Shadows of Falling Night

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Belgium

“We will be landing in Brussels shortly,” the pilot said over the intercom. “Will everyone please take their seats and fasten their seat belts.”

That was no surprise; the very slight falling-elevator feeling you got had started a few minutes before. Eric had talked with the pilot a little on the long flight; not much, and that was because the pilot himself didn’t want to. If they hadn’t both been graduates of the Suck, Eric suspected communications would’ve been strictly limited to “yes, sir” and “no, sir.” The pilot knew there was something very odd indeed about Adrian Brézé and presumably about his friends, knew the pay was good, and had absolutely no desire to know any further details. His copilot was even more set on minding her own business.

“Please fasten your seat belts, and keep them fastened until the plane comes to a full and complete stop.”

There wasn’t much to be seen; they came down through layers of gray cloud that had a sort of psychic glumness to them, chilly and dull even when you only saw them through the porthole of an airplane window. It was the type of weather that made you want a cup of hot chocolate with some rum in it despite the fact that you were indoors and perfectly warm and comfortable. All you could see below the final level of cloud cover was a cluster of tall buildings to the south, and endless built-up area everywhere else.

They landed gently and taxied for a while; this aircraft was too small for the regular Jetways, but bigger than most of the other private aviation stuff it ended up among. A little electric cart pushed the gangway up, and the copilot opened the door to let in the wet chill and the rumbling whine of an airport.

“In a way this is even weirder,” Peter said, extending the handle of his suitcase, while Leon and Leila solemnly donned their backpacks. “Weirder than the openly weird stuff.”

“Weirder than what?” Eric said, shrugging into his coat and helping Cheba into hers. “My weird-o-meter started shooting blue sparks and making gurgling noises a while ago.”

He also checked on his knives and coach gun, and discreetly made sure the others were doing the same with their weapons. In his experience a long spell in the air had a sort of stunning effect; the monotony, the noise and vibration, or whatever. He could feel something of the same effect now even though the business jet had been more comfortable than anything he’d flown in before. It took an effort of will to get up to speed again right away, and it was when you were logy that you most needed to be alert.

The copilot noticed the assorted instruments of destruction, and her high-cheeked Slavic face was absolutely impersonal as they walked past.

The time was only three in the afternoon in Brussels, but as they went down the ramp to the tarmac and trundled their luggage into the airport building the gray dankness was all-pervasive. It gave you a vague feeling that somehow it was bedtime already; even the twins were yawning, though they had slept most of the way across the Atlantic. The air outside was full of what might have been light rain or a heavy mist, and as they walked to the terminal, ridges of slush squelched beneath their shoes with a feeling that was halfway between a crunch and a splash. Getting miniature droplets of cold water flicked in your face at least had the advantage of being a little invigorating; Eric felt torpid and badly in need of some brisk exercise at the same time.

Peter seemed to be thinking hard as he hunted for phrases. “Before that-”

He visibly reconsidered using Adrienne’s name in front of her children.

“-evil bitch came into my life…at Los Alamos…things were real, if you know what I mean. Well, someone who wasn’t a scientist might have thought they were a bit strange, but they were what I was used to, going to work, hanging out with people I knew, and catching the odd movie…Then the evil witch carried me off to her lair at Rancho Sangre, and that was a complete nightmare.”

Cheba nodded. “Worse because it was pretty, you know? Pretty town, pretty clean houses, pretty farms and the beautiful Casa Grande. And her, pretty like a snake.”

The two former lucies shared a glance; Eric supposed that was something you had to go through to really understand, but he was perfectly contented to be on the outside looking in as far as that was concerned. Helping Cheba get through withdrawal from the feeding addiction had been bad enough. It was worse than coming off heroin or meth cold turkey, though apparently while you were on it didn’t do any particular harm. And the thought of detoxing alone, the way Peter had…

Peter made a gesture of agreement that turned into a wave at their surroundings.

