The Council of Shadows (5 page)

“You
did
more, eventually. That was more important than hurrying and failing!”

“Yes. She never . . .”

“Took me into her memory palace? No. Told me about it, and said we'd go there when she wanted to get more . . . extreme.”

Ellen shivered a little, and Adrian put an arm around her shoulder. Seriously:

“We must begin your training now. I have no objection to rescuing and defending you, my darling, but you should be able to defend yourself. I may not be enough, someday!”

Ellen nodded emphatically. “Yeah, I like
playing
at being helpless sometimes. The real thing's not nearly so much fun.”

“And we will have work to do that will involve risk. I hate the thought, for you, but—”

“Hey, buster, your sister and her friends are trying to destroy the
world
, remember? You think I'm going to stay in a bunker or . . . or some
resort
sipping margaritas and let you do all the work? You're older than you look, but you're not
that
much of an antique sexist, I hope!”

He laughed, and touched the tips of his fingers to her cheek.

“No. Knowing you as I do now, I would expect you to want to fight by my side. This will involve a great deal of effort, though. You must learn how to fight—fight in a number of ways—how to hide, how to pursue, everything from defensive driving to forged documents. And I must show you a number of things about the Power.”

“I don't have enough of the Shadowspawn genes to use it, you said.”

Adrian nodded. “But I can help plant . . . artifacts . . . in your mind that will render you less vulnerable to it. Wreakings, localized permanent modifications of reality. I
am
an adept, and both more powerful and better trained than nearly anyone of my generation.”

“
That's
comforting,” she said. “Is there an advantage to doing it here in, ummm, your head, though?”

He nodded. “How long have we been here?”

“Oh . . . three, five minutes?”

“Four and a bit, to us. Back in the real world . . . less than five seconds. I can stretch the perceived duration. By the time we leave for Paris in a few months, you will have had
years
.”

She thought for a moment. Something nagged at her.

“Hey, maybe that's where the Elf Hill legends came from? But look, this is as real to you as it is to me, right?”

Ellen took a breath, tapped one foot on the tile of the floor. Heat from the fire on her legs, thin mountain air in her lungs, scent of burning conifer wood in her nostrils. You
couldn't
tell this from reality . . . until something impossible happened. And she'd learned over the past year that her previous idea of what constituted the possible out in the real world was far, far too limited.

“Yes.”

“And you can shape things here just by thinking about them?”

He made a gesture and they were
elsewhere
. This was a huge room, like a converted warehouse. Metal beams overhead, light from high dusty windows around the top of the metal box, a floor of coarse concrete, with reed mats rolled against the walls and big swinging doors opening on a vista of palms leading down to a river. There were wall mirrors in some places, gymnastic equipment elsewhere, ropes dangling from the rafters, odd-looking staffs and swords and various esoteric Eastern-looking things racked neatly around the tall rusty steel pillars.

The air had a warm, moist feel, scented with spices, frangipani blossom and wet earth, and a hint of diesel fumes. Then she looked down at herself; she was wearing an outfit something like a
gi
but not quite, loose trousers and a jacket whose sleeves didn't quite come to the wrists. The coarse tough cotton slid over her skin.. . .

“So,” she said. “How come Shadowspawn bother with, like, ruling the world and stuff? Can't you have everything you want
here
? Better than you possibly could in the real world? Sort of like TV, only fullsensory and you're directing the program.”

He nodded. “But those vulnerable to that temptation didn't breed very successfully,” he said. “We are a very old species, considerably older than modern humans, shaped by both evolution and the Power. To one of us, this is . . . fundamentally unsatisfying, after a while. Or perhaps satisfying only in limited doses? I think the ability to build this interior reality is a side effect of other aspects of the Power, perhaps the telepathic organ.”

“Okay. Second question, it's just my
mind
here. I know from tennis—”

At which she was a more than decent player at a level that would have let her go pro if she'd wanted to devote her life to it.

“—and running that the body has to learn too. If I learn something here, will my body know it?”

“Your nerves and reflexes and memory will. Somatic memory transfers very well. Your body is already in excellent shape from the tennis and the cross-country running.. . .”

He looked her up and down with frank appreciation and snapped his teeth at her. Ellen shuddered with a complex of emotions, pleasure and fear. He wasn't the first Shadowspawn who'd used that gesture around her. It was playfully flirtatious in a way that might be sexual or not . . . unless it wasn't friendly, in which case it was a sign you were being given the sort of look a chocolate-coconut macaroon got before the first nibble.

Bad Shadowspawn liked to play with their food; strong emotions and sensations made the blood taste much better. Like a wink, context was all.

“So this will cut down on how much you have to train.. . . You will need to build more upper-body strength, work on your flexibility, yes, and some real-world repetition to key the lessons into muscle memory, but not much beyond that.”

His face went somber: not exactly cold, but a little remote.

“Understand, Ellen, that while we are training I am not your lover or your husband, or your friend. I am the
teacher
, and what you are learning may be the difference between life and death—or between life and eternal damnation. You accept this?”

“Yes.” She stopped herself from adding,
darling
.

“And it will be very hard work.”

“I'm not afraid of that.”

“There will be pain,
serious
pain.”

“Okay, understood. Look, Adrian, I know you're a lot older than I am and have all sorts of knowledge and power and . . . and shit. If I weren't okay with that, I'd have said, ‘Thanks for the rescue, fuck off,' not ‘Yes, I'll marry you.' So here, you're Yoda and I'm the padawan. Right. I've assimilated that. Let the hard stuff commence.”

“Understood.”

