likely. They mostly don't think that way.”

“Adrienne liked technology.”

“She was unusual, and thank God she's dead. So we're safe until he figures out what he feels like doin' next. But that's one heap powerful adept out there. A lot of them don't study on
how
to use the Power, they just wing it by instinct, but this one does have the full postgraduate course. I could sense it. He's likely to have all the luck—literally.”

“You're the, um, Brotherhood?” he asked, as Farmer and Guha started spray-painting again.

This time it was in black paints, spiky symbols around the edges of the room that seemed to twist and hurt his eyes, until he had to blink and look away. They murmured as they did, in whining, throat-catching syllables.

A thought occurred to him:
Wait a minute, that's Mhabrogast! These guys are using the Power too!

Harvey seemed to sense it. “Yeah, we're the Brotherhood, more or less.
La Résistance
.”

“Ah,” Peter said. “A ragtag band of heroes who'll overthrow the evil empire?”

“Nah, mainly we're a nuisance not worth the effort of squashing'cause we're really good at hiding. A lot of us have enough of the genes to use the Power—not enough to night-walk or feed on blood, though. Think of us as ferrets up against a timber wolf.”

That's comforting.
Peter thought.
Not.

“What about Adrian?”

“He's somethin' of an exception. And I hope he's here real soon now.'Cause otherwise we are well and truly fucked.”

 

 

“Good to see you out and about,” Dmitri said, leaning on a boulder after he assumed human form once more. “And as lovely as ever.”

“Flattery, my snake in the grass,” Adrienne chuckled.

She leapt atop it, her own head-height, and squatted in an easy crouch next to her kit to talk to him.

“Besides, this is my etheric body.”

She was justly proud that even another adept couldn't tell it from the corporeal form without probing.

“I'm still not completely back to meat-normal.”

The night was on the comfortable side of chilly; the dry desert air lost heat rapidly. The stars overhead glowed in colors someone more human—less her type of hominid—could not have seen. Steel blue, red, pale green, the almost harsh-bright of the three-quarter moon; Shadowspawn had always been more nocturnal than their prey, and even in the flesh saw better in darkness. The etheric form's eyes were more sensitive still.

“The plan proceeds,” she said.

“Except for the unplanned elements, such as my being shot in the arse and having my throat cut. That is a role reversal I do not relish.”

“A mere detail,” she said, and they both laughed.

“Though I did get a taste of your lucy. In any case, we'd better scout the place again,” he said, shifting to Russian.

“Da, ”
she said, in the same language. “Good idea, Dmitri Pavlovitch. We must make their hairbreadth escape completely convincing.”

Learning new tongues was easy for their breed; the same enlarged speech centers that let the telepathic facility read the code of another brain helped the learning process.

“But cautiously,” she said; Dmitri tended to be reckless.

And then she
willed
, reaching within for the familiar template.

“Amss-aui-ock!”
she snapped, a purling, spitting sound.

Mhabrogast, the
lingua demonica
, the language that mapped and compelled the hidden structures of the world. Potential-beingbecoming, an arrogant command directed at the stuff of reality itself. You convinced your mind that you were something, and the mind made it real.. . .

Or close enough to real for government work,
she thought whimsically.
Close enough for biting, rending, tearing. Close enough for blood.

Pain thrilled along her nerves, a shivering almost-pleasure, a dissolution like sleep or orgasm or death as her very self ceased to exist for nanoseconds. Sight dimmed as her quasi body folded and stretched. Sound exploded outward, and smells—it was much easier to tell Dmitri was night-walking when his very scent had a sharp metallic overtone, like a small thunderstorm.

A real wolf would have snarled and cowered; she let her long red tongue loll over her fangs and jerked her nose upward. The scurrying rustle of a field mouse nibbling the papery cover of a seed yards away was distinct; so was the growl of a heavy truck's diesel near the distant mountains on the western horizon. The clean scents of the desert's sparse life flowed into her nose, a tapestry even more powerful than hearing, and one that made sight almost irrelevant. The human reeks from the little hamlet a few miles upwind were harsh by contrast. But though the body was a timber wolf, the mind wrapped around the brain stem was Shadowspawn; the thin black lips skinned back from long teeth as she smelled human blood. Warm, spicy, enticing. . .

Business,
she thought.
Mere prowling terrorism must await happier times.

Da,
Dmitri replied; at close range telepathy was easy and swift.
Let us continue our little charade. Ah, if only Michiko-
sama
were here!

She's attending to something else,
Adrienne said.
Besides, I don't think she reciprocates your affection, Dmitri.

I'd be waiting for
her
to get silver in her buttocks,
the male Shadowspawn gibed.

