"We're well settled in and getting some results," Peter Boase said.
"No complaints about the facilities?" Harvey Ledbetter asked.
"The cook, pardon me, the chef, is too good. Fortunately this is a great area for high-impact running and looks like it'll be great for crosscountry skiing, too. Otherwise I'd look like a blond garden slug with limbs, but otherwise no complaints, nada. Anything we want appears like magic as fast as FedEx can fly."
Harvey looked around at the pines. Peter had the wiry, tensile build of a cross-country man, and this would be the perfect ground for it. The old base had been tucked away in a remote valley in Dalarna, designed to ride out a Soviet nuclear strike and provide a center for prolonged resistance. It was blasted deep into the granite up where Sweden faded into Norway in a tangle of hills graduating into mountains. The hills were densely green with fir and birch, and he could hear the sound of trickling water, smell rock and greenery and sap, watch a squirrel run chattering up a tree like a streak of red fire. The sun was bright, though it was well after eight, and it glittered on the long narrow lake below. Snow peaks shone like white salt far to the west, floating like the ramparts of Jotunheim in a saga.
I wish I hadn't thought about that, Harvey thought. Man-eating Ettins. Christ. The stories are all about them, when you get right down to it.
"Better be a bit more explicit about that there progress, Professor," Harvey said.
Peter smiled-he looked much better than he had the last time Harvey saw him, which said a good deal for his basic resilience and toughness.
Gotta remember that the opposite of badass is not weenie, Harvey reminded himself. That's a risky way to think, could lead to underestimating people, which can lead to a bad case of the deads.
"This isn't like any research project I've ever worked on," Boase said. "No bureaucracy, no nonphysical constraints on equipment, only the security considerations are anything like what I'm used to."
"Glad you're happy," Harvey said. "The Brotherhood hasn't done much scientific research before; we didn't think in those terms."
"I suppose you don't, when you're a magician," Boase said.
"It ain't magic. We've known that for generations now."
"But you've been using it as if it were magic."
Harvey could feel a combination of fear and resentment and fascination in the other man's mind; he suspected that the existence of the Power just plain offended the physicist. That it had been in the hands of black-arts secret societies and their esoteric opposite numbers probably offended him even worse. It was a good thing he'd never seen a meeting of the Brotherhood's leadership, with the white robes and doves and meditation and chanting. The meditation actually served a useful purpose; the rest was pure theater, a relic of their origins as witchfinders. Though you could eat the doves, in a pinch.
Harvey shrugged. "For that matter, this operation is really sorta off the reservation, Adrian bulldozin' his own priorities through. Since he controls the financing, no reason for the leadership not to go along. Now, about the results?"
Boase smiled. "I actually got nearly all the theory done while I was at Rancho Sangre," he said.
For a moment his handsome, good-natured face turned savage. "And she'd really be going to regret that if she were still alive."
"If she were still alive, you'd still be there. Now, the results."
"The essential thing was realizing that the Shadowspawn brain doesn't create the oomph that you guys call the Power. It just modulates it, like a transistor does electric currents; the basic force comes from the substrate of the universe. Saying that someone is 'strong in the Power' just means they can tap more without frying their neural circuitry, the centers that step it up and direct it. But a brain is a physical object, and what one object does another can do."
"Wait a minute, you've got some sort of computer that can use the Power?"
Boase shook his head. "Oh, no. Not for a long time, like two or three paradigm shifts in our ability to process information. Generations, even if the whole world were trying really hard. A computer as we know it, a Turing machine, is far too, ah, too coarse a mechanism. The brain has a subatomic, a quantum element that's essential to consciousness, and it's that part that interacts with the substrate of the universe, the holographic-"
The words stopped making sense; Harvey shook his head impatiently.
"Cut to the chase."
"Okay, we'd need a quantum computer as sophisticated as a brain to really handle the Power. With that we could fry any protoplasmic adept. We'd be the next thing to God, which worries me a little, but we don't have it and we aren't going to in our lifetimes anyway. But. The way silver screws up the Power, and the transuranics, was a clue. There's one simple thing that we thought we could do with the electromagnetic spectrum, provided we-"
Boase lapsed into Old High Technicalese again; Harvey spoke with dangerous patience:
"Don't tell me about the dilithium crystals, boy, just tell me what they can do?"
