Shadows of Falling Night (5 page)

“But that is not altogether the same thing as
dangerous
. Harvey is at least as
dangerous
as I; and if I am
as
dangerous, it is because he trained me.”

Ellen shivered slightly. You never got used to the Power…unless you’d grown up with it, she supposed. She remembered watching Leila, Adrienne’s daughter—and Adrian’s—cupping her child’s hands around a feather, her seven-year-old face intent, the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth. And the feather beginning to dance.

He sighed. “Something will have to be done about Harvey. Sending Jack Farmer and Anjali after him is a good start; they know his methods well. The problem with that…”

“Is?”

“That saying
something must be done
about Harvey neglects the fact that Harvey is very good at
doing something
to others, and not just killing them, either. I would not fully trust even myself, going up against him.”

CHAPTER THREE

Eastern Turkey

T
he truck’s suspension was shot. Harvey Ledbetter grunted as he pulled himself out from under the vehicle, slipped his flat LED torch into the back pocket of his trousers and slapped dust off his clothes. A series of freak accidents had cracked the springs on the rear axles, and an undetected lubricant leak had seized a set of bearings in the rear differential until they smoked. Somehow the temperature alarms in the big MAN hybrid’s all-glass controls hadn’t picked it up. If his thumbs hadn’t started prickling the first he’d have noticed might have been flames destroying the shield generator and spilling the weapon within all over the landscape. The possibility made him sweat in retrospect.

It was so
easy
to fry solid-state circuitry with the Power, because
screwing with quantum-mechanical fluctuations was what the Power basically did anyway. Which particle tunneled where…

He straightened up and stretched until something went
pop
in his back. Above him through the still, thin, dry air the stars were a multicolored splendor in the night, with a three-quarter moon bright enough to dim them around its silver sheen. He saw just a bit better in light like this than the standard-issue human. His nose was a bit better too; there was a smell of dry powdery soil and hot metal from the wrecked truck, and things vaguely like bruised sagebrush. This upland stretch of mountain and steppe felt older than the Southwestern deserts of his youth, somehow; you could taste the dust of empires and ages and armies.

Anger coursed through him, tasting sour and iron-rich at the back of his throat.

“Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil, for verily I bear a slab of plutonium nuke-goodness
fuck you
!” he shouted at the darkness.

The Texan was a lean man who liked to think of himself as spending several years being fifty-nine; his sandy-brown hair was only lightly grizzled, but the short beard he’d grown to fit in as he crossed Anatolia was iron-gray-flecked white. He was wearing local clothes, too, of a hick-from-the-sticks variety; a collarless shirt, cloth cap, coarse jacket and rather baggy pants. Despite that, and the fact that he spoke fair Turkish, he didn’t expect to pass for a local if someone looked hard unless he was willing to expend precious energy on a Wreaking. It wasn’t his blue eyes, or the complexion under his weathered tan, though they were out of the ordinary. Enough Turks were just as Nordic looking, their sainted Kemal for starters, that it didn’t attract undue attention, and it was pretty common among Kurds too—this was Kurd country.

The shape of his bones was wrong, though, and his body-language;
he’d never had the time or motivation to acquire a convincing act for hereabouts.

What he usually did with anyone who penetrated his first layer of cover in this part of the world was pass for an American or European intelligence agent pretending to be a Turk—he could do a convincing
mitteleuropan
, and his French and German were fully native-fluent. If they thought you were CIA or DGSE or
Kommando Strategische Aufklärung
it didn’t occur to them that you might be a witch-finder, which was how the Brotherhood had started out. Though these days it was more a matter of keeping the witches from finding
you.
It also made it logical that you dealt in large amounts of cash and didn’t talk much. He’d even managed to pull that off with the odd
Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı
type, though the odds of running into the Turkish secret police were remote this far from the borders.

This part of the world swarmed with spooks, metaphorically. He grinned tautly; with the Council of Shadows holding their first full meeting in decades over in Tbilisi, across the border in Georgia, there were going to be plenty of
literal
spooks around in a few months. Until he triggered the twenty-five-kiloton device and blew them—corporeal and post-corporeal alike—into oblivion. The blast would do for the embodied ones, and the radiation would be as deadly as sunlight to the rest.

For a moment sheer aching need clenched his teeth. If he could take out most of the pureblood adepts, the Brotherhood could finally
win
the ancient war. Collateral damage…was unfortunate, but whole orders of magnitude less than what the Council of Shadows had planned for humanity in its Trimback options, not to mention the endless torment that would follow when the Empire of Shadow returned full-force. Most of the really bad stuff in the past hundred-odd years had been their work anyway, like the Holocaust and the Great Leap.

Plus he didn’t plan to survive the explosion. The Brotherhood could unload all the guilt on him, and then scoop the pieces off the board.

A quick glance either way showed nothing coming or going; there was an abandoned and burned-out light truck with its right wheels in the ditch about half a kilometer away, nothing out of the ordinary; Turkey wasn’t a third-world shitheap like say the ruins of Syria, but it wasn’t exactly Denmark either, or even Texas. And this was Turkey’s equivalent of West Bumfuche, Arkansas, plus it could give lessons in
bleak
to the country south of Lubbock.

The wreck was unexceptional…except that it was a fairly
new
four-wheel-drive light truck, the sort you used for adventure tourism. The soot had fooled his eye for a moment. He walked closer, and when he got to within a few yards he could still feel the heat of its burning…

He took a stance and closed his eyes, taking one deep breath after another, slower and slower. Let everything go; fear, worry…then thought, identity and hope.

“
Tzze-mogh
,” he murmured, snarling at the feel of icy knives sliding through his head.

