The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (49 page)

‘Okay,’ she said, squeezing her forehead as if she could cram the headache back inside the bones of her skull. ‘Here goes.’ And this time, she pulled down her left sleeve
and looked at the chilly skin on the inside of her wrist – pale and almost blue with cold, save for the dark green-and-brown design stippled in dye below the pulse point.

It worked.

*

That night, Miriam didn’t sleep well. She had a splitting headache and felt sick to her stomach, an unfamiliar nausea for one who didn’t suffer migraines. But
she’d managed a second trip after dark, only four hours after the first, and returned after barely an hour with aching back and arms (from lifting the heavy shooting hide and a basic toolkit)
and a bad case of the shivers.

Brilliana fussed over her, feeding her moussaka and grilled octopus from a Greek take-out she’d discovered somewhere – Brill had taken to exploring strange cuisines with the glee of
a suddenly liberated gourmet – and readied her next consignment. ‘I feel like a goddamn mule,’ Miriam complained. ‘If only there were two of us!’

‘I’d do it if I could,’ Brill commented, stung. ‘You know I would!’

‘Yes, yes . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just – I can carry eighty pounds on my back, just. A hundred and twenty? I can’t even pick it up. I
wish I could take more. I should take up weight lifting . . .’

‘That’s what the couriers all do. Why don’t you use a walking frame?’ asked Brill.

‘A walking – is this something the Clan does that I don’t know about?’

Brill shook her head. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘I never saw how they operate the post service. But surely – if we get a very heavy pack ready, and lift it so you
can walk into it backwards, then just lock your knees, wouldn’t that work?’

‘It might.’ Miriam pulled a face. ‘I might also twist an ankle. Which would be bad, in the middle of nowhere.’

‘What happens if you try to go through with something on the ground?’ Brill asked.

‘I don’t.’ Miriam refilled her glass. ‘It was one of the first things I tried. If you jump on my back I can just about carry you for thirty seconds or so before I fall
over – that’s long enough. But I tried with a sofa a while ago. All that happened was, I got a splitting headache and threw up. I don’t know how I managed it the first time,
sitting in a swivel chair, except maybe it was something to do with its wheels – there wasn’t much contact with the floor.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Which says interesting things about the family trade,’ Miriam added. ‘They’re limited by weight and volume in what they can ship. Two tons a day, normally. If we open up
“world three” that’ll go down, precipitously, although the three-way trade may be worth more. We’ve got to work out how to run an import/export business that doesn’t
run into the mercantilist zero-sum trap.’

‘The what?’ Brill looked blank.

Miriam sighed. ‘Old, old theory. It’s the idea that there are only a finite quantity of goods of fixed value, so if you ship them from one place to another, the source has to do
without. People used to think all trade worked that way. What happens is, if you ship some commodity to a place where it’s scarce, sooner or later the price drops – deflates –
while you’re buying up so much of the supply that the price rises at the source.’

‘Isn’t that the way things always work?’ Brill asked.

‘Nope.’ Miriam took a sip of wine. ‘I’m drinking too much of this stuff, too regularly. Hmm, where was I? This guy called Adam Smith worked it out about two centuries
ago, in this world. Turns out you can create value by working with people to refine goods or provide services. Another guy called Marx worked on Smith’s ideas a bit further a century later,
and though lots of people dislike the prescription he came up with, his analysis of how capitalism works is quite good. Labor – what people do – enhances the value of raw materials.
This table is worth more than the raw timber it’s made out of, for example. We can create value, wealth, what-have-you, if we can just move materials to where the labor input on them enhances
their value the most.’ She drifted off, staring at the TV set, which was showing a talk show with the volume muted. (Brill said it made more sense that way.) ‘The obvious thing to move
is patents,’ she murmured. ‘Commercially valuable ideas.’

‘You think you can use the talent to create wealth, instead of moving it around?’ Brill looked puzzled.

