Shadows of Falling Night

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 going 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.

“Woof,” Ellen said, dusting her hands. “That’s heavy!”

“Needs to be,” Eric said. “I recognize the type, it’s pretty much a CRRC. You want to do the honors?”

He handed her a line hooked to a little lever arrangement on the casing. She gave it a firm yank, and the ends blew off the tube and a seam along the top cracked open, all with hissing brack sounds, like an aerosol can in a fire. The boat within unfolded like a flower in stop-motion photographs, and in a few seconds it was a black rectangle about twelve feet long by six wide, bluntly pointed at one end. Peter went down the rope ladder and balanced expertly.

Eric looked slightly surprised, but handed down the outboard motor with the shrouded propeller as the other man reached up.

“Whitewater rafting,” Peter said by way of explanation, as he secured it to a plate at the stern. “The SEALs use these things; you ever try out for that?”

“Mierda! Do I look completely loco? You have to love to suffer and have a suicide complex to even apply for the teams.” A snort. “Actually I did apply, but I met my own personal IED before I could try for the qualifying course.”

Cheba and Ellen looked at each other and shrugged; the Mexican girl tapped a finger on her temple and wiggled the others. They formed a chain and handed the gear down into the boat; it didn’t take long, since they were carrying only essentials, mostly in knapsacks. Hopefully they could pass for backpacking tourists.

“Okay, ladies…hey, boss!” Eric called. “Ready to go?”

Adrian shook his head, a little as if he were emerging from deep water. “Very tangled…” he sighed. “There are too many powerful adepts gathering, too many already near. They…step on each other’s Sight, confuse the inner eye.”

He handed down the children, and Eric started the motor as he slipped easily into the boat. The engine burbled, and water foamed up behind the stern; spray came over the bows, cold in Ellen’s face. She put a hand on the cooler full of bagged blood that was her special responsibility; in its way it was as much ammunition as the half-moon clips of silver bullets in her pockets.

It’s odd, she thought. This is dangerous and uncomfortable, but there’s something comfortable about it…well, Adrian’s here, but…you know, I’m with all my best friends. Well, not exactly all my friends, there’s Giselle back in Santa Fe, but we’re all close somehow. It’s…not comfortable, it’s comforting.

Peter killed the throttle some distance from the land; the boat slid onto the shore with a shrrrussh sound as the fabric rasped over the gravel of the beach. Ellen braced herself against the forward surge. Eric hopped out and grabbed one of the loops at the bow, bracing himself against the greasy sideways motion of the flat bottom on the muddy gravel. Everyone else followed, and the adults all grabbed on and pulled the craft forward beyond the wet dirt. Then the backpacks and duffels were handed out and distributed. Eric and Adrian bent to examine the drag marks near Harvey’s beached ship.

“Yeah, you were right, they had some sort of rig with a winch,” Eric said. “See, that’s a spade jack’s mark where they planted it to brace the vehicle. Looks like they used a chain saw to crack the structural members from the inside, cut through on the top and most of the way on the bottom, then put a loop of the cable around one of the strakes and pulled. Then they switched the cable to drag the load out of the hold onto the section of hull, refastened it to that timber there and dragged the whole thing up like a sled, then switched the cable onto the container again and pulled it up onto the bed of the truck up a standard double ramp. Looks like a two-axle job to me, military from the treads, but not ours. Big but not huge, six-tonner maybe.”

“Agreed,” Adrian said. “They probably…yes, several local helpers. They would be hired, no knowledge of what the cargo is.”

He knelt by the track and extended a hand, closing his eyes and touching the ground lightly.

“You are right…I can See the truck before they loaded it…a GAZ model. Old, battered, the engine is knocking.”

“Yeah, not much doubt about that around here.”

“And a local…his interior dialogue is in Georgian…nervous, afraid…he sees Harvey laughing…then the shield generator comes too close.”

“We can follow the tracks with the Eyeball Mark One,” Eric said. “That’ll get us to a road, at least.”

