Shadows of Falling Night (33 page)

She would have loved it herself as a kid, but her family had never even made it to Orlando; some of the rides looked truly spectacular, the two-hundred-foot-high Ferris wheel in particular. It was well over a century old, too, though the gondolas were a fortunately much younger product of an early 21st-century restoration.

“Thank you,” Adrian said at the Ferris wheel’s ticket booth.

This time it wasn’t all old-world charm, or even the thousand euros. She could see something flicker in the attendant’s eyes as he changed his mind about telling them the ride was just now closing down. There were fifteen gondolas on the great wheel; they saw Peter and Cheba and the children into one. The great machine clanked and rumbled as it advanced to the next position.

Eric took a step back into the shadow. He had a gift for being inconspicuous, possibly just his training as a detective, or possibly his trace of the Power magnifying it. Two sets of footsteps approached. For a moment Ellen didn’t recognize the dark hook-nosed man in the lead—his hair was cropped close now, and he wore a casual-elegant dark suit with a camel’s hair overcoat draped across his shoulders cloak-fashion. He took a last puff of the cigarette he held between thumb and forefinger and flicked it away. His lucy/renfield, Kai, walked behind, silent and blank faced in her blue skirt-suit, one hand casually inside her open purse. Adrian nodded and extended a hand.

It wasn’t invitation to shake; they touched fingers in a gesture Ellen had seen among Shadowspawn before. Without looking back at her Adrian said:

“It is him, and in the flesh.”

It was easy enough for Shadowspawn to imitate each other in aetheric form, as long as they had some DNA for a template. A nightwalker who was really expert at imitating auras could fool even another adept unless there was direct contact; that was one point of the gesture. Dale Shadowblade flicked his eyes to her and Eric, then inclined his head and motioned to the gondola. They all climbed in and the machinery swept them up, up and up until even through the wet winter’s night the Prater and the greater Vienna beyond were a sweep of multicolored beauty.
Faintly, she could hear the delighted laughter of the children from above. It seemed—and did—to come from another dimension, one where normal things existed and monsters did not stalk the waking world.

“I will speak to you through her,” Kai said, and in French.

No, not Kai,
Ellen thought.

The voice was hers, and even the slightly slurred nasal urban working-class East Coast American accent, but the whole tone and cadence were different. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but she thought the girl’s pupils had expanded until they swallowed the iris and left only pools of black. Beside her she could feel Eric tense very slightly, like a hunting dog pointing. Adrian shrugged, indifferent to eccentricity and used to it.

“What do you have to say?”

“That Adrienne did indeed commission me to kill your Great-uncle Arnaud, for a beginning.”

Adrian shrugged again. “I had assumed that. You will of course be unwilling to state that before the others.”

Kai chuckled, and Ellen shivered a little at the grating sound.
I’ve hated Kai ever since I met the vicious little bitch,
she thought.

Among other things she’d acted as a Judas goat luring victims for her master and participated in the kills.

But right now, I can actually feel a little pity for her.

“Unwilling to die? Most certainly!” Dale said. “At least the Final Death. But possibly the body’s death, if I can get out from under
her
.”

“Then what use are you to me? You confirm something I already know, and give me no proof to use.”

“It is simple; demand that she produce me to prove my innocence. Furthermore, you may now swear—and demonstrate—that Dale Shadowblade agreed that Adrienne ordered him to kill her great-uncle, while
he was under his brother’s protection on the train. That ought to be reasonably safe for you, if done in public and with care.”

The assassin lit another cigarette and looked out over Vienna. There was an interval of silence that felt like a steel string bending.

“Why?” Adrian said softly. “Any of us would have killed Arnaud, under the right circumstances. But why would she compel another to do so, and at such a crucial time?”

“He was the weak link. He was her original conduit to her great-grandfather, some time ago. It was a long considered plan, you understand. But he was developing…very strong reservations about her plans.”

“What sort of reservations? About Trimback Two?”

Dale shrugged. It was oddly disconcerting to have the body language in a conversation coming from one person, while the actual voice came from another. It produced an odd mental stutter, and made it that much harder to analyze the meaning of either. Doubtless that was part of the purpose of a tactic weird even by Shadowspawn standards.

“Not so much that as the little subplot you discovered considering the Brotherhood rogue and his bomb. Indeed, his last words to me were about that. He did not save his life, but it did make me think. Adrienne is very clever, but perhaps not as clever as she thinks, and she has a tendency to think of others as mere chess pieces for her cunning hand to move. Using this Harvey as a chess piece takes arrogance to the borders of folly, given his record—Shadowspawn who underestimated him before tended to die as did Tōkairin Michiko and her grandfather. And using her great-grandfather so, that lies beyond those boundaries into outright madness.”

“Ah,” Adrian said. “That has puzzled me. How does she plan to remove
herself and her principal supporters from Tbilisi at the crucial moment without alerting the Council?”

“She does not. Somehow, she plans to preserve herself—and her favored ones—
through
the explosion. Too clever by half, eh? And it makes everyone in her party far too dependent on her for survival at the crucial moment. I do not find “trust me” a very convincing argument. Perhaps her definition of
rival
extends further than she says.”

Adrian spread his hands palm down, a gesture that said:
you have a point
.

“And you wish from me? Protection, perhaps?”

Dale Shadowblade laughed, a dry chuckle; horribly, Kai echoed it in a shrill giggle with exactly the same rhythm, like the very same sound moved up several octaves.

“The only protection for me is for Adrienne to die the Final Death, and to stay very much out of your way, my…friend. With the plague unleashed, you will have enough to occupy you for a good long time, I think. I wish to avoid the Final Death as long as I may.”

