S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

He drew on his cigarette and savored the harsh bite. The Wreakings that shielded his mind were a teasing feeling at the corner of perception's eye, like a slight continuous buzzing. Nicotine helped long-learned mental disciplines to keep him reasonably calm, despite the knowledge of what was coming towards him. A click sounded through the bud in his right ear: alert.

It was some comfort to know that hidden snipers were covering the meeting site with rifles firing silver-jacketed. 338 Lapua magnum rounds. Some comfort, but not too much. Tokairin Michiko was a pureblood. She could sculpt the probabilistic foam underlying reality at a level that made his own meager talent look like a toy water pistol compared to an Apache gunship. Despite defenses as elaborate as he could make them, at close range she could probably simply make his ticker give out, or block a vein in his brain for a few crucial seconds. She could certainly do it if given time to use glyphs and Mhabrogast to focus the effect, or if she used something preactivated.

A quiet burble of engine, a singing and crunching sound of gravel under wheels. The car snaked up the switchbacks of the road towards him, trailing dust. His brows rose a little when it was close enough for him to see the make: a Nissan GT-X, low-slung sleek elegance, with a double-turbocharged engine that put out more power than most armored personnel carriers weighing twenty times as much. You could use that on dirt country roads, but…

Tacky. Very fucking rich-bitch, Michiko- sama.

It was chrome yellow, with a license plate bearing the mon symbol of the Tokairin clan and the black sun pierced by a jagged trident that was the sigil of the Council of Shadows.

On the one hand, it wont mean anything to anyone who doesn't know already. On the other hand, it's worrisome that they're so confident now. The last generation was a lot more careful about hiding. Michiko's bunch just doesn't give a shit. I wonder if they'll register it as the official Trademark of Evil one of these days.

The sports car pulled to a stop ten yards away, the quiet sound of its engine dying instantly. Harvey noted without surprise that the position would block one of his snipers and give the other the worst possible shot; Michiko probably wasn't even consciously aware that she'd done that. He threw his cigarette to the ground, twisted it under his heel and moved to the tailgate of his pickup, which would put her back under both scopes.

She got out of the car with a lithe catlike motion and walked towards him, smiling. She wore low-slung black Key Closet skinny jeans, which he admitted she could bring off, and a sleeveless silk shirt. It all showed the sort of figure high-bred Shadowspawn females tended to have, slim but high-tensile.

All right if you like weasels with small tits, he thought whimsically, fighting down a hundred thousand years of instinctive terror. In her case, blond Japanese weasels.

He bowed his head slightly as she approached. She took off her sunglasses, tucked one arm of them in the neck of her shirt and returned the gesture, a little more deeply.

"Hoping the water will fall out of my head?" she said, in pluperfect Californian English.

"Well, you may notice I'm not offerin' cucumbers," he said dryly, the Texan Hill Country rasp strong in his voice.

It was only in his imagination that she smelled of rotting blood. There wasn't any physical way of telling her apart from any rich Yonsei girl, unless you counted the tiny golden flecks in the irises. The Tokairin had thought they were ninja sorcerers until the missionaries of the Order of the Black Dawn arrived in the early Meiji era and told them where their powers really came from, and how to make the next generation stronger.

"You're being very unfriendly. I can sense hostility even with those tiresome shields," she said, pouting slightly. "Is this any way to treat a friend?"

"No," he said.

After a moment she shrugged. "Oh, well, if you want to be all tiresome and businesslike. I've got the preliminary schedule for the Council meeting in Tbilisi. Who's coming in, when, and where they're staying, plus the security protocols."

He raised his brows. "They've settled on those already? Bad tradecraft."

She shrugged. "It's a protocol. The older generation…"

He nodded. Shadowspawn tended to be fanatically conservative, more so as they got older. Many of the current Council lords had been youngsters when their parents carefully directed Archduke Ferdinand down the wrong road in Sarajevo.

"We've made a formal request for a security review, warning that terrorists might strike, but they turned it down. Of course."

"We?" Harvey asked.

"Ah, the…Progressive Party, we're calling ourselves. Or the whippersnappers, to the other side."

Harvey laughed; it was quite genuine, and he wished it back.

One slim yellow brow went up. "I notice that you're not exactly the official Brotherhood yourself, Mr. Ledbetter," she said. "They're not nearly imaginative enough to try using us against one another the way you have. Perhaps you're not as different from us as you'd like to think."

He hid his wince, but it was her turn to laugh; the silver tinkle was like splints shoved under the fingernails of his mind.

Don't talk to them beyond the bare necessity, he repeated to himself. Don't show any reactions. Don't emote, don't engage. They're naturally good at getting inside your head even if you're warded, and they play games and manipulate the way they breathe. Don't give her leverage to fuck with your mind. Just the minimum.

He held out his hand. She extended hers, with a memory stick in it; his came back before skin could touch skin.

"Now I'm hurt. Don't you trust me?" she said archly.

" 'Bout as much as I trust a cobra," he said.

"Hssssssss!"

The sound was startlingly realistic. He waited, immobile, until she tossed the little data-storage unit. He caught it out of the air, then waited while she walked back to her car with a taunting swing of the hips. The superchargers whined, and the long yellow-and-black shape seemed to stretch, vanishing in a spray of dust and gravel as she tapped the accelerator. Harvey dropped the stick into a plastic baggie, tucked it into his pocket and sighed, then produced a handkerchief to wipe his face.

"Tough?" a voice asked in his ear.

"Strenuous," he replied. "Just a mite strenuous, I'd say."

And I don't know whether I'm glad Adrienne is dead or not. She was just as much a monster, maybe more, and a lot smarter. On the other hand she was more rational, so maybe a bit easier to anticipate. Michiko might have killed me just because it felt good.

Harvey's covering squad waited a half hour before they came in, which was good fieldcraft. Both had scope-sighted rifles with them, angular military models with chassis of carbon fiber and aircraft-grade aluminum; the Mhabrogast protective glyphs and silver threads were decidedly nonstandard.

They broke them down, fitted them into the shaped and padded recesses of the carrying cases and slipped them into the compartment behind the rear seat of the pickup. Otherwise they were in the sort of thing hikers might wear, tough cotton drill in neutral colors and laced boots. Traipsing around Big Sur in a sniper ghillie suit would be a bit conspicuous.

"I could have gotten her easy," Jack Farmer groused.

He was a thirty-something hard case with cropped blond hair and a snub nose, and Harvey didn't like him.

He's trustworthy, and he's good at what he does. I just don't like him, because he's a son of a bitch. I suppose his mother loved him. Before he learned to talk, at least.

His partner was a woman named Anjali Guha, South Asian dark, athletic, and, in Harvey's opinion considerably smarter. Or at least less driven and obsessed, which was more important than sheer IQ. Your mind could do only what your emotions let it. Character was more important than the size of your vocabulary every time.