Shadows of Falling Night (16 page)

“
Sadece sakin, arkadaş
,” Harvey said, dropping into Turkish for a moment: “Just keep quiet, friend. No need for anyone to get hurt. Hurt much.”

The truck driver gave an incoherent grunt and then froze as Harvey laid the barrels of his coach gun beside the right side of his face. The man’s eyes rolled frantically, trying to see them without turning, but Farmer’s hold meant that he’d wrench his arm out of the socket if he did anything but stay uncomfortably still. The unmistakable feel of the gun’s twin barrels in the skin over his cheekbone encouraged this pragmatic attitude. Still, you could never be completely certain. Men under stress sometimes did astoundingly stupid things, even professionals, and he could feel this amateur’s fear and bewilderment.

Fear had its uses, but encouraging rational thought was not one of them. Harvey reached up with his left hand and placed thumb and forefinger on either side of the man’s head just above the neck; contact made things much easier for his modest command of the Power.

“No!” he said sharply to Anjali, who was buttoning her coat and also winding up for one of her patented toe-cap ballectomies. “He hasn’t done anything but get unlucky and we’ve got him under control.”

The woman scowled and shoved her hands into her pockets instead. Harvey took a deep breath, let it out, and adjusted the auras—there was some scientific term about entangling the functions, but that was what it felt like, as if the edges of their personalities had started vibrating in tune. Then he
pushed
mentally.

“Szzeee. Mogu, ze
ta!
”

Blackness-devouring-thought. Command!

Farmer released his grip and stepped back as the driver went totally
rigid for an instant and then as limp as a set of empty clothes. Anjali stepped forward and grabbed a handful of the sweater, setting herself to guide the fall a little. When the trucker was on his back, they could see trickles of blood running out of his nose.

Anjali stared at it fixedly for an instant, then turned away, unconsciously licking her lips and swallowing repeatedly. Then the lips curled back from her teeth.

“Watch it!” Harvey said sharply.

“I am,” she muttered. “Just leave me alone for a moment.”

The hands in her pockets clenched and her shields went up like ceramic laminate armor on a tank. She was the highest of the three on the Albermann scale, but well short of the ability to feed. Human blood was nothing but dirty salt water as far as her digestive system was concerned. Unfortunately, the
craving
for blood hit at a much lower level; without endless and very careful control, that was what produced a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Blood Countess. Housekeeping in Hell as you tried over and over again to reach an itch you couldn’t scratch, tormenting as an insect dancing on your eardrum. He felt only the faintest shadow if it himself, and that was bad enough.

So you gotta make allowances. It’s no wonder some people are testy a lot of the time.

“That will hurt more than a kick, yes,” she said shortly.

Harvey grunted. He was feeling bad himself; you had to ration Wreaking very carefully indeed when it all came out of you.

“I gave him a dose of short-term amnesia,” he said. “Safer than a concussion, though. Rearranging his man-tackle wouldn’t have made him forget this.”

“A good thump on the head would,” Farmer observed. “And it takes less out of you than a Wreaking.”

“Tell me,” Harvey muttered; he was still feeling logy and aching all over. “That’s risky, though. Concussion’s no joke.”

He looked at the truck. “You’re young and full of beans, Jack. Get this thing backed up to mine. The load’s on rails and I’ve got a good set of tools and a winch. We should be able to transfer it and hook up the power leads in a couple hours.”

“What about the cargo?” Farmer said.

“It’s…”

He hopped up into the bed of the truck and used his knife to rip open a few cartons marked as condensed chicken soup in Georgian. That was Georgian as in the Georgia in the Caucasus, an obscure and isolate language with its own script.

“…yeah, cigarettes and booze, probably dodgy as hell. We’ll just dump it out and you can be damned sure it’ll all disappear and
I know nothing, Officer, nothing!
Anjali, give me a hand with this osco. We’ll leave him in my truck’s cab, wrap him up in a foil blanket, there’s a couple of spares. He ought to be all right.”

It was a little odd taking the trouble, since he was going to blow up an entire city right down to the little girls and their big-eyed kittens. On the other hand, that was
necessary
.

Leaving the driver to die of exposure would just be
convenient.
Keeping the distinction in mind was crucial.

On the mountainside a mile distant, Dmitri Pavlovich Usov watched patiently through the scope of the M82 sniper rifle. It was a .50 weapon, thirty pounds of recoil-operated precision throwing slugs the size of a woman’s thumb fast enough to blast through a quarter inch of armor plate, and the maximum range was two thousand meters. More, if you
could do a little Wreaking with aimpoints, and there were few adepts better at that than he was. The range was farther than the usual individual hexes could reach, especially if the target was taken by surprise, so it was hard to defend against with the Power.

He imagined the sudden distant explosion of terror as the first round hit; those massive bullets could rip limbs off or kill from shock alone. The instant despair as the others died trying to leap for cover…He smiled. He had no intention of killing them, but there was no harm in dreams. He was a happy man, because he often lived his dreams.

Dmitri looked around thirty and was in his forty-eighth year, a sharp-featured blond man with a long lean body covered in ropy muscle, and currently wearing grey-brown hiking clothes and padded jacket. He watched the three Brotherhood agents as they toiled and sweated at their task. Even now, even at this distance the sheer
absence
of the cargo was disturbing. He knew it was there, and he could see it with the eyes of the body, but it simply did not affect the balance of the world as the Power perceived it.

