The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  Another twisting, and it was two naked men facing each other, one dark, one fair, both lithe and muscular. Their snarls were as bestial as the animals’ had been. Those turned into words as they circled, purling, spitting, their fingers tracing shapes in the air that hurt the eyes to watch. Peter yelled and rolled away off the edge of the bed as the wall behind him suddenly turned freezing cold, the sort of cold that would tear off your skin if you touched it. An instant later the frame of the broken door burst into flames. With a screech the Mhabrogast glyphs around the edges of the room began to glow.

  Cherenkov radiation! Peter thought. And they’re changing, too.

  He felt an impulse to beat his head open against the floor. Images spun through his mind, intolerable glimpses down dark whirlpools that spun through the depth of things. For an instant the flames seemed to melt the blond man’s form, making it run. Then he turned and leapt, arms before his face as he dove through the blaze. Through the fire Peter could see him take a dozen strides and then throw himself into the air. A fractional second, and an eagle thrashed itself skyward.

  The remaining man swayed and went to one knee. His skin was sheened with sweat, and there was a raw, feral look in his eyes as he panted. That faded, and humanness came back to them.

  “Harvey?” he croaked. “I’m not sure I can stay palpable, Harvey. He was too strong.”

  Then Farmer’s voice, sharp with pain and throttled panic: “Guha’s hurt! Bad!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ellen felt herself freeze; she was already motionless, but this was an inability to move. Then she took a deep, quiet breath and made herself relax. Less than a second later there was an impact behind her. Right behind her, where Adrian had put the final glyph.

  Not physical. Nothing had struck her, but something had wanted to and started to make the world obey its will. And then been caught in a very bad place.

  Scratch one night-walker.

  Ellen started to giggle, then jammed it down with an effort of will of her own. Something was walking towards her. Trotting easily. . .

  Eeep! she thought as she adjusted the rifle, taking a turn of the sling around her upper arm to steady her aim. There’s another one!

  Then: It’s a wolf. Big fucking wolf with big fucking teeth. I don’t like dogs, and wolves are even worse. Wolves with a Shadowspawn inside are even worse than that.

  She’d been savaged by a dog as a child.. . .

  A blur too swift to be really seen, and the beast became a man. . . more or less. Arrogantly fit, brown skinned, with a broad, hook-nosed, high-cheeked face and black hair falling to his wide shoulders. The eyes shone lambent yellow. They turned down at the ring of glyphs Adrian had drawn around her, and his lips moved in what was probably either a curse or Mhabrogast, if there was a difference.

  Dale Shadowsblade, she thought. One of Adrienne’s bully boys.

  She’d met him while she was Adrienne’s prisoner, and even by Shadowspawn standards he was nasty; also extremely powerful. His usual day job . . . sort of . . . was to carry out executions for the Council.

  “I’m unarmed—” he began, smiling.

  “Unarmed? Good! ”

  Crack. The rifle hammered back at her shoulder.

  Just as it did, her hand slipped on the rock she was using as a rest; dust fountained up from the desert as the heavy silver bullet kicked into the dirt near Dale Shadowsblade’s feet.

  The Apache—Apache to the limited extent he was anything human at all—grinned at her, teeth very white in the darkness.

  “Not in a chatty mood, eh? I like women with spunk. They fuck good, die well and taste even better.”

  Doggedly she broke the action open and thumbed in another shell. It was a little depressing that the Shadowspawn just stood and grinned at her at point-blank range. Then his eyes went to the rock face at her back and down to Adrian’s motionless form as it lay breathing once every twenty seconds.

  “Szau-ti glyph! That Adrian has a nasty mind,” he said. “Put you in front of it like a tethered goat and see what he can catch while he’s off being busy, and you’re one tasty piece of meat. Dmitri the apeshit got whupped by Adrian and now he looks like he’s got his ass caught in a crack back in there. He’s going to be pissed, let me tell you.”

  Okay, so that’s who got trapped behind me. Now if I can kill Dale here, it’ll be a prefecta.

