The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “Yes,” Adrian said. “That could well be so. The Power”—he smiled grimly—“operates in mysterious ways.”

  This thing reminded her a little uncomfortably of Adrienne’s private jet, though it was bigger, and the decor—Birdseye marble tile in the bathroom, Persian carpets in the lounge area—was considerably less restrained. Gaudy, in fact, though extremely expensive and very well maintained.

  “Particularly where many purebreds, many adepts, are involved,” he went on. “Strokes of luck may happen, yes, but they may be. . . ultimately . . . lucky for someone else than the first recipient. Coil upon countercoil.”

  Wow, Ellen thought. It takes a bit of getting used to, strokes of luck that really happen.

  He frowned a little. “Even so, it seems rather odd, since normally my parents would have killed any of Adrienne’s lucies who survived her. Granted, I am more purebred than they, but they are there and the Power attenuates according to the inverse-square law, generally.”

  Ellen winced at the thought of the orgy of slaughter that had probably followed her escape. Poor Monica. The den mother of Lucy Lane, with her brownies and her sympathy . . . and Jose. . .

  Jose might get off. He’s a native, born into the service of the Brézés. God, I hope Monica’s kids are okay. They don’t feed on kids but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t hurt them. Adrienne’s parents . . . Adrian’s too . . . they were always charming, and I got the distinct impression they’d watch people thrown to crocodiles and make witty repartee about it.

  There was no way to tell for sure, of course. It had taken all Adrian’s command of the Power and the Brotherhood’s resources just to find the main estate of the California branch of the Brézés. None of them was going into that maze of traps arcane and physical again if they could help it; plus Adrian’s parents were there now, which put two adepts in charge instead of just one. They were postcorporeal, but that wasn’t much of a handicap.

  Still, I wish I knew what had happened.

  Adrian quirked a smile at her. “You are a refreshing change from the people I have associated with most of my life, my sweet.”

  “Honey?” she said.

  “You are sweet,” he said. “Empathetic. You care for people. Even people you met in a very horrible place.”

  “So are you a sweetie. You’ve just . . . not had much opportunity to show that side of yourself.”

  “The running and hiding and fear and killing and death do tend to limit opportunities for emotional expressiveness.. . .”

  “I could hit you sometimes, Adrian!”

  “You see what I mean.”

  She laughed. “Besides, the people you knew can’t have all been bad. Those Brotherhood types are on the side of the Good, Pure and True. Right?”

  “So were the men who saturated Dresden and Tokyo with incendiary bombs until streams of melted human fat ran in the gutters,” he said. “One becomes hardened, if you live at all.”

  Then he surprised her a little by reciting:In bombers named for girls, we burned

  The cities we had learned about in school—

  Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among

  The people we had killed and never seen.

  When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;

  When we died they said, “Our casualties were low.”

  They said, “Here are the maps”; we burned the cities.

  He shook his head and snorted a little. “Living with you challenges me,” he said. More softly: “And shames me. I have not dared to feel deeply, for fear of loss. That is unpardonable cowardice.”

  The rental came with pilots, maintenance and cabin staff; she suspected Adrian would have done without the latter if he could, and it had meant keeping certain parts of their luggage locked and in the bedroom. Even with a private charter like this, people would talk if you carried an assortment of lethal hardware on board openly. Which reminded her . . . “What about going through customs?”

  This time his smile was a little ironic. “My darling, I can use both the Brotherhood’s and the Council’s . . . safe words. Codes that will tell the officials to turn a blind eye and wave us through. They undoubtedly think—”

  “—that we’re spooks,” she finished, and thumped herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “I feel like I’m walking through walls all the time. The bottom dropped out of the world, but as a compensation I get to go through all these cool secret doors. I suppose I’ll get used to living down the rabbit hole. Only it’s not Wonderland, it’s WonderHell.”

  “I hope you don’t have to live so,” he said. “Not for long, at least.” She noticed that he didn’t say she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life doing just that. One of the things she liked about Adrian was that he didn’t overpromise.

