The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “Tough?” a voice asked in his ear.

  “Strenuous,” he replied. “Just a mite strenuous, I’d say.”

  And I don’t know whether I’m glad Adrienne is dead or not. She was just as much a monster, maybe more, and a lot smarter. On the other hand she was more rational, so maybe a bit easier to anticipate. Michiko might have killed me just because it felt good.

  Harvey’s covering squad waited a half hour before they came in, which was good fieldcraft. Both had scope-sighted rifles with them, angular military models with chassis of carbon fiber and aircraft-grade aluminum; the Mhabrogast protective glyphs and silver threads were decidedly nonstandard.

  They broke them down, fitted them into the shaped and padded recesses of the carrying cases and slipped them into the compartment behind the rear seat of the pickup. Otherwise they were in the sort of thing hikers might wear, tough cotton drill in neutral colors and laced boots. Traipsing around Big Sur in a sniper ghillie suit would be a bit conspicuous.

  “I could have gotten her easy,” Jack Farmer groused.

  He was a thirty-something hard case with cropped blond hair and a snub nose, and Harvey didn’t like him.

  He’s trustworthy, and he’s good at what he does. I just don’t like him, because he’s a son of a bitch. I suppose his mother loved him. Before he learned to talk, at least.

  His partner was a woman named Anjali Guha, South Asian dark, athletic, and, in Harvey’s opinion considerably smarter. Or at least less driven and obsessed, which was more important than sheer IQ. Your mind could do only what your emotions let it. Character was more important than the size of your vocabulary every time.

  “The plan is to use her to get a chance at a lot more of them,” Harvey said patiently. “We did use her . . . and through her, Adrienne Brézé . . . to get Hajime.”

  “She and her husband stepped into her grandfather’s shoes,” Farmer said. “Does that mean we used her, or she used us?”

  Guha gave him a barbed glance. “That’s a distinction without a difference, Jack,” she said sharply. “We got Adrienne Brézé too, who is, was, a bigger fish.”

  “Ellen Tarnowski got her,” Harvey pointed out, which made them both pout a little at being outclassed by an amateur.

  “And anyway,” Guha went on, “if you’d really intended to kill her, something would probably have happened to stop it. You’d have had a stroke, or a wasp would have stung you just as you were squeezing the trigger, or some tourists would have tripped over you, or you’d have been assaulted by a wild sheep that suddenly decided it was an arse-bandit queer for humans. You know how that works, yes, indeed, you do.”

  “Yeah,” he said, half snarling with frustration. “But I just want to exterminate them.”

  Harvey sighed. “You’re around thirty on the scale, aren’t you?”

  The Alberman Scale ran from fully human at zero to absolute purebred Shadowspawn at a hundred; there were around a hundred and thirty-seven genes involved, mostly recessives. Professor Alberman had developed the scale and the automatic DNA sequencing test for the Council of Shadows, but both sides used it.

  The Brotherhood operative was tanned, but he could still flush; thirty was more than twice the average in the general population. It took twenty-five or higher to use the Power consciously, not just have premonitions or the occasional tweaking of probabilities. Harvey was a twenty-seven.

  “Yeah, I am. Your point?”

  The point is that I keep having to remind you of things, Harvey thought. That’s the problem with talking politics—which this is, down and dirty. People have to be continually mentally reinforced if you want them to absorb knowledge that contradicts what they want to hear; otherwise it just sort of slip-slides away, gets blurred down to the noise level of their viewpoint. It’s a pain in the ass.

  It wasn’t an accident that Harvey was known as the Brotherhood’s loose cannon.

  “The point is that you’d have to exterminate the human race to get rid of the Shadowspawn genes,” Harvey went on patiently. “Startin’ with the ones like . . . oh, the three of us. Humans’re too mixed; hell, being a stable Shadowspawn-human mix probably defines us as a species and has for twenty thousand years. If the bad guys hadn’t spread their genes around during the Empire of Shadow, humans . . . mostly humans . . . probably wouldn’t have been able to overthrow them in the first place. Why do you think we’re the only surviving type of hominid? I suspect it’s because they preferred fucking us to Neanderthals or the rest.”

