A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  “Seversk, that oozing chancre upon Siberia’s lower intestine,” Adrienne said with a grin. “Still, it’s a good place to reminisce about Srebrenica.”

  Ellen kept eating through the Shadowspawn laughter. Four oysters were just enough to remind her that it had been a long day since lunch.

  And that I lost half a pint of blood, she reminded herself grimly. This cocktail is going straight to my head. Then: So what?

  The longer the time that passed, the less . . .

  Peaceful, she thought. Dreamy, peaceful, pleasant, right-and-proper. . . . the memory of Adrienne’s ecstatic face, turned to the sky, mouth open with Ellen’s blood trickling from the corners.

  I can remember thinking at the time that I’d be grossed out later, and I remember now how good it felt then. And I really don’t like the way Michiko keeps glancing at me, as if I were one of these oysters. Eating with people who think of you as food is nerve-racking.

  “The bad news is that he’s pretty much decided to support option Trimback One,” the woman in the elaborate hairdo went on.

  Adrienne sighed and took the last oyster. She replied . . . and it was in Japanese, as the head-waiter came in again.

  “Champagne-cured Monterey sardines for you, Ms. Tōkairin,” he said triumphantly, laying out the appetizer. “With French fingerling potato salad, micro beet greens, and sauce verte.”

  Another flourish. “And for you, Ms. Brézé, artichoke-stuffed local calamari, with Iacopi Farms white bean puree, mizuna, and preserved Meyer lemon bagna cauda.”

  Another plate was deftly twitched from a server and set in front of Ellen:

  “And for the pretty blond lady who looks so hungry, seared hand-line-caught Ahi tuna, accompanied by yellow foot chanterelles, braised salsify, and wild mushroom consommé. Now with these, I recommend the Paul Hobbs Russian River Valley Chardonnay.”

  Ellen took a forkful; the tuna was almost as much like rare steak as fish.

  Oh, my, this is good! But why are these Shadowspawn all such foodies? Adrian was too. I had to add an extra mile to my run to keep from inflating like a blimp, and he never gained an ounce.

  “Because we have much sharper senses of taste and smell than you do, ma douce,” Adrienne said. “And very active metabolisms. When we’re not in trance, it cranks right up. Our bodies are treating it as a brief hunting season, but we don’t have to wait out glacial winters anymore.”

  “You’ve got her verbalized thoughts already?” Michiko asked, raising a thin black brow. “It takes me a couple of days at least.”

  “Our acquaintance has been brief, but intense,” Adrienne said. “And even though he didn’t feed on her, there was a ground-link between her and Adrian. I could taste it the first time her blood hit my tongue.”

  “Kinky,” Michiko laughed.

  “Delightfully so. I’m disappointed to hear about your grandfather. I had hopes he’d be reasonable.”

  “He wavered, but the al-Lanarkis talked him around. Convinced him we could handle things like the reactors melting down after the EMP.”

  “Oh, now we’re going to rely on our administrative abilities to pull things through? Name of a black dog!”

  Adrian used that same odd curse, Ellen thought. For a moment her throat squeezed shut; then she took a deep breath and doggedly kept eating.

  “Adrienne, you’re preaching to the converted here. The Lanarkis don’t have to worry so much; it’s mostly camels and goats out in their bailiwick anyway.”

  “And then there would be the burning cities, and the refineries . . . Oh, what’s the use? You’re right, Michi; I don’t have to convince you. We’ll just have to hope we can convince a quorum at the Council meeting, or at least block hasty action.”

  “I’m getting ready for Tiflis,” Michiko agreed, sipping at her wine. “My, this does go well with the cured sardines.”

  “I hope you’ll have all the East Asian data so we can circulate it—and nothing too technical. PowerPoint, with lots of pictures. You’ve got better access there than I do. My cousins will have Europe more or less sewn up—the downside to Trimback One is fairly obvious there, enough so that even a lot of the postcorporeals are en courant.”

  “My people are working on it,” Michiko said. “We’ll have it in good time. And I’ve got just the expert for calculating the spread on the initial exposures.”

