The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (71 page)

The sergeant shook himself. ‘Ma’am?’

‘What food, drink, and medical attention has this child had?’

He shook his head. ‘I really couldn’t say, ma’am.’

‘I see.’ Miriam’s hands tensed on the back of the chair. She turned back to Lin. ‘I didn’t order this,’ she said. ‘Will you tell me who sent you to my
house?’

She saw him swallow. ‘If I do that you’ll kill me,’ he said.

‘No, that’s not what I’ve got in mind.’

‘Yes you will.’ He looked at her with bitter certainty in his eyes. ‘They’ll do it.’

‘Like you were going to kill me?’ she asked quietly.

He didn’t say anything.

‘You were supposed to find out if I was from the Clan,’ she said. ‘Weren’t you? A strange new woman showing up in town and making waves. Is that it? And if I was from the
Clan, you were supposed to kill me. What was it to be? A bomb in my bedroom? Or a knife in the dark?’

‘Not me,’ he whispered. ‘One of the warriors.’

‘So why were you there? To spy on me? Are they that short-handed?’

He looked down at the table, but not before she saw shame in his eyes.

‘Ah.’ She glanced away for a moment, trying desperately to think of a way out of the impasse. She was hopelessly aware of the guards standing behind her, waiting patiently for her to
finish with the prisoner.
If I leave him here, the Clan
will
kill him,
she realized, with a kind of hollow dread she hadn’t expected to be able to summon up for a
housebreaker. Housebreaker? What his actions said about his family,
that
was something she could get angry about. ‘Hell.’ She made up her mind.

‘Lin, you’re probably right about the Clan. Most of them would see you dead as soon as look at you. There’ve been too many years of their parents and grandparents cutting each
other’s throats. They’re suspicious of anything they don’t understand, and you’re going to be high on any list of mysteries. But I’ll tell you something else.’
She stood up. ‘You know how to world-walk, don’t you?’

Silence.

‘I said – ’ She stopped. ‘You ought to know when you can stop holding it in,’ she said tiredly. Thinking back to Angbard, and how she’d managed to face him
down over Roland:
Don’t look too deep. Everything on the surface.
The families all worked that way, didn’t they? ‘Nothing you say to me can make your position worse. It
might make it better, though.’

Silence.

‘World-walking,’ she said. ‘We
know
you can do it, we got the locket you carried. So why lie?’

Silence.

‘The Clan can world-walk too, you know,’ she said quietly. ‘It isn’t a coincidence. Your family are relatives, aren’t they? Lost for a long time, and this murder
– the killing, the feuding, the attempts to reopen old wounds – isn’t in anyone’s interests.’

Silence.

‘Why do they want me dead?’ she asked. ‘Why are you people killing your own blood relatives?’

Maybe it was something in her expression – frank curiosity, perhaps – but the youth looked away at last. The silence stretched out for a long moment, lengthened toward a minute,
punctuated only by the sound of one of the guards shifting position.

‘You betrayed us,’ he whispered.

‘Uh?’ Miriam shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘In the time of the loyal sons,’ said Lin. ‘All the others. They abandoned my ancestor. The promise of a meeting in the world of the Americans. Reduced to poverty, he took
years to gain his freedom, then he spent his entire life searching for them. But they never came.’

‘This is all news to me,’ Miriam said quietly. ‘He was reduced to poverty?’

Lin nodded convulsively. ‘This is the tale of our family,’ he said, in sing-song tones. ‘That of the brothers, it was agreed that Lee would go west, to set up a trading post.
And he did, but the way was hard and he was reduced to penury, his caravan scattered, his goods stolen by savages, abandoned by his servants. For ten years he labored as a bond servant, before
buying his freedom: He lost everything, from his wife to the first talisman of the family. Finally he forged a new talisman, working from memory, earned his price, and bought himself liberty. He
was a very determined man. But when he walked to the place assigned for meeting, nobody was there to wait for him. Every year, at the appointed day and hour, he would go there; and never did anyone
come. His brothers had abandoned him, and over the years his descendants learned much of the eastern Clan. The betrayers, who profited from his estate.’

Oops, a betrayal-for-a-legacy myth. So he accidentally mangled the knotwork and ended up going to New Britain instead of
– she blinked.