  I need to keep Farmer on-side. On the other hand, he’s not stupid, exactly. He just filters out things that don’t fit the story as he’d prefer it. Shit, that just makes him human. For that matter, Shadowspawn do that too.

  “In fact,” he went on, “if we weren’t mixed, we’d probably be sitting around in caves splitting mammoth bones for the marrow and eating the lice out of one another’s hair. Notice when civilization started?”

  “When we overthrew them!”

  “Yeah, which was just about the same time they finished diluting themselves until it was pretty hard to know who was them and who was us. A lot of the first pharaohs and kings and high priests and whatnot had a lot of Shadowspawn blood, judging from the way they acted. And if the Council Shadowspawn weren’t mixed, they’d be less of a problem—they wouldn’t be able to cooperate or care about long-term group interests even as much as they do.”

  “We can kill all the purebred ones,” Farmer said stubbornly; he had the ghost of a Midwestern accent under the California. “There aren’t more than a few thousand of them. The ones in the Council clans, in their breeding program.”

  Guha snorted as she snapped the last of the latches on the battered rifle case.

  “Jack, back in Victorian times you would have been a purebred. Most of the original Order of the Black Dawn weren’t any stronger than you when they discovered Mendel and Darwin and started to use the Power to reconcentrate the heritage. They let in anyone who could lift and turn a feather then. And even if we did get rid of the ones who think of themselves as Shadowspawn, the whole thing might happen again. The genes themselves are lucky. They want to recombine and they’d still be there.”

  “Sort of like the One Ring,” Guha put in.

  “Yeah, all we have to do is reeducate them,” Farmer jeered. “They’ll become members of PETA—People for the Eating of Anthropoids.”

  Harvey checked the hidden compartment to make sure nothing was visible to the naked eye; it was a pity this wasn’t Texas, where a gun rack was routine. Hiding was one thing the Brotherhood was very good at, though Farmer could probably simply tell a cop that these weren’t the droids he was looking for and get away with it.

  There was a cooler in the back of the pickup. He pulled out beers, a hefeweizen he’d picked up in Los Gatos, plus shaved-ham sandwiches on sourdough rolls, and handed them around.

  “That’s pretty much what I did with Adrian, Jack,” he said, biting into one and savoring the sharp-smoky-meaty flavors.

  If hunger was the best sauce, danger survived came a close second; it made you horny too. Luckily that wasn’t as big a nuisance when you were over sixty, though it didn’t go away either.

  “I got him around puberty and raised him,” he pointed out mildly. “And he turned out all right.”

  A lot more like a human being in the positive sense of the term than you, Jack, he thought to himself. I suspect if you were just a little higher on the Alberman, if you could feed and get any benefit from the blood and night-walk, you’d be off to the other side like a shot.

  Guha nodded. “And Adrian has killed more Shadowspawn than you’ve had beers, Jack, yes, indeed. He scares the hell out of me, but not like he’s going to boil my eyeballs just for the fun of seeing me run around bumping into things.”

  “Yup,” Harvey drawled. “The problem with the Shadowspawn isn’t really their instincts. Hell, I feel like killing people pretty often—who doesn’t occasionally want to kick some asshole into oblivion? The
problem is that the Order of the Black Dawn started as a bunch of black-path occultists. Just because they stopped worshiping Satan and started worshiping themselves after they found out why they could do what they did didn’t make them any less assholes, and they raised their kids that way.”

  Farmer took a swig of the beer and shrugged. “So long as I get to kill the bastards, I’m satisfied. And you two give me more opportunities than I’d get if I stayed on the reservation. The Brotherhood’s gotten too much like a fucking rabbit in the headlights, you ask me. The Council’s planning to wreck the world and all they’re doing is trying to build a bolt-hole so they can survive the apocalypse.”

