The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  I’d be waiting for her to get silver in her buttocks, the male Shadowspawn gibed.

  He’d been rubbing at his arse—she had to admit it was a fairly nice one, taut and muscular, though right now marked with red where the silver bullets had grazed the snake’s tail. He was taller than most, nearly six feet, and his hair was long and white-blond. It tossed like hers in the grit-filled wind that coursed by. Then he threw his arms upward. Form sparkled for an instant too brief for even her senses to fathom, turned into something like a mist with eyes, and then the eight-foot wings of Aquila chrysaetos simurgh whipped at the air.

  She reached down to her baggage and took out a small shape in her teeth. They closed on it, and the wolf’s powerful neck muscles tossed it a dozen feet upward.

  Talons closed on the metal oblong, and the extinct golden eagle of Pleistocene Crete soared upwards.

  The wolf leapt down and loped to the west.

  The Humvee was old but well maintained. Adrian drove it into the shadow of a tall boulder and parked. The engine ticked slightly as cooling metal contracted; even in the tail end of summer the Arizona desert could be chilly at night. Ellen swung out of her seat and looked around at the moon-silvered landscape and breathed the cool sage-scented air with its hints of caliche and dust.

  Adrian’s mouth tightened as he glanced around likewise. She had her night-sight goggles pushed up on her forehead, but he could pierce the darkness on his own. The lights of a very small town or mediumsize hamlet glittered in the middle distance. Somehow they emphasized the loneliness of the spot the way the passing of a train did, a peculiarly American desolation—it made you think of dust blowing over the cracked concrete of a gas station and people looking out a window over their fifth cup of midnight coffee.

  I really am an artsy, Ellen thought. Here I am about to fight for my life and I’m making comparisons to Hopper paintings.

  “This is an abortion of a mission,” Adrian said. “There is at least one night-walker out there, perhaps more. I can scent them.”

  Oh, thanks, honey, Ellen thought—and then hoped that Adrian wasn’t listening.

  He was usually scrupulous about her mental privacy, at least as far as words went: sensing her emotions was something he just couldn’t help.

  It’s a compliment in a way, she thought. He’s really treating me as a comrade-in-arms. I guess this is that soldier’s bitching you hear about. Goes with the gallows humor, I expect. And I may not have thought seriously about enlisting in high school—the university money wasn’t quite tempting enough—but I’ve been well and truly drafted.

  It all made taking a permanent holiday in that flying penthouse look pretty attractive. Her instincts were telling her things about why the night was dangerous, and she knew the source of those genetic promptings better now.

  Things were out there, things far more dangerous than any tiger or lion. They’d hunted her human ancestors like rabbits while the glaciers came and went and came again. She’d had personal experience with them, and only the training inside Adrian’s mind was letting her control her fear. It was there, lurking in her mind as the predators did in the night.

  “Let us get ready, then,” he said.

  She helped him get their gear out. Part of it included a high-impact oblong of composites. She knelt and unlatched it. A sniper rifle lay within, and she let her hands occupy themselves snapping it together. It was beautifully crafted and scrolled with silver inlays that would look like ornament to a casual gaze. But it was also a single-shot weapon that broke open like a shotgun, a thing of stone-ax simplicity; the fewer moving parts, the less for the probability-twisting Power to grasp.

  While she completed the mechanical task she was conscious of Adrian moving in the background: the scrape of colored chalks against the rock behind them, the purling whine of Mhabrogast. She turned, the rifle cradled in her arms like a cold lover of walnut and blued steel. The final glyph was sketched on the sandstone surface. It glittered faintly in the moonlight.

  “I meant to ask about that. If the Power can’t affect silver, how come you can use it for a glyph?”

  “That is a glyph of negation, of constraint,” he said. “You want it to be unchangeable. This sort of thing involves feedback loops; you can alter the probability cascades keyed to the glyphs on the fly if you’re good enough.”

  She made a questioning sound—she couldn’t really understand the Power intuitively or use it herself, but she could learn the theory—and he shrugged.

