The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  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 fullsensory 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 blasé 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 him.”

  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 Brézé 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,” Tōkairin 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.

  Like a famine victim, only not so funny, she thought.

  She ached. Her digestive system felt as if it were packed with mud from the back of her throat to her lower intestine. She itched. Not just the amputated foot where the regeneration was starting far too slowly, but all over. Having several dozen milligrams of silver solution and radioactive waste pumped into you would be bad enough for a human, but the Shadowspawn metabolism was more vulnerable to both. If she’d gotten the full dose . . .

  “You do look pretty awful,” Michiko said. “It’s a good thing I cut your foot off in one swell foop.”

  Then she giggled. “I only beat Dale to it by a second or two because I had a wakizashi on me. Dale was going to use his bowie, and Dmitri just went around roaring and waving a chair in the air.”

  “He was a silverback gorilla at the time. It’s easy to get lost in the beast when it’s that close to your own form.”

  “Especially with Dmitri and gorillas. But one advantage of all that old Japan stuff grandfather liked is that I had the short sword on me.”

  “That was quick work,” Adrienne acknowledged. “I’d have died if you had
not cut the foot off before much of that Hell-brew got into my circulatory system—and I might have been too distracted to go postcorporeal in time, too. Even the best plans and probability fluxes are . . .irritatingly uncontrollable at times.”

  “Well, your darling brother was involved, which screws the Power. Why don’t you just spend more time inside while you’re healing?”

  “Because it’s boring playing games in my head after a while, Michi,” Adrienne replied. “So I ration myself, that way it’s a relief when I do it. Besides, I have to keep track of what’s going on and make decisions.”

  “You could night-walk and then sleep away the days,” she pointed out. “Your night-walking manifestation is so good even I can’t tell you’re out-of-body unless I really concentrate.”

  “Night-walking . . . my body’s still too weak to have the personality gone for long, it needs me in here concentrating on healing. Unless I want to go postcorporeal for good, and I don’t, not yet. It would be inconvenient. I’m going to stay corporeal until I get old.”

  Michiko wasn’t being very considerate—but then, they were both Shadowspawn, and empathy simply wasn’t their breed’s strong point; Michiko was nearly as purebred as the Brézés.

  There’s always Monica or Jose if I feel like sympathy.

  The other Shadowspawn was also looking disgustingly sleek and contented, dressed in a pale silk summer dress and strapped sandals; she’d turned her hair blond again—a minor Wreaking—and it fell in silky waves past her high-cheeked Asian face.

  “Now, to business,” Adrienne said. “My father and mother say things are going smoothly.”

  Michiko nodded. “The Tōkairin clan’s accepted me . . . and Ichirō . . . without much trouble. Only had to kill a few, and no Final Deaths,” she said. “I can’t be too friendly to the Brézé interests yet, of course. I’m supposed to be here talking to your parents, warning them not to try anything while we settle down under the new management. Nobody suspects you’re not gone, as far as we can tell.”

  “Good cover. And after all, you didn’t kill my parents, your grandfather did, so it would be easier for you to negotiate with them now that he’s dead all the way.”

  Under Michiko’s grandfather the Tōkairin had ousted the Californian Brézés as the primary Shadowspawn group on the West Coast in a neat little coup over a generation ago. Most of the Tōkairin liked it just fine that way. Fortunately Michiko accepted that Adrienne had her mind on larger things, and besides that, they were on the same side of the great Shadowspawn generational divide. As her now thoroughly deceased grandfather had learned, far too late and very briefly.

  Michiko went on: “We’re gearing up for the Council meeting, and we won a lot of support for the way we acted when the Brotherhood terrorists killed Grandfather.”

  A mental communication passed between them: not words, more like a snigger.

  “That’s good.. . . I’m a little tired now, Michi.”

  “Get better soon. I’m not up to heading the Progressives on my own! Besides, we could go clubbing.”

  “Better I remain dead-dead for a while, to the rest of the world.”

  The sickroom was part of the casa grande of Rancho Sangre Sagrado, the mansion in the little California town that had been the first Brézé property on the West Coast, back in the eighteen sixties, when they brought the message of the Order of the Black Dawn to this part of the New World.

  “Oh,” Michiko said. “And the police in Santa Fe are sniffing around about that lucy of yours . . . the blond one whose blood smelled so edible . . . those marvelous tits and the way her brain fired when you hurt her . . .”

  “Ellen. Who did this to me, don’t forget. Take care of it for me, would you?”

  “De nada. I’ll set our renfields in the government on it. Do them good. I can look in if it’s more than they can handle quietly, we do want to keep people—”

  By which she meant their kind of people, of course.

  “—from thinking too much about Adrian. Since I’m the head of the ruling clan in the area, nobody can object.”

  Adrienne shut her eyes and sighed as her friend-ally-rival left. One of the advantages of being sick was that nobody expected her to take care of business. Whatever was happening in Santa Fe, for example, where Ellen and Adrian and Adrienne between them had been fairly . . .

  Blatant, she thought.

