The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (62 page)

It wasn’t only women’s rights that were a problem here – and
that
was bad enough, as she’d discovered: women here had fewer civil rights than they had in Iran,
in her own world; at least in Iran women could vote – here, anyone who wasn’t a member of the first thousand families was second-class, unable to move to a new city without a permit
from the Polis, a subject rather than a citizen. ‘Fomenting democratic agitation’ was an actual on-the-books felony that could get you sent to a labor camp in the far north. Outright
chattel slavery might have fizzled away in the late nineteenth century, but casual racism was pervasive.

I just want to go home. If only I knew where home is!

The water was growing cold. Miriam finished her ablutions, then returned to the hotel room. It was close and humid in the summer heat, so she raised the sash window, dropping the gauze insect
screen behind it.
Erasmus can let himself in,
she thought, crawling between the sheets.
How late will he
– She dozed off.

She awakened to daylight, and Erasmus’s voice, sounding heartlessly cheerful as he opened the shutters: ‘Rise and shine! And good morning to you, Miriam! I hope you slept well.
You’ll be pleased to know that your letter made the final collection: it’ll have been delivered already. I’ll be about my business up the corridor while you make yourself decent.
How about some breakfast before we travel?’

‘Ow, you cruel, heartless man!’ She struggled to sit up, covering her eyes. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s half-past six, and we need to be on the train at ten to eight.’

‘Okay, I’m awake already!’ She squinted into the light. Burgeson was fully dressed, if a bit rumpled-looking. ‘The chaise was a bit cramped?’

‘I’ve slept on worse.’ He picked up a leather toilet bag. ‘If you’ll excuse me? I’ll knock before I come in.’

He disappeared into the corridor, leaving Miriam feeling unaccountably disappointed.
Damn it, it’s unnatural to be that cheerful in the morning!
Still, she was thoroughly awake.
Kicking the covers back, she sat up and stretched. Her clothing lay where she’d left it the evening before. By the time Erasmus knocked again she was prodding her hair back into shape in
front of the dressing-table mirror. ‘Come in,’ she called.

‘Oh good.’ Erasmus nodded approvingly. ‘I’ve changed my mind about breakfast: I think we ought to catch the morning express. How does that sound to you? I’m sure we
can eat perfectly well in the dining car.’

She turned to stare. ‘I’d rather not hurry,’ she began, then thought better of it. ‘Is there a problem?’ Her pulse accelerated.

‘Possibly.’ He didn’t look unduly worried, but Miriam was not reassured. ‘I’d rather not stay around to find out.’

‘In that case,’ Miriam picked up the valise and began stuffing sundries into it: ‘Let’s get moving.’ The skin in the small of her back itched. ‘Are we being
watched?’

‘Possibly. And then again, it might just be routine. Let me help you.’ Erasmus passed her hat down from the coat rack, then gathered up her two shopping bags. ‘The sooner
we’re out of town the better. There’s a train at ten to seven, and we can catch it if we make haste.’

Downstairs, the hotel was already moving. ‘Room ninety-two,’ Erasmus muttered to the clerk on the desk, sliding a banknote across: ‘I’m in a hurry.’

The clerk peered at the note then nodded. ‘That will be fine, sir.’ Without waiting, Erasmus made for the front door, forcing Miriam to take quick steps to keep up with him.
‘Quickly,’ he muttered from the side of his mouth. ‘Keep your eyes open.’

The sidewalk in front of the hotel was merely warm, this early in the morning. A newspaper boy loitered opposite, by the Post Office: early-morning commuters were about. Miriam glanced in the
hotel windows as she followed Erasmus along the dusty pavement. A flicker of a newspaper caught her eye, and she looked ahead in time to see a man in a peak-brimmed hat crossing the road, looking
back towards them. She tensed. She’d seen this pattern before – a front and back tail, boxing in a surveillance subject. ‘Are we likely to be robbed in the street?’ she
asked Erasmus’s retreating back.

He stopped dead, and she nearly ran into him: ‘No, of course not.’ He didn’t meet her eyes, looking past her. ‘I see what you see,’ he added in a low,
conversational tone. ‘So. Change of plan – again.’ He offered her his arm. ‘Let’s take this nice and easy.’

Miriam took his arm, holding him close to her side. ‘What are we going to do?’ she muttered.

