The Merchants’ War

First Light

A narrow spiral staircase wormed upwards through the guts of a building, its grimy windowpanes opening onto a space that might once have been an alleyway but was now enclosed on all four sides by building extensions, so that it formed a wholly enclosed shaft at the bottom of which a pile of noisome debris had accumulated over the years. Other windows also opened onto the tiny courtyard; windows that provided ventilation and light to rooms that could not be seen from any street, or reached other than by the twisting staircase, which was concealed at ground level by a false partition in the back of a scullery closet. Almost a quarter of the rooms in the building were concealed in this fashion from the outside world. And in a garret at the top of the secret stairwell, a middle-aged woman sat working at a desk.

Bent over her wooden writing box, she systematically read her way through a thick stack of papers. Periodically she reached over to one side to pick up a pen and scrawl cryptic marginalia upon them. Less frequently, her brow furrowing, she would pick up a clean sheet of writing paper and dash off a sharp inquiry to one of her correspondents. Somewhat less frequently, she would consign a report—too hot to handle—to the glowing coals in the fireplace. The underground postal service that moved this mail was slow and expensive and prone to disruption: it might strike an ignorant observer as odd that Margaret, Lady Bishop would treat its fruits so casually. But to be caught in possession of much of this material would guarantee the holder a date with the hangman. Every use of the Movement’s post was a gamble with a postman’s life: and so she took pains to file the most important matters only in her memory, where they would not—if she had any say on the matter—be exposed to the enemy.

The darkness outside the window was complete and the stack of files before her was visibly shrinking when there came a knock at the door. “Come in,” she called sharply: there was no possibility of a surprise police raid here, not without gunshots and explosions to telegraph their arrival.

The door opened and the rough-looking fellow outside cleared his throat. “Got a problem downstairs. Woman at the door, asking for you by name. Says Burgeson sent her.”

“Was she followed?” Lady Bishop asked sharply.

“She said not, and I had a couple of the lads go ’ave a word with the hack what brought her. Nothing to fear on that account.”

“Good.” Lady Bishop breathed slightly easier. “Who is she? What does she want?”

“Figured we’d best leave that for you. She’s not one such as I’d recognize, and she’s dressed odd, like: Mal took her for a madwoman at first, but when she used your name and mentioned Burgeson I figured she was too dangerous to let go. So we stashed her in the cellar while we made arrangements.”

“Right. Right.” Lady Bishop nodded to herself, her face grim. “Is the Miller prepared?”

“Oh, aye.”

“Then I suppose you’d better bring her up here and we can get to the bottom of this, Ed. I shall start with an interview—to give the poor woman a chance to excuse herself. But when you come, bring Mal. In case we have to send her down.”

She spent the minutes before Ed’s return with the prisoner methodically prioritizing her remaining correspondence. Then she carefully moved the manila paper folders to a desk drawer, closed and locked her writing case, and tried to compose herself. In truth, Lady Bishop hated interrogations. However necessary it might be for the pursuit of the declaration, the process invariably left her feeling soiled.

The rap at the door, when it came, was loud and confident. “Enter,” she called. Edmund opened the door; behind him waited a woman, and behind her, the shadow of Mal the doorman. “Come in,” she added, and pointed to a rough stool on the opposite side of her desk: “and sit down.”

The woman was indeed oddly dressed. Is she an actress? Margaret wondered. It seemed unlikely. And her outfit, while outlandish, was in any case both too well tailored and too dirty for a stage costume. Then Lady Bishop took a good look at the woman’s face, and paused. The bruise on her cheek told a story: and so, when the woman opened her mouth, did the startling perfection of her dentistry.

“Are you Lady Bishop?”

Margaret, Lady Bishop stared at the woman for a moment, then nodded. “I am.” She had the most peculiar feeling that the woman on the stool opposite her was studying her right back, showing a degree of self-assurance she’d have expected from a judge, not a prisoner. Titled? Or a lord’s by-blow?

“I’m Miriam Beckstein,” said the woman. “I believe Erasmus has told you something about me.” She swallowed. “I don’t know how much he’s told you, but there’s been a change in the situation.”

Lady Bishop froze, surprise stabbing at her. You’re the Beckstein woman? She turned to look at her assistants: “Ed, Mal, wait outside.”

Ed looked perturbed. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

She gave him a hard stare: “you don’t need to hear this.” Why in Christ’s name didn’t you say it was her in the first place? She wanted to add, but not at risk of tipping off the prisoner about her place in the scheme of things.

Ed backed out of the room hastily and pulled the door shut. Margaret turned back to her unexpected visitor. “I’m sorry; we weren’t expecting you, so nobody told them to be on the lookout. Do you know who struck you?”

