S. Stirling - Shadows of Falling Night

She winced. She didn’t in the least regret shooting Tōkairin Michiko, who had been a murderous sociopath with the powers of a junior-grade goddess and who’d been trying to kill Adrian at the time, not to mention Eric Salvador. Still, the thought of passing by the physical shell, gradually decaying in its deep coma was…

Creepy. But I am the Connoisseur of Creep by now, and that’s relatively minor.

Down, until the lighting looked as if it should have Installed During the Reign of the Red Czar written on it, and the masonry might have come from long-vanished incarnations of this city-the Tbilisi of the Ottomans, or the Safavid Shahs, or Queen Tamar the Great. Until they were in a corridor of old rock and crumbling mortar, with a single bulb hanging from a wire. She looked around: nothing but dimness, dampness, and a smell of old wet stone running into a dead end. He looked around.

“Solid rock for many yards in all directions except above us,” he said. “Guard me.”

She gulped slightly and drew her revolver, trying to be conscious of the long corridor and the ceiling at the same time. Training and Wreakings made it harder to come upon her invisible and impalpable…but not absolutely impossible. Ellen controlled her breathing and pushed fear away, not denying it but denying it the attention that turned into a feedback cycle. Instead she opened her senses and simply waited.

A click. “ Got it,” Adrian breathed. “Oh, that was clever, of her. And dangerous, to us.”

Ellen looked down; a square trap-door showed in the corridor’s floor. “Booby-traps?” she said.

“Of course.” A grin. “But I am one of the two most powerful adepts…slightly more powerful than the other, and there are times when brute strength is useful.”

He levered the trapdoor up and dropped through, the glow of his pen-light showing through. “About six feet down. Come.”

She sat on the edge, felt his hand on her shoes, then slid through. He didn’t precisely catch her; it was more a matter of a guiding hand, and enough experience to land without a dangerous shock. They were in a small square room, rather like a largish walk-in closet. This looked more recent, with the marks of power-drills on the walls, and a low tunnel led off. Adrian headed into it and she followed, stooping, the skin between her shoulder blades itching. As they went she tried to imagine how this related to the structure above.

“We must be about below…”

“The main theater,” Adrian said, and stopped.

Ahead of them was a blank oval steel door. Adrian leaned palms and forehead against it. “Oh, clever again,” he said. “This can only be opened from the inside, once it is closed. The locking mechanism is much too massive to move with the Power. And it is silver-plated on the inside, and to either side. I must…I must try to go around.”

They looked at each other, appalled. Nightwalking thorough solid rock for any distance was utterly disorienting. Not quite suicide, but close enough. She opened her mouth to start an argument she knew she would lose-lose, and be left with the body while God knew what happened to the real Adrian. Then a familiar sensation came over her, a coldness, and a little implanted ting-ting-ting feeling at the back of her brain.

“Nightwalker!” Adrian hissed, his hand going to his knife.

There was a chunk from behind the door, and it swung slowly open. Dale Shadowblade stood there, in nondescript dark clothing…and then he smiled, and changed. So swiftly and skillfully that the clothing didn’t fall away during the transition, though it was baggier on the slim dark man.

“Why are you taking on the seeming of the man you killed?” Adrian asked.

His great-grandfather’s brother smiled. “Have you not guessed yet, my old?” he said in impeccable, old-fashioned aristocrat’s French. “Name of a black dog, I should have thought it obvious by now. Yet even your sister, far more suspicious, did not guess.”

“Arnaud!” Adrian said.

“Indeed, Arnaud,” the man…or what had once been a man…laughed. “Now post-corporeal once more. I killed your sister’s Apache…Apache in both senses of the word…not he, me.”

“The powdered silver…”

“Self-administered, so that when we grappled he was paralyzed by the sudden pain.”

“And it is possible-”

“To reinhabit a body vacated by the death of the aetheric form? Yes. Not even a prolonged process, though far from easy. I became interested because possession was one of the few myths that did not seem to have its roots in us. Most said that it arose because we could take the seeming of our victims when we nightwalked, but I suspected otherwise. That savage of your sister’s gave me the empty body to use. Observe…”

The two Shadowspawn locked eyes; as she watched, expression drained from both of them, and Arnaud’s eyes became blank glowing yellow. Communication flowed between them, sensed but as impalpable as if it was water that moved through sand.

Adrian stirred and shook his head. “My God, it is true,” he said. “We all underestimated you, it seems.”

“Yes. And now I shall flit away, a mosquito too elusive to skin as a wolf or shoot from an elephant’s back like tiger. Adieu, mon cher , and I very much hope we never meet again.”

He sauntered away down the path they had followed; Ellen tracked him with her pistol, and he looked over his shoulder for a moment to blow a kiss from his fingertips as he vanished into the darkness.

Adrian shook his head. “He showed me what he had done. Imposssible to lie at that level…no time!”

They stepped through into what might have been a dungeon once, or a section of long-disused sewer or storm-drain dug in the palmy days before the Revolution.

“Her coffin is within,” he said.

“A coffin? She’s in a coffin ?” Ellen said. “Adrienne wouldn’t be caught dead in a coffin. Well, you know what I mean,” she added defensively, as he snorted.

The chamber was long and round, cut from the living rock; water glistened here and there as their flashlights moved across a surface that still bore the scars of the drills. Nobody had ever smoothed them, but a mesh of new-gleaming wire covered the whole interior except for the roof.

“See,” he said, directing the little light upward. “They entered in the body, and left as nightwalkers, closing the door behind them. Arnaud…Dale Shadowblade, they thought…locked it behind them. Then the only way to enter would be through the solid roof.”

“Wouldn’t they be afraid of being buried alive? The bomb…”

“This is solid rock and deep. And they could always dig themselves out from the outside afterwards-one can be in two places at once. My sister likes bombs; let us proceed.”

More than a dozen of the elongated boxes stood on frame bases. They didn’t look all that much like coffins; more like featureless footlockers of the appropriate size. One in the center stood on a higher frame than the others, with the Brézé arms in a golden plaque attached to the upper surface.

“Vanity,” Adrian said. “At a guess, this is an abandoned effort at an extension to the sewer system. Easy enough to expunge it from the records…and arrange accidents for all who knew of it. But the time, the patience for such a plan…”

“Maybe she did something like this anywhere there might be a full Council meeting,” Ellen said.

“My sister likes bombs. Let us oblige her.”

They removed their backpacks. Eric and Adrian had made them up; simple blocks of semtex plastic explosive, with mechanical timers. They placed one on each of the…

Coffins. It’s traditional, so let’s call them coffins.