S. Stirling - Shadows of Falling Night

Ellen sighed. “I like Harvey. In fact…you know, of all the Brotherhood people I’ve met, he’s the only one I really do like. The rest don’t seem like people as much, if you know what I mean. Grim and fanatical, or weird, or weirdly grim and fanatical, or just plain scary.”

“Scary…” Adrian said, and his mouth quirked. “My darling, who is the most dangerous man you know?”

“Ah…that would have to be you, honey.”

Adrian shook his head. “I am the most powerful adept you know, at least of those still in the flesh. Or are likely to meet, apart from my sister; she and I are equals in that respect, I a little stronger, she just a touch more subtle.”

He reached out and took a cube of sugar from the tea-set resting on a sideboard, flipped it in the air, and let it fall on his palm. Quietly, without any fuss, the cube crumbled as if it were rock eroding away over eons of time, and the individual grains disintegrated into a powder finer than talc. The powder stirred and rose, twisting into a rising double spiral like a DNA molecule, then puffing away.

“But that is not altogether the same thing as dangerous . Harvey is at least as dangerous as I; and if I am as dangerous, it is because he trained me.”

Ellen shivered slightly. You never got used to the Power…unless you’d grown up with it, she supposed. She remembered watching Leila, Adrienne’s daughter-and Adrian’s-cupping her child’s hands around a feather, her seven-year-old face intent, the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth. And the feather beginning to dance.

He sighed. “Something will have to be done about Harvey. Sending Jack Farmer and Anjali after him is a good start; they know his methods well. The problem with that…”

“Is?”

“That saying something must be done about Harvey neglects the fact that Harvey is very good at doing something to others, and not just killing them, either. I would not fully trust even myself, going up against him.”

Eastern Turkey

The truck’s suspension was shot. Harvey Ledbetter grunted as he pulled himself out from under the vehicle, slipped his flat LED torch into the back pocket of his trousers and slapped dust off his clothes. A series of freak accidents had cracked the springs on the rear axles, and an undetected lubricant leak had seized a set of bearings in the rear differential until they smoked. Somehow the temperature alarms in the big MAN hybrid’s all-glass controls hadn’t picked it up. If his thumbs hadn’t started prickling the first he’d have noticed might have been flames destroying the shield generator and spilling the weapon within all over the landscape. The possibility made him sweat in retrospect.

It was so easy to fry solid-state circuitry with the Power, because screwing with quantum-mechanical fluctuations was what the Power basically did anyway. Which particle tunneled where…

He straightened up and stretched until something went pop in his back. Above him through the still, thin, dry air the stars were a multicolored splendor in the night, with a three-quarter moon bright enough to dim them around its silver sheen. He saw just a bit better in light like this than the standard-issue human. His nose was a bit better too; there was a smell of dry powdery soil and hot metal from the wrecked truck, and things vaguely like bruised sagebrush. This upland stretch of mountain and steppe felt older than the Southwestern deserts of his youth, somehow; you could taste the dust of empires and ages and armies.

Anger coursed through him, tasting sour and iron-rich at the back of his throat.

“Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil, for verily I bear a slab of plutonium nuke-goodness fuck you !” he shouted at the darkness.

The Texan was a lean man who liked to think of himself as spending several years being fifty-nine; his sandy-brown hair was only lightly grizzled, but the short beard he’d grown to fit in as he crossed Anatolia was iron-gray-flecked white. He was wearing local clothes, too, of a hick-from-the-sticks variety; a collarless shirt, cloth cap, coarse jacket and rather baggy pants. Despite that, and the fact that he spoke fair Turkish, he didn’t expect to pass for a local if someone looked hard unless he was willing to expend precious energy on a Wreaking. It wasn’t his blue eyes, or the complexion under his weathered tan, though they were out of the ordinary. Enough Turks were just as Nordic looking, their sainted Kemal for starters, that it didn’t attract undue attention, and it was pretty common among Kurds too-this was Kurd country.

The shape of his bones was wrong, though, and his body-language; he’d never had the time or motivation to acquire a convincing act for hereabouts.

What he usually did with anyone who penetrated his first layer of cover in this part of the world was pass for an American or European intelligence agent pretending to be a Turk-he could do a convincing mitteleuropan , and his French and German were fully native-fluent. If they thought you were CIA or DGSE or Kommando Strategische Aufklärung it didn’t occur to them that you might be a witch-finder, which was how the Brotherhood had started out. Though these days it was more a matter of keeping the witches from finding you. It also made it logical that you dealt in large amounts of cash and didn’t talk much. He’d even managed to pull that off with the odd Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı type, though the odds of running into the Turkish secret police were remote this far from the borders.

This part of the world swarmed with spooks, metaphorically. He grinned tautly; with the Council of Shadows holding their first full meeting in decades over in Tbilisi, across the border in Georgia, there were going to be plenty of literal spooks around in a few months. Until he triggered the twenty-five-kiloton device and blew them-corporeal and post-corporeal alike-into oblivion. The blast would do for the embodied ones, and the radiation would be as deadly as sunlight to the rest.

For a moment sheer aching need clenched his teeth. If he could take out most of the pureblood adepts, the Brotherhood could finally win the ancient war. Collateral damage…was unfortunate, but whole orders of magnitude less than what the Council of Shadows had planned for humanity in its Trimback options, not to mention the endless torment that would follow when the Empire of Shadow returned full-force. Most of the really bad stuff in the past hundred-odd years had been their work anyway, like the Holocaust and the Great Leap.

Plus he didn’t plan to survive the explosion. The Brotherhood could unload all the guilt on him, and then scoop the pieces off the board.

A quick glance either way showed nothing coming or going; there was an abandoned and burned-out light truck with its right wheels in the ditch about half a kilometer away, nothing out of the ordinary; Turkey wasn’t a third-world shitheap like say the ruins of Syria, but it wasn’t exactly Denmark either, or even Texas. And this was Turkey’s equivalent of West Bumfuche, Arkansas, plus it could give lessons in bleak to the country south of Lubbock.

The wreck was unexceptional…except that it was a fairly new four-wheel-drive light truck, the sort you used for adventure tourism. The soot had fooled his eye for a moment. He walked closer, and when he got to within a few yards he could still feel the heat of its burning…

He took a stance and closed his eyes, taking one deep breath after another, slower and slower. Let everything go; fear, worry…then thought, identity and hope.