  Guha nodded. “That’s why I’m with you, Harvey. But I notice you don’t tell Adrian about your little talks with Michiko-san,” she pointed out.

  “I did my job too good. The boy’s idealistic.”

  They all chuckled. “So,” Farmer said, “what’s your solution for the ones we can’t reeducate?”

  “Oh, we kill ’em all,” Harvey said cheerfully. “And Tbilisi is goin’ to be one fine opportunity for that. A lot more than Michiko and her hubby think. I got a project going along those lines. You guys in?”

  “In,” Farmer said.

  Guha shuddered. “In. But it also means we’ll have to walk into the biggest nest of them that’s gathered for generations. With enough Power in the air to make all the molecules dance in their favor.”

  “Considering the alternative, I don’t think there is much of an alternative. At least Adrienne isn’t going to be around. She was too smart for comfort and she had a lot more self-control than most of her friends.”

  Guha sighed. “I said I am in, too. Deep in doo-doo.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Adrian and Ellen crossed the Loire heading north towards Paris in the early evening; the rain had stopped and the lingering twilight of September had a liquid washed-out quality to it.

  “I’m glad we didn’t take the A6,” Adrian said. “It is a nightmare this time of year.”

  The sun was setting westward, across a low, rolling landscape of vineyards showing red and yellow, reaped fields and autumn-tinged woods, villages and the occasional château. They both ignored the petrol stations and other modern excrescences.

  On their right the sunlight caught a line of hills in the distance, turning them blue flushed with a slight tinge of pink towards their tops. Adrian handled the Ferrari F50 with his usual verve; it would do zero to a hundred in eight seconds, and he liked to do exactly that. It no longer drove Ellen to the verge of lost bladder control, and she’d finally started believing that the police wouldn’t pull them over either.

  Well, he’s got reflexes like a leopard, when he isn’t literally being a leopard, she thought, as he touched the accelerator and the g-force shoved her back into the upholstery in a scent of fine leather. Plus he can warp probability. It’s still a little scary.

  She chuckled as they zipped around a large truck and back into the left-hand lane, and he looked over at her.

  “I was just remembering that while I was at Rancho Sangrón—”

  He chuckled in turn; she’d coined the pun on the place’s name, turning it from Ranch of the Holy Blood to Ranch of the Asshole.

  “—Adrienne took me on that motorcycle cruise up the coast to San Francisco. Scared the shit out of me, and that was only just a metaphor. You Brézés have a thing for speed and risk, don’t you?”

  He stiffened, then shook his head. “You’re right. For too many years I defined myself in opposition to her; yet we are . . . were . . . similar in many respects.”

  “Your evil twin.”

  “Exactly! I can afford to acknowledge things like that now.”

  “Now that she’s dead.”

  “Since you killed her.” Adrian laughed.

  Ouch.

  Ellen winced inwardly. Half the time she remembered plunging the hypo into Adrienne’s foot with savage glee. The other half it made her queasy. Not so much the fact that she’d done it, as the way it had felt for her.

  Which was very damned good. And yes, she deserved it—God, did she deserve it!—but should I have enjoyed it so much? Should I enjoy remembering it so much? Yeah, I was so scared all the time and it was such a fucking relief to get away from the mad, sadistic bitch, but I did kill her, after all. I always used to put spiders and centipedes out in the garden instead of squishing them. I totally lost it when my cat brought me a dead bird.

  And now I’m killing people. And enjoying it. Okay, Adrienne only just qualifies as “person,” but still.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed for a moment. It would have been even more comforting if they weren’t doing nearly two hundred kilometers per hour with only one of the driver’s hands on the wheel.

  “I am sorry, my sweet. I forget sometimes that you were not brought up to this war. Most of those close to me have been born into it, but you were not.”

  “Yeah, I’m not a conflict junkie. Even to get out of the coal country I never seriously considered enlisting. And now I’m a supercommando fem-ninja in training.”

  He laughed aloud at that. “You have natural talent,” he said. “But I would not go quite that far.”

  “And I feel a little, mmm, guilty about all the people we left in that horrible place.”