‘Yes, that’s it exactly.’ Miriam put her glass down. ‘A large gold nugget is no use to a man who’s dying of thirst in a desert. By the same token, a gold nugget may
be worth a lot more to a jeweler, who can turn it into something valuable and salable, than it is to someone who just wants to melt it down and use it as coin. Jewelry usually sells for more than
its own weight in raw materials, doesn’t it? That’s because of the labor invested in it. Or the scarcity of the end product, a unique work of art. The Clan seems to have gotten hung up
on shipping raw materials around as a way of making money. I want to ship ideas around instead, ideas that people can use to create value locally – in each world – actually
create
wealth rather than just cream off a commission for transporting it.’

‘And you want to eventually turn my world into this one,’ Brilliana said calmly.

‘Yes.’ Miriam looked back at her. ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing, do you think?’

Brill gestured at the TV set. ‘Put one of
those
, showing
that
, in every peasant’s house? Are you kidding? I think it’s the most amazingly wonderful thing
I’ve ever heard of! My mother would say that’s typical of me, and my father would get angry and perhaps beat me for it. But I’m right, and they’re wrong.’

‘Ah, the self-confidence of youth.’ Miriam picked up her glass again. ‘Doesn’t the idea of, like, completely wiping out the culture of your own people worry you? I mean,
so much of what we’ve got here is such complete shit – ’ She stopped. Brill’s eyes were sparkling – with anger, not amusement.

‘You really think so? Go live in a one-room hut for a couple of years, bearing illiterate brats half of whom will die before they’re five! Without a fancy toilet, or even a thunder
mug to piss in each morning. Go do that, where the only entertainment is once a week going to the temple where some fat stupid priest invokes the blessings of Sky Father and his court on your heads
and prays that the harvest doesn’t fail again like it did five years ago, when two of your children starved to death in front of your eyes.
Then
tell me that your culture’s
shit!’

Miriam tried to interrupt: ‘Hey, what about – ’

Brill steamed right on. ‘Shut
up
. Even the children of the well-off – like me – grow up living four to a room and wearing hand-me-downs. We are married off to whoever
our parents think will pay best bride-price. Because we’re members of the outer families we don’t die of childbed fever – not since the Clan so graciously gave us penicillin
tablets and morphine for the pain – but we get to bear child after child because it’s our duty to the Clan! Are you insane, my lady? Or merely blind? And it’s better for us in the
families than for ordinary women, better by far! Did you notice that within the Clan you had rights? Or that outside the Clan, in the ordinary aristocracy, you didn’t? We have at least one
ability that is as important,
more
important, than what’s between our legs. But those ordinary peasants you feel such guilt for don’t have any such thing. There’s a
better life awaiting me as a humble illegal immigrant in this world than there is as a lady-in-waiting to nobility in my own. Do you think I’d ever go back there for
any
reason
except to help you change the world?’

Miriam was taken aback. ‘I didn’t realize all that stuff. No.’ She picked up her wine glass again. ‘It’s post-colonial guilt, I guess,’ she added by way of
explanation. ‘We’ve got a lot of history here, and it’s really ugly in parts. We’ve got a long tradition of conquering other people and messing them up. The idea of taking
over and running people for their own good got a very bad name about sixty years ago – did anyone tell you about the Second World War – so a lot of us have this cringe reflex about the
whole idea.’

‘Don’t. If you do what you’re planning, you couldn’t invade and conquer, anyway. How many people could you bring through? All you can do is persuade people to live their
lives a better way – the one thing the families and the Clan have never bothered trying to do, because they’re already swimming desperately against the stream, trying to hold their own
lives together. It takes an outside view to realize that if they started building fabulous buildings and machines like these at home they wouldn’t be dependent on imported luxuries from the
world next door. And they never – ’ her chest heaved – ‘let us get far enough away to see that clearly. Because if we did, we might not come back.’

‘You don’t want to go back?’ asked Miriam. ‘Not even to visit, to see your family and friends?’

‘Not really.’ It was a statement of fact. ‘This is
better
. I can find new friends here. If I go back there, and you fail – ’ she caught Miriam’s
gaze. ‘I might never be able to come back here.’

For a moment, looking at this young woman – young enough to be at college but with eyes prematurely aged by cynicism and the Clan’s greedy poverty of riches – Miriam had second
thoughts. The families’ grip on their young was tenuous, always in danger of slipping. If they ever got the idea that they could just take their lockets or tattoos or scraps of paper and
leave, the Clan would be gone within a generation.
Am I going to end up making this family tyranny stronger?
she wondered.
Because if so, shouldn’t I just give up now . . .?
‘I won’t fail you,’ she promised. ‘We’ll fix them.’

