The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “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 Provençal 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 Brézés, care about us?”

  “We killed Tōkairin 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 Brézés 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 Île 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 Île 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 Île has effectively become a cruise ship permanently anchored in the Seine, for some time. The Rothschilds have a pied-à-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 à tour réfléchis 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 Île de la Cité 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 street 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 Noémi Lasalle. Madame Lasalle, my wife, Ellen, née Tarnowski.”

  “It is a pleasure,” the older woman said in English; then she dropped back into French. “Even if you married an American, Adrian, at least your Hélène is beautiful, beautiful! May your lives have much happiness.”

  The old lady drooped one eyelid at Ellen, who chuckled in reply. Adrian missed the byplay, for once.

  “Madame Lasalle, I am an American by birth, as were my parents and grandparents,” he said, exasperation in his tone. “It is appropriate that I marry an American as well, hein?”

  “Bah. Jesus Christ was born in a stable; does than make him a horse?”

  “Ah . . . She also speaks French, Madame Lasalle.”

  “Of course,” Lasalle said with a sniff. “You are a man of impeccable taste. Could you marry a woman who did not speak the language of civilization?”

  Ellen laughed aloud and spoke . . . in French. Her accent wasn’t too strong, and her grammar was good if slightly formal and slow. She’d been speaking it with Adrian for some time now, to gain fluency.

  “You have reason, madame. I was a student of the arts by profession, and French is inescapable if one is serious.”

  “Indeed. I would also expect Adrian to marry a woman of solid good sense. I have stocked the appartement Henri IV so that you need not leave it if you wish.”

  “There is glace Berthillon?” Adrian asked.

  “Of course there is Berthillon! Did I not know you as a youngster?”

  He smiled; Ellen blinked a little at the fond expression.

  Well, I do have fifty years of stuff to catch up with.

  “What flavors?”

  “Agenaise, Banane, Café au whisky, Café Dauphinoix, Cannelle Cappuccino, Caramel, Caramel au beurre salé, Caramel au gingembre, Chocolat au nougat, Chocolat blanc, Chocolat du mendiant, Chocolat blanc du endiant, Chocolat noir, Créole, Feuille de Menthe, Gianduja à l’orange, Gianduja aux noisettes, Grand-Marnier, Lait d’amande, Moka, Marron Glacé, Noisette, Noix, Noix de coco, Nougat au Miel, Pain d’épices, Pistache, Plombières, Praline au citron et coriandre, Pralieé aux pignons, Réglisse, Thé Earl Grey, Tiramisu, Turron de jijona, Vanille . . .”

  “You did not stock the entire selection! There would not be room!”

  “No, but enough that you will think that I have: the new smaller containers. Go, go, you two are newly married! You do not wish to stand talking to an old woman.”

  The elevator was another antique, though not quite seventeenth-century; there was a sliding accordion-joint door, with wrought-iron curlicue gates at each floor. It clunked and creaked upwards, and Ellen leaned into Adrian’s shoulder.

  “I wish this were just an extension of our honeymoon.” She sighed.

  “Me also.”

  “What’s Berthillon?”

  “The best glace . . . ice cream . . . in Paris. Which is to say, in the entire world. Made here on this island, by hand.”

  He laid a palm on the apartment’s door for an instant, closing his eyes and concentrating; she felt a nearly irresistible impulse to smooth the lock of black hair that fell over his forehead. Then she noticed that her right hand was resting under the tail of the windcheater jacket she was wearing, on the hilt of a knife whose blade was inlaid with silver and etched Mhabrogast glyphs.

  Wow. All that inside-the-head training really has started to bite!

  His eyes opened and caught hers. “Welcome to my world, my dear one. I am sorry.”

  “Well, I’m not,” she said, grabbing his ears and giving him a brief fierce kiss. “Let’s unpack and have some dinner. We have to go meet this atom wrangler, but we’ve got an hour or two yet.”

  He laughed and lifted her across the threshold.

  “Very well. I will fix us something to eat, and you unpack?”

  “Done,” Ellen said. “You’ll have to give me cooking lessons sometime.”

  “I find it soothing to cook, but of a certainty, my sweet.”

