The Merchants’ War tmp-4 Read online

  The man with the knife looked surprised for a moment. Then he darted forward, as if to punch her. Miriam felt a light blow across her ribs as he danced back. “Oof!” He was skinny, and short, and she outreached him, and his face was a frozen picture of surprise as she grabbed his arm, yanked him closer, stomped down on his foot, and then jerked her knee up inside his thigh. Just like teacher said, she thought, remembering the self-defense class she’d taken—what, two years? three years?—ago. Her assailant made a short, whimpering gasp, then dropped like a log, rolling on the ground in pain. Miriam looked past him, hunting for his friends.

  The one standing behind him took one look at her as if he’d seen a ghost, then turned tail and fled. “Doan’ leave me!” wailed the third in a thick accent, waving spidery arms at the ground: there was a rattling noise. Miriam stared. He’s got no legs, she realized as he pawed at the ground with hands like oars, scooting away on a crude cart. Why did the other one run—she put a hand to her chest. There was a rip in her stolen coat. That’s funny. She frowned, stuck a finger through the hole, and felt the matching rip in the outer fabric of her dress where the knife had slid across the boned front. “Damn!” She looked down. The little guy with the knife lay at her feet, twitching and gasping for breath. The knife lay beside him in the gutter: the blade was about three inches long and wickedly sharp. “You little shit!” She hauled up her skirts and kicked him in the ribs with all her might. Then she knelt down and took the knife.

  The red haze of fury began to clear. She looked at the moaning figure on the cobblestones and shuddered, then stepped round him and quickly walked to the end of the alleyway. Cold sweat slicked her spine, and her heart pounded so hard it seemed about to burst. I could have been killed, she thought dizzily, tugging her coat into place with jerky motions, her hands shaking with the adrenaline aftershock. It wasn’t the first time, but it never failed to horrify her afterwards. She moved unconsciously towards the street lights, panicky-tense and alert for any sign that knife-boy’s friends had stopped running and were coming back for her. He tried to stab me! She felt sick to the pit of her stomach, and her usual post-world-walking headache had intensified unbearably, thumping in time with her pulse. I’ve got to get help, she realized. Got to find Erasmus.

  Miriam had grown up in Boston, in the United States of America, in a world where things made sense. Random spavined beggars in alleyways didn’t try to gut you like a fish. There was no king-emperor in New York—New London, as they called it over here, in this world—no zeppelins, either. She’d had a job as an investigative journalist working for a leading tech business magazine, and a mother who she knew had adopted her when she was a baby, and a solid sense of her own identity. But it had all gone out of the window nine months ago, when she’d discovered that she was a long-lost relative of the Clan, a tight-knit body of world-walkers from another, far more primitive world.

  The Medicis of their timeline, the Clan traded between worlds, parallel universes Miriam had heard them called. Which was bad news because the Gruinmarkt, where they came from, hadn’t progressed much past a high-medieval civilization of marcher kingdoms up and down the eastern seaboard; in the world of the United States, the Clan was the main heroin connection for New England. Miriam’s ingrained habit of sticking her nose into any business that took her interest—especially when it was explicitly forbidden—had landed her in a metric shitload of trouble with the Clan. And things had gotten even worse with the shockingly unexpected fight at the Summer Palace in Niejwein. Miriam had ducked out (with the aid of a furtively acquired world-walking locket) and ended up here, in New London. In another world that made little sense to her—but where she did, at least, speak the language passably well.

  I’ve got to find Erasmus, she told herself, holding onto the thought as if it was a charm to ward off panic. The twisting road at the end of the alleyway was at least lit by rusting gas lamps. There was nobody in sight, so she put on a burst of speed, until she rounded a curve to see a main road ahead, more lights, closed shop fronts, a passing streetcar grinding its wheels on the corner with a shower of sparks from the overhead pickups. Whoa. She slowed, eyebrows furrowed, shoulders tensing as if there was a target pasted right above her spine at the base of her neck. I can’t go anywhere like this…!

