S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

While she completed the mechanical task she was conscious of Adrian moving in the background: the scrape of colored chalks against the rock behind them, the purling whine of Mhabrogast. She turned, the rifle cradled in her arms like a cold lover of walnut and blued steel. The final glyph was sketched on the sandstone surface. It glittered faintly in the moonlight.

"I meant to ask about that. If the Power can't affect silver, how come you can use it for a glyph?"

"That is a glyph of negation, of constraint," he said. "You want it to be unchangeable. This sort of thing involves feedback loops; you can alter the probability cascades keyed to the glyphs on the fly if you're good enough."

She made a questioning sound-she couldn't really understand the Power intuitively or use it herself, but she could learn the theory-and he shrugged.

"Nobody has ever been able to prove whether Mhabrogast objectively helps one to use the Power or whether it's just a focusing device. Latin certainly isn't more than that, and it's useful as a lead-in."

"You mean the lingua demonica may be psychosomatic? Or some sort of symbolic placebo?"

"Or the operating code of the universe." He snorted laughter. "We can't even prove that modern Mhabrogast is actually what the Empire of Shadow spoke. The Order of the Black Dawn's adepts used the Power to reconstruct it from a few fragments, back in the nineteenth century. But we know it works."

"Or maybe it works because you know it does…My head hurts when I think about that…What does that one do? The silver one."

Adrian smiled grimly. "If someone comes walking through the stone and into contact with it in their aetheric form…let us say the consequences will be unfortunate. For them. Think of it as running into a cross between invisible barbed wire and the web of a very large spider."

"Except there's no spider."

He smiled, a remarkably unpleasant expression if you were on the receiving end of the dislike.

"Oh, so there is one. That so relieves my mind, honey. Having to think about someone fading through solid walls right behind me and then biting me on the ass is sort of paranoia-inducing. Now I feel safe because there's a giant murderous spider lurking in the rock."

"More the potential for something that would be perceived as a giant, murderous spider. In a way the victim creates it themselves."

"That so reassures me. Not." She took a deep breath and gave him a light kiss on the lips. "Go get 'em, tiger."

"And I have you to make sure I have a body to come back to."

He lay down on the unrolled foam mat inside the semicircle of glyphs, crossing his arms on his chest.

"Amss-aui-ock!"

Adrian was there, lying on the mat in his fatigues, with a webbed belt bearing tools and devices and pouches. And he was there, naked under the moon. Another not-quite shift and he was gone. What stood there instead still took her breath away a little: Smilodon populator.

Sabertooth tiger. A cat but not really a tiger, built as much like a bear as a feline, a tawny bulk with huge shoulders coming up to her chin and a broad back sloping down to the hindquarters. The face was a cat from a nightmare, with fangs like curved ivory daggers more than a foot long, serrated like steak knives on their edges. The lambent yellow Shadowspawn eyes didn't help either. Something deep down screamed, Run, at the sight.

The great feline weighed as much as a horse-she'd ridden on its back, not least when they escaped from the bloody shambles at Rancho Sangre, after Hajime's death. Now it brushed against her, rocking her back a little, then nuzzled affectionately at her body with its stumpy tail twitching, and nuzzled again in a way that would have been fresh from someone…something…she wasn't married to.

She leaned the rifle against the rock and used both hands to scratch at its ruff and behind the palm-size ears; there was a rumbling deep in the chest, and it licked her with a great rough washcloth of a tongue. Then it turned and leapt into the darkness, eerily silent for all its mass. Ellen crouched back against the stone, cradling the rifle in her arms.

"There're definitely some kinky elements in this relationship," she murmured to herself. "And I don't mean just the good ol' vanilla B and D. But kinky in a good way."

Then she fell silent. That was another part of the training, and one she'd enjoyed after a while; she'd never realized how much she missed by being noisy all the time, not least the noise she made herself inside her head. In a way the listening was like sinking into a painting, opening yourself completely while excluding everything else. Thought went away, until she was floating somehow, but intensely aware of everything. Letting it pass through without dwelling on it, her attention suspended until something tripped it.

After a while-later she thought it might have been an hoursomething did.

Pain ran along Adrian's nerves like a wave of white fire as he shifted. He fought briefly for control as he took the Smilodon's form, man-thought crowded into the dim, focused brain of the great carnivore. It was easier this time; he'd been using the sabertooth's form for more than two years now, since investigators unknowingly in his employ had succeeded in reconstructing the beast's genome. You could lose yourself in the beast, if it was unfamiliar and you weren't careful-that was one of the many ways the Power could kill you.

It also accounted for a lot of the bad reputation of werewolves.

Hearing flooded in, keen enough that Ellen's quick heartbeat was like a snare drum thudding in the night. Vision painted the desert silver-bright, sight as good as a man's at high noon and much sharper than a wolf's; his scent wasn't as keen as the canid model, but it was a thousand times better than that of a man. Enough that her femaleness was like a club across the senses; he walked over, his platter-size paws soundless on the gritty soil, and nuzzled at her. Confused images of mingled human and beast-form mating and feeding cascaded through his mind.

A practiced effort of will thrust down the consciousness of how appealingly, mouthwateringly meaty she smelled, something that harmonized all too well with more complex Shadowspawn hungers. Her fingers dug into the ruff around his throat, and he rumbled in contentment, then turned and sprang into the night.

The sabertooth was a young male in its prime years, an ambush hunter made for burst speed. He raced in a series of twenty-foot bounds southwards to leave as little trace on the ground as possible. Then he slowed to a springy trot. The lights of the little hamlet glared with a blue-white radiance that human eyes would have seen as isolated pools of dimness.

Closer, and the rank scents of burnt petroleum and chemicals made his nose wrinkle, whiskers bristling as his thin black lips curled back to show the rest of his fangs. Then the smells of humanity, stale and dirty, the present-but-uninteresting tang of children, others healthy and fresh and insidiously appetizing and tempting, now and then the revolting odor of sickness.

Shadowspawn senses picked up other things: the way sleeping minds whimpered and retreated into nightmare as his form padded down through the thick, cool dust beside the road, the growls or frightened silence of dogs. He could tell instantly where the humans he sought were holed up. The blaring, shrilling wrongness of the silver-particle lining they'd applied to the inside of the motel room. He winced and turned the eyes of his mind aside as if he'd stared into the sun. A struggle for a moment; was he supposed to attack those men, or…

Defend them. I must defend them.

It seemed odd, alien, unnatural. Taste fear, scent terror, the hot intoxicating spurt of blood -

No.

The humanoid energy-matrix mind at the base of the feline's brain mastered it; mastered its own drives as well. He vaulted over a goat-stick fence and into a backyard bare except for a rusty slide and the tattered remains of a children's wading pool, then eeled between the aluminum siding of the house and a pitted Chosan sedan.