Shadows of Falling Night

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Tbilisi

I am getting sick of hotels, Ellen thought, glancing out the window as they all sat down around the suite’s table.

Tbilisi was a city of moderate size, about a million and a half people, on the same order as Philadelphia if you subtracted the suburbs. Over millennia it had grown along the steep banks of the winding Kura River, which had been navigable all the way to the Caspian until the Soviet engineers and dam-builders got to work on it. There were hills to the north and lower, more distant ones to the south, and the area along the river was mostly trees and walkways, with a jumble of older buildings and narrow streets around it, lined with pleasant older buildings including some very odd-looking churches with octagonal towers in their middles.

Even good hotels.

They were staying at what had been the Hotel Majestic just before the First World War; it had been refurbished (including filling in bullet-holes) in the early years of the century and was now the Tbilisi Marriott. The exterior was a very nice provincial Beau Arts, pale stone cladding and engaged pillars with arched windows; the interior was slightly bland upper-level business traveler international standard.

The main merit was that it was right downtown on Rustaveli Avenue. Under other circumstances, she’d have enjoyed staying there, taking walking tours of the city with Adrian and visiting vineyards and historic buildings and enjoying the way Georgians burst spontaneously into choral song in places like elevators, rather like inhabiting an operetta. As it was-

I like to travel, but not to conventions for monsters. Not in the wake of a nuclear weapon. Not to conventions for monsters and in the wake of a nuclear weapon. I want a holiday. And it’s comforting to have Peter and Cheba and Eric along, but I’d like to have it with just me and my sweetie sometimes. Though we seem to have acquired some kids, of course. Okay, back to business.

“Farmer thought the yield would be about twenty-five kilotons,” Adrian said.

The table between the five adults was scattered with their tablets and tourist maps of Tbilisi and the surrounding area. There was also the remains of a Georgian dinner, sent in from a local eatery: round khachapuri cheese-stuffed breads something like a yeasty pizza, spinach with walnut and pomegranate-juice sauce, spiced kupati sausages made of pork, garlic, cilantro and more pomegranate and touches of cinnamon and cloves, and other dishes as well-the local cuisine favored lots of small plats and had never met a pomegranate it didn’t like. They’d split a bottle of local red wine, which had been excellent in a hearty sort of way, and were now gnawing on elongated things made of thickened grape juice and nuts and looking at the map with frustration.

The children had taken theirs off to their bedroom to watch the third Ender movie. It was all eerily calm, considering the business and the risk that they might all get vaporized in the next day or two. Though she supposed that getting excited wouldn’t help.

Adrian prodded at the map with a finger. “Harvey carefully gave Farmer and Guha no idea of precisely where he planned to put it, but it must be reasonably close. Within miles, not tens of miles.”

“Does it have to be close?” Cheba said. “It is a nuclear bomb!”

“Okay, thing is, nukes aren’t magic,” Eric said, hunched over the map, tracing distances with a piece of string and a pencil.

“Which is a change from dealing with Shadowspawn,” Peter said. Then he raised a hand to Adrian: “Yes, I know the Power isn’t magic. But it feels like magic. You talk to water in a special language and it flows uphill.”

“Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, who gives a fuck if it’s not a duck?” Eric agreed. “Back to nukes. I did a course on the effects of nukes when I made sergeant, it’s sort of academic now but you still do it, Cold War hangover I guess. They’re real powerful explosives and the radiation’s bad news, but guys have survived within less than two miles of a fusion bomb’s ground zero just by sitting in a slit trench. And that’s a multi-megatonner we’re talking about, one of those big mothers they made in the 50s. Forty times the size of the plutonium job we’re facing, or more.”

Peter nodded. “Eric’s right.”

Cheba looked a little dubious; Ellen felt that way, she’d always thought of nuclear weapons as a one-per-city apocalypse, but between them the two men didn’t make mistakes about that sort of thing. Peter went on:

“I’m not an expert, but I studied the effects a bit at Los Alamos-you really can’t avoid it there unless you do that deliberately, like Victorians hoping sex would go away if they didn’t talk about it. Earth or stone stops the immediate pulse of radiation pretty quickly. Then there’s the blast, overpressure and shock waves and the flash heat. The flash heat can vaporize you close up or give you bad burns quite a ways away, but any solid barrier will give you a high degree of protection.”