  It was still important not to be too conspicuous. Not for much longer, though. Not after the Empire of Shadow returned in force.

  Then it’ll be just one long party. Except for the ones on the buffet.

  The various monitors and the tubes and catheters gave a tang of ozone to the medicine scents, overriding the greenery from outside. A doctor came in, middle-aged and ginger-haired, with a stethoscope looped around her neck and the head tucked into a pocket of her green scrubs.

  “It’s time for your feeding, Doña,” she said briskly, a slight Scots burr still roughening her voice.

  The hunger was there, but curiously muffled. I never thought I’d get bored with blood, she thought. I want to hunt now and then. Or maybe it’s just that I crave some solid food as well for variety.

  A postcorporeal could survive on human blood alone, but even they didn’t want to, usually, except for a few superstitious antique types. Corporeals needed ordinary nourishment at least every now and then.

  “I wish I could eat something more tangible as well, Dr. Duggan,” she said, a little fretfully. “I’m starting to have dreams about steak, or some crab claws, or sweet-and-sour pork. Or even vegetables.”

  “Intravenous will have to do. You’re not ready, though you should be able to take broth soon,” the renfield doctor said. “I’m still amazed you survived, even with the whole-body transfusions we did. Entire organs kept . . . nearly . . . shutting down. But once the corner was turned the recovery has been very rapid, and it seems to be accelerating. Astonishingly rapid, in fact, as if your body is chelating the poisons somehow.”

  “The Power was helping, but on an unconscious level,” Adrienne said. “I can direct it now, and that’ll speed things up, and the more I get rid of the toxins the more my command of the Power will return. It’s a positive feedback cycle.”

  Duggan nodded, obviously taking mental notes. She had been the primary physician at Rancho Sangre for two decades now, and she’d always been intrigued by the Shadowspawn.

  “I am feeling a little blood-hungry,” Adrienne went on. “Now that you mention it.”

  Plus, of course, you needed blood to do more than the most basic Wreaking with the Power. Otherwise you risked draining your own reserves dangerously.

  I wonder why that is, she thought.

  One of her lucies, Peter, had been—still was—a physicist. He had some interesting ideas about how the Power functioned. What had he said . . .

  The Shadowspawn mind is like a transistor. It modulates the forces it draws from the quantum foam, it doesn’t create it. But the modulation itself draws from the energy matrix of the personality.

  He wasn’t a biologist, of course, so he hadn’t been any help with the physical mechanisms, or why human blood was essential. And she was using the Power to heal. She should take as much blood as her stomach could handle.

  “Who’s on the schedule?” she asked. “I’ve sort of lost track.”

  “We were using pickups at first. You weren’t really conscious and there was some incidental damage while you fed.”

  “Are any of my lucies ready? I’m in the mood for comfort food.”

  “Yes.” Duggan consulted a clipboard. “You fed on Peter the day before yesterday, the spare before that, Jose the day before that . . . so Cheba and Monica are both past due, actually. That’s stressful.”

  “Cheba, then,” Adrienne said. “Don’t let me overfeed if I go into fugue; my control is still shaky.”

  And she’s the one I’d miss least if I do go all mindless-voracity.

  Cheba was Mexican and from Coetzala in Veracruz, mestiz
o with a touch of African somewhere, dark and slim and very pretty, a girl Adrienne had bought from a coyote people-smuggler with a job lot of refreshments for the party where the previous head of the Tōkairin had died four months ago. She came through the door with Duggan holding one arm, but there wasn’t much struggle; after repeated feedings the addiction had her strongly, and she was quivering a little with the need. And averting her eyes in horror from what lay on the bed, but Adrienne couldn’t really blame her for that.

  I’m not exactly aesthetic at the moment. Very ungrateful of Ellen to treat me this way, after all I did for her! I will have to punish her quite severely when I get her back, which will be a lot of fun. Still, it’s a stroke of luck in the long run. Everyone thinking I’m dead makes it all so much easier.

  “Sit here, lassie,” Duggan said; there was a padded rest beside the bed. “Then lean forward and present your throat for the Doña.”

  She did. The scent was enough to make Adrienne feel a little more alive: fear in complex layers, shuddering disgust, and something musky that was probably self-loathing. The emotions she could feel directly were a lovely roil too, though Adrienne knew her telepathic sensitivity was still deplorably weak, and she could barely pick up the conscious part of the thought stream at all.

  The cinnamon-colored throat came closer and closer . . . a tear dropped into her mouth, and then the contact of skin against her lips brought the taste of sweat, a sting in the cracks. Her mouth moved in the precise grace of the feeding bite, and the microserrations on the inside of her incisors sliced the taut surface.

  The girl’s whimper turned into a hoarse moan mixed with sobs. Adrienne growled deep in her throat as the blood flooded into her mouth, salty and meaty and sweet and as intoxicatingly complex as a glass of Bollinger VVF 1999, the taste of life. The burst of ecstasy flared in the victim’s mind and resonated in hers, mingled with terror and despair, swirling down to a warm contentment as the blood flowed, a delicious yielding. Her mouth worked against the skin.. . .