S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

When the sun was fully up he rose and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and running shoes. The computer was plugged in this time, and he'd set it to activate at exactly seven o'clock-checking every five minutes would make the time crawl even more unendurably.

His breath checked in his throat. There was a message: Wait there and don't make any waves. From the Giant Rabbit.

"Okay, calm down," he told himself. "Don't exhaust yourself emotionally. You can't afford it, not now."

Of course, it might be from the wrong people. But he remembered Adrienne raving about how most of the older Shadowspawn hated using information technology. Most of them were older, as you'd expect in a species that aged at about half the human speed and then could survive indefinitely after the death of the physical body. The median age must be well over sixty.

He frowned thoughtfully. You know, that could be a real disadvantage, he thought with some hope. Younger people tend to be more imaginative and innovative.

That was certainly true in physics; most did their best work before they got beyond middle age.

"So they'd be a bunch of Strudlebugs, eventually."

He wondered what it had been like in the old Stone Age, the hundred thousand years when Homo sapiens nocturnus had dominated the planet as the predator of the apex predator. After a while, almost all of them would be postcorporeal, ageless parasites hiding in caves by day and emerging by night to hunt and feed. The organic phase would be sort of a pupa breeding stage in their life cycle.

"Not as much of a disadvantage then," he said to the air. "Nothing changed much back there from millennium to millennium. Or it might be the other way 'round-nothing changed because they were in charge. Maybe that's why it took so long for a human civilization to emerge."

Eventually it was late enough to head out to T RESA'S for breakfast. A little gaggle of children stopped to stare at him. He heard giggles, and when he turned away a pebble bounced off the back of his head. It was enough to sting, especially in his weakened state.

"Hey!" he said-tried to shout, and heard his voice crack. "What was that about!"

The children ran off, laughing, all except for one girl about seven. She stood looking at him solemnly from under the brim of a floppy hat, her hair in two glinting blue-black braids over her shoulders, dressed in a loose pinafore-style dress the worse for wear.

"What was that about?" he said again.

Her face was narrow, weasel-like, and her eyes were large and dark.

"Yor a stranger," she said, in a strong accent like a West Texan rasp. "You otter move 'long."

"Hey, I'm staying here."

"Strangers don't stay here," she said, and walked away.

He shrugged off an unease and headed for the restaurant. Fortunately he had his personal library with him on his machine, and he could use a lot of time to get his strength back.

Peter looked around. The momentary enchantment of the desert dawn was fading, heading towards another baking white day.

There probably wouldn't be much else to do here…and even his sleep was likely to be unpleasant.

Bad dreams are bad enough, he thought. It's when the nightmares spill over into the waking time that things get really unpleasant.

"Are you sure we should accept the invitation?" Ellen said.

Adrian shook his head. "No," he replied frankly. "But when my great-grandfather issues it, I am sure that the consequences of refusal would be worse. If he simply intended to kill us, we'd probably be dead already."

He left unspoken the knowledge that there were worse things than death, and that his technically dead ancestor might simply be toying with them.

"Ah…honey…"

He turned and looked at her, concern in his dark gold-flecked eyes.

She took a deep breath. He wasn't in the least a bully, not even unintentionally, but his strength of personality could make you feel uncertain about arguing with him just by existing.

"Honey, I don't think you realize just how much I don't want to meet any other Shadowspawn but you. You're the only one I've met who doesn't make me want to kill them, or run screaming, or…And I'm afraid of flashbacks. This great-grandfather of yours, he's the Big Bad, right?"

He nodded. "Grand master of the Order of the Black Dawn and the Council of Shadows," he said. "He has been for over a century."

She closed her eyes. "Okay, this is the guy behind World War One and Two, the Holocaust, the killing fields, the Congolese wars, the Seoul thing, the…the just about everything. And we're supposed to go have dinner with him?" Almost pleadingly: "Look, couldn't I stay here and watch over Professor Duquesne or something? Rather than having dinner with werewolf Hitler and his vampire bride?"

He took her hands. "My dove, for one thing I want you to be safe. Or as safe as possible."

" Safe?" she said.

"This place…the Pavillion Ledoyen…opened in 1791," he replied. "Great-grandfather has been coming here all his…well, life. And postlife. He brought me there on a visit when I was ten, during our annual summer trip to Europe."

Which was forty years ago, Ellen thought. That keeps tripping me up.

Adrian went on: "It's one of the favored spots for Shadowspawn in Paris because of the continuity; there's a truce for the restaurant and grounds. That's one of the main reasons I agreed to this, instead of running immediately. I do not want you anywhere else without me."

"More, I feel stronger with you beside me, also," he said. "We are comrades-in-arms now, as well as lovers. And…you are my link to normalcy, to sanity, to all that is good. Merely being around my great-grandparents is to fall into an alien dimension, ethically."

She hugged him. "Okay, when you put it like that. Sorry for the collywobbles."

"It is nothing."

"Odd to get a dinner invitation from the emperor of the Earth," she mused.

"First among rivals, rather," Adrian said. "And by aspiration, more of a living god. Or unliving god."

"You're frightened, aren't you?" Ellen asked.

He glanced at her quickly. "Anyone who is not afraid of Etienne-Maurice Breze is an idiot," he said quietly. "And Seraphine is only marginally less dangerous, if at all."

Then he smiled a crooked smile. "Yet at least you look lovely."

Even with the tension, that could make her feel a flush of pleasure, and she turned slowly; she was wearing a turquoise sheath, shoulderless, tight above and with a slightly flared skirt three fashionable inches below the knee that showed off her hourglass figure. Her antique shawl shimmered with silver paillettes, and the choker silver necklace held aquamarines laid out in Mhabrogast glyphs, bringing out the deep blue of her eyes.

It was all rather fetching, and the choice of precious metal was not an accident, either. It wasn't precisely that silver was toxic to Shadowspawn; they certainly didn't sizzle at its touch. But the Power couldn't affect it, or could only by massive and painful effort, and silver weapons affected them as ordinary ones did her type of human. That went doubly for night-walkers and postcorporeals, who could make themselves impalpable to ordinary matter with a little warning.

Her fair brows drew together a little, and she paused to adjust Adrian's bow tie-he was in formal evening dress, and looking very fetching in an archaic, rakish James Bond sort of way, especially with the deep red cummerbund.

"Honey, there's something that sort of puzzles me. You can walk through walls, right?"

"Yes, when out of the body, with a little effort."

"Then how come you don't drop right into the ground when you do?"

To her surprise he looked a little alarmed; rather the way a claustrophobic would if confronted with the thought of being buried alive in a small coffin.