“You don’t want to be underneath the fallout plume either,” Eric pointed out. “That’s a longer-term problem, though. Short form, you’re close, you’re toast. It’ll kill you with the blast wave, or get you with the radiation, or fry you to a fajita, or pulverize you with high-velocity bits of everything, or you get caught in a firestorm when the buildings go up. But even a little farther away, and some pretty basic protection can get you through, though it’s a good idea to keep upwind and run fast.”

“Harvey will take no chances. This is his one opportunity,” Adrian said.

Eric nodded: “So if you want to be sure…with a twenty-five-k bomb, put it no more than a mile away, and even then not with any terrain features in between.”

“Shadowspawn are more vulnerable to the radiation, aren’t they?” Ellen said. “I’ve heard you say that.”

Adrian tapped his fingers together, leaning back in the chair. “Yes. Especially the aetheric body, nightwalking or post-corporeal. About…roughly, about as vulnerable as unshielded electronics are to EMP. That is not the mechanism, you understand, but the effect, in range and so forth, is about the same.”

Peter nodded. “I think the actual mechanism that randomizes things is-”

He started to lapse into mathematics, then stopped as everyone groaned. Adrian smiled slightly as he went on:

“It tracks very closely. The Council did some experiments…using Shadowspawn under sentence of death…in the 1950s, around the Soviet nuclear tests. It was simpler to hide in the middle of a continent, and the Soviet government made secrecy easy, with the Council in control.”

“I’ll bet,” Peter said. “The Soviets used to set off nuclear tests upwind of cities like Semipalatinsk to see what fallout did to civilians, and that was without evil sorcerers sticking the Power in. So the effect on aetheric bodies is like EMP?”

“Closely similar.”

“Ah,” Eric and Peter said together. “After you, professor,” Eric went on.

“Okay, that limits it too,” Peter said. “EMP is short-range when the explosion is low-altitude.”

He went into details that flowed over Ellen’s head; Adrian apparently had the same problem:

“Just the results, Peter.”

“Ah…three miles maximum. Less if there’s a building in the way. Really, the EMP for a ground burst is about the same radius as the blast effects.”

“That simplifies matters a little,” Adrian said. “And Shadowspawn who are corporeal are only slightly more vulnerable to radiation than normal humans, but they could not escape in aetheric form if they feared a nuclear weapon had gone off nearby. So it will be close, to kill the corporeals with blast and heat and the post-corporeals with the gamma radiation. Not more than half a mile from the Rustaveli Theatre, I would say.”

“And we know the target is this Rustaveli place?” Eric said, tapping a pencil on the little cultural landmark symbol.

“Rustaveli National Theater, yes. That is the only location where all the adepts will ever be in one place. You understand, Shadowspawn do not like being concentrated so, it makes our prescience much less effective. Think of it as being in a dark room with plugs in your ears, a lot of background noise and a large group of your worst enemies. They will keep it to a minimum. There need be little debate; the fix is in.”

“So a mile around here,” Eric said, tapping the spot on Rustaveli Avenue…which was right in Tbilisi’s historic downtown. “Above ground location…top floor, if possible. But the thing weighs what, a hair under two tons? Bulky, hard to handle on your own.”

“If that bomb goes off there, a hundred thousand humans will die, minimum,” Adrian said grimly.

“Yeah, it’s bad,” Eric said. “The way the hills surround that area, that’ll focus it. Whooosh!”

He made a welling-up gesture. Ellen winced. She didn’t like the clinical way he was talking about it…but it wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was a technical area he knew something about, the way she did the evolution of perspective, and that was how he discussed it.

“I thought you said there were simple ways to protect yourself?” she said.

He shrugged his thick shoulders. “Simple if you know ’em and you’ve got the stuff you need and you’ve got warning. If you don’t, you die. Or if you’re just too damned close. That’s right in a city center. Lots of people just too damned close.”