‘We’re going to deliberately get on the wrong train.’ He steered her around a pillar box, then into the entrance to the station concourse, and simultaneously passed her a
stubby cardboard ticket. ‘We want to be on the ten to seven for Boston, on platform six. But we’re going to get on the eight o’clock to Newport, on platform eight, opposite
platform six, and we’re going to get on right at the front.’

‘Then what?’

‘It’s sixteen minutes to seven.’ He smiled and waved his ticket at the uniformed fellow at the end of the platform: Miriam followed his example. ‘At twelve minutes to the
hour, we cross over to the correct train. If we’re stopped or if you miss it, remember your cover, we just got on the wrong train by mistake. All right? Let’s go . . .’

Miriam took a deep breath.
This doesn’t sound good,
she realized, her pulse pounding in her ears as an irrational fear made her guts clench. She resisted the urge to look over her
shoulder, instead keeping hold of Burgeson’s arm until he steered her towards a railway carriage that seemed to consist of a row of small compartments, each with its own doors and a running
board to allow access to the platform. As she reached the train, she glanced sideways along the platform. The same two men she’d seen on the street were walking towards her: as she watched,
one of them peeled off toward the carriage behind.
It’s a box tail all right.
She forced herself to unfreeze and climbed into the empty eight-seat compartment, and Erasmus’s
arms.

‘Hey!’

‘This is the hard bit.’ He steered her behind him, then pulled the door to and swiftly dropped the heavy leather shutters across the windows of the small compartment. Then he walked
to the door on the other side of the carriage and opened it. ‘I’ll lower you.’

‘I can climb down myself, thanks.’ Miriam looked over the edge. It was a good five feet down to the track bed. ‘Damn.’ She lowered herself over the dusty footplate.
‘Got the bags?’

‘Right behind you.’

The track bed was covered in cinders and damp, unpleasant patches. She patted her clothes down and reached up to take the luggage Erasmus passed her. A second later he stood beside her,
breathing hard. ‘Are you all right?’

‘A touch of – of – you know.’ He wheezed twice, then coughed, horribly. ‘All right now.
Move.
’ He pointed her across the empty tracks, towards a
flight of crumbling brick steps leading up the side of the platform. ‘Go on.’

She hurried across the tracks then up the steps. She glanced back at Erasmus: he seemed to be in no hurry, but at least he was moving.
Damn, why now?
This was about the worst possible
moment for his chest to start causing trouble. She looked round, taking stock of the situation. The crowd on the platform was thinning, people bustling towards open doors as if in a hurry to avoid
a rain storm. A plump man in a tricorn hat was marching up the platform, brandishing a red flag. Nobody was watching her climb the steps from the empty track bed.
Come on, Erasmus!
She
took a step towards the train, then another, and picked up her pace. A few seconds later, an open door loomed before her. She pulled herself up and over the threshold. ‘Is this compartment
reserved?’ she asked, flustered: ‘My husband – ’

A whistle shrilled. She looked round, and down. Erasmus stood on the platform below her, panting, clearly out of breath. ‘No reservations,’ grumbled a fat man in a violently clashing
check jacket. He shook his newspaper ostentatiously and made a great show of shifting over a couple of inches.

Miriam reached down and took Erasmus’s hand. It felt like twigs bound in leather, light enough that her heave carried him halfway up the steps in one fluid movement. She stepped backwards
and sat down, and he smiled at her briefly then tugged the door closed. The whistle shrilled again as the train lurched and began to pull away. ‘I didn’t think we were going to make
it,’ she said.

Burgeson took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds. ‘Neither did I,’ he admitted wheezily, glancing back along the platform towards the two running figures that had just
lurched into view. ‘Neither did I . . .’

It’s all very simple,
Huw tried to reassure himself.
It’ll take us somewhere new, or it won’t.
True, the Lee family knotwork worked fine, as
a key for travel between the worlds of the Gruinmarkt and New Britain. But the limited, haphazard attempts to use it in the United States had all failed so far. Huw had a simple theory to explain
that: Miriam was in the wrong place when she’d tried to world-walk.

You couldn’t world-walk if there was a solid object in your position in the destination world. That was why doppelgängering worked, why if you wanted protection against assassins for
your castle in the Gruinmarkt you needed to secure the equivalent territory in the United States – or in any other world where the same geographical location was up for grabs. That explained
why the Lee family had been able to successfully murder a handful of Clan heads over the years, triggering and fueling the vicious civil war that had decimated the Clan between the nineteen-forties
and the late nineteen-seventies. And their lack of the pattern required to world-walk to the United States explained why, in the long run, the Lee family had fallen so far behind their Clan
cousins.

