Shadows of Falling Night

by S. M. Stirling

  “Th…that doesn’t sound so bad,” Jessica said hopefully.

  Monica sighed and went on gently: “But other parts of it are probably going to hurt a bit, yes. And be…stressful. You should just keep thinking I can do this all the way through and it won’t go too badly, though. It takes a while to get used to.”

  Jessica Bertsch whimpered slightly and gripped her husband Todd’s hand; his eyes flicked to her and then to Dave Cheung leaning in the doorway with a Glock in his hand. They were both extremely frightened, of course; your first glimpse of a nightwalker transforming evoked primal terrors. A hundred and fifty thousand years as the prey species of Homo nocturnis ensured that the genes remembered, besides the way it knocked the world out from beneath your feet.

  Then there was the kidnapping, the armed guards and the prospective violation.

  “The Doña is going to be, ummm, very hungry when she wakes up. She’s doing a lot with the Power tonight, you don’t need to know the details yet, but it makes a Shadowspawn ravenous. Our blood is the fuel for the Power. Though they eat normal food as well, of course.”

  “She turned into…a tiger,” Todd said; his voice held the peculiar tone of someone who had no doubt that they’d seen something but still didn’t really believe it. “A tiger. And she walked through the wall. And her body was still there.”

  “They can do that, yes. It’s called the aetheric body, and when they come out it’s called nightwalking. And…umm, they can read your mind, too, so…no fibbing! It has to be a completely honest relationship. And they can do a lot of other things. Right now, though, you need to focus on getting through your first feeding.”

  “And you…” he said.

  “Oh, yes, I’ve been a lucy for ten years now. So you see, it isn’t that bad. What I’d advise is that you, Jessica, be right next to her when she comes back from nightwalking and re-enters her body. She’ll just go for your throat then, and after she’s drunk a pint or two of your blood you’ll be…sort of glassy and spaced-out for a while. That will be the drug in the bite getting a hold on you.”

  Todd Bertsch was a graceful-looking man, with wavy dark-red hair and freckles and a body that looked like a gymnast’s, shown to advantage in the briefs that were all either of them wore. He also looked mutinous. Monica smiled at him and spoke reassuringly.

  “No, really, Todd, I understand your concern and it’s very sweet, but that’s safest for her. Then Jessica will be quiet while the Doña, ummm, well, she’s going to be feeling playful by then. Excited. When the Doña has been at you for a while and fed again on you she’ll be more relaxed and less…well, a bit less dangerous for Jessica when it comes to playing. So you’ll be protecting her this way, really.”

  That would appeal to his feelings, and had the advantage of being true. Monica patted the sobbing woman on the shoulder.

  “It’s all right to cry and be scared, honey. I was too and I cried all the time at first. But this whole thing is natural. Just remember you’re serving this need. It can be quite satisfying if you think of it that way, feeling your blood draining into the hunger. It’s what we humans are for, like flowers for hummingbirds. It can be beautiful as well as terrible. The Doña is really the nicest Shadowspawn there is, too.”

  “There’s more of them?” Todd said.

  “Oh, thousands. All over the place, little bunches everywhere. They run the world, pretty much. I mean, who could stop them from doing anything they want? They just don’t let people know, though I understand that’s going to change soon.”

  She looked at her phone; it wasn’t long before dawn. “Come on, let’s get things ready.”

  Dave Cheung motioned with the gun. Todd glared at him, but they both rose and walked down the corridor, through the sitting room and into the stateroom of the Morey. Which was named after the giant eel, a voracious ambush predator.

  It was part of the stern of the ship and ran its full width, darkly lit by light reflected off the surface of the water and coming through the outward-slanting windows that made a semicircle at the rear. The panels and floor were African rosewood, and there was an oval king-sized bed and a few other items of understated furniture and some Tabriz carpets. Adrienne looked almost childlike as she lay with the cream silk coverlet drawn up under her chin and her arms crossed on her shoulders.

