The Merchants' War (21 page)

"I sent Lady Brilliana after her. She's to stop Helge if she shows signs of turning traitor-beyond that, she's to try to bring her home. Ideally before the pregnancy goes too far."

"Brilliana? That's a good choice. Might even be enough, if we're lucky."

"Enough? I hardly think Helge will be able to prevent her-"

"I meant, enough to stop the auld bitches' assassins. If you'll excuse me, Angbard, I have urgent arrangements to make. Is the prescription I asked for ready yet?"

"It's in the outer office."

(Chuckle.) "So you weren't planning to kill me after all! Admit it!"

"Don't tempt me. You believe Hildegarde will try to kill Helge?"

"Who said anything about Hildegarde? She'll be pissed about me having a granddaughter to call my own, especially one who's an heir and a world-walker, but it's still her lineage. No, what you've really got to worry about are the other members of the old ladies' embroidery circle and poisoning society. Hmm. Then again, Helge thinking she's Miriam-thinking she's an American woman-could really spoil all your plans." "I hardly think that changes anything-" "Really? You're telling me you've never heard of
Roe v. Wade?"

(Pause.) "Who?"

END TRANSCRIPT

Miriam found the journey uncomfortable. It wasn't the compartment, for the seats were padded and the facilities adequate, but the lack of privacy. Of the eight places- there were two bench seats that faced each other across (he compartment-she and Erasmus occupied one side. The other was taken by the plump man in the loud coat, sitting beside the window, and a pinch-faced woman of uncertain years who clutched her valise to her lap, her long fingers as double-jointed as the legs of a crane fly. When she wasn't flickering suspicious glances at the fellow in the check jacket, she parked her watery gaze on a spot fifteen centimeters behind Miriam's head. Whenever the discomfort of being stared at got the better of her, Miriam tried to stare right back-but the sight of the woman's stringy, gray hair sticking out from under the rim of her bonnet made her feel queasy.

It was also hot. Air-conditioning was an exotic, ammonia-powered rarity, as likely to poison you as to quell the heat. A vent on the ceiling channeled fresh air down through the compartment while the train was moving, but it was a muggy, humid day and before long she felt sticky and uncomfortable. "We should have waited for the express," she murmured to Erasmus, provoking a glare from Crane Fly Woman.

"It arrives a few minutes later." He sighed. "Can't be late for work, can I?" He put a slight edge on his voice, a grating whine, and caught her eye with a sidelong glance. The fat man rattled his newspaper again. He seemed to be concentrating on a word puzzle distantly related to a crossword, making notes in the margin with a pencil.

"Never late for work, you." She tried to sound disapproving, to provide the shrewish counterpart to his henpecked act.
What's going on?
She sniffed, and glanced out of the window at the passing countryside.
Where did Erasmus go last night? Why were those guys tailing us? Was it him or me they were after?
The urge to ask him about the incident was a near-irresistible itch, but one glance at the fellow travelers told her that any words they exchanged would be eavesdropped on and analyzed with vindictive, exhaustive curiosity.

Luckily, things improved after an hour. The train stopped at Bridgeport for ten minutes-a necessity, for only the first-class carriages had toilets-and as she stretched her legs on the platform, Erasmus murmured: "The next compartment along is unoccupied. Shall we move?"

As the train moved off, Miriam kicked back at last, leaning against the wooden paneling beside the window. "What was that about? At the station." She prodded idly at an abandoned newspaper on the bench seat opposite.

Erasmus looked at her from across the compartment. "I had to see a man last night. It seems somebody wanted to know who he was talking to, badly enough to set up a watch on the hotel and tail all his contacts. They got slack: I spotted a watcher when I opened the curtains."

"Why didn't they just move in and arrest you?"

"You ask excellent questions." Erasmus looked worried. "It might be that if they were Polis, they didn't want to risk a poison pill. You can interrogate people, but they won't always tell you what you want to know, and if they do, it may come too late. If you take six hours out to break a man, by the time you get him to spill his guts his own people will have worked out that he's been taken, and they won't be home when you go looking for them."

"Oh." Her voice was very small.
Shouldn't you have been expecting this?
She asked herself. Then she looked back at his eyes. "There's more, isn't there?"

He nodded, reluctantly. "They didn't smell like Polis." His expression was troubled. "There was something wrong about them. They looked like street thugs, backstairs men, the kind your, ah, business rivals employed." The Wu family's street fixers, in other words. "The Polis aren't afraid to raise a hue and cry when their quarry breaks cover. And the way they covered us was odd."

