A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  “Egyptian?” Harvey said incredulously. “You never mentioned that before, either.”

  “Yes, Egyptian, painted in the 1830s, when it was the headquarters of the Order of the Black Dawn, before they discovered Darwin and Mendel. When they thought they were sorcerers and loup-garou.”

  “Yeah, but they were. Nobody allowed in who couldn’t actually Wreak with the Power. And they married each other’s sisters. Unscientific, but it worked, sorta-kinda.”

  Adrian nodded; that had been what kept traces of the ancient, horrible truth alive, there and elsewhere.

  His voice went soft: “Then as we grew older, the ceremonies, the first Words in Mhabrogast . . . little sips of blood from the prisoners, mostly wretched beurs, like letting a child have a tiny glass of wine with his meal to make him feel grown-up. Staring into pools of ink, and . . . other things. At last one night we saw les vieux arise. My great-grandparents, after a gap of fourteen thousand years, the first to survive death. I can remember them en miá chambra, beside our beds, like pillars of mist with bright golden eyes, and then people smiling down at us—”

  “Whoa, ol’ buddy. You realize you’re not only talking in French, which is OK, you’re talking Auvernhat patois thick enough to chisel into building blocks for one of those fucking châteaux?”

  Adrian shook himself and smiled. “Sorry,” he said, shifting back into General American English. “They put Wreakings on us, of course, to keep us from revealing the truth when we were at ‘home.’ Some of them still linger down there, twined around the root of my mind. It all seems like a dream, now.”

  “Nightmare. OK, we’re here.”

  The restaurant was so discreet that it didn’t even have a sign; just a big Victorian gingerbread, like so many others that had survived the earthquake and the fire. And generations of vandalism in the dangerous period between being new and fashionable and old and venerable, when a building was just out of date and shabby. The maître d’ was just as polished, fitting into the darkly rich interior like a piece of the mahogany furniture or one of the old Persian rugs.

  “Ms. Polson is waiting for you and your friend, Mr. Brézé. This way.”

  Sheila Polson was scowling at the menu as they were ushered into their private nook. She glanced up sharply as Adrian extended his senses; no electronic ears tickled at his consciousness. Just because you had the Power didn’t mean you had to use it rather than some technological equivalent.

  Adrian inclined his head slightly. He hadn’t met the chief of the Brotherhood’s California section before; he’d mostly operated in Europe and Asia when he and Harvey were a team, and the organization was tightly compartmentalized.

  She was a medium woman—medium height, medium build, medium unmemorable navy business suit, dark-brown skin and wiry hair cropped short. Only the eyes struck in the mind, and that was because of something in them; otherwise she might have been a paralegal or middling bureaucrat. Though most of those would not have the weapons he sensed, a spring-loaded gun with silver darts in the attaché case leaning against her chair and an inlaid blade in a scabbard sewn into her jacket. And her shoes were made for fast movement, not style.

  Her looks said mid-thirties. From what he felt, she could have been that, or possibly a decade or more older. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, after all, and she smelled of the Power too. Not nearly as much as he, but considerably more than Harvey. Her mind was tightly warded under a wash of patterned no-thought, so tightly that he couldn’t even feel the dislike he was certain was there.

  “Hello, Ms. Polson,” Adrian said. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  She looked at his hand as if it were a cobra, or decayed, or both, and then shook.

  “This place is a waste of money,” she said as they sat. “There isn’t a lunch entrée under thirty dollars!”

  “It’s Adrian’s money, Sheila,” Harvey pointed out. “And since he gives a couple of million of it a year to us, you really can’t complain about how he spends the rest of it.”

  The rangy, graying man glanced at the menu. “No BBQ or hamburgers? Damn. Had my mouth set for a double bacon cheeseburger. Guess I’ll have to settle for the Lapin á la Moutarde Et Au Romarin.”

  Adrian hid a smile; Harvey’s French was much less accented than his Texan-flavored English. He could have passed for someone from Tours on the telephone, in fact, as opposed to Adrian. Any Frenchman listening to him would have heard some village in Puy-de-Dôme under the overlay of Paris and Sorbonne. With a very old-fashioned tinge at that.

