The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  Back to the bed. Sleep, a falling into a welcome darkness.

  But yellow-flecked eyes waited there.

  This time the misery was less when he woke, but for a moment Peter couldn’t tell where he was. Twelve, Christmas, lying sick with the flu while the rest of the family was down in the living room. The model of the Enterprise hanging over his bed, the Hubble photograph on the cupboard door, the Xbox on the desk, the shelf with his Jack London and schoolbooks. Mom would come soon, and spoon some of her chicken soup into his mouth, and change the cloth on his forehead—

  No. I’m not twelve. I’m thirty-two.

  Cold clarity, and tears ran down his cheeks again in reaction.

  I want my mom, I want my mom! Oh, shut up, Peter!

  He coughed, deep, and had to spit as dryish sticky phlegm filled his mouth. Fastidious reflex made him blunder into the bathroom to use the sink for it, then he forced himself to stop and move with the aching care of a very old man. A clinical appraisal told him he was a little more mobile, but just enough to hurt himself if he wasn’t cautious. For the first time in a while his bladder was full, and there was a stinging pain at the beginning of the dark yellow flow.

  He drank more water, more broth, blundered back to bed and collapsed as if bludgeoned. His dreams were memories: ice spray whipping in a glittering veil off a hillcrest under moonlight as he crested it on his skis, gray slush on a city street, a canoe and big mosquitoes and white birch trees. A chocolate bar forgotten in one hand as he stared at a textbook and suddenly he understood what that theorem meant, the multilayered elegance of it clicking home in his mind. Ruth’s shy smile . . .

  But all with a sense of wrongness. It faded as he woke, coughed, and wrinkled his nose at the smell of stale ancient sweat that filled the room. Flies buzzed near the ceiling. He hadn’t noticed those before, but now his eyes tracked them for minutes at a time.

  For three days he kept up the pattern, sleeping, eating what he could—he graduated to crackers as well as broth—sleeping again. When he was stable enough for a shower the relief was inexpressible, though going back to the smelly sheets was hard for the moments it took to tumble into unconsciousness.

  “You say you don’ want the maid,” the manager of the motel said; he was a short, thickset dark man in a stained T-shirt.

  “That was then. This is now. Now I want the room cleaned,” Peter said.

  The office had a tall, dirty glass wall that turned it into a solar furnace. The air-conditioning unit in a side window rattled and wheezed, laboriously dumping the heat back out into the environment and leaving a slight smell of mildew in the cooler air. Peter reached carefully into his hip pocket and took out his wallet, then fanned another three hundred dollars onto the desk.

  “Okay,” the man said.

  “And that covers the next week.”

  “Maybe you should pay extra,” the manager said.

  “Maybe I should pay less. Maid service is part of the standard charge.”

  There was open contempt in the motel operator’s gaze; he might as well have said junkie aloud. After a moment he shrugged and swept up the money.

  “Okay, one more week.”

  “Is there anyplace in town to get something to eat?”

  “This isn’t like the city, mister,” the man said. “Hell, it ain’t even like it’s a town.”

  Peter managed to smile; his lips weren’t so dry and cracked now.

  “The place I grew up was about this size. Just a lot colder and greener.”

  “There’s Teresa’s. The truckers stop there. Out past the gas station.”

  “Thanks.”

  “De nada.”

  Of course, probably Teresa’s your cousin or your aunt.

  Heat hit him like a club as he pushed open the nonfunctioning automatic door and walked out of the little patch of shade flanked by the dry twigs of something dead in two concrete planters. It must have been at least a hundred, but it felt good, as if it were sinking into his bones and driving out lines of ice crystal there. He walked cautiously into the white light, a dozen steps at a time and then a moment’s rest.

  The little sun-faded Arizona hamlet held the one run-down motel, a scattering of old crumbling adobes, and some trailers and doublewides sandblasted by years of the desert winds, along with a few spindly bushes that were trying to be trees, their silvery gray leaves turning in the slight hot breeze. Beyond was nothing but rock and sand, occasional tufts of reluctant hardy vegetation, and things that glinted in the brilliant sunlight and might have been old broken bottles or flecks of mica in the rocks.

