The Council of Shadows Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  NOVELS OF THE SHADOWSPAWN

  A TAINT IN THE BLOOD

  NOVELS OF THE CHANGE

  ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME

  AGAINST THE TIDE OF YEARS

  ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY

  DIES THE FIRE

  THE PROTECTOR’S WAR

  A MEETING AT CORVALLIS

  THE SUNRISE LANDS

  THE SCOURGE OF GOD

  THE SWORD OF THE LADY

  OTHER NOVELS BY S. M. STIRLING

  THE PESHAWAR LANCERS CONQUISTADOR

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, May 2011

  Copyright © Steven M. Stirling, 2010 All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Stirling, S. M.

  The council of shadows/S. M. Stirling.

  p. cm.—(Shadowspawn; 2)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51477-1

  I. Title.

  PS3569.T543C68 2011

  813’.54—dc22 2010052285

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Richard Foss, for help with the fine details of food, wine, and restaurants, and invaluable hints about Paris and other locations.

  To Kier Salmon, for all sorts of help throughout construction!

  To Marino Panzanelli and Marco Pertoni for help with Italian, and also the other members of the Stirling Listserv.

  To Melinda Snodgrass, Emily Mah, George R. R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Vic Milan, John J. Miller, Jan Stirling, and Ian Tregellis of Critical Mass, for constant help and advice as the book was under construction.

  To Jack Williamson, Fred Pohl, Sprague de Camp, and other Golden Agers for inspiration; and Roger Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen.

  To Joe’s Diner, which makes the best Greek salad in Santa Fe, and to Roland and Sheila Richter, proprietors, who put up with the weird guy in the far booth cackling and talking to himself as he typed. And to Lisa, favorite waitress.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ellen Tarnowski ran through the darkness, darkness so thick that the jungle was merely shapes of a deeper black.

  Branches flogged at her naked body, ripping and stinging, stinging again as sweat ran down her body in the hot, airless night. Rocks cut at her feet, and mud clung. Breath rasped in and out through a mouth gone dry as old leather, though she struggled to keep it even, as years of cross-country running had taught her. Fear made her heart thunder between her ribs, and her hands were outstretched to keep her from running into a tree trunk. They did nothing when a foot came down on emptiness. With a scream she pitched forward and tumbled down the slope, clutching at bushes that cut her hands and wrenched loose strands of her long yellow hair.

  Behind her came a high, racking snarl that built up into a great squalling feline screech. There was the rage of hunger in it, and killinglust, and an appalling hint of laughter.

  The tumble ended with a thump that knocked the breath out of her, in a little clearing of waist-high grass and flowers that showed like pale trumpets in the night. Clouds parted above, and great strange-colored stars shone like jewels around a pale moon. Ellen pushed herself backwards with hands and heels, her eyes going wider.

  A tiger flowed down the slope and slunk into the open. It was nightshade itself, striped in black-on-black, its eyes pools of molten sulfur yellow. It snarled like an ivory-fanged saw as it came forward, placing its paws with slow precision. As the teeth showed a voice sounded in Ellen’s mind, hatefully familiar, soft-toned and musical.

  Hallo, chérie. ’Allo, my sweet tasty curvy little blond wonton dumpling of delight! Let’s play now, shall we? Play-play-play!

  It came closer, taunting in its sleek fluid grace. Then its muscles rippled beneath the midnight coat as it crouched to spring.

  Now, how about a nice cozy scream? Fear first, mousy-girl. Then the agony. Then the blood, your lovely blood . . .

  Ellen did scream as it leapt. Then another streak came through the darkness. The arcs met in midair, and the two huge cats went tumbling over in a blur of striking paws tipped with claws like knives, gleaming fangs and blazing yellow eyes. The newcomer was more massively built, as much like a bear as a cat, tawny colored, with heavy hulking forelimbs and seveninch fangs that jutted saberlike below its jaws. The tumble ended with both rearing and hammering at each other in a blurring frenzy of paw strokes.

  Ellen screamed again, this time in rage. A sword lay near her on the ground, its silvery curved blade marked with glyphs that blazed back the moonlight. She snatched it up, darted in and struck a long lashing blow with both hands on the hilt, as if it were a backhand smash in a game of tennis.
The black hide of the tiger parted and blood spilled, the red nearly black itself in the night. She struck again and again and again, lost in the hate that possessed her—

  And woke.

