Guha nodded. "That's why I'm with you, Harvey. But I notice you don't tell Adrian about your little talks with Michiko- san," she pointed out.
"I did my job too good. The boy's idealistic."
They all chuckled. "So," Farmer said, "what's your solution for the ones we can't reeducate?"
"Oh, we kill 'em all," Harvey said cheerfully. "And Tbilisi is goin' to be one fine opportunity for that. A lot more than Michiko and her hubby think. I got a project going along those lines. You guys in?"
"In," Farmer said.
Guha shuddered. "In. But it also means we'll have to walk into the biggest nest of them that's gathered for generations. With enough Power in the air to make all the molecules dance in their favor."
"Considering the alternative, I don't think there is much of an alternative. At least Adrienne isn't going to be around. She was too smart for comfort and she had a lot more self-control than most of her friends."
Guha sighed. "I said I am in, too. Deep in doo-doo."
CHAPTER FIVE
Adrian and Ellen crossed the Loire heading north towards Paris in the early evening; the rain had stopped and the lingering twilight of September had a liquid washed-out quality to it.
"I'm glad we didn't take the A6," Adrian said. "It is a nightmare this time of year."
The sun was setting westward, across a low, rolling landscape of vineyards showing red and yellow, reaped fields and autumn-tinged woods, villages and the occasional chateau. They both ignored the petrol stations and other modern excrescences.
On their right the sunlight caught a line of hills in the distance, turning them blue flushed with a slight tinge of pink towards their tops. Adrian handled the Ferrari F50 with his usual verve; it would do zero to a hundred in eight seconds, and he liked to do exactly that. It no longer drove Ellen to the verge of lost bladder control, and she'd finally started believing that the police wouldn't pull them over either.
Well, he's got reflexes like a leopard, when he isn't literally being a leopard, she thought, as he touched the accelerator and the g-force shoved her back into the upholstery in a scent of fine leather. Plus he can warp probability. It's still a little scary.
She chuckled as they zipped around a large truck and back into the left-hand lane, and he looked over at her.
"I was just remembering that while I was at Rancho Sangron-"
He chuckled in turn; she'd coined the pun on the place's name, turning it from Ranch of the Holy Blood to Ranch of the Asshole.
"-Adrienne took me on that motorcycle cruise up the coast to San Francisco. Scared the shit out of me, and that was okay just a metaphor. You Brezes have a thing for speed and risk, don't you?"
He stiffened, then shook his head. "You're right. For too many years I defined myself in opposition to her; yet we are…were…similar in many respects."
"Your evil twin."
"Exactly! I can afford to acknowledge things like that now."
"Now that she's dead."
"Since you killed her." Adrian laughed.
Ouch.
Ellen winced inwardly. Half the time she remembered plunging the hypo into Adrienne's foot with savage glee. The other half it made her queasy. Not so much the fact that she'd done it, as the way it had felt for her.
Which was very damned good. And yes, she deserved it – God, did she deserve it!- but should I have enjoyed it so much? Should I enjoy remembering it so much? Yeah, I was so scared all the time and it was such a fucking relief to get away from the mad, sadistic bitch, but I did kill her, after all. I always used to put spiders and centipedes out in the garden instead of squishing them. I totally lost it when my cat brought me a dead bird.
And now I'm killing people. And enjoying it. Okay, Adrienne only just qualifies as "person," but still.
He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed for a moment. It would have been even more comforting if they weren't doing nearly two hundred kilometers per hour with only one of the driver's hands on the wheel.
"I am sorry, my sweet. I forget sometimes that you were not brought up to this war. Most of those close to me have been born into it, but you were not."
"Yeah, I'm not a conflict junkie. Even to get out of the coal country I never seriously considered enlisting. And now I'm a supercommando fem-ninja in training."
He laughed aloud at that. "You have natural talent," he said. "But I would not go quite that far."
"And I feel a little, mmm, guilty about all the people we left in that horrible place."
