CHAPTER TWELVE
Vienna
“Vienna is one of my favorite cities,” Étienne-Maurice Brézé said.
The Orient Express halted a little after sunset in the Westbahnhoff, in a squeal of steel and a deep shush-shush of water vapor. Ellen hated to think how much it had cost, cost other people, to let this steampunk dinosaur fantasy function in the contemporary station, or the rail network as a whole. Where were the water and coal coming from? Not to mention clearances and the effects of the smoke; it had probably left a trail of at least minor disaster across Europe, turning people’s lives upside-down…not that that would matter to the people who’d done it.
Sorta people. And maybe it would matter; they’d view the video of people scrambling desperately to cope and not knowing what’s going on and laugh themselves silly. Yeah, you would like Vienna, she thought. It went into a deep depression in 1918 and didn’t come out for generations. So it’s still basically the city of the Habsburg emperors. You remember it from when you had a body, not just a quantum-field imitation put together by memory.
There was a bit of a crowd, drawn by the exotic antique technology, exclaiming and pointing behind a ring of policemen. The disembarking Shadowspawn and their retainers generally ignored them, apart from a few lingering glances that were probably hunting reflex and the audience probably interpreted as hauteur. They vanished in a cloud of flunkies, heading for their limousines and dispersing to palaces and guest suites and in a few cases top-end hotels across the city.
Humans have problems adapting to the modern age, because we evolved for the Old Stone Age, Ellen thought. Shadowspawn do too, maybe more so because they’re more specialized. They evolved when humans were scarce—I think that’s why they have that addictive quality. It kept the blood source around…and willing to give them other stuff they needed, too. But now they’ve recreated themselves and they’re in a world with billions of humans instead of just a few scattered through a wilderness, humans who don’t know about them and are lousy at dodging or fighting them. They’re like leopards dumped into a sheep farm.
“Pigs,” Adrian murmured into her ear; they’d agreed he could read her thoughts when open conversation was unsafe. “Humans are more like pigs—and I mean that as a compliment; pigs are much smarter and more formidable and adaptable than sheep. The comparison would be leopards hunting wild boar in the Old Stone Age, and leopards dumped into a confinement facility in Iowa now.”
Ellen winced, and came back to the present when Adrian’s great-grandfather spoke again:
“Though I do not like this part of it,” Étienne-Maurice went on, aristocratic nostrils flaring.
The Westbahnhoff’s original Victorian layout had been forcibly rearranged by Soviet artillery in 1945, and rebuilt and re-rebuilt since, with only a few preserved segments. It looked very slightly run-down now—most of the Eurosphere didn’t have that burnished look that it had had on her first teenage visit as a student—but it was still cheerful and bustling, bright and large.
Which was why the Emperor of Evil doesn’t like it, of course.
She imagined giving him an elevated finger as he stalked away, cane and robe and all with Seraphine in his wake, wearing a tall hawk-faced Somali beauty this time. Better still a load of silvered buckshot, the shocked scream of pain and then…At that she stopped and shook her head. Fighting when she had to was one thing; entertaining murderous fantasies for the pleasure they gave was another, and she didn’t want to go down that road.
“I will be seeing you over the next few nights,” he said to Adrian. “It would be…unfortunate for your ambiguous standing with the Council…if you were to disappear in the interim.”
“I will be present, sire. I expect my children to join me here, in any case.”
“Or join their mother, your sister,” Seraphine said with casual malice. “Until then, descendant.” She looked around. “Come, let us leave this vulgar excrescence, Étienne.”
The post-corporeals were mostly like that, conservatives in a way that made small-town Alabama look like Upper West Side. Which produced a disturbing thought; would she still love Adrian the same way when he didn’t have a physical body any more? She’d gotten used to his shape-shifting into other people and things, which besides being useful lent itself to some really interesting perversions, and you really couldn’t tell when he was nightwalking in his own form, but…
It’s sort of an abstract question now, she thought. And I’ll probably be dead of old age before he transitions, he could make a hundred easy in his original bod, and that’s okay because with a thirty-year start we’ll look about the same age…except that his body might be killed tomorrow and then I’d be married to a post-corporeal. That’s…disturbing. Well, I could get used to a strictly nighttime schedule, I guess. We mostly live that way anyway…no tanning time at the beach together, though.