“But Rancho Sangre was at least honestly beyond belief, like dropping into a movie. This…I’ve flown into Brussels before. Going to scientific conferences, mostly. Now I’m back here, in what should be a familiar place, but I’m not part of that old life anymore. It’s as if I’m dragging a bubble of alien weirdness around with me, or I can see and everyone else around me is blind. And I can’t go back, because I can’t stop knowing what I know now about what’s going on below the surface.”

Eric chuckled. “Welcome to the club, compadre. When you’re in the Suck you know it’s a different world and that nobody can understand who isn’t in there with you, but it’s sort of obvious because everybody’s wearing camouflage and carrying a gun and it separates you. This is more like being a cop, and especially a homicide detective-we used to say homicide roach, ’cause it gave you a roach’s-eye-view of things. It’s a different world in the middle of what everyone else thinks is the real world. It looks the same, but you know things other people don’t, like adding a colored filter. Or taking one away.”

Peter smiled a crooked smile. “Well, we’re all in that situation now!”

“No,” Cheba said vigorously, shaking her head until the black curls tossed. “For me, it is all strange. Everything is differently strange, the things you think are familiar are strange to me too. Some is just different; other things are twisted. It started when I left Coetzala for Mexico City. I don’t understand how people live in a world of only buildings, like they don’t eat beans and use the toilet…The twisted part…it’s all different in sizes and sounds and colors. Nothing looks real to me, everything is like the pictures on a TV only it is my town that is like a little picture on TV in my head…and then I feel that it isn’t real or this isn’t real and I end up not knowing what real actually is. And then I met the brujos!”

She took a deep breath. “So I don’t think about how strange things are too much, or it would make me crazy.”

Looking around: “Why do we want to come to this place, Brussels, anyway? Big! Too big!”

The three adults and two children were a little lost in the sleek vastness of Brussel Nationaal/Bruxelles-National Airport once they made their way into the general concourse. Over twenty thousand people worked here full time, and hundreds of thousands passed through every day. Much of it, Eric reflected, might have been any major airport anywhere-shiny tile, shiny metal, shiny glass, overpriced goods and rows of metal and plastic seats carefully calculated not to be too comfortable, all amid a slight smell of burned kerosene.

All that was deeply reassuring. With Peter’s little gadgets on their persons they wouldn’t stand out to the eye of the Power, and there was plenty of crowd to lose themselves in. He let his detective sense fan out, that subliminal reading that flagged anyone who was looking for somebody in particular rather than just going with the flow. So far, nothing but his making a bunch of people who were obviously cops or security agents of some sort, like the creepy-looking plump little dude over there with the waxed mustache.

Of course there was one local feature you wouldn’t see most places-

“And why is everything spelled out twice?” she asked. “One way that looks a little like Spanish, but isn’t, and another way that looks a little like English, but isn’t either.”

Peter grinned; Cheba had spent a lot of time on their flight with a set of headphones and a textbook, doggedly polishing her spoken and written English. Both the men were hard workers, and they both found her a little intimidating that way.

“Because they speak two languages here, Dutch and French, and the Flemings speak Dutch and the Walloons speak French and they can never agree on anything. Starting with which language to disagree in, and mostly they never get past that part,” he said.

“Sounds familiar,” Eric said, thinking of New Mexico. “I haven’t been to Brussels before when I transited through Europe.”

“Isn’t NATO HQ here?” Peter said.

“Sí, but it’s administrative, not operational. We staged through Ramstein-Frankfurt. Doesn’t matter much, when they let us off the transports it was usually only for an hour or so and we spent it lying down on the hangar floor with our packs for pillows or grabbing a smoke. You could be anywhere in the Suck Archipelago, except for the weather.”

Peter said: “A lot of scientific stuff gets channeled through here too. So just about all I’ve seen of it is hotels and some excellent universities, which I admit beats an airport hangar. Even if the universities aren’t as old as they look, despite the attitude Europeans put on. All that medieval and Renaissance stuff pretending to have been there for centuries.”