‘You’ve seen my world,’ she said. ‘Do you know, that’s where the Clan have been going all along? Where you go when you world-walk, it’s all set up by the, uh,
talisman. Your illustrious ancestor recreated it wrong. Sending himself over to, to, New Britain. For all you know, the other brothers thought that your ancestor had abandoned
them
.’

Lin shrugged. ‘When are you going to kill me?’ he asked.

‘In about ten seconds if you don’t shut up about it!’ She glared at him. ‘Don’t you see? Your family’s reasons for feuding with the Clan are bogus.
They’ve been bogus all along!’

‘So?’ He made a movement that might have been a shrug if he hadn’t been wearing fetters. ‘Our elders, now dead, laid these duties upon our shoulders. We must obey, or
dishonor their memory. Only our eldest can change our course. Do you expect me to betray my family and plead for mercy?’

‘No.’ Miriam stood up. ‘But you may not need to beg, Lin. There is a Clan meeting coming up tomorrow. Some – most – of them will want your head. But I think it
might be possible to convince them to let you go free, if you agree to do something.’

‘No!’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Really? You don’t
want
to go home and deliver a letter to this elder of yours? I knew you were young and silly, but this is ridiculous.’

‘What kind of letter?’ he asked hesitantly.

‘An offer of terms. It seems to me that you need it more than we do, I hasten to add. Now we can get into
your
world – ’ he flinched – ‘and there are many
more of us,
and
there’s the other world you saw, the one the Clan’s power is based in. Did you see much of America?’ His eyes went wide: He’d seen enough.
‘From now on, in any struggle, we can win. There is no “maybe” in that statement. If the eldest orders your family to fight it out, they can only lose. But I happen to have a use
for your family – I want to keep them alive. And you. I’m willing to settle this thing between us, the generations of blood and murder, if your eldest is willing to accept that
declaring war on the Clan was wrong, that his ancestor was not deliberately abandoned, and that ending the war is necessary. So I’m going to do everything I can to convince the committee to
send you home with a cease-fire proposal.’

He stared at her as if she’d sprouted a second head.

‘Will you carry that message?’ she asked.

He nodded, slowly, watching her with wide eyes.

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ she warned. She turned to the door. ‘Take this one back to his cell,’ she said. ‘I want you to make sure he’s given food and
water. And take good care of him.’ She leaned toward the sergeant. ‘There is a chance that he is going to run an errand for us. I do
not
want him damaged. Do you
understand?’

Something in her eyes made the soldier tense. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he grunted warily. ‘Food and water.’ His companion pulled the door open, staring at the wall behind her,
trying to avoid her gaze.

‘See that you do.’

She came out of the cellars shivering into the evening twilight, and headed upstairs as fast as she could, to get back to a warm fireplace and good company. But it was going to take more than
that to get the chill of the dungeon out of her bones, and out of her dreams.

PART TEN

ESCAPE PLANS

‘He’s done
what
?’ demanded Matthias, in a tone of rising disbelief.

During Angbard’s lengthy absence the duke’s outer office in Fort Lofstrom served as a headquarters from which the Clan’s operations in Massachusetts were coordinated. One of a
chain of nine such castles up and down the eastern seaboard (in the Gruinmarkt, but also in the free kingdoms to the north and south), it coordinated the transshipment of Clan cargo along the
entire eastern continental coast. Half a dozen junior Clan members were stationed there at any time, each shuttling back and forth at eight-hour intervals. Every three hours a message packet would
arrive from Cambridge, and Matthias would be the first to open it and read any confidential dispatches.

This packet had contained a couple of letters, and a terse coded message. It was the latter that had whetted Matthias’s curiosity, then raised his ire.

The youth standing in front of his desk looked very frightened, but held his ground. ‘It came over the wireless just now, sir, an order to shut down. A blanket order, for the duration of
the extraordinary general meeting, sir.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Isn’t that unusual?’

‘Hmm.’ Matthias looked at him hard. ‘Well, Poul.’ The lad was barely out of his teens, still afflicted by acne and a bad case of deference to authority – especially
the kind of deadly, self-confident authority that Matthias exuded – but for all that he was brave. ‘We’ll just have to shut down the postal service, won’t we?’ He
allowed his expression to relax infinitesimally, determined not to give the youth any hint of his anger and apprehension.