“Let us walk to the hotel,” he said quietly, when they were alone except for the staff. “I am a little tired of the…company.”
“I know what you mean!” she said fervently. Then, as she took his arm: “Adrian, what would you do if I was killed?”
“Mourn,” he said. And flatly: “After I had avenged you.”
“Okay, good with the mourning and vengeance, but I meant…with my persona, my soul, whatever. If you had the opportunity.”
Shadowspawn could sort of snap you up, especially if you were base-linked; the essential you would run on their wetware, and it would go on after your physical body died if they wanted it to, like a post-corporeal but inside the Shadowspawn’s mind, in whatever environment they imagined. That had kept her sane while she was a prisoner at Rancho Sangre, and they’d used it frequently since…
“I would carry you, of course,” Adrian said.
“I’m…I’m not sure I’d want that,” she said. “Going on without a body.”
“I face that prospect myself,” he said.
“Yeah, I was thinking of that. But you’d still be…real. In a sense. For me it wouldn’t really…I mean, even if you still loved me, I’d be part of you, more like a memory that you could revise—might revise even without being aware you did it. I don’t think I’d want to just…go on like that. I mean, yeah, we’re the dyadic unit, and yeah, you’re the top and I’m the bottom, but that would be pushing things too far in the loss-of-control thing. Don’t. If I’m dying, let me go and move on.”
His eyebrows went up, then down in a frown. “What brought this on?”
“What, thoughts of violent death being on my mind? Recent experience, much? But…I don’t think I’d want to be a figment of your imagination.”
He smiled ruefully. “I see your point, my darling.”
It was rainy and cold outside, and they put up their umbrellas; the baggage was being whisked unseen to their destination, which was a relief. Locals were out in force; early sunsets and this sort of miserable weather were nothing much to them. The air had a peculiar scent of damp stone and brick and something indefinable that she associated with European cities underneath all their local peculiarities; for some reason even with identical weather New York or Chicago smelled different. Though come to think of it, Boston was a little similar.
“I’ve been spoiled by the Southwest,” she said. “My hardy Polish-German-Pennsylvanian blood got thinned and I became addicted to blue skies.”
“Oh, your blood has no problems at all, my darling!” he said, and they both chuckled.
The splendors of nineteenth-century Vienna soothed her eyes, only occasionally interrupted by some more recent construction; they walked over the tree-lined Europaplatz, passed what looked like a big glasshouse and was probably a subway station, and down the Marianhilferstrasse to the eastward; literally downhill, since it sloped towards the Danube. The pre-Christmas crowds were dense and lively; this was the best of downtown Vienna’s shopping streets, less tourist-haunted than the ones in the First District and attracting more natives and younger people. There were a few big department st
ores, but most were hole-in-the-wall size, the sort of idiosyncratic place that had been hollowed out by big-box competition in most of her native land.
“My God, they’ve got Cop.Copine,” she said, looking into one of the windows.
“Not limited to Paris any more,” Adrian said. “That silvered leather coat is quite fetching; the detail work on the back, particularly.”
“Nice, but it would make me look like the Attack of the Forty-Foot Lamé Woman,” Ellen said. “I’ve actually got tits, unlike that mannequin or the anorexic stork-waifs on the walkways. But those black leather pants with the zippers up the sides…possible.”
“You should have them,” Adrian said with a grin. “Now that you are Ellen Brézé, Scourge of the Shadowspawn. Are they not what a female supercommando would wear?”
“In a graphic novel, one doing serious fanservice,” she retorted. “Those are the sort of pants you put on so you can take them off again.”