  “Nobody has ever been able to prove whether Mhabrogast objectively helps one to use the Power or whether it’s just a focusing device. Latin certainly isn’t more than that, and it’s useful as a lead-in.”

  “You mean the lingua demonica may be psychosomatic? Or some sort of symbolic placebo?”

  “Or the operating code of the universe.” He snorted laughter. “We can’t even prove that modern Mhabrogast is actually what the Empire of Shadow spoke. The Order of the Black Dawn’s adepts used the Power to reconstruct it from a few fragments, back in the nineteenth century. But we know it works.”

  “Or maybe it works because you know it does.. . . My head hurts when I think about that.. . . What does that one do? The silver one.”

  Adrian smiled grimly. “If someone comes walking through the stone and into contact with it in their aetheric form. . . let us say the consequences will be unfortunate. For them. Think of it as running into a cross between invisible barbed wire and the web of a very large spider.”

  “Except there’s no spider.”

  He smiled, a remarkably unpleasant expression if you were on the receiving end of the dislike.

  “Oh, so there is one. That so relieves my mind, honey. Having to think about someone fading through solid walls right behind me and then biting me on the ass is sort of paranoia-inducing. Now I feel safe because there’s a giant murderous spider lurking in the rock.”

  “More the potential for something that would be perceived as a giant, murderous spider. In a way the victim creates it themselves.”

  “That so reassures me. Not.” She took a deep breath and gave him a light kiss on the lips. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

  “And I have you to make sure I have a body to come back to.”

  He lay down on the unrolled foam mat inside the semicircle of glyphs, crossing his arms on his chest.

  “Amss-aui-ock!”

  Adrian was there, lying on the mat in his fatigues, with a webbed belt bearing tools and devices and pouches. And he was there, naked under the moon. Another not-quite shift and he was gone. What stood there instead still took her breath away a little: Smilodon populator.

  Sabertooth tiger. A cat but not really a tiger, built as much like a bear as a feline, a tawny bulk with huge shoulders coming up to her chin and a broad back sloping down to the hindquarters. The face was a cat from a nightmare, with fangs like curved ivory daggers more than a foot long, serrated like steak knives on their edges. The lambent yellow Shadowspawn eyes didn’t help either. Something deep down screamed, Run, at the sight.

  The great feline weighed as much as a horse—she’d ridden on its back, not least when they escaped from the bloody shambles at Rancho Sangre, after Hajime’s death. Now it brushed against her, rocking her back a little, then nuzzled affectionately at her body with its stumpy tail twitching, and nuzzled again in a way that would have been fresh from someone . . . something . . . she wasn’t married to.

  She leaned the rifle against the rock and used both hands to scratch at its ruff and behind the palm-size ears; there was a rumbling deep in the chest, and it licked her with a great rough washcloth of a tongue. Then it turned and leapt into the darkness, eerily silent for all its mass. Ellen crouched back against the stone, cradling the rifle in her arms.

  “There’re definitely some kinky elements in this relationship,” she murmured to herself. “And I don’t mean just the good ol’ vanilla B and D. But kinky in a good way.”

  Then she fell silent. That was another
part of the training, and one she’d enjoyed after a while; she’d never realized how much she missed by being noisy all the time, not least the noise she made herself inside her head. In a way the listening was like sinking into a painting, opening yourself completely while excluding everything else. Thought went away, until she was floating somehow, but intensely aware of everything. Letting it pass through without dwelling on it, her attention suspended until something tripped it.

  After a while—later she thought it might have been an hour—something did.

  Pain ran along Adrian’s nerves like a wave of white fire as he shifted. He fought briefly for control as he took the Smilodon’s form, man-thought crowded into the dim, focused brain of the great carnivore. It was easier this time; he’d been using the sabertooth’s form for more than two years now, since investigators unknowingly in his employ had succeeded in reconstructing the beast’s genome. You could lose yourself in the beast, if it was unfamiliar and you weren’t careful—that was one of the many ways the Power could kill you.

  It also accounted for a lot of the bad reputation of werewolves.