‘Are those your orders, sir?’ Poul asked eagerly.

‘No.’ Matthias cocked his head. A Clan extraordinary meeting, held without warning . . . it didn’t smell good. In fact, it smelled extraordinarily bad to him. Ever since
Esau’s asshole relatives had started trying to rub out the long-lost countess and another bunch of interlopers had joined in, things had looked distinctly unstable. ‘It sounds to me as
if there’s something very big going on,’ Matthias said slowly. ‘On that basis, I don’t think suspending the post is sufficient. We have assets on the other side who may not
have got the warning. I’ll need you to make one more crossing to deliver a message, as soon as possible.
Then
we shut down. Meanwhile, it will be necessary to secure the
fort.’

‘Secure the – sir? Do you know what’s going on?’

Matthias fixed the young man with a grim stare. ‘I have a notion that it’s no good. The civil war, lad, that’s what this is about. Pigeons are coming home to roost and promises
made thirty years ago are about to be delivered on.’ He snorted. ‘Idiots,’ he muttered bitterly. ‘Wait here. I have to go and get the special dispatches out of the
duke’s office. Then I’ll go over what you have to do to deliver them.’

Matthias rose and let himself through the door into the duke’s inner study. Everything was as it had been when Angbard departed, a week ago. Matthias closed the door, then leaned his head
against the wall and cursed silently.
So close, so damned close!
But he couldn’t just sit here. Not with that bitch about to spill her guts at the meeting. Esau’s confession
– that the eldest had authorized repeated attempts on Helge’s life – had shaken him. He’d had Helge, Miriam, in his sights: She was a natural fellow traveler for his plans.
He’d been getting positioned to bring her into his orbit until the idiot fanatics started trying to kill her, making her suspicious of everyone and everything. With no friends but Roland,
she’d been easy meat before. But now –

He read through his illicit decrypt one more time. The original message wasn’t addressed to him, but that had never stopped Matthias in the past; as Angbard’s secretary he was used
to reading the duke’s correspondence – and also mail for other people on station that passed through the post room. People such as Sir Huw Thoms, lieutenant of the guard, who right now
was over on the other side, making a delivery run. And he had access to the code books, too.

Matthias crumpled the letter in his fist, his face a tight mask of anger.
Bitch,
he thought. Either his hold on Roland wasn’t as strong as he’d believed, or she was more
ruthless than he’d imagined. But the old man has made a mistake. Poul, the callow messenger, was in the next room. That gave him an edge, if he could only work out how to use it.

He went back out to his own office, and opened another desk drawer. He smiled to himself at the thought of Angbard’s reaction should he discover what Matthias kept in it, the use to which
Matthias had put his access to the duke’s personal files. But there was no time now for self-indulgent daydreams. What Matthias needed was a smokescreen to cover his own disappearance, and
smokescreens didn’t come any thicker than this one.

First, Matthias removed the most recent addition from the safe: an anonymous CD, the enigmatic phrase ‘deep throat’ scrawled on it in a feminine hand. Obtaining it had taken him a
lot of detective work; only the hints turned up by the duke’s background checks on Miriam had kept him searching until it came to light, buried in her music collection. Next, he removed three
stamped, addressed envelopes, each containing a covering letter and another item. When he left his office a minute later, the drawer was locked and empty of incriminating evidence. And the letters
were on the first stage of their journey to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Clan courier. Letters addressed to local FBI and DEA offices.

*

The huge ballroom at the back of the Clan’s palace could, when the situation demanded it, be converted into a field hospital – or a boardroom large enough to hold
all the voting members of an ancient and prolific business partnership. It was only when she saw it filled that Miriam began to grasp the scale of the power the Clan wielded in the Gruinmarkt.

The room was dominated by a table at one end, behind which sat a row of eight chairs: three for administrative officers of the committee, and one for each head of one of the families. Rows of
green leather-topped benches had been installed facing the table, the ones farther back raised to give their occupants a view of the front. The huge glass doors that in summer would open onto the
garden were closed, barricaded outside by heavy oak shutters.