  She stopped at the end of the side street, panting as she took stock. I’ve got no money, she realized. Which was not good, but there was worse: I’m dressed like…like what? Clothing wasn’t cheap in New Britain; that had been a surprise for her the first time she came here. People didn’t wear fancy dress or strange countercultural outfits, or rags—unless they could afford no better. If she’d had the right locket to reach New York, her own world, she might have passed for an opera buff or a refugee from a Goth nightclub: but here in New London she’d stick out like a sore thumb. And she did not want to stand out. To mark herself out for special attention might attract the attention of the police, and the word had a different (and much more sinister) meaning here. I need somewhere to blend in quick, or get a change. Contact Erasmus. But Erasmus was what, two hundred miles away, in Boston? What was that place he mentioned? She racked her brains. Woman called Bishop. Some place, satirist, Hogarth, that’s it. Hogarth House, Hogarth—

  A cab was clattering along the nearly-empty high street. Miriam took a step forward and extended her right hand, trying to hold it steadily. The cabbie reined in his horse and peered down at her. “Yuss?”

  Miriam drew herself up. “I want to go to Hogarth, Hogarth Villas,” she said. “Immediately.”

  The cabby’s reaction wasn’t what she expected: a low chuckle. “Oh yuss indeedy, your ladyship. Hop right in and I’ll take you right there in a jiffy, I will!” Huh? Miriam almost hesitated for a moment. But he obviously knew the place. What’s so funny about it? She nodded, then grabbed hold of the rail and pulled herself up. The cabbie made no move to help her in, other than to look down at her incuriously. But if he had any opinion of her odd outfit he kept it to himself, for which she was grateful. As soon as she was on the foot plate, he twitched the reins.

  I’m going to have to pay him, Miriam thought, furiously racking her brains for ideas as the cab rattled across the stone pavements. What with? She fumbled in her greatcoat’s pockets. One of them disgorged a foul-smelling cheesecloth bag full of loose tobacco. The other contained nothing but a loose button. Oh, great. They were turning past Highgate now, down in what corresponded to the East Village in her world. Not an upmarket neighborhood in New London, but there were worse places to be—like inside a thief-taker’s lockup for trying to cheat a cabbie of his fare. What was the woman’s name, Bishop? Margaret Bishop? I’m going to have to ask her to pay for me. Miriam tensed up. Or I could world-walk back to the other side, wait a couple of hours, and—but her headache was already telling her no. If she crossed back to the Gruinmarkt she’d be good for nothing for at least three hours, and knowing her luck she’d come out somewhere much worse than an alley full of muggers. For the time being, returning to the other side was unthinkable. Damn it, why did James have to give me the wrong locket?

  The journey seemed interminable, divided into a million segments by the plodding clatter of hooves. Probably a yellow cab in her own familiar New York would have gotten across town no faster—there was less traffic here—but her growing sense of unease was driving her frantic, and the lack of acceleration made her grind her teeth. That’s what’s wrong with this world, she realized, there’s no acceleration. You can go fast by train or airship, but you never get that surging sense of purpose—

  The traffic thickened, steam cars rattling and chuffing past the cab. The lights were brighter, some of the street lights running on electricity now: and then there was a wide curving boulevard and a big row of town houses with iron railings out front, and a busy rank of cabs outside it, and people bustling around. “Hogarth Villas coming up, mam, Gin Lane on your left, Beer Alley to your right.” The cabbie bent down and leered at her between his legs. “That’ll be
sixpence ha’penny.”

  “The doorman will pay,” Miriam said tensely, mentally crossing her fingers.

  “Is that so?” The leer vanished, replaced by an expression of contempt. “Tell it to the rozzers!” He straightened up: “I know your type.” A rattle of chain and a leather weather shield began to unroll over the front of the cab, blocking off escape. “I’ll get me fee out of you one way or the other, it’s up to you how you pays.”

  “Hey!” Miriam waved at a caped figure standing by the gate, pushing the side of the leather screen aside. “You! I need to see Lady Bishop! Now!”

  The caped figure turned towards her and stepped up towards the cab. The cabbie up top swore: “Bugger off!”

  “What did you say?” Miriam quailed. The man in the cape was about six feet six tall, built like a brick out-house, and his eyes were warm as bullets.