Brill nodded. ‘I know you will.’ And Miriam nodded right back at her, her mind awash with all the other family children, her distant relatives – the siblings and cousins
she’d never known, might never have known of, who would live and die in gilded poverty if she failed.

*

A woman dressed in black stepped out of the winter twilight.

She looked around curiously, one hand raised to cover her mouth. ‘I’m in somebody’s garden by the look of things. Hedge to my left, dilapidated shed in front of me – and
a house behind. It looks a mess. The hedge is wildly overgrown and the windows are boarded up.’

She glanced around, but couldn’t see into the neighboring gardens. ‘Seems like an expensive place.’ She furtively scratched an arrowhead on the side of the shed, pointing to
the spot she’d arrived on, then winced. ‘This light is hurting my head.
Ow . . .
’ She hitched her coat out of the grayish snow then stumbled toward the house, crouching
below the level of the windows.

She paused. ‘It looks empty,’ she muttered to the dictaphone. ‘Forward.’ She walked around to the front of the house, where the snow was banked in deep drifts before the
doors and blank-eyed wooden window shutters. Nobody had been in or out for days, that much was clear. There was a short uphill driveway leading to a road, imposing iron gates chained in front.
‘Damn. How do I get out?’ She glanced round, saw a plaque on the front of the house – BLACKSTONES, 1923. There was a narrow wooden gate next to the pillar supporting one of the
cast-iron gates: it was secured by a rusty bolt on the inside. Miriam waded toward it, shivering from the snow, levered the bolt back with her multitool, and glanced round one final time to look at
the house.

It was
big
. Not a McMansion, but the real thing. And it was clearly mewed up, shutters nailed across those windows that weren’t boarded, gates chained tight. She gritting her
teeth against the cold. ‘Right, you’ll be mine.’ Then she slipped through the wooden door and onto the sidewalk. The street here was partially swept. On the other side of it lay
an open field in the middle of what was dense forest in world one and downtown Cambridge in world two. She could see other big town houses on the far side of the field, but that didn’t
matter. She turned left and began walking toward the crossroads she could see at the far corner of the quadrangle.

Her teeth were chattering by the time she reached the clock tower on the strange traffic circle at the crossroads. There was almost no traffic on this bitterly cold morning. A lone pony trap
clattered past her, but the only vehicles she saw were strange two-deck streetcars, pantographs sparking occasionally as they whirred down the far side of the field and paused at a stand in the
middle of the traffic circle. Miriam blinked back the instinctive urge to check her watch.
What day is it?
she wondered. A sign in heavy classical lettering at the empty tram stop answered
her question: Sunday service only.
Oh.
Below it was a timetable as exact as anything she’d seen at an airport back home – evidently trams from this stop ran into the waterfront
and over something called Deny Bridge once every half hour on Sundays, for a fare of 3d, whatever that meant. She shivered some more and stepped inside the wooden shelter, then fidgeted with the
handful of copper change that she had left. Second thoughts began to occur to her. Was it normal for a single woman to catch a tram, unaccompanied, on a Sunday? What if Burgeson’s shop was
closed? What if –

A streetcar pulled up beside the shelter with a screech of abused steel wheels. Miriam plucked up her courage and climbed aboard. The driver nodded at her, then moved off without warning. Miriam
stumbled, nearly losing her footing before she made it into the passenger cabin. The wooden bench was cold but there seemed to be a heater running somewhere. She surreptitiously examined her fellow
passengers, using their reflections in the windows when she couldn’t look at them directly without being obvious. They were an odd collection – a fat woman in a ridiculous bonnet who
looked like a Salvation Army collector, a couple of thin men in oddly cut, baggy suits with hats pulled down over their ears, a twenty-something mother, bags under her eyes and two quietly
bickering children by her side, and a man in what looked like a Civil War uniform coming toward her, a ticket machine hung in front of his chest. Miriam took a deep breath.
I’m going to
manage this,
she realized.