  It also held a gas station–cum–convenience store, and beside it a blocky white single-story structure labeled, T RESA’S. He supposed that had originally been, TERESA’S, and it was definitely a restaurant. A bell tinkled as he pushed through the screen door; from the silence he guessed that it wasn’t air conditioned, but it was oddly cool. After a moment he felt his mind function again; the wall had been three feet thick. This was adobe, and excellent thermal insulation.

  The big surprise was that it didn’t smell. Well, not of anything but food; the interior was plain, and some of the furniture looked like it dated to the eighties or even earlier, but it was dim and cool, and his stomach clenched in anticipation at the prospect of solid food, helped by the smells of spices and frying meat and onions. Everything seemed reasonably clean, though. Presumably truckers stopped here, or maybe smugglers. He sat at one of the plastic-topped tables and panted a little, exhausted by the brief walk. There was sweat under the straps of his light knapsack; the damp patches felt cool with evaporation for a moment as he sat and controlled his breathing.

  “I’ll have . . .” he croaked.

  The waitress could have been Mexican or Indian, in her thirties and built like a rain barrel. She looked at him incuriously.

  “A burrito. And a glass of water. A pitcher of water, please. Just a little ice.”

  She waited expressionlessly until he put a twenty by his plate, even though he was clean and he’d thought he looked much better once he shaved. Evidently much better still didn’t mean acceptable.

  The food came fairly quickly, which wasn’t surprising, since he and the waitress were the only humans visible. There was a cat in one corner, but it was firmly asleep on a mat, stretched out to “sleep thin.” Nothing moved, except the overhead fan in its eternal slow revolution, giving off a slight squee and wobble with each turn.

  “Careful, careful,” he muttered to himself when the plate arrived.

  It was a long time since he’d had much solid food. Peter swallowed painfully, aware that he’d been nearly drooling; it was as if he were an old rusty outboard engine that had finally caught and was stuttering and letting out clouds of blue smoke but turned the propeller nonetheless. The thought made him smile a little. Despite years in the Southwest, his mind still used Land O’ Lakes visual metaphors!

  One bite, and he almost moaned with pleasure. Chewing, chewing, making himself go slowly and not bolt it and overburden his shrunken stomach. The burrito was Mexican-style, not surprising this close to the border, smaller and thinner than the American variety, and holding only barbacoa-style pork and onion and refried beans. A pause while he monitored his stomach; it was going to stay down. He finished and licked his fingers, and then just sat sipping at his water for twenty minutes, feeling relatively good for the first time since the symptoms started to hit.

  “Okay, work,” he muttered to himself. “You’re supposed to be a logical thinker. At least about physics. At least, you used to be.”

  His hands still wobbled a bit as he slid his workpad computer out of the knapsack on the chair beside him. A gentle tap to the screen projected the virtual keyboard onto the table. He slid the foot down to put the image at the right angle and adjusted the distance. The battery had a three-quarter charge.

  “I should have remembered to leave it plugged in. Hell, am I fit to do anything right now? Doc Duggan said the withdrawal was rough but there
usually wasn’t any permanent damage. Usually is sort of an unpleasant word. And I sort of liked Duggan, we had things in common, but she’s a renfield. She works for them. How trustworthy was what she said?”

  Although she hadn’t been born into the Shadowspawn-worshiping cult, like most of the inhabitants of the town of Rancho Sangre Sagrado. Some of those people were all right, if you stayed away from their . . . well, not quite a religion, but nearly.

  The Shadowspawn are creepy enough if you know that what they do isn’t really supernatural. I mean, they do drink blood and they can assume other shapes and move things with their minds and affect how chances turn out.. . .