Adrian shrugged expressively. "My sweet, you are in the war now. And you are on the side of the guerrillas. We cannot afford sentiment. If I had tried to smuggle out…oh, say, little Cheba…"
She shot him a dark glance, half-serious. He'd been impersonating one of Adrienne's guests, and he'd had to take the girl as refreshment .
I believe he didn't have sex with her. He's actually a bit of a Boy Scout about that – which, considering what it would be like to be a teenage boy able to play orgasmatron games with girls' brains, says something very good about him. But I find I'm jealous of his putting the bite on her, too. Mine! Mine! All mine! And when I'm short, you stick to the blood-bank product no matter how bad it tastes!
"…it would have aroused suspicions."
"Well, she's dead now too," Ellen said. "Poor girl…"
There was a quality to his silence this time.
"She's not?"
Adrian shook his head, his eyes commendably on the roadway.
"No?"
"No," he said aloud, reluctantly. "We have a base-link."
She nodded; being on the receiving end of a feeding attack wasn't just a matter of the Shadowspawn drinking your blood or the euphoric drug. There was a mental joining, a feedback loop; she'd heard Adrienne use the phrase quantum entanglement. The feedback could get seriously disturbing, and not only for the human victim. Ellen suspected that was why Shadowspawn had evolved clinical sadism as their normal personality type; otherwise feeling their prey's emotions would put them off their food.
"Not like we have?"
"No, not nearly so close. That was a high-link, with very detailed transference that let us communicate directly. That takes long interaction. I get…generalized feelings from her. She is being used for feeding and-"
He shrugged his shoulders.
Yeah, a feeding attack means you usually also get the full explosion-in-the-kink-factory sex-object treatment, like someone playing with their food, World Wrestling Federation style. Fun when its a game with Adrian, pretty horrible when it's real. Well, there was a lot of pleasure involved, technically, but in a sort of squiky, self-loathing, terrorized, half-crazy way. Definitely not fun.
"Poor girl doubled, then," Ellen said.
Adrian frowned. "There was a toughness to her," he said. "Resilience."
"She'll need it," Ellen said, feeling a rush of sympathy. "At least I can wake up from my nightmares now."
CHAPTER SIX
"I wish we could have rescued them all," Ellen said. "You sent those two Brotherhood types away before the end…couldn't you have sent Cheba with them, at least?"
"Possibly. But possibly that would have aroused suspicions, and I could not take that risk. Not with your life at stake. Shadowspawn are paranoid, not least about one another; even when she believed I was another, Adrienne would have watched me carefully for the slightest sign of intrigue. You would not believe what a black brew of murder and madness, incest and sadism and depravity their lives are."
"Oh, I got some faint tinge of an idea," she said dryly, and she could sense he flushed a little. "What with the torture and the rape and mortal terror and mass murder for fun and so forth."
"In any case, you must learn that the mission comes first. This is hard, yes. It is also essential."
"Yeah, I can see that. With my head. My gut's only half convinced."
Adrian looked eastward again. "And not far away is where it all started," he said.
"The Breze chateau?"
"Hey, fella, don't brood while you're driving at this speed! I think what's really bothering you is thinking about what you might have been like if Harvey hadn't rescued you. Or kidnapped you. Taken you away from your family before you really knew what they were, at least."
"True, that thought haunts me sometimes. And he was supposed to kill me, by the way. That was the first time Harvey dangerously exceeded his mission brief. Not the last, of course."
"Kill you?" She sat as upright as the reclined seat and the safety harness would let her. "Wait a minute, you never told me that."
Adrian shrugged. "Harvey was playing a hunch…and to be sure, by then he knew me, and as he said, killing a young boy he actually knew was…difficult. Despite what his orders were."
"Well, good for him, and to hell with the Brotherhood!"
"They thought…still largely think…that purebreds like me are damned." In profile she could see his mouth take on an ironic twist. "And there's considerable evidence in favor of that hypothesis."