  “Uhhh. Uhhhh. Uhhhh.”

  She gasped for breath, feeling her sweat soaking the sheet and suddenly turning cold and gelid, eyes blinking in the light of the bedside lamp. Adrian’s hand closed on her arm, careful not to make her feel constrained as a hug might.

  “You’re awake, darling. You’re awake. I’m here.”

  She grabbed him with a sudden convulsive movement, burrowing into the strength and warmth as his arms closed around her gently. The big room had the still darkness that comes an hour before dawn, and she could smell the sea and cool scents of dew and rock through the balcony windows. After a few moments she began to shiver in reaction, her skin turning to goose bumps. Adrian wrapped her in a blanket and pulled her back against him, rocking her slightly as her dry sobs wound down.

  “That was a bad one,” she said. “Adrian, was that sabertooth you?”

  He nodded, his chin moving against her head. “Yes. I walked into that part of the dream.”

  Ellen felt dizzy with exhaustion. “Why didn’t you kill her?”

  “Too risky, my sweet one. That wasn’t Adrienne. Adrienne is dead; what you saw in your dream was a memory, a projection, part of your own psyche. Only you could kill it safely. As you killed Adrienne herself. You were very brave, then and now.”

  Ellen sighed wearily. “I wish killing the memories were as easy,” she said. “I just got around my childhood and then I get more trauma dumped on me. Dad goes, Adrienne steps into the all-powerful-nightmareabuser slot.”

  “I am so sorry, my darling,” Adrian said softly.

  She thumped her fist against his back in weak anger. “Not your fault! You didn’t do it!”

  Then she was too tired to speak, but too shivering-taut to sleep. Adrian laid her down, stripped off the sopping sheets, and began kneading the muscles along her spine with strong, expert fingers. There were muted clicks as things adjusted and relaxed; then he covered her again and brought a glass.

  “Drink,” he said. “You need to hydrate and get your blood sugar up.”

  It was sweet lemonade; the landlady of the pensione kept a carafe of it in their rooms, squeezed each day from the grove that surrounded the building. She drank it gratefully and lay back in his embrace, cocooned in the blankets.

  “Sleep, darling, sleep. I will watch over you.”

  “Urrgggh,” she said.

  Ellen knuckled at her eyes. Adrian waited until she’d blinked them clear before sitting down on the edge of the bed. Bright sunlight spilled through the louvers of the bedroom window, falling over the hatched tile floor and cream-colored stucco of the walls and the tumbled linen of the bedding. She sighed and leaned her head against the flat muscle of his shoulder, like hard living rubber under the soft fine-grained olive skin.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I am sorry that you have the dreams,” he said. “I’m glad that I can help.”

  “Oh, brother, do you ever!” she said, and sighed. “It can’t be much fun, being on a honeymoon with someone who wakes up screaming every five or six days, and . . . well, you know, freezes up sometimes.”

  He chuckled. “Anyone else would be catatonic, or dead, or mad beyond help after six months as my sister’s prisoner. You are a very strong person, my love.”

  Ellen laughed too, ruefully, stretching, aware that she smelled a little of stale fear-sweat.

  “I’m sort of a stinky person right now. I’ll go shower.”

  “And I will see to breakfast,” he said.

  God, he’s tactful, she thought—right now she wasn’t in the mood for a shower à deux, something they often enjoyed.

  But then again, he’s telepathic. Men keep saying women expect them to read their minds. It’s a little odd being married to one who really can do it.

  Adrian was usually fairly tactful about reading her actual thoughts, but apparently he couldn’t help picking up her feelings. The really important thing was that he cared about them, too, but actually knowing for a fact what they were made him feel marvelously sensitive to her.

  The hot water leached tension out of her muscles; she let it cascade over her face and sighed.

  A new life, she thought. After a near-death experience . . . I don’t really miss my old one. In the old one, I didn’t have Adrian. But I do miss being normal, the way I was back in Santa Fe. Funky-artsy normal, at least. I wonder what’s happening back there? Have they forgotten me already? How did they react when I just . . . vanished?