“Hasn’t that been here?” Cheba said curiously. “In Mexico City-that was the only big city I saw before this-there were ancient things from the time of the old indios, the pyramid, and old Spanish things, and buildings from the time of the Porfiriato, and the modern ones of glass, all mixed together and all looking as they are.”

“This part of the world has been burned down or blown up or both so often that you can’t tell what’s original and what isn’t. They try to make it look the same afterwards, but the same isn’t the same, if you know what I mean. The first part of this airport was built by the Nazis during World War Two, for example. A lot of things around here were nothing but broken rock covered in the marks of tank-tracks at one time or another, mostly in 1945. Sometimes 1918 and 1945.”

“They have really, really good chocolate here,” Leon said, bringing the conversation back to practicalities.

His sister nodded vigorously. “I love the ones that are shaped like little seashells,” she said with an air of heavy hinting.

Peter nodded solemn agreement. “Come to think of it, I remember those too, and they’re completely authentic. C’mon, you guys, let’s get some! There’s bound be a shop selling them around here.”

As the slight blond man led the two raven-haired children away, Cheba leaned closer to Eric.

She nodded. “Peter is like a brother,” she said, which he found rather comforting. “Or the way they should be. Back in mi tierra, they were, well, focused on going to the city. And in the city, all the boys, they were hijos de su tal por cual…How do you say in English, ah! So short a word-assholes.”

Then, seriously: “What do we do now?”

“I’ve got a list of inconspicuous hotels and we’ll take a taxi,” Eric said. “We’ll start for Vienna in the morning as soon as we organize the transportation; I don’t want to spend more time on the road at night than we have to. We should get there before these Council asswipes get their act together, they can’t decide whether to have breakfast without fighting about it for a day or two. Easier to hide in a car than it is in a plane.”

“Why are we taking the twins towards their parents at all?” she said quietly. “Isn’t that where the fighting will be? The danger, at least, no? Why would Adrian want that?”

Eric had been looking at the children, smiling a little wistfully. They made them feel a little wistful-he’d always wanted some of his own, and being an uncle had confirmed the feeling, and he’d never see thirty again so the clock was ticking if he didn’t want to be trying to ride herd on teenagers in his sixties. Although…

“Maybe not. I talked this over with Adrian. He doesn’t want to use the children as shields…But it’s possible they could be safer near their mother, or their mother and him, than anywhere else in the world. That’s where she’d have more control over the other Shadowspawn. It’s not like they’ve got any real discipline, and a lot of them tend to act on impulse. If they’re right under her eye, they’ll be more cautious.”

“They may not have this discipline, but they certainly fear her.”

“Yeah, but believe me when you’re trying to get people to do anything, at least to do it effectively, discipline is a lot better. People act crazy when they’re afraid. Anyway, we tried hiding them somewhere far away from the action, and look how that worked! Whoever came after us probably got reamed out by Her Supreme Evilness, but that wouldn’t have been much consolation to us if he’d won. Or to her for that matter, if he’d ended up killing the kids as well as us.”

Cheba frowned. “That is all true. But I have grown to care for them, and I worry that they might come to harm.”

“Me too.” He hesitated. “Though…Something I’ve been thinking about…Have you noticed how much you like them and how quickly it happened?”

She blinked, then her eyes narrowed. Living proof that lack of education has nothing to do with lack of smarts, he thought.

“Why shouldn’t I like them? I have always liked los niños, and they are good children. Even when I was their mother’s prisoner they did not behave badly. No more badly than other children. Well, other rich people’s children.”

Eric nodded. “I like them too, but I remember something that Adrian said. That Shadowspawn often leave their children to be brought up by others.”

“You mean like, what is that bird that puts its eggs in other birds’ nests, the cuckoo?”

“Yeah, and it would make sense for Shadowspawn children to evolve, to develop, in ways that made them real likable to the human adults-cute, appealing.”

“All children are like that! If they weren’t we would not feed them and clean up their messes.”

