The Council of Shadows s-2

by S. M. Stirling

  His partner nodded; it was, surprisingly so under some circumstances.

  "Looks a lot like Dark Mystery Woman, eh? But it was a guy, very certainly. Wearing a dark zippered jacket open with a tee underneath. Mrs. Lopez said he looked real fit. Not bulked up but someone who worked out a lot. She got a better look at him than at the woman, they went right by. Nothing from the databases on either of them, by the way, but look at this."

  His fingers moved on the screen, and the two images slid until they were superimposed. Then he tapped a function box.

  "Okay, the little machine thinks they're relatives," Salvador said. " I could have figured that out."

  "But could you have said it was a ninety-three-percent chance?"

  "Sure. I just say: 'It's a ninety-three-percent chance.' Or in old-fashioned human language, con certesa. Okay, back up to what Mystery Woman was doing earlier. She and Tarnowski get in Tarnowski's car and drive off around five thirty, a few minutes earlier?"

  "Mystery Woman was driving. Tarnowski looked shaky." Cesar consulted his notes. "Yeah, Mrs. Lopez said Tarnowski looked like she was going to fall over, maybe sick, the other one helped her into the car."

  "That's two people who have to be helped into cars. This smells."

  "And then two and a half hours later someone runs in waving a sawed-off shotgun, while Mystery Woman's brother or cousin or whatever was standing outside ignoring everything and talking to himself in a strange language-"

  "Strange language?"

  "They just heard a few words. Not English, not Spanish, and not anything they recognized. He talks in the strange language, falls, goatsucker with the gun gives him a hand, they drive off, and then the place just happens to burn down a few minutes later."

  Salvador sighed and turned up the collar of his coat; it was dark, and cold.

  "I need a drink. But get an APB out on Ellen Tarnowski and flag her name with municipal services and the hospitals statewide. Also the old gringo with the sawed-off shotgun, use the face-recognition protocol for surveillance cameras. We can get him on a reckless-endangerment charge, trespassing, uttering threats, suspicion of arson, bad breath, whatever."

  " Si, and littering. The Mystery Woman and the Mystery Man too?"

  "Yeah, why not? Let them all do a perp walk and we can apologize later."

  He sat down on the tailgate and began doggedly prodding at the screen. The first thing tomorrow he'd start tracing Tarnowski's life. So far nobody had died, and he'd like to keep it that way. The employer was a good first place.

  In the meantime, he could try to get some sleep. He snorted quietly to himself. After dredging up this many memories, much chance there was of that.

  Dream.

  Eric Salvador always knew it was a dream; he just couldn't affect it or get out of it or do anything except watch and smell and taste and feel an overwhelming sick dread as it unfolded. There hadn't really been a burned-out MRAP at the end of the village street by the mosque. That had been somewhere else, that little shithole outside Kandahar he'd seen on his first tour, and it had been there only one day. It was a composite of all the bads, building up to the Big Bad itself.

  A couple of other things are right for the day, he thought.

  The way Olsen flicked the little Raven surveillance drone into the air, and the buzz of its engine as it climbed to circle above them, and the dopey little smiley-face button with fangs he'd glued to the nose of the corps' thirty-five-thousand-dollar toy airplane. He'd tried to put little fake Hell-fire missiles under the wings, too, and Gunny had torn him a new asshole about it. The way the translator was sweating and his eyes were flicking here and there, and you wondered if it was just the heat or generalized fear or if he knew something he wasn't saying.

  Christ, I've had this fucking nightmare so many times I'm starting to sound like a movie critic.

  Smith always went into the door of the compound the same way, the way he really had. Regulation, the two of them plastered on either side, Jackson taking out the lock on the gate with a door-knocker round, whump-boom, the warped old planks smacking inward as the slug blew the rusty lock into the courtyard, Smith following, his M-4 tucked into his shoulder and Jackson on his heels.

  The explosion was always silent. Silent, slow-mo, the flames leaking around the fragments of wood and the two men flying and just enough time to realize, Oh, shit, this is a bad one, before a giant's hand picked him up and threw him backwards until there was the impact and the pain.

