The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “Very slow,” it said. “Continue strictly on this line—”

  A glowing track came up on the screen forward of the wheel, with an outline of the truck approaching a matching form beneath the crane.

  “Halt! Reverse ten centimeters!”

  “Shut up; it’s a fucking truck and I’m only two inches off!”

  “Halt! Reverse ten—”

  “Shut up, you fucking Nazi bitch!” Jack screamed, hammering a fist on the wheel and punching the controls more or less at random until he found the mute function; then he tapped the ready icon on the screen.

  “Ve haff wayz of making you stop talkink!” he shouted, then added: “Sorry,” in more normal tones.

  Oh, my, but Jack is not wired too tightly at all now and then, Guha thought—not for the first time. At least I only scream when I am dreaming.

  The screen switched to one of the pickups on the cab of the truck, showing the huge four-legged crane as it trundled over on its man-high wheels. The heavy weight spooled down smoothly and landed on the truck bed with a muffled clunk. Clamps were inserted and turned. Guha hopped down briefly, did a visual examination to confirm the video and sensors, and then climbed back in.

  “You may now proceed to exit gate seventy-six-B,” the truck said. “Please follow the indicated route. Do not deviate from the route or Europoort Security will be alerted. A condition of heightened security awareness is in force. Thank you.”

  “Fuck you, bitch!” Jack snarled, as he pulled away.

  “It’s just a truck, Jack,” Guha soothed.

  “Then it won’t mind me calling it names, will it?” he grumbled.

  Guha slipped a hand inside the toolbox and let it rest on the compact little Steyr machine pistol there; it wouldn’t be much use if an adept were around, but it would kill stray renfields very effectively. The gray sky began to drizzle, and Jack was driving as much by the telescreens as through the windshield. They slowed again for the exit scan. There were more personnel there than usual.

  “Uh-oh,” Jack said softly.

  The extra personnel were in camo fatigues and body armor; as they came closer she saw that they had C7 assault rifles and wore badges shaped like a burning grenade.

  “Koninklijke Marechaussee,” she muttered. “So much for machine pistols. And they are not renfields. Not really, they do not know for whom they are working.”

  “Big fucking difference,” Jack muttered.

  Koninklijke Marechaussee meant Royal Gendarmerie; specialists in border protection and counterterrorism work, with a well-deserved reputation for professionalism. This wasn’t a problem you could solve by slipping a couple of hundred euros from hand to hand.

  And they had a van that looked like it was full of some sort of detection equipment to add to the usual scanners; she could sense its buzzing activity. The forty-foot container behind them was lined with lead fabric, among other things, but it did have a nuclear weapon in it, and it was a bomb made by amateur fanatics for a one-off use at that.

  “You take care of the gendarmes,” Jack said quietly. “I’ll fox the machinery.”

  Guha nodded stiffly. “I would guess someone found the little workshop of the jihadi elves in Veracruz,” she said. “And the DNA would tell them who made it.”

  The workshop would have, besides half a dozen very decayed bodies with interesting personal dossiers, an underground facility with unmistakable traces showing that someone had been handling plutonium there. Even if the original theft from Seversk hadn’t been detected, which it probably had, the Veracruz thing would have security forces all over the world on the alert; even the Shadowspawn might be concerned, since they were more vulnerable to ionizing radiation than true humans anyway, especially when night-walking or postcorporeal.

  Guha smiled grimly. A very long time ago, human rebels had slain Shadowspawn with everything from silver arrowheads to poison, but they had always buried the bodies with carved disks of natural pitchblende—uraninite—in the grave as well.

  To make sure they stayed dead.

  She licked dry lips as the computers in the gendarmes’ equipment identified the serial number on the container and shook hands with the truck’s own IT system and the Europoort mainframe. One of the military police held up a hand, carefully not standing in the way where a desperate terrorist might have run him down; the road had a pop-up toothed barrier that would rip their wheels to ribbons if they tried that anyway.

