The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (34 page)

‘Nobody said you were.’ Mike tried to push himself up against the desk, but a growing sensation of nausea stopped him.

‘And now I will leave. Get up.’

Mike took a deep breath, trying to ignore his butterfly diaphragm. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to take me downstairs. And then we will get into a car and drive somewhere where I will contrive to make you lose me.’

‘You know that’s not possible.’

Matt shrugged. ‘I don’t care whether it is possible or not, it is what will happen. Seeking your government’s help was a mistake. I’m going underground.’

Mike took another deep breath. His stomach clenched; he waited the spasm out, trying to will the blurring in his vision and the pounding at his temples away. ‘No. I mean. Why? What do you
hope to achieve?’

‘Revenge. Against the bitch.’

‘Who?’

Mike must have looked puzzled, because Matt threw back his head and laughed, a rich belly-chuckle that would have given Mike an opening if he’d been in any condition to move. ‘The
queen in shadow.’ Matt stopped laughing. ‘Anyway, we’re leaving.’

‘They won’t let you,’ Mike said tiredly.

‘Want to bet? Remember the sample of metal I gave you, from the duke’s private stockpile?’

The plutonium ingot
. Mike could see it coming, like a driver stalled on a level crossing at night staring into the lights of an oncoming freight train. He blinked tiredly, trying to
focus his double vision. ‘What, the, the – ’

‘There are several of them,’ Matthias explained. ‘Bombs made with this magic metal of yours. The current duke’s father arranged to take possession of several of them
three decades ago . . . anyway. I have the keys to the stockpile. They are held in storage areas across the United States. It is the Clan’s ultimate deterrent, if you like: they were much
more paranoid during the, the seventies when the civil war was being fought. I arranged to deploy one before I defected. It is on a timer, a very long timer, but if the battery runs down, it will
explode. The battery is good for a year. I thought, when I came to you months ago, you would let me out in time and I would reset it and that would be all, an insurance policy against your good
intentions, nothing more. But now’ – he looked irritated – ‘you leave me no alternative.’

‘Oh Jesus.’ Mike stared at him. ‘Tell me you didn’t.’ ‘I did. Or at least, you cannot prove that I
didn’t
. So, you see, as soon as you are
ready to stand, we will go down and talk to your boss, yes? And you will explain that you have to drive me somewhere. And you and I, we will go and I will get lost. But before I go, I will take you
to the lockup and you will wait with the device, of course, until it can be defused, and we will all be happy and nobody will be hurt. Yes?’

‘You’ll tell me where it is?’ Mike demanded.

‘Of course. I know where the others are, too. They aren’t active yet – if you do not follow me, I will not need them, no?’

Three images of a smirking Matt hovered in front of Mike’s nose; the back of his neck prickled in a cold sweat.
I’m going to be sick
, he realized.
I’m probably
concussed
. The idea that the Clan had planted atomic bombs in storage lockers across the United States was like something out of a bad thriller – like the idea Islamic terrorists would
crash hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, before 9/11.
I’ve got to tell someone!
‘I feel sick.’

‘I know.’ Matt peered at him. ‘Your eyes, the pupils are different sizes. Stand up now. It is very important you do not go to sleep.’ Matt straightened up and took a step
back. Mike pushed against the panel behind him and shoved himself upright, wobbling drunkenly. ‘To the elevators,’ said Matt, gesturing with Mike’s own stolen gun.

What have I forgotten?
Mike wondered dizzily. He stumbled and lurched toward the doorway.
Feel sick
. . .

‘Elevator first. There is a telephone there, no?’

‘Mmph.’ His stomach heaved: he tried desperately not to throw up.

‘Go on.’

Mike stumbled on down the corridor. He was certain he’d forgotten something, something important that had been on his mind before he got distracted, before the slab of window landed on him
and Matt made his outrageous claim about the nuclear time bomb. Matt closed the door on the room with the damaged windows behind him, an unconscious slave to habit. Mike leaned against the wall,
head down.

‘What is it?’ Matt demanded, pausing.

‘I don’t feel so well –’
What’s going to happen?
Mike had a nagging sense that it was right on the tip of his tongue. Then his stomach gave a lurch.
‘Ugh.’