Eerie,
he thought.
I do not like it.

There were practical matters to attend to.

Adrienne…Juliyevna…
he thought.

A sense of awareness, of sharp-edged attention. Damped down behind shields, of course; his emotions were too. You never handed a tool to a potential opponent…which everyone was. Your allies most particularly.

Dmitri…Pavlovitch…
came the reply.

Normally Adrienne and her fellow Progressives preferred to just text someone if they wanted to communicate; telepathy took energy and had low bandwidth long-range. It was very difficult to tap, though. They also used an obscure dialect once found only in a few villages in Central
America. One no Shadowspawn had ever known, except for a peculiar renegade in New York most of a century ago, when things were more free-wheeling. The Council clean-up squad had buried his body and that of his seven odd associates under the Empire State Building, and killed off the villagers who’d helped him on general principles. Adrienne had come across the handwritten notes taken in the last raid and dumped in an old warehouse by the Council’s mercenaries, liberated them, and had a few of her inner circle learn the language from her. Abstractly he admired her energy, because she had had to do it the slow way from the paper notes and the recordings.

It made a very good code. Shadowspawn could pull a language out of the brain of a speaker, but it was much harder to do to an adept. Impossible, under most circumstances.

The…subjects…are…mobile…again…I…did…not…need…to…intervene.

Good…do…not…underestimate…them.

He nodded, let
agreement
flow over the link, and waited. Soon enough they would leave. They had little of the Power, but they used what they had well. He would clean up the site—and of course dispose of the truck driver, which would be amusing—and then follow, cautiously. Things were coming together.

Another communication:
the…situation…in…new mexico…is…confused.

He acknowledged that without replying; no complex operation came off as planned, even where Dale Shadowblade was involved. Here it was fascinating to watch a major action develop with so
little
of the Power and prescience involved. The Council and its foes had relied on their abilities for a very long time; there was a curious advantage to limiting
it to passive deflection.

Though even that took some effort. He licked his lips and snarled lightly. He hoped they hurried; he was growing hungry.

Finish…there…and…join…Shadowblade…in…Santa…Fe…to…exert…control…act…only…with…a…low-risk…opportunity.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Santa Fe, New Mexico

T
he tunnel ran half a mile from the underground…

Lair,
Eric Salvador thought.
Face it, it’s a lair
.
And we may be walking right towards an ambush…with absolutely no way to go
back
if things go wrong.

It didn’t have the spaciousness and smooth interior decor of the rest, though; this was one of the clandestine emergency exits. Cheba could walk upright but he had to stoop a little—it would be just doable for Adrian Brézé, who was a bit of a shrimp. The naked rock was patched here and there with concrete where the tunnelers had run into cracks, sparsely lit by occasional LEDs stapled to the ceiling and smelling of slightly damp stone and the metal of the ventilation ducts. You felt the weight above you here, and he could have sworn he heard it creak in the arch over his head.

Every hundred feet or so was a portcullis of silver-plated steel, cranked up by a simple ratchet mechanism like a car jack, also silver-plated; when they went through, a touch on a toggle and the welded bars crashed home again behind them with a sound like giant teeth. Which left you between two of the things, with no way to raise the one behind you.

Good thing I’m not claustrophobic…much,
he thought.

“Why no motors?” Cheba asked.

Eric shrugged, looking at the tunnel with tactical eyes and feeding in what he’d learned of the creatures he was fighting against…and with. “Don’t know for sure. I’d guess motors could be jiggered by their minds, that Wreaking stuff. Electric controls just needs a little nudge but this is straight-up hard work.”

“Can’t they lift things? By thinking at them? I’ve seen that.”

“Not silver, and these would be too heavy anyway. Notice how the crank handles are all
behind
these gate things? This is a one-way route, for going out not in.”

The children were grinning; they’d had a good night’s sleep and bowls of Grape-Nuts and cream and orange juice and toast and were raring to go. The tunnel became an instant accessory to an improvised game, and from what he overheard and understood—half the time they were talking French—it was something like
Dungeons and Dragons
with the Hobbit movies they’d been watching thrown in. Cheba was a little subdued, and Eric felt…

Okay, truthiness time, I’m getting a rush out of this. Hey, Eric, why did you reenlist twice? Did your brain flip your skull open and run away screaming like a pink blob on legs both times before you put your hand up, or were you addicted? As in, you’d have been in twenty years and made Gunny and been the terror of recruits at Camp Pendleton in your middle age if that IED
hadn’t given you a lot of time for thought and a rearranged face? At least I don’t have that bug-crawling sensation this time. Just normal fear.

Cheba was in expensive stone-washed black jeans, ankle-boots with silver chains and toe-caps—

The better to kick you with,
he thought.
Useful masquerading as bling.

—and a midnight-blue silk turtleneck with more very fine silver thread sewn invisibly into the collar, and a sheepskin jacket; the fashionable backpack had the machete sheath built into it, with the handle looking like an innocuous fixture. She didn’t have much formal training, but she had what was much more important, an instant readiness to put everything she had into doing an enemy lethal harm. Most people took a while to learn to throw the switch like that; some just couldn’t.