  Jessica checked at the sight of the delicately carved ebony X-shaped frame with the restraints and the clamps bolted to one wall, and the various toys. Her eyes seemed focused on the whip, then took in some of the other things.

  “Shhh, shhh, it’s all right,” Monica said. “That’s for play, later; I mean, I spend a fair bit of time tied up like that and it’s really quite stimulating when you’re used to it, and it makes your blood sort of…tasty. Todd, get her to lie down here on the bed, that’s right. Then you sit here, in this chair next to the bed.”

  He jerked as the renfield gunman secured him to the chair with a padded restraint built into the arm.

  “There, you sit beside her, Todd,” Monica said. “This is just so you don’t get in the way when the Doña goes for her. Things could get…out of hand if you did that, it’s a natural impulse, but…I mean, really bad. Never, never try to interrupt a feeding, it, um, sets them off. You can fight and resist afterwards, she quite likes that sort of game.”

  Jessica’s brown eyes were wide, and her dark skin had roughed as if with a chill, though the chamber was at a perfect mild seventy degrees, with a subtle scent of flowers. Dave gave her a wink as he left, and Monica scowled at him.

  It’s their first time, she thought, annoyed. Don’t spoil things, Dave. It should be dark and awful and terrible, but…pure and wonderful too. Really, sometimes I think you have no class at all.

  Of course, he wasn’t really a lucy, though the Doña fed on him now and then; basically he was a renfield, a helper-worker. Monica looked at the time again, moving towards the door, and wondering if she should have warned the Bertsches about the special thing Adrienne could do to you with her mind. Technically it involved stimulating certain centers in the brain with jolts of the Power, though it certainly didn’t feel like it happened in the head. They’d certainly be experiencing that in the next couple of hours, but…

  No, it’ll be such a nice surprise and help them come to terms with things. It feels so much better than you’d expect from hearing someone talk about it. Though it does sort of change your self-image.

  Not long to dawn…could Adrienne have been delayed, so that she’d have to spend the day in deep water?

  No. She’s here, she’s close.

  There was an unmistakable flavor when nightwalkers approached, if they weren’t hiding and you’d experienced it before. A chill, a feeling of being lost somehow, even in the most familiar place, as if the world had changed around you to another place with completely different rules. The couple looked about wildly; they didn’t know what it meant. Adrienne Brézé entered her lair through the wall, flowing, twenty-two feet of reticulated python marked in blue and green and black. Jessica gave a series of hiccupping moans and shook in terror too paralytic for anything louder as the head reared over the foot of the bed and then slid under the sheet, winding itself around her body coil upon coil. Monica shivered herself and licked her lips; she knew exactly how that coiling embrace felt, so cool and resilient and irresistibly strong.

  The snake sparkled and disappeared as Adrienne returned to her own flesh-body. Jessica tried to scramble up as the yellow-flecked dark eyes opened and turned to look at her with a smile, but Adrienne pounced in a blur of speed, arms and legs trapping her and mouth lunging for the neck with the lips rolled all the way back from the teeth. Monica slipped the door closed as the victim screamed once, high and desperate, and her husband shouted in helpless anguish.

  The door was nearly soundproof, but Dave was looking at a screen set in the desk of the sitting room outside. Monica marched over and tapped three times on the screen, locking it out of internal surveillance mode. The sensors were keyed to
her fingerprints, of course.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” he protested.

  “Whatever I please, because she listens to me, Dave.”

  The man snarled at her; she wasn’t impressed, having been snarled at by people who did it much better.

  “Where do you get off being so high and mighty?” he said. “She—”

  “She’s a Shadowspawn adept, I’m a favorite lucy…and you are just a creep, Dave. You are a…a toad. Show a little respect for people’s feelings!”

  He met her eyes for a second, then glanced aside. She went on briskly:

  “Go and tell the captain she’s back. He knows what to do then. And tell the cooks…”

  She thought. “A late lunch for two here. And something for the Bertsches in their cabin, something rich and special with plenty of liquids. They’re going to be shaky and they’ll need to talk things over and have some privacy.”