  She aimed, took a breath, let half of it out, squeezed the trigger—

  And as she did the man faded away. Crack, and the bullet split the night. Then he was there again.

  “Pity the glyph worked, bitch. If it hadn’t you’d be spending some quality time with my wolf right now, and then Dmitri’s would be getting sloppy seconds. Before we drank you dry. Hey, they’re man’s best friend, right, so why not a gal’s?”

  Reload. Do not think about that. Ignore him. They try to play with your mind. Just fucking shoot him. Look on the bright side: before you met Adrian, you never got to shoot or knife abusive sexist assholes.

  “But I guess I’ll have to rescue him instead, no matter how much fun it would be to leave him there. Think about what you’re missing!”

  Suddenly he was rushing towards her. Crack, but the man was a wolf again. The bullet went over its head, and then it rose in a soaring leap over the semicircle of glyphs. Her head swiveled to follow it, and it vanished into the moonlit rock.

  “Oh, man, I do not like this,” she said, reaching for another shell. An effort made her fingers stop shaking.

  “Adrian, what’s going on?”

  Adrian’s body breathed once more, very slowly.

  “Guha’s hurt!”

  Harvey went over to her. Peter let the knife drop and hobbled around the bed, vague recollections of Boy Scout first-aid courses in his mind. He stopped, shocked. The Texan’s fingers were unlatching and easing away her body armor.

  “Aw, shit,” he said tiredly.

  The dark woman was shaking slightly—shivering, Peter thought, but with an odd mechanical look to it. More like machinery than a human being. There were bubbles on her lips, swelling and popping, but they weren’t spit. Even in the dim light of the single remaining bulb he could see that they were red—a very dark red, almost black. Her eyes were open too, and one had the pupil contracted to a pinhead. There was a smell about her, blood and something else.

  “Aw, shit,” Harvey said again. “He didn’t just hit her. There’s a bane with it, feel?”

  Peter felt nothing.. . . No, I feel terrified. Farmer ran his hands through the air over the injured woman, and his face scrunched up. It looked as if it were going to crack as it showed an emotion that it wasn’t used to: sorrow.

  “Right down into the cells,” he said. “She’s trapped in there. Everything’s black-pathed. She’s hurting really bad, and it won’t stop until she dies, and her duration sense is stretched out so that seconds are days. The physical stuff would be all right but even her blood isn’t clotting. All the healing functions are blocked. Harvey, do something!”

  “Fucking what, Jack? I couldn’t touch that any more than I could rip steel cuffs off barehanded!”

  There was a stumbling sound behind Peter. The little hairs on his neck tried to stand up. That was just very tired footsteps, but. . .

  Fascinating, he thought. My body knows when to be afraid.

  But they were a night-walking Shadowspawn’s footsteps. Something very far down wanted to whimper and puke and piss itself and scream and plead.

  The Empire of Shadow must have been really awful, for a very long time.

  “Let me see,” Adrian Brézé said hoarsely.

  The others moved back; Farmer hesitated, and Harvey Ledbetter laid a hand on his shoulder. Adrian crouched, then went to one knee.

  “I’ve known her only a little,” he said. “But she was very brave, to go after that thing.”

  “Yeah,” Farmer said tightly; he’d picked up his knife and was looking at it and the injured woman, his face twitching with what he would prob
ably have to do. “She is. Was.”

  Adrian sighed. His face went completely blank for an instant, and then he held his hands out in the same gesture that Farmer had used.

  “Wait a minute, Adrian! You could just fucking dissipate if you overstrain, you’re night-walking and you’re not strong enough after that fight—” Harvey began.

  “I will have to be strong enough, won’t I?” he said remotely. Then: “Auii za!”

  Both hands clenched closed. Guha’s back arched, and then she was awake and screaming. And Adrian faded.

  “I wish I hadn’t seen that,” Peter said, muttering to himself. Then he collapsed backwards on the bed. “I’m a physicist, I was trained to believe in an orderly universe where things make sense. I shouldn’t see that sort of thing. I shouldn’t be squeezed to paste by wereanacondas, I shouldn’t—”

  “Yeah, you’re a physicist.”