“And we’ve got too many places to look,” Peter said, peering at the map and then dancing his fingers across his tablet. “I mean, jeez, look at the number of buildings!”

Adrian shook his head. “If the bomb were not shielded…but then, it wouldn’t be here.”

He frowned. “Let us first eliminate the obviously unlikely ones. Then…I think you should search, and I will try a search for the right people. Harvey is very skilled, but lacks the raw power to compel large numbers to forget. He cannot take the bomb with him when he deals with them, and must be outside its influence. He can hide himself, but not the ripple effects of his interactions. Someone may notice something.”

“Yeah, there are a couple of angles. Like, construction companies-did anyone rent a crane last day or two? Pain in the ass investigating without knowing the local language, but I can try.”

“Me?” Cheba said.

“I need you to guard the children,” Adrian said.

She nodded grimly and made no foolish objections; that would be dangerous enough, and she had nothing to prove-not when she’d attacked a giant squid with a machete not forty-eight hours before.

When the others dispersed to get some rest, Ellen looked a question at him.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I do not think it would work, taking them with us as shields. Too much is at stake, and my sister…she loves them in her fashion, but she is ultimately a solipsist.”

“Yes, and-”

She stood very still for a long moment. Adrian waited, his eyes locked on her.

“We’re starting at the wrong end. Look, Adrienne is planning on being there, at the meeting, right?”

“Yes, she must.”

“And she’s going to blow it up while everyone’s doing the UN From Hell bit…she must know when Harvey’s going to blow it up, that is.”

“Yes.”

“Look, lover, we’ve got to find out how she plans to survive that. If we find out that, we’ll find out where the bomb is, or get a lever on it. We can work back from that.”

He seized her, and the kiss left her breathless. “And that will be for you and me.”

“That was a stroke of genius you had,” Adrian said, looking around the interior of the Rustaveli Theatre.

A few Shadowspawn lounged there already, and a slightly larger number of renfields seeing to the arrangements. Ellen winced as they walked past the manager, who was middle-aged and portly and probably normally a dignified-looking man. He was looking down at the body of one of the theater attendants, with tears trickling down his cheeks.

A renfield cuffed at him and snarled in Russian; probably get rid of that and be quick about it, because after a moment he bent clumsily, grasped the dead woman’s wrists and began to drag her out.

“I really do not like saving this bunch from getting fried,” she said. “If only they didn’t have a city as a human shield.”

As a theater, it all looked quite nice, in an old-fashioned way; about eight hundred seats, with three levels of boxes extending around to the horseshoe-shaped section at the rear, and a broad stage. On that workers and technicians were erecting…

Yup, that’s an altar, she thought queasily. Carved altar. And they’re putting down a waterproof surface around it. And those scared, cute-looking people at the back in the handcuffs are going to have a starring role in the production, so they’re making them watch, and the carvings show what’s going to happen to them…though I doubt they really believe that, because some of the things are impossible without the Power and nightwalking.

“I know what you mean, but needs must,” Adrian said.

He walked over to one of the renfields. “The seating arrangements,” he snapped.

The man looked like he wanted to object; he glanced into Adrian’s face and tapped his tablet instead. A printer nearby spat out hard copy, and Adrian took it without thanks.

He’s usually unfailingly polite to waiters and ticket agents and bellhops, Ellen thought. But here, I can see why he’s a bit…abrupt…this time.

“This is the Brézé area; this is the speaker’s podium below the altar,” he said. After a long moment:

“I can think of only one way for her and her supporters to leave the theater fast enough to catch the others by surprise.”

“How?” she asked, baffled; that had been puzzling her.

He looked down. She did too…and then remembered Adrienne walking out of walls in Rancho Sangre to take her by surprise.

The bitch loved it when I screamed in shock. I got so I twitched every time I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye.

“But isn’t that dangerous?” she said.

“Hideously,” Adrian said. “One mistake and you suffer the Final Death.”

Then, a deep breath. “Come, we do not have much time.”

