The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) Page 8

  Smith took a deep breath, held it for a moment. The smells of crushed grass and gun oil and desperate men filled his nostrils. ‘It’s a siege tower. They weren’t running away from us, they were breaking into something.’ He gestured at the theodolites and the scaffolding. ‘That’s positioned with extreme care. I think it’s a siege tower – they had a target in their own world and this took them to a precise location. The map’ – Herz was waving at him – ‘excuse me.’ He walked over to the table. ‘Yes?’

  ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘We’re here.’ Her finger stabbed at the heptagonal structure. ‘This thing is about five hundred feet across, look, concentric rings – does that remind you of anything?’

  Smith nodded and turned to Dr. James. ‘If their map’s telling the truth, that structure is some kind of fortification. And we already know from CLEANSWEEP that some kind of internal struggle was going down fourteen to sixteen days ago. We could do a lot worse than send a couple of scouts across in the next valley over.’ He cracked his knuckles, first the right hand then his left. ‘It’s a shame we don’t have anything that can touch them, because they’re probably still bottled up in there, in strength.’

  James grinned like a skull. ‘Well, I have an update for you. Let’s take a walk.’

  BEGIN TELEPHONE TRANSCRIPT

  (A telephone buzzes for attention.)

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ah, is that the Lee residence?’

  (Pause.) ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I’d like to speak to James Lee, please. It is dringen – urgent.’

  (Pause.) ‘Please wait.’

  (Two minutes later.)

  ‘Hello? Hello?’

  ‘Who is this? Is – James? James, is that you?’

  ‘Ah, yes – Who, um – ’

  ‘Poul, Poul ven Wu. You may remember me, from my cousin Raph’s wedding to Kara ven – ’

  ‘Ah, yes! I remember now! Yes, indeed. How good to hear from you. But surely this isn’t just a social call?’

  ‘I wish it were. Unfortunately a somewhat delicate situation has arisen at short notice, and I hoped you might be able to advise me on how it might be resolved without undue difficulty.’

  (Pause.) ‘Ah. I see, I think.’ (Pause.) ‘Would this situation have anything to do with the events at the Thorold Palace earlier this month?’

  ‘Mm . . . in a manner of speaking, yes. It’s a delicate matter, as I said, and we’re anxious to resolve it without violating the terms of the settlement between our families, but it’s quite urgent and it appears to be becoming time-critical.’

  ‘Hmm. Can you be more specific? I think I can safely say that we would also like to remain within the conditions of the truce, but I cannot commit to anything without my elders’ approval, and I am quite anxious to know what I shall be putting before them.’

  (Pause.) ‘We would like to arrange for the safe passage of a substantial group of our people, from a location near Irongate – near Wergatsfurt – across a distance of some three miles, on foot, at night.’

  ‘Passage. You mean, from Wergatsfurt, in Gruinmarkt, to somewhere about three miles away, also in Gruinmarkt, but through our world, I take it?’

  ‘Precisely.’ (Pause.) ‘In addition, the group is armed. Not civilian.’

  (Long pause.) ‘You’re asking us to give safe passage to a small army.’

  (Hastily.) ‘Only for about three hours, at night! And there are only two hundred and eighteen of them. Eleven walking wounded, six stretcher cases. We don’t want to attract attention – we want to keep it out of sight of the Polis, and everybody else. Can you – is it possible – to arrange this? I can supply details of the end-points of the sortie, and precise numbers – but what we would like, if it is possible, is not simply a dispensation within our agreement but active help. If you can organize covered trucks, and secure the destination, for example . . .’

  ‘I can’t agree to that, Poul. I don’t have the authority to make agreements like that. I can tell you that my father can make such a decision, but it would be better to petition him yourself – ’

  (Urgently) ‘It has to be done tonight!’

  ‘I’m sure it does. And I can arrange for my father to see you within the hour – but the request must come directly from your lips to his ears.’ (Pause.) ‘You understand that he will expect some reward for this inconvenience.’

  ‘Of course.’ (Pause.) ‘We expect to pay for any assistance, and I am authorized to negotiate with you – or your father. Only understand that it is a matter of some urgency, and while we are prepared to be generous, we would take a very poor view of any attempt to exploit the situation to our detriment.’