The wheel turned as they talked, which Ellen hoped wasn’t too symbolic, or too much of an omen, and came to a stop at the entrance. Dale and Kai stepped out and walked away without another word, past the knot of park officials standing and arguing with each other, waving pieces of paper and tablets.

“I’m sorry if there’s a problem,
meine Damen und Herren
,” Adrian said smoothly, in faultless Viennese German. “I am truly sorry if we have violated any park regulations, but my children would have been so disappointed to miss this historic ride. We’ve come all the way from California, and our time is so limited. We have nothing like this at home, after all!”

“Oh, you
are
a smoothie!” Ellen murmured as they walked past, putting
her arm through his. “You didn’t even have to spread any more cash around. Unless you were just telling them we aren’t the droids they are looking for?”

“No, no Wreaking. And while you can bribe some Austrians, it would be very risky to try it on a petty scale, openly and in a mixed group. Too much
ordnungsliebe
, even this far south and east.”

He turned his head to Eric; unless someone was using a directional microphone on them they had plenty of privacy. And, of course, Adrian could fry any such electronics. The crowd had thinned out, even before they left the Prater itself.

“What did you make of that conversation we had?”

Eric’s scarred and battered features knotted in a scowl. “My initial expert response? Fucked if I know. For starters, I don’t know French. This Apache guy does?”

“Shadowspawn are very old-fashioned—it is the formal language of diplomacy and high politics among us. Partly because so many of the post-corporeals are old enough that they grew up thinking that way, and partly because of the role the Brézés played in the original discoveries. And languages are easy for us. A week or two to acquire full native fluency, and the process doesn’t require much conscious effort. You can force it down to an hour or two with a Wreaking.”

Eric made brushing gesture. “Okay, so maybe it was better that I was focusing on his body language—and hers. Christ, that’s creepy, that ventriloquist dummy thing they were doing. Now, granted, I only met this guy once and he was naked and trying to kill me, but he didn’t give me the same…vibe then. If this was the first time I’d seen the guy I’d say he was a badass, right, but a lot less rough-hewn about it than my first impression back in Santa Fe if you know what I mean.”

“You know, that’s true,” Ellen said thoughtfully. “And I did meet him
a couple of times when I was Adrienne’s lucy. I mean, this time he hardly gave me any of that
I want to rape you and torture you and kill you and drink the last gulp of your blood as you die
that I got before. He barely bothered to hide it then. Adrienne thought it was funny to dangle me in front of him like a steak in front of a mean dog.”

“He would know that it would anger me, not amuse me,” Adrian observed.

“Yeah. And it that could be because he was concentrating on business this time. The dynamic with Kai seems sort of different too; there was always a lot of terror there, but it was a…comfortable terror, if you know what I mean. Something’s happened to Dale.”

Adrian made a thoughtful sound. “His shields were like diamond plating on steel. His aura revealed absolutely nothing; but then, that is his reputation. He made his name as an assassin of other Shadowspawn, and would have to be exceptionally good at concealment of all types.”

“I’m going to circulate a bit among the other humans attending,” Eric said. “Something doesn’t
smell
right here.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Vienna

“W
hy do Shadowspawn have funerals?” Eric asked Adrian Brézé, just after sunset a day later. “I mean, for starters there’s no body, not with the old ones like him.”

He was more or less getting used to the nocturnal sleep cycle; it seemed to be easier for him than it was for Peter or Cheba. Of course, according to the Albermann test he had more of the
H. nocturnis
genes than the average, though not all that much more. That might account for it.

He preferred to think of it as just being adaptable.

“After the first death, the death of the body, it’s quite common to have a party,” Adrian said seriously. “Often both the killer and the victim will attend.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Ellen shook her head sadly.

“
Mierda,
” he said. “And anyway, there isn’t much question about the afterlife, either. I mean, they
get
one, but then it ends.”

Cheba smiled an unpleasant smile. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe there is a hell for them, after this spirit form is killed.”

“I certainly hope so,” Peter said. “And I’m speaking as a guy who decided there was no Santa Claus when he was four years old.”

The limousine wasn’t particularly large by American standards, but it was still having problems negotiating the narrow streets. They were a bit winding, too, and fewer of the buildings were what he’d come to consider Viennese-looking, which was to say fewer of them were symmetrical and stuccoed with a lot of flamboyant ornament. A few had half timbering like that little village where they had been snowed in; more were brick or stone in irregular masses, here an overhang, there a pointed arch. Then Ellen saw him frowning a little out of the window.

“This is the old part of town,” she said. “Old by local standards, that is. Richard the Lion-Heart was held prisoner not far from here.”

“Yes,” Adrian said grimly. “And it has been a…meeting place of sorts…For a long time too. Not quite that long, but for many generations.”

The car stopped, let them out, and drove away. A flicker of curiosity passed through Eric’s mind; what had the driver thought of it all? He looked around the…he supposed you’d have to call it a church. It certainly had the same form as a church, Austrian Baroque Catholic variety, and a lingering smell of incense. He was willing to bet that it
had
been one a long time ago. It was full of formally dressed Shadowspawn in suits or robes for various weird costumes, something like a couple of hundred of the most powerful adepts on earth.

Nearly all of them would be delighted to kill him in some hideous fashion, but at least he wasn’t running away from them through the snow with wolf-form fangs inches from his ass and a civilian, a girl and two kids to look after and him sick into the bargain. It was a lot easier to view the enemy objectively now that he wasn’t on his own; not that Peter and Cheba and even Leon and Leila hadn’t done their part. You didn’t feel nearly as much like a rabbit at a coyote party when there was a friendly adept around.