  “I need to see Lady Bishop,” Miriam repeated, trying to keep a deadly quaver out of her voice. “I have no money and it’s urgent,” she hissed. “I was told she was here.”

  “I see.” Bullet-eyes tracked upwards towards the cabbie. “How much?”

  “Sixpence, guv, that’s all I need,” the cabbie whined.

  Bullet-eyes considered for a moment. Then a hand with fingers as thick as a baby’s forearm extended upwards. A flash of silver. “You. Come with me.”

  The weather screen was yanked upwards: Miriam lost no time clambering down hastily. Bullet-eyes gestured towards a set of steps leading down one side of the nearest town house. “That way.”

  “That—” Miriam was already halfway to the steps before several other details of the row of houses sank in. Lights on and laughter and music coming from the ground-floor windows: lights out and nothing audible coming from upstairs. The front doors gaped wide open. Men on the pavement outside, dressed for a good time by New London styles. Women visible through the open French doors in outfits that bared their knees—oh, she thought, feeling herself flush. So that’s what’s going on. Damn Erasmus for not telling me! Halfway down the steps, which led to a cellar window and a narrower, grubbier, doorway, another thought struck her: a brothel would be a good place for Erasmus’s friends to meet up. Lots of people could come and go at all hours and nobody would think it strange if they took measures to avoid being identified. Even her current fancy dress probably wasn’t exceptional. Erasmus Burgeson, almost the first person she’d met on her arrival in New Britain, was connected to the Leveler underground, radical democrats in a country that had never had an American revolution, where the divine right of kings was still the unquestionable way the world was run. Which meant—

  The door was snatched open in front of her. Miriam looked round. Bullet-eyes was right behind her, not threatening, but impossible to avoid. “I need to see—”

  “Shut it.” He was implacable. “Go in.” It was a scullery, stone sinks full of dishwater and a couple of maids up to their elbows in it, a primitive clanking dishwasher hissing ominously and belching steam in the background: “through there, that way.” He steered her towards a door at the back that opened onto a narrow, gloomy servant’s corridor and a spiral staircase. “Upstairs.”

  Another passage. Miriam registered the distant sound of creaking bedsprings and groaning, chatter and laughter and a piano banging away on the other side of a thin plasterboard wall. Her chest was tight: it felt hard to breathe in here. “Is it much further?” she asked.

  “Stop.” Bullet-eyes grabbed a door handle and shoved, glanced inside. “You can wait here. Tell me again what you came for.”

  Miriam tensed and looked at him. She’d seen dozens of men like this before, hard men, self-disciplined, capable of just about anything—her heart sagged. “Erasmus Burgeson told me I should come here and talk to Lady Bishop next time I was in town,” she managed to explain. “I wasn’t planning on being here quite this early, without warning.” She sagged against the door-frame, abruptly exhausted. “I’m in trouble.”

  “Has it followed you?” His voice was even, quiet, and it made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end as if someone had stepped over her open grave.

  “No,” she managed, “not here. I lost it on the way.”

  “Inside. I’ll be back.” She stumbled into the room. He flicked a switch and a dim incandescent bulb glimmered into light. “I may be some time.” The door closed behind her. The room was a servant’s bedroom, barely longer than the narrow bed that occupied half of it. There was a window, but it opened onto a shaft of brickwork, another darkened window barely visible opposite. Click. Miriam spun round, a fraction of a second too late to see the lock mechanism latch home.

  “Shit,” she moaned quietly, “shit!” She sat down on the bed and rested her head in her hands, her energy and will to resist fading frighteningly fast. It had been a long and terrible day, and even standing up felt like a battle. What have I done? Erasmus was nuts, or playing a sick joke on her, sending her to a brothel to talk to the madam: although, on further thought, it didn’t seem particularly strange compared to the rest of this eventful day. She’d been dragged out of her house arrest, shanghaied into a forced wedding, just missed being blown up by a bomb, seen the king and the prince she’d been engaged to gunned down (and who knew what the hell was going to happen in the Gruinmarkt now?) and run into an old heartthrob (and what the hell was he doing there, working for the DEA?). Then she’d fled for her life, been attacked by muggers, menaced by a cabbie who thought she was a prostitute, and finally locked up in another goddamned prison cell, this time in a brothel. I’m going to go mad, she thought dizzily, lying down on the lumpy mattress. I can’t take much more of this. But instead, she fell asleep. And that was how they found her when they came for her, an hour after midnight.