Beckstein looked startled for a moment, then raised a hand to her cheek. “This? Oh, it’s nothing to do with your men.” A distant expression crossed her face: “The man who hit me died earlier this evening. Before I continue—did Erasmus tell you where I come from?”

Lady Bishop considered feigning ignorance for a moment. “He said something about a different version of our world. Sounded like nonsense at first, but then the trinkets started showing up.” Her expression hardened. “If you think we can be bought and sold for glass beads—”

“I wouldn’t dream of it!” Beckstein paused. “But, uh, I needed to know. What he’d told you. The thing is, I ran into some trouble. I was able to escape, but I came here because it was all I could do—I got away with only the clothes on my back. I need to get back to Boston and contact some people to let them know I’m alright before they, before I can get everything back under control. I was hoping…” She ran out of words.

Lady Bishop watched her intently. Do you really think I’m that naive? she asked silently, permitting herself a moment’s cold anger. Did you really think you could simply march in and demand assistance? Then a second thought struck her: or maybe you don’t know who you’re dealing with…?

“Did Erasmus tell you anything about me? Or who I am associated with?” she asked.

Beckstein blinked. “He implied—oh.” Her eyes widened. “Oh shit.”

Lady Bishop stifled a sigh of exasperation. Indelicacy on top of naivety? A very odd mixture indeed.

The Beckstein woman stared at her. “Erasmus didn’t tell me enough…”

Margaret made up her mind. “I can see that,” she said, which was true enough—just not the absolution it might be mistaken for. Either you’re really down on your luck and you thought I might be an easy touch, or perhaps you’re really ignorant and in trouble. Which is it? “Tell me who you think I am,” she coaxed, “and I’ll tell you if you’re right or wrong.”

“Okay,” said Beckstein. Margaret made a mental note—what does that word mean?—then nodded encouragement. “I think you’re a member of the Levelers’ first circle. Probably involved in strategy and planning. And Erasmus was thinking about brokering a much higher-level arrangement between you and my, my, the people I represent. Represented.” She swallowed. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked, only a faint quaver in her voice.

“If you were entirely right in every particular, then I would absolutely have to kill you.” Margaret smiled to take the sting out of her words before she continued. “Luckily you’re just wrong enough to be safe. But,” she paused, to give herself time to prepare her next words carefully: “I don’t think you’re telling me the entire truth. And given your suspicions about my vocation, don’t you think that might not be very clever? I want the truth, Miss Beckstein. And nothing but the truth.”

“I”—Beckstein swallowed. Her eyes flickered from side to side, as if seeking a way out: Margaret realized that she was shaking. “I’m not sure. Whether you’d believe me, and whether it would be a good thing if you did.”

This was getting harder to deal with by the minute, Margaret realized. The woman was clearly close to the end of her tether. She’d put a good face on things at first, but there was more to this than met the eye. “I’ve seen Erasmus,” said Margaret. “He told me about the medicine you procured for him.” She watched the Beckstein woman closely: “and he showed me the disc-playing machine. The, ah, DVD player. One miracle might be an accident, but two suggest an interesting pattern. You needn’t worry about me mistaking you for a madwoman.

“But you must tell me exactly what has happened to you. Right now, at once, with no dissembling. Otherwise I will not be able to save you…”

BAM.

Judith Herz tensed unconsciously, steeling herself for the explosion, and crossed her fingers as the four SWAT team officers swung the battering ram back for a second knock. Not that tensing would do any good if there was a bomb in the self-storage room…

“Are you sure this is safe?” asked Rich Wall, fingering his mobile phone like it was a lucky charm.

Herz took a deep breath. “No,” she snapped. What do you expect me to say? “According to Mike Fleming, the asshole who sent us on this wild goose chase has a hard-on for claymore mines. That’s why—” she gestured at the chalk marks on the cinder block wall the officers were attacking, the heaps of dust from the drills, the fiber-optic camera on its dolly off to one side “—we’re going in through the wall.”

BAM.

A cloud of dust billowed out. There was a rattle of debris falling from the impact site on the wall. They’d started by drilling a quarter-inch hole, then sent a fiber-optic scope through with the delicacy of doctors conducting keyhole cardiac bypass surgery. The black plastic-coated hose had snaked around, bringing grainy gray images to the monitor screen on the console like images from a long-sealed Egyptian royal tomb. The dust lay heavy in the lockup room, as if it hadn’t been visited for months or years. Something indistinct and bulky, probably a large oil tank, hulked a couple of feet beyond the hole, blocking the line of sight to the door to the lockup. The caretaker had kicked up a fuss when she’d told him they were going to punch through the wall from the other side—after unceremoniously ejecting the occupants’ property—until she’d shown him her FBI card and the warrant the FEMA Sixth Circuit court had signed in their emergency in camera session. (Which the court had granted in a shot, the moment the bench saw the gamma ray spike the roving search truck had registered as it quartered the city, looking for a sleeping horror.) Then he’d clammed up and gone into his cubicle to phone the landlord.

