Shadows of Falling Night

by S. M. Stirling

  He nodded to Adrienne. “A point you have made to me, ma fille. If we deny the humans all their inventions, there is so much less we can take for ourselves. After all, where would we be if my own father had not been scientific and progressive, in his way?”

  Adrienne made a wordless sound of appreciation as she sipped her own, with her eyes held reverently closed for a moment before she spoke. The Brézés might not be really human, but they were certainly old-style French about some things. Ellen thought her appreciation was genuine, not just flattery:

  “I shall add this to my mental cellar, sire, for only in trance will I see its equal, alas. Also, if we returned the world to the Dark Ages I would miss my aircraft. And motorcycles and fashion shows, for that matter. Castles are so drafty and boring! And I prefer my victims to wash and not have skin diseases.”

  The lord of the Shadowspawn put his snifter down and made a small gesture over it to keep the servant from refilling.

  “So, Adrian,” he said after a brooding stare over steepled fingers. “You claim that Adrienne is attempting to use a rogue Brotherhood agent to smuggle a nuclear bomb into the Council meeting, despite my embracing her policy preferences? Presumably to wipe us all out and leave her and her faction to inherit the Throne of the World after the humans are put in their place.”

  Seraphine smiled, covering her lips for a moment with two fingers as if smothering a chuckle. Adrian kept his face expressionless as he nodded.

  “In essence, yes, sire.”

  Adrienne chuckled and shook her head indulgently. “And I am supposed to be concealing a nuclear weapon from nearly a thousand powerful adepts…in what way or manner, exactly? If I could Wreak on that level, I would be God. Not a god, the God. Which would be delightful, but which is beyond even my ambitions at present.”

  Étienne-Maurice raised his glass and tilted it, viewing the low flames through the dark honey-colored liquid. “That is the crux of the matter, is it not? I could not conceal such a weapon, not if I intended to use it so. If you know of such a means, Adrian, will you drop your shields so that I may verify?”

  “If Adrienne will do the same,” Adrian said.

  Something went clank in Ellen’s head, Wreakings activating to conceal her thoughts, and suddenly all her emotions felt curiously muffled and distant, as if she had just taken a heavy hit of Percocet. It was actually rather welcome in itself, since what she’d been feeling was mostly fear and loathing, but this was the crisis point. If Adrienne was willing to do that, then the Brotherhood’s secret would be out. That would be a disaster, and destroy the first real advantage the Brotherhood had ever had in the long war: Adrian had given every oath he could think of to its commanders, and submitted to Wreakings that made it impossible for him to betray it to his kin, despite the fact that it would instantly make his story of the smuggled bomb credible.

  Adrienne had ferreted it out, of course. If she agreed to open her mind, the secret would be revealed.

  Thankfully, the chances of that are—

  “No, of course I will not,” Adrienne said cheerfully. “What, and expose my plots?”

  Ellen closed her eyes in relief and completed the thought:—very low. Then she finished off the brandy to hide the gesture.

  “What, you are plotting against me? I am shocked, chère pucelle, shocked to the depths of my wicked soul,” Étienne-Maurice said.

  He and his wife and great-granddaughter all laughed, his deep, Seraphine’s silvery, Adrienne’s warm and soft. Ellen shivered slightly. Adrian’s face showed nothing at all.

  I have met a family that’s worse than mine was. And the drawback of being totally—justifiably—paranoid is that it makes you more vulnerable to treachery, not less. Because he assumes she’s always been plotting against him along with everyone else, the real plot vanishes in the background noise. It’s…diabolical. It is so fucking Adrienne!

  A touch on her arm told her that Adrian had picked the thought out of her head, though she wouldn’t have been surprised if both of them had had it at once anyway.

  “And so this accusation…one cannot take it seriously,” Seraphine said.

  Étienne-Maurice cocked an eyebrow. “That does not mean it should not be dealt with at all, or that there is no element of truth involved. I will arrange a ritual this evening…there is certainly enough talent available. Eastern Anatolia, you say, Adrian? I never liked the area, though the Armenian business had a certain crude grandeur—that was the al-Lanarkis, of course. Throwing a curse in that general direction will be a…pardon the expression…good deed.”