  I suspect that my people here means something like my horses, Ellen thought.

  “And I’m learning Georgian,” she went on. “Me minda ts’avide tbilisshi . It’s so much better when you can understand them, and I expect to do a little hunting there.”

  “Who are you learning it from?” Adrienne inquired.

  “An adjunct professor down at Stanford named Vakhtang Choloqashvili. Darkly handsome and—”

  She giggled and put a hand to her mouth; when she went on it was with a fake-guttural accent:

  “In Georgia, are real men! Are like wild”—with a crook-fingered grabbing gesture—“bull of ze mountains!”

  She went on in her normal mid-Californian voice: “He’s just beginning to suspect that the nightmares aren’t really nightmares. He gave me this look the last time I drove down for a tutorial, and his hands were shaking.”

  “I could teach you a few words,” Adrienne said, and they snapped at each other with a sideways flick of the head and a mutual click of pearly teeth.

  Literally snapped, Ellen thought, and turned her eyes down to her plate.

  The gesture had looked absolutely natural, and playfully flirtatious.

  God. Oh, God.

  “I should be fully fluent by the time things are concluded,” Michiko said. “Then I could console his grieving widow. She’d need someone who really understood her, all alone in a strange country.”

  She glanced at Ellen. “Aren’t we awful?”

  They both laughed at her involuntary mental wave of agreement. Platters of Maine lobster claws and Dungeness crabs and Kona Blue sashimi came in and were enthusiastically devoured amid gossip about people and places and politics Ellen had never heard of; what she did grasp would have killed her appetite a few days ago if she’d believed it. Now she found she could push it all out of her mind and concentrate on each bite; it might be her last meal.

  At least if it is, I can console myself that I didn’t die with the taste of KFC on my tongue. Adrian managed to turn me into a bit of a foodie too.

  It helped that the conversation shifted unpredictably among at least five languages, two of which she didn’t even recognize. Jason returned to consult about the desserts; or dictate them, as far as Michiko was concerned:

  “Chocolate blackout cream cake, dulce de leche, raspberry sorbet, and sweet and salty peanuts,” he said, setting the plate before her. “I’d suggest the Late Harvest Sauvignon Black-Semillon, Rancho de Oro Puro. And coffee? Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, perhaps: a slight cherry fruitiness but also the bitterness to balance the unctuous sweet here.”

  “This Rogue Creamery cheese from Oregon looks very interesting,” Adrienne said; she was perusing the menu.

  “It is, it is,” Jason replied. “Cold smoked over hazelnut shells, sharp and sweet together. To die for, ma’am.”

  “I’ll go French for the wine. Loire Valley?”

  “Excellent! We have a very nice Vouvray Moelleux . . .”

  “I’ll have that. You pick for my friend here. She needs corrupting and I suspect you’re good at that, Jason.”

  “We’ll soon get rid of that wholesome schoolgirl innocence!” Jason said. “Depravity is the way to go.”

  He probably thinks I’m some sort of cheap hookup! Ellen thought. Some student putting out for glamour and a taste of the high life.

  When you were in terror of death it was absurd to be concerned about social embarrassment. She found that perfect fear did not drive out shame.

  They just synergize.

  “Then the quince-apple turnovers for you, miss, with brown sugar pecan ice cream, and cinnamon caramel sauce. A wh
ite Riesling, I think. The Anderson Valley Navarro Cluster Select.”

  It appeared, and tasted as good as it sounded. She was distracted enough that something almost escaped her:

  “—parasmallpox.”

  Her ears pricked up at that.

  “Well, at least something went right,” Michiko said, chasing the last crumb of the cake around her plate.

  “The Congo field tests were just what we’d hoped.”

  Michiko clapped her hands together. “Stopping things just where we want. My family would be perfectly happy with ten million on the West Coast.”

  Adrienne nodded. “And the humans would offer their necks to us out of sheer gratitude to the savior gods.”

  “Mmmm,” Michiko said dreamily. “I can see establishing this ceremony, somewhere, where they offer a youth and a maiden to me every year. Like a kami, you know? Something beautiful and sad, with music and dancing.”