  The apartment wasn’t grand, despite the mildly pretentious name, though it shone with expert care and smelled slightly of sachets and wax. A hallway, a living room with windows on the plane trees of the courtyard and the Seine, a modest but superbly equipped kitchen, a study and a bedroom. The floors were polished hardwood, with a few Oriental rugs, and the furniture mostly plain in a subtle way that said expensive and old. One of the paintings on the wall opposite the fireplace was very good, but by a nineteenth-century Academic she couldn’t quite identify. French, certainly, and pre-1900.

  Wait a minute, she thought. Wait a minute . . . Yup. It’s by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, all right.

  It was a pleasure just to be an art history student again for an instant, and the Academics had become hot enough again to be a big part of her second-year course on French painting, to the scandal of old-fashioned Impressionist/Postimpressionist/avant-garde–succession worshipers still in thrall to the Whig narrative.

  This one had a lot less of the slick surface that he used for his mythological pictures; it showed two barefoot girls, one eleven or so and one a few years younger, sitting in a wood. They wore rather plain realistic Victorian-era peasant costumes colored brown and off-white, what working countryfolk actually used every day rather than the Offenbachoperetta exaggeration of festival-day gaudiness the genre usually showed. Their faces were done with a delicate realism that actually gave you a feeling for their personalities.

  Though of course they don’t have the dirty, calloused feet or grime under the fingernails and their hair is far too neat and clean. Still for Bouguereau it’s practically The Stone Breakers. Not one of his better-known ones. It’ll come to me, it’ll come to me . . . Ah, it’s The Nut Gatherers!

  There was probably a story about how it ended up here, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it. The casual way Shadowspawn just appropriated what they liked from galleries and museums still made her angry—which was odd, considering the other things they routinely did, but it hit her at a level below conscious ethical priorities. This was a really fine piece of work; whether you considered it a great painting depended on what you thought of the Academics, but there was absolutely no doubt that Bouguereau had total mastery of his technique.

  The paint does exactly what he wanted it to do, she thought, with a smile. The question is whether he should have wanted it to do that.

  There were times she could just stand and look at something like this for hours. Instead she threw the traveling cases on the bed and continued her tour of the apartment. The only real luxury was a large bathroom, featuring a bathtub carved from a block of some silver-gray stone
and shaped like a futuristic gravy boat.

  Just big enough for two, she thought happily.

  Adrian was already busy in the kitchen; she wandered in, took a carrot and nibbled on it while she perched on a stool and watched him work.

  “I get a man who’s soulfully beautiful, with a body like a Greek god, knows just how to tie a girl up, he’s rich and he cooks. There’s no justice in the world and for once I’m the beneficiary.”

  “Of a surety there isn’t, or you would have better,” he said, pouring her a glass from the bottle of red wine he’d opened. “But this is scarcely cooking; mere unpacking and setting out. Noémi has been very thorough. Hand me those tomatoes, would you?”

  She did, then hooked her feet up on a rung, sipping and watching the smooth fluidity of his motions, chuckling occasionally when he added a flourish like flipping a knife up to the ceiling and catching it as it fell; it was a pleasure with a slight frisson, when she recalled the things she’d seen him do with the same assurance. For a moment the wine distracted her.

  “What is this?”

  “Domaine de la Butte Bourgueil Mi-Pente 2003,” he said. “That was a wonderful year, but perhaps . . . No, it’s still at its peak. That hint of chocolate is nice, eh?”

  They sat and ate: salad, olives, charcuterie of dry sausage and cured ham and rabbit terrine with herbs, a round loaf of pain Poilâne that crackled when you cut it, butter, a hard dry white cheese that bit gently at the mouth. She looked down again when he served the ice cream and she took her first taste. Dense, rich, tasting of actual cream and fruit . . .

  “My God,” she said.

  “I told you so.”

  She tried to kick him beneath the table, and found her foot trapped under his. “You mustn’t become predictable, my sweet.”

  Noémi Lasalle gave them another set of kisses when they left. It was full dark now, or at least as dark as it got in a major city, with the tall buildings of La Défense showing to one side in the middle distance and the lower-rise center of Paris to the other. The granite paving blocks glistened in the light of the cast-iron street lamps, and the heavy, silty smell of the Seine was all around them. It was cool enough to make her jacket comfortable; that also made her less self-conscious about going armed. Beneath it she wore a silk shirt, and tights and a pleated skirt and soft black pumps.