“Right, if they weren’t we’d strangle them instead. But maybe Shadowspawn kids are more like kids than kids are. To push our buttons, you know?”

Cheba shook her head. “I like them anyway. Even if that is true, they are not pretending to be good children. They are doing it by really being that way.”

Leon and Leila came back, holding up a box in triumph. “Here, you should have some too!” Leila said; Leon nodded emphatically while he chewed.

Thing is, Adrian also told me that the human foster parents…A lot of the time, they’re the first ones kids kill when they hit puberty. Because that’s when they stop being naturally inclined to get along with anybody.

He took one of the candies from the box the girl offered. The shell was a dark, slightly bitter chocolate, while the interior had a creamy filling of hazelnut praline.

“Thanks,” he said; it really was good chocolate.

Damn, he thought. And they really are cute kids.

“And Adrian wants me in Vienna,” he said to Cheba. “You too, and Peter.”

“Why? Me to look after the children and guard them, and Peter because he understands these machines…You because you were a soldier, and he needs you to fight?”

“A little. But also because I was a detective, and he wants me to detect. Let’s get going, it’s a long drive.”

“How far?” Cheba said.

Peter glanced at his tablet. “About eleven hundred kilometers, call it six hundred miles, about the same as the distance between Santa Fe and Dallas. One long day’s drive. In Europe that’s a long way, just like in America a hundred years is a long time.”

“Call it twice that distance, the way we’re going to be driving, but we can take it relays,” Eric said. Peter groaned slightly, and Eric went on: “Consider it the scenic route, professor.”

“Talk about bad luck!”

Peter stopped talking abruptly and looked up at Eric and Cheba. The three were grouped around the Citroën seven-seater car by the side of the road, peering under the raised hood. Leon and Leila were happily engaged in snowballing each other, but the same anxiety showed on the faces of all the adults.

“I thought your machine would hide us, Peter?” Cheba said.

They were all carrying one of the little pseudo-tablets that concealed the wearer from the Power and they’d gotten fairly paranoid about making sure they were working. Even the children were wearing them, and had stopped complaining about it.

Peter was wearing a black Astrakhan wool hat with ear flaps. He ran his fingers under it and rubbed at his forehead. His explanations tended to emphasize the limitations of the equipment.

“Sure, what we’ve got will hide us,” he said. “But I didn’t say it would protect us, did I? Because it won’t. Protect the car? Even more not. It doesn’t make us invisible, either. Not to ordinary regular eyes.”

“Or it could just be common or garden-variety bad luck,” Eric said, taking a closer look the engine. “Christ, the fuel injector on this thing is shot seven ways, we might as well have been running wet cement through it. So much for high-end rentals and the synthetic crap they use for gas here. Shit.”

“Do you want to bet on it?” Peter said. “Bet on this being luck instead of, you know, luck?”

“Normally, I might.”

Eric looked around. It was as cold as you would expect in the run-up to Christmas, and they were in a world of black and white and gray. The white snow lay knee-deep across the lumpy fields of the little valley they were in; he’d been avoiding the autobahn and sticking to rural back roads on general principles, and much good it had done them. The asphalt of the little two-lane was black, flanked by banks of off-white snow where the plow had gone through; the ranks of pine trees on the ridges that flanked them to either side looked black in the dim light. The sky overhead was the color of a wet manhole cover, and the air had the damp mealy smell that made you expect snow.

“But here in Hansel and Gretel land, maybe not,” Eric said. “I keep expecting to see a gingerbread house and a little old lady with a taste for veal.”

Cheba looked at him, frowning in puzzlement.

It must be a major pain in the ass, he thought. Not just having to work in another language, but not knowing all the references everyone else learned when they were kids. Like everyone else was speaking a different language, and in code. I guess that accounts for a little of the way she snaps at times, that and everything else she’s gone through.

“A children’s story about wicked witches,” Peter said, filling in for her. “A story that comes from around here.”