  The Santa Fe Fire Department was turning off their hoses; dank steam rose into the night, and chilly water dripped from the buildings to either side where they’d sprayed to keep the flames from spreading; there was a blank wall across the street. It was high-desert winter, cold, dry, moonlight visible on the white peaks of the Sangres floating off to the north. No city stink, which he liked; there were only sixty thousand people in what passed for New Mexico’s capital city.

  Capital large town, maybe, Eric Salvador thought.

  “So what made it burn down, hey?” he asked the investigator from the fire marshal’s office.

  “Arson,” she said to the detective. “And it burned up.”

  “Yeah, arson. Some specifics would be nice, Alice,” he said.

  “That’s the thing. I can’t find any reason it should have burned. None of the usual indicators. It just did.”

  “Very much.”

  He ducked under the yellow police tape, a stocky man of thirty or so with a mustache and a blue jowl who’d put on a few pounds lately, not many, not enough to hide his hard outlines, with his coarse black hair still in a high-and-tight. There was a deep scar across one olive cheek, and he rubbed at it with a thumb; it hurt a little sometimes, where the flying metal of the IED had cracked the bone. The scar ran down under his mustache, giving a bit of a quirk to his mouth.

  “One thing I can tell you,” the investigator said. “This thing burned hot.”

  “Heavy accelerants? I can’t smell anything.”

  “Right, gasoline or diesel you usually can. But damned if I can prove it yet, maybe with the lab work . . . I’d say yes, though. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if it wanted to burn.”

  “Alice . . .”

  “You know I’m not superstitious. But there’s no sign it started in one place and spread. Everything capable of combining with oxygen just went up all at once, whoosh. The cutlery melted, and that’s a lot hotter than your typical house fire.”

  The building had been a little two-story apartment house, one up and one down. This wasn’t far off Canyon Road and the strip of galleries, and close to the Acequia Madre, the ancient irrigation canal, which meant it had been fairly expensive. But not close enough to be real adobe, which in Santa Fe meant old and pricey. Brown stucco pseudopueblo-Spanish style built over frame, like nearly everything in town that stayed on the right side of the building code.

  Alice had worked with him before. She was a bit older than he—mid-thirties—and always looked tired, her blond hair short and disorderly. He liked the way she never let a detail slip by, no matter how hard she had to work at it.

  “ ‘Santa Fe, where prestige is a mud house on a dirt road,’” she said, quoting a local saying. “So it’s not likely an insurance torch. Not enough money here.”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t afford this place either. When it was still here. You’re right, it must have gone up like a match head.”

  There wasn’t enough left to tell any more details. There was a heavy wet-ash smell where bits and blackened pieces rested on the scorched concrete pad of the foundation. He blinked again. That smell, and the way the bullets had chewed at the mud brick below the window flecking bits of adobe into his face. The way his armor had chafed, the fear as he made himself jerk up over the sill and aim the M-4, laying the red dot, the instant when the
mouj had stared at him wide-eyed just before the burst tracked across his body in a row of black-red dots and made him dance like a jointed doll . . .

  “Eric?” Alice said, jarring him out of the memory.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Deep thought.”

  She spared him any offensive sympathy and he nodded to her in silent gratitude, still feeling a little shaky. Got to get over this. I can have flashbacks later.

  “Let me have the workup when you can,” he said.

  Of course, when I was on the rock pile I said I’d deal with it later, when it wouldn’t screw the mission. This is later, I suppose.

  “I’ll zap it to your notepad,” Alice said. “I’ve got to get some more samples now.”

  He turned away. Cesar Martinez was talking to the Lopez family, minus the three children who were with some neighbor or relative; the couple was sitting in one of the emergency vans, and someone had given them Styrofoam cups of coffee. His own nose twitched at the smell, though what he really wanted was a drink. Or a cigarette. He suppressed both urges and listened to his partner’s gentle voice, calm and sympathetic. He was a hotshot, he’d go far, he was good at making people want to help him, soothing them, never stepping on what they had to say.

  “I was going to go back in. They were gone, and I was going to go back in and then—” the husband said.

  Cesar made a sympathetic noise. “You were having dinner when the man forced you out of the house?”

  “Take-out Chinese, from Chow’s,” the wife said. Her husband took up the thread:

  “And this man came in. He had a gun . . . a gun like a shotgun, but smaller, like a pistol,” Anthony Lopez said. “It still looked pretty damn big. So was he.”