  The light cut out. Harvey was standing over him, and staring, and Peter found that he was a little afraid of this man, as well.

  “And you’d better be worth all this,” he said flatly to the physicist. “You really had better be worth it. Especially if Adrian ain’t waking up in his body right about now.”

  Ellen shivered again. The night felt empty. There was the palest pale to the east, over the leagues of silvery desert. She’d never thought how good emptiness could feel.

  There was a trickle of alarm along her nerves. Then Adrian’s body reared up and fell back. A keening sound came from between his clenched teeth. She leaned the rifle against the boulder—guns could go off if you dropped them; that caution was automatic now—and threw herself down beside him.

  His sweat smelled rank, despite the chill of the desert night. The yellow-flecked eyes were open and rolled up in his head, and teeth showed white and bare; they chattered, and he shook as if in the grip of a chill. Strings of disconnected words sounded, in half a dozen languages, then French, then English:

  “I . . . she was hurt, I had to . . . Too much, too much! The fighting and the healing, too much!”

  He had to help someone. He’s overdrawn on the Power, Ellen knew. Which is entirely like him. He talks cynic and acts like Galahad.

  And she knew what she must do; the thought made her mouth go dry with him in this condition, but her voice was steady. His eyes were fixed on her and the pupils had grown to swallow the iris, a thin band of gold around pits of black; his teeth showed, and a line of spittle hung from one lip.

  “Come on, darling. I’ve got what you need.”

  “No. . . control . . . get away. . .”

  “Do it,” she said, and bent forward, bending her chin back. “Come on, you goddamned Boy Scout!”

  He snarled and lunged. Ellen gave a scream that was half moan as cable-strong arms closed around her and teeth scored her throat.

  Dawn broke; the air was still comfortably cool, but it had a hint of the day’s white furnace, and a scent of dry dust. Harvey Ledbetter walked into the motel’s office and held up one hand. The manager was obviously frightened—despite the overcranked air-conditioning there was a sheen of sweat on him—and obviously desperate to know what had happened to his unit in the night.

  “There’s been a bit of damage,” Harvey said aloud.

  Meanin’ your little fleabag is trashed, he thought.

  And saw the same knowledge on the man’s face; he’d been out to take a look. A grenade did do regrettable things to cheap construction, not to mention tons of homicidal gorilla and sabertooth rolling around making bad and throwing off Wreakings while they did. Fortunately there hadn’t been any flames they couldn’t put out, and the bloodstains were nothing out of the ordinary.

  Harvey smiled and flicked his right hand. A fan of hundred-dollar notes appeared there; even these days, a C-note wasn’t toilet paper. He put them down on the desk, and then rested his index finger on them, friendly blue eyes peering over the tops of his mirrored shades.

  “I think that will keep things nice and tidy,” he said, and let something else show; he could feel the man’s mind jump. “And quiet.”

  The way the Texan was leaning gave just a hint of the shape of his shoulder holster and the Colt within. The manager paled a little at that and the eyes, then crumpled—not physically, but you could sense the inward collapse. Also his calculations: three people in civilian versions of field gear, their truck, the disturbances, the Humvee that had arrived a few minutes ago. All that said either police or cartels, possibly both in this part of the country. Or perhaps spook, but he’d be less likely to think that.

  “Sí. Just some friends getting a little rough, eh?” the manager said, and made the money disappear. “A little party. Insurance, I have it.”

  “Friends? Well, one of ’em was a real gorilla, and I didn’t like him at all,” Harvey said, and smiled at the other man’s uneasy laugh. “And the other was a real cool cat. Just so we understand each other.”

  Harvey nodded, smiled again—there was no point in pushing the man when he’d gotten what he wanted. Frightening people had its uses, but it was all too easy to make them terrified, and terror was the original two-edged knife. Desperate human beings switched off their minds and got really unpredictable. Besides that, there was no point in taking out his frustrations on bystanders.