They trudged on up towards a narrow, overgrown lane with puddles standing in the ruts of the truck that had born the bomb. Leila took her hand and swung it as they walked. That led through the orchard, which turned out to be an orange grove, which from the look of it hadn’t been tended or harvested in a while, and the ground was dotted with the rotted remains of fruit, filling the air with an over-sweet scent. The field beyond was equally scruffy, though comely enough in a disheveled way, looking like neglected pasture; it was bordered and dotted with trees, and her art-student eyes identified oak, ash and hornbeam. There were a lot of birds, including a flock of a big finch with spectacular rose-red plumage and a group of pheasants that burst out of some bushes as they passed, skimming off across the landscape in a thrumming clatter of wings.

The overgrown lane from the water fed into a slightly less overgrown dirt road bordered by big plane trees. Adrian took a stance and murmured, the whining, grating syllables of Mhabrogast.

“There will be cars down this road, the first in about twenty minutes,” he said. “Even on local roads we could be in Tbilisi in a few hours. If we are not on the right side of the border, that could make for complications.”

“Can we get them to stop? They might not want to pick up so many hitchhikers,” Peter asked, then held up a hand. “Okay, okay, don’t laugh at me!”

None of the others did, though there was amusement in Eric’s voice as he said: “One way or another we will, professor.”

“Wait,” Adrian said. “There is something else…a Wreaking, it’s familiar but I can’t quite place…”

“Cover! Cover!” Eric shouted.

Ellen promptly dove for the ditch at the edge of the road, ignoring the mud and water, landing with an ooof! mainly because Leila came down on top of her. She got her revolver out and the girl arranged beside her first, not least because while the twins were on the whole well-mannered children they had an instinctive tendency to snap when startled or frightened. Then she saw what Eric had seen-or what he had heard before they were visible. Two armored vehicles were coming out of the tree line to the northeast, crackling through saplings and brushes, the heavy wheels humming as the diesel engines burbled. They were low-slung boxy shapes with wedge fronts and eight big wheels, the weapons in the skeletal remote-operated turrets probing as the operators within turned their joysticks and watched the screens.

“Fuck! BTR-90s!” Eric said, some piece of military acronym-ese she didn’t recognize.

They were all armed, but they were armed with things like coach guns and revolvers full of silvered shot, or knives and Cheba’s machete; weapons designed to fight nightwalker adepts. Against soldiers with modern weapons, they didn’t seem like much.

Plus I don’t think any of us want to hurt ordinary human type people. Not that there’s much choice now.

“Jefe, over to you,” Eric called. Then: “Shit!” as something went by overhead and a crackle of explosions came from behind their position. “Grenade launcher and heavy machine gun on each of those APCs. Do something!”

Adrian came up to one knee, began a pass with his hands…then stopped and toppled forward, clutching at his head. Something like a flush of liquid nitrogen seemed to run through Ellen’s chest and belly as she saw the contorted agony on his face, and the twin trickles of blood from his nostrils.

She crawled along the ditch, hauling the cooler of blood. The grenade launcher chattered again, a series of dull thumpthumpthump sounds, and the next line of explosions was much closer. Something slashed through the leafless branches of the tree above her, showering her with bits of twig.

“Adrian! What’s going on?” she asked sharply.

He looked up; his eyes were bloodshot too, and he grated around a hissing snarl: “Old Wreakings…childhood…like hooks in my head…damn Harvey! I will not let them harm you and the children, I will not-”

Then he screamed; it was an instant before she realized it was in Mhabrogast. He slumped backward as the last syllable sounded, his body arching and then going limp. Eric cast a glance over his shoulder: we’re all going to die now was plain in the frustrated anger of his expression.

This was obviously no time for shyness, or bottled blood. She tore open the neck of her jacket with her left hand and put her right hand behind Adrian’s head. He was making small whimpering sounds and his eyes had rolled up until only the pink-tinged whites were visible, and his hands twitched in a random way that made her heart clench. She took a deep breath and brought his mouth up to touch the skin at the base of her neck.