  Hearing flooded in, keen enough that Ellen’s quick heartbeat was like a snare drum thudding in the night. Vision painted the desert silverbright, sight as good as a man’s at high noon and much sharper than a wolf’s; his scent wasn’t as keen as the canid model, but it was a thousand times better than that of a man. Enough that her femaleness was like a club across the senses; he walked over, his platter-size paws soundless on the gritty soil, and nuzzled at her. Confused images of mingled human and beast-form mating and feeding cascaded through his mind.

  A practiced effort of will thrust down the consciousness of how appealingly, mouthwateringly meaty she smelled, something that harmonized all too well with more complex Shadowspawn hungers. Her fingers dug into the ruff around his throat, and he rumbled in contentment, then turned and sprang into the night.

  The sabertooth was a young male in its prime years, an ambush hunter made for burst speed. He raced in a series of twenty-foot bounds southwards to leave as little trace on the ground as possible. Then he slowed to a springy trot. The lights of the little hamlet glared with a blue-white radiance that human eyes would have seen as isolated pools of dimness.

  Closer, and the rank scents of burnt petroleum and chemicals made his nose wrinkle, whiskers bristling as his thin black lips curled back to show the rest of his fangs. Then the smells of humanity, stale and dirty, the present-but-uninteresting tang of children, others healthy and fresh and insidiously appetizing and tempting, now and then the revolting odor of sickness.

  Shadowspawn senses picked up other things: the way sleeping minds whimpered and retreated into nightmare as his form padded down through the thick, cool dust beside the road, the growls or frightened silence of dogs. He could tell instantly where the humans he sought were holed up. The blaring, shrilling wrongness of the silver-particle lining they’d applied to the inside of the motel room. He winced and turned the eyes of his mind aside as if he’d stared into the sun. A struggle for a moment; was he supposed to attack those men, or. . .

  Defend them. I must defend them.

  It seemed odd, alien, unnatural. Taste fear, scent terror, the hot intoxicating spurt of blood—

  No.

  The humanoid energy-matrix mind at the base of the feline’s brain mastered it; mastered its own drives as well. He vaulted over a goat-stick fence and into a backyard bare except for a rusty slide and the tattered remains of a children’s wading pool, then eeled between the aluminum siding of the house and a pitted Chosan sedan.

  A dog whimpered inside the house. Beyond was dense shadow, and he went belly-down on the stained concrete as he approached the motel, as intent as a tabby with a mouse. The slit pupils of his eyes widened nearly round as he scanned back and forth. The Power stretched out too, despite the pain of the silver barrier, seeking—

  A tingle. A strumming along the nerves. The feeling of matter turned and constrained, a knot of warped probabilities. Will imposed on chaos and dragging a piece of the universe down the slope of entropy as it did. Up there.

  The great cat had a different perception of distance than did a man; it was more concerned with what was within one or two leaps, very much with scents, less so with larger patterns. He forced its attention outwards.

  Flying.

  The huge golden eagle came with a whoosh of displaced air to land on the flat roof. Then a naked man was there instead, his long white-blond hair blowing around his muscled shoulders. He kicked something upward as if with a soccer ball and caught it, something that the eagle had carried in its talons. Then he began to walk forward sure-footed towards the other side of the roof, the inner court where the units of the motel faced.

  There he paused, looked over the edge, and made a gesture. Hands together, then apart, then dropping something. . .

  Grenade, the thinking part of the sabertooth’s hybrid mind said. The rest replied: Kill.

  Huge muscles moved on the creature’s bones, and claws flared out as it worked its paws into the dirt. Then he was flying, a bronze streak through the darkness, his mouth gaping open to keep the lower jaw out of the way of the stabbing downward slash. The man toppled forward over the edge of the roof, changing as he did.

  The door blew in. Peter tumbled backwards towards the bed; things hit him, astonishingly painful, and he yelped. There was a flash with it, and a crashing bang! and a sharp, acrid smell.

  “Grenade!” someone yelled.

  Lying blinking at the ceiling, all he could think for an instant was: That’s a grenade? That little flash ?

  He’d expected globes of slow-motion flame and people flying through the air with their arms and legs windmilling. But the blow had been hard ; he tasted blood in his mouth again. And loud, his ears were numbed.