  Adrian shrugged expressively. “My sweet, you are in the war now. And you are on the side of the guerrillas. We cannot afford sentiment. If I had tried to smuggle out . . . oh, say, little Cheba . . .”

  She shot him a dark glance, half-serious. He’d been impersonating one of Adrienne’s guests, and he’d had to take the girl as refreshment.

  I believe he didn’t have sex with her. He’s actually a bit of a Boy Scout about that—which, considering what it would be like to be a teenage boy able to play orgasmatron games with girls’ brains, says something very good about him. But I find I’m jealous of his putting the bite on her, too. Mine! Mine! All mine! And when I’m short, you stick to the blood-bank product no matter how bad it tastes!

  “. . . it would have aroused suspicions.”

  “Well, she’s dead now too,” Ellen said. “Poor girl . . .”

  There was a quality to his silence this time.

  “She’s not?”

  Adrian shook his head, his eyes commendably on the roadway.

  “No?”

  “No,” he said aloud, reluctantly. “We have a base-link.”

  She nodded; being on the receiving end of a feeding attack wasn’t just a matter of the Shadowspawn drinking your blood or the euphoric drug. There was a mental joining, a feedback loop; she’d heard Adrienne use the phrase quantum entanglement. The feedback could get seriously disturbing, and not only for the human victim. Ellen suspected that was why Shadowspawn had evolved clinical sadism as their normal personality type; otherwise feeling their prey’s emotions would put them off their food.

  “Not like we have?”

  “No, not nearly so close. That was a high-link, with very detailed transference that let us communicate directly. That takes long interaction. I get . . . generalized feelings from her. She is being used for feeding and—”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  Yeah, a feeding attack means you usually also get the full explosion-in-the-kink-factory sex-object treatment, like someone playing with their food, World Wrestling Federation style. Fun when it’s a game with Adrian, pretty horrible when it’s real. Well, there was a lot of pleasure involved, technically, but in a sort of squiky, self-loathing, terrorized, half-crazy way. Definitely not fun.

  “Poor girl doubled, then,” Ellen said.

  Adrian frowned. “There was a toughness to her,” he said. “Resilience.”

  “She’ll need it,” Ellen said, feeling a rush of sympathy. “At least I can wake up from my nightmares now.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I wish we could have rescued them all,” Ellen said. “You sent those two Brotherhood types away before the end . . . couldn’t yo
u have sent Cheba with them, at least?”

  “Possibly. But possibly that would have aroused suspicions, and I could not take that risk. Not with your life at stake. Shadowspawn are paranoid, not least about one another; even when she believed I was another, Adrienne would have watched me carefully for the slightest sign of intrigue. You would not believe what a black brew of murder and madness, incest and sadism and depravity their lives are.”

  “Oh, I got some faint tinge of an idea,” she said dryly, and she could sense he flushed a little. “What with the torture and the rape and mortal terror and mass murder for fun and so forth.”

  “In any case, you must learn that the mission comes first. This is hard, yes. It is also essential.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. With my head. My gut’s only half convinced.”

  Adrian looked eastward again. “And not far away is where it all started,” he said.

  “The Brézé château?”

  “Yes. My great-great-grandfather’s lair. Grand adept and commander of the Order of the Black Dawn. Diabolist, murderer, genius.”

  “Hey, fella, don’t brood while you’re driving at this speed! I think what’s really bothering you is thinking about what you might have been like if Harvey hadn’t rescued you. Or kidnapped you. Taken you away from your family before you really knew what they were, at least.”

  “True, that thought haunts me sometimes. And he was supposed to kill me, by the way. That was the first time Harvey dangerously exceeded his mission brief. Not the last, of course.”

  “Kill you?” She sat as upright as the reclined seat and the safety harness would let her. “Wait a minute, you never told me that.”

  Adrian shrugged. “Harvey was playing a hunch . . . and to be sure, by then he knew me, and as he said, killing a young boy he actually knew was . . . difficult. Despite what his orders were.”