  It was shaping up to be a night to remember for all the wrong reasons, Mike decided. The flat metallic banging of musketry outside blended with the screams of wounded men and the sullen roar of the burning palace to form a hideous cacophony, punctuated by the occasional crack of modern smokeless-powder firearms and shouted orders. This is worse than that mess down in Colombia, that mountain village. What was it called?

  He inched carefully out from behind the broken wall. The stench of burnt gunpowder and charred wood lent an acrid taste to the nighttime air. About four meters from the wall, the indistinct shapes of a row of trees loomed out of the darkness. He turned his head, looking around cautiously.

  That nameless village on a forested mountainside in Colombia: he’d been there as part of a DEA training team, working with the Colombian army to weed out cocaine plantations in the hilly back country. What he hadn’t realized at first was that the cocaine plantations belonged to the other government—the Maoist guerrillas working to overthrow the authorities controlled vast swathes of territory, had battalions of expressionless men in green with machine guns and rifles. It wasn’t a police raid, it was more like an army spearhead advancing into hostile territory. And then the shooting started…

  He twitched back into focus, scanning the area for threats. The palace behind him was burning merrily, flames reaching through holes in the steeply pitched roof. Doors and windows had been blown out: some were half-blocked by improvised barricades where the defenders were trying to hold out. It was full dark, and they were trying to fight a battle against attackers who were shooting from outside the circle of light. The noises were getting louder, Mike noted. More banging of muskets, the hollow shotgun-like thump of a blunderbuss, then yells and a distant drumming of hooves, the sound of many horses running. He turned to face the darkness, closed his eyes for ten long seconds to let them adjust, then rose to a crouch and dashed towards the tree line, zigzagging madly and praying he’d make it without putting a foot in a rabbit hole or catching a tree root.

  At least I got Miriam out of there. He dived past a tree, ducked under a low branch, and crouched down again to scan for watchers. Wonder if she’ll call. It was just too weird: he’d known she’d be here, hell, that was the whole reason they’d inserted h
im, to see if he could make contact—but actually seeing her in the midst of all this weird medieval squalor, dolled up like an extra from a historical drama, brought it all home to him. She was part of the Clan: she was a world-walker, one of the narcoterrorist dynasty that was running drugs up and down the eastern seaboard. And she wanted out!

  But he’d blown it. You’re going to make her an offer she can’t refuse, said the colonel, and instead he’d come out with the truth, limp-dicked and apologetic, and as good as told her to go to ground. Phone me in a week or so, he’d told her. Yeah, right. And all because he’d seen it coming, like a slow-motion train wreck: Miriam was about as unlikely to cooperate with Smith as anyone he could imagine. And he couldn’t stomach the idea of them turning her into a mule, like the guy in the cellar with the collar-bomb and the handcuffs, terrified that Mike was going to execute him.

  Something moved in the brush behind him. Mike spun round, gun raised.

  “Sir!” The hissed voice was familiar: Mike lowered his pistol immediately.

  “That you, Hastert?”

  The shadow in front of him nodded. “O’Neil’s twenty yards that way. Go to him now.” Bulky night-vision goggles half-covered Hastert’s face, in surreal contrast to his baggy trousers and chain mail vest. He’d acquired a gun from somewhere, some kind of machine pistol with a bulky silencer attached.

  “Okay, I’m going, I’m going.” Mike scuttled away, his pulse hammering with the adrenaline aftershock. Hastert and O’Neil were part of the forward support team in Zone Blue, specialists yanked out of Delta Force to handle the sharp end of the Family Trade Organization’s intel operation on the ground in the parallel universe the criminals came from. Dangerous men, but it was their job to get him out of this alive. I could have told her to come with me, he told himself. Could have lied, offered her witness protection. Hell, she asked for it! We could have gotten her out.