"And you to disprove it. That's…that's racist!"
"There, my little cabbage, is the one sin of which neither Shadowspawn nor the Brotherhood can be accused, at least the younger generations. Not as far as fripperies like skin color are concerned."
"You look like the original variety, don't you?"
"Probably, though the first Empire of Shadow is so far in the past that nobody can be sure. Only broken fragments of legends were handed down among the secret clans. When the back-breeding nears nine-tenths purity, this set of looks and build tends to crop up. But they're not closely linked to the Power, or the personality traits. It's one of the most common human phenotypes anyway; I could pass for a Provencal or a Spaniard, a Sicilian or Greek or Turk or Arab or Kurd. It's the…inner drives that count."
"Adrian, I can see half my job's going to be convincing you that you're not a monster."
"Oh, but I am," he said softly, barely audible over the low, humming growl of the engine. "But I'm a humanist monster, of sorts."
Ellen frowned several hours later. "Isn't it sort of…well, blatant of us to stay in Paris?"
"No more than anywhere else, if we're not under deep cover," Adrian said. "Why should the local Shadowspawn, who are incidentally ruled by the European branch of the Brezes, care about us?"
"We killed Tokairin Hajime," she pointed out. "And Adrienne."
He shrugged, eyes on the narrow street. "Hajime killed my parents…admittedly, not the Final Death. And Adrienne had tried to kill me more than once. As long as I'm not officially back with the Brotherhood, nobody will much care. It is, you might say, just normal family life. The local Brezes probably considered me only marginally more…unorthodox…than Adrienne."
Ellen nodded. "I'm beginning to see how the Brotherhood has managed to survive all these years. The Council runs the world, but they don't do it very well."
"They approach it more like managing a series of game parks," he agreed. "Or game ranches. With the neighboring ranchers fighting one another most of the time, when they're not indulging in lethal sibling rivalries."
"Back in California, Peter, the other lucy I told you about, the scientist? He said that humans were apes who'd become more like wolves. And Shadowspawn were like apes who'd decided to imitate cats instead."
"That is quite perceptive; he seems to be a very intelligent man."
"He produced that research I got to you," Ellen said proudly; she'd liked Peter.
"We'll see what Professor Duquesne thinks; it's a good sign that he's agreed to meet us." He sighed. "And that catlike nature is part of my problem."
Ellen made an inquiring sound and he went on: "I have to fight a war and I don't know how."
"Seems to me you've been doing a good job."
"No. Oh, I know how to fight, certainly. I was very good working for the Brotherhood-but they pointed me at the targets, and I went after them. I was a, hmmm, black-ops wet-work specialist, not a strategist or even a field commander. A leader of small teams at most. The Brotherhood should be doing strategy, but despite what you and I found out for them they are not. They are in a defensive crouch; too many generations of defeat have demoralized them."
Ellen had been impressed beyond words with the way Adrian had rescued her from his sister.
But come to think about it, that was all fairly small-scale.
"It's not your genes," she said slowly. "Really. Adrienne, well, except for the XY thing she was you, genetically speaking, given how inbred the Shadowspawn lines are. And I got the distinct impression that she did operate on a big scale, with big plans. That horrible synthetic smallpox thing she was working on with Michiko and those other friends of hers! But you stuck a stiletto into the plans."
"Harvey and I did," Adrian said. "Harvey is an excellent general, or at least he's been a colonel in this war of shadows. There's only one problem there."
"What's that?"
"Harvey is a bit drastic at times."
Ellen blinked; she liked the big grizzled Texan, and thought he was extremely shrewd behind the Hill Country-boy persona. But to have someone who could be as pellucidly ruthless as Adrian say he was too drastic made her think.
"I think," she said very carefully, "that you've been too much in Harvey's shadow, Adrian."
" Merde," he muttered. "I'll concentrate on tactical problems for now. And first let's get onto this ridiculous island."
"I like the idea of staying on an island in the Seine," she said.