  “Exactly. And then we could have all the modern conveniences and still be absolutely sure they’d never, ever be dangerous again, or learn anything we don’t want them to know. Now that’s what I call a Dread Empire of Shadow!”

  “Wonderful,” Michiko breathed.

  She bowed her head for an instant. When she raised it again her eyes were moist.

  “Adrienne, it’s a beautiful vision!”

  Oh, God! They’re talking about destroying the world!

  Michiko sighed. “I just hope we can convince enough of the others. And on a personal note, things turned out fine with Adrian; you got the note?”

  “Yes.” She frowned. “That was a little close to the mark.” Michiko shrugged. “It’s a high-stakes game with a lot of powerful Wreakers involved. Nothing lost except two of my least favorite cousins. And all’s well—”

  “—that ends well.”

  “I’m going out clubbing now. Want to come along?”

  “Not tonight, Michi. I know how that ends up. We wake up together with blood-soaked sheets, headaches, and an empty going into rigor mortis between us.”

  “You didn’t have any complaints last time,” she said with a wink and a pout.

  “He was just a pickup,” Adrienne said with a smile.

  She looked over, and Ellen felt a slow flush traveling up her throat.

  “As I said, I have plans for this one.”

  Michiko laughed as she rose. “I can imagine.”

  They repeated the fingertip-touching gesture. “Thank you, Michiko. You’ve been une vrai amie. We can do this!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  At four hours past midnight, Adrian Brézé shook off dreams of dread and fear, of savage pleasures taken and bestowed. Of rapturous abandonment of self.

  Ellen’s asleep now, at last, he knew as he woke. Yes, that’s a minor Wreaking on her, a sedative.

  He could tell that, though not the precise location; simply that she was near, and slept in a mix of exhaustion and Power-driven unconsciousness that turned aside the chances of waking.

  Pauvre petite. Caught in the contentions of demons. Poor girl.

  Then a wry correction to himself:

  Unfortunate young woman? It doesn’t feel right to say it that way, but she always disliked being called a girl unless she did it herself. I was too much around oldsters as I grew, and too little around ordinary folk. I was born in the sixth decade of the twentieth century, but I’m not really a child of my own time. Or of any year. Or I am part of many? Of the age of chipped flint and the Empire of Shadow whose memory haunted all the ages after? Of the nineteenth century that saw its rebirth, of the twentieth that lived beneath it and thought its evil dreams their own, the twenty-first that may see its final triumph? Adrian Brézé is home no-where and no-when. Forever out of time, out of place.

  He let a Mhabrogast phrase run through his head: Amss-aui-ock!

  That was being-becoming-now. The sensation was like thinking in syllables of razor-edged glass. They cut him away from his flesh. A brief flash of pain, and he rose and looked down at his own birth-body lying in the hospital bed, shivering as the slight shock of the separation died away.

  Out of body, too, now. And Harv was right. I do look like shit. It’s been a long while since I went night-walking. You don’t see yourself in a mirror as you do with a stranger’s eye.

  He was thinner than he should be, and looked older, and with lines of pain in his face even asleep. They smoothed out a little as the empty body sank into the coma that would sustain it, heart beating once or twice a minute, breath imperceptibly slow. He flicked his mind at the monitors to keep them reporting all was well, and passed his hands from head to toe of his physical form. The wounds felt full of flickers of light to his senses, a tingling on the hands as the cells lived their accelerated lives.

  Healing well, he thought. Yes, I can leave tomorrow.

  Then he looked down at the body he was wearing. It was the default, his hindbrain’s picture of his physical self, partly read from the paired helixes of his heredity and partly through his somatic memory of his life. He tried to see himself as another might. He was naked, of course; what most would have called a slender man a few years short of thirty, a little below medium height, with the muscles of a runner or gymnast or dancer. The scars showed, those graven on the memory of his cells and mind. The four long parallels across the right thigh were still vivid; he’d never been able to shed those.

  Adrienne’s parting gift in Calcutta. My mind doesn’t want to let that go, on some level.