“Oh. I think I saw a movie about that. There were many guns and Gretel wore black leather.”

“That’s not the original version,” Peter said, wincing slightly.

“One thing that’s for certain,” Eric said. “I’d feel awfully damn suspicious about anyone who stopped and offered us help about now.”

Cheba nodded. “Or of la policia. Or of anybody. If this is los brujos, that would be the next thing they did.”

“Right,” Eric said. “I think I saw a church steeple from that hill back about half a mile, though it’s hard to tell around here with this wet thick air. I’m surprised the people here don’t have moss on their north sides.”

“A church means a village,” Cheba said. “Do we have time to get there before dark?”

“We’ll still be closer when dark hits than we would if we stayed here. If it isn’t just normal bad luck somebody wants us to stay here, and doing what an enemy wants you to do is usually a really lousy idea.”

“And it is only a few hours until the sun goes down,” Cheba said grimly.

They all glanced at each other again; their enemies were so much stronger at night.

One of the advantages of traveling on Adrian’s nickel was that he didn’t have to give a damn about the luggage, though the wastefulness of it did make him twinge a little. Cheba cast a wistful look at the flat ostrich-hide case with gold clasps that contained a lot of expensive girl stuff. He couldn’t blame her; this was probably the first time she’d had a chance to accumulate any of her own.

“Just weapons, money, and our camouflage tablets,” he said. “Incidentally, Peter, how long before we have to recharge ’em?”

“Oh, not for at least twenty-four hours. And even that ought to leave us a margin, I’ve got some spare battery packs ready charged. It just needs some trickle current, it’s a very economical application.”

“Right, let’s get going. Walking on this road…not so advisable either but we don’t have much choice.”

He checked everyone’s clothes with a flick of the eyes; fortunately everybody including the kids had winter boots on, and they all had good parka-and-hood-style coats they’d put on when they got out of the car. They trudged on heading southeast; to the right the land rose into forested heights that probably would’ve turned into mountains if the cloud hadn’t swallowed them. After a quarter-mile a fold in the land showed the ruins of a castle on a hill to the south, probably built long ago to dominate this valley and the passageway through it down to the Danube. Half the tower and the snag of a curtain wall still stood, though the war that blackened and cracked the stones might have happened eighty years ago or eight hundred.

“Was that a castle I saw back there? Hope to hell Franken-N-furter doesn’t show up,” Peter muttered, and began humming the tune to “Let’s Do the Time Warp” as he walked.

I was right, Eric thought. This really is Red Riding Hood country. That might’ve been funny a while ago. Now remembering all those old stories feels…different. Too many of them take it for granted the monster has a long career of eating people before they get their comeuppance. When it’s for real, how do you know that you aren’t the one who got the oven treatment before Hansel and Gretel showed up?

Just about then it started to snow, big soft flakes that stuck to the shoulders and hoods of their coats and then to their eyebrows as the wind shifted into their faces. It cut visibility to almost nothing, and little rivulets of icy meltwater trickled inside no matter how tight you pulled the lace at the neck. Peter just sighed and dug his hands deeper into his pockets, clearly used to this sort of thing from the grisly winters of his upper Midwestern home. Santa Fe could get cold too and had the odd blizzard, if not as often; it was a skiing resort area in the winter. Plus Eric had seen every possible variety of bad weather at one time or another on his travels for Uncle Sam.

Christ Jesus, but I seem to make a career out of piling up bad memories to choke on later. The only compensation is the new bad experiences aren’t such a shock when they come along.

Cheba looked utterly disgusted as she trudged, but then she had grown up in a sugarcane sort of place, and her time in the United States had mostly been in coastal California. She didn’t actually say anything; one of the things he liked about her was that she didn’t bitch and moan about stuff that couldn’t be helped.

“I’ll never feel the same about the Brothers Grimm again,” Peter said as the wet cold settled into their bones, echoing his first thought.

“Who?” Cheba said.

