S. Stirling: Shadows of Falling Night

“Now for the relevé ,” Adrienne said, showing her teeth.

“The main course? Do I have to watch?” Monica asked unhappily, looking at the young Frenchman. “I’ll probably throw up, and you don’t like that.”

“Not this time,” Adrienne said, rubbing her hands together. “It’s going to be loud , though. Delightfully loud and wet and…primal. Earthy, like la matelote d’anguille à la bourguignonne .”

To the intrigued Henri, as she stood and pulled Monica up by the hand: “I’ll be back in a moment. And remember, I’m being far less metaphorical than you think.”

He looked between them, puzzled. “What does Monica so strongly not wish to see? She has seemed as charmingly free of inhibitions as you yourself, so far.”

“Oh, she is far more inhibited,” Adrienne said. “Particularly with the messy parts.”

“And who is this Ellen?”

“A once and perhaps future victim of mine, currently married to my twin brother Adrian. Who is-but of course! — gorgeous, sexy, intelligent…yet distressingly egalitarian.”

“Ah, a socialist?” Henri said. “Perhaps you’re not so American after all, your family.”

“Not exactly a socialist, except that he believes in equal rights for food. Yet I love him dearly, in my fashion. Perhaps that is why my attempts to kill him never quite come off, try though I may. Though one episode of torture and violation was truly delightful…and then there are the children…ah, the joys of family. I have a complicated culinary life,” Adrienne said.

“Culinary or amorous?”

“We’re also the source of the succubus and incubus myths, remember. So for me, there is as it were little distinction between”-she dropped into English for a second, for the sake of the alliteration-“feeding and fucking.”

“That seems true. When my friends hear that I was seen eating a galette of pigs’ feet with a jus de veau and truffles at Dominique Bouchet, in the company of not one but two beautiful women in Adeline André exclusives…they will conclude that either I have won the lotto or become a gigolo. We’ve certainly piled one intense pleasure on another this evening!”

“A moment, Henri,” Adrienne said, leading Monica away. “And then more intense sensations, I promise you. Ones you’ve never dreamed of.”

The bedroom was a little more modernist than Adrienne really liked, stark and pale except for the 3-D wallscreen, with a faint scent of clean linen and lavender. This apartment was one of those at the service of visiting Brézé scions, and her not-quite-living ancestors strongly encouraged them to use what was provided rather than make their own arrangements.

That meant putting up with their habit of simply hiring the most expensive architects and interior decorators around, something they wouldn’t dream of doing for the antique splendors of their own quarters. Still, you did not ignore polite suggestions from Étienne-Maurice Brézé, Duc de Beauloup and lord of the Council of Shadows. Or from Seraphine, his even more appalling spouse. Not if you wished to avoid the Final Death, and Adrienne was not even post-corporeal yet.

Monica turned down the covers of the great bed and threw herself down on her side, clutching one of the pillows around her head with both arms and radiating an enchanting dread mingled with unwilling fascination. Adrienne lay on the bed as well, carefully putting one of the pillows under her head-she found it gave her an annoying stiff neck afterwards if she went into trance lying completely flat. Her arms crossed, each hand resting on a shoulder; the shaman’s posture. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, releasing it slowly, decoupling from the false perception of a world obedient to laws rather than will.

Mhabrogast drifted through her mind, scratching at the brain with dreadful meaning; the lingua demonica , the operating code of a universe chaotic at its core, deduced from that raw foam by minds that evolved to manipulate it directly. When her race still believed in legends, they had called it the native tongue of demons, the language spoken in Hell. An adept at her level didn’t need to vocalize for the basics:

Amss-aui-ock!

A twisting silvery dart of tingling pain that traced along her whole neural system, and she sat up. Then she stood and swung upright, looking down at her birth-body with happy vanity. Shorter than the human norm, to be sure-all near-purebreds were. Apex predators did tend to be smaller than their main prey species. Slimly taut, subtly curved, the sleeping face regular in a sharp-chinned triangular fashion, skin a smooth light olive and long hair feathery-fine and raven-black…Adrienne clenched her fists under her chin for a moment.

“Oooooh, I am such a hottie!” she murmured, not for the first time. “My God, I’m turning me on.”

Then she turned and walked through the interior wall into the apartment’s lounge. There was a moment of darkness as the nightwalking pseudo-body slipped through the atomic matrix of plaster and stone.

This was where young Shadowspawn sometimes made amusingly fatal mistakes. If you let yourself get impalpable enough, you fell right through the surface and into the earth and couldn’t get out, whereupon your personality matrix disintegrated and the vacant body eventually just…stopped. It was a good idea to check for silver threads, too, since those were the commonest defensive measure. Stumbling into them in your aetheric form was the equivalent of running naked and at speed into a mass of razor ribbons.

There were silver threads in the outer walls and ceiling and floor, installed well over a century ago. Shadowspawn were always the primary cause of death and Final Death for each other, even more so than carelessness about silver or sunlight. That was natural enough for an apex predator, too, but the fact that Shadowspawn existed only in various mixtures with humanity made the problem worse. The conflicting drives didn’t produce the most stable of personalities.

Light again, and a pushing effort; her body became fully palpable once more, became something only the Power could tell from the real thing. Henri started violently as she came up behind him and touched his neck, spilling a little of his champagne on his chest. Adrienne grinned. Even in this hominid form her nose was sensitive, and under the sexual musk and the sharp almost citrusy bite of the sparkling wine came the first delicious scent of fear. And the direct sense of it, drifting from the human’s mind like the most appetizing of cooking odors. Like meat lightly brushed with garlic-infused olive oil just starting to sizzle…

He didn’t believe when I told him the truth, but it prepared him for the last, true moment of horror as the lid is yanked out from beneath his feet and the fall into Hell begins. Ooooo, this is going to be fun!

“Holy God, how did you get here?” he asked, craning his head around to look at her. “That is the only door out of the bedroom and I was watching it all the time!”

“I walked through the wall, Henri,” she said.

“Your eyes…” he whispered.

They were a blank solid yellow now, the color of molten sulphur, the way a Nightwalker’s eyes looked unless you made a special effort.

“I really wasn’t lying, Henri,” she chuckled. “Or making it up. All true, dear little kebab, all true.”

Then she snarled, a shrill racking squall, the hunting-call of Homo nocturnis . The man started backward and tumbled out of the lounger and fell painfully against the table. He lay on the floor in a tangle, staring as her lips peeled back from white sharp teeth in a way not quite possible for his breed. A hundred thousand years of inherited dread wrenched at Henri Desmarais, a genetic legacy of the first Empire of Shadow, something far older than the age of polished stone.