“I think we’re gonna need that jack,” called one of the cops with the ram. His colleagues laid the heavy metal shaft down while two more cops in orange high-visibility jackets and respirators moved to shovel the rubble aside. “Should be through in a couple more minutes.”

Judith glanced at Rich, who grinned humorlessly. “This is your last chance to take a hike,” she suggested.

“Naah.” Rich glanced down. He was fidgeting with his phone, as if it was a lucky charm. “Let’s face it, I wouldn’t get far enough to clear the blast zone, would I?”

Judith suppressed a smile: “That’s true.” Go on, whistle in the dark. She shivered involuntarily. The guys with the battering ram didn’t know what they were here for: all they knew was that the woman from the FBI headquarters staff wanted into the storage room, and wanted in bad. She’d done the old stony stare and dropped an elliptical hint about Mideast terrorists and fertilizer bombs, enough to keep them on their toes but not enough to make them phone their families and tell them to leave town now. But Rich knew what they were looking for, and so did Bob, who was suiting up in the NIRT truck in the back parking lot along with the rest of his team, and Eric Smith, back in Maryland in a meeting room in Crypto City. “You could always step outside for a last cigarette.”

“I’m trying to give up. Last cigarettes, that is.” Rich shuffled from foot to foot as two of the cops grunted and manhandled a construction site jack into place beside the blue chalk X on the wall, where it was buckling ominously outwards.

“Okay, one more try,” called one of the cops—Sergeant McSweeny, Herz thought—as the ram team picked up their pole and began to work up their momentum.

BAM. This time there was a clatter of rubble falling as overstressed bricks gave way. The dust cleared and she saw there was a hole in the wall where the ram had struck, an opening into the heart of darkness. The battering ram team shuffled backwards out of the way of the two guys with shovels, who now hefted sledgehammers and went to work on the edges of the hole, widening it. “There’s your new doorway,” said one of the ram crew, wincing and rubbing his upper arm: “kinda short on brass fittings and hinges, but we can do you a deal on gravel for your yard.”

“Ri-ight,” drawled Rich. Judith glared at him, keeping her face frozen. That’s right, I’m a woman in black from a secret government agency, she thought. I’ve got no sense of humor and you better not get in my way. Even if the black outfit was a wind cheater with a big FBI logo, and a pair of 501s.

The cop recoiled slightly. “Hey, what’s up with you guys?”

“You have no need to know.” Judith relented slightly. “Seriously. You won’t read about this in the newspapers, but you’ve done a good job here today.” She winced slightly as another sledgehammer blow spalled chips off the edge of the hole in the wall. Which was growing now, to the point where a greased anorexic supermodel might be able to wriggle through. A large slab of wall fell inward, doubling the size of the hole. “Ah, showtime. If you guys could get the jack into position and then clear the area I think we will take it from here.” If only Mike Fleming was about. This is his fault, she thought venomously.

Ten minutes later the big orange jack was screwed tight against the top of the opening, keeping the cinder blocks above the hole from collapsing. The SWAT team was outside in the parking lot, packing their kit up and shooting random wild-assed guesses about what the hell it was they’d been called in to do, and why: Judith glanced at the wristwatch-shaped gadget strapped to her left wrist and nodded. It was still clean, showing background count of about thirty becquerels per second. A tad high for suburban Boston, but nothing that couldn’t be accounted for by the fly ash mixed into the cinder blocks. The idea of wearing a Geiger counter like a wristwatch still gave her the cold shudders when she thought about it, but that wasn’t so often these days, not after three weeks of it—and besides, it was better than the alternative.

A big gray truck was backing in to the lot tail-first. Rich waved directions to the driver, as if he needed them: the truck halted with a chuff of air brakes, five feet short of the open door to the small warehouse unit. The tailgate rattled up to reveal a scene right out of The X-Files—half a dozen men and women in bright orange inflatable space suits with oxygen tanks and black rubber gloves, wheeling carts loaded with laboratory instruments. They queued up in front of the tail lift. “Is the area clear?” Judith’s ear-pieces crackled.

She glanced around. “Witnesses out.” The SWAT team was already rolling up the highway a quarter of a mile away. They were far enough away that if things went really badly they might even survive.