“Or someone else can.”
“Yeah, or want to take them off you. Still…tempting…they look flexible enough to actually move in and they’d go with those boots I got…”
They dodged in, though she felt slightly scandalized with herself. There was a moment of confusion because the salespeople assumed she was Austrian herself, but their English was fine. One thing led to another, shorts led to pants led to blouses, and time passed…
“Still, otherwise I’d just be worrying back at the hotel,” she said. “Catholic guilt hitting, I suppose.”
“It is a good thing you are not a Hindu Catholic,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because then you could be guilty in front of hundreds of gods…”
“Okay, we’ve been touristing this shop and now I’ve got to try those pants.”
They felt like suede gloves for the legs. The staff made admiring noises when she came out of the changing room, adding a little sashay to her walk—sincerely, probably, from the envious looks some of them were shooting Adrian—as she examined herself in the mirror. They were tight, but also not confining; you really could move quickly in them, though it would be a sin to expose this butter-soft kidskin to rough usage.
Or some of them are just envying me, she thought.
The staff were showing a tendency to flutter around Adrian too, where he leaned against a wall with his arms crossed, long black cashmere overcoat hanging from his shoulders to show the trim outline of his waist and black shirt just open enough to hint at the hard swell of his pectorals.
Not to mention the truly tight butt and the dangerous, smoldering yellow-flecked eyes with their hint of menace and the way that lock of hair falls over his forehead. It’s amazing a man can look so pretty and so…so…so at the same time. Look all you want, boys and girls, but he’s mine.
She thought she lost a little of the status bank they’d built up when they gave the address for delivery—the Sabatier tunic and vest were irresistible too, but she didn’t want to wear them out the door. The Hotel Imperial was definitely high-end, but…
“You two are so…so young to be staying there,” one of the salesgirls said. “I mean, that’s where they put elderly oil sheiks and Chinese politicians and…and people like that. Though their torte is amazing.”
“I am older than I look,” Adrian assured her in Viennese German; Ellen could just catch the gist.
She grinned. He was: about a generation older than he looked, in fact. Not quite a Bella-and-you-know-who situation, but it was there.
Then he shifted into something else; still German, but with an affected braying accent and ending with Gnädige Frau, which even she knew was pretty obsolete. That seemed to be a real knee-slapper, and had one of the girls hooting:
“I didn’t think anyone our age could speak Schönbrunner Deutsch so well anymore! Just like my great-grandfather! Just like!”
Outside Ellen added: “Whereas you aren’t at all like your great-grandfather, except your accent a little, thank God.”
“Thank Harvey,” Adrian said, his smile turning sad.
“You had something to do with it too,” she insisted.
They went on past a small church, with an odd-looking assortment of derelicts around its side-entrance.
“I wonder what’s going on there?” she said.
Adrian frowned for a second. “Homeless shelter in the basement,” he said. A grimace: “I wish I had not done that. It’s like licking a sick rat.”
She winced; there were drawbacks to telepathy-empathy. Then she pointed out an imposing Neo-Renaissance pile to their left where the street opened out, all tall arched windows flanking a tall green dome, a little spoiled since this side was probably a lot less impressive than the front.
“Sorry…now, this I can tell you about. It’s the Kunsthistorische Museum/Art History museum. We learned about it, and I’ve met people who work there. They’ve got some really nice Classical stuff, there’s this vase by the Brygos Painter, sixth-century red-figure kylix, it’s the Ransom of Hector and you could look at it for hours, I only saw it once when it was on tour to the Met in ’16, but…”
“Ah, I will drop in and take it, and we can have it shipped home; just the thing for the table by the vestibule, perhaps we could put mints in it—”
“Adrian!” she began, then saw his grin. “Oh, you, you—”
She made to kick him; he pounced and pinned her wrists behind her back to immobilize her for a long breathless kiss.
“Thanks. I needed that,” she said as they went on hand-in-hand.