  Only this time was different. This time something walked out of the fire to where he lay with the broken ends of his ribs grating under the body armor that had saved his life.

  The shape twisted and its wrongness made him want to scream out the bloody foam in his lungs, but the eyes were flecked yellow. And the voice slithered into his ears:

  "Who's been a naughty boy, then?"

  He began to sink into the dry dusty earth, and it flowed into mouth and nose and eyes, the dust of ages and of empires.

  "Naughty!"

  "Christ!"

  He lay panting in the darkness, smelling his own sweat and waiting to be sure he was awake-sometimes he dreamed he was, and then the whole thing started cycling through his head again. It was blurring away already, details fracturing like sunlight through a drop of water. His hand groped for the cigarettes on the bedside, and then remembered he'd stopped.

  "Go back to sleep," he told himself. "Dreaming's no worse than remembering, anyway."

  Christ.

  "I wonder where Tarnowski is?"

  He didn't really want to know; kidnap victims usually didn't end up anywhere good.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Ellen came out in a too-large white cotton robe with a towel wrapped around her hair he had the breakfast table set, in the big airy room that led out onto the balcony. The pensione was perched high on the slope above Amalfi's little cove, and the Tyrrhenian Sea sparkled an impossible blue to the west; white buildings tumbled down the hillside to meet it, down to the Duomo and the half-Romanesque-Byzantine, half-Saracen cathedral.

  She felt much better now; the hot water had driven the last of the grue out of her mind and the stiffness out of her muscles, and she found herself eager for the day, sniffing the scent of the coffee. When she tossed the towel aside the mild warm breeze tumbled through her curly blond hair.

  "Good morning, Mrs. Breze," Adrian said.

  " Salut, Monsieur Breze," she replied.

  "And buongiorno" they added in unison; this was Amalfi, after all.

  "You look enchanting. And dressed like that, you also look about twelve."

  "Not really," she said.

  Ellen struck a pose with one hand behind her head and a leg showing through the slit. Adrians gaze lingered on it. She was twenty-four; she was also five-foot-six and thirty-six/twenty-seven/thirty-six, taut from tennis and cross-country running, with a face close enough to a certain fifties actress that it had been embarrassing in NYU's art history classes when they came to study Warhol's famous portrait.

  "No, on second thought, of a perfectly legal age," he said, after clearing his throat.

  She sat, and began to eat. The breakfast was more or less Italian, except for the chilled mango, ripe figs, crisp crumbly frese, slightly sweet and flavored with anise, torta di nocciole e limoni di Amalfi, rich with hazelnuts and tart with lemon, rolls, jam.

  "Well, that's certainly blatant," Adrian said after a moment, a slight prickle of danger in his smooth voice.

  "What is?" Ellen replied.

  "This."

  He showed her his tablet across the remains of their breakfast. She took the reader and held the thin sheet between her hands. This was an announcement in the Corriere della Sera that the…

  " Ikhwan al-Fajr al-Aswad is to meet in Tbilisi, Georgia," she murmured, yawning. "Next year, about this time."

  It was late morning, which was a compromise between their preferred hours; Adrian might be a Good Guy, but his genes gave him a thoroughly Shadowspawn preferenc
e for waking up around noon and not becoming really active until sunset. By no coincidence whatsoever, that was a preference shared by many eccentric artists and mad dictators. She'd always been an early-to-bed, morning-type person. Marriage required a lot of meeting in the middle; going to bed late sometimes left her tired despite eight hours' sleep, even when it hadn't been interrupted the way it had last night.

  Nobody at the inn objected to their schedule, even though it must have played havoc with their housekeeping. They had long experience with eccentric foreigners, and Adrian had used this place before. Mostly for prolonged recoveries and convalescence, after missions for the Brotherhood during his years fighting the Council.

  "It's pronounced Ikkhh -"

  He repeated the name as a rapid series of gargling gutturals and rough breathing.

