Shadows of Falling Night (7 page)

She nodded. “Accelerated healing. Adrian did the Wreakings,” she said.

Laying on of hands
actually worked reliably with someone at Adrian’s level; it was sort of like transferring his own biochemical
luck.
Unfortunately the cost was high.

“Always was a good sort. How’s it hanging in Iowa, Jack?”

“I’m from Wisconsin, you dumb Hill Country shitkicker!”

Harvey grinned at the other man’s snarl. “Charmin’ as ever, Jack. That was your little cross-country number still smoking a bit out there about three klicks back, right? Someone got their blessings an’ curses and ever-filled purses crossed, or did they just not give a damn about you being downrange of the muzzle?”

Jack Farmer was favoring his left hand and there was a spot on one cheek that looked a little reddish, which was consistent with putting up the arm to shield his face as he plunged through a growing wall of flames. Both of them smelled a little singed at close range.

“Let me count the
ways
you cowboying away with a fucking
nuke
has nearly gotten us killed—” Farmer started.

Harvey chuckled. “Hell, you two helped me get it. Don’t recall you being too behind-hand doing the down-and-dirty boogie when we had that little black flag party in Veracruz with our late buddy Dhul Fiqar. Or thinking it was a bad idea to hit the Council meeting in Tbilisi whether or not we had official permission from the Brotherhood’s not-so-omniscient committee of bickering. I can’t see you two getting’ all weepy about collateral damage the way Adrian would. How’d he talk you around into stopping me?”

“We helped you before we—” Anjali said.

“Before you learned Adrienne was alive and was manipulatin’ us all from behind the curtain like the Great and Powerful Oz?” Harvey asked genially. “Great and Powerful Ozzette? Ozma? Whatever.”

They both started this time, and looked at each other. He laughed, scooped up a few of the meatballs, and chewed. When he’d swallowed:

“You thought I didn’t
know
? Or that I had some sort of Wreaking planted in my brain? Hell, you can tell from this distance
that
ain’t so. Check on it, I won’t bite. Just be careful ’cause it would be truly tragic if this gun went off.”

Harvey drank another swallow of the raki as he felt the featherlight touch of their probes, and exhaled in satisfaction as the warmth hit his belly. They looked at each other.

“He is clean,” Anjali said. Then, cautiously: “As far as I can tell.”

“Yeah, that’s the way I read it too,” Jack said after a moment.

Harvey nodded. There was a
click-clack
as he broke the action of the coach gun open, palmed the shells, and set them down neatly on the table. Both the other operatives relaxed infinitesimally.

“Let me tell you two a little about the wheels within the turning wheels,” he began.

As he spoke, he wondered what had been going on among the enemy, a category that had ballooned uncomfortably of late.
Something
had happened, or he’d be tooling along towards his target. There had probably been enough wheels within wheels on the other side to make up a fair chronometer.

’
cause if you’ve got two Shadowspawn in a room, you’ve got a conspiracy and three double-crosses.

CHAPTER FOUR

Paris

“G
ood of you to see me before the reception at Great-grandfather’s tomorrow,” Adrienne said. “Just family for this, eh?”

The problem with being a Brézé,
she thought, looking at the unreadable face so much like a male version of hers,
is that we all look so alike. Well, of course incest is an ancient family tradition. There was even a eugenic justification until recently; now it’s just fun. For some of the participants, at least.

Her great-grandfather’s brother Arnaud Brézé and she were meeting at Carré des Feuillants, a restaurant appropriately enough located in the jewelers’ district on the Place Vendôme, since it catered to the appetites of a similar clientele.

She was a little surprised that Arnaud had picked it, because while
the exterior was 18th-century—the entire neighborhood had originally been built by Louis XIV as a monument to himself, which gave her some suspicions about his genetics—the inside was a series of smallish pale monochromatic rooms, with Modernist art on the walls. Quite
good
Modernist art, but she’d noted that the really old ones just couldn’t grasp modes more than a generation after their transition to post-corporeality—it wasn’t simply that they didn’t like it: she didn’t herself. They had trouble
seeing
it, for good or ill.

It was white noise rather than a disagreeable message. She’d seen theories by the few scholars among her race that the extreme stability of the Old Stone Age—tens of thousands of years without so much as a change in flint-knapping styles—had been due to the unseen dominance of the planet by post-corporeals who lived millennia or tens of millennia themselves.

The two of them had this roomlet to themselves, of course, which made the layout convenient. Even today simply commandeering a large establishment was discouraged by the Council, though the need for secrecy was not what it had once been.

“Not quite what I would’ve expected of you, Arnaud,” she said, waving her hand at the decor.

“One attempts to do something new occasionally,” he said. “Otherwise, well, what is the point of simply
continuing
so long?”

He shrugged, and she had to remind her subconscious that he wasn’t her brother, especially since he was taking extra care with his human form. They both had the same black yellow-flecked eyes as she, the same build like a compact leopard, and the same raven hair and triangular olive-skinned face.

The auras differed too, of course, though that might not be as obvious
to someone not of the family. There was a slight but definite overtone of rot to Arnaud’s, half sensed out of the corner of the eye, and that curious metallic flavor the post-corporeals had. Something somehow
inorganic
to their spirits.

And she couldn’t imagine Adrian wearing that
boulevardier
outfit, the latest thing for the man-about-town a hundred and twenty years ago, right down to the white spats and the carnation.

“This building is even older than I,” he said. “
My
father massacred the communards not a thousand meters from here and one might have looked from the same windows to enjoy the spectacle, even if the interior was a town house then. So it is no new thing for the blood to flow here, eh?”

