The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (7 page)

‘It’s a safe house,’ Brill explained as she pushed buttons on an alarm system that was far fancier – and newer – than the building it was attached to. ‘We own
a bunch of them, lease them out for short stays via a local agent, so there’s a lot of turnover. There’s always one free when we need it, and it doesn’t look suspicious. We
actually make money on the deal: We can buy the properties with spare capital and they’re mostly going up.’

Miriam glanced around as they entered the front hall. Dust tickled her nostrils; the husk of a dead beetle lay, legs upturned, in the middle of the floor. She wrinkled her nose.
‘What’s the plan?’

‘Oh, I just phoned the agent and told them I was a friend of the owner and we were taking it for two weeks.’ She held up a key. ‘There’s some emergency gear stashed in
the cellar, behind a false wall. Other than that, it’s clean – the emergency gear’s the kind of stuff a survival nut would have, nothing to attract special attention. The only
real trouble we’ve ever had with these safe houses was when one of them was accidentally let to a meth dealer. We cleared them out good. The Sheriff’s department
like
us.’
She said it with such evident satisfaction that Miriam shivered. For a meth dealer, setting up a clandestine lab in a Clan safe house was a bit like a fox setting up house in a grizzly’s den.
‘You may want to take the front bedroom, milady. I’ll get the air and hot water working and everyone else settled in, then we can talk.’

Three hours later, Miriam felt a lot more human. Air conditioning! Proper showers! Toilets with lids and a handle you turned to flush, rather than yanking on a chain! It was almost like being
home again. Brill had even, somehow, managed to find the time to scare up some clothes that fit her, so she didn’t look totally weird. Well, Brill had been her lady-in-waiting for some
months, as one of the jobs she did for the thin white duke – Miriam’s uncle – so knowing her measurements wasn’t that odd. It was a shame she’d bleached her hair blond
while she’d been on the run, Miriam told herself; the colors Brill had picked didn’t match her new look, and besides, her roots were starting to show.

But I’m home. So, what now?

She sat on the edge of the bed, one leg of a very new pair of jeans dangling, and stared at the window. It was utterly unlike the stony castle casement she’d spent weeks staring at in a
state of desperation, under house arrest and facing a forced political marriage as a lesser evil to paying the price of her earlier mistakes, but it was still a window in a house guarded by the
Clan’s traditions and rules. The formal betrothal had gone adrift in a sea of flame and gunfire, as Crown Prince Egon took exception to the idea of a Clan heiress marrying his younger (and
retarded) brother; then she’d been on the run in the confusing political underworld of New Britain, moving too fast to think. But now –

It all depends on what else has been going on since I left
. She sighed and began to work her other foot down the pants leg.
Is Mom okay?
She paused again.
Brill said something
about being under attack over here. Is
Paulie
okay?
Paulette, her sometime PA, was an outsider to all this – but if the Clan was being attacked from outside, she could be in big
trouble, stuck in Cambridge. Guilt by association: Some within the Clan would see her as a tool tainted by Miriam’s low stock, while whatever agency was going after the Clan would assume the
worst.
I’ve got to find out
, Miriam decided, and stood up just as there was a tentative knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ she called, hastily buttoning up.

The door opened and Brilliana looked in. ‘Milady?’

‘I’m nearly done here.’ Miriam glanced around. ‘Where did I put my shoes?’ Handmade leather ankle boots from New Britain wouldn’t look too out of place, and
shoes were the one thing Brill hadn’t been able to buy for her. ‘Eh.’ They were hiding under the dressing table.

‘I think we need to talk.’

‘Yes.’ Miriam bent over and began working on her left foot. ‘What exactly has been going on since the, the banquet?’ Her brain began to catch up with her earlier
thoughts: ‘My mother – is she all right? What about the duke? My grandmother – ’

