He took out his tablet and tapped. It was a special model untraceable even when he hooked into the Web via satellite uplink, and it had GPS and a map of the vicinity. The nearest settlement was only three kilometers northeast, a wide spot in the road just above the farming-village level; the nearest city was a crapsack named Elâzığ whose main claim to fame was cement factories. Luckily it was fifty miles behind him and he hoped he didn’t need to go there again.
“My Google-fu is strong, grasshopper,” he muttered, and got his backpack out of the truck.
I hate to leave my beloved nuke alone for a moment, but I can’t very well stuff it in here.
What looked like company logos on the side of the truck body were actually preactivated Mhabrogast glyphs. Ordinary folk would leave it alone without knowing exactly why.
Twenty-four hours before the internal fuel cell runs out and the nuke is a blazing signpost. Just have to arrange things by then. Christ, I hate doing this alone, too. Nice to have backup…Adrian, if I had my druthers. As it is, I suspect someone with an unhealthy interest in me is in that little town up ahead. Let’s go and see who it is. Maybe kill ’em, maybe talk, maybe both.
There was a machine-carbine and a couple of clips in the backpack, a compact little H amp;K G36C, but he didn’t think he’d be using it against even a low-level Power user-complex weapons were too easy to fuck with via Wreaking, even for low-levels like him. It was a fallback in case he stumbled across hostile locals, or needed to deal with strictly human renfields and mercenaries working for the Council.
He left it in the pack and took out the coach gun instead; the Brotherhood had a lot of experience dealing with the Power. That was a weapon as simple as a firearm could be, a big pistol cut down from a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun. The surface was webbed with silver thread and the parts plated with it; the clear spaces in between had pre-activated Mhabrogast glyphs in jet that gave a prickly, itchy feel through your palms, if you could sense the Wreakings. He slipped a dozen shells into the pockets of his coat and tucked the coach gun into a set of Kevlar loops sewn into the inside of his jacket on the left. The stiffening disguised the outline of the weapon a little, and his knife was across the small of his back with the worn dimpled bone hilt slightly down, where he could get his hand up under the tail of his jacket and out again in a single flick.
He set out along the side of the road with a nasty chill wind in his face. Dust smoked off the plowed fields like pale mist, and a little rose even where they were left in the sparse native pasture; wind erosion aided by men and goats had been at work around here for a very long time. There were no trees, and it undoubtedly looked even barer in the daytime. This high up and this late in the season the night was cold enough for his breath to smoke. Snow-capped mountains were a hint of white and purple to the north and east.
The big noisemaker approaching an eastern Anatolian village was the dogs, which were great vicious brutes fully capable of using the average wolf as a chew-toy. They were a threat to any chance traveler on foot, but they could smell the Shadowspawn blood in you and hated it unless they’d been exposed as puppies. Domesticating the dog had been one of the things that triggered the original human revolt against the Empire of Shadow; they could sense disembodied nightwalkers, too, even when they were impalpable and invisible as far as men were concerned. Three of them were circling him while the lights were still a dim glow on the other side of the hill. He stooped, picked up a couple of golf-ball-sized rocks, and sighed as he juggled them and picked targets.
“Thing is, fellers, I like dogs. So this hurts me too, but not nearly as much as it’s going to hurt y’all.”
He wound up and let the first one go just as the beast was slinking in at a sidling trot, massive head low. It hit his nose with a dull thuwmp sound, and there was a startled yip before it turned and ran. The other two tried to rush him from behind. He turned and threw the next rock, and the dog went over with a drumlike thump as it plowed into his ribs. The last skidded to a stop, visibly had second thoughts, and backed off growling. Harvey waited until it turned tail, plowed the last rock into its rump to discourage any other reconsiderations, sighed again as it yelped and fled, and walked towards the outline of the stubby minaret that marked the little town’s mosque. Everything else important-the gas station, the meyhane tavern-cum-hotel, and the stores if any-would be fairly close to it.
Change the mosque to a church, and it could be something in parts of Mexico or even the American Southwest. The village was a straggle of old plastered-stone or mud-brick homes, one-story and flat-roofed, and newer cinder-block structures with tin roofs, with a scattering of tired, scrubby-looking fruit trees, apples and pistachios. He could smell sheep-pens farther out. One fairly largish new building was probably the school. Harvey pulled his cloth cap down over his eyes and sidled towards the meyhane, keeping to the edge of the buildings rather than crossing open spaces. The door slammed out, and he heard a woman’s voice raised over a man’s strangled cry.
Well, well, he thought. And they say there’s no such thing as coincidence…and where the Power’s involved, there ain’t no such thing. Could that be who I think it is? Sending my ol’ buddies after me? Tricky, but tricks can work both ways, Adrian.
It was definitely the pair from the wrecked vehicle; you were about as likely to see a bullfrog playing a mandolin as a local woman in a village tavern hereabouts.
Three men came though the door; one sagged, and his friends were holding him under the arms as he gasped and whimpered and made cradling motions around his crotch, as if he wanted to rub himself but was afraid to. A moment later he began to puke, at which point his friends cursed and shifted their grip to his back.
Harvey ducked aside and ghosted down a rubbish-strewn alleyway behind the inn that stank of stale urine even in the cold, then eeled through a back door. Down a narrow hallway between walls that had the lumpy smoothness of plastered adobe, past a kitchen where an antique gas range threw heat and the cook’s back was to him as he began to pack up for the night. He took out the weapon, waited until there was a metallic clatter and racked the hammers back; there was nothing quite like that little springy click to alert the experienced ear.
Then he halted a foot back from a screen of wooden bead strings that gave onto the largish front chamber, the gun held down by his thigh, as inconspicuous as possible with a massive deadly weapon. People saw what they expected, even when you didn’t encourage them with the Power.
The air was hazy with harsh tobacco smoke; rural Turkey hadn’t caught on to the no-smoking thing yet. There was also the scent of garlic-heavy grilled meat, and the distinctive bitter-spirits and aniseed smell of raki, double-distilled white lightning made from grape pomace or (in a place like this) sugar-beet molasses. Most of the patrons seemed to be gone, though it was early in a winter’s evening, the slow season of the farming year. Possibly the village was unusually religious, but he wouldn’t bet on it. Those few left were bristly-chinned middle-aged men built like swarthy barrels on legs, and they were clumped at the tables over by the door, trying not to look at the pair closer to the back wall here.