Peter smiled beatifically, glanced at his phone's time display, and waved a hand behind him.
"Look," he said. "I was stalling for this."
Harvey turned and did. "Well, fuck me blind," he said mildly, blinking in astonishment.
That was a particularly appropriate oath. The entrance to the complex was disguised as a farmhouse, red painted, with barns and outbuildings of the same, all looking considerably run-down; it had been mothballed most of a generation ago, and the new occupants had left as much of the patina of neglect as they could. The dirt road was more like two ruts through weeds, and only a careful observer would have noticed the wear of a great many trucks last year.
The actual entrance to the tunnels was through the "barn," which had doors big enough for heavy vehicles; the whole thing was splendidly camouflaged, and the power source was an underground water turbine powered by a mountain stream, so there wasn't even much of a heat signature.
None of that meant anything to the Power, of course. Even Harvey's modest talent could sense the minds there, the flow of energies, and feel the bunching of world-lines. It was like a smell. The ability had evolved to track down humans doing their very best to hide-in caves, among other things-and to foil competitors equipped with the same brain centers.
Everything had an effect on the world, casting its shadow back from the infinite spray of possible futures into the present. A grain of sand on the other side of the galaxy did, though of course that was far too faint even for the greatest adept to detect. People most of all, because their minds touched the foaming substrate of reality even if they couldn't mold it the way a Power wielder did.
Only now it isn't there and I can't smell a thing, he thought. It's like the Power doesn't apply there. But not in a way that would be obvious if I didn't already know otherwise. It's just about the most dramatic undramatic thing conceivable, when you think about it.
"It's like it's vanished," he said, wondering. "Not like a silver barrier. You can feel that even if you can't get through it. Silver's like a hole in the universe, or like having a tooth drilled if you try to probe. This isn't an absence, it's as if there's nothing there to sense."
Boase was grinning from ear to ear. "How's that for accelerated R and D-"
Pop.
Harvey blinked. Everything was back, and now he could hardly believe that he hadn't noticed anything before.
"Whoa, that is one odd effect," Harvey said. "Sorta tampering with reality, if you know what I mean. Now you don't see it, now you do, and the whole universe switched over from one to t'other without making no fuss I could detect."
Boase was scowling and punching at his phone. He looked up as he did.
"Says the walking quantum effects manipulator!" he said. " You people have been screwing with my nice rationalistic if indeterminate worldview for years now."
Harvey was grinning too, happy enough that not even being classed with the Shadowspawn annoyed him. He supposed that from the point of view of someone who couldn't Wreak at all, it was fair enough.
"Hey, wait a minute," Boase said thoughtfully, pausing in midprod at the smartscreen. "I think I've just had a thought."
"Happens to most people with functioning brain stems every now and then. What sort of thought?"
"The Fermi Paradox."
"What…Oh, why we haven't had little green men droppin' in on us in flying saucers?"
"Yes. We know there are planets around most stars and a lot of them are Earth-like, we know that for sure now. Why hasn't anyone shown up or at least sent a message? But it just occurred to me that it's quite likely any species with a conscious brain would eventually evolve the Power-or some subset of every species would. And that means no science."
"How so?"
"Well, to invent the scientific method, you've got to believe in an orderly, rational, deterministic universe. The sort of billiard-ball world Newton and Laplace thought they were discovering."
"Hell, that isn't the whole truth, is it?"
"No, but it's the indispensible first step. But if the Power is around, the universe wouldn't feel that way. It would be magical!"
The word sounded slightly obscene in the scientist's mouth. He went on:
"It would be irrational, arbitrary. Mhabrogast glyphs, water running uphill because you wanted it to, doing things because they felt lucky, shaping reality by sheer willpower. I don't see how you could even get as far as a Hellenistic view of the world with that stuff around. Not if you're living in a fairy-tale world for real. It would look like Hansel and Gretel all the way down, and that means you'd never discover any way to really analyze the world-or even just the Power. And without that, you'd always be limited to what brains could handle, which means no interstellar flight. And if you had telepathy, would you ever want radio?"
"Phones are a lot less trouble."
"But not at first. And you'd never think that way to begin with."
Harvey looked up into the blue arch of the sky. "Oh, great, a universe full of Shadowspawn."
"Except here."
