He’d transferred half the capital to her name, too, which was a sum to make Gates choke. Leaving aside the nefarious Shadowspawn plan…plans…to wreck the world, which would fall like the gentle rain from heaven on rich and poor alike, and the fact that she was madly in love, she could walk tomorrow and be an exceedingly affluent divorcee…which was probably the point of what he’d done. It was sort of equivalent to their safe word, letting her exult in the way he pampered her without really being like a kept woman.
At least Adrian doesn’t think about money a lot, which merely rich people generally do. Of course, he doesn’t have to.
Since he could have it in any quantity he wished by—literally—sticking the occasional pin in the financial pages to determine what was going up or down and texting the result to his brokers in Hamburg. That his ancestors had been aristos under the ancien régime (and heads of a cult of murderous peasant-sacrificing Satanist black magicians called the Order of the Black Dawn, to boot) was only a slight complication. Her own father had been a degenerate child-abusing shit and her mother a doormat who pretended it wasn’t happening. There was no point in disliking people for what their progenitors had done. Because then she’d have to start with herself, and she’d given that up long ago.
The outfit did go well with the crown-braided platinum hair, and the light hint of makeup that brought out her turquoise eyes.
And the glyphed silver-edged knife and derringer with silver bullets tucked into the cutest little purse, she thought mordantly. Taking silver to a Shadowspawn party, how vulgar.
She paused as they went through the living room. One of the paintings on the wall to the left of the fireplace was The Nut Gatherers by Bouguereau, a late-19th-century Academic who’d been in and out of fashion and now was very much back in again, driving some of the older and more reactionary critics bananas. It showed two barefoot prepubescent rural girls sitting in a wood. They wore rather plain brown-and-white outfits and looked like French peasant elves, except for an unexpected and rather charming realistic chunky thickness to their ankles and calves. Those were the legs of girls who walked five or six miles a day, usually carrying a wicker basket full of something heavy.
“I wonder who actually posed for this?” Adrian said, stopping beside her. “It is beautiful…or at least very pretty…but not much like real countrywomen, even that young.”
He held his jacket over his shoulder with one finger in the collar; he was wearing a sleek black suit in slightly wrinkled linen, sockless black-on-black worked Louboutin shoes, and a narrow black tie against the white Egyptian cotton shirt.
Despite that and his slightly androgynous handsomeness, he didn’t look like a model. There was something too concentrated in his eyes…not to mention several fading scars. And the way he moved had a gliding grace that made your spine bristle, even before you felt the shocking strength of his hands.
Ellen grinned. Adrian could be a little intimidating, even when he wasn’t trying. Which she very much liked, a man without a hint of danger was like boiled potatoes without salt, but it was nice to have something she knew more about than he did. They’d met in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she’d been working in a gallery, fresh out of NYU, and at first she’d thought he was just an old-money Euro-trash collector, of whom she met legions in the course of her work in that art-crazy resort town. He’d been an unusually sexy one even at first glance, of course.
“No, look closer,” she said. “Yeah, they’re too clean and they don’t have calluses on their feet, but look.”
She had a degree in Art History from NYU, and these days that included a fair degree of social background.
“They were probably actual peasants,” she went on. “Back then French peasants were cheap and you could get swarms of ’em. This one was painted near La Rochelle, I think. God, but this man could do skin tones.”
“Strikingly clean peasants, with expert hairdressers!”
Her finger traced above the outlines of the girls’ legs, caressing the air. “Yes, but see? He didn’t show the muscle articulation. That would have violated the canons he worked with, but those aren’t dainty little pegs. And look at the sitting girl’s arms, the younger one, her forearms here just below the elbow? She so whacks wet laundry on rocks for Mom. Most of the time Bouguereau is as stylized as a Kabuki mask—when he does something mythological the women are always hoofers from the follies or high-priced demimondaines or both, with those big butts the Victorians liked that always look like they’ve been carved out of marshmallows—but every now and then something like that breaks through. It’s the contrast, you see? They’re pretty, idealized village girls. And pretty real ones, both at the same time.”
“Hmmm. Looking at art with you is always an education, my darling. Someday we will take a year and tour galleries. Assuming the world does not end.”
“All these things we’re going to do if the world doesn’t end! And sometimes it’s better just to appreciate. All those years at NYU mean I can’t, usually. I got into it because I just liked it, loved it in fact, but now I start to analyze by sheer reflex.”
“You still enjoy,” Adrian said with a smile, touching one finger to her cheek for an instant. “And the knowledge…enlarges…things for me. Harvey’s tastes ran to neon paint on black velvet; he is a very competent cook, but otherwise aesthetically…”
His face went hard for a moment at the mention of his old mentor’s name. The man who’d raised him to think of himself as human was an enemy now. He thought he was about to destroy the Council, and all the while he was Adrienne’s catspaw.
Ellen sighed. “I like Harvey. In fact…you know, of all the Brotherhood people I’ve met, he’s the only one I really do like. The rest don’t seem like people as much, if you know what I mean. Grim and fanatical, or weird, or weirdly grim and fanatical, or just plain scary.”
“Scary…” Adrian said, and his mouth quirked. “My darling, who is the most dangerous man you know?”
“Ah…that would have to be you, honey.”
Adrian shook his head. “I am the most powerful adept you know, at least of those still in the flesh. Or are likely to meet, apart from my sister; she and I are equals in that respect, I a little stronger, she just a touch more subtle.”
He reached out and took a cube of sugar from the tea-set resting on a sideboard, flipped it in the air, and let it fall on his palm. Quietly, without any fuss, the cube crumbled as if it were rock eroding away over eons of time, and the individual grains disintegrated into a powder finer than talc. The powder stirred and rose, twisting into a rising double spiral like a DNA molecule, then puffing away.
“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
The 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. Wh
oever 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.
Shadows of Falling Night Page 3