Peter explained, in a way that had the Mexican girl laughing. The twins joined in, giving bits from their favorite stories-though the way Shadowspawn told them to their kids often had a disturbingly different perspective. Eric would’ve felt mildly jealous if he hadn’t been worried enough to keep his hand close to the hidden grip of his coach gun whether or not that made walking harder. Everybody quieted down after they been on the road an hour or so, but none of them were going to collapse just from a few miles. The fall made it like walking in the middle of a snow globe, visibility cut to ten or twenty yards at most and sometimes only arm’s-length. There was no sound at all except the muted hoot of the wind and the hiss of the flakes; it was quite enough to hear people’s breaths and the scuffing crunch of their feet. The real limiting factor was how fast the kids could move. They were a bit too big to be comfortably carried piggyback.

As if to echo his thought Cheba caught his eye and inclined her head towards the children, who were tramping along with their heads down now, game little troopers but obviously feeling the strain.

He shrugged a little and raised a hand in a gesture as if to say I know, but what can we do, stop and wait for it to bury us?

With the weather thickening and the sun heading towards an early grave he lost track of the vague estimate of distance he’d formed. It was a bit of a shock when the church suddenly showed, a steep-roofed white stucco rectangle with a tall square tower, the black top sloping in and then swelling out again into a bulb before finishing in a long thin spire. Snow hid it again, then revealed a vertical shadow, then turned to a permanent reality, Central European but with a faint trace of Byzantium or Russia somewhere way back in its ancestry.

Don’t zone out, Eric, he thought, disgusted at himself.

Around it the lights of the town glowed, blurred through the snow. Eric breathed out a silent sigh of relief. There hadn’t been any traffic until they were almost on top of the place, but a few cars passed them now and a tractor went by pulling a wagon loaded with something under a tarpaulin. The village was a cluster of homes and a few shops with a small river running through it under an arched stone bridge

If the Santa Fe River back home had ever had any water in it, it would’ve been about the same size, which meant that in most of America it would’ve been described as a medium-sized creek. They got nods and a few calls of “Grüss Gott,” but less inquisitiveness than a similar party could’ve expected in most American towns this far into the boonies.

There was a big Christmas tree in the town square not far from the church, with the lights twinkling on it already fairly bright as the short afternoon faded. There were a few other decorations spotted around the village, including angels blowing trumpets and pictures of an ethereal-looking blond child handing out gifts. A big Nativity scene wasn’t much different from the ones he grown up with except that a second glance showed that the lambs were real-life breathing lambs, just about to be taken off for the night by a teenage girl with yellow braids.

He supposed that the statue standing nearby was Santa Claus or St. Nick, from the great curly white beard, but otherwise it was dressed more like the pope and for some reason there was a kid in a black steeple hat, a red waistcoat, and a green leprechaun outfit standing next to him.

Peter pointed to a sign that hung creaking over the street, too thickly coated with snow to show anything except that there was heraldry and gilt beneath it. The building it marked was well-kept, but looked so old that it was leaning a little to one side. A bit closer and you could see the marks where the ancient black oak timbers had been squared with adze and broadax, and how the patches of white plaster between the beams weren’t quite regular.

Even a Southwesterner like him could tell the difference between fake half timbering and the real thing this close. For that matter, there were enough really old buildings in Santa Fe to recognize the somehow organic, grown-in-place look that amateurs using hand tools in a strictly local style produced, even if the details of that style had nothing in common.

“That’s a Gasthaus, which means tavern or small hotel,” Peter said helpfully.

“Yeah, professor, I have been outside New Mexico once or twice,” Eric replied, with a flash of irritation. “I finished high school too, when I wasn’t pulling my sombrero down over my eyes and sleeping against the adobe wall with a fucking burro standing next to me chewing on a cactus.”

“Sorry,” Peter said, flushing even more than the cold could account for.

“Sorry back at you,” Eric said after a moment. “Worried, tired, hungry. Feeling a bit off, like maybe I’ve got a cold coming.”