“Okay, we’re coming in.” That was Dr. Lucius Rand, tall and thin, graying at the temples, seconded to the Family Trade Organization from his parent organization. Just like Judith, like Mike Fleming, like everyone else in FTO—only in his case, the parent organization was Pantex. He was in his late fifties. Rumor had it he’d studied at Ted Taylor’s knee; Edward Teller had supervised his Ph.D. The tailgate lift ground into operation, space-suited figures descending to planet Earth.

“We haven’t checked for booby traps yet,” she warned.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Rand sounded impatient.

Judith nodded to Rich as she pulled on a pair of disposable plastic shoe protectors: “Let’s go inside.”

The hole in the wall was about two feet wide and three feet high, a jagged gash. She switched on her torch—a tiny pocket LED lantern, more powerful than a big cop-style Maglite—and swept the floor. There were no wires. Good. She ducked through the hole, coughing slightly. Her Geiger watch still ticked over normally. Better. She stood up and looked around.

The room was maybe twenty feet long and eight feet wide, with a ten-foot ceiling. Naked unpainted cinder block walls, a galvanized tin ceiling, and a concrete floor completed the scene. There was a big rolling door at one end and dust everywhere. But what caught her attention was the sheer size of the cylinder that, standing on concrete blocks, dominated the room. “Sweet baby Jesus,” she whispered. It was at least ten feet long, and had to be a good four feet in diameter. There was barely room to walk around the behemoth. She shone her torch along the cylinder, expecting to see—“what the hell?”

“Herz, report! What have you seen?”

“It’s a cylinder,” she said slowly. “About ten, twelve feet long, four, five feet in diameter. Supported on concrete blocks. One end is rounded; there’s some kind of collar about three feet from the other end and four vanes sticking out, sort of like the fins on a bomb…” She trailed off. Like the fins on a bomb, she thought, dazed. Jesus, this can’t be here! She shook herself and continued, “there’s some kind of equipment trolley near the back end, and some wires going into the, the back of the bomb.” She glanced down at her watch. The second hand was spinning round. It was a logarithmic counter, and it had jumped from tens of becquerels per second to tens of thousands as she crossed the threshold. Gamma emission from secondary activation isotopes created by neutron absorption, she heard the lecture replay in her mind’s eye; Geiger counters can’t detect neutrons until the flux is way too high for safety, but over time a neutron source will tend to activate surrounding materials. “I’m reading secondaries. I think we’ve got a hot one. I’m coming out now.” A quick sweep across the screen door in front of the gadget’s nose revealed no telltale trip wires. “No sign of booby traps.”

“Acknowledged. Judith, I want you and Rich to go back into the van and wait while I do a preliminary site survey. Don’t touch anything on your way out. I want you to know, you’ve done good.” She realized she was shaking. Don’t touch anything. Right. She clambered out through the hole in the wall, blinking against the daylight, and stood aside as two figures in bright orange isolation suits duckwalked past her. The cylinders hanging from their shoulders bounced under their rubber covers like hugely obese buttocks as they bent down to crawl through the hole. Two more suits waved her down with radiation detectors and stripped off her shoe protectors before pronouncing her clean and waving her into the truck.

The back of the NIRT truck was crowded with consoles and flashing panels of blinkenlights, battered laptops plastered with security inventory stickers, and coat rails for the bulky orange suits. This was a NIRT survey wagon, not the defuse-and-disarm trailer—those guys would be along in a while, as soon as Dr. Rand confirmed he needed them. Too many NIRT vehicles in one parking lot might attract the wrong kind of attention, especially in these days of Total Information Awareness and paranoia about security, not to mention closed-circuit cameras everywhere and journalists with web access spreading rumors. And rumors that NIRT were breaking into a lockup in Boston would be just the icing on a fifty-ton cake of shit if Homeland Security had to take the fall for a botched Family Trade operation. Rumors of any kind about NIRT would likely trigger a public panic, a run on the Dow, and a plague of boils inside the Beltway.

“Coffee?” asked Rich, picking up a vacuum flask.

“Yes, please.” Judith yawned, suddenly becoming aware that she felt tired. “I don’t believe what I just saw. I just hope it turns out to be some kind of sick prank.” Low-level lab samples of something radioactive stashed in an aluminum cylinder knocked together in an auto body shop, that would do it. But it can’t be, she realized. Nobody would be that crazy, just for a joke. Charges of wasting police time didn’t even begin to cover it. And it wasn’t as if some prankster had tried to draw attention to the lockup: quite the opposite, in fact.

“Like hell. That thing had fins like a fifty-six Caddy. I swear I was expecting to see Slim Pickens riding it down…” Don poured a dose of evil-looking coffee into a cup and passed it to her. “Think it’ll go off?”