  Jose Villegas, one of his fellow lucies, had been a decent guy, what they’d called a regular Joe in his grandfather’s day, though he’d been born and raised there. Others, like the household manager Theresa, were rabid weasels, as bad as Shadowspawn in their way—maybe worse, given that they didn’t have all the king-predator genes pushing them. A lot of them were really screwed up in one way or another, functioning neurotics with weird forms of denial. He suspected that suicide was a major health problem there.

  “Okay, Peter, think logically.”

  He stared at the screen as the system logged onto the Web—the area had phone reception, and that was all it needed.

  “I can’t be Peter Boase again.”

  The thought of resuming his researcher’s life at Los Alamos was wonderful beyond belief, but every bit as impossible as being twelve again. Peter Boase had kept prying into anomalous phenomenon despite strong hints that he shouldn’t. Peter Boase had been marked for death by the Council of Shadows, and Adrienne had come in to kill him because she was the one who happened to be closest.

  Stroke, heart attack, traffic accident, slipping on the soap in the shower; they didn’t have to make it look like an accident, they could produce a real accident.

  If I was a tub of unwashed lard like, say, Bob Heigel or a pencil-necked geek with adult acne like Johnny Wong, I’d have died right there no matter how interesting my mind felt to her. But Adrienne was a collector and she took a fancy to me. Making me one of her lucies was as good as killing me. Probably just a slow form of killing me. Monica had been there on Lucy Lane for eight years, but that was the longest. We never talked about the others.

  The changes that intrigued him had been in certain constants; now he knew it was the effect of so many Shadowspawn mucking with the quantum foam, making probabilities blur into one another. Homo sapiens nocturnus was the source of all legends in more ways than one.

  The tales of leopard-men and werewolves and blood-drinking ogres and evil sorcerers came from them, from the Empire of Shadows in the dim pre-Neolithic past, or from chance recombinations of the genes in the ages since producing someone with half-understood powers and inhuman hungers. But the weird, arbitrary, anything-can-happen world of the legends was a folk memory of the way the world was when there were many powerful Shadowspawn in it, enhancing chaos just by existing.

  A world where trees could speak and gingerbread houses with ovens for stray children waited in the woods and water flowed uphill. . . which was happening again.

  Concentrate, dammit! he thought savagely. Okay, my old life’s gone. And if the Brézés back at Sangre ever get their hands . . . or talons or claws or tentacles . . . on me, I’m worse than dead. I know Ellen’s boyfriend, Adrian, is supposed to be a good guy, more or less, but I don’t think I’ll be able to contact him, he’ll be hiding too hard and he’s Adrienne’s equal with the Power, which means he’s consistently lucky. If he doesn’t want to be found, a normal human would never, ever stumble on him; it’s the damned luck. Now, what else did I hear.. . .

  Ah. At the party . . . someone had mentioned a Harvey Ledbetter. And this Brotherhood thing, some sort of resistance group.

  “Oh, risky. But I can’t just wander around until they find me or I run out of money.”

  Still, you could find almost anything on the Web, with a little patience.

  He took a deep breath and poised his fingers over the keyboard.

  He was screaming. The voice in his ear whispered:

  “You love it, don’t you, Peter. Tell me how much you love the lovely pain when I—”

  Still screaming, he sat bolt upright. The clean sheets were sopping again, and tears streaked down his cheeks. After a moment he bolted for the bathroom again and vomited into the toilet. Then he spit, rinsed out his mouth and sat on the lid.

  “Great,” he said to himself. “I’m over the addiction to the drug in the bite. Now all I’ve got to worry about is the post-traumatic stress syndrome turning me into a wreck. And I thought I’d be home free, yeah, right, that’s the way the world works, Peter.”

  He looked at his watch; it was four thirty in the morning. Not all that long to dawn, and he’d gone to bed early. It wasn’t that surprising; he had enough memories to give him nightmares and shakes and attacks of depression for a long time. He looked over at the pill bottles, then shook his head violently.

  No. That’s all I need, another monkey on my back, one I put there myself.