Night was falling. Tbilisi wasn’t very cold, but it smelled like it might snow, mealy and damp and densely overcast. Eric looked up at the building.

“That would be perfect,” he said.

It was new; still under construction, in fact. In the States it would be a middling office building, but it was larger than average here. This was mostly a low-built town, even more so than say Albuquerque.

“And the contractor couldn’t figure how his computer lost the file,” Peter went on. “That was a good idea.”

He looked up at the building again. “We’ve got to decide quickly. And I don’t want to go up against someone who can Wreak without an adept.”

“Not to mention the way Adrian always talks about him. That is one serious badass and I want the odds in our favor,” Eric agreed. Thank God Peter isn’t trying to be Action Man. “Time to get backup.”

He took out his phone. Under his stoic exterior he could feel the sweat trickling down his flanks. Unless he missed his guess, up there was a nuke with a man sitting by the controls ready to hit the switch.

He tapped the number. Then again, then again…

“Shit! Boss isn’t answering! I’m getting full bars here, too!”

“Back to the theater,” Peter said. “He may be somewhere reception is bad.”

They turned and trotted, pushing through the crowds on the sidewalk and ignoring the throaty Georgian imprecations in their wake. It was only a third of a mile, anyway. They were running against the clock and they’d better win, or they’d be trying to outrun a fireball, and failing.

“What do you want?” the manager said, in heavily accented English.

He was slumped behind his desk in the cheerful, cluttered office whose walls were posters where they weren’t bookshelves. There was a stale smell in the air, as if he hadn’t bathed in days, or as if he was exuding a heavy musky scent of despair.

Adrian replied in gargling Georgian. He didn’t just speak it; his body language adapted, gestures growing wider, hands moving more fluently. Ellen could see whatever he was saying break through the apathetic misery of the man’s demeanor, until he virtually flung himself at a file and brought out a roll of old blueprints. He and Adrian spoke quickly and traced their fingers over sections of it, then the man took a pen and sketched rapidly. Adrian nodded, and spoke again.

The man walked quickly out the door without looking back. Adrian snarled a laugh.

“Occasionally virtue is its own reward. I could not have gotten cooperation like that by compulsion-not without time, and Wreaking.”

“What did you tell him at the end there?” Ellen asked.

“That he should leave, get his family, and head south as fast as he could. And I laid a minor Wreaking on him, to fool a casual probe with the Power.”

She looked down at the plan. “That’s not marked as a passage,” she said.

“It isn’t; nor will there be any records or municipal permits-though with money, you could do that anyway here. But that man…his name is Botso…says that there was construction here last year. Very mysterious, with government agents telling him to ignore it. This is a very old city; there are many unrecorded catacombs. He has marked where he thinks the entrance is. Come, quickly.”

Her breath caught; they were heading to confront Adrienne in whatever lair she had prepared. I thought I killed her last time. Maybe I can actually do it this time. Hooray, as long as I survive it. Vengeance is sweet but I’m not suicidal about it.

Down, down. One spot where Adrian’s arm stopped her before she could turn a corner.

“What?” she said softly.

“Tōkairin retainers. Where they are keeping Michiko’s body…perhaps to make a point during the deliberations.”

She winced. She didn’t in the least regret shooting Tōkairin Michiko, who had been a murderous sociopath with the powers of a junior-grade goddess and who’d been trying to kill Adrian at the time, not to mention Eric Salvador. Still, the thought of passing by the physical shell, gradually decaying in its deep coma was…

Creepy. But I am the Connoisseur of Creep by now, and that’s relatively minor.

Down, until the lighting looked as if it should have Installed During the Reign of the Red Czar written on it, and the masonry might have come from long-vanished incarnations of this city-the Tbilisi of the Ottomans, or the Safavid Shahs, or Queen Tamar the Great. Until they were in a corridor of old rock and crumbling mortar, with a single bulb hanging from a wire. She looked around: nothing but dimness, dampness, and a smell of old wet stone running into a dead end. He looked around.

“Solid rock for many yards in all directions except above us,” he said. “Guard me.”