‘It’s a mess,’ said Brill. She perched on the stool by the table. ‘We’re not sure exactly how long Egon had been planning it for, but he used Henryk’s
scheme’ – the plan to forcibly marry Miriam into the Gruinmarkt’s royal dynasty – ‘as leverage to get a bunch of the backwood peers behind him. He’s declared the
entire Clan outlaw and placed a price on our heads, and is promising half our estates to those nobles who back him. It’s turned into a messy civil war and Angbard’s hands were tied
trying to defend individual holdings instead of going after the pretender’s army. While all that was going on, we’ve had some disturbing – well, a couple of couriers have gone
missing over the past six months. Missing with no explanation, no hint of trouble. Not only did that bastard Matthias rat us out to the Drug Enforcement Agency, now there’s some sort of
secret government cross-agency committee trying to hunt us down. Everyone on this side has had to activate their emergency cover plans. And the really bad news is that this agency managed to sneak
a couple of agents into the Gruinmarkt, which means it’s serious.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Miriam sat up and took a deep breath. ‘I told you about meeting Mike, didn’t I?’ She’d once had a thing going with Mike Fleming. Odd, it seemed
an awfully long time ago. ‘He got me out of the palace alive.’ She shrugged. ‘He was unexpectedly honest.’ Another deep breath. ‘Told me that if I wanted to join the
federal witness protection program . . .’

The words hung in the air for a few seconds. Finally, Brilliana nodded. ‘We know. And it will count for much when it comes to the Council’s attention, I think,’ she said
slowly. A longer pause. ‘Olga and your mother have been talking to him. Trying to negotiate a, a temporary ceasefire. But things are really bad. They believe we’ve stolen a nuclear
weapon, and they want it back.’

‘Jesus.’ Miriam shook her head. ‘Why would they think
that?’
She looked at Brill, aghast. ‘Hang on. They
believe
the Clan has stolen a
nuke?
Why?
Why would they believe that? Has Angbard – ? He’d have to be mad! Tell me he hasn’t?’

Brill looked uncomfortable. ‘
Angbard
hasn’t stolen a nuke. But they leave them in undoppelgängered bunkers; is that not a temptation?’

‘Oh,
shit
.’ Miriam shoved her hair back from her face. ‘Has someone in the Clan actually gone and stolen a nuclear weapon? How? I mean, I thought they were too big to
carry – ’

‘Not one,’ Brill said, then bit her lip. ‘Six, we think. Maybe more. They’re backpack devices, part of the inactive inventory – the CIA asked for them,
originally.’

Aghast, Miriam stared at her. ‘Is that why they’re all over us?’

Brill nodded.

‘Then who – ’

‘Oliver, Baron Hjorth, is the key-holder designated by the Clan committee.’

‘Jesus, why
him?’
The thought of what might happen if the feds discovered the Clan had haunted Miriam ever since she’d learned about her own ancestry; what they might do
if they thought the extradimensional narcoterrorists had nuclear weapons didn’t bear thinking about. And Baron Oliver was about the worst person she could think of to be holding them –
an unregenerate backwoodsman and dyed-in-the-wool conservative faction member. ‘And they can get their own people into the Gruinmarkt, can’t they.’

‘There’s more bad news,’ Brill added after a moment. ‘Why don’t you come downstairs? Then Huw can deliver it himself.’

*

Elena sprawled across the sofa in the living room, pulling an oiled cleaning cloth through the breech of her P90. ‘Find another channel, minion,’ she drawled without
looking up. ‘I can’t
stand Friends
.’

‘As you wish, my princess.’ Yul, hulking and fair-haired as any Viking warrior, carefully squeezed the remote. Advertisements and sitcoms strobed across the eviscerated guts of the
machine pistol on the coffee table until he arrived at MTV. ‘Ah, that is better.’ Marilyn Manson strutted and howled through ‘The Last Day on Earth’; Elena pulled a face.
‘Manly music for martial – ’ an oily rag landed on his head.

‘Children.’

Elena glanced round, pulled a face. ‘
He
started it!’

‘Sure.’ Huw stood in the doorway, trying not to smile. ‘Did you get the Internet working?’

‘Something’s wrong with it,’ Yul said apologetically.

‘Ah, well.’ Huw shrugged and walked over to the armchair, where a laptop trailed bits of many-colored spaghetti towards the wall. ‘I’ll sort it out. Got to report
in.’ Expecting Yul or Elena to do anything technical had been a forlorn hope.
Am I the only competent person around here?
he wondered. Dumb question: While he’d been studying in
schools and colleges in the United States under a false identity, Yul had been bringing joy to their backwoods father’s heart, riding and hunting and being a traditional son on their country
estate in the western marches of the Gruinmarkt; and Elena had been under the stifling constraints of a noble daughter, although she’d kicked up enough of a fuss that her parents had allowed
her to escape into Clan Security, leaving them with one less dowry to worry about. Which left Huw as the guy who knew one end of an Internet router and a secure voice-over IP connection from
another, and Yul and Elena as the armed muscle to watch over him when they weren’t engaging in risky post-adolescent high jinks – risky because the older generation weren’t many
years past fighting blood feuds over that sort of thing.

