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…
Real. All five senses.
'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 full-sensory 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 blase 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.'
CHAPTER THREE
'I look like death,' Adrienne Breze 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,' Tokairin 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