Or at least I can’t imagine Adrian wearing it except as a joke,
she thought. Then, disturbingly:
Perhaps Arnaud is also joking, in his way?

It was as well to remind yourself occasionally that the post-corporeals hadn’t lived…well, survived…this long by accident.

“Though I had thought we would speak alone,” he added, glancing at Monica.

“Oh, I have no secrets from her,” Adrienne said. “That fact produces the most charming fits of guilty self-accusation late at night. Though no attempts at suicide for the last few years. Still, the weeping misery has its charm, and then there is the pleading to yield the blood, or suffer well-deserved pain.”

Monica smiled and patted her long mane of platinum hair; tonight it was worn
up
and secured by long golden pins headed by carved carnelian buttons, which complemented the warm russet of her silk sheath dress. Adrienne was in an outfit of boots, glove-tight black leather pants, a long full-sleeved white silk shirt-tunic, and a black embroidered velvet vest.

“Well, Doña, you have to admit I do self-abasement
well
,” she said, and took a forkful of her appetizer. “It’s my job, after all.”

“Granted,” Adrienne said. “You have developed a real talent for it.”

“You say the
nicest
things sometimes,” Monica replied with a sunny smile.

Adrienne ate as well; the dish deserved its title of lobster
with three affectations
, and the sweet meatiness of the Breton crustacean went charmingly with the mushrooms and okra.

“It is sometimes obvious that you both come from California,” Arnaud said dryly.

“Name of a dog, that is the second time in two days someone has thrown the purely geographical locus of my birth at me, and I cannot even torture you to death for the discourtesy, the way I did the first.”

She looked at Monica. “I am going to punish you for that.”

“Goodie!” she said brightly, a flash of fear and longing running through her aura. “The whip?”

“Among other things. One must be flexible. Or at least you must be.”

“I’m sure you’ll come up with something original,
Doña
. It keeps me on my toes.”

“I thought that was the chains and cuffs?”

“Well, metaphorically. More wine, anyone?”

Arnaud had chosen it, a Domaine Dublere Les Preuses 2010, very pale gold now and absolutely at its peak with hints of citrus and mango. Only the very best Chablis benefited from that much aging, or any time in oak. Arnaud seemed to catch the thought, though not through her hard-held shields, and nodded. He held the glass up to view the straw-colored liquid through the candle.

“A few more years and even such a wine as this would decline and eventually become undrinkable. Just so one must maintain
steerage way
down the stream of time. Those who seek to build an enclave in which they may be insulated from it are merely embracing their own Final Death. Building a coffin and getting inside, one might say.”

“You are a progressive at heart, uncle,” she said. “I am gratified that you rallied to my cause at last. It has been very helpful in securing backing for Trimback Two.”

“Perhaps I am more progressive than you,” he said with a thin smile. “For what is this scheme of yours, this Trimback Two, but another plan to halt the flow of time?”

“I am not a reactionary!” she said, stung to indignation.

He laughed. “Oh, not in the sense of those fossils who wish to create a world of peasants and oxcarts once again; I experienced the last of that, and the ennui would be paralyzing. They yearn for a past they themselves never experienced. You are more forethoughtful; you seek to hold the wave of change in place
here
, the wave I have seen erode away all I knew…and,
ma cherie
, I speak as one who has worn the pith helmet in his time and seen the Hovas fall before the Lebels. You seek to hold this
modern
world in place before it leaves you, too, stranded in time. I grant that you are being…preemptive…rather than reactionary.”

“Well, then.”

“But from the viewpoint of that future you would abort before it was born, perhaps the difference between your stasis and that of the ox-cart nostalgics might not be so great. A thousand years from now, you would be playing with the same toys.”

The Pyrénées lamb slow-roasted in clay arrived, with its accompanying simple artichokes, vegetables and watercress, its measured tang of garlic blending smoothly with the herb-scented meat. They argued amiably for a moment about the wine and settled on a Chateau Belgrave from early in the century.

“You have some reason,” she said. To herself:
Which affects my resentment not at all.

She continued aloud: “But my motivations are not merely psychological. Or at least not completely so. If the humans continue their project of science much longer, it will be impossible for us to control the world in secret.”

He made a graceful gesture of agreement and the waiters cleared the plates. “Ironic, is it not? For it was science that let us reconstitute our race.”

That was true enough; their own family had discovered Gregor Mendel’s work long before the world in general was conscious of it. The Power was subtle enough to act as a tool of genetic engineering, if you knew where to point it…or just knew that you
had
genes.

Then he lit a cigarette. One of the attendants made a horrified sound, and Arnaud gestured again, his eyes going a little blank with concentration for an instant. The man clutched his head and staggered out of the room, weeping softly; there was a soft heavy
thump
from the next room. The faces of the others might have been carved out of seasoned beechwood, save for the sheen of sweat. Adrienne lit a cigarillo of her own, a private blend of Turkish tobacco and Moroccan hashish, a slim brown cylinder in an ivory holder. The smoke was mildly soothing, and complemented the selection of cheeses, coffee and brandy that ended the simple meal.

“One might argue that we have done very badly at directing the world, secretly or otherwise,” he said. “I speak purely from our own viewpoint, of course. A wise parasite keeps its host healthy and does not draw attention to itself. And if we had done that, we would not be confronted by these…unpalatable and risky choices now. We
seek to cure a disease of which we were the agents, or at least responsible for.”

“Are we parasite or predator?”

“That depends on one’s self-image. My brother identifies with the wolf or tiger.”

“Natural enough, surely?”