Shadows of Falling Night

by S. M. Stirling

  Inside the main doors the host was waiting, smiling, chatting with each guest as they entered and handed hats and cloaks to the servants…or in a few cases transformed back into human form and accepted robes. One had arrived as a golden eagle, flown into a window, and was now rubbing at his forehead and cursing in some language Ellen didn’t even recognize, a brown-skinned man with heavy bold features. Behind him a great silverpoint gorilla knuckled by, deep in soundless conversation with a blade-nosed man in a black burnouse and gutrah headdress, who fingered a curved knife thrust through his sash as if that was his hand’s natural resting-place.

  The Duc de Beauloup had been post-corporeal for over a century. The form he wore was his own, in what his own era considered the prime of life, so that he looked like a slim, swarthy, vital man of around forty. His height was average for the twenty-first century, which made him tall for a Frenchman of the nineteenth. The face was eerily similar to Adrian’s, though blunter and somehow a little coarser. His black hair fell down his back nearly to his waist, the top layer gathered in a horse-tail by a jet clasp above the loose torrent below; he wore a full robe of thick black silk that swept the floor, embroidered with black yli-silk thread down the front panel and around the neck and cuffs.

  The Shadowspawn’s eyes were hot yellow pools, blank glowing fire. An attendant carried a sheathed sword, carefully keeping the hilt within reach, a gray shadow against the gilt and convolutions and worked plaster of the interior.

  “Great-grandfather,” Adrian said politely, bowing to kiss the extended hand and the golden ring with the Council’s sigil.

  “We have met twice in a year now, my descendant,” the head of the Council said. “There is hope for you yet. And many of your earlier attempts to kill me for the Brotherhood terrorists were truly ingenious, worthy of a Brézé, if a trifle childish and impulsive.”

  And I thought I had a dysfunctional family! ran through Ellen’s mind as she sank into a curtsey.

  “One attempts to maintain some traditions, sire, even as a rebel,” Adrian said coolly. “You have met Ellen.”

  The molten-sulfur eyes turned on her. For an instant Ellen felt a sensation roughly like the mental equivalent of having your skin plucked off with tweezers. Constructs Adrian had planted within her mind came alert with a clanging of internal barriers, and the Shadowspawn lord smiled.

  “And your lovely and now very well-guarded wife,” he said. “Enchanted, my dear.” To Adrian: “There is even something to be said for it from a eugenic point of view. I have come to think that reconcentrating our heritage beyond a certain point is…problematic, is that the word currently used for possibly unwise?”

  She could tell Adrian was actually interested now. “Why, Sire?” he said.

  Étienne-Maurice smiled thinly. “Have you ever tried to compel a cat to obedience by inflicting pain upon it?” he said.

  “No, I cannot say that I have,” Adrian said carefully.

  “An interesting but ultimately futile pursuit, producing only a thoroughly uncooperative cat. The most you can do is drive it away. Whereas with dogs, and of course humans, that approach often works well. I suspect that our remote ancestors were too much like cats for comfort; at least, for the comfort of those who seek to impose discipline and rule upon them.”

  Adrian nodded. “You were perhaps thinking of me, Sire?”

  “And your sister. You are as near pureblood as we have achieved to date. And while your command of the Power is admirable, formidable…”

  Adrian bowed wordless, polite thanks at the compliment.

  “…post-corporeally the command of the Power increases little by little anyway. I have more raw strength now than you, for example, however much you surpass what I had at your age and in the body. Given that there are certain drawbacks to excessive purity of blood…Perhaps it would be better to stop after we achieve consistent survival past the body’s death, which would require a much lower score on the Albermann than you have, for example. Between fifty and sixty percent would do.”

  “Oh, you are always so serious, Étienne,” a woman’s voice said. “Wasting this splendid golden creature on mere breeding when she is obviously meant for pleasure!”

