The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

Ellen smiled. Then something teased at her memory. It wasn’t all that long since her graduation, and she’d had to take English literature courses as well.

  Defarge, she thought. That Dickens book. She’s the one who sat knitting by the guillotine during the Terror, while the heads of the aristos fell into the basket.

  Adrian shrugged again. “One of the reasons I liked living in Santa Fe for so long was how quiet it is. Little happens there.”

  “Well, that’s unique,” the Santa Fe chief of police said.

  The forensics team moved around the room. Most of them had more than one hat; Santa Fe’s police force didn’t run to elaborate hierarchies.

  Eric Salvador felt a surge of anger, and throttled it back automatically. It wouldn’t help . . . and he’d said the same sort of thing. You did, it helped you deal with what you were seeing. Usually.

  Cecile was on the bed. Usually dead bodies didn’t have much expression, but usually they weren’t arched in a galvanic spasm. They’d have to break her bones to get her into a bag. The look on her face was not quite like anything he’d ever seen, and his experience was broader than he liked. Now he’d have to have this in his head for the rest of his life. He licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat.

  Cesar was naked, lying on his face between the bed and the window. His pistol was in his right hand; the spent brass of fourteen shells littered the floor around him. Most of them were in the coagulating blood, turned dark red now with brown spots. In his left was clutched a knife, not a fighting knife, but some sort of tableware. A wedge of glass as broad as a man’s hand at its base was in his throat, the point coming out the back of his neck.

  “This is a murder-suicide,” the chief said quietly.

  Salvador stirred. The older man didn’t look at him as he continued.

  “That’s exactly what it is, Eric.”

  He doesn’t call me by my first name very often.

  “Probably that’s what the evidence will show. Sir,” Salvador added.

  I’ve seen friends die before. I didn’t sit down and cry. I did my job. I can do it now.

  He hadn’t been this angry then, either. He’d killed every mouj he could while he was doing tours on the rock pile, and it had been a lot of tours and a good round number of kills, but he hadn’t usually hated them. Sort of a sour disgust, most of the time; he hadn’t thought of them as personal enough to hate, really.

  This is extremely personal. Now I hate.

  “Chief.”

  That was one of the evidence squad. He walked around the pool of blood to them. “We got something on the windowsill, going out. Sort of strange. When did you say you got here, Salvador?”

  “Three thirty. Half an hour after . . . Cesar called me.”

  The night outside was still dark, but there was a staleness, a stillness to it, that promised dawn.

  Baffled, Salvador shook his head. The man held up his notebook. The smudge he’d recorded on the ledge turned into a print as he ran the enhancement. A paw print.

  “You notice a dog? Or something else like that?”

  “No,” he said dully. “Just a cat.”

  “Well, that’s not it.” The print was too large for a house cat. “Probably just something drawn by the smell. Big coyote maybe, the things are all over town.”

  “Time of death?”

  “Recent but hard to pin down, on a warm night like this. Everything’s fully compatible with sometime between the time you got the phone call and the time you called it in.”

  The chief put a hand on his shoulder and urged him outside. He fumbled in the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

  “You know you can’t be on this investigation, Eric,” the older man said. “Go home. Get some sleep. Crawl into a bottle of tequila like a worm to get some sleep if you have to. Take a couple of days off and as many bottles as it takes.”

  “That doesn’t last,” he said.

  “It works for a while, and the pain afterwards distracts you too,” the chief said.

  Salvador nodded, flicked the cigarette into the weedy gravel of the front yard and walked steadily over to his car. He pulled out very, very carefully, and drove equally carefully to Saint Francis, down to the intersection with Rodeo and the entrance to the I-25. Only then did he pull over into a boarded-up complex of low buildings probably originally meant for medical offices or real estate agents, built by some crazed optimist back in the late aughts or early teens.

  “Okay, Cesar, talk to me,” he said aloud, and slid the data card he’d palmed into the slot on his notebook; nobody would notice, not when he’d left his shoes standing in the pool of blood. “This had better not be your taxes. Tell me how to get the cabrón.”