  Another walked towards her side of the cab, and two more went towards the cargo containers with sensor paddles in their hands.

  My, my, would they not get a surprise if they looked in there! she thought, fighting down a hysterical giggle.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she said in excellent Dutch as she keyed down the window.

  Jack slumped down in his seat; he couldn’t go into full trance here, but that was close. And he had the easier task, dealing with the coarse and simple processes inside computer circuits. Though they were both going to be very shaky after this. Using the Power when you didn’t have the biochemical equipment to feed on others—or even to use the ghastly stored blood that was a very bad alternative—meant that you were taking it out of yourself.

  Guha felt a familiar, complex set of emotions shudder through her hindbrain. A dark longing that could never be satisfied, even if you gave in to it. She had enough of the inheritance to want to feed, but blood would simply be contaminated seawater to her stomach. Best not to think about it. That way lay madness; that way lay Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory and Jeffrey Dahmer.

  I do not know if the ones like Sheila Polson are luckier or even farther down the ramp to Hell, she thought. She could feed. She does use Red Cross blood, foul though that tastes, to give her strength. She could give in to the temptation, while I know it would be useless. She probably even feels that she is better because she has a real choice and refuses the power, the ecstasy.. . . I am not a bad person. I am just a good person who wants to do bad things. I know giving in would do nothing except make me hate myself even more.

  But the needs coiled down in the base of her skull knew nothing of reason or consequences. They just wanted. And they never went away, though it was worse when she used the Power.

  “Goede middag, mevrouw,” the yellow-haired gendarme said with a flat, nasal accent in his standard Dutch, which meant he’d probably grown up speaking Frisian. “Papers, please.

  “Thank you,” he added as she handed over the manifest and the truck’s papers and her and Jack’s—false—IDs.

  She noticed a wachtmeester’s single chevron on his sleeve, which made him a sergeant, more or less. He had a headset monocle deployed over one eye, part of a full mil spec infantry IT outfit; it would be reading her face and running the digitized pattern through the EU database, and matching it to the papers she’d just given him. That didn’t worry her; planting data in computers just wasn’t very difficult for the Brotherhood’s specialists, who combined high-level conventional IT skills with low-level Wreaking. That worked better than the usual Shadowspawn habit of simply making the system forget them. A false positive was much more convincing than mere absence.

  She wasn’t very worried that they were slightly in violation of EU regulation (EC) No. 561/2006 on driver rest periods either, which just added a touch of authenticity. Nobody could actually abide by all of Brussels’ pettifogging micromanagement even if they wanted to; sliding around it was a way of life.

  “This all seems to be in order,” the man said.

  But he’s tense. Not very tense, but alert. So if this is but a routine check and everything’s in order, why—

  “We will be doing a physical inspection of this container, madam,” he said. “This is purely routine, due to the heightened state of alert currently in force.”

  He smiled, politely. So did the woman trooper behind him, with the C7 on the assault sling across her armored torso. Everyone was paranoid about this sort of thing since Marseilles.

  The real irony wa
s that if she’d been the jihadi lunatic they were looking for, she’d have a deadman switch rigged to the bomb, and Europoort-Scheldt and much of Rotterdam would cease to exist about now.

  Training kept her from snarling. She couldn’t just bludgeon his mind the way a purebred might. Instead. . .

  Warmth. Such a pretty face. Yes, you have warm feelings for me. Mother/sister/lover. Look into my eyes.. . .

  Feeling emotions was easy. Manipulating them was much harder; you had to sort of tie them to your own, then change what you felt. It took effort, and she could feel it drawing on the inner reserve, as if something deep inside her were draining away like blood through a wound. Guha smiled and gazed into his eyes, blue meeting a brown so dark it was almost completely black.

  Such a nice young man. He joined the gendarmerie because he wanted to help people, to protect them. We know each other. We trust each other.. . .

  The man blinked. “I’m . . . I’m very sorry to bother you,” he said, mumbling a little.

  The sharp blue eyes had lost their focus. He slurred in his birth speech, enough like both English and Dutch that she could follow along:

  “ Mem . . . mem . . .”