Not to mention fighting off a feeling of oh shit here we go again without any concrete reason behind it. I’ve always trusted those feelings, and now I’ve had experts tell me that they’re the real thing.

Aloud he went on: “You speak any German? We’re a little off the beaten track for much tourist traffic. All I know is some cusswords, from some German snake-eater types I met once.”

“Only a bit-one of my grandmothers was German and she tried to teach me some when I was a kid. Oh, and I know the physics terminology, enough to help a conversation about that. Probably not much use here. There’s almost always somebody who can speak English in a German town, though, even a small one.”

The cold damp air was wonderfully enlivened with baking smells, rich with vanilla and buttery-nutty and gingery scents. It was long past lunchtime, and they’d just finished a long cold hike. Despite his general misery, that made part of him perk up.

“Okay, we need to get the kids warmed up and fed, and see if we can organize some transportation. We may be stuck here tonight from the look of the weather.”

He let himself shiver, no longer forcing the unpleasant feeling of being core chilled out of his mind by sheer willpower, surprised at how bad it was.

I may not be twenty-two anymore, but am I an old man already? Can a couple of eight-year-olds run me into the dirt?

The inn was blessedly warm and bright as they pushed through the door and stamped the snow off their shoes. The common room featured a lot of carved wood that reminded him of Swiss cuckoo clocks, a couple of murals of fairy tales with an unfortunate prevalence of wolves and white teeth, and pine logs crackling in a big fireplace with wrought-iron andirons and a tile surround. It was all presided over right now by a wrinkled crone in a shapeless black dress whose nose nearly met her chin. For a moment he remembered his joke about Hansel and Gretel, but her bright blue eyes looked at them with alert curiosity as she put down her knitting, and then widened in concern at the sight of the cold, snow-soggy children.

“Ha woesch! Wo’ her?”

They looked at her blankly; she clucked her tongue and continued into a flow of German, with a broad mooing accent that even he could tell wasn’t anything like the standard form of the language. It sounded rather like a compassionate and elderly Teutonic cow. Peter looked baffled, but Leon and Leila immediately started chattering back at her in German that was apparently fully fluent-and from the crone’s delighted smile, the same dialect she used. After a moment Leila turned to him:

“We told her that our car broke down,” she said.

“She says that we’re lucky it wasn’t any farther away from the village,” her brother added. “This is a lonely place, she says, and that they get snowed in a lot.”

“And she says that dinner will be ready soon if we want to eat-and there will be Kniadel,” Leila added eagerly.

“You mean Knödel?” Peter asked.

“Ja, Kniadel,” the old woman said helpfully, and broke into a new set of moos, evidently asking things like where is your car and what about luggage and do you know these kids are wet and freezing?

A comedy of languages and dialects followed. Luckily some younger members of the family turned up who spoke reasonable English, albeit apparently somehow learned from Englishmen who spoke a thick and adenoidal version of their own, which was absolutely indescribable on a base of deeply rural Swabian. The grandchildren of the crone had a couple of children of their own around the twins’ age and size who could lend them some dry clothing. A message went off to ask around for someone with a four-wheel-drive vehicle to go fetch the luggage from the stranded car. Apparently with the weather this bad, there was no hope of getting the car itself fixed until after Christmas.

In the course of all that the ancient, her rather more than middle-aged son, and his son and daughter-in-law, took their coats, set them down in front of the fire to warm up and dry out, brought coffee and cream and plates of crescent-shaped biscuit/cookie things dusted with sugar and full of hazelnuts. Then they waded through a dinner of roast ham hocks done with mustard, horseradish and pickled chilies and accompanied by red cabbage, onion cakes and potato dumplings-which was what Kniadel turned out to be. Or Knödel, according to Peter. A bunch of locals trickled to in to have the same, mostly families, and mostly people who obviously knew each other from childhood; he supposed they were giving the housewives a rest before the big family dinners around Christmas.

“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 was 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.