  He nodded and stalked out. Monica nodded to herself as she sat and brought the screen live, setting it to turn on the camera and record, and began to compose her daily message to Sophia and Josh, composing her face into a smile.

  Somebody had to keep up standards around here.

  “We had a wonderful time in Istanbul. I’m sending a file of pictures and yes, there will be presents. I saw Leon and Leila with their dad in Vienna and they say hi!—”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Caucasus

  “There it is,” Ellen said grimly, as the Tulip came to a stop half a mile offshore.

  The wreck of the gulet they’d been chasing lay on the low muddy shore, both masts broken off and lying forward in a tangle of rigging and sails. A huge ragged hole in the shoreward side gaped empty; past this spot the coast rose to low jagged cliffs. The wind was off the land, cool and smelling of green and damp earth. Up above the waterline was a section of planking and beams, its edges matching the hole in the ship’s flank.

  They were well north of Batumi, the main port of Georgia; somewhere close to one side or the other of the border with the secessionist Republic of Abkhazia, an irritated triangular piece of land thrust like a sore thumb into the westernmost Caucasus Mountains. She’d vaguely recalled reading headlines about troubles here all her life. If she recalled correctly, they’d started before she was born, back when the old Soviet Union broke up.

  A quick tap on the tablet had produced more articles about multisided conflicts than she’d wanted to see or had time to read, including the usual massacres, double-dealings, reciprocal ethnic cleansings and convoluted feuds involving Circassians, Abkhazians, Dagestanies, Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Russians, Turks, and a clutch of other ethno-linguistic groups mostly about the size of a moderate high school district. All with histories of mutual hatred stretching back to mythical times, and all wrapped in absolutely contradictory narratives, with each minute groupescule insisting with fanatical intensity that their version was the capital-T Truth. Most of the differences between them looked invisible or deeply trivial to an outsider, though you’d be well-advised not to say so.

  Stalin had come from near here, and apparently the only time the locals weren’t bashing and knifing each other was when they all cringed together under the knout of some mad-dog tyrant and his secret police.

  “That was clever,” Adrian said grudgingly, looking at the wreck of the ship. “But then, Harvey always was. There are no cargo facilities here. That puzzled me for a while, I thought this location might be dyezinformatsiya.”

  “Subtle guy, Harvey,” Eric said.

  “Blasting a hole in the side of the ship to get something out is subtle?” Peter asked.

  “Yeah, it’s subtle thinking,” Eric said admiringly. “Outside the box, and how! Don’t confuse that with subtle execution. I’d like the guy, if I weren’t on the other side. Sorta.”

  Adrian nodded: “If you just beach your ship and hack a great hole in the side, then it all becomes much simpler. Use the segment of hull as a ramp, then a skid as you drag it up with a truck…”

  It was an hour after sunrise, and the weather was about like Pensacola at this time of year—humid and mild, above-freezing chilly at night, in the fifties right now and not likely to go much higher, windbreaker weather. The low coast was intensely green; as they got closer she could see dense pine forest, the mouth of a small river and what looked like a run-down orchard of some sort of fruit tree, small with round-trimmed tops. The undergrowth was waist-high at least, and a few of the trees were dead. There was open ground beyond, glimpsed through the vegetation, and then—

  She gripped a stay and shaded her eyes with her right hand against the morning sun. Very far away to the north and northeast were the blue-and-white line of a range of snowcapped mountains, the peaks seeming to float in the sky; they reminded her of the Colorado Rockies, and must be immense to be visible at this distance. The sight was quite lovely, the white of the snow very faintly tinged with pink deepening to red as she watched.

  It was all very pretty, and empty, and unutterably discouraging, a feeling like being very tired and having a lump in your stomach at the same time. She’d been hoping that they could catch Harvey at sea; the ocean was very big, but didn’t have many hiding places on the surface. That shore, that land, looked very big and very easy to hide in, and they were running out of time.