  Mountains ran north and south from here, blue and dreaming in the Mediterranean summer warmth that brought odors of rock and citrus and stone pine through the open French doors that gave onto the balcony terrace. She shivered a little; places like this made the contrast between how the world seemed and how she now knew it really worked all the more dreadful. With an effort she cast the thought away.

  Besides her native coal-country Pennsylvania English, Ellen could speak fair French and some Italian; those were the legacy of an undergraduate degree in art history from NYU. And a little Spanish, from years spent in Santa Fe. Adrian was fluent in over a dozen languages that she knew of.

  "Show-off," she said sweetly, and kicked him in the ankle under the table. "And don't repeat it in Tibetan."

  " Merde alors!" he yelped, startled. Then he smiled: "I thought that it was you who enjoyed pain, cherie."

  She smiled back. "What can I say…I swing both ways when it comes to lovely hurting. That's why it's called sadomasochism, dear."

  Then more seriously: "Anyway, what does it mean? Ikhwan al-Fajr al-Aswad?" she added, trying to get the throaty sounds right.

  "It's Arabic," he said. "For Order of the Black Dawn."

  "You're right, that's blatant. That's an elevated finger to the whole planet. The secret conspiracy of evil that runs the world is actually announcing its meetings to the news services?"

  "They do want everyone to know…at least, every one of the people who are supposed to attend. Many of whom are both eccentric and hermetic recluses, or quite mad."

  "Why not send an e-mail around?"

  Adrian chuckled. "My sweet, people don't change much after their twenties. And many of the ones attending this affair were born before the First World War, and intend to live…well, exist…forever."

  "Of course they don't change. They're dead!"

  "Only technically."

  Ellen laughed ruefully herself. "I remember Adrienne saying something about the Old Ones disliking technology, or at least any technology that didn't involve shoveling coal into a boiler."

  "Exactly. Also this announcement, it is a boast. They draw closer to the day they need not be secret. When they can rule as demon-gods once more."

  "Why in Arabic? I thought French was the Council's official language."

  "A slight unblatancy or minor disguise," he said. "That's the Arabic version of the original… Ordre de l'Aube Noire. It's the term the al-Lanarki clan uses, too. Probably one of them thought it was amusing; they have an odd sense of humor."

  "Odder than yours?" Ellen said sardonically. "In which I include your disreputable relatives, my love."

  "My ancestors thought they were magicians and loup-garou, before they ferreted out the truth. The al-Lanarkis thought they were ghilan , until the Order of the Black Dawn contacted them and showed them how to reconcentrate the genes. It shows in their…subculture, you might say. As the Tokairin thought they were Ninja sorcerors."

  "Ghilan?"

  "The translation would be…ghouls, roughly."

  "Ech," she said. "Graveyards and corpses and that?"

  "Not quite. The ghul of the East is not exactly the ghoul of the West. It is a thing that can assume the guise of an animal, lures unwary travelers into the desert wastes to slay and devour them. Ghul rob graves, drink blood, and take on the form of the one they had fed upon to deceive the living."

  "Sounds familiar."

  "The Shadowspawn are the source of all legends. Tbilisi is near their bailiwick, they operate out of Beirut for the most part, and they often get handed jobs like this."

  He had a slight accent in English; Ellen thought it was charming and distinguished. It went well with his looks, raven black hair, olive skin, a slim build muscled like a cat, and no more than an inch or so taller than her five-six. Of course, he had a slight accent in every one of his many languages, as far as she could tell, including French, which was more or less his first. First if you counted a sort of quasi-Provencal patois from the Auvergne as part of that language; it was what his technically dead but still very vocal great-grandparents had spoken to him in his childhood along with the standard tongue.

  "My Mhabrogast is utterly faultless, darling," he murmured, picking the thought out of her mind.

  "Yes, but that's the lingua demonica," she teased. "What they speak in Hell."

  "Bah, mere superstition. It may be the operating code of the universe, I admit that."

  Then he took the reader back and flicked the pages down with one finger.

  "Mmmmm…name of a black dog! They're even specifying that it's to elect new members to the Shura al-Khayal!"

  "Council of Shadows, right?"

  Yes.

  Ellen sighed. "And then they decide on which version of their end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it plan to implement."