She glanced down at the floor. "It's possible it's not you they're looking for," she murmured.
I should have thought of this earlier: they know Erasmus is my friend, why wouldn't they he watching him? They're probably watching Paillette, too
-her business agent in Boston, back home in the world of airliners and antibiotics-
I'm a trouble magnet.
"Hair dye and a cover identity may not be enough."

"Explain." He leaned forward.

"Suppose someone in Boston spotted you leaving in a hurry, a day or two after I'd disappeared. They handed off to associates in New London. Either they followed you to your hotel, or they figured you'd pay for a room under your own name. They missed a trick; they probably thought you were visiting a brothel for the usual reason-" Were his ears turning red? "-but when you reappeared with a woman they knew they'd found the trail. We threw them with the streetcar, and then I turned up at the hotel separately and in disguise, but they picked us up again on the way into the station and if we hadn't done the track side scramble they'd be-" Her eyes widened.

"What is it?"

"We'll have to be really careful if we go back to Boston."

"You think they're looking for you, yes?"

"Well- " Miriam paused. "I'm not sure. It could be the Polis tailing you. But if they were doing that, why wouldn't they turn over Lady Bishop's operation? I think it's more likely someone who decided you might lead them to me. In which case it could be nearly anyone. The cousins in this world, maybe. Or it could be the Polis looking for
me,
although I figure that's unlikely. Or it could be the Clan, in which case the question is, which faction is it? It's not as if-"

"The Clan factions would be a problem?"

"Yes." She nodded. "I've been thinking about it. Even if,
if
, I wanted to go back, I'd have to approach it really carefully. A random pickup could be disastrous. I need to get in touch with them or they'll think I've gone over the wall, and that's-I don't want to spend the rest of my life hiding from assassins. But I've got to get in touch with the right people there, see if I can cut some kind of deal. I've got information they need, so I might be able to work something out-but I don't trust that slimy shit Morgan who they put in charge of the Boston office."

Erasmus shrugged. "But they've lost us, haven't they? They can't possibly overtake us before-"

"You're wrong. They've got two-way radios better than anything the Royal Post can build. If it
is
Clan security, they'll have us in the Gruinmarkt before we get off the platform."

Erasmus nodded thoughtfully. "Then we won't be on this train when it arrives, will we?" He reached into his valise and pulled out a dog-eared gazetteer. "Let's sec. If we get off at Hartford, the next stopping train is forty-two minutes behind us. If we catch that one, we can get off at Framingham and take the milk train into Cambridge, then hail a cab. We'll be a couple of hours later getting home, but if we do our business fast we can make the express, and we won't be going through the city station. You know about the back route into the cellar. Do you think your stalkers know about it?"

Miriam blotted at her forehead. "Olga would. But she's not who I'm worried about. You're right, if we do it your way, we can probably get around them." She managed a strained smile. "I really don't need this. I don't like being chased."

"It won't be for long. Once we're on the transcontinental, there's no way they'll be able to trace us."

* * *

The shadows were lengthening and deepening, and the omnipresent creaking of cicadas provided an alien chorus as Huw sat in the folding chair on the back stoop, waiting for Hulius. Elena had installed her boom box in the kitchen, and it was pumping out plastic girl-band pop from the window ledge. But she'd gone upstairs to powder her nose, leaving Huw alone with the anxiety gnawing at his guts like a family of hungry rats. For the first hour or so he'd tried working on the laptop, chewing away at the report on research methodologies he was writing for his grace, but it was hard to concentrate while he couldn't stop imagining Yul out there in the chilly twilit pine forest, alone and in every imaginable permutation of jeopardy.
You put him there,
Huw's conscience kept reminding him:
You ought to be there instead.

Well yes,
he'd tell his conscience-which he liked to imagine was a loosely knit sock-puppet in grime-stained violet yarn, with webcams for eyes-
hut you know what would happen. I don't have Yul's training. And Yul doesn't have the background to run this project if anything happened to me.
It sounded weak to his ears, even though it was true. He'd known Yul back when he'd been a tow-headed blond streak of mischief, running wild through the forest back of Osthalle keep with a child's bow and a belt of rabbit scalps to show for it-and Huw had been a skinny, sickly, bookish boy, looked down on pityingly by his father and his hale, hunting-obsessed armsmen. The duke's visit changed all that, even though the intensive English tuition and the bewildering shift to a boarding school in the United States hadn't felt like much of an improvement at the time. It wasn't until years later, when he returned to his father's keep and went riding with Yul again, that he understood. Yul was a woodland creature, not in an elfin or fey sense, but like a wild boar: strong, dangerous, and shrewd within the limits of his vision. But not a dreamer or a thinker.