  ‘Oh, that’s understood. Give me an hour to prepare things and you will be welcome at my father’s house. Do you need directions?’

  END TRANSCRIPT

  Erasmus Burgeson arrived in Fort Petrograd four days late, footsore and weary and out-of-pocket – but a free man, thanks to those extraordinary friends of Miriam Beckstein who had arrived just in time to stop the secret police from collaring the two of them.

  After the shoot-out at the one-cow railroad station in the middle of nowhere, he’d taken up Miriam’s invitation to help himself to the political officer’s no-longer-needed steamer, and topped off both its tanks before cracking open the throttle and bumping across dirt tracks and paved military roads in the general direction of the southwest and the Bay Area. But the car had run out of steam ten miles before he reached Miwoc City, and he’d had second (and third) thoughts about the wisdom of paying a mechanic to come out and get her rolling again, in light of the car’s bloodstained provenance. (Not to mention the bullet hole in the left, passenger side, door.)

  So he’d walked into Miwoc, dusty and sore-footed, and taken a room in a working men’s hostel, and spent the night lying awake listening to the fights and the begging and the runners clubbing indigents outside the thin wall of his dive – and set off for Fort Petrograd the next morning, whistling and doubtless mangling a ditty he’d picked up from Miriam, about a hotel in California.

  It was a hundred miles to the big city, where the guns of Fort Petrograd loomed out across the headland of the bay, aiming south towards San Mateo. It shouldn’t have taken three days, but Erasmus decided to avoid the railways – one close shave with the law was more than enough – and not risk buying an automobile: A solitary man driving alone was as good as a green flag to a certain kind of highwayman, and it would swallow all his remaining funds besides. The buses and streetcars that connected the grids of these western townships were more than adequate, if one made allowances for delayed connections . . . and the increasing number of checkpoints where nervous thief takers and magistrate’s men stood guard with shotguns while the transport Polis examined internal passports and work permits. These, at least, Erasmus was equipped to deceive, thanks to the package Edward had given him in New London.

  This worked until the third day, when the bus he was riding from Abadon reached Patwin (which Miriam would have pointed to on a map and called ‘Vallejo’), and ran into a general strike, and barricades, and grim-faced men beneath a blue flag slashed diagonally with a cross of St. Andrew beneath the glaring face of a wild turkey. ‘Ye can gae nae farthur,’ said the leader of the band blocking the high street, ‘wi’out any in calling ye strikebreaker.’ He stood in front of the bus with arms crossed in front of him and the stolid self-confidence born of having two brothers-in-arms standing behind him with hunting rifles and an elderly and unreliable-looking carronade – probably looted from the town hall’s front steps – to back them up.

  ‘I’m no’ arguing wi’ t’artillery,’ said the driver, turning to address his passengers. ‘End of t’road!’

  An hour later, by means of various secret handshakes and circumlocutions, Erasmus was talking to the leader of the strike force, a lean, rat-faced man called Dunstable. ‘I was on my way to Fort Petrograd on Party business when I was forced off the train and only just escaped with my life.
I need to get there immediately.’

  ‘Let me see what I can do,’ said Dunstable, then vanished into the back of the Town Aldermen’s office, doubtless to cable for directions. The two hard-faced men with pistols sat with Erasmus in silence; he made himself comfortable until Dunstable returned. ‘Aye, well, your story checks out.’ Dunstable nodded at the two men. ‘Joe, go and get the mayor’s runabout. Frank, you stay with Mister Burgeson here. You and Joe will drive Mister Burgeson straight to Fort Petrograd, to the Crimea Barracks – you know how to find it? Good. Our people hold it. When you get there, do as Mister Burgeson says.’

  Erasmus stood. ‘I’ll send them back as soon as possible,’ he promised. ‘Good luck here.’

  ‘Luck?’ Dunstable snorted. ‘Luck’s got now’t to do with it: People are starving and the frogs are trying to retake New France!’

  ‘They’re what?’ Erasmus stared at him.

  ‘Oh, the king’s got it nailed down quiet like, but we know the score. Furrin troops in Red Club, a dauphin looking to set foot in New Orleans next week.’ Dunstable tapped the side of his nose. ‘Got to look oot fer our selves in times of unrest, ’aven’t we?’