  The screen came on, only one file, and that was video. Salvador tapped his finger on it.

  Vision. Three ten in the carat at the lower right corner. Cesar was sweating as he spoke, wearing a bathrobe but with his Glock sitting in front of him within range of the pickup camera; the background was his home office–cum–TV room, lit only by one small lamp.

  “I’m recording this before you get here, jefe, ’cause I’ve got a really bad feeling about this. I was on the Net tonight and I got a query from the Quantico analysis lab we sent the puke and blood to back when before we were told to back off, you know? They said there were some ‘interesting anomalies’ and did I want any more information on the Brézé guy, they attached the file. It looked like a legit file, it was big enough.”

  Cesar’s image licked its lips; he could see that, but Salvador’s mind superimposed how he’d looked with half his face lying in a pool of his own blood.

  “Okay, it was a trap and I was stupid. I should have asked them, ‘Who dat, never heard of no Brézé, me,’ or just hit the spam blocker. But we weren’t getting anywhere, creeping into Adrian Brézé’s house like we planned would be desperation stuff, so I downloaded. Here’s what I got, repeated a whole lot of times.”

  Letters appeared, a paragraph of boldface:

  —youaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouareso—

  “I—”

  “Cesar!” A scream in a woman’s voice from another room, high and desperate. Then: “Don’t—don’t—please, don’t—”

  Then just screaming. Cesar snatched up the pistol and ran. Salvador heard himself screaming too, as the shots began. Then more sounds, for a long time. Then another face in the screen.

  It was the woman he’d seen in the dream; he could tell, even though her face was one liquid sheet of dull red. Only the golden flecks in her eyes showed bright, and then her teeth were very white when she licked them clean.

  “You are so fucked,” she crooned, and the screen went black.

  Eric Salvador choked as the tears ran down his face. His hand twitched towards his pistol and he forced it to lie still.

  There were far too many people who had to die before he did. People he had to talk to. Adrian Brézé, for starters.

  Adrienne Brézé lay back in the big hot tub, watching the high cold stars slip by in the skylights overhead and enjoying the gentle eddies of the hot lavender-scented water. Her toes floated slightly above the surface with wisps of mist half veiling them, but the regenerated foot was now just as large as the other and only slightly pink; for that matter, her hair was shoulder-length again. No trace of the famine-gauntness remained on the rest of her.

  “I’m back to my full, magnificent form,” she said.

  There were three other people in the room with her, besides Monica. Theresa Villegas was a thin, dark woman in her forties and the household manager, which to a Shadowspawn meant considerably more than overseeing the maids, or even scaring up the human refreshments for parties. The household was the instinctive unit of organization for her breed, the way clans were for Homo sapiens. Harold Bates was recorded somewhere as head of security for Brézé Enterprises; that meant he ran her human mercenaries, mostly Gurkhas. David Cheung was young, extraordinarily fit, with the sort of build you saw on g
ymnasts or martial artists, and sleekly handsome. She used him as a guard and enforcer, among other things; it was a rather unusual arrangement.

  But the whole point of being a Progressive is not to be overly bound by tradition, hein?

  By her elbow there was a dish of smoked salmon and little spiced shrimp on toothpicks and a glass of slightly chilled New Zealand gewürztraminer—quite extraordinarily good; she made a note to acquire the vineyard as she nibbled and sipped.

  “The arrangements?” she said.

  “Your great-grandfather agreed to the meeting,” Theresa said efficiently, her eyes flicking down to her tablet for an instant. “His personal reply . . . I quote: ‘Quelle surprise, we Brézés are infernally hard to kill.’ ”

  “I think he used infernal with malice aforethought,” she said, chuckling. “Alas, he retains a sentimental attachment to the satanist part of the family heritage. Emotionally if not literally. Captain Bates?”

  The mercenary nodded. “The security plan is ready for implementation, Ms. Brézé,” he said in upper-class British tones.

  “Good, it would be tiresome if there were interference. I need to consult closely with Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother, without distractions.”