They saw relics more recent—a flak tower from the 1940s, now housing an aquarium—and past an enormous 18th-century barracks built when barracks could be a work of art, four stories of restrained Palladian giganticism.
“Beats a prefab,” she said. “Why do our equivalents all look ugly?”
Adrian was startled out of his brown study. “In an imperial capital they could afford aesthetics,” he said.
Ellen rolled her eyes a little. “Not going to get guilty about the oppressed Carpathian peasants who paid for it, are you? And you think I am a Catholic Hindu!”
“I will have you know my conscience is a delicate work of art requiring frequent lubrication and careful watering, wench. Besides, when that was put up the peasants of the Carpathians were still being oppressed by the Ottomans and were paying for the Sublime Porte’s harem, not the Habsburgs’ architectural fantasies.”
“What do you think that Adrienne has in mind next?” she said abruptly.
“She plays a waiting game,” Adrian said. “Partly because things unfold as she wishes.”
“Well, that’s our take on it. I’ll give you any odds it doesn’t look as reassuring to her.”
“Reassuring, and probably true. And it is partly because of the children. If she had them…then she would act more decisively. I think our raid on Rancho Sangre was not totally unanticipated or totally unwelcome to her—she saw it as a distraction while Harvey went rogue. But it returns to bite her…”
“On her skinny androgynous ass.”
He chuckled. “I have been told that mine is, as well.”
“Nope, manly-type narrow muscular butt. Good luck to Eric and Peter and Cheba, then.”
“Good luck indeed. I do not like acting so through others, but…”
“General now, sweetie. Not supercommando.”
His mouth quirked. “I must keep a watching brief. The thought inspires me to poetry.”
“It does?” she said, surprised, as they came onto the Ringstrasse with its busy one-way traffic and two-way trams.
“Something that Eric told me.”
“He knows poetry?”
“Of a sort,” Adrian said.
“This I have to hear.”
Her husband nodded, cleared his throat and declaimed:
“Oh, I could have been a general
And sent men out to die;
But the sort of things that generals do
They make me want to cry;
&n
bsp; Oh, I could have been an officer
But they found I was too smart;
They stripped away my rank-tabs
When they found I could walk and fart.”
Mitteleuropa
Eric didn’t feel as bad as he had, but even bundled up leaving the Gasthaus and going outside again into cold and falling snow was the last thing he wanted to do. Fortunately, doing things he deeply did not want to do was one of his oldest habits. He’d only been awake for a couple of hours, but the craving for more sleep was already unendurable. Doggedly, he made himself walk to the car—some German 4 × 4—and let someone push him in, then fumbled at the seatbelt. The blast of hot air from the heater was almost as unpleasant as the cold had been, but then when you were in the state he was, everything made you feel bad. All you wanted to do was get into the least uncomfortable position in bed and sleep as long as possible.
The old lady’s son drove the car southward; at first for an hour or so over a pretty good two-lane road, with glimpses of snow on fields to either side, and then down a bit of a slope, then turning off through a gate on to what was probably a dirt track, a foot or two down under the layers of snow and ice. He was conscious enough to note that the burly white-haired German handled the deep fresh snow skillfully, not creeping, not going too fast and accelerating gradually when he had to. After a while he started to talk, probably as much to avoid thinking about what was going on and how horribly he was violating the sacred rules as anything else.
“This is the family’s old cottage, you understand,” he said. “My mother’s grandmother—”
Which meant it had happened a long time ago, possibly a very long time.
“—lived there, her husband was a woodsman for the Frieherr back before the Kaiser’s war and was called up in 1914. He never came back, but somehow she got a little gold together during the war—English sovereigns if you believe my mother’s tale of what her mother told her! Given to her by a secret agent she sheltered while he was ill! Well, after the war when the paper money became worthless and a little gold went a very long way she bought the Gasthaus…”
Shadows of Falling Night Page 19