The Council of Shadows s-2

by S. M. Stirling

  "Oh, I don't mean just your feeding on me and the drug in the bite," she said. "Though that is very satisfying. I mean the whole setup. Strolls along the seaside, the fantastic sex, we wander off to the Trattoria da Ciccio for lunch, the fantastic sex, sailboating down the coast, the fantastic sex, we go ramble around some quattrocento palace full of murals I've only ever seen in prints and on the Web, the fantastic sex, you buy those prawn things and Mrs. Boriello cooks them up for us with her handmade pasta and we have dinner on the terrace and watch the moon rise over the sea, you drink some of my blood, then the fantastic-"

  "Stop, stop, you are turning me into a satyr again!"

  He began trailing kisses up her torso.

  "You need help for that? Not that I've noticed!"

  "I needed your help to stop feeling conflicted."

  "Well, c'mon, then, tiger. The safe word for the day is whoa!"

  Adrian laughed. "I find I like the safe-word concept very much."

  "So do I, but why 'very much'?"

  "It assures me I'm not being a monster."

  "Not the bad kind, at least. Well, c'mon!"

  "Not now, my sweet. It is time to begin preparing you. This holiday can last longer if we make it a working vacation…or a working honeymoon."

  She sighed. "I'm supposed to take a level in badassery, right? Starting now?"

  "Just a few precautions. An unprepared…normal…"

  Human, she thought, and he nodded.

  "…is too vulnerable to a Shadowspawn. Even one who isn't an adept."

  " Tell me. I was your sister's prisoner for six months, remember. Of course, she is an adept."

  He snarled. She jerked back in involuntary alarm for an instant; it was literally a snarl, a predator's warning sign, showing teeth that weren't quite human. Not her variety of human, at least: Shadowspawn were hominids, but they had evolved to prey on Homo sapiens sapiens. They were as territorial as you'd expect a specialist predator to be, too. He loved her and hated his sister, but at an instinctual level he was also furious at another hunter poaching his turf.

  "Sorry," he murmured, forcing his face back to calm.

  " 'Sall right. I killed her, after all. Pop goes the hypodermic in her foot, in goes the poison. God, that was satisfying! Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me the opportunity. And the hypodermic."

  He laughed ruefully. "It is an accomplishment for which I will always envy you. And as you remembered it, your thoughts grew remarkably predatory too."

  Well, humans are predators. The Shadowspawn are very predatoresque predators. Like supertigers evolved to hunt lions. Predators on top of predators, on true humans and on Neanderthals and Homo erectus and maybe on those funny little things on Flores, she thought.

  "All of them." He nodded. "For a very, very long time. A hundred thousand years or more. But Adrienne…knowing she is no longer in the world has lifted a great burden from me, my love."

  He rolled onto his back, one arm behind his head, looking at the ceiling. Ellen propped herself up on her elbows.

  "C'mon, there's something there, lover," she said, " I can't read minds, so I have to ask you."

  He was silent for a long minute. Then: "You are not the only one to have bad dreams about Adrienne," he said. "Or to have good reason for them."

  Her brows went up. "She tried to kill you a lot, didn't she?"

  "That was not the problem. It was war, and we were on opposite sides. We…were antagonists as well as enemies. Counterparts, almost, in command of our respective operations, outwitting each other. That meant negotiations, from time to time. She kept trying to turn me, as well as kill me. Appealing to our memories of our childhoods…oh, not blatantly. Very subtly."

  "Hey, you didn't tell me about this!"

  He shrugged and reached for a cigarette with his free hand. "I do not like to think of it. Then in Calcutta…Operation Black Hole. I was cut off for some time. So was she-a rogue Shadowspawn was involved, one outlawed by the Council as well as hunted by the Brotherhood. I made a very bad mistake; I trusted her."

  "You did?"

  "Only tactically, but it was enough. She launched a mental attack on me. I think I was her prisoner for some time, but escaped; Harvey found me wandering. Naked, scarred, bleeding and half-mad."