  “I understand your brother consulted with them first,” the Englishman said. “Is that likely to create difficulties?”

  “No, no. I wanted him to make his appearance first. It will confirm certain assumptions he has made about my plans. Because, at the time he saw them, Étienne and Seraphine shared those assumptions, you see? I did not want to illuminate them for fear he would sense something. He is astonishingly sensitive at times, my dear sibling.”

  She looked at David. “And we’ll need you active when we arrive, so go wait for me. You can sleep afterwards.”

  The young man grinned, bowed, and left through the door that led into her private chambers. She caught a flicker of verbalization from Bates; they’d been in close enough proximity for long enough that her mind had begun to decode the symbol structure of his.

  “I don’t think you think much of David, Captain Bates.” She laughed.

  His mind jerked in alarm; then he tried to focus on a mathematical formula. As a shield, it was pathetic.

  “He’s very useful as an instructor in hand-to-hand combat,” he said neutrally. “Surprisingly so, for someone so . . . academic.”

  “I’ve given him the opportunity to fight for real quite a few times,” she said. “That means he’s not just a dojo ballerina anymore. And, Captain Bates?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You’re really not in a position to indulge a feeling of moral superiority, you know.”

  “I, ah, have no such opinion of Mr. Cheung, ma’am.”

  “Oh, yes, you do. Really, you should have realized by now that you can’t lie to me. Gigolo was among your unkind thoughts. You’re a very able man, Captain Bates; you’re also quite satisfyingly venal and sadistically murderous, which is why despite the drawbacks you find my employ so satisfying.”

  She held up a hand. “Not a criticism! Just an observation! And you work for a monster; you can’t trust me, but you can’t keep secrets from me, either.”

  “Your service has been . . . educational, ma’am.”

  “What was that? ‘Peeled back the lid’? Yes, I suppose so. And you’re helping upend that can and spread a nice thick layer of what’s inside all over the world. Do keep that in mind, my little toenail of Satan.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’d better get to work on the details if we’re traveling overland from Paris.”

  “By train,” Adrienne amplified. “Call it the Orient Express. Then by ship from Istanbul.”

  Theresa smiled thinly and followed him, her tablet tucked under her arm. The Villegases had been renfields for a long time; one knew where one stood with them.

  “But how much more authentic it would be if I were sailing across the Atlantic,” she said sourly. “Mthunzi would just love that. Or if I had a log and a couple of humans to paddle it for me. Or I could try being a werealbatross and fry like an egg when the sunlight caught me. And then we could travel by coach to Tbilisi, through oceans of mud and streets running with shit.”

  “Doña?” Monica asked. “Mthunzi?”

  “Oh, did I ever tell you about him? He’s head of the Council eugenics program. He has been for most of the last century.”

  Monica shivered a little; she preferred not to think about other Shadowspawn. As far as possible she preferred not to remember that they existed.

  “He’s . . . not a friend of yours?”

  “He’s a reactionary fossil,” Adrienne said. “Compared to him, my great-grandfather is a Progressive.”

  “What sort of name is that, Mthunzi?”

  “Zulu. He wears this absurd costume at gatherings, with cow horns and beads and bells, a veritable witch doctor’s outfit. Well, Great-grandfather dresses up in that Robe of the Dark Magus, like some Parisian version of Aleister Crowley. . . or Saruman . . . actually it was the other way ’round; Crowley was imitating him, with much poorer taste . . . but at least it looks striking and not just silly, and he doesn’t wear a pointed hat.”

  “He’ll be coming to Tbilisi too?”

  “Yes. He wants us back in the caves. Caves are boring. I think he’s just as aware of how Trimback One would probably be much worse than the projections as I am. He simply wants that.”

  The phone function sounded a quiet chime. “Here,” Adrienne said; not many people had her private number, and she’d gone to a great deal of trouble to encrypt the link.

  Or rather, others went to a great deal of trouble. They work, I enjoy the results; it’s the natural order.

  “Hi!” Michiko’s voice.