  Of course, I spent much time in my childhood with Auvergnats born in the nineteenth century. Granted, they were dead, but they were quite talkative.

  “Magret De Canard Au Porto,” Adrian said; he was partial to duck breast anyway, and the port sauce, celery root and apple puree sounded interesting.

  “I’ll have the sliced lamb on mixed greens,” Polson said with malice aforethought.

  Adrian gave the order to the waiter, and added: “A glass of the Ronceray for me, thank you. Anyone else? No?”

  She waited in tight silence until privacy returned. Then:

  “You resigned from the Brotherhood, Brézé,” she said. “Nobody resigns from the Brotherhood. Why should we help you?”

  “Sheila,” Harvey put in. “Remember those millions? As in millions of bucks? As in, weapons, transportation, living stipends, bribes, special equipment, safe houses, research? Hell, the organization runs on silver and it ain’t cheap.”

  “Stolen money,” she said. “Blood money.”

  Adrian hid his annoyance with a raised brow he knew was intensely annoying in itself.

  Fanatic, he thought. Then again, who else would wage a failing struggle all their lives long?

  Aloud he went on: “No. Directing money to investments that will increase in value harms nobody. And before I resigned from the Brotherhood—which, despite your statement, I did successfully do—”

  Polson’s frown said all any of them needed to know: Because you had no way to punish me except at a cost you weren’t prepared to pay.

  “I carried out many missions. But most of all, you should help me because I propose to kill a powerful Shadowspawn who ranks high beneath the Council of Shadows. Specifically, my sister, Adrienne Brézé.”

  “Ah, there we get to it,” she said. “You’ve left each other alone ever since the last time you locked horns. Why should she come for you? We know the Council didn’t send her.”

  Their meal came. Adrian thanked the man, threw his card onto the tray and added a fifty-dollar bill; these were hard times, and a lot of restaurants had taken to raking back a share of tips. Then he took a sip of his wine; the cabernet-merlot-petite Verdot combination had just enough acidity to go with the fatty richness of the duck.

  “Why is abstract at this point. She . . . there are personal reasons. In any case, she abducted a young lady I’m very fond of. We know she’s taken her somewhere in California, probably the central coast. I need information; all the Brotherhood files on the Brézé properties there, their defenses, layout, everything.”

  “Specialized weapons, too,” Harvey put in.

  Adrian nodded. “And since this was a personal vendetta on Adrienne’s part, aiding me won’t bring the Council down on you any more than usual.”

  “We should help you get your lucy back?” Polson asked.

  The air went still. Harvey’s hand made a slight gesture towards his coat before his conscious mind controlled it, prompted by decades of experience with the bubbling edge of violence. Adrian carefully finished chewing and swallowing, laid down his knife and fork, and leaned forward. His gold-flecked eyes met Sheila Polson’s, and locked. After a long moment she looked aside, a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead.

  “Ms. Polson, I will say this only once. Ellen Tarnowski was my friend—yes, we were lovers. She was not my lucy. I don’t force blood from living humans, and I don’t compel their minds except at urgent need. My sister does. I resigned from your war but I didn�
�t resign from the personal obligations of a human being. I’d be a pretty poor specimen of a man if I didn’t do what I could for her. Living with myself is . . . hard enough as it is.”

  She looked away for an instant, nodded as if to herself, then turned back to him:

  “I apologize, Mr. Brézé.” At his surprise, she smiled very slightly. “I actually am sorry. You . . . must know how disturbing a pureblood is to someone who can sense the Power.”

  “He don’t bother me none,” Harvey said, returning to his rabbit.

  “You’re a loose cannon, Ledbetter, and you bent every rule to breaking point haring off to New Mexico that way.”

  “I’m also the best field team leader in the Brotherhood, so you’re not going to do anything but scold me.”

  She shrugged and went on to Adrian: “Please describe your encounter in Santa Fe, if you would.”

  Adrian did; Harvey nodded approval. “He can still do a damn nice after-action report,” he added.