  The other marks of blades and bullets were long-faded and nearly gone, just as they were on his birth-self. New red lines on his left forearm and thigh stood out, anticipation of healing, freed of all pain.

  “Stop admiring yourself and get going,” Harvey said. “I don’t like the idea of a meet with Hajime anyway. Yeah, and I know it was my idea.”

  He could see the night-walker’s shape, even when Adrian wasn’t trying hard to manifest. The rifle he cradled in his arms was a shrilling note of wrongness in the darkened hospital room; night-sight goggles were pushed up on his forehead.

  “You ought to have me in closer overwatch,” Harvey grumbled.

  “The old bastard said he’d give me an hour’s start if he decided to kill me,” Adrian said reasonably. “He has an antique sense of the proprieties. I certainly wouldn’t trust Michiko with a safe-conduct like that. But if he or his men detected you . . . you’ve killed too many Shadowspawn, Harvey. There would be no mercy for either of us.”

  “Not as many as you’ve killed, personal-like.”

  “They make allowances for me because of my blood.”

  Harvey sighed. “Well, I’ll be listening. I may not project all that well, but I can hear at these ranges. If things go south, I’ll head east.”

  Adrian nodded wordlessly. He dressed from the suitcase in dark slacks and a black long-sleeved cotton knit shirt and slipped on moccasin-like shoes; it was possible to imagine clothes for the aetheric body, but easier not.

  A moment’s concentration showed nobody alert outside; a sleepy duty nurse at the station near the stairs, and minds tossing in the restless sleep of the ill in the other rooms. Their dreams grew evil as he walked past, endless ones of flight and fear and pain and fangs lurking in the dark. The nurse shivered and turned up the space heater beneath the desk and rubbed her hands together.

  And that fear I cannot help, not without wasting time and energy I cannot spare.

  He couldn’t help the impulses that made his lips want to curl back from his teeth, either, or make the meaty appetizing scent of their blood less appealing. The lust was even stronger in this form. The dim night-lights were bright as daylight to his eyes, though everything had a slightly silvery sheen. Detail leapt out at him without shadow.

  They have reason to fear. Nightmare walks here.

  Even a great city was quiet at this hour, and not many lived in this district save in hotels. A few stray dogs and cats sensed him; one brindled tabby stared with unwinking green eyes and carefully circled a
round him. Webs of energy spanned the night, though, flowing in wires, humming through the air. Particles sleeted into the atmosphere above, leaving rippling curtains of fire along the edge of the atmosphere that shielded him.

  At last he was in South Park, an oval of trees and grass in a district where the mathematical complexities of computers laid a sparkling shimmer to his eyes when he let them see. A long dark limousine was parked at one end of the park. He walked towards it and bowed his head.

  “Master Tōkairin Hajime,” he said, in Japanese. “I humbly greet you.”

  Even to Adrian’s senses the Master was barely distinguishable from a living man; his form would be as tangible as he wished. He wore a black and dark-beige hakama kimono, the practical garment warriors had used, with the two swords thrust through the obi-sash. He didn’t bother with the complex antique hairdo, though; it was cropped close in a silvery-gray cap. His long lined face was that of a man in his sixties—probably because someone born in Yamagata Prefecture in 1890 simply assumed core-deep that the face of authority had wrinkles.

  Only the eyes were visibly different from those of a corporeal; they were unmixed gold. The swords were real, and silver-threaded; the warning pain of the metal that the Power shunned radiated through the lead-lined scabbards. Adrian bowed again, in unspoken respect at the strength of will and Power needed to carry them. Hajime hadn’t been as close to purebred as Adrian, not that far back. But anyone who survived the birth-body’s death for long tended to gradually grow in their capacity to Wreak. His mind was like a surface of mirrored steel, revealing nothing. It was a little eerie, not to be able to sense intent before speech.

  There were two men behind the Master, in dark suits. They were Shadowspawn, but corporeals, young and fit and very alert; he could sense the knives beneath their jackets. The driver was a human, a renfield carefully not observing what passed.

  “Adrian Brézé,” the old man said. “Traitor, why have you come to my territory and killed my people? Why do you think you can do so and live?”