"So do I. Unless we have to get off it quickly."
The Ile Saint-Louis was mostly inhabited by very reclusive rich people who liked having a front window facing the Seine. The buildings were all seventeenth-century and immaculately kept, stone and brick and mansard slate roofs glistening in the last of the sunlight, with poplars lining the waterfront paths. She half expected to see Porthos and Aramis stroll out from an alleyway with ruff and rapier, with a link-boy trotting in front of them.
Adrian laughed when she mentioned it. "The period is right," he said. "And this was a dueling ground before it was completely built up, too. But it undoubtedly smells much better now."
He dropped into French, and quoted: "'If you walk along the streets of the Ile Saint-Louis, do not ask why you feel gripped by a sort of nervous sadness. For its cause you have only to look at the solitude of the place, at the gloomy aspect of its houses and its large empty mansions.'"
"Ah…Adrian, you didn't lock the car," she said, as they left it by the curb. "And I don't think that's a parking spot."
His teeth glinted white in the semidarkness. "It's my car, darling."
"Oh. And I don't think these mansions look empty anyway. Painfully well kept and fully booked, from the looks of things."
"The Ile has effectively become a cruise ship permanently anchored in the Seine, for some time. The Rothschilds have a pied-a-terre here. Besides which, Balzac just liked portentous gloom. I enjoyed his work much more as a young man; adolescent weltschmerz, I presume. Baudelaire lived here for a time as well, rooming with Gautier and smoking hashish."
"I remember about Baudelaire," Ellen said. " Et je vois tour a tour reflechis sur ton teint / la folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes," she quoted with relish. "Either that, or you've got gas."
"'And I see in turn reflected on your face / Horror and madness, cold and silent.'" He laughed. "Am I that bad?"
"No, just grumpy sometimes."
His hand squeezed hers. "You are stronger than I, my Ellen."
"Oh, I dunno. You rescued me just in time, I think."
The streets were moderately full, too; a footbridge led to the Ile de la Cite northwards, and the towers of Notre Dame beyond. Besides the tourists there were…
"Is that a Captain Ahab look-alike with an accordion and a harpoon?" she asked. "Beside the fire-eater."
"Indeed. And mimes, those s
treet lice of Paris."
She privately agreed with that, though she supposed her brief visits made them seem more tolerable; he'd lived here off and on, and gone to university. One of them was complete with black beret, white pancake makeup and the horizontal-striped jumper, doing the supremely annoying I-see-a-glass-wall-in-front-of-you act to a harried-looking woman with a couple of baguettes sticking out of a string net shopping bag. She heard Adrian muttering under his breath.
Then the fire-eater turned, apparently fascinated by something on the river below and letting the burning stick droop. The mime was devoted to his art; it took him several seconds to notice that his fellow street performer had set the seat of his baggy trousers on fire. The mime dashed in circles, beating at the flames with both gloved hands.
Half a dozen people stopped to watch. Ellen bit down on her hand as they started to applaud, wondering how many of them thought it was part of the act.
The mime's efforts grew more frantic; then he dove over the rail into the Seine headfirst, with a high-pitched scream. A moment later he came up, standing chest-deep with water running down his greasepainted face. Both hands were underwater, presumably clutching at his seared buttocks.
"Adrian!"
He grinned sheepishly. "It is the first time, my sweet. I have fought the temptation for more than thirty years."
They came to another of the mansions, this one split up for furnished apartments. A motherly-looking Frenchwoman in her well-kept seventies greeted Adrian with a bonsoir and a kiss on both cheeks in the entranceway, and then gave Ellen the same and a long, considering look as she handed over the keys.
"Everything is in readiness, Adrian," she said in French. "But it will be a long time before I forgive you for starting your honeymoon in Italy, of all places, rather than here. And giving me only a few days' notice!"
"Ellen, an old friend from my time here as a student, Madame Noemi Lasalle. Madame Lasalle, my wife, Ellen, nee Tarnowski."
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