Matt took a step back, standing between Mike and the elevator core. He blinked, disgustedly. ‘Get it over with.’

‘Going to be –’ Mike never finished the sentence. A giant’s fist grabbed him under the ribs and twisted, turning his throat into a fire hose. He doubled over, emptying
his guts across the carpet and halfway up the wall opposite.

Matt’s face twisted in disgust. ‘You’re no use to me like that. Wait here.’ The next door along was a restroom. ‘I’ll get you some towels – ’

There was a ringing in Mike’s ears, and a hissing. His guts stopped heaving, but he felt unaccountably tired.
What have I forgotten?
he asked himself, as he sat down and leaned
against the wall. He felt his eyes closing. Something hard-edged was digging into his ribs.
Oh,
that
. Must be time, then
. He could put the mask on again in a few minutes,
couldn’t he?
Just a quick nap
. . . Almost without willing it he felt his hand fumbling for the respirator, dragging it out of his inside pocket. His hands felt incredibly hot, but
not in a painful way – it was like the best, most wonderful warm bath he’d ever had, all the heat concentrated in his extremities. He wanted it to never stop. But that was all right: he
managed to raise the mask to his face, doubling over to get his head low enough to reach, and inhaled through the filter.
I wonder if Matt heard Eric’s announcement?
he thought
dizzily.
If he was outside the building, at the time
. . .

He was still breathing through the respirator when they found him twenty minutes later, put him on a stretcher, and hauled him off to hospital in an ambulance with blaring siren and flashing
lights. But it took them another ten minutes to find Matthias – and by then it was five minutes too late to ask him whether he’d been bluffing.

Miriam found it hard to believe that she’d never attended a wedding among the great families of the Gruinmarkt in the months she’d been living among them. After a
sleepless night, she chivvied her maids into helping her into the outfit Kara had picked from her wardrobe, then waited while the ferret rousted out the sedan chair bearers.

Another tedious, uneven magical mystery tour: another bland mansion with walled grounds, somewhere else in the city. Miriam straightened her back as the ferret and his guards waited. ‘This
way,’ he indicated, nodding toward a narrow passageway. ‘You will wait at the back, behind the wooden screen. You will say nothing during the ceremony. Observe, do not interfere or it
will be the worse for you. I will fetch you from the reception afterward.’

‘Worse?’ she asked – rhetorically, for she had a very good idea what he meant. ‘All right.’ She stuck her nose in the air and marched down the corridor as though
her guards didn’t exist, as if she were attending this function of her own accord, and the occasion were a happy one.

The passage led to a small chapel, located near the back of the building in the oldest construction. The walls were of undressed stone, woodwork blackened with age. Her first surprise was that
it was tiny, barely larger than her reception room. Her second surprise was the altar, and the brightly painted statues behind it. She’d have taken them for saints, but the iconography was
wrong – no trinity here, but a confusing family tree of bickering authorities, a heavenly bureaucracy with responsibility for everything from births, marriages, and deaths to law enforcement,
tax returns, and the afterlife. The post-migration Norse-descended tribes who had eventually settled the eastern seaboard of North America in this world had adopted the Church of Rome, but the
Church of Rome hadn’t adopted Christianity, or Judaism, or anything remotely monotheistic. The Church here was a formalization and outgrowth of the older Roman pantheon, echoes of which had
survived in the Catholic hierarchy of saints, the names and roles of the gods updated for more recent usage with a smattering of Norse add-ons.
But no blood eagles
, Miriam thought, as she
walked past the pews of menfolk to take her place behind the wooden latticework screen at the back, behind the women of the two households.

There were only about ten women present, and about twice that number of men; they were mostly servants and bodyguards, as far as Miriam could tell. A couple of heads turned as she walked in,
including one formidable-looking lady. ‘Wer ind’she?’

‘Excuse me, I am Helge. Kara asks me to, to come,’ she managed in her halting Hochsprache.

‘Ah.’ The woman frowned. She wasn’t much older than Miriam, but her attitude and the deference the others showed her suggested she was important. And there was a family
resemblance.
Mother? Aunt?
Miriam dipped her head. The frown vanished. ‘I am . . . please? You are here,’ she said in heavily accented English. ‘I am Countess Frea. My
daughter . . .’ She shrugged, reaching the limits of her linguistic ability, and muttered something apologetic-sounding in Hochsprache, too fast for Miriam to catch.