She gulped slightly and drew her revolver, trying to be conscious of the long corridor and the ceiling at the same time. Training and Wreakings made it harder to come upon her invisible and impalpable…but not absolutely impossible. Ellen controlled her breathing and pushed fear away, not denying it but denying it the attention that turned into a feedback cycle. Instead she opened her senses and simply waited.

A click. “Got it,” Adrian breathed. “Oh, that was clever, of her. And dangerous, to us.”

Ellen looked down; a square trap-door showed in the corridor’s floor. “Booby-traps?” she said.

“Of course.” A grin. “But I am one of the two most powerful adepts…slightly more powerful than the other, and there are times when brute strength is useful.”

He levered the trapdoor up and dropped through, the glow of his pen-light showing through. “About six feet down. Come.”

She sat on the edge, felt his hand on her shoes, then slid through. He didn’t precisely catch her; it was more a matter of a guiding hand, and enough experience to land without a dangerous shock. They were in a small square room, rather like a largish walk-in closet. This looked more recent, with the marks of power-drills on the walls, and a low tunnel led off. Adrian headed into it and she followed, stooping, the skin between her shoulder blades itching. As they went she tried to imagine how this related to the structure above.

“We must be about below…”

“The main theater,” Adrian said, and stopped.

Ahead of them was a blank oval steel door. Adrian leaned palms and forehead against it. “Oh, clever again,” he said. “This can only be opened from the inside, once it is closed. The locking mechanism is much too massive to move with the Power. And it is silver-plated on the inside, and to either side. I must…I must try to go around.”

They looked at each other, appalled. Nightwalking thorough solid rock for any distance was utterly disorienting. Not quite suicide, but close enough. She opened her mouth to start an argument she knew she would lose-lose, and be left with the body while God knew what happened to the real Adrian. Then a familiar sensation came over her, a coldness, and a little implanted ting-ting-ting feeling at the back of her brain.

“Nightwalker!” Adrian hissed, his hand going to his knife.

There was a chunk from behind the door, and it swung slowly open. Dale Shadowblade stood there, in nondescript dark clothing…and then he smiled, and changed. So swiftly and skillfully that the clothing didn’t fall away during the transition, though it was baggier on the slim dark man.

“Why are you taking on the seeming of the man you killed?” Adrian asked.

His great-grandfather’s brother smiled. “Have you not guessed yet, my old?” he said in impeccable, old-fashioned aristocrat’s French. “Name of a black dog, I should have thought it obvious by now. Yet even your sister, far more suspicious, did not guess.”

“Arnaud!” Adrian said.

“Indeed, Arnaud,” the man…or what had once been a man…laughed. “Now post-corporeal once more. I killed your sister’s Apache…Apache in both senses of the word…not he, me.”

“The powdered silver…”

“Self-administered, so that when we grappled he was paralyzed by the sudden pain.”

“And it is possible-”

“To reinhabit a body vacated by the death of the aetheric form? Yes. Not even a prolonged process, though far from easy. I became interested because possession was one of the few myths that did not seem to have its roots in us. Most said that it arose because we could take the seeming of our victims when we nightwalked, but I suspected otherwise. That savage of your sister’s gave me the empty body to use. Observe…”

The two Shadowspawn locked eyes; as she watched, expression drained from both of them, and Arnaud’s eyes became blank glowing yellow. Communication flowed between them, sensed but as impalpable as if it was water that moved through sand.

Adrian stirred and shook his head. “My God, it is true,” he said. “We all underestimated you, it seems.”

“Yes. And now I shall flit away, a mosquito too elusive to skin as a wolf or shoot from an elephant’s back like tiger. Adieu, mon cher, and I very much hope we never meet again.”

He sauntered away down the path they had followed; Ellen tracked him with her pistol, and he looked over his shoulder for a moment to blow a kiss from his fingertips as he vanished into the darkness.

Adrian shook his head. “He showed me what he had done. Imposssible to lie at that level…no time!”

They stepped through into what might have been a dungeon once, or a section of long-disused sewer or storm-drain dug in the palmy days before the Revolution.