"Except here from the Bronze Age to the Victorians," Harvey said. He slapped Boase on the back hard enough to stagger him a little. "And with your help, Professor, we're going to keep it that way!"
Peter shrugged, embarrassed. "Anyway, the effect only lasted thirty-eight seconds," he said disgustedly. "Come on, Duquesne-"
A conversation happened; Harvey Ledbetter didn't even try to follow it. For one thing it was in New Middle Physics Babbleonian, a language he had never learned, and for another, unless he wanted to Wreak he could hear only half of it.
"What happened?" he said, when the other American pocketed his phone.
"Well-"
Harvey listened to two sentences and then held up a hand. "In Ignoramish!" he protested. "Pretend you're Samantha Carter trying to tell O'Neil something."
"Oh, you watched SG-1 when you were a kid too?"
"Professor!" Harvey said; and he'd been a young adult, which suddenly made him feel his sixty-odd years more.
Boase stood silent for a minute, obviously lost in thought, then shook himself.
"Ah…we blew a fuse."
"That mean what it sounds like?"
"No, it's just a metaphor, and not a very good one either. Equipment failure, let's say. There was a spillover of…A fuse blew. But we have proof of concept."
" Yes!" Harvey shouted, punching his fist in the air.
When it came down he pointed his finger at the younger man's face.
"Son, if Duquesne did have a spunky, red-haired daughter, your handsome assistant ashes would get thoroughly hauled. She'd not only be smooching you, she'd be throwing herself on her back and throwing her heels towards her ears right this-"
"Hey, I'm not his assistant!" Boase said. "Hell, I'm his boss, if anything. I'm the theorist. He's the experimentalist. And most physicists do their best work in their thirties!"
"Yeah, he's just the man with the soldering iron." Harvey chortled. "You run along now and make one that's reliable for days at a time and doesn't weigh more than half a ton. Something we could put on an eighteen-wheeler truck and not take up more than, oh, half the load would do right nice."
"Wait a minute! Going from proof of concept to-"
"You git, you high-forehead wonder, you!"
Harvey stood quiet for a moment and then pulled out his own phone. It had a specialized little program that not only ate all record of the conversation at either end but erased it from the servers in between.
I come from a place northwest of San Antonio, he thought whimsically, as he waited for the acknowledgment icon as the little machines shook hands. Paranoia County.
Operation sheet is go, he tapped out.
It is?
Yeah. Fondest expectations and all.
A long pause, and then: All right. I'll want details on that, but provided you satisfy me, Defarge can proceed. Surprised you got Mowgli to sign off on it.
I'm persuasive.
He turned off the phone function and did a purge just to be sure, then drew back his arm and threw. The little black oblong soared away, turning in the air and then hitting a lakeside rock with a faint crack . The pieces went into the lake like a string of pebbles, and then the crystal blue water closed over them.
"Hallelujah," he whispered.
Deep within his mind an image of a mountain city grew. And a fire brighter than a thousand suns. When he spoke again, for a moment his voice was an exultant shout that echoed off the hills: " 'For I am become death, breaker of worlds.'"
"At last, a place where neither of us sticks out, Jack," Anjali Guha said, looking out the window of her side of the cab. "Here in the entranceway to Europe."
"More like the stinking lower intestine of Europe," he said sourly, slumped behind the wheel of the waiting vehicle; the elevation gave a good view. "Which orifice it uses to eat and crap."
"I grant it is not beautiful," she said, and sniffed at air heavy with a mixture of stale brackish water and every variety of hydrocarbon. "Nor is it a rose garden."
Europoort-Scheldt wasn't. The whole area was reclaimed marshland in the Scheldt delta, flat as a tabletop, and covered in gray concrete for the most part to match the gray North Sea just visible beyond the cranes and container blocks, and the gray November sky above. The stacks of shipping containers around them were the most colorful things in sight, their blue and red and yellow in contrast to the many acres of oil refinery, the storage tanks, and the vast coal and iron-ore heaps. Boxy, hulking modern freighters plowed the waters, and heavy trucks and strings of freight cars moved in and out in an intricate computer-controlled dance.
"Still, Veracruz was worse."
"Yeah, it literally smelled like shit. This just smells like PetroDystopiaLand."
