“I suppose they’ll be stuffing their turkeys soon,” Eric said, and took a mouthful of the ham. “Dang, I expected German food to be sort of soggy and bland but this is pretty good.”
“It’s usually a goose, not a turkey, from what grandma used to say, her mother came from somewhere east of Munich, but yeah,” Peter said. “German food is sort of heavy, but after walking a couple of miles in the snow you realize why it got that way.”
It was just the sort of thing you wanted in this weather, although Eric found himself tapering off long before he expected, giving it up and pushing away his half-full plate of the main course while the twins were already working their way through some cake full of cinnamon and nuts.
“Liabr da Maga verrenkt, als em Wirt ebbes gschenkt,” someone said disapprovingly as they took the remains of his dinner away; evidently that was a breach of manners here.
“I like it, this food,” Cheba said, polishing off hers with gusto. “I like this place, too. It’s different, but it’s more like a place where people live.”
“There’s even a ruined castle!” Peter chuckled.
“That too, there was an old ruined hacienda near where I was born, burned by the rebels in my great-grandfather’s time.”
Leon turned and relayed the remark about the castle to the old lady as she put a bowl of whipped cream down by the cake. Her benevolent-granny’s smile ran away from her face, and she said something guttural. Which was admittedly hard not to do in German, but it sounded more so than usual.
“She says that was the castle of the accursed von Trupps. And it’s under a curse, too!” Leila added with ghoulish enthusiasm. “And they were, like, tremendously wicked and stuff, très mal.”
“Like us Brézés,” Leon said helpfully, and the sister went on:
“Especially the last von Trupp, the mad baron. They say his master, the Devil, came for him in the form of a French magician in a black robe and stabbed him in the heart with a silver knife before he carried off his soul to Hell!”
One of the younger generation of the family that ran the inn started at the name, and then rolled his eyes at the repetition of the story.
“Schmarrn! Heidezapf! Superstition!” he said, in his odd hybrid accent. “In the days of the last Freiherr von Trupp there was plenty of bloody wickedness in the whole sodding country without bringing curses or any nonsense like that into the matter. The only truth in that story is that it was the French prisoners in the work camp there who burned down the Schloss. And killed the baron. They had good reason to do it, God knows; we were lucky they didn’t come after the village.”
Which started a ding-dong argument, involving granny (who would have been younger than the twins at the time) shaking her knotted finger in her grandson’s face, but didn’t make the table service any less efficient. Even his headache couldn’t keep Eric from smiling slightly: with some slight differences in looks—darker, and desiccated rail-thin as opposed to solid brick outhouse—she was his own great-grandmother to the life, from what he remembered as a small child. From his parents’ stories, the old biddy had ruled the whole family with a rod of iron until the day she died.
The Gasthaus had some rooms available, up under the roof and reached by a narrow twisting wooden stair that creaked beneath their shoes. Eric booked two of them, one for Cheba and the kids and another for him and Peter. The family of the old lady who liked stories about curses were obviously puzzled by the domestic arrangements of the strange Americans, the more so when they paid in cash from a thick roll of hundred-euro bills despite impeccable ID. The kids might just possibly have been Peter and Cheba’s from their looks, but the ages were wrong and then there were their odd linguistic accomplishments. And they would’ve heard Cheba and Eric swapping the occasional phrase in Spanish.
Fortunately they were too polite to pry. When they had the children settled, the adults had a brief conference.
“You don’t look so good, Eric,” Peter said.
Eric sighed and slumped back, rubbing his hands across his face. “Yeah, I’m not feeling so great either. Started getting a little off about the time the car gave up the ghost, but I couldn’t say anything then. Just had to bull through, there was no point in bitching. It’s getting worse, though.”
It was true; the headache had come on worse, his joints were aching, he felt hot shivery at the same time and he was beginning to regret dinner though he’d been hungry and justifiably so. It felt like the flu, but not quite. Cheba leaned forward and put her hand on his forehead—with two beds and two chairs the room was fairly crowded and half the space above was cut off by the slope of the roof. The calloused palm felt cool against the skin of his face.
She asked a few sharp questions in Spanish about how he felt, then made a sort of spitting noise of exasperation.
“Paludismo,” she said. “There is no doubt—I’ve seen it often enough before.”
“She means malaria,” Eric said, grimacing.
“What!” Peter blurted.
“I’ve had it,” Eric said. “Got careless about my preventive stuff while we were down south of Kabul where the national bird is the mosquito, the stuff they give you brings on these bitching headaches. Christ, though, I had it treated to a fare-thee-well and the doc said it wouldn’t recur…I suppose exertion and cold could have brought it on…”
“More bad luck,” Peter said.
Cheba looked frightened for the first time. “This is very bad,” she said. “Malaria can kill.”
Peter nodded. “Yes. We have to get him to a hospital.”
Both of them looked at the Minnesotan. After a moment he flushed a little. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s what they want us to do.”
Eric grunted; he didn’t feel up to speaking much. With an effort, and pressing his hands to the sides of his head, he managed to say:
“Primaquine…I need primaquine and quinine. Better…try to get them without any records.”