“Her coffin is within,” he said.

“A coffin? She’s in a coffin?” Ellen said. “Adrienne wouldn’t be caught dead in a coffin. Well, you know what I mean,” she added defensively, as he snorted.

The chamber was long and round, cut from the living rock; water glistened here and there as their flashlights moved across a surface that still bore the scars of the drills. Nobody had ever smoothed them, but a mesh of new-gleaming wire covered the whole interior except for the roof.

“See,” he said, directing the little light upward. “They entered in the body, and left as nightwalkers, closing the door behind them. Arnaud…Dale Shadowblade, they thought…locked it behind them. Then the only way to enter would be through the solid roof.”

“Wouldn’t they be afraid of being buried alive? The bomb…”

“This is solid rock and deep. And they could always dig themselves out from the outside afterwards-one can be in two places at once. My sister likes bombs; let us proceed.”

More than a dozen of the elongated boxes stood on frame bases. They didn’t look all that much like coffins; more like featureless footlockers of the appropriate size. One in the center stood on a higher frame than the others, with the Brézé arms in a golden plaque attached to the upper surface.

“Vanity,” Adrian said. “At a guess, this is an abandoned effort at an extension to the sewer system. Easy enough to expunge it from the records…and arrange accidents for all who knew of it. But the time, the patience for such a plan…”

“Maybe she did something like this anywhere there might be a full Council meeting,” Ellen said.

“My sister likes bombs. Let us oblige her.”

They removed their backpacks. Eric and Adrian had made them up; simple blocks of semtex plastic explosive, with mechanical timers. They placed one on each of the…

Coffins. It’s traditional, so let’s call them coffins.

Then Adrian stood by his sister’s, and laid one hand on the back of Ellen’s neck. “Time to bargain,” he said. “And from a position of strength, for once. Let her be obliged to drop into a bomb-ambush of her own.”

The world seemed to blur. For a moment she could see another place-the theater above, with the last screams of the sacrifices just dying away, and the intoxicating-

It’s intoxicating? Oh, damn, I hate it when I get confused like this!

— scent of the blood filling the air, along with the vinagery smell of Shadowspawn excitement and the aggression crowding bred.

sister…i…have…your…body.

Anger/fury/barely restrained amok rage. Then a weird amusement, and: bargain?

quickly!

A sense of internal movement, of personalities emerging from layer upon layer of defenses. An intimacy of perfect hatred from Adrian and a bone-deep reluctance to engage on this level, layers of complex emotion from Adrienne that made Ellen queasy even at this remove, flashes of memory about Adrian that made her squirm with an effort to un-know.

The knowledge that falsehood had become impossible for an instant.

here…it…is…location…under…your…mentor’s…control…can’t…stop…now. beyond…my…power…my seeing…five…years…ago…date…time…place…you…have…twenty…minutes…

so…do…you…now…

The powerful, malevolent consciousness turned to Ellen for an instant:

and…you…will…die…soon…i have…seen…

The link broke. Adrian’s breath was ragged and his face sheened with sweat; for a moment his throat worked as if he were about to vomit, then he controlled it. They ran from one coffin to the next, setting the timers and hitting the buttons. Then they dashed out the door and Adrian paused only long enough to kick it closed behind them-as much to augment the force of the blast when-if as to fulfill the letter of that literally unspoken agreement. Pounding back up the corridor, and he stopped and linked hands. Her foot hit the stirrup running, and she soared upward and landed…

…just in time to see the flash of the katana, but far too late to do anything. Anything but feel the huge impact as it flashed down between neck and shoulder, and the coldness, and the beginning of darkness. A scream felt through the mind, of rage and grief beyond all bearing, and a huge grabbing sensation on the inside of her head.

No, Adrian. Let me go. Let me die.

“Mother of God,” Eric blurted, when he saw the limp figure over Adrian’s shoulder. “What the fuck-”

“No time, you were right, follow me.”