It took him a few minutes, some scrabbling with cables, and a reboot to get everything working properly. Huw was setting up the encrypted link to the ClanSec e-mail hub and looking forward to
checking in when he heard footsteps.

‘Yes?’ He glanced round. It was Miriam. She looked – not tired, exactly, but careworn. And something else.

‘Brill tells me we need to talk,’ she said, then glanced across the room at the sofa.

‘She said – ’ Huw’s larynx froze for a few seconds as he stared at her. The first time he’d met her, gowned and bejeweled at a royal reception, she’d been
turned out in the very mode of Gruinmarkt nobility; then earlier, when Lady Brilliana had so rudely yanked him (and Yul, and Elena) away from his survey, she’d been wearing an out-landish
getup. Now she looked –
at ease
, he decided.
This is her. She isn’t acting a part. How
interesting. ‘Ah. Well, she did, did she?’

‘She said.’ Miriam leaned on the back of his chair. ‘You’ve been exploring. Whatever that means.’ She sounded bored, but there was a glint in her eye.

‘Uh, yeah.’ Huw leaned forward and shut the laptop’s lid. ‘Why don’t we go fix something to drink?’ He glanced sidelong at Yul and Elena, who were sitting on
the sofa, bickering amiably over the gun, their heads leaning together. ‘Somewhere quieter.’ The TV howled mournfully, recycling the sound track of a guitar in torment.

The kitchen was bland, basic, and undersupplied – they’d traveled light and hadn’t had time to buy much more than a bunch of frozen pizzas – but there was coffee, a
carton of half-and-half, and a coffee maker. Huw busied himself filling it while Miriam searched the cupboards for mugs. ‘How did you go about it?’ she asked, finally.

Huw took a deep breath. ‘Systematically. We haven’t started deconvoluting the knotwork’ – the two worlds to which the Clan’s members could walk were distinguished
by the use of a different knot that the world-walker had to concentrate on – ‘but I’m pretty sure we’ll start finding others once we do. The fourth world we found –
it’s accessed from this one, if you use the Lees’ knot. We couldn’t get through to it in New England, but it worked down south; I think it may be in the middle of an ice
age.’

‘Did you find anyone? People, I mean?’

‘Yes.’ Huw paused as the coffee maker coughed and grumbled to itself. ‘Their bones. A big dome, made out of something like, like a very odd kind of concrete. Residual
radioactivity. A skull with perfect dentistry, bits of damaged metalwork, fire escapes or gantries or something, that I’ll swear are made out of titanium. It’s clearly been there
decades or centuries. And then there’s the door.’

‘Door?’

‘Yul hit it with an axe. Nearly killed us – there was hard vacuum on the other side.’

‘Whoops.’ Miriam pulled out a stool and sat down at the breakfast bar. ‘Too fast.
Vacuum?
You think you found a
door
onto another world?’

‘We didn’t stick around to make sure. But it didn’t stop sucking after a couple of minutes. Last time we saw the dome, it was surrounded by fog.’

‘Oh my.’ Her shoulders were shaking. ‘God.’

Huw watched her, not unsympathetically. He’d had more than a day to get used to the idea: If Lady Brilliana was right – and his own judgement was right – and Miriam was fit to
lead them . . .

‘That changes a lot of things,’ she said, looking straight at him. ‘If it
is
a door to another world . . . how do you think it works?’

Huw shrugged again. ‘We are cursed by our total ignorance of our family talent’s origins,’ he pointed out. ‘But what we seem to have is a trait that can be externally
controlled – that’s what the knot’s for – and I figure if it turns out that other knots take us to other worlds, then it’s no huge leap to conclude that it was
engineered. I don’t think anyone’s looked inside us – I figure the mechanism, if there is one, has got to be something intracellular – but the fact that it’s
controllable, that we don’t world-walk at random when we look at a maze or a fractal generator on a PC, screams design. This door? There’s more stuff in that dome, lots more, and it
looks like wreckage left behind by a civilization more advanced than this one.’ He pointed at the coffee maker. ‘Think what a peasant back home would make of that? You know, and I know,
what it is and how it works, because we went to school and college in this country.’ He pulled the jug out and poured two mugs of coffee. ‘Electricity. But to a peasant . . .’