Miriam smiled and nodded. Some of the younger women were whispering, but then one of them moved aside and gestured to her. A seat at the back.
Yes, well
. Miriam accepted it silently,
annoyed that her grasp of the language was insufficient to tell whether she was being snubbed or honored.
I’ve been depending on Kara too much. And Brill
, she told herself.
Wherever she’s gotten to
. Brilliana’s other duties made guessing at her whereabouts much less easy than dealing with Kara.

Another knot of women arrived, with much bowing and nodding and kissing of cheeks on both sides: an old lady with her daughters – both older than Kara’s mother, Frea – and
their attendants. A brief introduction: Miriam bobbed her head and was happy enough to be ignored. At the front a couple of priests in odd vestments had begun chanting something in what might have
been a mutant dialect of Latin, filtered through many generations of Hochsprache-speaking colonials. A young lad swung an incense censer, spilling fumes across the altar as they continued. To
Miriam’s uneducated eye (she’d been raised by her mother and her agnostic Jewish foster-father, and churchgoing hadn’t been on the agenda) it looked vaguely Catholic – until
a third priest emerged from the not-a-vestry at the back, clutching an indignant white chicken and a silver knife. At which point Miriam was grateful for her place at the rear, which meant nobody
was in a position to notice the way she closed her eyes until the squawking and gurgling stopped. It wasn’t that she was particularly squeamish herself, but she found the idea of killing an
animal in cold blood as part of a religious ritual disturbing.
I got the impression from Olga that they didn’t do that anymore
.
What else did I get wrong?

Things speeded up after the sacrifice, which the priests dedicated to the Lady of the Hearth, the Lord of the Household, and sundry other parties who were contractually obliged to bless familial
alliances, as far as Miriam could tell, or who at least had to be bought off in order for the whole enterprise not to end in a messy annulment some hours later. Two men walked up to the altar,
neither of them particularly young: Frea’s eyes lingered on the older one, making Miriam suspect he might be a relative.
Kara’s father?
The priests asked him a whole bunch of
questions, the answers to which seemed to boil down to ‘Yes, she’s my daughter to give away.’ The other man waited patiently. Miriam couldn’t see him clearly because of the
screen, but she had an impression that he was in his thirties, balding, and stockily built. And there was a sword at his belt.
A sword? In church? I don’t understand these people
. .
. Now it was his turn to answer questions. They sounded a lot like ‘How much are you willing to pay for this guy’s daughter?’ to Miriam, but she was barely catching one word in
four. It could have been anything from ‘Will you take her as your wife and love her and cherish her?’ to ‘That’ll be three pounds of silver and sixteen goats, and make sure
you keep her away from the wine.’ The questioning went on and on, until Miriam’s eyes began to glaze over with boredom.

Some sort of resolution seemed to be reached. One of the priests turned and marched into the back room. A few seconds later he reappeared, followed by a subdued-looking Kara. They didn’t
go in for frothy white wedding dresses and veils here: Kara was wearing a rich gown, but nothing significantly different from what she might have worn for any other public event. The bald guy with
the sword asked her something, and she nodded; and a moment later the other priest offered them both a cup containing some kind of fluid.
I hope that’s wine
, Miriam thought with a
sinking feeling as they sipped from it. She couldn’t see the chicken anymore.
Somehow I don’t think these guys hold with abstractions like transubstantiation
.

Conversation started up on the bench ahead of her almost immediately. ‘It’s done,’ or ‘That’s that,’ if she understood it correctly. Two of the younger maids
(daughters? nieces? servants?) stood up, and one of them giggled quietly. Up front, the men were already rising and filing out of the side door. ‘You will with us, come?’ asked the old
woman in front of Miriam, and it took her a moment to realize she was being spoken to.

‘Yes,’ she said uncertainly.

‘Good.’ The old lady reached out and grabbed Miriam’s wrist, leaning on it as she levered herself up off the wooden bench. ‘You’ve got strong bones,’ she
said, and cackled quietly.