“None whatsoever!” Arnaud said cheerfully. “Another time. There are tiresome matters of business my so-arrogant brother has delegated.”
“You volunteered? I was under the impression that you had spent an entire century in absolute idleness.”
“I volunteered, but under threat of death.”
“I am not surprised. Is there anyone even in the Council’s ranks who does not desire to see you meet the Final Death?”
“Only those who have not met me,” the dapper figure said with a charming grin. “But then, that is no particular distinction.”
“Farewell, Arnaud. You may not be so lucky if you try to indulge another such impulse.”
“We shall see.”
The name rang a bell as he turned away; that and the style of dress.
“Was he the one who tried to kill Professor Duquesne last year?” she said. “Him and those hired goons.”
That had been the first time she’d had someone try to kill her, and had to kill in self-defense. It had been necessary…but she would very much have preferred not to lose that particular virginity.
“And to kill us, yes.”
“No hard feelings, then, but at the first opportunity…let’s kill him. Nothing fancy, no artistic embellishments, just dead.”
“I agree.”
“He turned into a giant…that Madagascar lemur-eating cat thing just before he blew Dodge, the…”
“Fossa, yes. He spent some time there a century ago, or a little more. In la legion, oddly enough.”
“What was a brother of the honcho doing as a Foreign Legionnaire back in the Beau Geste days?”
“Having fun, mostly. They had to be more…cautious, then, here in Europe. That was why Étienne-Maurice and Seraphine went on long holidays to the Congo Free State under Leopold, and to Mexico in the Porfiriato, to Yucatan and the Valle Nacional in Oaxaca. Of course, Diaz and King Leopold were Shadowspawn themselves, albeit not of very pure blood. Leopold almost transitioned to post-corporeality, but not quite.”
Something else teased at her mind as they strolled through the corridors and chambers. She thought for a moment and snapped her fingers.
An elegant sloe-eyed woman in a late Edwardian hobble skirt outfit that would have wowed them on the Titanic raised a lorgnette and stared at her for a moment before turning away to take a champagne flute from a tray. Her companion was a young-looking man in full fig of shaggy brown hair held back by an embroidered headband, long mustaches, tie-died shirt, fringed buckskin vest, bell-bottoms and love beads.
And for some reason it’s more disturbing than all that Masterpiece Theatre and Downton Abbey stuff.
Her own grandfather might have dressed that way, if he’d been a privileged college kid in 1969 rather than a blue-collar draftee humping bad bush in Vietnam. She briefly met eyes as blue as her own before they reverted to slits of hot yellow.
She turned away and cleared her throat as she returned to the thought that had struck her: “Juste Aurèle Meissonier!”
“Who?” Adrian said.
“The designer who did this place. Juste Aurèle Meissonier. He was one of the Rococo greats. He did commissions all the way from Lisbon to St. Petersburg.”
“Did I mention that?”
“Nope.”
Adrian’s brows went up. “Very thorough research. I remember hearing the name as a child, before Harvey…removed…me from the Brézé family, but offhand I would not know how to find out otherwise. The records all perished long ago in fires or other convenient accidents. Even the municipal maps show no building here, the databases have false images and data.”
“Research, hell,” Ellen said, glad to distract herself for a moment. “I thought I recognized the touch. All that overlapping asymmetric carved plasterwork on the ceiling and the surrounds? And those mirrors with the ormolu frames, and the engraved mahogany legs and intaglio tops on that side-table? Right out of Livres d’ornements en trente pieces. He was the Frank Lloyd Wright or Julia Morgan of his day, he designed everything from the building down to the shape of the chamberpots-he’d do your snuffbox, too, and the buckles on your shoes, if you’d let him.”
“Isn’t she a charming asset, not least culturally?” a warm voice said, a tone like a knife stroked over velvet. “I compliment myself on your taste, and vice versa.”
“Merde alors,” Adrian said very quietly.
Ellen turned, making herself do it at a natural speed and sternly suppressing mingled impulses to scream and flee and draw her knife and attack. No nausea; she wouldn’t permit it. Control the sudden pounding of her heart, and the rush of rage as Adrienne cocked an ear at the sound and sent her an air-kiss and playful-predatory snap of the teeth. The Shadowspawn woman was wearing a gown that was a shimmering black sheath, with her neck and shoulders covered in bands of wrought platinum and a headdress of the same framing her face. Ellen decided that she looked like a very elegant wasp.
For once, truth in advertising.
Then Adrienne smiled at Adrian, a roguish expression, as if inviting him to share a private joke. As they stood within arm’s reach of each other, their likeness was shockingly apparent, the way identical twins would look if they came in different genders.
“How are the children?” she asked.
“Well, and well cared for,” Adrian said neutrally. “Unfortunately I have not had time for much…personal interaction yet. They seem happy, from their auras and behavior.”
“I told them that they might be visiting with their father’s household and that they should not worry,” Adrienne chuckled. “And of course I walk in their dreams.”
“You told them?”
“I had a Seeing to that effect.”
Adrian’s brows rose; that was a term of art for detailed prescient dreams. They showed a future, since the course of events was probabilistic, not fixed, but a powerful adept could deduce how likely it was. Often the distinction between a high probability and utterly inexorable fate became very thin. The world had a massive inertia at times.
“I have always been more prone to those,” he said clinically; an expert exchanging data with someone in the same field.
Adrienne nodded at her twin. “Yet they come to me occasionally, particularly on personal matters. I understand you have had several dealing with the results of the Trimback One and Two options. Great-grandpère takes your Seeings seriously. That has been quite useful to me in discrediting Trimback One.”
Adrian’s teeth showed. Trimback One was a global blitz on modern technology using electro-magnetic pulse from high-altitude fusion explosions. The more radically reactionary Shadowspawn lords favored it, to destroy the modern world and return the world to preindustrial stasis forever. It would be simple enough to do; all of the governments powerful enough to bother with had long been the Council’s puppets. How could you resist ruthless telepaths who could walk through walls in the form of ravening beasts? A few orders to a few generals, and the thing was done.
His Seeings had shown that the consequences, from nuclear power plants melting down to firestorms in refinery complexes, were much worse than anyone had thought. Shadowspawn tended to be conservationists, because they all intended to live in the world for a very, very long time. And they dreaded radiation, since the aetheric body was so vulnerable to it.
Adrienne’s Progressive faction favored Trimback Two, a tailored plague they had used renfield scientists to develop. Dalager’s parasmallpox was more contagious than the flu throughout its month-long sub-clinical period, and then swiftly more deadly than Ebola in its final stage. The Council could emerge at just the right point with the vaccine, when everyone was utterly desperate but before things broke down completely, and take over open rule of the world by default. A world with just enough population and industry to furnish the Shadowspawn with luxuries, and a unified planetary government to keep the masses in order and suppress inconvenient research.