  It took eight hours to drive the fifty miles from Patwin, overlooking the inner shore of the great bay, to Fort Petrograd and the downtown strip of barracks and museums and great houses that defined the core of western society on the edge of the Pacific. The roads were good, but the two ferries they required ran only infrequently at present, and they had to stop every five to ten miles to convince another roadblock, revolutionary caucus, civil defense brigade, emergency committee, republican guard, and ladies’ union that they were not, in fact, agents of the secret political police, the French dauphin (who had simultaneously invaded New France, or Louisiana as the French called it, and Alaska, and the Brazilian Directorate, not to mention New London), or even the Black Fist Freedom Guard (which last was worryingly close to the truth). Luckily the situation was so confused, the news so hazy, that Erasmus discovered that sounding vague and asking lots of questions quickly convinced most of them that he was what he said he was – an innocent business traveler trapped on the road with his driver and bodyguard. A couple of the local militias made halfhearted attempts to shake him down, but his invincible self-righteousness, combined with a pious appeal to the forces of order and justice once the emergency resolved itself, scared them off. The British were, it seemed, still half-convinced that it was all a bad dream, and the breakdown of government – it seemed the exchequer had run out of money two days ago, and the king had reconvened parliament, then told parliament to resign again when he didn’t like what they had to say, and parliament had refused, and the unpaid dragoons had refused to clear the benches – was not quite real.

  It was, in short, exactly the sort of confused pre-revolutionary situation that Erasmus had spent most of his life not praying, but hoping for. And he was in very nearly exactly the wrong place, if not for having had the good luck to run into Dunstable and his fellow travelers.

  The broad boulevards and steel-framed stone buildings of metropolitan Fort Petrograd were awash with excited strikers from the munitions factories and – not entirely to Erasmus’s surprise – sailors from the vast naval base sprawling across the southwestern rim of the bay. Erasmus made a snap decision. ‘Forget the Crimea Barracks, take me to City Hall,’ he told Joe.

  City Hall, a neoclassical lump of concrete reinforced with steel – and, curiously, featuring no windows less than eighteen feet above ground level, and clear lines of fire in all directions – was the logical place to go. And so, when they were stopped two blocks from the place by a barricade manned by marines who had torn their insignia of rank from their uniforms, Erasmus climbed out of the car. ‘I’m here to see Adam,’ he said. ‘Take me to him.’

  It took a while, but half an hour later Erasmus slid to the front of a queue of supplicants. They were queuing to see the man in the mayor’s office, but the man behind the mayor’s desk was not the mayor, and he wasn’t doing ordinary civic business as usual. When Erasmus entered the room he was holding forth animatedly with a group of hard-looking types who he recognized instantly as party cadres. Sir Adam Burroughs had aged in the nearly twenty years since Erasmus had last seen him: His hair was thin and straggling, and his high forehead was deeply grooved with worry lines. But the magnetic charm and hyperactive temperament remained –

  ‘Hello? Who’s this?’ Burroughs looked at him for a few seconds. Then his eyes widened. ‘Joshua? Is that you?’

  ‘It is indeed.’ Erasmus bowed low – not a flourishing courtier’s bow, but a salute born of deep respect. ‘Lady Margaret sends her regards, and her hopes for your success in this venture.’ He smiled. ‘Though it seems to me that you’ve made a good start already!’

  ‘Joshua, man – ’ Burroughs stood up and flew from behind his desk, then gripped Erasmus by the shoulders. ‘It’s been too long!’ He turned to face his half-dozen assistants. ‘This man is Joshua Cooke! During the eighty-six he was my secretary and correspondent, he ran the People’s Voice in New York. Since then he’s been a mainstay of the movement out east.’ Eyes were staring, lips mumbling silently. ‘You’ve come to join us, I take it.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Erasmus nodded. ‘And to plug you into what’s been happening out east. I go by the name of Erasmus Burgeson these days, and it’s gotten to be something of a habit. I was delayed, I’m afraid, by the Polis – got away, but it was a near thing. And everywhere I went, rumor was chasing falsehood’s tail for truth’s bone. I take it loyalists are thin on the ground around here?’