They dashed through the street and into the building. Eric flung himself at the door in a running leap, feet first. The hoarding over the opening came free in a screech of nails, and he fell down with bruising force. He ignored the impact that wooshed the air out of his lungs, the pain of sharp things gouging through his clothes, have to move move move. Adrian leapt over him, and Peter caromed into him just as he started up again. They went down in a cursing tangle, saw Adrian lay his burden down and dash up the stairs heedless. They followed, without time for thought.

Story after story, push the legs like pistons, suck breath, ignore the body’s protest. The top, nothing but scaffolding and boards around the edges, an empty echoing concrete space lost in shadow and darkness save for one portable light. Harvey looked up from the long container and held up his hand, his craggy face underlit into an iron idol of regret and unmoveable determination.

Deadman switch! Eric knew in a moment of despair, and thought he could see the thumb begin to relax.

“Mogh-urdak-tzee, tzee!” Adrian screamed, his hand shooting out in a claw, a bottomless rage in his voice.

“Ufff!”

Eric grunted as if punched in the stomach. Behind him Peter tripped on the last tread of the stairwell and fell full-length. He knew that it was impossible to move, that the world was frozen in one eternal moment in time. His thought returned to bite itself on the tail, over and over, then broke free as breath returned to him.

And Harvey froze, his thumb holding the contact closed. The edge of the Wreaking had paralyzed Eric Salvador; defenses or no, he didn’t like to imagine what it must be to have it thrown like a lance of burning ice directly into his brain.

Adrian walked over and took the mechanism from the older man’s hand, examined it, made a motion over it and set it down.

“I am sorry,” he said, his voice a rasp but with a gentleness in it. “I did not want it to come to this. I owe you very much, my brother, I owe you my soul. But you are too dangerous…and Ellen was killed.”

“Sorry ’bout that too,” Harvey said. “Real sorry. Never wanted-”

Blood burst from his lips and eyes. He went rigid for a single instant, then fell, limp and dead.

“Jesus,” Eric whispered, clutching at his own chest, feeling the distant echo of a force that tore the veins loose and flooded his chest. “Jesus.”

Peter came up beside him, wheezing. “We’ve-”

“Name of a dog, what is that?” Adrian cried, throwing up a hand as if to shield himself from something in the sky.

An instant later the cloudy night outside became white light, frosted like the inside of a bulb, but bright, harsh, flat. Adrian dropped to his knees and clapped his hands to his head. Eric waited to die…

Wait a minute, if the bomb had gone off I’d have been dead before I knew it. It’s only fifteen feet away, for fuck’s sake. My brain wouldn’t have had time even to register the light.

“We lost?” Peter said.

The light faded, changed color, slowly died like the world’s biggest parachute flare. Shadow returned, darker than ever. His head snapped to the gaps in the hoardings, and behind them was no light at all, none of the diffuse glow that a city always showed. Adrian laughed, soft and bitter.

“No. We won. We saved this city. We even saved the corporeals at the theater, though I wish we had not. Somehow she concealed another weapon.”

“That’s a high-level airburst, it must have blanketed most of Georgia and chunks of Armenia and Azerbaijan,” Peter said, going to the edge and peering out through a crack in the plywood. “Yup, city’s blacked out. High enough it wouldn’t do much damage otherwise, though. Maybe a statistical uptick in the cancer rate.”

“Your sister had a backup plan,” Eric said.

“Yes,” Adrian said. “I should have expected it. An intermediate range missile, a confederate of hers in control of some Russian commander; she would not chance a ground burst that might strike too hard, but a high-level one, yes. Probably part of Trimback One, ready to go, and somehow she got another shield. It makes no difference. No, it is better than merely stopping the bomb. I felt my great-grandfather die, and Seraphine, and many another, and the souls they had imprisoned. Now the real war begins, and we have the advantage. Harvey would have been happy to see this.”

“Wait a minute,” Eric said, his mind slipping a little from the diamond point of concentration. “You said Ellen died? Then who was that you were-”

“Come,” Adrian said, an infinite weariness in his voice. “We must get to Cheba and the children. The city will be in chaos, and soon Adrienne will strike what she thinks is the killing blow on the world.”