“Not now,” Judith said with a confidence she didn’t feel. “Dr. Strangelove and his merry men are going over it with their stethoscopes.” There was a chair in front of one of the panels of blinkenlights and she sat down on it. “But something about this whole setup feels wrong.”

Her earphone bleeped, breaking her out of the introspective haze. “Yes?” she asked, keying the throat pickup.

“Judith, I think you’d better come back in. Don’t bother suiting up, it’s safe for now, but there’s bad news along with the good.”

“On my way.” She put her coffee down. “Wait here,” she told Rich, who nodded gratefully and took her place in the swivel chair.

When she straightened up inside the warehouse she found it bright and claustrophobic, the air heavy with masonry dirt and the dust of years of neglect. It reminded her of a raid on a house in Queens she’d been in on, years ago: one the mob had been using to store counterfeit memory chips. Someone here had found the long-dead light fitting and replaced the bulb. Seen in proper light, the finned cylinder looked more like a badly made movie prop than a bomb. Two figures in orange inflatable suits hunched over the open tail of the gadget, while another was busy taking a screwdriver to the fascia of the instrument cart that was wired into it. Dr. Rand stepped around the rounded front of the cylinder: “Ah, Agent Herz. As I said, I’ve got good news and bad news.” There was an unhealthy note of relish in his voice.

Judith gestured towards the far end of the lockup from the NIRT team operatives working on the ass-end of the bomb. “Tell me everything I need to know.”

Rand followed her then surprised Judith by unzipping his hood and throwing it back across his shoulders. He reached down to his waist and turned off the hissing air supply. His face was flushed and what there was of his hair hung in damp locks alongside his face. “Hate these things,” he said conversationally. “It’s not going to go off,” he added.

“Well, that’s a relief.” She raised an eyebrow. “So, is this the one?”

“That would be the bad news.” Rand frowned. “Let me give it to you from the top.”

“Be my guest.” Sarcasm was inappropriate, she realized, but the relief—

“I’ve met this puppy before,” said Rand. “It’s a B53-Y2. We built a bunch of them in the sixties. It’s a free-fall bomb, designed to be hauled around by strategic bomber, and it’s not small—the physics package weighs about six thousand pounds. It’s an oralloy core, high-purity weapons-grade uranium rather than plutonium, uses lithium deuteride to supply the big bang. We originally made a few hundred, but all but twenty-five were dismantled decades ago. It’s basically the same as the warhead on the old Titan-II, designed to level Leningrad in one go. The good news is, it won’t go off. The tritium booster looks to be well past its sell-by date and the RDX is thoroughly poisoned by neutron bombardment, so the best you’d get would be a fizzle.” He looked pensive. “Of course, what I mean by a fizzle is relative. A B53 that’s been properly maintained is good for about nine megatons—this one would probably top off at no more than a quarter megaton or so, maybe half a megaton.”

“Half a—” Her knees went weak. She stumbled, caught herself leaning against the nose of the hydrogen bomb, and recoiled violently. A quarter of a megaton? The flash would be visible in New York City: the blast would blow out windows in Providence. “But—”

“Calm down, it’s not going to happen. We’ve already made sure of that.”

“Oh. Okay.” Jesus. If that’s the good news—

“Funny thing about the timer, though,” Rand said meditatively. “Sloppy wiring, dry joints where they soldered it to…well, the battery ran down a long time ago. Judging by the dust it’s been there for years.”

“Timer?”

“Yes.” Rand shook himself. “It was on a timer,” he explained. “Should have gone off ages ago, taking Boston and most of Cambridge with it. Probably back during the Bush I or Reagan administrations, at a guess. Maybe even earlier.”

“Holy, uh, wow.”

“Yes, I can see why you might say that.” Rand nodded. “And we are going to have real fun combing the inventory to find out how this puppy managed to wander off the reservation. That’s not supposed to happen, although I can hazard some guesses…”

“Huh. Six—did you say it weighs six thousand pounds?” Herz stared at the nuclear weapons engineer.

“Well, of course it does; did you think air-dropped multimegaton hydrogen bombs were small enough to fit in a back pocket? Why do you think we ship them around in B-52s?”

“Uh.” She took a deep breath. “And it’s a, like, a single unit? You couldn’t dismantle it easily?”

“No, I don’t think so. We’ll need to truck it away intact and examine it for—”

“Then we’ve messed up.”

“What makes you say that?” Rand sounded offended.

“Because it’s too big. A world-walker can’t haul something any larger than they can lift. So it doesn’t belong to the Clan.”

“Oh,” said Rand. He sounded at a loss for words.