But they both did fit in with the human geography; Farmer had a generic northwest European look, as long as he didn't open his mouth and expose his heavily accented Dutch or French or American-variety English, and the Netherlands' long-standing connections with the east made her South Asian features boringly unremarkable anywhere outside the depths of tulip-growing rural Blondistan.
Besides which, I speak better Dutch than Jack does, she thought a little snidely. Better English, too, if you want to be picky, and I do .
They were dressed in stained blue overalls, and they had really good forged IDs as well. None of that would help them if some Shadowspawn simply followed a line of might-be down to the docks. Her own slight talent was already starting to shrill at her, a feeling like giant snake slithering through her dreams. Or as if her mind had looked too long into the sun, a rolling wave of flame and heat coming at her out of the future. On many of the possible world-lines that bomb was going to send lives by the tens of thousands into the stratosphere in a gout of radioactive flame.
Possibly including all the strongest adult Shadowspawn, she thought with savage satisfaction. Oh, indeed, yes. Decapitation! So many years of defeat, and at last victory is possible.
The freighter was the CM Pavlina, Panama-registered with a mixed but mainly Filipino crew, currently out of Mexico with a cargo that was officially mainly industrial parts. The Panamax cranes moved like vast robotic elephants as the last of the load came ashore, neatly grouped in rectangles four containers high, half a dozen technicians performing labor that would once have taken hundreds of stevedores days of effort.
The control unit on their dashboard beeped as the code for the container matched that loaded into the truck's computer. In a few years this wouldn't need humans at all…or perhaps in a few years this would be broken ruins, with the sea reclaiming it and the metal gantry shapes tilting up out of the mud.
Our job is to see that it does not happen. No wonder my precog is blinded, with Trimback facing us!
Jack engaged the engine and let the big eighteen-wheeler purr forward; it was a nearly new Daimler hybrid, and the all-glass control panel looked like an F-42's. It also prompted the driver in a female German voice that somehow conveyed a grating, hectoring, anal-retentive personality along with a strong Mecklenburger accent.
"Very slow," it said. "Continue strictly on this line-"
A glowing track came up on the screen forward of the wheel, with an outline of the truck approaching a matching form beneath the crane.
"Halt! Reverse ten centimeters!"
"Shut up; it's a fucking truck and I'm only two inches off!"
"Halt! Reverse ten-"
" Shut up, you fucking Nazi bitch!" Jack screamed, hammering a fist on the wheel and punching the controls more or less at random until he found the mute function; then he tapped the ready icon on the screen.
"Ve haffwayz of making you stop talkink!" he shouted, then added: "Sorry," in more normal tones.
Oh, my, but Jack is not wired too tightly at all now and then, Guha thought-not for the first time. At least I only scream when I am dreaming.
The screen switched to one of the pickups on the cab of the truck, showing the huge four-legged crane as it trundled over on its man-high wheels. The heavy weight spooled down smoothly and landed on the truck bed with a muffled clunk. Clamps were inserted and turned. Guha hopped down briefly, did a visual examination to confirm the video and sensors, and then climbed back in.
"You may now proceed to exit gate seventy-six-B," the truck said. "Please follow the indicated route. Do not deviate from the route or Europoort Security will be alerted. A condition of heightened security awareness is in force. Thank you."
" Fuck you, bitch!" Jack snarled, as he pulled away.
"It's just a truck, Jack," Guha soothed.
"Then it won't mind me calling it names, will it?" he grumbled.
Guha slipped a hand inside the toolbox and let it rest on the compact little Steyr machine pistol there; it wouldn't be much use if an adept were around, but it would kill stray renfields very effectively. The gray sky began to drizzle, and Jack was driving as much by the telescreens as through the windshield. They slowed again for the exit scan. There were more personnel there than usual.
"Uh-oh," Jack said softly.
The extra personnel were in camo fatigues and body armor; as they came closer she saw that they had C7 assault rifles and wore badges shaped like a burning grenade.
" Koninklijke Marechaussee," she muttered. "So much for machine pistols. And they are not renfields. Not really, they do not know for whom they are working."
"Big fucking difference," Jack muttered.
Koninklijke Marechaussee meant Royal Gendarmerie; specialists in border protection and counterterrorism work, with a well-deserved reputation for professionalism. This wasn't a problem you could solve by slipping a couple of hundred euros from hand to hand.