Yul had gone to school, too, and there'd even been talk of his enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps for a while-the duke's security apparatus had more than a little use for graduates of that particular finishing school-but in the end it came to naught. While Huw had been sweating over books or a hot soldering iron, Hulius had enlisted in Clan security, with time off to serve his corvee duty with the postal service. And now, by a strange turnaround of fate that Huw still didn't quite understand, he was sitting with a first-aid kit on the back stoop of a rented house at twilight, worrying his guts out about his kid brother, the tow-headed streak who'd grown up to be a bear of a man.

Huw checked his wristwatch for about the ten-thousandth time. It was coming up on eight fifteen, and the sun was already below the horizon. Another half hour and it would be nighttime proper.
I could go over and look for him,
he told himself.
If he misses this return window, I could go over tomorrow.
Elena's video footage had been rubbish, the condensation on her helmet camera lens blurring everything into a madcap smear of dark green shade and glaring sunlight, but Hulius was wearing a radio beacon. If anything had happened-

Something moved. Huw's head jerked round, his heart in his mouth for an instant: then he recognized Yul's tired stance, and the tension erupted up from his guts and out of his mouth in a deafening whoop.

"Hey, bro!" Yul reached up and unfastened his helmet. "You look like you thought I wasn't coming back!" He grimaced and rubbed his forehead as he shambled heavily towards the steps. "Give me medicine. Strong medicine."

Huw grabbed him for a moment of back-slapping relief. "It's not easy, waiting for you. Are you alright? Did anything try to eat you? Let's get you inside and get the telemetry pack off you, then I'll crack open the wine."

"Okay." Hulius stood swaying on the stoop for a moment, then took a heavy step towards the doorway. Huw picked up the first aid kit and laptop and hurried after him.

"Make your weapons safe, then hand me the telemetry pack first-okay. Now your backpack. Stick it there, in the corner." He squinted at his brother. Yul looked much more wobbly than he ought to be. "Hmm." Huw cracked the first-aid kit and pulled out the blood pressure cuff. "Get your armor off and let's check you out. How's the headache?"

"Splitting." Hulius pawed at the Velcro fastenings on his armor vest, then dumped it on the kitchen floor. He fumbled at the buttons on his jacket. "I can't seem to get this open."

"Let me." Huw freed the buttons then helped Hulius get one arm free of its sleeve. "Blood pressure,
right now."
"Aw, nuts. You don't think-"

"I don't know what to think. Chill out and try to relax your arm." The control unit buzzed and chugged, pumping air into the pressure cuff around Yul's arm. Huw stared at it as it vented, until the digits came up. "One seventy four over one ten."
Shit
. "You remember to take your second-stage shots on time, two hours ago?"

"Uh, I, uh, only remembered half an hour ago." Hulius closed his eyes. "Dumb, huh?"

Huw relaxed a little. "Real dumb. You're not used to doing back-to-back jumps, arc you?"
Lightning Child, he could have sprung a cerebral hemorrhage!
"The really bad headache, that's a symptom. You need those pills. They take about an hour to have any effect, though, and if you walk too soon after you take them you can make yourself very ill."

"It's just a headache-"

"Headache, balls." Huw began to pack up the blood pressure monitor. "All you can feel is the headache, but if your blood pressure goes too high the arteries and veins inside your brain can burst from it. You don't want that to happen, bro, not at your age!" Relief was making him angry.
Change the subject.
"So how was it?"

"Oh, it was quiet, bro. I didn't see any animals. Funny thing, I didn't hear any birds either; it was just me and the trees and stuff. Quite relaxing, after a while."

"Okay, so you had a nice relaxing stroll in the woods."
Why needle him? It's not his fault you were chewing you guts out.
"Sorry." He glanced away from Hulius just as the door opened and Elena bounced in.

"Hulius! You're back!
Squeee!"

Huw winced as Elena pounced on his brother. Judging from the noises he made, the headache couldn't be too serious. Huw cleared his throat: "I'll be in the front room, downloading the take. You guys, you've got ten minutes to wash up. We're going out for dinner, and I'm buying." He picked up the telemetry pack and slunk towards the living room, trying to ignore the giggling and smooching behind him.
Young love
-he winced again. He might be out from under the matrons' collective thumb, but being expected to chaperon Hulius and Elena was one of the more unpleasant side effects of the manpower shortage.
If the worst happened... At least they're both inner family, and eligible.
A rapid wedding was a far more likely outcome than an honor killing if their affair came to light.