  An image haunted her, of a human shadow cast forever on a concrete wall by the burst of nuclear fire that had vaporized its maker. When she’d seen it in a collection of photographs she’d been mainly interested in the aesthetics, the stark black-and-white formal composition. Now…

  “The Caucasus,” Adrian said. A wry twist of the lips: “And the ancient homeland of my species, or close enough.”

  “Where next?” Eric said.

  “That is also clever. Harvey had a truck waiting here, but we do not because we were following him and didn’t know exactly where he would land. We can track it to the nearest road, and presumably they will be heading for Tbilisi…but walking after them is not really practical.”

  “You can’t hex out the direction?”

  Adrian nodded at Peter. “You did your work well. No, the bomb is a hole in the world. More than that; it is an invisible hole in the world. As is anyone standing within a few feet of it, particularly if they are touching the casing.”

  Peter shrugged, smiled and blushed. “Hey, once I sussed out the principle, the applications sort of leapt out. Professor Duquesne did as much of the work as I did, or more.”

  “So we need to get ashore, organize transport, and try and catch them before they get to the city,” Eric said.

  He was apparently doggedly indifferent to discouragement. So was Cheba, who appeared on deck with the last load of the carefully selected gear and baggage she’d packed.

  Okay, they can do it, I can do it. Never say die, until you die.

  “Good man,” Adrian said softly, then nodded. “Let us be about it. I am focusing on Harvey himself as much as I can, but I am getting only a vague southeastward heading even when he is away from the device…he shields very well. Or he would have died long ago, fighting powerful adepts. Fortunately we know roughly where he is going.”

  “Yeah, I want to get off the beach as fast as we can,” Eric said. “Let’s not be more obvious than we have to be, we’re sort of exposed. What about this ship? Want me to open the scuttling cocks?”

  Ellen winced. The Tulip was a handsome enough product of human hands and minds that casually destroying it offended something deep in her; also there was an irrational reluctance to casually dispose of something that had served them well, even if it was only an inanimate tool. Also—

  “Not much point,” she said. “The masts would be above water even if we did, and the other ship, Harvey’s, is right there and the only way we could get rid of it would be to burn it, which would be very conspicuous. And think of the time. I suppose eventually the police or whatever will figure something out, but by then it won’t matter one way or another. This is all go
ing to be resolved in the next couple of days.”

  So if there’s a world left by then, we’ll worry about it then.

  “Yeah, not worth the trouble,” Eric conceded. “And you’re right, I don’t want to attract attention. The locals might get antsy at a bunch of mysterious armed Americans—”

  Cheba gave a small snort, but continued stacking the gear.

  “Hey, you wanted that green card bad, chica, so get used to it—Americans wandering around. Better to avoid them if we can. This isn’t Expendables Twelve.”

  “And the people we rented the Tulip from can get it back if we just leave it here,” Peter said. “The ownership documents are still there in the cabin.”

  Cheba grinned without looking up from her work. “Yes. Of course the officials and police here will send a boat worth lots and lots of money back to some foreigners…how do these what, Georgians, feel about Turks, jefe?”

  “They hate them,” Adrian said succinctly. “Not as much as Armenians do, that would be impossible, but fairly emphatically.”

  “Yes, back to some foreigners they hate if they find it with nobody on board, with no permission, and they would never just throw the papers into the water. Those people we got it from knew they would never see it again, that is why the jefe paid so much.”

  Peter winced. “You’re such a cynic, Cheba.”

  “What is this place you lived in once where people act like that? I would like to live there too, except that there is no such place,” she replied.

  Eric chuckled. “Translated: what planet do you come from, professor, and how many moons does it have? So, boss, we bug out right now?”

  Adrian nodded as he stood with his hands in the pockets of his light waxed-cotton jacket, staring at something none of the rest of them could see. His children crouched at his feet, watching him with their heads cocked on their sides and identical frowns on their faces. They looked as if they were trying to follow something interesting but more complex than they could really grasp.

  The Tulip’s equipment included a big yellow plastic cylinder that held an inflatable boat, and the rest of them unlashed it and pushed it over the side, anchoring it with a line secured to a ringbolt. Lettering on its side specified the contents.