And they had a van that looked like it was full of some sort of detection equipment to add to the usual scanners; she could sense its buzzing activity. The forty-foot container behind them was lined with lead fabric, among other things, but it did have a nuclear weapon in it, and it was a bomb made by amateur fanatics for a one-off use at that.
"You take care of the gendarmes," Jack said quietly. "I'll fox the machinery."
Guha nodded stiffly. "I would guess someone found the little workshop of the jihadi elves in Veracruz," she said. "And the DNA would tell them who made it."
The workshop would have, besides half a dozen very decayed bodies with interesting personal dossiers, an underground facility with unmistakable traces showing that someone had been handling plutonium there. Even if the original theft from Seversk hadn't been detected, which it probably had, the Veracruz thing would have security forces all over the world on the alert; even the Shadowspawn might be concerned, since they were more vulnerable to ionizing radiation than true humans anyway, especially when night-walking or postcorporeal.
Guha smiled grimly. A very long time ago, human rebels had slain Shadowspawn with everything from silver arrowheads to poison, but they had always buried the bodies with carved disks of natural pitchblende-uraninite-in the grave as well.
To make sure they stayed dead.
She licked dry lips as the computers in the gendarmes' equipment identified the serial number on the container and shook hands with the truck's own IT system and the Europoort mainframe. One of the military police held up a hand, carefully not standing in the way where a desperate terrorist might have run him down; the road had a pop-up toothed barrier that would rip their wheels to ribbons if they tried that anyway.
Another walked towards her side of the cab, and two more went towards the cargo containers with sensor paddles in their hands.
My, my, would they not get a surprise if they looked in there! she thought, fighting down a hysterical giggle.
"Can I help you, sir?" she said in excellent Dutch as she keyed down the window.
Jack slumped down in his seat; he couldn't go into full trance here, but that was close. And he had the easier task, dealing with the coarse and simple processes inside computer circuits. Though they were both going to be very shaky after this. Using the Power when you didn't have the biochemical equipment to feed on others-or even to use the ghastly stored blood that was a very bad alternative-meant that you were taking it out of yourself.
Guha felt a familiar, complex set of emotions shudder through her hindbrain. A dark longing that could never be satisfied, even if you gave in to it. She had enough of the inheritance to want to feed, but blood would simply be contaminated seawater to her stomach. Best not to think about it. That way lay madness; that way lay Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory and Jeffrey Dahmer.
I do not know if the ones like Sheila Poison are luckier or even farther down the ramp to Hell, she thought. She could feed. She does use Red Cross blood, foul though that tastes, to give her strength. She could give in to the temptation, while I know it would be useless. She probably even feels that she is better because she has a real choice and refuses the power, the ecstasy…I am not a bad person. I am just a good person who wants to do bad things. I know giving in would do nothing except make me hate myself even more.
But the needs coiled down in the base of her skull knew nothing of reason or consequences. They just wanted. And they never went away, though it was worse when she used the Power.
" Goede middag, mevrouw," the yellow-haired gendarme said with a flat, nasal accent in his standard Dutch, which meant he'd probably grown up speaking Frisian. "Papers, please."
"Thank you," he added as she handed over the manifest and the trucks papers and her and Jack's-false-IDs.
She noticed a wachtmeesters single chevron on his sleeve, which made him a sergeant, more or less. He had a headset monocle deployed over one eye, part of a full mil spec infantry IT outfit; it would be reading her face and running the digitized pattern through the EU database, and matching it to the papers she'd just given him. That didn't worry her; planting data in computers just wasn't very difficult for the Brotherhood's specialists, who combined high-level conventional IT skills with low-level Wreaking. That worked better than the usual Shadowspawn habit of simply making the system forget them. A false positive was much more convincing than mere absence.
She wasn't very worried that they were slightly in violation of EU regulation (EC) No. 561/2006 on driver rest periods either, which just added a touch of authenticity. Nobody could actually abide by all of Brussels' pettifogging micromanagement even if they wanted to; sliding around it was a way of life.
"This all seems to be in order," the man said.
But he's tense. Not very tense, but alert. So if this is but a routine check and everything's in order, why -
"We will be doing a physical inspection of this container, madam," he said. "This is purely routine, due to the heightened state of alert currently in force."
He smiled, politely. So did the woman trooper behind him, with the C7 on the assault sling across her armored torso. Everyone was paranoid about this sort of thing since Marseilles.