  “Yes, sire,” Adrian said, rising and bowing. “I would not presume to advise you on the details of a black curse.”

  “If I did not know better, I could find an accusation in that!”

  Seraphine wiggled her fingers at Adrienne. “Perhaps you would join me instead?” she said. “There is a…guest. A very sincere young priest—a rarity in these degenerate times. I have an amusing scenario in mind, involving a form I picked up in the 40s of the last century, a gloriously beautiful youth of fifteen, just barely sufficiently ripe.”

  “That would be lovely, madame,” Adrienne said cheerfully.

  In the corridor outside Ellen shivered. “That went better than I thought it might,” she said. “Essentially, we won…sorta.”

  “And yet Adrienne is not dissatisfied. That is a bad sign.”

  “Would she let you know if she was doing a slow burn?”

  Adrian quirked an eyebrow. “She and I are twins; she could not entirely conceal it. She is planning some devilment, probably by proxy. And we have many vulnerabilities.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  “Weasel! I’m a weaaaasel!” the boy shouted as he dove over the chamiso bush in an explosion of powdery snow.

  “Woof! Woof! I’m a wolfie and I’ll eat you up!” his sister caroled as she raced after him, eight-year-old arms pumping.

  “Come back here, you little par de esquintles!” Eusebia Cortines yelled.

  Eric Salvador listened and grinned, cradling the shotgun in his arms and keeping his eyes moving over the field of view. You couldn’t keep kids in all the time, and this pair were more active than most.

  He was a stocky, muscular thirty-one years old, and his upper lip was very slightly lighter than the weathered dark-olive of the rest of his face, where a mustache had been until recently. A scar ran down from his cheek to the corner of his mouth, giving it a bit of a quirk. Black hair was cropped close to the sides and top of his head, showing with the hood of his jacket thrown back.

  He looked like an ex-Marine NCO from here in northern New Mexico. One who’d pulled a tour in the sandpit, Iraq, and one and a quarter on the rockpile—which was what you called Afghanistan, if you were in the Suck and hence among the connoisseurs of bad neighborhoods. And then spent years being a cop, after he healed up from the IED.

  All that was exactly what he was. The indios among his ancestors had been around here since the last glacial period; the rest was seventeenth-century Spanish and a little Irish several generations back. He’d started to grow love-handles while he was a homicide roach and especially after the divorce—irregular hours and junk food—but they were gone again now.

  Because now I’m a Brotherhood soldier, I suppose, sorta-kinda and without most of the regular training yet. Mierda, back in the Suck only with less air support. Hell, I’m the mouj now, running scared because the other side has all the cool toys. Like, they can make your blood boil…literally.

  Eusebia—Cheba to her friends—managed to grab Leila and Leon Brézé before they vanished into the darkening juniper and piñon-clad hillside, and escorted them back with a hand under each arm.

  “It is late,” she said firmly; she believed children should obey adult caretakers promptly, and didn’t give a damn who their parents were. “It is nearly time for dinner.”

  The word dinner got the twins’ attention; they were both chowhounds and loved Mexican. Their
near-identical triangular faces turned up towards her under mops of raven hair.

  “Did you cook dinner, Cheba?” the boy asked.

  “Yes, I did, mi rey.”

  “Okay, we’re ready!” his sister said.

  “Show me your hands, reynita. I thought so. Go and wash,” she said, giving them a little shove towards the front doors.

  Her English was much more fluent now, but still a little slow, and had been developing a tendency to a bookish, Worf-like lack of contractions. Eric gave the surroundings a long last look. The house that Adrian Brézé had built northeast of Santa Fe was long and low, built of fieldstone covered with stucco for the most part. The surroundings turned imperceptibly from a xeroscape garden of native plants into shaggy, rocky hills. The sky was turning dark purple to the east, with the first stars just starting to glitter in the high-desert air. The west was still an implausible striation of clouds turning to cream and hot gold and molten copper, fading to teal green and blue above; the snow on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains westward was blush-pink for a moment.

