Shadows of Falling Night (47 page)

“
Cover! Cover!
” Eric shouted.

Ellen promptly dove for the ditch at the edge of the road, ignoring the mud and water, landing with an
ooof!
mainly because Leila came down on top of her. She got her revolver out and the girl arranged beside her first, not least because while the twins were on the whole well-mannered children they had an instinctive tendency to snap when startled or frightened. Then she saw what Eric had seen—or what he had heard before they were visible. Two armored vehicles were coming out of the tree line to the northeast, crackling through saplings and brushes, the heavy wheels humming as the diesel engines burbled. They were low-slung boxy shapes with wedge fronts and eight big wheels, the weapons in the skeletal remote-operated turrets probing as the operators within turned their joysticks and watched the screens.

“Fuck! BTR-90s!” Eric said, some piece of military acronym-ese she didn’t recognize.

They were all armed, but they were armed with things like coach guns and revolvers full of silvered shot, or knives and Cheba’s machete; weapons designed to fight nightwalker adepts. Against soldiers with modern weapons, they didn’t seem like much.

Plus I don’t think any of us want to hurt ordinary human type people. Not that there’s much choice now.

“
Jefe
, over to you,” Eric called. Then: “Shit!” as something went by overhead and a crackle of explosions came from
behind
their position. “Grenade launcher and heavy machine gun on each of those APCs.
Do
something!”

Adrian came up to one knee, began a pass with his hands…then stopped and toppled forward, clutching at his head. Something like a
flush of liquid nitrogen seemed to run through Ellen’s chest and belly as she saw the contorted agony on his face, and the twin trickles of blood from his nostrils.

She crawled along the ditch, hauling the cooler of blood. The grenade launcher chattered again, a series of dull
thumpthumpthump
sounds, and the next line of explosions was much closer. Something slashed through the leafless branches of the tree above her, showering her with bits of twig.

“Adrian! What’s going on?” she asked sharply.

He looked up; his eyes were bloodshot too, and he grated around a hissing snarl: “Old Wreakings…childhood…like hooks in my head…
damn
Harvey! I will not let them harm you and the children, I
will
not—”

Then he screamed; it was an instant before she realized it was in Mhabrogast. He slumped backward as the last syllable sounded, his body arching and then going limp. Eric cast a glance over his shoulder:
we’re all going to die now
was plain in the frustrated anger of his expression.

This was obviously no time for shyness, or bottled blood. She tore open the neck of her jacket with her left hand and put her right hand behind Adrian’s head. He was making small whimpering sounds and his eyes had rolled up until only the pink-tinged whites were visible, and his hands twitched in a random way that made her heart clench. She took a deep breath and brought his mouth up to touch the skin at the base of her neck.

For a moment she thought he was too far gone even for that. Then his arms closed around her with bruising force and she felt the sting of the bite, sharper than usual with the desperate need.

“Ah.
Ah.
”

She closed her eyes and shuddered; not even fear of death could make the sensation any less overwhelming. After a time she couldn’t have
judged he gently laid her down and stood, his face a mask of blood—hers and his own, running from nose and eyes and dripping off his chin beneath the red grin of his mouth, the coppery smell of it rank. Her whole body felt warm and almost liquid, but she craned her neck to follow him as he walked forward.

The turrets turned towards him. His hands came up to either side, fingers crooked and then moving in patterns that hurt the eye to watch while he shrieked falsetto abominations in the language of demons, the war-magic of a Lord of Shadow. She felt a sharp pain, as if something had reached into her head, clenched and tugged towards the place behind her eyes; beneath that was pride, and also an impulse to pound her head on something hard until she didn’t have to listen any more. At times like this you realized that the Power was simply
wrong
, chaos and Old Night let loose on earth.

One of the low-slung vehicles slewed sharply and then halted; there was a muffled
bang
from its engine compartment, followed by black smoke and low red flames. The turret on its top pivoted and fired six times into its companion, shredding all the wheels on one side, then blew up with a rending
crang.
Pieces flew, some of them trailing smoke. Soldiers poured out of the machines. Some of them fled wailing, stumbling, falling and rising to run again or just crawl with foam dribbling from their lips. The rest began firing…at each other. Bullets sparked off the armor of the war-machines in little pale flecks of light, and then the survivors threw aside their assault rifles and fell on each other with knives and teeth, bestial howls and cackling laughter. After a moment nothing moved but the wisps of smoke drifting on the breeze and carrying the acrid stink of scorched metal and heavy oil.

The first Empire of Shadow had lasted for a hundred thousand years of cannibalistic sadism. You could see why.

Then another man crawled out of a hatch, hobbled and lurched over to the other machine—one of his feet wasn’t working—and crawled inside the rear hatch. He screamed with pain as he reappeared hauling a slight limp figure, but he dragged it twenty yards before he collapsed.

“Wait,” Eric said as Adrian began to walk forward towards them. “
Jefe
, those things are burning, they’re stuffed with explosives and fuel, they’re going to
blow
.”

Ellen flogged herself into motion, ran up beside Adrian and held up a bag of the blood. He took it, ripped off the top with his teeth and poured it down his throat, then spat redly.

“Safe enough for a minute,” he rasped.

They all followed, into the stink of burning and the raw smell of death, blood and urine, feces and ripped meat. It was Jack Farmer and Anjali Guha, both wearing some sort of camouflage-patterned uniform. The American’s right foot was canted at an angle inside its boot, and tears ran down through the grimy sweat on his pug face as he cradled his unconscious companion’s head and shoulders.

“She’s dying,” he said dully as Adrian and the others came up. “She’s bleeding inside.”

“Twenty men just died because of you,” Adrian said, his voice unhuman. “A million more may die tomorrow.”