The real irony was that if she'd been the jihadi lunatic they were looking for, she'd have a deadman switch rigged to the bomb, and Europoort-Scheldt and much of Rotterdam would cease to exist about now.
Training kept her from snarling. She couldn't just bludgeon his mind the way a purebred might. Instead…
Warmth. Such a pretty face. Yes, you have warm feelings for me. Mother/sister/lover. Look into my eyes…
Feeling emotions was easy. Manipulating them was much harder; you had to sort of tie them to your own, then change what you felt. It took effort, and she could feel it drawing on the inner reserve, as if something deep inside her were draining away like blood through a wound. Guha smiled and gazed into his eyes, blue meeting a brown so dark it was almost completely black.
Such a nice young man. He joined the gendarmerie because he wanted to help people, to protect them. We know each other. We trust each other…
The man blinked. "I'm…I'm very sorry to bother you," he said, mumbling a little.
The sharp blue eyes had lost their focus. He slurred in his birth speech, enough like both English and Dutch that she could follow along:
" Mem…mem…"
She remembered her own mother: the warmth, the comfort, the security that were like nothing you ever felt again.
"It's just that we're behind schedule," she murmured. "You can see that. And there're all these people behind us, waiting. We don't want to get into trouble. You don't want to cause us trouble…"
She could feel the decision crystallizing in his mind, like a muscle flexing under her fingertips.
"What's the scanner say?" he said over his shoulder.
The woman with the assault rifle glanced at the team with the paddles and whispered, probably into a throat-button pickup.
"Absolutely clean," she said. "But they've got the machinery ready to open the container."
She looked and sounded part Indonesian by background, and was even younger, without any rank badges at all. Her mind felt a little puzzled by her superior's actions.
"Let them by, then."
"Sergeant, we're supposed-"
"We're supposed to stop one-tenth of one percent at random and so far we're over quota. The next but ten will do just as well. Pass this one through."
The truck accelerated soundlessly save for a slight whine of electrics as the barrier went up and the spikes sank into the roadway, then with a low burbling mumble as the turbodiesel cut in. The scraggly clutter of the area around the Europoort faded as they swung onto the A15 snelweg that ran all the way to the Ruhr; if you wanted to hide a needle, the best place was in a pile of needles, not a haystack, and this road swarmed with big trucks hauling cargo containers.
"You okay, Anni?"
Guha shook her head, clasping her arms around her middle. "Not so great, Jack. Overstrained. That was a stubborn man."
Cold. Empty, cold, alone. A bit nauseous too.
"Yeah, squareheads are like that. You did a great job. We definitely weren't the droids they were looking for."
She nodded jerkily, feeling his concern and walling it off. They pulled off into a desolate little place with just enough to merit the title of a truck stop, and the European equivalent of a motel; the noise of the thundering traffic was louder when they had parked and opened the door. A youngish man lounging against a cheap elderly hybrid threw away a cigarette and came over to meet them: thin and dark and shifty eyed.
"Here are the papers," Jack said, waving them while he spoke in the Italian that was their common language; it was easier than any of the other Western tongues for a Romanian speaker to acquire. "And here are three thousand euros in advance. You get the container to Istanbul and you get twenty more."
" Si, si," the man said, smiling like a lamprey. "I know this is an important cargo, me. Very important, very valuable, eh?"
Beneath the growing physical misery, Guha felt a little comfort; you didn't have to have the old blood to be a bastard. Ordinary humans could manage that quite well on their own. Jack took a stride closer and his hand moved. From the mercenary driver's sudden guukkk! and wide-eyed stillness Guha knew what the other Brotherhood agent had grabbed.
"And, Shandor, if it doesn't get there, or if anyone opens that container, I will hunt you down and kill you. Slowly, with lots of cutting and burning and peeling and taking your teeth out one at a time, so you beg to die first. Believe me, the teeth hurt even worse than the balls. I know."
Shandor tried to smile ingratiatingly, and Jack squeezed harder while staring into the man's eyes and smiling in a completely different way. She knew that look; nobody with any experience would doubt that Jack meant exactly what he said, or that he could do it. A faint scream and a very quick nod came together. The Brotherhood agent stepped back, and the driver quickly scrubbed a hand across his face to wipe away gelid sweat.