A sense of
wrongness
. Bane, of paths tending black, of complex parts breaking, rupturing, wearing, grinding, on down to the bubbling chaotic foam that underlay everything…

Harvey came back to himself with a jerk, panting and sweating and staggering two steps before he went down on one knee, resting his weight on a hand braced against his thigh. He fumbled in a pocket, took out a plastic bottle of a sports-energy drink and gulped it, and waited until the shivering and headache dulled a little. Then he walked over to the abandoned truck and gave it a once-over, careful to avoid touching the still-hot metal. Two fuel lines in the nearly-new engine had come undone, flooding the hot parts with sprays of mixed gasoline and air. The doors
were all still shut, and it was unlikely that anyone making a fast exit would have bothered to close them.

Aha,
he thought.
The doors jammed at the same time. Secondary effect tacked onto the big one. Charming. Real Council-type curse, high-level adepts working there with rivers of blood to power ’em.

The front passenger-side window had been broken out; kicked out, probably; it was much harder to jam a boot or bugger up the effect of a straight-up impact. There were tracks on that side of the vehicle. Two people, one much bigger than the other, both wearing hiking boots. That was about as much as he could make out without showing a light. A little way away he found a bootlace, which had apparently split all the way up when someone tried to tighten it. That was even more unlikely than the engine failure, just the sort of combination of immense power and skill with petty vindictiveness you’d expect.

The term of art was
probability cascade
, a directed aetheric structure like an immaterial sensor-effector mechanism; sort of like a Power-driven edition of Murphy’s Law dropped on your head, only for real, and something only the most powerful adepts could do on this scale. It worked right down to the zipper jamming on your dick when you went to take a leak afterwards.

There was an interesting pattern to the damage in the rear trunk of the light vehicle, too. The panels were bowed outward in a flower-petal pattern studded with small holes, as if there had been an explosion and high-velocity debris. Contrary to Hollywood, cars very rarely blew even when they burned. That required an extremely precise fuel-air mixture. The fire had probably gone up very fast, with a roar and a flash and the speed of passage driving the flames back towards the windscreen even before it hit the fuel tank, then a rupture and spill and the whole thing burning, but it hadn’t gone kaboom.

Now, certain other things
did
react to heat that way…he focused for a moment to make sure there weren’t any live rounds still waiting to cook off like those last few popcorn kernels, then wrapped a handkerchief around his hand and reached carefully through. Even in the dim light the little brass shape was definitely a round of ammunition that had blown itself into shreds. From the damage to the trunk, someone had had a couple of boxes of mike-nine back there when their transport did its Mr. Crispy and tried to reduce them to long-pig chitterlings.

“Well, sheee-it,” he said, and went back to his own vehicle. “Could have been worse. Whoever made it out could have just spontaneously caught on fire themselves.”

The metal of his truck felt solid, in a way that went beyond the physical. Adrienne Brézé had made a very bad mistake when she didn’t kill a physicist named Peter Boase. She’d been sent to Los Alamos by the Council to end researches which had come uncomfortably close to the truth of
why
the world was sliding down into a pit of seething chaos ruled by hatred and cruelty. On a whim she’d decided to take the young scientist along as a toy and keep him with her other lucies on her Californian estate to destroy at leisure and milk for useful data in the process.

Peter had escaped…sorta. He’d certainly beaten the feeding addiction, and the truck contained the first fruits of his investigations at the secret labs of the Brotherhood. Adrienne had probably made a mistake there, however clever it looked in the short run.

And then there’s the nuke,
Harvey thought.

He’d engineered that himself, diverting a little extra stolen plutonium. The Brotherhood used the stuff in hits, putting chunks in with a dead Shadowspawn master to make sure their final resting place was really restful and completely final. He’d simply liberated a few extra kilos, let some jihadi lunatics think they were buying it from him and then
dropped back in later to collect the weapon. When that was over, all was quiet at Casa Jihad until the neighbors noticed a stink really bad even by the standards of a Veracruz slum. The Mexican cops had probably written it off as another of the innumerable gangland killings.

A nuke by itself wasn’t very useful; brute-force engineering rarely worked against adepts. The explosion would cut across too many world-lines, rippling back in time through the possible paths to resonate with those who were threatened by it, if they had the Power. Anyone with the right genes blueprinting their neural circuitry would sense it and just avoid the location without thinking about it; those with the training as well would probably be able to make a good guess at what was making their hair crawl. The chance of taking a whole slew of powerful Shadowspawn adepts by surprise that way were somewhere between zip and nada. That was the drawback of fighting people with turbocharged luck.

What
encased
the bomb was a…field…that turned aside the Power. That blocked all traces of what it shielded from the whole web of possibilities, regardless of how strong they were. Peter Boase had gotten his start by investigating why silver baffled the Power, but unlike the traditional silver sheathing this didn’t shout its presence either. It just…wasn’t present unless you could eyeball it.

When he tried to focus the Power on the truck himself, it was just
there
, without the fuzz of world-lines everything else had. He couldn’t see its past, or its potential futures, or anything that it affected. It was as if around it the world was the deterministic set of blind billiard-balls that Newton had imagined, rather than the will-driven sea of ultimately arbitrary malleability that it really was.

The problem right now was that while a seer couldn’t locate the bomb, or even trace it back from the impact it would make on the world, ordinary logic and evidence worked just fine. And while the
Power couldn’t
see
the area inside the shield, as far as he knew there was nothing to stop a Wreaking from
affecting
it. Someone was using the shotgun principle, and ready to spend a lot of the Power on it. Luckily it had been a truck-break-down curse, not a nuke-go-off one.