For a moment she thought he was too far gone even for that. Then his arms closed around her with bruising force and she felt the sting of the bite, sharper than usual with the desperate need.

“Ah. Ah.”

She closed her eyes and shuddered; not even fear of death could make the sensation any less overwhelming. After a time she couldn’t have judged he gently laid her down and stood, his face a mask of blood-hers and his own, running from nose and eyes and dripping off his chin beneath the red grin of his mouth, the coppery smell of it rank. Her whole body felt warm and almost liquid, but she craned her neck to follow him as he walked forward.

The turrets turned towards him. His hands came up to either side, fingers crooked and then moving in patterns that hurt the eye to watch while he shrieked falsetto abominations in the language of demons, the war-magic of a Lord of Shadow. She felt a sharp pain, as if something had reached into her head, clenched and tugged towards the place behind her eyes; beneath that was pride, and also an impulse to pound her head on something hard until she didn’t have to listen any more. At times like this you realized that the Power was simply wrong, chaos and Old Night let loose on earth.

One of the low-slung vehicles slewed sharply and then halted; there was a muffled bang from its engine compartment, followed by black smoke and low red flames. The turret on its top pivoted and fired six times into its companion, shredding all the wheels on one side, then blew up with a rending crang. Pieces flew, some of them trailing smoke. Soldiers poured out of the machines. Some of them fled wailing, stumbling, falling and rising to run again or just crawl with foam dribbling from their lips. The rest began firing…at each other. Bullets sparked off the armor of the war-machines in little pale flecks of light, and then the survivors threw aside their assault rifles and fell on each other with knives and teeth, bestial howls and cackling laughter. After a moment nothing moved but the wisps of smoke drifting on the breeze and carrying the acrid stink of scorched metal and heavy oil.

The first Empire of Shadow had lasted for a hundred thousand years of cannibalistic sadism. You could see why.

Then another man crawled out of a hatch, hobbled and lurched over to the other machine-one of his feet wasn’t working-and crawled inside the rear hatch. He screamed with pain as he reappeared hauling a slight limp figure, but he dragged it twenty yards before he collapsed.

“Wait,” Eric said as Adrian began to walk forward towards them. “Jefe, those things are burning, they’re stuffed with explosives and fuel, they’re going to blow.”

Ellen flogged herself into motion, ran up beside Adrian and held up a bag of the blood. He took it, ripped off the top with his teeth and poured it down his throat, then spat redly.

“Safe enough for a minute,” he rasped.

They all followed, into the stink of burning and the raw smell of death, blood and urine, feces and ripped meat. It was Jack Farmer and Anjali Guha, both wearing some sort of camouflage-patterned uniform. The American’s right foot was canted at an angle inside its boot, and tears ran down through the grimy sweat on his pug face as he cradled his unconscious companion’s head and shoulders.

“She’s dying,” he said dully as Adrian and the others came up. “She’s bleeding inside.”

“Twenty men just died because of you,” Adrian said, his voice unhuman. “A million more may die tomorrow.”

Farmer didn’t answer. Adrian didn’t speak either; instead he knelt and touched the sleeping woman. After a moment she jerked slightly and her breathing slowed from a rapid shallow panting to something deeper and slower. Adrian’s face ran with sweat, diluting the trails of thickening blood.

“Heart,” he said hoarsely, and clutched at his own chest. “There-”

Farmer looked up. Adrian shook his head and spoke: “She’ll live now; I did just enough. Open your mind, I need the details.”

There was a moment of silent communion; Farmer ground his teeth and grunted hoarsely, as if he’d been punched in the gut.

Adrian nodded before he went on: “And don’t either of you ever cross my path again,” he said, in a low rasping growl she couldn’t even imagine disobeying.

“We won’t,” Farmer said, and turned his face away.

“Boss, we’ve got to move,” Eric said.

Adrian nodded, wiping at his face with one sleeve, and his expression human once more, as if great dark wings had faced away from about him.

“I need some water. And…yes, there will be a van in a few minutes.”