  Seraphine Brézé’s natural appearance—insofar as the term had any meaning with a post-corporeal—would have been very much like Adrian or his sister. Today she was wearing one of her victims, a petite Asian woman in a tight sheath crimson áo dài, slit nearly to the waist at the sides over some sort of hose and jeweled slippers. She had acquired it during the French conquest of Indochina, an after-dinner story of which she was fond. Her piled hair was secured by long golden pins whose ends were wrought into Art Nouveau butterflies by Lalique. She took her spouse’s arm and smiled at them:

  “Such a fascinating mind…it would be a pity not to kill her, a wonderful project spanning years, spanning circle upon descending circle of horror and pain, spiritual and physical torment and degradation complementing each other. Only a great soul is capable of a really satisfying despair, which adds so much to the experience…”

  “My dear, you paint an enchanting picture, but perhaps another time?”

  The doll-like face smiled at Ellen impishly. “They can be such…such grim puritans, the men, can they not?”

  Ellen contented herself with another curtsey, and they moved ahead to let the next in line follow.

  “You know,” she said when they were hopefully out of earshot, “this assumption that I’d be a party pooper not to appreciate the grand fun of my own slow-tortured demise gets really old, quickly. She isn’t the first Shadowspawn to suggest it, either.”

  “Even humans are prone to solipsism,” Adrian replied. “Imagine being a thing of murderous power and darkness and unfettered will for generation after generation…”

  “I’d rather not,” she said. Then, dropping into English because there were things you just had to say in your native tongue: “I’m not one to insist on vanilla heteronormativity. But why does coming into contact with this bunch make me feel I should be wearing a whole-body condom?”

  “I presume that is a rhetorical question? The answer being because they are vile, degenerate and evil?”

  “Yup, pretty much. What next?”

  “My great-grandfather will want to torment us by delay, of course,” Adrian said matter-of-factly. “And indeed with this Council meeting coming up—the first full gathering in decades—he will be very busy.”

  “Why Tbilisi, by the way? Why not here in Paris?”

  “Two reasons. First, paleontologists working for the Council determined back in the 20s of the last century that the Shadowspawn probably evolved in the Caucasus late during the Riss glacial period, trapped in a little pocket by the ice. They escaped and overran the planet during the Riss-Würm interglacial, when the warmth returned.”

  “Some Empire of Shadow, putting the bite on lice-crawling cavemen and Neanderthals and those little hobbit thingies out in Indonesia.”

  Adrian shrugged. “The Order of the Black Dawn were depraved Satanists, but they were also Victorian romantics and loved dramatic grandiose titles and dressing up in elaborate costumes, imposing their own concepts upon the past. They thought of it as the French or British empires of their time, or those of Rome and Greece they had studied at school. Only more evil, with Wreaking, prehistoric beasts, better clothes and run by themselves.”

  “Great, Sir Walter Scott and Quo Vadis with magic powers and all done to an obbligato composed by demons.”

  Adrian nodded. “And so the meeting is a return to where we began.”

  “Oh, sort of a ‘roots’ thing.”

  “And…would you want this assembly of devils in your backyard any longer than you must, even if you were the arch-devil? In the meantime, we should circulate.”

  “Mill-and-swill at the serial killer’s convention,” Ellen said hollowly. “Joy.”

  He looked around and hissed slightly in anger, drawing a few dark looks or sets of bared teeth. Occasionally h
is body-language reminded you that he might think of himself as a human being, but his genes were another matter.

  “I have never been in a single building with this many adepts present, all tangling the world-lines. It’s like being blind. I dare not extend my senses! There are reasons Shadowspawn are not gregarious with their own kind.”

  “Yeah, you sort of cancel each other out.”

  Inwardly she shivered. In a way—several ways—outright fighting the Shadowspawn would be easier than socializing with them. More terrifying, more dangerous, but less…

  Gruesome, she decided. Not least because if you’re fighting them, you don’t have to acknowledge they rule the planet, and don’t run it only because then they’d have to work too hard, reading reports and going to meetings, and they don’t do that because they’re lazy. The Brotherhood’s la resistance and not a very strong example of the type, either. Great-granddaddy back there is the Emperor of the World, or near as no matter, as long as he doesn’t use the power so much it’s obvious. And they’re planning to remove that limit too.