Peter looked unhappy. “This is Germany. You can’t buy a sandwich without leaving a record in triplicate.”
“They might know, know that I’ve got malaria, or it might be just some general curse. Christ, just what I need, something that screws up my head.”
It was coming on strong now, and even more unpleasant than he remembered. They helped him over to the bed, got a basin in case dinner left, and then undressed him. It was all a blur shot through with pain, which the aspirin didn’t help much at all. He could feel the sweat running down his face and flanks, and someone wiping his face with a cold cloth. One of the worst parts was knowing that he’d soon be dreaming, and how well-stocked his subconscious was with some truly vile shit.
Vaguely, voices: I must stay here and look after him; you will be better with the children.
“Where the hell am I?” Eric asked. Then after a moment: “Oh, yeah.”
What it looked like was the living room of Adrian Brézé’s house back near Santa Fe, the place where the were-eagle had attacked them. It felt absolutely realistic, down to the smell of piñon burning from the fireplace. The most dreamlike thing about it was that he felt completely healthy; that was an enormous relief and at the same time gave him a twinge at how bad it would feel when he went back. One of the many downsides of being really sick was that it seemed like it would last forever.
He turned, and Adrian and his wife Ellen were sitting together on the couch. She flashed him a sympathetic smile, and Adrian gave a brisk nod.
“You are in my Memory Palace,” Adrian said courteously; that meant he was effectively in Adrian’s head. “And that is only possible because of the base-link.”
That had involved donating a syringe of his blood for Adrian to step out and drink in discreet privacy. Despite the clinical nature of the exchange, Eric still felt vaguely embarrassed by the memory. He overcame an obscure impulse to come to attention and say Sir, and sat down on one of the chairs facing them instead. Adrian selected one of the slim brown cigarettes from the case on the cast glass table and
lit it.
“It is extraordinary how invisible you are,” the adept went on. “When I seek you with the eye of the Power, there is absolutely nothing. I can communicate with you, but you might as well be in China for all I can tell of your physical location; even the direction is obscure. It is the same with the others, even the children, and usually their direction is as plain as a compass heading. Where are you in fact?”
He filled them in on everything that had happened. When he had finished, there was a pause before Ellen filled it with a succinct:
“Shit.”
Adrian blew meditative smoke at the ceiling. “Precisely. This is quite bad. Worse than I had anticipated.”
Eric suppressed an instinctive ya think? Instead he said: “Who’s doing this?”
“Immediately, I would say the von Trupps. Perhaps some of the more crazed members; there are some quite old post-corporeals in that clan, some still haunting the old castle occasionally, though they retain enough reason to go far before they feed for the most part.”
“Not the Tōkairin?” Ellen said.
“Possibly both; the Tōkairin might…will…be supplying information, and then a little telepathic hint from the active head of the von Trupp clan to their ruin-haunting ancestors would suffice…”
“Not Adrienne?”
“Not directly. It does not have the marks of any adept she uses, those who are her close allies. But…In a way, yes, she and those like her are indirectly responsible. Just as she was for Peter’s anomalous readings at Los Alamos. It is the way she affects, that the Council affects, that the nature of the Power itself affects the world. That feeling you get from the ancient stories, from the Odyssey or from fairy tales as they were before the Victorians had their way with them? The quality of arbitrary menace, malignant fate…As their sway in it grows, and they use the Power with growing recklessness, so the world becomes more as they would have it. Chaotic, fluid, a place where chance rules, and in turn is ruled by will.”
His yellow-flecked dark eyes turned from contemplating something impossible to see and focused on Eric again. “I am very much afraid that you’ve fallen into…How shall I put it…A pocket where these new rules, which are very old rules, apply. A hint of what the world might become, if our enemies triumph.”
You know, this mystical crap doesn’t get any more agreeable just because it’s true, Eric thought; Peter had said something similar, though with a more techy slant. Very much the other way around, in fact.
“This is God damned informative,” he said aloud. “But what the hell am I supposed to do?”
Adrian nodded, appreciating the point. “You must get out of the area as quickly as possible; you need to get back to where there are more people, because there the…how shall I put it…inertia of things preserves ordinary causality for the present.”
“Is there anything you can do for backup?”
Adrian shook his head. “Not at this distance. All three of you have as many protective Wreakings implanted as can be done without limiting your individuality. Obviously, someone is trying to trap you in that area, just as obviously you must get out. Back to people, but in getting back you must not take the most obvious route.”
A frown. “Quite possibly those who are after you care nothing for the welfare of the children, either, and are not much afraid of me or my sister.”
“Well, that just proves that they’re pretty fucking stupid, doesn’t it?”
Most of the time Eric Salvador and Adrian Brézé didn’t have much in common, except a high degree of mutual respect. Right now their common smile shared worlds. Ellen glanced between them and rolled her eyes slightly.
“And I’ll look after the kids,” Eric said.