“You can say that again.” Judith turned to head back to the hole in the wall. “Listen, I’ve got to go, this isn’t Family Trade business anymore, okay? Run it through the normal NIRT channels, I’ve got to go report to the colonel now. See you around.” And with that, she ducked through the hole in the lockup wall, and headed back to the car park. Rich was waiting next to the truck. “Come on,” he said, waving at her car.

“What’s the story?”

“It’s a nuke, but it’s not our nuke,” Herz said as she started the car.

“Oh.”

“Yes. Come on, I’ve got to get back to the office and report to Eric.”

“Shit.”

“Language, please.” Judith put the car in gear and crept out of the parking lot, leaving the gray NIRT van and the orange rubber-suited atomic bomb disposal specialists behind like a bad memory. “What a way to start the week.” Somewhere out there in the city there was supposed to be another bomb. One that was activated four months earlier by Matt, when he defected from the Clan, as an insurance policy to hold over the Family Trade Organization’s head. But Matt was dead, and Mike Fleming had failed to wheedle the location of the bomb out of him before he died—all they knew was, it was on a one-year countdown, and they had maybe two hundred days left to find it before they had to evacuate three or four million folks from Boston and Cambridge to avoid a disaster that would make 9/11 look like a parking violation.

Miriam had run through the emotional gamut in the past six hours, oscillating wildly between hope and terror, despair and optimism. Being taken out of the cellar room and escorted up to the top of this rickety pile of brick and lath by a pair of thugs, and ushered into a garret where a middle-aged woman with a kindly face and eyes like a hanging judge sat at a writing desk, and then being expected to give an account of herself, was more than Miriam was ready for. All she had to vouch for this woman was Erasmus Burgeson’s word: and there was a lot more to the tubercular pawnbroker than met the eye. He had some very odd friends, and if he’d misread her when he suggested she visit this “Lady Bishop,” then it was possible she’d just stuck her head in a noose. But on the other hand, Miriam was here right now, and there were precious few alternatives on offer.

“I’d quite understand if you thought I was mad,” Miriam said, shivering slightly—it was not particularly warm in this drafty attic room. “I don’t really understand everything that’s going on myself. I mean, I thought I did, but obviously not.” She felt her cheek twitch involuntarily.

Margaret Bishop leaned forward, her expression concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked.

Miriam twitched again. “No, I’m—” She took a deep breath. “A few bruises, that’s all. And I’m lucky to be alive, people have been trying to kill me all evening.” She took another deep breath. “Sorry…”

“Don’t be.” Lady Bishop rose to her feet and opened the door a crack. “Bring a pot of coffee, please. And biscotti. For two.” She closed it again. “Would you like to tell me about it? Start from the beginning, if you please. Take your time.” She sat down again. “I must apologize for the pressure, but I really need to know everything if I am to help you.”

“You’d help me?” Miriam blinked.

“You’ve been very helpful to us in the past. We tend to be suspicious, with good reason—but we look after our friends.” Lady Bishop looked at her gravely. “But I need to know more about you before I make any promises. Do you understand?”

Miriam’s vision blurred: for a moment she felt vertiginous, as if the stool she sat upon was half a mile high, balanced in a high wind. Relief combined with apprehension washed over her. Not alone—it was like waking suddenly from a nightmare. The world had been narrowing around her like a prison corridor for so long that the idea that there might be a way out, or even people who would help her willingly, seemed quite alien for a moment. Then the dizziness passed. “I’ll tell you everything,” she heard herself saying, in a voice hoarse with gratitude. “Just don’t expect too much.”

“Take your time.” Lady Bishop sat back on her chair and waited while Miriam composed herself. “We’ve got all night.”

“There are at least three worlds.” Miriam squeezed her tired eyes shut as she tried to fumble her way towards an explanation. “I’m told there may be more, but nobody knows how to reach them. The people who can reach them…they’re my relatives, apparently. It’s a hereditary talent. It’s what geneticists call a recessive trait, meaning you can’t inherit it unless it was present in both sides of your family tree. It’s difficult to do—painful if you do it too often, and you need a focus, a kind of knotwork design to look at to make it work—but it’s made the families, the people who have the ability, rich. The world they live in is very backward, almost medieval: something went wrong, some blind alley in history a couple of thousand years ago, but they’ve risen into the nobility of the small feudal kingdoms that exist up and down the New England coastline.