  He’d grown up around here, albeit in far more modest circumstances, and he’d never tired of looking at it. Why leave the best part of it all for the tourists? Outsiders thought the paintings of Santa Fe sunsets were garish kitsch; you had to live here a while to realize that no paint palette could rival the real thing, or the clarity of the air. You had to go away and come back to really appreciate it if you’d been born here.

  They went through the big copper-plated doors; the copper had silver sheathing within and the walls had silver thread. The central block of the house was open-plan with eighteen-foot ceilings of exposed viga beams; the southeast-facing wall was mostly tall windows, a narrow tile-paved terrace and planters outside it dropping off several thousand feet in a jagged steepness of cliff and arroyo. The view was spectacular, and there was nothing human in it except the lights of a tiny hamlet twinkling in the middle distance and a freight-train drawing away. Off to the left was a large kitchen full of European equipment separated by a stone island from a dining area centered on a massive cast-glass table. It was a big house, not a mansion that couldn’t function without a huge staff of servants, though it was also certainly not like anything he’d lived in before.

  “¡Dios! ¡Huele ’re sabroso, niña!” he said, sniffing with appreciation at the cooking odors. “God, that smells good!”

  He cleared the chambers of the double-barrel as he sniffed and hung it and the bandolier on a wall rack. It still seemed odd to carry a weapon so primitive, but even the five moving parts in this relic needed to be protected with glyphs if they were to function at all when an adept was around and trying to screw things up. They made his palms buzz a little. He’d always had a nose for danger, which was why he hadn’t come back from the rockpile in a plastic bag—it had been close even so.

  The Albermann test the Brotherhood used said that he was just barely capable of doing simple Wreaking, though it still seemed a lot like magic to him. The down-side of that capacity was that without training it made you even more vulnerable to Shadowspawn thinkery-fuckery than ordinary people. He was absorbing the techniques as fast as he could.

  “¡Inglés!” Cheba said. “I need the practice. And this country is freezing. Freezing, dry, rocky. Why did anyone from Mexico ever come here?”

  He carefully didn’t say: You’re beautiful when you’re angry, though it was true. Though you spend a lot of time being angry. Understandable, I suppose.

  She was a dime and some younger than him, with more indio and less Spanish, plus a dash of African, originally from a little corn-and-beans ejido called Coetzala in the hills of upcountry Veracruz, a place so backward every third inhabitant still spoke Nahuatl. She had a full-lipped heart-shaped face, curly black hair, skin the color of cinnamon and a figure closer to the hourglass type than was common where she came from. She had very little formal education, but he’d come to respect her almost fanatical pursuit of self-improvement and focus on the main chance.

  Instead of the compliment that sprang to mind he answered the question:

  “Why come here? Chasing rumors of gold. Back then a Spaniard would crawl naked over cactus for that. And later because this was where you sent relatives who embarrassed you, cousin Diego who couldn’t keep it in his pants with the alcalde’s daughter—”

  She gave a snort of laughter as she wielded a spoon in a dish of something bubbling and brown.

  “—the backside of nowhere with Apaches behind every rock, knives in their teeth. There was one caravan from Sonora or Chihuahua every year, sometimes every two years. My people here used to hunt buffalo with lances, and trade the hides to the wild Commanche for guns they got from the French, that was how poor they were.”

  He helped her set the table as he spoke. He was pretty sure she thought that was a bit odd; she’d probably have considered him something of a sissy if she hadn’t seen him in action when they’d busted her out of Rancho Sangre and got Adrian’s kids. That was the estate of the California branch of the Brézé family.

  There was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in the Suck, and you could spend only so much time pumping iron. He’d had a fair amount of time to read, and it gave him the vocabulary to describe that little bit of quiet, picturesque isn’t-this-pretty New Urbanist hell-on-earth.

  First it’s like Norman Rockwell. Then you realize it’s more like Stephen King.

  “Then why did the gringos want this country?”

  “Because it was between Texas and California and too big to jump over even with a running start.”