  "Which we must stop. I like the world as I know it."

  "So do I, especially now that I'm with you. I knew the honeymoon couldn't last forever. Damn."

  Adrian reached across the table and took her hand.

  "Only in the narrowest sense," he said, kissing the fingers one by one. "Metaphorically we can keep this up forever."

  The kisses sent little tingling feelings up into her hand and arm.

  Which is a good sign after a week of really energetic honeymooning, when I didn't have the collywobbles. And the way Adrian takes care of me then…that's even better, in a way.

  "And there is nothing we can do immediately. Especially if we do not wish to attract attention. We will move slowly, cautiously, until it is time to strike."

  Then he leaned back in his chair, completely at ease. Sunlight dappled across his bare torso and loose chino drawstring pants; he tapped a slim brown Turkish cigarette out of a pack on the table and crossed one ankle across his knee. The bare foot was slender, like his hands, and high-arched.

  "Gag. Retch. Cough," she said. "Ak. Ak. Pthft."

  He raised one eyebrow but didn't put the cigarette back. Instead he held it up before his face, concentrating, frowning a little with a fixed expression in his eyes, which were brown, almost black, save for tiny gold flecks. After a moment smoke began to curl up from the end of the tube, an acrid pungency with an aromatic undertone. She had to admit it wasn't entirely unpleasant; it was tobacco but very good tobacco, and it had been treated with rum.

  "Show-off," she said again. "You only do that so you can look like a Francois Truffaut character."

  He smiled at her through the smoke, drew, and let it trickle out of his nostrils.

  "But, darling, I grew up on Truffaut movies," he said. " L'Histoire d'Adele H. was the first one I ever went to on my own."

  Ellen blinked; occasionally she forgot that Adrian was over fifty. He looked twenty-something, like her. His breed aged more slowly, even in their original bodies.

  "It's still a disgusting vice," she said lightly. "And not even one of the fun disgusting vices. Plus it's dangerous."

  "It's perfectly safe for me," he pointed out, gesturing elegantly…very much like a Truffaut character, in fact, probably deliberately. "I can't get cancer. Or heart disease. Or lose the sensitivity of my taste buds, either."

  "I can get cancer."


  "Yes, but I could cure you."

  She put her tongue between her lips and went pffffthttttt!

  Adrian let his head fall back and stared at the white plaster that overlay the arched stone of the ceiling as he smoked; this place had started out as a nobleman's house six centuries ago, built into the steep almost-cliff above the little city. He was obviously in deep-thought mode, and he hated to be interrupted then. Which was fair enough. She loathed interruptions when she was working too.

  Ellen poured more coffee, picked up her cup and saucer and walked out on the terrace, under an arch of arbor thick with hanging bougainvillea, purple and crimson and white. Gulls flew by below the stone balustrade, and above the strip of lemon trees on the terrace below. The polished mosaico hidrdulico tiles felt comfortable on her bare feet, as if the green and blue floral pattern were a smooth stroking. She lost herself in the moment and the view.

  This is a very long way from Swoyersville, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, she thought happily. Or even from Allentown.

  "Eek!"

  His fingers caressed the nape of her neck, touching the fine hairs there-the rest of his hand was curled up on her head. Then he stripped the robe down, pinning her arms behind her back. She shivered, and then gasped as he gripped the knot of hair and bent her head back. His other hand stroked her. Anyone looking up from the roadway below-anyone with a good set of binoculars, at least-was going to be getting an eyeful of natural blonde having a very good time.

  Which added to the excitement. And technically, she had a government license-though not one for in public.

  " Con il suo permesso?"his voice murmured in her ear.

  " Oh, yeah."

  A slight sting at the base of her throat, and hot fire ran through her body like a wave.

  "That could get addictive," she said some time later.

  "It is addictive," he pointed out, head resting on her stomach.

  Ellen lay propped against the carved olive-wood headboard of the canopied bed and sipped at the red wine; it was an excellent way to keep your blood cell count up when your husband had…special needs. It was also around two in the afternoon, which meant she wasn't starting too early.