"Here's an extra thousand because I like the swift and decisive way you accept the reality principle," Jack said, extending a sheaf of bills, which was half snatched. "Don't fuck up."
Guha felt herself swaying as her partner came back, but she managed to remain upright until the truck pulled away towards the access ramp. Then she let herself lean against him as he helped her into the room they'd rented. Then she stumbled and half collapsed to fall facedown on the bed, shivering. The pain seemed to be throughout her, as if it were following her veins, or her nerves where they ran through the flesh.
Dimly she was conscious of hands undressing her, getting her into the bed, the sting of an injection. The pain was still there, but it ceased to matter quite so much as peace flowed out from the spot on her arm. Water and broth were held to her lips.
"So hungry, Jack," she said. "So hungry!"
"It'll be all right," he said, holding her awkwardly against his shoulder. "It'll be all right. Don't worry. We're going to get them all."
Three days later she looked at the text. " California?"
Jack shrugged. "Looks like it."
"What about the bloody bomb?"
"It may actually be safer if we don't go near it," he said. " We might draw the attention of a Shadowspawn adept. By itself-"
"It stands out like a bloody fireworks!"
"Yeah, again. That's why we're holding it in Istanbul for now. Harvey says he's working a way to disguise it, something new and radical. Plenty of time before Tbilisi."
She blew out her lips. "This is bad tradecraft."
"Yeah…I seem to say that a lot, you know? And now we'll be working with the Boy Wonder again." He grimaced at her frown. "Okay, I know he saved you. Hell, we'd all have died in that shitty motel if he hadn't shown up. So I'm grateful, right, but I don't like him."
"Or anyone else, Jack."
He sighed. "At least with him picking up the tab we don't have to fly coach."
"Magnificent, Great-grandfather," Adrienne said sincerely. "Merely an amusement, simply duck with figs and olives, but magnificent. Even better than the lemon-cured baby scallops."
"You eat with all the enjoyment of one back from the dead," Etienne said. "And I should know, since I am dead."
"Only the least important part of you," Adrienne replied graciously.
They were dining on one of the outdoor terraces of the Villa Leopolda, looking down over the acres of cypress and olive trees that studded the gardens and the moonlit waters of the Cote d'Azur far below. The villa was a Belle Epoque fantasy of tile and terra cotta and marble, originally built on a whim financed by colonial plunder over a century ago, like some Edwardian dream of ancient Rome. The mild warmth of the air was full of the scents of roses and lady-of-the-night jasmine; bougainvillea frothed down from the balconies overlooking them; below was a tumble of jeweled lights and gardens and the running lights of the yachts in the basins below.
"Such a pity that King Leopold did not transition to postcorporeal successfully," Seraphine said.
She was wearing the body she'd been born with, or the etheric equivalent: tall for a nineteenth-century Frenchwoman, and chestnut haired.
"Have I ever told you of the wonderful tour of his Congo Free State that we took in 'aught-three? The Force Publique officers were such good company, charming rogues. And their Batanga mercenaries were like frisky puppies, with their filed teeth and simple, earthy, substantial cuisine. A true example of the civilizing mission, a veritable Utopia in the jungle."
Servants whose minds were a careful wash of no-thought whisked away the dishes, and brought out the entree: a tiny suckling pig, its crisp skin delicately scented with lavender. Along with it came the first mountain mushrooms of the season, sauteed with onion and a little garlic, a dash of white wine, fresh tomatoes and tarragon, with just a touch of lemon juice and sea salt.
You have told me of your Congolese tour only seventeen thousand, three hundred and forty-two times, ma chere bisaieul, Adrienne thought. Beginning when I was about six. Though it sounds like a great deal of fun, if one enjoys the tropics; severed hands as currency, what a droll idea.
"Yes," Etienne said. "Of course, a golden haze of nostalgia is only to be expected; in Europe in those days a certain discretion was required, whereas we could be quite free in the Free State, if you will pardon the pun. Poor Leopold. One would have thought him a natural, and his father was of a Black Dawn lodge, though of course that was before the breeding program really got under way on scientific principles. He could night-walk, a little, though his manifestation was weak…It did take several minutes for his matrix to disintegrate after his body died, and it was rather interesting to witness."
"How we all laughed!" Seraphine said reminiscently, with a tinkling chuckle. "Seldom have I felt such utter despair. Subjectively his death must have lasted a thousand years."
