Shadows of Falling Night by S. M. Stirling Read Free Book Online Page B

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 whilethe 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 obviousto 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