  "Oh," Ellen said, and laid her head on his shoulder. "That sounds like your sister, all right. Adrian…I haven't asked before, but you remember when you contacted me mentally, just after Adrienne took me to Rancho Sangre?"

  He nodded without looking at her.

  "And I told you that she had two kids? Why did that affect you so strongly?"

  He let smoke trickle from his nostrils. "Because," he said very softly, "they may be mine as well. I am not certain. My memories of those days are scrambled. Fragments, some that must be nightmares, others that were true-I had the scars for some time-and some that might be either."

  She nodded. "I thought so. They…really looked like you, especially the boy. He even moved like you."

  "That does not make it certain. Shadowspawn are inbred, the Brezes in particular."

  "I couldn't prove it, but I'm morally certain," Ellen said carefully.

  A sigh. "And me also," he said. "What were they like?"

  "Creepy," she said bluntly. "But, ummm, sort of creepy in an innocent way. Charming, even…in a creepy way."

  "That is the hell of it, this war. So many innocents. So many, and it is so seldom that we can do anything to protect or help. Even Adrienne, once…It haunts me, that if she had been the one Harvey rescued, I might be on the other side even now."

  "Well, for a girl she's really hot stuff, lover, but I still wouldn't have married her. Not even in California and not even if she'd been the Good Guy who rescued me. A brief passionate fling in Saint Barts, maybe, with a bittersweet teary farewell; marriage, no. God, whole decades of 'Who took my Tampax?' No way."

  "I am glad to hear it."

  He laughed as she poked him in the ribs, then crushed out the cigarette.

  "And…there is a shadow in my mind when I think of those children. Perhaps it is merely my emotions speaking. Perhaps the Power; it can be hard to tell the difference. Shadows within shadows…"

  "Sometimes I think your mind is mostly made up of shadows. And don't make the obvious pun."

  She tickled him ruthlessly in the most sensitive spot she'd found, just below one armpit. They wrestled for a moment, and then he said briskly:

  "Enough. Now, the protections against the Power will come later. Let us begin with the physical side."

  He lay back on the bed and crossed his arms on his chest, each hand to the opposite shoulder-the shaman's posture. She lay back herself, closed her eyes, let her mind float downward into her tired body – and was elsewhere.

  This was the image he used as the entry to what he called his memory palace, a duplicate of the main living space of his mountaintop retreat near Santa Fe, New Mexico. One side held a huge fieldstone fireplace and a polished-concrete sitting shelf before it; a low fire crackled on the andirons, fragrant pinon pine. The other wall was a stark expanse of glass, rising eighteen feet high.

  The smooth stone-tiled floor ran right out past it to the narrow terrace beyond; after that the ground fell away two thousand feet in crag and ravine and pinon and dwarf desert juniper, down to the lights of a little town lost amid the empty moonlit expanse. She enjoyed the view for a moment. Then:

  "Hey. I just realized-you have a thing for scenic dropoffs outside the room, don't you? Here in Amalfi, and in your house in Santa Fe. You like to be in a high place, looking down."

  He paused, blinked, and nodded slowly in agreement.

  "You are right, dear one. I had not realized." A grin. "At least I do not come out on a high balcony and make demagogic speeches to adoring crowds."

  She tossed here head. "I like it here, though. It felt so good while Adrienne had me, when you came and…brought me here. An escape."

  He sighed agreement. "But frustrating, that I
could do no more."

  "You did more, eventually. That was more important than hurrying and failing!"

  "Yes. She never…"

  "Took me into her memory palace? No. Told me about it, and said we'd go there when she wanted to get more…extreme."

  Ellen shivered a little, and Adrian put an arm around her shoulder. Seriously:

  "We must begin your training now. I have no objection to rescuing and defending you, my darling, but you should be able to defend yourself. I may not be enough, someday!"

  Ellen nodded emphatically. "Yeah, I like playing at being helpless sometimes. The real thing's not nearly so much fun."

  "And we will have work to do that will involve risk. I hate the thought, for you, but-"

  "Hey, buster, your sister and her friends are trying to destroy the world, remember? You think I'm going to stay in a bunker or…or some resort sipping margaritas and let you do all the work? You're older than you look, but you're not that much of an antique sexist, I hope!"