  She remembered her own mother: the warmth, the comfort, the security that were like nothing you ever felt again.

  “It’s just that we’re behind schedule,” she murmured. “You can see that. And there’re all these people behind us, waiting. We don’t want to get into trouble. You don’t want to cause us trouble.. . .”

  She could feel the decision crystallizing in his mind, like a muscle flexing under her fingertips.

  “What’s the scanner say?” he said over his shoulder.

  The woman with the assault rifle glanced at the team with the paddles and whispered, probably into a throat-button pickup.

  “Absolutely clean,” she said. “But they’ve got the machinery ready to open the container.”

  She looked and sounded part Indonesian by background, and was even younger, without any rank badges at all. Her mind felt a little puzzled by her superior’s actions.

  “Let them by, then.”

  “Sergeant, we’re supposed—”

  “We’re supposed to stop one-tenth of one percent at random and so far we’re over quota. The next but ten will do just as well. Pass this one through.”

  The truck accelerated soundlessly save for a slight whine of electrics as the barrier went up and the spikes sank into the roadway, then with a low burbling mumble as the turbodiesel cut in. The scraggly clutter of the area around the Europoort faded as they swung onto the A15 snelweg that ran all the way to the Ruhr; if you wanted to hide a needle, the best place was in a pile of needles, not a haystack, and this road swarmed with big trucks hauling cargo containers.

  “You okay, Anni?”

  Guha shook her head, clasping her arms around her middle. “Not so great, Jack. Overstrained. That was a stubborn man.”

  Cold. Empty, cold, alone. A bit nauseous too.

  “Yeah, squareheads are like that. You did a great job. We definitely weren’t the droids they were looking for.”

  She nodded jerkily, feeling his concern and walling it off. They pulled off into a desolate little place with just enough to merit the title of a truck stop, and the European equivalent of a motel; the noise of the thundering traffic was louder when they had parked and opened the door. A youngish man lounging against a cheap elderly hybrid threw away a cigarette and came over to meet them: thin and dark and shifty eyed.

  “Here are the papers,” Jack said, waving them while he spoke in the Italian that was their common language; it was easier than any of the other Western tongues for a Romanian speaker to acquire. “And here are three thousand euros in advance. You get the container to Istanbul and you get twenty more.”

  “Sì, sì,” the man said, smiling like a lamprey. “I know this is an important cargo, me. Very important, very valuable, eh?”

  Beneath the growing physical misery, Guha felt a little comfort; you didn’t have to have the old blood to be a bastard. Ordinary humans could manage that quite well on their own. Jack took a stride closer and his hand moved. From the mercenary driver’s sudden guukkk! and wide-eyed stillness Guha knew what the other Brotherhood agent had grabbed.

  “And, Shandor, if it doesn’t get there, or if anyone opens that container, I will hunt you down and kill you. Slowly, with lots of cutting and burning and peeling and taking your teeth out one at a time, so you beg to die first. Believe me, the teeth hurt even worse than the balls. I know.”

  Shandor tried to smile ingratiatingly, and Jack squeezed harder while staring into the man’s eyes and smiling in a completely different way. She knew that look; nobody with any experience would doubt that Jack meant exactly what he said, or that he could do it. A faint scream and a very quick nod came together. The Brotherhood agent stepped back, and the driver quickly scrubbed a hand across his face to wipe away gelid sweat.

  “Here’s an extra thousand because I like the swift and decisive way you accept the reality principle,” Jack said, extending a sheaf of bills, which was half snatched. “Don’t fuck up.”

  Guha felt herself swaying as her partner came back, but she managed to remain upright until the truck pulled away towards the access ramp. Then she let herself lean against him as he helped her into the room they’d rented. Then she stumbled and half collapsed to fall facedown on the bed, shivering. The pain seemed to be throughout her, as if it were following her veins, or her nerves where they ran through the flesh.

