S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

“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 Br?ncu?i,” 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 Br?z? 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?”

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!”

Inside her head she could hear: Oh, quite unwillingly, ch?rie. That didn’t need any spooky telepathy.

For an instant she sat on the bed, winded and gasping. After shock came a wave of anger; to have something like this hanging in your bedroom, exposed to all the possible accidents…

The BlackBerry beeped at her, a half-hour warning. She fumbled at it until it came up with a map of the route to the clinic, and ran-that was another thing she could do well, even in sandals-out into the hallway, down a service stair, out a rear entrance, down a long pathway, out through a boundary wall and gate into what looked like a smallish town or large village tucked under the hill where the casa grande sat. It wasn’t even far enough to raise much of a sweat, not in the cool springlike weather of a fine February day in the California lowlands.