“I’m…I’m an outsider. About fifty years ago the families started killing one another, there was a huge blood feud—what they called a civil war. My mother, who was pregnant at the time, was on the losing side of an ambush: she fled to the, the other of the three worlds we know about. Uh, I should have explained that the Clan families didn’t know about this one at the time. There’s a lost offshoot family of the Clan who ended up here more than a hundred years ago, who can travel from here to the Clan’s world: they were the ones who kept the civil war going by periodically assassinating Clan leaders and pointing the evidence at the other families. The other world, the one I grew up in, is very different from either this one or the one the Clan comes from.”

There was a knock on the door. Miriam paused while one of the guards came in and deposited a tray on the table where Lady Bishop had been working on her papers. The coffee pot was silver, and the smell drifting from it was delicious. “May I…?”

“Certainly.” Margaret Bishop poured coffee into two china mugs. “Help yourself to the biscotti.” The guard departed quietly. “Tell me about your world.”

“It’s—” Miriam frowned. “It’s a lot less different from yours than the Clan’s world is, but it’s still very different. As far as I can tell, they were the same until, um, 1745. There was an uprising in Scotland? A Prince Charles Stuart? In my world he marched on London and his uprising was defeated. Savagely. A few years later a smoldering war between Britain and France started—and while France eventually won a paper victory, there was no invasion of England. The wars between France and Britain continued for nearly eighty years, ending with the complete defeat of France and the British dominating the oceans.”

Lady Bishop shook her head. “What is the state of the Americas in this world of yours?” she asked.

“There was a revolution…Why, is it important?”

“No, just fascinating. So, continue. Your world is very different, it seems, but from a more recent point of change?”

“Yes.” Miriam took a mouthful of coffee. “Something went wrong here. I think it was something to do with the French administration of England after the invasion, in the eighteenth century. In my world, a lot of the industrialization you’ve had here in the past hundred years happened in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in England. Over in this world it started late and it’s still happening here, in New Britain. Things are further ahead in the United States, the nation on this continent where I come from. And in other countries in the other world. That doesn’t mean things are necessarily better—they’ve got big problems, too. But no kings, at least not many: most countries got rid of them over the past century. And better science and technology. Cures for tuberculosis.”

“How do your relatives, this Clan, account for their power? I’d have thought that if they live in a backward society it would be difficult to rise.”

Miriam put her mug down. “They’re smugglers,” she said bluntly. “In their own world, they are the only people who can get messages across the continent in anything less than weeks. They use the U.S. postal service to accomplish miracles, in the terms of their own world. And they’ve got modern firearms and lots of toys, because in my world they smuggle illegal drugs: they can guarantee to get them past the Coast Guard and police and border patrols. They’re immensely rich merchant princes. But they’re trapped by the society they live in. The old nobility don’t accept them, the peasants resent them, and the crown—” She shook her head, unable to continue.

“You said someone tried to kill you today. Which world did this happen in?”

“The Clan’s,” Miriam said automatically. She picked her mug up, took a sip, rolled it nervously between her palms. “I, when they discovered me, I needed to figure out a way to make some space for myself. I’m not used to having a big extended family who expect me to fit in. And there aren’t enough of them. They wanted me to marry for political reasons. I tried to—hell, I made a big mistake. Tried to get political leverage, to make them leave me alone. Instead I nearly got myself killed. They left the, the political marriage as a compromise, a way out. Tonight was meant to be the official betrothal. Instead…”

She put the mug down. “The groom is dead,” she said. “No, no need for condolences—I barely knew him. There was an attack on the betrothal party, and I only just managed to escape. And the United States government has found out about the Clan and discovered a way to get at the Clan’s world.”

Her eyes widened. “Hey, I wonder if Angbard knows?”

Mike’s first hint that something had gone badly wrong was the scent of burning gunpowder on the night air.

He hunkered down behind a large, gnarled oak tree at the edge of the tree line and squinted into the darkness. Hastert and his men had night vision goggles, but they hadn’t brought a spare pair for Mike and the moon wasn’t an adequate substitute. The stone wall across the clear-cut lawn was a looming black silhouette against a slightly lighter darkness. The sounds drifting over the wall told their own story of pain and confusion and anger: it sounded like there was a riot going on in the distance, still punctuated with the flat bangs of black powder weapons and the bellowing of men like cattle funneled into the killing floor of an abattoir.

A shadowy figure moved across the empty space. Someone tapped Mike lightly on the shoulder, and he jerked half-upright. “Let’s move,” whispered Hastert. “After me.” He rose lightly, and before Mike could say anything he faded into the gloom.

Mike forced himself to stand up. He’d been crouching for so long that his knees ached—and the nervous apprehension wasn’t helping, either. What have I gotten myself into? It seemed to be the story of his life, these days. He shifted his weight from side to side, restoring the circulation in his legs, then took a step through the undergrowth around the big oak tree.