He reached out, plucked a knife from the wall, turned and threw in a blur of speed. The hard impact knocked Ellen back. She could see the black hilt standing in her right shoulder, and her hands tried to grasp it. Then the shock passed and there was pain, enormous, all-pain, everywhere, the floor rushed up and her head went
thock
against it and she screamed——and she was back on her feet. Her hand went to her smooth, unmarked shoulder.

“You son of a
bitch
!” she shouted. “That
hurt
!”

“It does,” he said somberly, and laid a hand on her shoulder. “But here I can . . . reset, undo. My darling, training is wonderful, but the only way to learn to fight well is to
fight
. And learn,
if
you survive. But here you can fight, lose, die, and
still learn from the mistake that killed or crippled you
.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay, remembering previous words here. Unless I get too blasé about it because I know it's not real.”

“You will not. The fear and pain operate below the conscious level.”

“Okay, if you say so . . . Where is this, if it's based on anywhere real?”

“The training salon . . . dojo, though the Thais don't use that word . . . of a man named Saragam, in a little town north of Bangkok.”

Adrian made a gesture, and the place was gone. Others flickered by. A crowded street in a European city with a blare of noise and a waft of pastry baking, a tiny atoll with a single palm tree and cerulean waves breaking white on a sugar-grain beach, a pine forest stark and silent with winter, snow freezing cold on her feet and heavy on the boughs. Then the converted warehouse again.

He sighed. “Harvey Ledbetter took me here, not long after my . . . foster parents died, as part of
my
training for the Brotherhood. The real here, that is. I miss him.”

Ellen felt her mouth quirk. “I realize Harvey's your wise grizzled mentor and second dad and comrade in arms and all those manly bonding things, and I like him myself. He helped save my life. But he's
not
welcome on our honeymoon, darling.”

Adrian grinned at her. “Actually, I had a very bad crush on him for the
longest
time. He was a strikingly handsome man then, you know, and very charismatic. There were attempts at seduction. All failures, alas.”

She laughed, a startled gurgle. “What did he think of
that
?”

“Quiet horror and loud irritation, my sweet, and the odd swat upside the head. Now let us begin. First, how to stand—”

 

 

What felt like twelve long hours later Ellen opened her eyes, and spent a moment being astonished that she
wasn't
exhausted. For a moment the tiredness was there, like the ghost of sensation, then it faded completely and she stretched, refreshed from sleep. Adrian was sitting up and looking at her, twining a lock of her curly blond hair around one finger and smiling. She made her face grow thoughtful, almost awestruck, and spoke solemnly:

“I know . . . kung fu.”

He frowned for a moment. “Saragam's style is not really—”

Then he winced. His film experience wasn't
entirely
with Euro classics.

“For that, I should make you fold Paris in half. Or spank you,” he said.

“Not until after dinner. I'm hungry, too.”

“I
look like death,” Adrienne Brézé said softly, shifting in the clinic bed and wincing a little. “I
feel
like death incarnate, and not in a
good
way.”

“At least you're not speaking in SMALL CAPITALS,” Tōkairin Michiko said from her chair beside the bed.

There was a pickup overhead, and Adrienne had routed it to the big screen at the foot; the view out through the French doors into the courtyard with its fountains and bougainvillea was pretty, but it got boring after a while. She
did
look like death in the screen's pitiless image, and not one of the more glamorous versions. Skeletally thin, and having good bones didn't make that any more attractive. Not to mention the discolored, peeling skin and the glistening ointments and the fact that every hair on her head and body had dropped out.

Like a famine victim, only not so funny,
she thought.

She ached. Her digestive system felt as if it were packed with mud from the back of her throat to her lower intestine. She
itched
. Not just the amputated foot where the regeneration was starting far too slowly, but all over. Having several dozen milligrams of silver solution and radioactive waste pumped into you would be bad enough for a human, but the Shadowspawn metabolism was more vulnerable to both. If she'd gotten the full dose . . .

“You do look pretty awful,” Michiko said. “It's a good thing I cut your foot off in one swell foop.”

Then she giggled. “I only beat Dale to it by a second or two because I had a wakizashi on me. Dale was going to use his bowie, and Dmitri just went around roaring and waving a chair in the air.”

“He was a silverback gorilla at the time. It's easy to get lost in the beast when it's that close to your own form.”

“
Especially
with Dmitri and gorillas. But one advantage of all that old Japan stuff grandfather liked is that I had the short sword on me.”

“That was quick work,” Adrienne acknowledged. “I'd have died if you had not cut the foot off before much of that Hell-brew got into my circulatory system—and I might have been too distracted to go postcorporeal in time, too. Even the best plans and probability fluxes are . . .irritatingly uncontrollable at times.”

“Well, your darling brother was involved, which screws the Power. Why don't you just spend more time inside while you're healing?”

“Because it's
boring
playing games in my head after a while, Michi,” Adrienne replied. “So I ration myself, that way it's a relief when I do it. Besides, I have to keep track of what's going on and make decisions.”

“You could night-walk and then sleep away the days,” she pointed out. “Your night-walking manifestation is so good even I can't tell you're out-of-body unless I really concentrate.”

“Night-walking . . . my body's still too weak to have the personality gone for long, it needs me in here concentrating on healing. Unless I want to go postcorporeal for good, and I don't, not yet. It would be inconvenient. I'm going to stay corporeal until I get
old
.”

Michiko wasn't being very considerate—but then, they were both Shadowspawn, and empathy simply wasn't their breed's strong point; Michiko was nearly as purebred as the Brézés.

The other Shadowspawn was also looking disgustingly sleek and contented, dressed in a pale silk summer dress and strapped sandals; she'd turned her hair blond again—a minor Wreaking—and it fell in silky waves past her high-cheeked Asian face.