  “All right to use them for physical pain,” he muttered. “The rest I’m just going to have to tough out. I can’t get a therapist, and if I did they’d just put me in an asylum . . . and something would come walking through the walls to get me there. Something with lots of teeth. There really are shoggoths in the places between.”

  Instead of trying to sleep he showered, then lay and watched the light grow gradually on the roof, trying to think.

  “I need facilities. I’m about ready to go experimental, in a small way. I need an experimentalist to work with, too. Lots of computer time. And ideally I’d need one of them to work with, as well.. . . Wish for the fucking moon while you’re at it, Peter. Wish you smoked, it would be something to do.”

  At least he felt physically better than he had, although there seemed to be a weight on his mind, turning his thoughts sluggish. After a while he abandoned the attempt at serious thought and let strings of disconnected images float through his consciousness. Most of them turned out to be the bad parts of his life. Oddly, that was comforting. Nothing had really been as bad as what happened after Adrienne turned up. With that perspective, messy ends to soured relationships and not getting the grant you lusted for paled into the minor toe stubbings they were.

  When the sun was fully up he rose and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and running shoes. The computer was plugged in this time, and he’d set it to activate at exactly seven o’clock—checking every five minutes would make the time crawl even more unendurably.

  His breath checked in his throat. There was a message: Wait there and don’t make any waves. From the Giant Rabbit.

  “Okay, calm down,” he told himself. “Don’t exhaust yourself emotionally. You can’t afford it, not now.”

  Of course, it might be from the wrong people. But he remembered Adrienne raving about how most of the older Shadowspawn hated using information technology. Most of them were older, as you’d expect in a species that aged at about half the human speed and then could survive indefinitely after the death of the physical body. The median age must be well over sixty.

  He frowned thoughtfully. You know, that could be a real disadvantage, he thought with some hope. Younger people tend to be more imaginative and innovative.

  That was certainly true in physics; most did their best work before they got beyond middle age.

  “So they’d be a bunch of Strudlebugs, eventually.”

  He wondered what it had been like in the old Stone Age, the hundred thousand years when Homo sapiens nocturnus had dominated the planet as the predator of the apex predator. After a while, almost all of them would be postcorporeal, ageless parasites hiding in caves by day and emerging by night to hunt and feed. The organic phase would be sort of a pupa breeding stage in their life cycle.

  “Not as much of a disadvantage then,” he said to the air. “Nothing changed much back there from millennium to mi
llennium. Or it might be the other way ’round—nothing changed because they were in charge. Maybe that’s why it took so long for a human civilization to emerge.”

  Eventually it was late enough to head out to T RESA’S for breakfast. A little gaggle of children stopped to stare at him. He heard giggles, and when he turned away a pebble bounced off the back of his head. It was enough to sting, especially in his weakened state.

  “Hey!” he said—tried to shout, and heard his voice crack. “What was that about!”

  The children ran off, laughing, all except for one girl about seven. She stood looking at him solemnly from under the brim of a floppy hat, her hair in two glinting blue-black braids over her shoulders, dressed in a loose pinafore-style dress the worse for wear.

  “What was that about?” he said again.

  Her face was narrow, weasel-like, and her eyes were large and dark.

  “Yor a stranger,” she said, in a strong accent like a West Texan rasp. “You otter move ’long.”

  “Hey, I’m staying here.”

  “Strangers don’t stay here,” she said, and walked away.

  He shrugged off an unease and headed for the restaurant. Fortunately he had his personal library with him on his machine, and he could use a lot of time to get his strength back.

  Peter looked around. The momentary enchantment of the desert dawn was fading, heading towards another baking white day.

  There probably wouldn’t be much else to do here. . . and even his sleep was likely to be unpleasant.

  Bad dreams are bad enough, he thought. It’s when the nightmares spill over into the waking time that things get really unpleasant.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Are you sure we should accept the invitation?” Ellen said. Adrian shook his head. “No,” he replied frankly. “But when my great-grandfather issues it, I am sure that the consequences of refusal would be worse. If he simply intended to kill us, we’d probably be dead already.”