  The interior of the Hôtel was more or less standard Rococo, if of high standards. The gathering was a substantial one. Not only were many adepts here, but some brought their higher renfield aides, or a favored lucy or two, or both—Shadowspawn custom was to have humans about their gatherings, to damp down the primal emotions of their highly territorial breed. She’d heard it compared to control rods in a nuclear reactor. You could usually recognize the lucies by the haunted look in their eyes, and the renfields…well, if you knowingly served evil, it left its mark.

  Some of both shot her looks that bordered on hatred. I’m popping their illusions about what they are.

  Many of the Shadowspawn inclined their heads deferentially to Adrian, as to a walking legend. He’d killed more of their kind than any other individual in history, with the possible exception of Harvey Ledbetter, which was something that brought profound respect. Ellen surprised herself by feeling a perverse but warm sense of pride in the accomplishment. It wasn’t as if they didn’t deserve it. Or he had any choice.

  No, he did have a choice. He could have joined his relatives and been a lord in darkness. He chose to fight for people instead of preying on them.

  “Ah, my dear boy, you are in Paris once more!” a voice said.

  It was apparently a man in his thirties, and to all appearances corporeal—his eyes were a common Shadowspawn color, very dark brown with yellow-amber flecks, like Adrian’s. In fact he looked very much like Adrian, except that he was dressed in full Edwardian formal turnout, of a rather foppish nature—black swallow-tail coat, double-breasted white piqué waistcoat, white tie, a double strip of black braid down the outside seam of his trousers, pearl and moonstone links and studs, and white kid gloves. A carnation graced the buttonhole.

  “Great-great-uncle Arnaud. Not accompanied by thugs and trying to kill me on this occasion?”

  Arnaud made an elegant gesture. “It would have been great fun to do so, and then throw your bride down across your corpse and ravish her in some amusing form and drain her, but it was the mere impulse of a moment. Something…told me it would be advisable.”

  “Ah, well, no hard feelings, then,” Adrian said, and even Ellen could barely detect the ironic edge.

  “None whatsoever!” Arnaud said cheerfully. “Another time. There are tiresome matters of business my so-arrogant brother has delegated.”

  “You volunteered? I was under the impression that you had spent an entire century in absolute idleness.”

  “I volunteered, but under threat of death.”

  “I am not surprised. Is there anyone even in the Council’s ranks who does not desire to see you meet the Final Death?”

  “Only those who have not met me,” the dapper figure said with a charming grin. “But then, that is no particular distinction.”

  “Farewell, Arnaud. You may not be so lucky if you try to indulge another such impulse.”

  “We shall see.”

  The name rang a bell as he turned away; that and the style of dress.

  “Was he the one who tried to kill Professor Duquesne last year?” she said. “Him and those hired goons.”

  That had been the first time she’d had someone try to kill her, and had to kill in self-defense. It had been necessary…but she would very much have preferred not to lose that particular virginity.

  “And to kill us, yes.”

  “No hard feelings, then, but at the first opportunity…let’s kill him. Nothing fancy, no artistic embellishments, just dead.”

  “I agree.”

  “He turned into a giant…that Madagascar lemur-eating cat thing just before he blew Dodge, the…”

  “Fossa, yes. He spent some time there a century ago, or a little more. In la legion, oddly enough.”

  “What was a brother of the honcho doing as a Foreign Legionnaire back in the Beau Geste days?”

  “Having fun, mostly. They had to be more…cautious, then, here in Europe. That was why Étienne-Maurice and Seraphine went on long holidays to the Congo Free State under Leopold, and to Mexico in the Porfiriato, to Yucatan and the Valle Nacional in Oaxaca. Of course, Diaz and King Leopold were Shadowspawn themselves, albeit not of very pure blood. Leopold almost transitioned to post-corporeality, but not quite.”

  Something else teased at her mind as they strolled through the corridors and chambers. She thought for a moment and snapped her fingers.

  An elegant sloe-eyed woman in a late Edwardian hobble skirt outfit that would have wowed them on the Titanic raised a lorgnette and stared at her for a moment before turning away to take a champagne flute from a tray. Her companion was a young-looking man in full fig of shaggy brown hair held back by an embroidered headband, long mustaches, tie-died shirt, fringed buckskin vest, bell-bottoms and love beads.

