The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (27 page)
Read The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) Online
Authors: Charles Stross
‘I think we should
find out
.’ She took a deep breath. ‘In a moment you’re going to open the door and walk towards G-Gunnar. I’ll be behind you. Close and
disarm him if he so much as blinks. If he draws, you may assume he’s an assassin – but if we can take him alive, I have questions I want answering.’
‘Your highness.’ Alasdair’s nod was cursory, but he sounded worried. ‘Is this wise?’
‘Very little I do is
wise
, but I’m afraid it’s
necessary
. If you’re going to be my bodyguard, you’d better get used to it: As you yourself noted,
I’m a target. After you, my lord.’
Sir Alasdair turned back to face the door and pushed it ajar. Then he surprised her.
The front hall of the country house was roughly rectangular, perhaps forty feet long and twenty feet wide. The grand staircase started at one side, climbing the walls from landing to landing in
turn, linking the two upper stories of the house. At the very moment the door opened, the floor held at least nine porters, servants, guards, cooks, maids, and other workers unpacking the small
mountain of supplies that Lady d’Ost had rustled up seemingly out of nowhere to furnish the Countess Helge’s entourage. Gunnar was two-thirds of the way across the floor from the door
to the blue room, deep in conversation with another fellow, both of them in the livery of guards of the royal household.
Miriam had expected Alasdair to approach his prey directly. Instead, he stood in the doorway for a couple of seconds, scanning the room: Then he broke into a run. But he didn’t run towards
Gunnar – instead he ran at right-angles to the direct line. As he ran, he drew his sword, with a great shout of ‘
Ho! Thief!
’ that echoed around the room.
Why did he
– Miriam raised her pistol, bringing it to bear on the Ferret with both hands –
oh, I see
.
At the last moment, Alasdair spun on his heel before the porter he’d been threatening to skewer – the fellow was frozen in terror, his eyes the size of dinner plates – and
rebounded towards the Ferret, who was only now beginning to react to the perceived threat, reaching for a sidearm –
‘Freeze!’ Alasdair shouted. ‘She has the better of you! Don’t throw your life away!’
Miriam swallowed, carefully tightening her aim.
He knew I’d drawn. And he deliberately cleared my line of fire! When am I going to stop underestimating these people?
The Ferret’s face, framed in her sights, was corpse-gray.
‘Raise your hands!’ she called.
The Ferret –
Sir Gunnar, he’s got a name
, she reminded herself – slowly raised his hands. Sir Alasdair stood perhaps six feet away from him, his raised saber lethally
close. A healthy man could lunge across ten feet in a second, with arm’s reach and sword’s point to add another six – the Glock holstered at Gunnar’s belt might as well have
been as far away as the moon.
If you’ve got a gun and your assailant has a knife, don’t
ever
let them get within twelve feet of you
, she distantly remembered a long-ago
instructor telling her.
Miriam took a shuffling step forward, then another, feeling for solid footing with her toes. It got easier to ignore the sensation of her heart trying to climb out through her mouth with
practice, she noted absently.
‘Disarm him,’ she heard Sir Alasdair tell the other guard, who glanced nervously over his shoulder at her –
at her
– then hastily pulled the gun and the sword from
Gunnar’s belt.
Miriam risked lengthening her stride. Her breath was coming hard. Amusement and hysteria vied for control. She stopped when she was about fifteen feet from her target. ‘Who sent you
here?’ she demanded.
‘I’m not going to plead for mercy.’ The Ferret’s eyes, staring at her over the iron sights of her pistol, seemed to drill right through her. ‘You’re going to
kill me anyway.’ He sounded curiously resigned.
He’d beaten her, once, to make a point:
Obey me or I will hurt you
. That he’d been following orders rather than giving rein to his own sadistic urge made no difference to
Miriam. But –
Hold a trial
.
And accuse him of
what,
exactly?
Of being her jailer after Henryk had violated Clan law and process by
not
executing her for what
she’d done? If she gave him a trial, stuff better swept under the rug would come out. Kill him out of hand, and her enemies – the ones who’d tried to have her raped, or killed, or
maimed several times over the past year – would find a way to make use of it, but at least he wouldn’t be able to rat her out. Likely they’d use it as evidence of her instability
or anger –
anger
was always a good one to pin on a threatening woman. But it was nothing like as damaging as what he could reveal.