  “That Wreaking on the apartment building . . . that is . . . not good news,” Polson said.

  “You could say that,” Adrian replied grimly. “If I hadn’t turned it in on itself, when the cascade fell it might have taken out everything within blocks. Driven dozens catatonic for the rest of their lives, at least.”

  “It gets harder and harder to fight . . .” Polson half-whispered to herself. Then: “You were using stored blood?”

  Adrian nodded, and spoke with careful precision:

  “I drink blood only when I must for major Wreakings with the Power. As do you, do you not? What is your rating on the Alberman Scale?”

  She forced her eyes back to his. “Yes. Red Cross supply. I’m . . . thirty-eight percent.”

  “Then you will have some idea of how absolutely horrible an experience drinking cold, dead blood is. It is much worse for me. Dog-piss would be more fun.”

  Polson nodded, stopping her fork halfway to her mouth. Then she visibly put the memory out of her mind and ate.

  “We’re preoccupied right now,” she said. “Believe me, I sympathize with the girl. I’ve done field work. But right now, the whole world is about to come down on our heads. You’ve heard about the Council meeting that’s been called for next year in Tiflis?”

  “No, I had not,” he said. “Well, not until last night.”

  “You heard that Gheorghe Brâncuşi was executed? Formally the meeting’s to elect his successor.”

  Executed, Adrian thought as he nodded. Or assassinated, depending on your viewpoint.

  “Harvey told me yesterday,” he said.

  “Christ, Brézé, don’t you follow anything?”

  “It hasn’t been on CNN, nor on the Internet,” he said dryly. “The Brotherhood has me on their shit-list, and pretty well all the Council’s Shadowspawn would kill me if they could and deceive me just for the pleasure of it if they couldn’t. Ms. Polson, what part of retired don’t you understand?”

  “Then you wouldn’t have heard that they’re going to implement Plan Trimback?”

  He looked at her, drank the last of his wine, and said: “No.”

  Harvey tore a piece off the baguette and buttered it.

  “Usually they couldn’t organize an orgy in a Bangkok whorehouse and they put everything off and off and off because they’re planning on living forever ’n’ figure they’ve got time,” he said, biting into the bread with a crackle. “This time it’s different.”

  Polson nodded. “We’re trying to figure out a counter-strategy—”

  “Bullshit,” Adrian said crisply.

  She glared at him; Harvey grinned and continued methodically demolishing the loaf and mopping his plate.

  “I quit because the Brotherhood isn’t a threat to the Shadowspawn,” Adrian said. “It’s a nuisance. You kill a few lower-level types—”

  “We got Brâncuşi,” she said.

  “That was me, actually, and Adrian’s right,” Harvey said. “Two members of the Council in thirty years. And that’s . . . what . . . less than half of the number of Council heads who’ve died in faction-fights or family coups. We’re never going to be able to kill our way to victory, Sheila. There are just too damned many of them now. And they’ve got the Power.”

  “You want to give up too, Ledbetter?” she rasped.

  “No. I think we should admit that the Power is here to stay. Sure, if you gave me a magic button I’d push till my thumb got sore. But even the Power can’t undo the past.”

  Harvey went on:

  “So we need to use the Power. Y’know, you could have gotten into the Order of the Black Dawn if you’d been around back then. Hell, I might have made it. And we’re not evil . . . well, not most of the time.”

  “The Order were evil,” Sheila said with flat certainty.

  “Yeah, but that’s ’cause they were demon-worshipping shits who figured out they could become demons. They’d have been just as evil if all they’d had was knives and bad attitudes.”

  He pointed his fork at Adrian. “Guys like Adrian are our hope. The Power isn’t evil either; it’s just a . . . technology.”

  Polson took a long breath. “That’s a policy question. We’re here to talk about this one instance. OK . . . I’ll see what I can do. We do have a lot of information about the Brézé family. We’ll get it to you as fast as we can; some of it will have to be dug out of hiding places. But I’m not going to clear everything off our plate just for this.”