"To hope for immortality and then have it snatched away…that would be exquisite," Adrienne admitted. "My, but this suckling pig is exquisite as well!"
"Of the season," Seraphine said. "But in spring, ah, the Carre d'agneau a la Provencale is superb here! We get ours from this shepherd in the mountains."
"Only here in the south does one experience lamb as it truly should be prepared," Etienne agreed. "Not only the herbs with which it is cooked, but the herbs on which its mother feeds in life up in the mountains and passes on to the lamb as it nurses."
Adrienne nodded and took a sip of her wine: a local vintage of no great fame, but more than adequate. The pork was indeed meltingly tender but firm enough for texture, and the kiss of the scallions and garlic in the oil that had been brushed on its surface complemented it completely. Not a complex dish, but one requiring real skill.
I must remember that satiety is a trap lurking before the feet of eternity, she thought. Keep the capacity to enjoy the simple things, or life might well become a burden.
The warm apricot tart with a dash of brandy went with the meal beautifully beneath the pale stars.
"Nice has grown too large," she said, sipping at the after-dinner pastis. "Does this not illustrate my point? At this stage of a dinner al fresco, one wishes to see the stars."
"True, true," her great-grandfather said indulgently. "You have convinced me, my descendant." A glimpse of something feral: "It would be well not to become tiresome, like your brother and his ludicrous earnestness."
"Oh, but it is in a much better cause, Etienne," Seraphine said soothingly. "And the dear girl has a point. I remember what this place was like when dear Leopold first built it. The night sky was truly lovely."
"True," Etienne said, mollified. "And at least the lad still shows good taste. That 'wife' of his…worthy of draining to the last drop, slowly, over years."
" Oh, yes," Adrienne said, lost in thought for an instant; when she blinked all three of the Shadowspawn were wearing identical smiles.
"Despite his convincing repentance, I still think he might have some sort of childish disruption planned for the Council meeting," Etienne grumbled. "That would make me truly displeased."
"Oh, I think we can manage to keep him from playing any reprehensible pranks," Adrienne said warmly.
They chatted idly for a while; the upcoming meeting in Tbilisi was the main topic, usually with an undertone of malicious gossip.
"And now for the true dessert," Seraphine said happily, and waved her hand.
The four chained to the fretted bronze poles began to scream as their vocal cords obeyed them once more. The Shadowspawn listened appreciatively.
"The children of the night, what music they make," Adrienne said, and all three laughed.
Then the victims stopped, panting and sobbing and transfixed as the lambent yellow eyes rested on them, speaking to instincts older than the age of polished stone. Adrienne had to admit it was a piquant group: a handsome French couple in athletic and well-kept middle age, and their teenage son and daughter, the beginning and end of the prime feeding years. The relationships offered so many interesting variations on emotional pain and degradation, as well as straightforward physical torment.
Their minds were a roil of terrified speculation already; being kidnapped and then left naked and unable to utter a sound during the meal was an excellent preliminary. So were the toys and cushions and implements scattered ready across the marble terrace between the terracotta jars with their trailing flowers, the little glowing brazier, and the expressionless servants standing by with hot, scented damp towels and fluffy dry ones.
Seraphine rose and let her clothes fall away as she did, falling through the momentarily impalpable substance of her body; then she transformed to a statuesque blonde.
"I've always favored this form for energetic amusements," she said. "A real strapping Danish Valkyrie."
She went to the mother of the family and gently touched her face, picking up a tear on one fingertip and then tasting it.
"Who…who are you?" the woman said. "Oh, God, you changed!"
"We are the purpose of your being, ma petite," Seraphine said. "All your lives you have been walking towards this moment, this service of a purpose beyond your comprehension. Now it has come, for you and these whom you love so much. This night is all that you have left; be wholly present in what you are about to experience! It will be so intense."
She began to scream again as the sense of the words sank home and Etienne transformed, stalking forward stiff legged, with the wolf's great head held low. Seraphine flicked the chains open with her mind and threw the woman to the cushions.
Adrienne rose and sauntered over to the husband.
"And soon we will do this to the whole world," she murmured, stroking him as Seraphine fed and then lifted her face to the stars, blood running from the corners of her mouth, and her sulfur yellow eyes slitted in joy. "To literalize the metaphor."