She licked her lips. ‘Not necessarily.’
Don’t tempt me
struggled briefly with a moment of revulsion:
Life is too damned cheap here as it is
. ‘Restrain
him.’ The other guard was already loosening the Ferret’s belt. ‘Lower your arms. Slowly.’
The room was very quiet. Miriam blinked back from her focus through the sights of the gun and realized all the servants had scurried for cover.
Smart of them
. ‘I hold him
covered,’ Sir Alasdair said conversationally.
‘Oh. Thanks.’ She blinked again, then lowered the gun and carefully unhooked her finger from the trigger guard, which seemed to have somehow shrunk to the gauge of a wedding ring.
The guard worked the Ferret’s arms behind his back and tied them together with his own belt. She glanced at Sir Alasdair. ‘Tell him what I told you to do with him. I don’t think
he’ll believe it, coming from me.’
Alasdair kept his sword raised. ‘Her highness ordered me to send you a very long way away from her and make sure she never set eyes on you again. Her exact words.’ His cheek
twitched. ‘I don’t
have
to kill you.’
‘Highness?’ Gunnar’s face slumped, defiance draining out of it to leave wan misery behind. ‘So it’s true?’
‘Is what true?’ she asked.
‘You’re carrying. The heir.’
She stared at Sir Gunnar. ‘You didn’t
know
?’
‘My lord did not see fit to tell me.’ He was pale, almost greenish. Miriam stared at the blue eyes set in a nondescript face, the balding head and wiry frame, trying to remember how
scant seconds ago she’d looked at them and seen a monster.
Who’s the
real
monster here?
she asked herself.
‘It’s true,’ she told him. ‘And what Sir Alasdair told you is true. You don’t have to die; all you have to do is stay the hell away from me. And tell us how your
name got on that list.’
‘What list?’ He looked away, at Sir Alasdair. ‘What the hell is she talking about?’
‘Why are you here? Look at me!’ Miriam shifted her grip on her pistol.
The Ferret turned his head, reluctantly. ‘What list?’ he asked again.
‘The master roster of available bodyguards for council members,’ Sir Alasdair rumbled. ‘You were right at the top of it.’
‘As if I shouldn’t be?’ Gunnar snorted. ‘What do you take me for?’
‘Wait,’ said Miriam. ‘What did you do for Henryk? Officially?’
There was a pause. ‘I was his chief of security.
Officially
.’
Ah
. ‘And unofficially?’
Gunnar made a small shrug. Now that he wasn’t staring down the barrel of a pistol held by an incandescently angry woman he seemed to be recovering his poise. ‘The same. I
was
his chief of security. Until the Pretender did for him.’
‘Right.’ She glanced at Sir Alasdair. ‘Maybe you’d like to tell him what I asked you
first
.’
‘Highness, I think he can guess.’ Alasdair’s smile was humorless, and it wiped the nascent defiance right off Gunnar’s face. ‘I am ordered, and empowered, to act
with any necessary force in defense of your person. Do you consider this man a threat to your person?’
It was hard to look at the Ferret’s frightened face and still want to see him swinging from a tree. It had been tempting in the abstract, but ven Hjalmar was the real villain of the piece,
and beyond her reach if he was indeed dead; in the clarity of the moment she found the Ferret pathetic rather than threatening, an accomplice rather than a ringleader. ‘Right now . . . no.
But he knows things. And I don’t trust where he’s been, why he’s here. It stinks.’ She glanced at Sir Alasdair. ‘Escort him from the premises and make sure he
doesn’t come back, but don’t kill him. I need to talk to you later, but first I have other work to do.’ Her cheek twitched as she looked back at the Ferret. ‘Payback can be
a bitch, can’t it? Have a nice day.’
Gunnar’s control finally cracked. ‘High-born cunt! The doctor was right about you!’ he shouted after her. But she had already turned her back on him, and he could not possibly
see her shock. The sound of her guards beating him followed her up the staircase.
BEGIN RECORDING
‘WELLSPRING?’
‘MYRIAD?’
‘No, I’m the fucking tooth fairy – who do you think? You’ve missed three calls in a row. This had better be good.’
