Harvey drank another swallow of the raki as he felt the featherlight touch of their probes, and exhaled in satisfaction as the warmth hit his belly. They looked at each other.
“He is clean,” Anjali said. Then, cautiously: “As far as I can tell.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I read it too,” Jack said after a moment.
Harvey nodded. There was a click-clack as he broke the action of the coach gun open, palmed the shells, and set them down neatly on the table. Both the other operatives relaxed infinitesimally.
“Let me tell you two a little about the wheels within the turning wheels,” he began.
As he spoke, he wondered what had been going on among the enemy, a category that had ballooned uncomfortably of late. Something had happened, or he’d be tooling along towards his target. There had probably been enough wheels within wheels on the other side to make up a fair chronometer.
’cause if you’ve got two Shadowspawn in a room, you’ve got a conspiracy and three double-crosses.
CHAPTER FOUR
Paris
“Good of you to see me before the reception at Great-grandfather’s tomorrow,” Adrienne said. “Just family for this, eh?”
The problem with being a Brézé, she thought, looking at the unreadable face so much like a male version of hers, is that we all look so alike. Well, of course incest is an ancient family tradition. There was even a eugenic justification until recently; now it’s just fun. For some of the participants, at least.
Her great-grandfather’s brother Arnaud Brézé and she were meeting at Carré des Feuillants, a restaurant appropriately enough located in the jewelers’ district on the Place Vendôme, since it catered to the appetites of a similar clientele.
She was a little surprised that Arnaud had picked it, because while the exterior was 18th-century-the entire neighborhood had originally been built by Louis XIV as a monument to himself, which gave her some suspicions about his genetics-the inside was a series of smallish pale monochromatic rooms, with Modernist art on the walls. Quite good Modernist art, but she’d noted that the really old ones just couldn’t grasp modes more than a generation after their transition to post-corporeality-it wasn’t simply that they didn’t like it: she didn’t herself. They had trouble seeing it, for good or ill.
It was white noise rather than a disagreeable message. She’d seen theories by the few scholars among her race that the extreme stability of the Old Stone Age-tens of thousands of years without so much as a change in flint-knapping styles-had been due to the unseen dominance of the planet by post-corporeals who lived millennia or tens of millennia themselves.
The two of them had this roomlet to themselves, of course, which made the layout convenient. Even today simply commandeering a large establishment was discouraged by the Council, though the need for secrecy was not what it had once been.
“Not quite what I would’ve expected of you, Arnaud,” she said, waving her hand at the decor.
“One attempts to do something new occasionally,” he said. “Otherwise, well, what is the point of simply continuing so long?”
He shrugged, and she had to remind her subconscious that he wasn’t her brother, especially since he was taking extra care with his human form. They both had the same black yellow-flecked eyes as she, the same build like a compact leopard, and the same raven hair and triangular olive-skinned face.
The auras differed too, of course, though that might not be as obvious to someone not of the family. There was a slight but definite overtone of rot to Arnaud’s, half sensed out of the corner of the eye, and that curious metallic flavor the post-corporeals had. Something somehow inorganic to their spirits.
And she couldn’t imagine Adrian wearing that boulevardier outfit, the latest thing for the man-about-town a hundred and twenty years ago, right down to the white spats and the carnation.
“This building is even older than I,” he said. “My father massacred the communards not a thousand meters from here and one might have looked from the same windows to enjoy the spectacle, even if the interior was a town house then. So it is no new thing for the blood to flow here, eh?”
Or at least I can’t imagine Adrian wearing it except as a joke, she thought. Then, disturbingly: Perhaps Arnaud is also joking, in his way?
It was as well to remind yourself occasionally that the post-corporeals hadn’t lived…well, survived…this long by accident.
“Though I had thought we would speak alone,” he added, glancing at Monica.
“Oh, I have no secrets from her,” Adrienne said. “That fact produces the most charming fits of guilty self-accusation late at night. Though no attempts at suicide for the last few years. Still, the weeping misery has its charm, and then there is the pleading to yield the blood, or suffer well-deserved pain.”
Monica smiled and patted her long mane of platinum hair; tonight it was worn up and secured by long golden pins headed by carved carnelian buttons, which complemented the warm russet of her silk sheath dress. Adrienne was in an outfit of boots, glove-tight black leather pants, a long full-sleeved white silk shirt-tunic, and a black embroidered velvet vest.
“Well, Doña, you have to admit I do self-abasement well,” she said, and took a forkful of her appetizer. “It’s my job, after all.”
“Granted,” Adrienne said. “You have developed a real talent for it.”
“You say the nicest things sometimes,” Monica replied with a sunny smile.
Adrienne ate as well; the dish deserved its title of lobster with three affectations, and the sweet meatiness of the Breton crustacean went charmingly with the mushrooms and okra.
“It is sometimes obvious that you both come from California,” Arnaud said dryly.
“Name of a dog, that is the second time in two days someone has thrown the purely geographical locus of my birth at me, and I cannot even torture you to death for the discourtesy, the way I did the first.”
She looked at Monica. “I am going to punish you for that.”
“Goodie!” she said brightly, a flash of fear and longing running through her aura. “The whip?”
“Among other things. One must be flexible. Or at least you must be.”
“I’m sure you’ll come up with something original, Doña. It keeps me on my toes.”
“I thought that was the chains and cuffs?”
“Well, metaphorically. More wine, anyone?”
Arnaud had chosen it, a Domaine Dublere Les Preuses 2010, very pale gold now and absolutely at its peak with hints of citrus and mango. Only the very best Chablis benefited from that much aging, or any time in oak. Arnaud seemed to catch the thought, though not through her hard-held shields, and nodded. He held the glass up to view the straw-colored liquid through the candle.
“A few more years and even such a wine as this would decline and eventually become undrinkable. Just so one must maintain steerage waydown the stream of time. Those who seek to build an enclave in which they may be insulated from it are merely embracing their own Final Death. Building a coffin and getting inside, one might say.”
“You are a progressive at heart, uncle,” she said. “I am gratified that you rallied to my cause at last. It has been very helpful in securing backing for Trimback Two.”
“Perhaps I am more progressive than you,” he said with a thin smile. “For what is this scheme of yours, this Trimback Two, but another plan to halt the flow of time?”