  The staff brought them dinner and retired quickly at his glare; Adrian was usually gracious in a sort of de haut en bas way, but this time he was deliberately cold, to keep them out of contact as much as possible. It was unlikely that more could endanger them, but there was no reason to take extra chances with bystanders.

  Ellen looked down at the meal; steamed asparagus with herb sauce, Kasseler Rippchen—smoked, brine-cured pork chops in an egg-andcrumb crust—finger-length golden-brown potato Schupfnudeln.. . .

  She began to laugh. At Adrian’s raised eyebrow she ate a bite of the pork, savoring the smoky, salty richness, and then spoke:

  “I was remembering my first cattle-car-with-wings across the ocean. NYU was by-God going to expose us art history types to the original font of kultcha, even if we had to suffer for it. My seatmates on either side weighed three hundred pounds each, and . . . Well, I wasn’t picky about food then, but. . .”

  Adrian winced. “I could not endure it. No, literally. My, ah, reflexes would be too likely to get the better of me. We do not adapt well to crowding, my breed.”

  Thoughtfully: “One can go into trance, of course. But that leaves you so helpless.”

  They finished with kranz ring cake, sweet buttercream frosting studded with toasted hazelnuts, and a filling of cherry preserve. After a moment they were feeding each other forkfuls across the table.

  “This is weird,” she said, using a napkin. “We get honeymoon crossed with deadly peril.”

  “Spice added to spice,” he said.

  The dark yellow-flecked eyes burned at her, and she felt a shiver prickle over her skin. She reached into a bag and smiled.

  “Recognize this?”

  He blinked in puzzlement. “No . . . some medical device?”

  “It’s made for people suffering from anemia,” she said, and stuck her finger in it. “Frau Saraçoğlu had it expressed to the plane for me. God knows what she thought I needed it for.”

  “Did she ask?”

  “Yes. I said you were a vampire, but considerate.”

  Adrian gave a shout of laughter. That gave her a spike of pleasure; he wasn’t exactly gloomy, but it wasn’t exactly a common thing to see him lose himself in a moment’s humor, either. A little light shone green and the digital display lit up.

  “Ah, red cell count normal, pressure normal, flow normal, viscosity normal . . . Think of it as compensation. With you having the Power, I don’t have to worry about birth control. I do have to keep track of blood loss.”

  He raised a brow. “It would be advisable for me to be . . . fully charged. Though we have blood-bank supplies on board.”

  Ellen grinned at his involuntary grimace; she knew how loathsome cold, dead blood tasted to a Shadowspawn. Adrian was the only one she’d met who would use it at all.

  “C’mon. That double king-size bed is calling our name. We’re going into danger. So first, let’s party.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The reticulated python of Asia was the world’s largest snake. For a flashing instant some part of Peter Boase’s mind contemplated the irony that his last thought would be a totally irrelevant piece of data like that, culled from a random Wikipedia search years ago.

>   Then he was rolling on the floor with four turns of the thigh-thick, thirty-foot body around him. It threw a loop of its tail around a leg of the bed for leverage and the needle teeth bit into his captive shoulder. Air wheezed out of his lungs as the terrible pressure squeezed inward.

  His scrabbling right hand came down on the knife, gashing his fingers. He gripped it and flailed at the snake’s diamond-patterned body, cutting himself again, and then slashed at its head. But the tip penetrated the taut skin, and the long head came up with a hiss. It whipped aside and the nose struck the base of his thumb like a jackhammer; the hand spasmed open and the weapon went flying a second time. That gave him a single instant to gasp in a breath before the pressure resumed.

  Cold reptile blood spattered his face. He wheezed again, and waited for the cracking of ribs and death.

  Crackcrackcrackcrack.

  Peter thought the stutter of harsh elastic snaps was the end, his own bones giving way like green sticks; then the intolerable constriction eased. He lay struggling to draw in air with his diaphram half-paralyzed. The python blurred as it thrust itself at the wall.. . .