  She laughed again. He thought she also thought it a bit odd he hadn’t hit on her to speak of. She’d ended up in Rancho Sangre as part of a job-lot of illegals Adrienne Brézé had bought from a coyote, a people-smuggler, quite literally as snacks for a party. Except that Shadowspawn liked to play with their food. He’d been a cop in the Southwest for years; he knew what was likely to happen to a girl in the pipeline for illegals, and then she’d caught Adrienne’s eye as a blood-donor-cum-toy, which was worse because an adept could seriously fuck with your head. Though that was better than what had happened to her companions.

  Eric was surprised she was as together as she was, and at how fast she’d bounced back; they made them tough down there.

  “And the people are all soft, like mozitas,” she grumbled as she set out bowls of a rich menudo.

  “You were a little girl once,” he pointed out.

  “Not like that.”

  “Like Peter?” he said.

  “No,” Cheba said. “He’s a man, that one, even if he looks like a girl. I got to know him at the hacienda.”

  Actually Peter Boase wasn’t particularly girly-looking, just blond, fine-featured and small; he’d escaped and gone cold turkey from the feeding addiction, all alone in a little rundown motel room in southern Arizona. Cheba had done it with experienced Brotherhood medics to help, and it had still hurt like hell, like coming off mainlining black tar. She gave the tribute grudgingly, though.

  “Let’s eat, then,” he said instead.

  Dinner was menudo thick with the hominy used south of the border. The tortillas to sop up the rich broth and tripe with chiles and tomatoes were made fresh from the hominy as well. Café con leche warmed little bodies that had chilled in the suddenly falling night.

  And when I said kids shouldn’t have coffee, she just looked at me like I was crazy, told me that La Doña had had no objection and her people always had it before sleeping, for cena, mostly with sweet breads or cookies.

  The children shoveled it all away with gusto and apparently with four hollow legs between them, though their table manners were excellent and they were slender-fit. Then they settled down to watch the third installment of the Hobbit trilogy on a 3-D screen that scrolled down over the big picture window while doing some serious damage to bowls of mint chocolate ice cream from the Aztec Café downtown. Eric pulled two beers out of the refrigerator and started to chuckle.

&nbs
p; “What?” Cheba said.

  “This,” he said, turning it so she could see the label. “It’s called Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale.”

  When she looked puzzled, he translated it:

  “Más o menos, El Cabron más Presumido.”

  He had to hunt for the equivalent of Bastard because the dialect of ladino Spanish he’d grown up with as his second language had a lot of English loanwords in it including that one as well as being archaic even by Mexican standards.

  And bastard is too common a condition south of the border to be an insult the way it is in the North, and arrogant? They’re all arrogant under the right circumstances.

  “That is…what’s the English word…” Cheba said, flashing a smile. “Like him? The right word, the…”

  “Appropriate?”

  “Sí, the a-prro-priate word for the man who owns this house.”

  “Adrian’s not a bad guy.”

  “He has good manners and he is a man of honor. He has balls, too. He is also, yes, a stone arrogant bastard. Like a cat, you know? Or a don in the old days.”

  “Yeah, but he’s our stone arrogant bastard. He killed…well, he and Ellen killed…that Shadowspawn bitch who murdered my partner and his girlfriend. Right over there where the kids are now, after I pumped the whole magazine from a Glock into her and she laughed at me and told me I looked delicious. I owe him.”

  “Me also too. And I don’t like owing things to people. I pay the debt as soon as I can, so I guard his children.” She sipped, and looked around. “Good beer. And someday I will have a house like this.”

  He’d grown up on Bud from cans, and at first this stuff hadn’t tasted like beer at all. It was caramel and coffee and chocolate and a smooth richness with a kick like a ball-peen hammer upside the head, and he’d come to like it. He’d been a little surprised by Casa Grande Adrian Brézé’s house and everything in it; it was simpler than he’d expected, certainly a lot plainer than what the bad branch of the Brézés had in that creepy place in California. Then he’d realized it was the simplicity of someone who did exactly what he wanted and didn’t give a damn for either expense or what anyone else thought of his choices.