  Dimly she was conscious of hands undressing her, getting her into the bed, the sting of an injection. The pain was still there, but it ceased to matter quite so much as peace flowed out from the spot on her arm. Water and broth were held to her lips.

  “So hungry, Jack,” she said. “So hungry.”

  “It’ll be all right,” he said, holding her awkwardly against his shoulder. “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry. We’re going to get them all.”

  Three days later she looked at the text. “California?”

  Jack shrugged. “Looks like it.”

  “What about the bloody bomb?”

  “It may actually be safer if we don’t go near it,” he said. “We might draw the attention of a Shadowspawn adept. By itself—”

  “It stands out like a bloody fireworks!”

  “Yeah, again. That’s why we’re holding it in Istanbul for now. Harvey says he’s working a way to disguise it, something new and radical. Plenty of time before Tbilisi.”

  She blew out her lips. “This is bad tradecraft.”

  “Yeah . . . I seem to say that a lot, you know? And now we’ll be working with the Boy Wonder again.” He grimaced at her frown. “Okay, I know he saved you. Hell, we’d all have died in that shitty motel if he hadn’t shown up. So I’m grateful, right, but I don’t like him.”

  “Or anyone else, Jack.”

  He sighed. “At least with him picking up the tab we don’t have to fly coach.”

  “Magnificent, Great-grandfather,” Adrienne said sincerely. “Merely an amusement, simply duck with figs and olives, but magnificent. Even better than the lemon-cured baby scallops.”

  “You eat with all the enjoyment of one back from the dead,” Étienne said. “And I should know, since I am dead.”

  “Only the least important part of you,” Adrienne replied graciously.

  They were dining on one of the outdoor terraces of the Villa Leopolda, looking down over the acres of cypress and olive trees that studded the gardens and the moonlit waters of the Côte d’Azur far below. The villa was a Belle Epoque fantasy of tile and terra cotta and marble, originally built on a whim financed by colonial plunder over a century ago, like some Edwardian dream of ancient Rome. The mild warmth of the air was full of the scents of roses and lady-of-the-night jasmine; bougainvillea frothed down from the balconies overlooking them; below was a tumble of jeweled lights and gardens and the running lights of the yachts in the basins below.

  �
�Such a pity that King Leopold did not transition to postcorporeal successfully,” Seraphine said.

  She was wearing the body she’d been born with, or the etheric equivalent: tall for a nineteenth-century Frenchwoman, and chestnut haired.

  “Have I ever told you of the wonderful tour of his Congo Free State that we took in ’aught-three? The Force Publique officers were such good company, charming rogues. And their Batanga mercenaries were like frisky puppies, with their filed teeth and simple, earthy, substantial cuisine. A true example of the civilizing mission, a veritable utopia in the jungle.”

  Servants whose minds were a careful wash of no-thought whisked away the dishes, and brought out the entrée: a tiny suckling pig, its crisp skin delicately scented with lavender. Along with it came the first mountain mushrooms of the season, sautéed with onion and a little garlic, a dash of white wine, fresh tomatoes and tarragon, with just a touch of lemon juice and sea salt.

  You have told me of your Congolese tour only seventeen thousand, three hundred and forty-two times, ma chere bisaïeul, Adrienne thought. Beginning when I was about six. Though it sounds like a great deal of fun, if one enjoys the tropics; severed hands as currency, what a droll idea.

  “Yes,” Étienne said. “Of course, a golden haze of nostalgia is only to be expected; in Europe in those days a certain discretion was required, whereas we could be quite free in the Free State, if you will pardon the pun. Poor Leopold. One would have thought him a natural, and his father was of a Black Dawn lodge, though of course that was before the breeding program really got under way on scientific principles. He could night-walk, a little, though his manifestation was weak.. . . It did take several minutes for his matrix to disintegrate after his body died, and it was rather interesting to witness.”

  “How we all laughed!” Seraphine said reminiscently, with a tinkling chuckle. “Seldom have I felt such utter despair. Subjectively his death must have lasted a thousand years.”