  “Ça va, Michi?”

  “Nothing much, you know?” she said, with an utterly Californian rising inflection. “Oh, that Santa Fe thing, a couple of the locals are poking around where they shouldn’t. I had the renfields warn them off, but it looks like they’re being naughty and trying to keep it secret.. . .”

  “Have them killed, then.”

  “I may go handle that myself. Nice to get in a little plain terrorizing and torture and butchery of unsuspecting ordinary humans now and then. The simple pleasures are the ones that last in the end, like steamed rice. I’m actually going to miss it once we’re out in the open, the way their minds dissolve in fear when they realize what we are.”

  “That is delicious,” Adrienne conceded. “Still, one can’t have everything, and there’s something to be said for lifelong dread and cringing fear. Wait, Adrian hasn’t been around there, has he? That would be. . . dangerous. The last I saw of him was too close for comfort. We don’t want him suspecting anything too soon.”

  “Don’t you think I could handle him?” Michiko bridled.

  Not in a thousand years, Adrienne thought. Aloud she went on:

  “Darling, I could barely handle him. He gave Dmitri all the trouble he could take just a few weeks ago. The poor boy is still sulking about Dale rescuing him.”

  “There is that. Well, he wouldn’t be around here, would he? He killed my grandfather; Ichirō and I would be on the lookout for him, even if you were really dead. This is probably just one of those irritating things the humans do now and then.”

  “True. But he might drop by for his things, or the Power might prompt him; he is one of our generation, remember. Do keep alert.”

  “You know, this is as much my home as anywhere,” Adrian said quietly.

  They were sitting on a bench in Santa Fe’s little central park on the plaza, eating ice-cream cones. The Palace of the Governors stretched in front of them, past the plain plinth of the Civil War memorial and the bandstand. He bit off a chunk of the cone; it was solid and smoothly rich, if not Berthillon, and there were piñon nuts in it as well.

  The patch of cottonwoods and grass was drowsily peaceful on a Sunday morning, just cool enough for their Windbreakers to be comfortable on a bench in the shade. The thin
mountain air seemed to impart an extra clarity to sight, as if everything were in a hyperrealist painting, sharp-edged and definite but with an unearthly glow to the colors.

  “More than Paris?” Ellen said in a teasing tone.

  “Much more,” Adrian answered soberly.

  I am a serious man, by inclination, he thought. Gloomy and brooding, in fact. Ellen . . . lightens me. Not that she is light minded, but she has more of a sense of proportion. Considering all that has happened to her . . . well, I knew she was a remarkable person.

  “I was a young man in Paris, a student.”

  “What, Harvey didn’t have you blowing things up and. . . Wreaking?”

  “Yes. Though explosives are only occasionally useful against Shadowspawn—more often against their hirelings . . . but he thought I should have that experience, to make me . . . how did he put it. . . less of a fuckin’ wing nut than most members of the Brotherhood. Many are born into the war, you understand, and it does strange things to the mind to be raised so. Others are recruited after an encounter with the Shadowspawn, and that is usually still worse.”

  “Did you like Paris, being a university student, being normal? Well, relatively normal.”

  “I loved it. I will always remember the city fondly . . . but there, even though I was estranged from the family, I could never forget that I was a Brézé. The very stones of the place spoke of them.”

  “And you didn’t feel at home when you were a kid?”

  “With my foster parents in my childhood I was living a lie—that I did not know it at the time makes no difference in retrospect.”

  “What about Harvey? He raised you.”

  “Nomadically, though I loved his place in Texas, the little ranch in the Hill Country. We moved frequently even then. When I became an active fighter for the Brotherhood, we moved every week, or nearly—and that was when I was sixteen. When we were not holed up in safe houses or redoubts. In a place in the Yukon for a whole winter, once, for training, and for the Brotherhood’s adepts to study me. Besides. . . though I tried to think of Harvey as a father, he was more like an elder brother to me. We are only a decade apart in age, after all. He was in his early twenties when he . . . rescued me. I was twelve.”