  “We won,” Harvey said, when she had gone.

  Adrian methodically finished the last of his duck. He would be needing his energy, and ordinary food had its part in that too.

  “And Ellen is . . . wherever she is,” he said.

  He snarled, then controlled the sound. A glimpse at his face in the beveled glass mirror stopped it more effectively. The sharp teeth showed between the drawn-back lines of his lips, and his eyes might have been glowing from a Pleistocene night by the reflected light of a frightened tribe’s campfires.

  “Christ, Harvey, I don’t want to do this.”

  “You’re going at it awful hard for a reluctant man,” Harvey said.

  His blunt fingers made pills from the last of the bread. Adrian gripped the edge of the table until rims of white stood out in his fingernails, welcoming the pain of it.

  “Do you know why I’ve spent these years sitting on a mountaintop, Harvey? Running, meditating, swimming, talking to people at safe remove through a keyboard. Playing tennis when I felt daring? Because that life . . . life on an even keel . . . is one I can control. I don’t like what this . . . walking armed towards a fight, thinking in terms of threats and counter-threats and strategy—does to me.”

  “It ain’t all that much fun, I grant you.”

  Adrian shook his head violently. “No. It is entirely too much fun, at some levels. I know myself. I was made for this.”

  “You don’t like you nearly as much as I do, ol’ buddy,” Harvey said quietly, looking away. “Think you might reconsider? You’d be a happier man.”

  Adrian felt himself smile; the expression in the mirror was worse than the snarl had been.

  “Consider my sister, my friend. She has an excellent sense of self-esteem, feels comfortable in her skin and enjoys her life.”

  Softly: “And she has Ellen. For a whole day now. What has been happening, there, in that creature’s nest?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Somethingchirped in her ear. Ellen woke, yawned, stretched, and frowned. The place smelled different from her own bedroom, and not like Adrian’s either, with its faint undertones of expensive tobacco and leather-bound books and juniper. Not bad—fresh linen, flowers, coffee, a spicy scent like eucalyptus—but different. She whimpered as memories crashed in on her. Then she realized she was alone in the big rumpled bed, and relaxed. The chirping came again; she turned her head and saw a BlackBerry resting on the pillow next to her.

  This is yours, the note on the screen said. Schedule loaded. First, go get checkup at clinic: 10:00
a.m. Dr. Duggan fully briefed. Don’t be late or I will spank you.

  The time display read 9:00. “Am I going to . . .” she started to mutter to herself. Then: “Of course I’m going to go for this checkup. She’s not kidding about that spanking. I don’t think she means just a pat, either.”

  She tore through showering and pulling on the cotton dress and sandals provided, clipped the instrument to her belt and grabbed a fluffy kiwi pastry and a slice of fruit-bread from the breakfast trolley. She scarcely noticed the quiet sumptuousness of the great room and the fixtures, except the painting hung to the left of the bed, Adrienne’s side. That caught her eye, enough to make her bend close for an expert’s quick appraisal.

  What a splendid reproduction! she thought, the professional taking over from the personal for a moment; she’d seen the original during her student years at NYU, on a field trip to France. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better one.

  A small plaque below had a poem inlaid in gold on some dark tropical wood:

  “And when I turned, no face I saw

  For the shadow was my own

  Death Angel’s shadow.”

  That was certainly appropriate. The painting was by Schwabe, La Mort et le Fossoyeur, with the Death Angel shown as a slender dark-haired woman poised over the old gravedigger in the snowy cemetery, her wings making a beautiful curve like a scythe-blade against the willow-twigs and tilted headstones. Ellen had always liked it, as far as she liked any Symbolist work, and the reproduction was striking; it caught the cruel impersonal compassion on Azrael’s face beautifully. Then she looked more closely, reaching out to touch and then taking back her hand.

  “Wait a minute,” she whispered. “Gouache, watercolor and pencil, that’s right. And it’s old, not just artificially aged. Look at the structure of the micro-cracks. And the frame is about a century old too! It isn’t a reproduction. My God, the Louvre would never willingly part with this, not for any amount of money!”