  ‘Vanished like rats from a sinking ship,’ grumped one of Burroughs’s new assistants, a heavy-set fellow with a nautical beard. ‘We’ll root ’em out.’

  ‘Organization first,’ Burroughs said mildly. ‘Josh – Erasmus, is it? – you’ve arrived at exactly the right time. We’ve got to get the word out, now that the Hanoverian has emptied his treasury, get control – I want you to take a flying picket down to the Petrograd Times and get the presses rolling again. And the telautograph senders on the east bay mount. I need a solid hand running the propaganda ministry. Can you do that?’

  Erasmus cracked his knuckles, grinning cadaverously. ‘It’ll be a good start.’

  *

  ‘An accident.’ Miriam stared at Brill across the width of the safe house’s kitchen. She looks like someone told her the family dog’s got cancer. ‘What kind of accident?’

  ‘The duke – ’ Brill swallowed.

  Huw sidestepped towards the sink, making an adroit grab for a water glass.

  ‘Yes?’ Miriam said encouragingly, her heart sinking.

  ‘He’s had a stroke, they say. World-walking.’

  ‘But why would he – ’ Huw fell silent, seeing Miriam’s expression.

  ‘The pretender’s army took the Hjalmar Palace by treachery. His grace was organizing a force to take it back when . . . something happened, something bad. Near Concord. Everyone had to cross over in a hurry. They retook the fortifications, but the duke – ’

  Brilliana swallowed.

  ‘Well shit,’ Huw said.

  Miriam raised a finger. ‘Is he still alive?’ she asked. ‘Is he conscious? Because – ’

  ‘Wait.’ Brill took the water glass from Huw’s fingers. ‘Anything. To put in this?’

  ‘There’s a bottle of brandy in the luggage.’ Huw headed for the door. ‘Don’t go away. Be right back.’

  Miriam pulled a stool out and steered it behind Brilliana, who sat, gratefully.

  ‘He’s in a bad way,’ she said eventually, visibly gathering her wits. ‘Paralyzed on one side. They need to get him to a neurology ward but they’re trapped in the Hjalmar Palace – a big castle near Concord, in this world – by some Winter Crone-cursed police or paramilitary force that tried to raid them just as they were mounting the counterattack on the pretender’s forces.’

  Huw reappeared with a dark green bottle. ‘Here.’ He splashed amber fluid into Brill’s gl
ass, then fetched down another and offered it to Miriam. ‘Yourself?’

  ‘No thanks.’ She glanced at him dubiously as he poured two fingers for himself. ‘What if you need to drive somewhere?’

  ‘Firstly, I delegate to Yul, and secondly, there’s a difference between having a shot and getting drunk. Are you sure . . . ?’

  ‘Oh hell, go ahead.’ Miriam snorted. Sometimes it was the little things about her relatives who’d grown up in the Gruinmarkt that tripped her up the hardest, like their extremely un-American attitude to alcohol. ‘Can they get him to a hospital?’

  Brill lowered her glass. ‘It’s in train, I think. I mean, Olga’s there, she’s working something out with Earl Riordan. They couldn’t tell me more – need to know. But – it’s spooky. The feds swooped on ClanSec just as they concentrated to go across to relieve the Hjalmar Palace. It’s almost as if someone told them exactly when – ’

  ‘Matthias is dead,’ Miriam interrupted.

  ‘Matthias?’ Huw looked fascinated. ‘Wasn’t he the duke’s personal secretary? I knew he disappeared, but – ’

  Miriam looked at Brill, who silently shook her head. ‘Later, Huw,’ she promised. ‘Brill, we need to get back to, to – ’ She stopped, the words to wherever we need to be piling up like a car crash on her tongue.

  Brill took a sip of brandy. ‘By the time we could get back to the east coast it’d all be over,’ she said huskily. ‘The important thing is what happens after that.’

  I can’t believe how fast it’s all falling apart. Miriam shook her head. ‘Something about this doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘Things fell to pieces in Niejwein when Egon decided Henryk’s little power play was a personal threat to him, that’s clear. But this new stuff, the feds – it’s one coincidence too many.’ She paused. ‘Could they be connected? Beyond the obvious, beyond Matthias defecting and spilling his guts?’