He could tell the other man controlled an impulse to let his eyes slide aside:
“I owe you a debt for that, you and the others,” he said. “There is not been enough time for…to use a horrible Californianism…bonding between the children and me. They actually care more for Ellen, because they have spent time with her while she was my sister’s prisoner. But I can tell a good deal from their auras, it is possible that with the right upbringing they could come to be human beings, or at least moral beings, to the extent possible for we purebloods. And in the end, they are my children.”
Then Adrian frowned, lifting his head tilted to one side as if catching a distant sound.
“I think you had best return quickly. Here…With your personality matrix a little apart from those damnable machines of Peter’s…I can sense a probability nexus approaching you.”
“I’m in pretty rocky shape back there, but there is where the there is,” Eric said sourly.
He took a deep breath, or rather the immaterial form of him currently dwelling in Adrian Brézé’s mind did.
“Let’s go.”
He could tell it was much later than sunset when he woke in his own body, or at least regained a little consciousness there. Maybe it was the icy draft that did it, or perhaps the voice yammering—screaming—at the back of his head. He forced gummy eyes open, suppressing an impulse to whimper at the inrush of sick physical misery and the contrast to recent memory of perfect health. The window was open, and a little reflected light trickled past the figure that crouched there.
He couldn’t make it out between the fever and the darkness…Except for the yellow eyes.
Am I awake? he thought, unsure for an instant whether or not he was in the evil dreams of fever.
And a calling hummed through the air, a sultry seductive music, a crooning in his head. It reminded him of something—the feeling you got looking out of a helicopter hatch or the edge of a cliff, telling you to throw yourself off. The voice was distant, as if he had his thumbs in his ears or there was white noise closer. Cheba stood between the beds; then she took a step forward towards the window, then another small step, slow and infinitely reluctant. All he could see was her back; she was wearing a big T-shirt, one that reached nearly to her knees.
Both of them ignored him, the woman and the monster, as if they were moving through some ritual in a place and time endlessly distant. He fought not to let his breath rasp as he made an arm heavier than lead and weaker than a child’s move towards the nightstand between the beds. His fingers were like stale sausages that belonged to somebody else, every motion needing deliberate thought and an effort of will that made him sweat as chills rippled through his body.
Cheba stopped, and her head tilted back.
—and the yellow eyes moved forward—
—and Cheba’s hand whipped out from where she’d held the knife behind her back—
—and slashed like a glint of moonlight—
There was an appalling scream, a squalling cry of rage. A shriek from Cheba too, as something struck her and she spun aside in a tangle of limbs and a spray of blood. That put her out of the line between his bed and the window. Thick and clumsy and distant, he still made his finger tighten on the trigger.
Thump!
Recoil wrenched the coach gun out of his hand like a blow from a hammer. Silvered shot cracked into plaster and shattered glass, and he sank back shivering and retching. There was another squalling scream, trailing away into the distance. Voices, feet pounding, anxious faces. He let it all trail away.
“If you call the authorities it is the same as killing us,” Eric managed to say the next morning. “And we have to get out of this place, now.”
He was conscious, just, and coherent, just, though there was a temptation just to look at the snow falling outside the window. A local doctor, an elderly man with white side whiskers that at home Eric would’ve classified as a ’60s hangover, had waded through the snow to deal with Cheba’s injuries and had been persuaded to cough up some medication for Eric as well. That he had anything for malaria was a stroke of luck, for once good.
Cheba’s injuries consisted of four parallel slashes across her shoulder and back, the unmistakable mark of a cat’s paw…But it would have to be a very large cat indeed. That w
as the biggest thing they had going for them, and they needed everything they could get. These were the most fanatically law-abiding people he ever met, and he could see it set a twisting in their guts to even think about not following proper procedures. Peter was in a quiet state of despair; if they were sent to jail or even just detained they’d undoubtedly have their shielding devices taken away, and that would be the end. Cheba was defiant, and fiercely stoic about the pain of her wounds, but she was also completely out of her depth here.
And so am I, Eric thought. My brain feels like it was stuffed with red-hot Brillo pads.
Leon and Leila were huddled in one corner of the room; they could be remarkably inconspicuous when they wanted to be. Now they quietly crawled under the bed and came up beside Gerta, the old matriarch of the family. She gave them a fond but distracted look, and then frowned as they started whispering urgently in her ears. She started to shake her head, then looked at Cheba again where the doctor was bandaging and swabbing. Her faded blue eyes grew metallic.
Suddenly she surged upright like a whale broaching, crossed her arms and began to speak. Her son and grandson tried to brush her off, failed, and then looked astonished when the grandson’s wife joined in on her side. The doctor stood up, clicked his bag closed and went to the door, saying something alliterative with a lot of ich and nicht while looking at the lintel before going through.
Peter leaned close and whispered in Eric’s ear: “He said, I know nothing and I saw nothing and I heard nothing.”
The argument went on for a little longer, with the old lady throwing around words like drucksmulle—which evidently meant something fairly dismaying—until the older man threw up his hands.
“We will do it,” he said in English. “It will be a disaster of course, but we will do it.”
His son nodded, also looking glum…but both of them looked a bit relieved as well.
Shadows of Falling Night Page 18