  He blinked. It had gone through the wall, as if it were diving into a horizontal pool of water. Then it was gone. Hands gripped him under the arms and threw him into a chair; two dark-clad figures sandwiched him, backs towards him and pistols leveled outward in professional two-handed grips. Their sweat stank of fear.

  “You get him, Jack?” the third man asked, his voice the rasping drawl of rural Texas.

  Like them he was in nondescript dark outdoor clothing; his long, bony face was battered and weathered, and gray streaked his cropped brown hair. He threw several packs on the bed as he spoke.

  “Clipped him,” one of the men said in reply. “Tail, I think. He didn’t have time to Wreak on the guns. And using a snake’s brain probably slows your wits.”

  “He will Wreak first if he comes back,” a woman’s voice said.

  “He’ll be hurting,” the one called Jack replied.

  The older man nodded. “Even so. Blades. Guha, you do the walls. Careful about the floor join, there’s no crawl space but. . .”

  “I know, big boss,” the woman said.

  Her voice was singsong, the accent of someone who grew up speaking Hindi along with English, possibly added for emphasis.

  They holstered the guns beneath their jackets and took out long curved knives; they looked like they were wearing some sort of body armor under their clothes as well. The woman went to the packs, shrugged one onto her back, and unclipped something that looked like a spraypaint attachment. That turned out to be exactly what it was. She started on the door and worked her way steadily and swiftly around the walls; there was a sharp creosotelike odor in the air, and everything turned a dull silver-gray beneath the nozzle.

  Silver, he thought, and croaked it aloud.

  “Yup,” the older man said. “Harvey Ledbetter, Mr. Boase. My friends here are Jack Farmer and Anjali Guha.”

  The Indian woman . . . or more probably Indian-American, from the way she moved . . . finished her task. The whole inside of the little room was covered in the silver paint now, and the sharp chemical stink filled the air; the three strangers seemed to relax fractionally.

  “We’re safe?” he said hoarsely.

  Guha handed him a glass of water; he drank it while she checked him over with impersonal skill. He winced and bit back a moan a couple of times. He’d been hurt worse whitewater rafting once, and another time while he was rock climbing, but not lately. Plus he was in generally lousy shape, weak and vulnerable.

  “No broken bones, no serious sprains or tears,” she said. “I will fix this bite.”

  He stifled another yelp when she ripped back the T-shirt over the red stain and applied antiseptic and a bandage from a kit in one of the knapsacks.

  “This . . . this isn’t enough to readdict me, is it?”

  Harvey looked at him with what he thought was considering respect.

  “You went cold turkey? No wonder you look like shit. You don’t have to worry about that. Reestablishing the dependency would take a lot more.” A grin. “And since Shadowspawn ain’t infectious, like in the stories, you don’t need to worry ’bout the next full moon either.”

  Peter let out a long breath. Right now, he was more afraid of the addiction than death; that would be preferable to going through withdrawal again.

  “So we’re safe?” he asked again.

  “Safe? Yeah, you might say so. Unless our snaky friend has an RPG—”

  At his puzzled look, the man clarified: “Rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Or somethin’ of that order. Not likely. They mostly don’t think that way.”

  “Adrienne liked technology.”

  “She was unusual, and thank God she’s dead. So we’re safe until he figures out what he feels like doin’ next. But that’s one heap powerful adept out there. A lot of them don’t study on how to use the Power, they just wing it by instinct, but this one does have the full postgraduate course. I could sense it. He’s likely to have all the luck—literally.”

  “You’re the, um, Brotherhood?” he asked, as Farmer and Guha started spray-painting again.

  This time it was in black paints, spiky symbols around the edges of the room that seemed to twist and hurt his eyes, until he had to blink and look away. They murmured as they did, in whining, throat-catching syllables.

  A thought occurred to him: Wait a minute, that’s Mhabrogast! These guys are using the Power too!

