Well, that was going to change. In fact, a lot of things were going to change. Starting with who ruled Paris. If Lady Clare wanted that little half-breed back she’d have to do what Lazlo demanded. And she would. Lazlo knew that. Everyone had a weakness and where Lady Clare Fabio was concerned it was her dangerously sentimental sense of duty.

Paris or that little bitch. It was an impossible choice and with any luck deciding would kill her.

Chapter Seven

Ein SchattenKönig

The wolves came down from Scandinavia. Screaming newsfeeds said hunger had driven them in from the wild Asiatic steppes but that was so much cack. There’d been wolves in Hungary and Poland for as long as anyone could remember. Wolves in Latvia and Finland, too. It was only Western Europe that wasn’t used to having beasts that slunk like grey shadows through city streets, scavenging for food. And it wasn’t hunger that drove the largest pack into Paris: it was the Reich moving westwards again, like a black stain across the map.

Wolf skins made excellent rugs, their bristling tails streamed banner-like from the whip aerials of a hundred APVs, and the hepmann shot them down for sport, with delicately balanced Ruger .722s. And by the time the Azerbaijani virus ate out the springs of the APVs and trashed ninety per cent of the Rugers it was already too late. Paris had been under siege for three days and the wolves had reached the Champs Elysees.

It was a seriously bad move, at least for the wolves. The only thing more dangerous than a hungry wolf is a human in need of food but not yet so weak that hunting is out of the question. In the outskirts the wolves were killed with ceramic gutting knives, rocks and sharpened sticks. And in the centre the animals were butchered with the same crude but effective weapons. They were cooked, not as the exotic delicacy wolf had once been, marinated in Meuse vinegar or grilled with wild chanterelle and shredded truffle as Brillat Saveran recommended, but over open fires and in earth pits, from blind necessity, from increasing hunger.

No deliveries could get through from the surrounding countryside, had the storms left any food in the fields. Half the limited-function Drexie-boxes were already virus-eaten. Without regular power for temperature control or maintenance of pressure, the ceramic monoclonal vats were becoming thick with rancid fermenting protein. It was small wonder the wolves didn’t last. Three days without food seems an eternity, until you try five or face the prospect of ten, fifteen...

The urban foxes would go too, following dogs and cats into the mouths of the starving. The rats would also go, but not for a week or more: hunger was not yet strong enough to draw them to the surface. It was a crap time to be human but a much worse time to be an animal. That humans were animal too was not a connection that anyone had yet made. But they would.

It was raining, not the light mid-January drizzle Lady Clare Fabio remembered from childhood, but backed-up sheets of black rain that hammered across the city’s rooftops like waves of sound, battering everything they touched. It crashed like cannon fire, it drum-rolled on the large cracked slates of the Hotel Sabatini like sticks on the skin of a kettle drum, it... Lady Clare didn’t know what the rain sounded like.

Rain, probably.

Hard driving rain had been falling for weeks out of a gunmetal sky so dark each day could have been permanently fixed at dusk. Today’s storm came from the Atlantic, but that wasn’t significant, not now the virus was here. The week before the virus had come in on the wind from Germany, followed by rain that re-drowned the sodden countryside before it hit Paris. There would be no winter crops, nothing useful anyway. And even if there had been, no estate manager — not even Lady Clare’s — would be stupid enough to try to run the Reich’s blockade.

Not that most Parisians wanted fresh food anyway, Lady Clare thought in disgust, at least, not normally. Back before the Reich hired the Black Hundreds to add Western Europe to what Prussia already possessed and the Parisians developed a sudden taste for anything that wasn’t actually rancid, the preferred food texture in the Paris slums had been fried chicken, though ham had been briefly in fashion last summer, except with the Muslims. Lady Clare knew these things. Facts like that passed her desk in digest, amended, annotated memoranda, in lists of supposedly relevant social data. History written as a series of shopping lists.

According to the finest meme-counters the CIA possessed you could define society by analysing what it stuffed down its gullet, not to mention what animals it cried over on Wonderful World, or which plucky downtrodden loser it rooted for in the novelets. Personally Lady Clare didn’t buy that. The only way you ever really found out what your people were thinking was to pull a random selection of them in and gut out their heads, literally. A SQUID could do it and often did.

Which was why Lady Clare was not just aide de camp to the Prince Imperial but also the longest-lasting head of the Third Section, the French Empire’s Directorate of Internal Security. The only bit of government still willing to get its hands dirty in the day-to-day shit of keeping society together. Of course, no one ever put it like that when talking to Lady Clare, but that was how she put it in her own head. She took the shit so that none of it could stick to the Prince Imperial. That was her job: Lady Clare didn’t have a problem with it.

Though sometimes she wondered if any of the other Ministers had the slightest idea of what went on inside her. The black demons, the violent dreams, the whole bubbling cauldron hidden behind her immaculate carapace of effortless manners and Dior make-up.

It was Friday, 12th January, at least she thought it was. The sub-stations for the electricity grid were now so virus-ridden that brown-outs were common and regular power was no longer an option. In fact, as of tomorrow or the day after, it looked like power itself might no longer be an option, unless you had your own virus-free generator, which she didn’t.

The Napoleonic Empire was falling, crumbling around her like cancerous concrete. In theory it still ruled from Schleswig-Holstein in the north to Gibraltar in southern Spain, from the Brittany coast to the borders of Austro-Hungary. But with a good pair of field glasses Lady Clare could have seen all that really remained from where she stood, if only the rain would stop. And she could count on one hand the number of Ministers who still thought it was a good thing. But, worse yet, Lady Clare no longer knew if she was still one of them.

Standing in the rain on the roof of the Hotel Sabatini, her priceless house on the Ile St-Louis, Lady Clare stared down over the inner courtyard to the slate-grey swollen waters of the Seine far below. The river was full to the point of bursting its banks. Only hastily piled sandbags held back the water that threatened to swallow her quiet, impossibly expensive street.

To live on the Ile took a carte blanche. It helped that Lady Clare was a registered noble, with the tax advantages that conferred: helped, too, that she was a Minister. But neither of those priceless social advantages could hold back the water if it decided to spill over the edge of the sandbags onto the cobbled quay. Rain had soaked through Lady Clare’s Dior coat, staining the purple Versace dress below. Her court shoes were ruined, as was the Hermès silk scarf wrapped round her neck. Water ran under the collar of her coat, dripped from black-lacquered fingertips and tumbled from the tiny rat tails of her close-cropped grey hair. But the water running over her cheeks was not rain. Not all of it, anyway.