He'd been rubbing at his arse—she had to admit it was a fairly nice one, taut and muscular, though right now marked with red where the silver bullets had grazed the snake's tail. He was taller than most, nearly six feet, and his hair was long and white-blond. It tossed like hers in the grit-filled wind that coursed by. Then he threw his arms upward. Form sparkled for an instant too brief for even her senses to fathom, turned into something like a mist with eyes, and then the eight-foot wings of
Aquila chrysaetos simurgh
whipped at the air.

She reached down to her baggage and took out a small shape in her teeth. They closed on it, and the wolf's powerful neck muscles tossed it a dozen feet upward.

Talons closed on the metal oblong, and the extinct golden eagle of Pleistocene Crete soared upwards.

The wolf leapt down and loped to the west.

 

 

The Humvee was old but well maintained. Adrian drove it into the shadow of a tall boulder and parked. The engine ticked slightly as cooling metal contracted; even in the tail end of summer the Arizona desert could be chilly at night. Ellen swung out of her seat and looked around at the moon-silvered landscape and breathed the cool sage-scented air with its hints of caliche and dust.

Adrian's mouth tightened as he glanced around likewise. She had her night-sight goggles pushed up on her forehead, but he could pierce the darkness on his own. The lights of a very small town or mediumsize hamlet glittered in the middle distance. Somehow they emphasized the loneliness of the spot the way the passing of a train did, a peculiarly American desolation—it made you think of dust blowing over the cracked concrete of a gas station and people looking out a window over their fifth cup of midnight coffee.

I really am an artsy
, Ellen thought.
Here I am about to fight for my life and I'm making comparisons to Hopper paintings.

“This is an abortion of a mission,” Adrian said. “There is at least one night-walker out there, perhaps more. I can scent them.”

Oh, thanks, honey,
Ellen thought—and then hoped that Adrian wasn't listening.

He was usually scrupulous about her mental privacy, at least as far as words went: sensing her emotions was something he just couldn't help.

It's a compliment in a way,
she thought.
He's
really
treating me as a comrade-in-arms. I guess this is that soldier's bitching you hear about. Goes with the gallows humor, I expect. And I may not have thought seriously about enlisting in high school—the university money wasn't quite tempting enough—but I've been well and truly drafted.

It all made taking a permanent holiday in that flying penthouse look pretty attractive. Her instincts were telling her things about why the night was dangerous, and she knew the source of those genetic promptings better now.

Things
were out there, things far more dangerous than any tiger or lion. They'd hunted her human ancestors like rabbits while the glaciers came and went and came again. She'd had personal experience with them, and only the training inside Adrian's mind was letting her control her fear. It was there, lurking in her mind as the predators did in the night.

“Let us get ready, then,” he said.

She helped him get their gear out. Part of it included a high-impact oblong of composites. She knelt and unlatched it. A sniper rifle lay within, and she let her hands occupy themselves snapping it together. It was beautifully crafted and scrolled with silver inlays that would look like ornament to a casual gaze. But it was also a single-shot weapon that broke open like a shotgun, a thing of stone-ax simplicity; the fewer moving parts, the less for the probability-twisting Power to grasp.

While she completed the mechanical task she was conscious of Adrian moving in the background: the scrape of colored chalks against the rock behind them, the purling whine of Mhabrogast. She turned, the rifle cradled in her arms like a cold lover of walnut and blued steel. The final glyph was sketched on the sandstone surface. It glittered faintly in the moonlight.

“I meant to ask about that. If the Power can't affect silver, how come you can use it for a glyph?”

“That is a glyph of negation, of constraint,” he said. “You want it to be unchangeable. This sort of thing involves feedback loops; you can alter the probability cascades keyed to the glyphs on the fly if you're good enough.”

She made a questioning sound—she couldn't really understand the Power intuitively or use it herself, but she could learn the theory—and he shrugged.

“Nobody has ever been able to prove whether Mhabrogast objectively helps one to use the Power or whether it's just a focusing device. Latin certainly isn't more than that, and it's useful as a lead-in.”

“You mean the
lingua demonica
may be psychosomatic? Or some sort of symbolic placebo?”

“Or the operating code of the universe.” He snorted laughter. “We can't even prove that modern Mhabrogast is actually what the Empire of Shadow spoke. The Order of the Black Dawn's adepts used the Power to reconstruct it from a few fragments, back in the nineteenth century. But we know it works.”

“Or maybe it works because you know it does.. . . My head hurts when I think about that.. . . What does
that
one do? The silver one.”

Adrian smiled grimly. “If someone comes walking through the stone and into contact with it in their aetheric form. . . let us say the consequences will be unfortunate. For them. Think of it as running into a cross between invisible barbed wire and the web of a very large spider.”