S. Stirling - Shadows of Falling Night

Jessica checked at the sight of the delicately carved ebony X-shaped frame with the restraints and the clamps bolted to one wall, and the various toys. Her eyes seemed focused on the whip, then took in some of the other things.

“Shhh, shhh, it’s all right,” Monica said. “That’s for play, later; I mean, I spend a fair bit of time tied up like that and it’s really quite stimulating when you’re used to it, and it makes your blood sort of…tasty. Todd, get her to lie down here on the bed, that’s right. Then you sit here, in this chair next to the bed.”

He jerked as the renfield gunman secured him to the chair with a padded restraint built into the arm.

“There, you sit beside her, Todd,” Monica said. “This is just so you don’t get in the way when the Doña goes for her. Things could get…out of hand if you did that, it’s a natural impulse, but…I mean, really bad. Never, never try to interrupt a feeding, it, um, sets them off. You can fight and resist afterwards, she quite likes that sort of game.”

Jessica’s brown eyes were wide, and her dark skin had roughed as if with a chill, though the chamber was at a perfect mild seventy degrees, with a subtle scent of flowers. Dave gave her a wink as he left, and Monica scowled at him.

It’s their first time, she thought, annoyed. Don’t spoil things, Dave. It should be dark and awful and terrible, but…pure and wonderful too. Really, sometimes I think you have no class at all.

Of course, he wasn’t really a lucy, though the Doña fed on him now and then; basically he was a renfield, a helper-worker. Monica looked at the time again, moving towards the door, and wondering if she should have warned the Bertsches about the special thing Adrienne could do to you with her mind. Technically it involved stimulating certain centers in the brain with jolts of the Power, though it certainly didn’t feel like it happened in the head. They’d certainly be experiencing that in the next couple of hours, but…

No, it’ll be such a nice surprise and help them come to terms with things. It feels so much better than you’d expect from hearing someone talk about it. Though it does sort of change your self-image.

Not long to dawn…could Adrienne have been delayed, so that she’d have to spend the day in deep water?

No. She’s here, she’s close.

There was an unmistakable flavor when nightwalkers approached, if they weren’t hiding and you’d experienced it before. A chill, a feeling of being lost somehow, even in the most familiar place, as if the world had changed around you to another place with completely different rules. The couple looked about wildly; they didn’t know what it meant. Adrienne Brézé entered her lair through the wall, flowing, twenty-two feet of reticulated python marked in blue and green and black. Jessica gave a series of hiccupping moans and shook in terror too paralytic for anything louder as the head reared over the foot of the bed and then slid under the sheet, winding itself around her body coil upon coil. Monica shivered herself and licked her lips; she knew exactly how that coiling embrace felt, so cool and resilient and irresistibly strong.

The snake sparkled and disappeared as Adrienne returned to her own flesh-body. Jessica tried to scramble up as the yellow-flecked dark eyes opened and turned to look at her with a smile, but Adrienne pounced in a blur of speed, arms and legs trapping her and mouth lunging for the neck with the lips rolled all the way back from the teeth. Monica slipped the door closed as the victim screamed once, high and desperate, and her husband shouted in helpless anguish.

The door was nearly soundproof, but Dave was looking at a screen set in the desk of the sitting room outside. Monica marched over and tapped three times on the screen, locking it out of internal surveillance mode. The sensors were keyed to her fingerprints, of course.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” he protested.

“Whatever I please, because she listens to me , Dave.”

The man snarled at her; she wasn’t impressed, having been snarled at by people who did it much better.

“Where do you get off being so high and mighty?” he said. “She-”

“ She’s a Shadowspawn adept, I’m a favorite lucy…and you are just a creep , Dave. You are a…a toad . Show a little respect for people’s feelings!”

He met her eyes for a second, then glanced aside. She went on briskly:

“Go and tell the captain she’s back. He knows what to do then. And tell the cooks…”

She thought. “A late lunch for two here. And something for the Bertsches in their cabin, something rich and special with plenty of liquids. They’re going to be shaky and they’ll need to talk things over and have some privacy.”

He nodded and stalked out. Monica nodded to herself as she sat and brought the screen live, setting it to turn on the camera and record, and began to compose her daily message to Sophia and Josh, composing her face into a smile.

Somebody had to keep up standards around here.

“We had a wonderful time in Istanbul. I’m sending a file of pictures and yes , there will be presents. I saw Leon and Leila with their dad in Vienna and they say hi! -”

The Caucasus

“There it is,” Ellen said grimly, as the Tulip came to a stop half a mile offshore.

The wreck of the gulet they’d been chasing lay on the low muddy shore, both masts broken off and lying forward in a tangle of rigging and sails. A huge ragged hole in the shoreward side gaped empty; past this spot the coast rose to low jagged cliffs. The wind was off the land, cool and smelling of green and damp earth. Up above the waterline was a section of planking and beams, its edges matching the hole in the ship’s flank.

They were well north of Batumi, the main port of Georgia; somewhere close to one side or the other of the border with the secessionist Republic of Abkhazia, an irritated triangular piece of land thrust like a sore thumb into the westernmost Caucasus Mountains. She’d vaguely recalled reading headlines about troubles here all her life. If she recalled correctly, they’d started before she was born, back when the old Soviet Union broke up.

A quick tap on the tablet had produced more articles about multisided conflicts than she’d wanted to see or had time to read, including the usual massacres, double-dealings, reciprocal ethnic cleansings and convoluted feuds involving Circassians, Abkhazians, Dagestanies, Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Russians, Turks, and a clutch of other ethno-linguistic groups mostly about the size of a moderate high school district. All with histories of mutual hatred stretching back to mythical times, and all wrapped in absolutely contradictory narratives, with each minute groupescule insisting with fanatical intensity that their version was the capital-T Truth. Most of the differences between them looked invisible or deeply trivial to an outsider, though you’d be well-advised not to say so.

Stalin had come from near here, and apparently the only time the locals weren’t bashing and knifing each other was when they all cringed together under the knout of some mad-dog tyrant and his secret police.

“That was clever,” Adrian said grudgingly, looking at the wreck of the ship. “But then, Harvey always was. There are no cargo facilities here. That puzzled me for a while, I thought this location might be dyezinformatsiya .”

“Subtle guy, Harvey,” Eric said.

“Blasting a hole in the side of the ship to get something out is subtle?” Peter asked.