Farmer didn’t answer. Adrian didn’t speak either; instead he knelt and touched the sleeping woman. After a moment she jerked slightly and her breathing slowed from a rapid shallow panting to something deeper and slower. Adrian’s face ran with sweat, diluting the trails of thickening blood.

“Heart,” he said hoarsely, and clutched at his own chest. “There—”

Farmer looked up. Adrian shook his head and spoke: “She’ll live now; I did just enough. Open your mind, I need the details.”

There was a moment of silent communion; Farmer ground his teeth and grunted hoarsely, as if he’d been punched in the gut.

Adrian nodded before he went on: “And don’t either of you ever cross my path again,” he said, in a low rasping growl she couldn’t even
imagine
disobeying.

“We won’t,” Farmer said, and turned his face away.

“Boss, we’ve got to
move
,” Eric said.

Adrian nodded, wiping at his face with one sleeve, and his expression human once more, as if great dark wings had faced away from about him.

“I need some water. And…yes, there will be a van in a few minutes.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Tbilisi

I
am getting sick of hotels, Ellen thought, glancing out the window as they all sat down around the suite’s table.

Tbilisi was a city of moderate size, about a million and a half people, on the same order as Philadelphia if you subtracted the suburbs. Over millennia it had grown along the steep banks of the winding Kura River, which had been navigable all the way to the Caspian until the Soviet engineers and dam-builders got to work on it. There were hills to the north and lower, more distant ones to the south, and the area along the river was mostly trees and walkways, with a jumble of older buildings and narrow streets around it, lined with pleasant older buildings including some very odd-looking churches with octagonal towers in their middles.

Even good hotels.

They were staying at what had been the Hotel Majestic just before the First World War; it had been refurbished (including filling in bullet-holes) in the early years of the century and was now the Tbilisi Marriott. The exterior was a very nice provincial Beau Arts, pale stone cladding and engaged pillars with arched windows; the interior was slightly bland upper-level business traveler international standard.

The main merit was that it was right downtown on Rustaveli Avenue. Under other circumstances, she’d have enjoyed staying there, taking walking tours of the city with Adrian and visiting vineyards and historic buildings and enjoying the way Georgians burst spontaneously into choral song in places like elevators, rather like inhabiting an operetta. As it was—

I like to travel, but not to conventions for monsters. Not in the wake of a nuclear weapon. Not to conventions for monsters and in the wake of a nuclear weapon. I want a holiday. And it’s comforting to have Peter and Cheba and Eric along, but I’d like to have it with just me and my sweetie sometimes. Though we seem to have acquired some kids, of course. Okay, back to business.

“Farmer thought the yield would be about twenty-five kilotons,” Adrian said.

The table between the five adults was scattered with their tablets and tourist maps of Tbilisi and the surrounding area. There was also the remains of a Georgian dinner, sent in from a local eatery: round
khachapuri
cheese-stuffed breads something like a yeasty pizza, spinach with walnut and pomegranate-juice sauce, spiced
kupati
sausages made of pork, garlic, cilantro and
more
pomegranate and touches of cinnamon and cloves, and other dishes as well—the local cuisine favored lots of small
plats
and had never met a pomegranate it didn’t like. They’d split a
bottle of local red wine, which had been excellent in a hearty sort of way, and were now gnawing on elongated things made of thickened grape juice and nuts and looking at the map with frustration.

The children had taken theirs off to their bedroom to watch the third
Ender
movie. It was all eerily calm, considering the business and the risk that they might all get vaporized in the next day or two. Though she supposed that getting excited wouldn’t help.

Adrian prodded at the map with a finger. “Harvey carefully gave Farmer and Guha no idea of precisely where he planned to put it, but it must be reasonably close. Within miles, not tens of miles.”

“Does it have to be close?” Cheba said. “It is a
nuclear bomb
!”

“Okay, thing is, nukes aren’t magic,” Eric said, hunched over the map, tracing distances with a piece of string and a pencil.

“Which is a change from dealing with Shadowspawn,” Peter said. Then he raised a hand to Adrian: “Yes, I know the Power isn’t magic. But it
feels
like magic. You
talk
to water in a special language and it flows uphill.”

“Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, who gives a fuck if it’s not a duck?” Eric agreed. “Back to nukes. I did a course on the effects of nukes when I made sergeant, it’s sort of academic now but you still do it, Cold War hangover I guess. They’re real powerful explosives and the radiation’s bad news, but guys have survived within less than two miles of a
fusion
bomb’s ground zero just by sitting in a slit trench. And that’s a multi-megatonner we’re talking about, one of those big mothers they made in the 50s. Forty times the size of the plutonium job we’re facing, or more.”

Peter nodded. “Eric’s right.”

Cheba looked a little dubious; Ellen
felt
that way, she’d always thought of nuclear weapons as a one-per-city apocalypse, but between
them the two men didn’t make mistakes about that sort of thing. Peter went on:

“I’m not an expert, but I studied the effects a bit at Los Alamos—you really can’t avoid it there unless you do that deliberately, like Victorians hoping sex would go away if they didn’t talk about it. Earth or stone stops the immediate pulse of radiation pretty quickly. Then there’s the blast, overpressure and shock waves and the flash heat. The flash heat can vaporize you close up or give you bad burns quite a ways away, but any solid barrier will give you a high degree of protection.”

“You don’t want to be underneath the fallout plume either,” Eric pointed out. “That’s a longer-term problem, though. Short form, you’re close, you’re toast. It’ll kill you with the blast wave, or get you with the radiation, or fry you to a fajita, or pulverize you with high-velocity bits of everything, or you get caught in a firestorm when the buildings go up. But even a little farther away, and some pretty basic protection can get you through, though it’s a good idea to keep upwind and run fast.”