‘There are a bunch of ways the knotwork might work,’ he’d tried to explain to the duke. ‘The fact that two different knots let us travel between two different worlds is
interesting. And they’re similar, which implies they’re variations on a common theme. But does the knotwork specify two endpoints, in which case all a given knot can do is let you
shuttle between two worlds, A and B – or does it define a vector relationship in a higher space? One that’s quantized, and commutative, so if you start in universe A you always shuttle
from A to B and back again, but if you transport it to C you can then use it to go between C and a new world, call it D?’

The duke had just blinked at him thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure I understand. How will I explain this to the committee?’

Huw had to give it some thought. ‘Imagine an infinite chessboard. Each square on the board is a world. Now pick a piece – a knight, for example. You can move to another square, or
reverse your move and go back to where you started from. That’s what I mean by a quantized commutative transformation – you can only move in multiples of a single knight’s move,
your knight can’t simply slide one square to the left or right, it’s constrained. Now imagine our Clan knotwork is a knight – and the Lee family’s design is, um, a special
kind of rook that can move exactly three squares in a straight line. You use the knight, then the rook: to get back to where you started you have to reverse your rook’s move, then reverse the
knight’s move. But because they’re different types of move, they don’t go to the same places – and if you combine them, you can discover new places to go. An infinite number
of new places.’

‘That is a very interesting theory. Test it. Find out if it’s true. Then report to me.’ He raised a warning finger: ‘Try not to get anyone killed in the
process.’

The pizza crusts were cold and half the soda was drunk. It was midafternoon, and the house was cooling down now that the air-conditioning had been on for a while. Huw sat in the front room,
staring at the laptop screen. According to the geographical database, the ground underfoot was about as stable as it came. There were no nearby rivers, no obvious escarpments with debris to slide
down and block the approaches. He closed his eyes, trying to visualize what the area around the house might look like in a land bare of human habitation. ‘You guys ready yet?’ he
called.

‘Nearly there.’ There was a clicking, rattling noise from the kitchen. Elena was tweaking her vicious little toy again. (‘You’re exploring: your job is to take
measurements, look around, avoid being seen, and come right back. But if the worst happens, you aren’t going to let anyone stop you coming back. Or leave any witnesses.’)

‘Ready.’ Hulius came in the door, combat boots thudding.

Huw glanced up. In his field camouflage, body armor, and helmet Hulius looked like a rich survivalist who’d been turned loose in an army surplus store. ‘Where’s your telemetry
pack?’

‘In the kitchen. Where’s your medical kit?’

Huw gestured at the side of the room. ‘Back porch.’ He slid the laptop aside carefully and stood up. ‘How’s your blood pressure?’

‘No problems with it, I’m not dizzy or anything.’

‘Good. Okay, so let’s go . . .’

Huw found Elena in the kitchen at the back of the rental house. She had her telemetry belt on, and the headset, and had rigged the P90 in a tactical sling across her chest. ‘Ready?’
he asked.

‘I can’t wait!’ She bounced excitedly on her toes.

‘Let me check your equipment first.’ She surrendered with ill grace to Huw’s examination. ‘Okay, I’m switching it on now.’ He poked at the ruggedized PDA,
then waited until the screen showed an off-kilter view of the back of his head. ‘Good, camera’s working.’ He turned to Hulius. Gruffly: ‘Your turn now.’

‘Sure, dude.’ Hulius stood patiently while Huw hung the telemetry pack off his belt, under the rucksack full of ration packs, drink cans, and survival tools. Hulius’s was
heavier, and included a Toughbook PC and a short-wave radio – unlike Elena he might be sticking around for a while.

‘Got signal.’

‘Cool. I’m ready whenever you are.’

‘Okay, I’ll meet you out back.’

Huw headed for the front room to collect the big first aid kit and the artist’s portfolio, his head spinning.
Demo time, right?
Nobody had done this before; not this
well-organized, anyway. He felt a momentary stab of anxiety.
If we’d done this right, we’d have two evenly matched world-walkers, able to lift each other, not a linebacker and a
princess.
The failure modes scared him shitless if he stopped to think about them. Still, Yul and ’Lena were eager volunteers. That counted for something, didn’t it?