  Harvey seemed to sense it. “Yeah, we’re the Brotherhood, more or less. La Résistance.”

  “Ah,” Peter said. “A ragtag band of heroes who’ll overthrow the evil empire?”

  “Nah, mainly we’re a nuisance not worth the effort of squashing’cause we’re really good at hiding. A lot of us have enough of the genes to use the Power—not enough to night-walk or feed on blood, though. Think of us as ferrets up against a timber wolf.”

  That’s comforting. Peter thought. Not.

  “What about Adrian?”

  “He’s somethin’ of an exception. And I hope he’s here real soon now.’Cause otherwise we are well and truly fucked.”

  “Good to see you out and about,” Dmitri said, leaning on a boulder after he assumed human form once more. “And as lovely as ever.”

  “Flattery, my snake in the grass,” Adrienne chuckled.

  She leapt atop it, her own head-height, and squatted in an easy crouch next to her kit to talk to him.

  “Besides, this is my etheric body.”

  She was justly proud that even another adept couldn’t tell it from the corporeal form without probing.

  “I’m still not completely back to meat-normal.”

  The night was on the comfortable side of chilly; the dry desert air lost heat rapidly. The stars overhead glowed in colors someone more human—less her type of hominid—could not have seen. Steel blue, red, pale green, the almost harsh-bright of the three-quarter moon; Shadowspawn had always been more nocturnal than their prey, and even in the flesh saw better in darkness. The etheric form’s eyes were more sensitive still.

  “The plan proceeds,” she said.

  “Except for the unplanned elements, such as my being shot in the arse and having my throat cut. That is a role reversal I do not relish.”

  “A mere detail,” she said, and they both laughed.

  “Though I did get a taste of your lucy. In any case, we’d better scout the place again,” he said, shifting to Russian.

  “Da, ” she said, in the same language. “Good idea, Dmitri Pavlovitch. We must make their hairbreadth escape completely convincing.”

  Learning new tongues was easy for their breed; the same enlarged speech centers that let the telepathic facility read the code of another brain helped the learning process.

  “But cautiously,” she said; Dmitri tended to be reckless.

  And then she willed, reaching within for the familiar template.

  “Amss-aui-ock!”
she snapped, a purling, spitting sound.

  Mhabrogast, the lingua demonica, the language that mapped and compelled the hidden structures of the world. Potential-beingbecoming, an arrogant command directed at the stuff of reality itself. You convinced your mind that you were something, and the mind made it real.. . .

  Or close enough to real for government work, she thought whimsically. Close enough for biting, rending, tearing. Close enough for blood.

  Pain thrilled along her nerves, a shivering almost-pleasure, a dissolution like sleep or orgasm or death as her very self ceased to exist for nanoseconds. Sight dimmed as her quasi body folded and stretched. Sound exploded outward, and smells—it was much easier to tell Dmitri was night-walking when his very scent had a sharp metallic overtone, like a small thunderstorm.

  A real wolf would have snarled and cowered; she let her long red tongue loll over her fangs and jerked her nose upward. The scurrying rustle of a field mouse nibbling the papery cover of a seed yards away was distinct; so was the growl of a heavy truck’s diesel near the distant mountains on the western horizon. The clean scents of the desert’s sparse life flowed into her nose, a tapestry even more powerful than hearing, and one that made sight almost irrelevant. The human reeks from the little hamlet a few miles upwind were harsh by contrast. But though the body was a timber wolf, the mind wrapped around the brain stem was Shadowspawn; the thin black lips skinned back from long teeth as she smelled human blood. Warm, spicy, enticing. . .

  Business, she thought. Mere prowling terrorism must await happier times.

  Da, Dmitri replied; at close range telepathy was easy and swift. Let us continue our little charade. Ah, if only Michiko-sama were here!

  She’s attending to something else, Adrienne said. Besides, I don’t think she reciprocates your affection, Dmitri.