  He laughed, and touched the tips of his fingers to her cheek.

  "No. Knowing you as I do now, I would expect you to want to fight by my side. This will involve a great deal of effort, though. You must learn how to fight-fight in a number of ways-how to hide, how to pursue, everything from defensive driving to forged documents. And I must show you a number of things about the Power."

  "I don't have enough of the Shadowspawn genes to use it, you said."

  Adrian nodded. "But I can help plant…artifacts…in your mind that will render you less vulnerable to it. Wreakings, localized permanent modifications of reality. I am an adept, and both more powerful and better trained than nearly anyone of my generation."

  " That's comforting," she said. "Is there an advantage to doing it here in, ummm, your head, though?"

  He nodded. "How long have we been here?"

  "Oh…three, five minutes?"

  "Four and a bit, to us. Back in the real world…less than five seconds. I can stretch the perceived duration. By the time we leave for Paris in a few months, you will have had years."

  She thought for a moment. Something nagged at her.

  "Hey, maybe that's where the Elf Hill legends came from? But look, this is as real to you as it is to me, right?"

  Ellen took a breath, tapped one foot on the tile of the floor. Heat from the fire on her legs, thin mountain air in her lungs, scent of burning conifer wood in her nostrils. You couldn't tell this from reality…until something impossible happened. And she'd learned over the past year that her previous idea of what constituted the possible out in the real world was far, far too limited.

  "Yes."

  "And you can shape things here just by thinking about them?"

  He made a gesture and they were elsewhere. This was a huge room, like a converted warehouse. Metal beams overhead, light from high dusty windows around the top of the metal box, a floor of coarse concrete, with reed mats rolled against the walls and big swinging doors opening on a vista of palms leading down to a river. There were wall mirrors in some places, gymnastic equipment elsewhere, ropes dangling from the rafters, odd-looking staffs and swords and various esoteric Eastern-looking things racked neatly around the tall rusty steel pillars.

  The air had a warm, moist feel, scented with spices, frangipani blossom and wet earth, and a hint of diesel fumes. Then she looked down at herself; she was wearing an outfit something like a gi but not quite, loose trousers and a jacket whose sleeves didn't quite come to the wrists. The coarse tough cotton slid over her skin…

  Real. All five senses.

  "So," she said. "How come Shadowspawn bother with, like, ruling the world and stuff? Can't you have everything you want here? Better than you possibly could in the real world? Sort of like TV, only full-sensory and you're directing the program."

  He nodded. "But those vulnerable to that temptation didn't breed very successfully," he said. "We are a very old species, considerably older than modern humans, shaped by both evolution and the Power. To one of us, this is…fundamentally unsatisfying, after a while. Or perhaps satisfying only in limited doses? I think the ability to build this interior reality is a side effect of other aspects of the Power, perhaps the telepathic organ."

  "Okay. Second question, it's just my mind here. I know from tennis-"

  At which she was a more than decent player at a level that would have let her go pro if she'd wanted to devote her life to it.

  "-and running that the body has to learn too. If I learn something here, will my body know it?"

  "Your nerves and reflexes and memory will. Somatic memory transfers very well. Your body is already in excellent shape from the tennis and the cross-country running…"

  He looked her up and down with frank appreciation and snapped his teeth at her. Ellen shuddered with a complex of emotions, pleasure and fear. He wasn't the first Shadowspawn who'd used that gesture around her. It was playfully flirtatious in a way that might be sexual or not…unless it wasn't friendly, in which case it was a sign you were being given the sort of look a chocolate-coconut macaroon got before the first nibble.

  Bad Shadowspawn liked to play with their food; strong emotions and sensations made the blood taste much better. Like a wink, context was all.

  "So this will cut down on how much you have to train…You will need to build more upper-body strength, work on your flexibility, yes, and some real-world repetition to key the lessons into muscle memory, but not much beyond that."

  His face went somber: not exactly cold, but a little remote.