There was a sharp cracking noise, a moment’s vibration as if a bowstring the size of a suspension bridge had just been released, and an excruciating pain lanced through his left leg, halfway between ankle and knee. He gasped with agony, too shocked to scream, and began to topple sideways. The serrated steel jaws buried in his leg were brought up sharply by the chain anchoring them to the oak tree, and dug their teeth into his shattered leg. Everything went black.

An indeterminate time later, Mike felt an urgent need to spit. His mouth hurt; he’d bitten his tongue and the sharp taste of blood filled his mouth. Why am I lying down? he wondered vaguely. Bad thought: In his mind’s inner eye his leg lit up like a torch, broken and burning. He drew breath to scream, and a hand covered his mouth.

“O’Neil, get me a splint. Lower leg fracture, looks like tibia and fibula both. Fleming, I’m going to stick a morphine syrette in you. Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here. Fuck me, that’s a nasty piece of work.” The hand moved away from his mouth. “Here, bite this if it helps.” Something leathery pushed at his lips. Mike gritted his teeth and tried not to scream as the bones grated. “I’m going to have to get this fucker off you before we can splint your leg and get you out of here.” A tiny sharpness bit into his leg near the searing agony. “How does it…eh. Got it. This is going to hurt—”

A sudden flare of pain arrived, worse than anything that had come before. Mike blacked out again.

The next time he woke up, the pain had subsided. That’s better, he thought drowsily. It was comfortable, lying down on the ground: must be the morphine. Someone was tugging at his leg, lifting and moving it and tying stuff tightly around it. That was uncomfortable. Something told him he ought to be screaming his head off, but it was too much effort right now. “What is it?” he tried to ask aloud, but what came out was a drunken-sounding mumble.

“You stuck your foot in some kind of man trap. Spring-loaded, chained to the tree, scary piece of shit. It broke your leg and chewed up your calf muscles like a hungry great white. Fuck, why didn’t nobody tell us these medievals had anti-personnel mines?” Hastert sounded distinctly peevish, in a someone’s-going-to-get-hurt way. “Now we’re going to have to carry you.”

“Don’t—” Mike tried to say. His mouth was dry: but he felt okay. Just let me lie here for a couple of hours, I’ll be fine, he heard himself thinking, and tried to laugh at his own joke. The darkness was florid and full of patterns, retinal rod cells firing in aimless and fascinating fractals to distract him from the pain. Medieval minefield, medieval minefield, he repeated over and over to himself. Someone grunted and dragged his arm over their shoulder, then heaved him upright. His left leg touched ground and he felt light-headed, but then he was dangling in midair. Shark bite. Hey, I’m shark bait. He tried not to giggle. Be serious. I’m in enemy territory. If they hear us…

There was a wall. It was inconveniently high and rough, random stones crudely mortared together in a pile eight feet tall. He was floating beside it and someone was grunting, and then there was a rope sling around him. That was rough as it dragged him up the side of the wall, but Hastert and O’Neil were there to keep his leg from bumping into the masonry. And then he was lying on top of the wall, which was bumpy but wide enough to be secure, and on the other side of it he could see a dirt road and more walls in the darkness, and a couple of shadowy buildings.

His mangled leg itched.

Consciousness came in fits and starts. He was lying on the muddy grass at the base of the wall, staring up at the sky. The stars were very bright, although wisps of cloud scudding in from the north were blotting them out. Someone nearby was swearing quietly. He could hear other noises, a rattling stomping and yelling like a demonstration he’d once seen, and a hollow clapping noise that was oddly familiar, pop-pop, pop-pop—hooves, he realized. What do horses mean?

“Fuck.” The figure bending over him sounded angry and confused. “O’Neil, I’m going to have to call four-oh-four on Fleming. Cover—”

What’s he doing with the knife? Mike wondered dizzily. The hoofbeats were getting louder and there was a roar: then a rattling bang of gunfire, very loud and curiously flat, not the crack of supersonic bullets but more like high caliber pistol shots, doors slamming in his ears. There was a scream, cut off: something heavy fell across him as an answering stutter of automatic fire cut loose, O’Neil with his AR-15. Who’s trying to kill whom, now? A moment of ironic amusement threatened to swallow Mike, just as a second booming volley of musket fire crackled overhead. Then there was more shouting, and more automatic fire, stuttering in short bursts from concealment at the other end of the exposed stretch of wall: we climbed the wall right into a crossfire!

He tried to focus, but overhead the stars were graying out, one by one: shock, blood loss, and morphine conspired to put him under. But unlike the others, he was still alive when the Clan soldiers covering the escape of their leaders from the Thorold Palace reached the killing zone and paused to check the identity of the victims.