  What next?

  A gorilla smashed through the shattered door, great black fists punching inward and then ripping the broken veneer and particleboard out of the way. Its shoulders sent chunks of the frame pinwheeling as well as it charged into the room, nearly five hundred pounds of black-shaggy silver-backed rank-smelling beast, roaring behind fangs that looked like daggers of white bone and beating its fists on a leathery chest like a great drum. Hair bristled in a roach on the pointed head, and the creature’s thigh-thick arms stretched out to grip and crush as it bounded forward on its thick bowed legs in a shambling run.

  Gorillas aren’t aggressive towards human beings! Peter thought, or gibbered. I remember that distinctly from that Dian Fossey article I read.

  Guha ducked a fist that would have torn off her head and slashed Guha ducked a fist that would have torn off her head and slashed with the long knife, then went flying head over heels at an openhanded cuff that hit not quite squarely.

  But Shadowspawn weregorillas are pretty damned aggressive, you betcha.

  Peter shook his head, winced at the pain that caused, and looked around for the silver table knife. He spotted it, and began a dogged crawl-roll towards it, ignoring the pain of the fresh bruises on his stillfragile body. The rest he saw in flashes, and heard bits and pieces as his blast-stunned ears began to function again.

  Farmer drove at the beast’s back with his blade. It whirled and caught him up, holding the man’s yelling form over its head, ready to throw him down with enough force to turn his body into a bag of shattered bone and ruptured organs. Something flew glittering through the air and slashed into the gorilla’s arms, lapping around them with a harsh rattling clank and a rip of leathery skin. Blood sprayed . . . and dissolved in midair with an iridescent sparkle as the pseudomatter lost coherence.

  That was the older man, Harvey. The weapon was a kau sin ke, a Chinese fighting iron; he recognized it from one of his guilty pleasures, the Shanghai action flicks of the late teens. Like a steel whip made from short rods joined by ring links of chain, but this had a silvery gleam, and each of the rods was a cylinder of razor-sharp blades.

  The Shadowspawn beast screamed
again, a stunningly loud roar even to Peter’s abused ears. Farmer tumbled away as it tried to clutch at the weapon, but more blood spurted from its huge hands as they met the sharp silver-inlaid edges of the jointed bars. Harvey turned the fighting iron into a whirling blur between himself and the giant ape, a gleaming circle of menace to protect himself and the injured humans. It filled most of the little motel room; Peter could see the sweat of effort and fear gleaming on the older man’s long, craggy face, and the way the muscles bunched and gathered on the gorilla’s massive bones. It knuckle-walked a pace back and forth, then stood and hammered its chest again, shrieking.

  Farmer crawled away and picked up his blade, long as a short sword, forcing himself back onto his feet; Peter found himself clutching the little sharpened table knife. He looked at the pathetic spike in his scrawny fist and suppressed a hysterical giggle. The gorilla would charge in an instant, even though its hands streamed lines of blood . . . blood that somehow disappeared as it dripped towards the floor. It would charge, and those hands would close on a human body, and that would be the end of it.

  He would die free, at least. Oddly, that actually was comforting. He propped himself up on one hand and held the little knife out in a wavering attempt at guard.

  An appalling shriek filled the room, halfway between a scream and a coughing roar. A tawny thunderbolt came through the ruined door.

  It struck the gorilla with a massive thud, and the combined forms went over and over in a ton-weight ball of black and brown and claws and saberlike canines and hammering fists the size of small casks. More blood and black bristly hide and skin covered in short sandcovered fur flew and misted away. For a moment Peter could see the gorilla’s hands locked around the cat’s throat, holding the dreadful stab of the long canines away, and the sabertooth’s hind paws raking at its swag belly.

  Harvey threw himself aside with a yell, dropping the kau sin ke. Something hit him in midleap, and he tumbled away to crash into the cheap bureau in a shatter of age-dried pressboard. A twisting in the melee, and suddenly it was two giant cats, rearing on their hind legs and slamming back and forth at each other with their taloned paws, sabertooth against Siberian tiger.