  He walked back into the bright sunlight, and onto the scuffed cracked asphalt and concrete and bare dirt of the motel’s courtyard. Despite the stiffness and the bruises, and the general message his body was sending him about slowing down in his early sixties, he grinned. There was even a tumbleweed, and a couple of skittering lizards.

  He’d been born in the Hill Country, not far southeast of Austin, which was pretty enough in a spare, rocky way; there were even olive groves and vineyards there these days. And would-be Tuscanista rural gentrifiers making organic goat cheese, most of which, in his opinion, was about as much fun to eat as the other caprine by-products.

  But there was a certain ugly charm to desolation like this, a sort that could appeal to any country-bred Texan. A Larry McMurtry fitness, as if Captain McCrae were about to ride in with a scruffy patrol of Rangers, a Winchester in a scabbard at his knee.

  A little unconscious nostalgia there too, he thought. Back then, all humans had to worry about was other humans, like the Comanche or Mexican bandits. The Order of the Black Dawn was just getting started.

  As he came out Farmer was helping Guha into the van. It was a big, nondescript vehicle, with oversize tires and certain facilities that didn’t show; the back could be rigged for casualties, for instance. She’d be some time healing, but it was a big improvement over dying after a subjective month or so of agony and fear. Farmer was moving carefully too, and he was thirty years younger than Harvey; that gave the older man a good deal of satisfaction.

  Peter Boase was being cautious, but holding up remarkably well for a civilian who’d just gone through a withdrawal process that made kicking heroin loose nothing by comparison.

  And there were Adrian and Ellen, both looking . . . ridden hard and put away wet, he thought ironically. Pale and interesting. The girl . . . woman . . . moved stiffly and looked washed out, but she and Adrian were still exchanging smiles and glances and touches, almost unconsciously.

  Well, that’s the real thing, he thought. And Adrian’s actually found a girlie who doesn’t mind being on the receiving end of a Homo sapiens nocturnus feeding frenzy. Good for him, since he can apparently control even that. And I can’t even find a woman who’ll put up with all-too-human me.

  There was a hint of irony in his smile. Harvey Ledbetter considered himself an excellent judge of character, including the female variety. As long as he wasn’t personally interested in the woman in question. When he was . . .

  Three marriages, three divorces, he thought. Fuckin’ perfect record. Of course, not being able to tell the truth about what you do really doesn’t help.

  He could talk to Brotherhood women, of course. Weird term, when you thought about it; they’d never gotten aro
und to modernizing the name for these gender-inclusive times. They were another story.

  The problem with that was that nearly everyone in the Brotherhood was insane in one way or another.

  “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Note that the feller who said that ended up wearing a straitjacket and baying out the window of the asylum at the Bavarian Alps. Now, I’m completely sane, I surely am. I’m planning on blowing up a city with a nuclear weapon for perfectly rational and highly moral reasons.

  He laughed as he walked over to the vehicles, and Adrian smiled at him. It had always been a charming expression, and it looked better now with some years on him and a bit less of that androgynous beauty Shadowspawn teenagers tended to show. Adrian looked like he was in his late twenties—maybe a bit older this morning, after a hard night—but his body language was somehow a little different.

  “What’s the joke, Harvey?”

  “I was just thinking that things were going too smoothly,” he said. “And then I backed off a bit and looked at that statement, plus the way we all give a pretty good impression of having been through the cat once, and it struck me as funny.”

  Adrian laughed himself. Peter Boase started to sputter, then looked around at all of them and chuckled a little himself, wincing when it made a scab on his lip crack. Harvey found himself thinking better of the man for it.

  “All right, Dr. Boase,” he said. “You’re going to Sweden for your new job. Consider yourself a lucky man.”

  The blond physicist did think about it for a moment. Then he joined in, for the same reason, and they all chuckled; even Guha smiled weakly.

  “I am,” Boase said. “It’s . . . I hate to say it, but from what little I remember it was even worse at Rancho Sangre after Adrienne died.. . .”