  "Understand, Ellen, that while we are training I am not your lover or your husband, or your friend. I am the teacher, and what you are learning may be the difference between life and death-or between life and eternal damnation. You accept this?"

  "Yes." She stopped herself from adding, darling.

  "And it will be very hard work."

  "I'm not afraid of that."

  "There will be pain, serious pain."

  "Okay, understood. Look, Adrian, I know you're a lot older than I am and have all sorts of knowledge and power and…and shit. If I weren't okay with that, I'd have said, 'Thanks for the rescue, fuck off,' not 'Yes, I'll marry you.' So here, you're Yoda and I'm the padawan. Right. I've assimilated that. Let the hard stuff commence."

  "Understood."

  He reached out, plucked a knife from the wall, turned and threw in a blur of speed. The hard impact knocked Ellen back. She could see the black hilt standing in her right shoulder, and her hands tried to grasp it. Then the shock passed and there was pain, enormous, all-pain, everywhere, the floor rushed up and her head went thock against it and she screamed – and she was back on her feet. Her hand went to her smooth, unmarked shoulder.

  "You son of a bitch!" she shouted. "That hurt!"

  "It does," he said somberly, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "But here I can…reset, undo. My darling, training is wonderful, but the only way to learn to fight well is to fight. And learn, if you survive. But here you can fight, lose, die, and still learn from the mistake that killed or crippled you!"

  "Oh," she said. "Okay, remembering previous words here. Unless I get too blase about it because I know it's not real."

  "You will not. The fear and pain operate below the conscious level."

  "Okay, if you say so…Where is this, if it's based on anywhere real?"

  "The training salon…dojo, though the Thais don't use that word…of a man named Saragam, in a little town north of Bangkok."

  Adrian made a gesture, and the place was gone. Others flickered by. A crowded street in a European city with a blare of noise and a waft of pastry baking, a tiny atoll with a single palm tree and cerulean waves breaking white on a sugar-grain beach, a pine forest stark and silent with winter, snow freezing cold on her feet and heavy on the boughs. Then the converted warehouse again.

  He sighed. "Harvey Ledbetter took me here, not long after my…foster parents died, as part of my training for the Brotherhood. The real here, that is. I miss hi
m."

  Ellen felt her mouth quirk. "I realize Harvey's your wise grizzled mentor and second dad and comrade in arms and all those manly bonding things, and I like him myself. He helped save my life. But he's not welcome on our honeymoon, darling."

  Adrian grinned at her. "Actually, I had a very bad crush on him for the longest time. He was a strikingly handsome man then, you know, and very charismatic. There were attempts at seduction. All failures, alas."

  She laughed, a startled gurgle. "What did he think of that?

  "Quiet horror and loud irritation, my sweet, and the odd swat upside the head. Now let us begin. First, how to stand-"

  What felt like twelve long hours later Ellen opened her eyes, and spent a moment being astonished that she wasn't exhausted. For a moment the tiredness was there, like the ghost of sensation, then it faded completely and she stretched, refreshed from sleep. Adrian was sitting up and looking at her, twining a lock of her curly blond hair around one finger and smiling. She made her face grow thoughtful, almost awestruck, and spoke solemnly:

  "I know…kung fu."

  He frowned for a moment. "Saragam's style is not really-"

  Then he winced. His film experience wasn't entirely with Euro classics.

  "For that, I should make you fold Paris in half. Or spank you," he said.

  "Not until after dinner. I'm hungry, too."

  CHAPTER THREE

  "I look like death," Adrienne Breze said softly, shifting in the clinic bed and wincing a little. "I feel like death incarnate, and not in a good way."

  "At least you're not speaking in small capitals," Tokairin Michiko said from her chair beside the bed.

  There was a pickup overhead, and Adrienne had routed it to the big screen at the foot; the view out through the French doors into the courtyard with its fountains and bougainvillea was pretty, but it got boring after a while. She did look like death in the screen's pitiless image, and not one of the more glamorous versions. Skeletally thin, and having good bones didn't make that any more attractive. Not to mention the discolored, peeling skin and the glistening ointments and the fact that every hair on her head and body had dropped out.