‘Oh yes? Well, that stunt you pulled with the physics package could have killed me! What the hell were you
thinking
?’
‘Hey,
I
didn’t pull the trigger on that one. We’re not a monolith; stovepipes melt and shit falls between the cracks. Did you just place this call so you
could bitch at me or do you have something concrete?’
(
Indignant snort
.) ‘Certainly. Your message in a pipe bomb, up near Concord? It was received loud and clear.’
‘Really? Good – ’
‘No,
bad
. You know there was a pocket-sized civil war going on over there? Well, your timing was
brilliant
. You wiped out an entire army. Only trouble is,
it
was the wrong one
. You handed the tinkers victory on a plate – they’re busy mopping up right now, chasing down the last stragglers. They’ve even got some kind of
half-cocked claim to the throne lined up, and you killed the only legitimate heir who wasn’t in their pocket! Did you know that? You’ve just killed off all their enemies,
and let them know into the bargain that it’s war to the knife.’
(
Silence
.)
‘Hello? Are you still there?’
‘Jesus.’
‘The phrase they use hereabouts is “God-on-a-stick”; but, yes, I echo the sentiment.’
‘Can you just confirm all that, please?’
‘Certainly. When you blew up the Hjalmar Palace, the royalist army that was
fighting
the tinkers had just occupied it.
They
had evacuated it a couple of hours
earlier. Among the casualties was the crown prince – ’
‘Hang on. You said the Clan had evacuated the structure. Are you certain of that?’
(
Snort
.) ‘If they hadn’t, then how come their soldiers are dispersed all around the capital? Oh, they’re not stupid – they got the message, you
won’t catch them all concentrating in a strongpoint again. Why?’
‘But how? How did they withdraw?’
‘The usual way – they world-walked. Or so I infer. They certainly didn’t fight their way through the pretender’s siege works: Individually they outgunned
his army, but quantity’s got a quality all of its own, as they say.’
(
Silence
.)
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes. Just thinking.’
‘Well, think faster. I don’t have long here.’
(
Slowly
.) ‘If the nar – If the Clan forces exfiltrated by world-walking, how did they do it? We had the whole area blanketed.’
‘You did? Well, they must have just gone through another world, then.’
‘Another’ – (
pause
) – ‘you’re shitting me.’
‘Huh?’
‘Other world, unquote.’
‘Yes. So?’
‘You mean there are more?’ ‘What?’
‘How many worlds, MYRIAD?
How many fucking worlds?
’
‘Eh, don’t get sharp with me, asshole! I can always put the phone down!’
(
Heavy breathing
.) ‘I need to know.’ (
Pause
.) ‘I’m sorry. This is – this upsets everything.’
‘I thought you knew this shit. Do I have to baby you?’
‘Knew – ah, shit. Look, this stuff is new to us. How many worlds are there?’
‘How should I know? Last week, there was ours, there was yours, there was the other one the homicidal cousins come from – ’
‘Homicidal
cousins
?’
‘Long story. Anyway, word just in says they’ve discovered a fourth, and there’s a team actively looking for more. For all I know there are factions or
conspiracies who’ve already gotten there, who’ve got their own private bolt-holes well stocked for a long siege; but it used to be that everybody only knew about two.
I’m guessing that cat’s out of the bag, and . . . nobody knows. Could be, four’s the total. But are you willing to bet on that?’
‘Oh Jesus. The VP is going to shit a supertanker.’
‘Hey, I’m just the messenger. Didn’t your other informants tell you?’
‘No.’ (
Pause
.) ‘How do they get to these other worlds?’
‘Fuck knows. I
think
there’s something about using a different symbol, or maybe it’s just where they start out from. I really don’t – ’
(
Pause
.)
‘Hello?’
‘Someone’s coming, got to clear down now. I’ll call later.’
(
Click
.)
‘Wait – ’
(
Dial tone
.)
END RECORDING
An attorney’s office in Providence was an unlikely setting to look for a government-in-exile, but it suited Iris just fine.
The boy’s smart
, she decided.
Smart
and
discreet
were interchangeable in this context: Nobody would bat an eyelid at an attorney receiving numerous visitors, some of them shady, some at odd times of day. It was
the next best thing to a crack house as an interchange for anonymous visitors, with the added advantage of being less likely to attract attention in its own right.