  And for some reason it’s more disturbing than all that Masterpiece Theatre and Downton Abbey stuff.

  Her own grandfather might have dressed that way, if he’d been a privileged college kid in 1969 rather than a blue-collar draftee humping bad bush in Vietnam. She briefly met eyes as blue as her own before they reverted to slits of hot yellow.

  She turned away and cleared her throat as she returned to the thought that had struck her: “Juste Aurèle Meissonier!”

  “Who?” Adrian said.

  “The designer who did this place. Juste Aurèle Meissonier. He was one of the Rococo greats. He did commissions all the way from Lisbon to St. Petersburg.”

  “Did I mention that?”

  “Nope.”

  Adrian’s brows went up. “Very thorough research. I remember hearing the name as a child, before Harvey…removed…me from the Brézé family, but offhand I would not know how to find out otherwise. The records all perished long ago in fires or other convenient accidents. Even the municipal maps show no building here, the databases have false images and data.”

  “Research, hell,” Ellen said, glad to distract herself for a moment. “I thought I recognized the touch. All that overlapping asymmetric carved plasterwork on the ceiling and the surrounds? And those mirrors with the ormolu frames, and the engraved mahogany legs and intaglio tops on that side-table? Right out of Livres d’ornements en trente pieces. He was the Frank Lloyd Wright or Julia Morgan of his day, he designed everything from the building down to the shape of the chamberpots—he’d do your snuffbox, too, and the buckles on your shoes, if you’d let him.”

  “Isn’t she a charming asset, not least culturally?” a warm voice said, a tone like a knife stroked over velvet. “I compliment myself on your taste, and vice versa.”

  “Merde alors,” Adrian said very quietly.

  Ellen turned, making herself do it at a natural speed and sternly suppressing mingled impulses to scream and flee and draw her knife and attack. No nausea; she wouldn’t permit it. Control the sudden pounding of her heart, and the rush of rage as Adrienne cocked an ear at the sound and sent her an air-kiss and playful-predatory snap of the teeth. The
Shadowspawn woman was wearing a gown that was a shimmering black sheath, with her neck and shoulders covered in bands of wrought platinum and a headdress of the same framing her face. Ellen decided that she looked like a very elegant wasp.

  For once, truth in advertising.

  Then Adrienne smiled at Adrian, a roguish expression, as if inviting him to share a private joke. As they stood within arm’s reach of each other, their likeness was shockingly apparent, the way identical twins would look if they came in different genders.

  “How are the children?” she asked.

  “Well, and well cared for,” Adrian said neutrally. “Unfortunately I have not had time for much…personal interaction yet. They seem happy, from their auras and behavior.”

  “I told them that they might be visiting with their father’s household and that they should not worry,” Adrienne chuckled. “And of course I walk in their dreams.”

  “You told them?”

  “I had a Seeing to that effect.”

  Adrian’s brows rose; that was a term of art for detailed prescient dreams. They showed a future, since the course of events was probabilistic, not fixed, but a powerful adept could deduce how likely it was. Often the distinction between a high probability and utterly inexorable fate became very thin. The world had a massive inertia at times.

  “I have always been more prone to those,” he said clinically; an expert exchanging data with someone in the same field.

  Adrienne nodded at her twin. “Yet they come to me occasionally, particularly on personal matters. I understand you have had several dealing with the results of the Trimback One and Two options. Great-grandpère takes your Seeings seriously. That has been quite useful to me in discrediting Trimback One.”

  Adrian’s teeth showed. Trimback One was a global blitz on modern technology using electro-magnetic pulse from high-altitude fusion explosions. The more radically reactionary Shadowspawn lords favored it, to destroy the modern world and return the world to preindustrial stasis forever. It would be simple enough to do; all of the governments powerful enough to bother with had long been the Council’s puppets. How could you resist ruthless telepaths who could walk through walls in the form of ravening beasts? A few orders to a few generals, and the thing was done.