‘Neither have I, Jim. We write, regularly – Xian says all is well and they’re enjoying the peace in the summer house near Nan Shang.’ Nan Shang in what would be California, two worlds over – or the Middle Empire in the world where the eastern seaboard belonged to the marcher kingdoms. With the fiscal crisis in full flow, and latterly the riots and disorder, many of the family’s elders had deemed it prudent to send their dependents away to safety. While the Lee extended family were nothing like as prominent in the West as the six Eastern families had become in the East, their country estates were nevertheless palatial. ‘The postal service is still working. Do you want me to – ’
‘No, I’m sorry, Father. Just curious. You wanted a chat?’
‘Yes.’ His father was silent for a few seconds. Then: ‘What is your opinion of the doctor? Did you have an opportunity to form an opinion of him during your stay with the cousins?’ During the six months during which James had been a pampered hostage.
‘I didn’t know him well, Father. But – you want my honest opinion? He’s a worm. A dangerous, slimy, treacherous worm.’
‘Strong words.’ The lightness of his father’s tone was belied by his sour face. ‘Do you have reason for it?’
‘I believe so. I don’t think he told Eldest any outright untruths, but nothing he said was quite right, either. He was telling the truth when he said he was the personal physician to many of the Eastern cousins’ womenfolk, but he was also . . . not as put-upon as he would have you believe. He said he earned the undying hatred of the woman Helge – and he was telling the truth there, too. But Helge didn’t impress me as being anybody’s fool. She’s neither naive nor stupid – we had time to talk – there’s something unpleasant underneath this excess of servility on his part, Father. I can’t tell you precisely what he’s hiding, but he’s hiding something.’
‘That much was obvious from his performance.’ Shen took a sip of whisky. ‘I don’t think Mei is serious about finding him a wife – unless she means to set the Widow Ting on him.’ James flinched; avoiding cousin Ting and her dangerous games had been one of his wiser moves. ‘I gather she’s itching to marry again. That would make . . . three? Four? No matter. It is perfectly clear that the doctor is as twisty as a hangman’s noose. What your uncle would like to know is – can he deliver what he offered?’
‘I don’t know.’ James paused. ‘You may know more than I, Father. Is it true that Helge is with child?’
For a long moment his father stared into his tumbler. ‘It might be so.’
‘Because.’ James licked his lips. ‘Before the Per– before the youngest son’s rebellion, she was held prisoner and securely chaperoned. And I met the heir to whom she was betrothed. He wasn’t going to do any begetting on her. There was unsavory whispering about some of ven Hjalmar’s works, among the servants I cultivated. Some said that the man was an abortionist. Others accused him of drugging and raping noblewomen – a story I find incredible, under the circumstances described. What is true is that the Clan’s ladies, whom he served, made use of a hospital or clinic in the United States, which he helped run. I know that much. And Helge was leashed for poking her nose into some business that sounds very like this baby clinic he offered to elder Yuan. So: I believe he is mostly telling the truth – again, only mostly.’
‘What do you think he plans?’
‘What he – ’ James stopped. ‘You can’t be thinking of working with him! He’s a viper. He’s stung two masters already, why would he stop short of making it three? It’s in his nature!’
‘Calm down, boy, I’m not making that decision!’
‘I’m sorry, Father.’
‘That is good. Don’t worry unduly – we trust him no more than you do. But we need to have some idea of his goals before we can decide whether to make use of him or not. If he can deliver what he offers – perhaps as many as five hundred world-walkers within ten years – that is a matter of enormous significance! We would not have to worry about the Eastern cousins after that. It would open up new business possibilities, ways of making ourselves useful to those in authority – whomever they may be, when the current incivility dies down – new blood in our thinning arteries. Can he do it? That is what my uncle asks. If he can, then we can use him: tie him down, shadow his work, and eventually take it over. But if he’s a mere charlatan’ – Shen made a dismissive gesture, casting the shadow of ven Hjalmar over his left shoulder – ‘we know how to deal with that, too.’
James tried again: ‘I think it’s unwise – ’
‘You have made that clear already!’ his father snapped. ‘Your opinion is noted. But the decision-making is for your elders; they must balance the safety and needs of the family against the risks involved in taking this asp to our breast. All my uncle needs from you now is an assessment – is what he says possible?’
James took a deep breath, embarrassment and anger warring. ‘I . . . I can’t deny it. From what the Eastern cousins were saying, when they had no reason to guard their tongues – yes, very possibly.’
‘Thank you.’ Shen lifted his tumbler. ‘I think it best if we do not include you in the discussion; you are, perhaps, too close to its subjects. I agree with your assessment of the doctor’s character – but even serial traitors may be useful to us on occasion. Especially if we know their weaknesses. Which is why I ask again: What do you believe his goals are?’
‘What goals? Beside keeping his head on his shoulders?’
Shen leaned forward. ‘Has it gone that far?’
‘He did something to Helge that angered her greatly. And she is pregnant, with an heir to the throne of Gruinmarkt that is universally acknowledged as such by the Eastern cousins, who say something about a, uh, DNA paternity check, whatever that might be. Are they fools, Father? Is she a fool? I think those rumors about drugs and rape are . . . not true, exactly, but close. Ven Hjalmar got Lady Helge pregnant with seed from the royal line – then his patron died, and he must run for his life. He wants money, sanctuary, and time to continue his work – which is this breeding program. He wants to use us, Father, that’s what I think.’
‘Ah.’ His father relaxed, smiling at last. He raised his glass. ‘And you think that’s all?’
‘I wouldn’t swear to it, but – ’
‘It’ll do.’ Shen took a sip. ‘Thank you, son. I think I can discuss this with Eldest now.’
James’s shoulders sank. ‘You think Uncle will take Dr. ven Hjalmar on.’
‘Yes.’ Shen’s smile widened. ‘But don’t worry. He will be under control . . .’
*
The second thing to catch Miriam’s attention was the mingled smells of scorched wood and warm blood. The first was managing to control her fall; being carried piggyback was hard enough when the steed was a strapping young soldier, never mind a physically fit but lightly built younger woman. As Miriam and Olga disentangled themselves, Miriam looked around curiously. They’d come through in the target area once a deeply relieved Brill had confirmed that the zone was secure, and it was Miriam’s first chance to see the havoc that the Pervert’s army had inflicted on the Clan’s outlying minor steadings.
One farmhouse looked much like another to her eye – in the Gruinmarkt they tended to be thick-walled, made from heavy logs or clay bricks depending on the locally available materials – but this one bore clear signs of battle. The roof of one wing was scorched and blackened, and the window shutters on the central building had been wrecked. More to the point –
‘Who – ’ she began, as Olga raised a hand and waved at the armed man standing guard by the door.
‘My lady!’ He went to one knee. ‘Lord Riordan awaits you in the west wing.’
‘Rise, Thom. Where are Knuth and Thorson?’ Olga was all business, despite what had to be a splitting headache.
‘We haven’t seen ear nor tail of them since they crossed over yesterday.’ The guard’s eyes widened as he looked at Miriam: ‘Is this – ’
‘Yes, and you don’t need to mak
e a scene over me,’ she said hastily. Turning to Olga: ‘The other two – they’re your missing guards?’
‘Let us discuss that indoors.’ Olga nodded at the farmstead’s front door, which stood ajar. Thom followed behind like an overeager dog, happy his mistress was home. ‘I think Knuth and Thorson are probably dead,’ she said quietly. ‘The two who were waiting for us definitely weren’t them.’
Miriam nodded, jerkily. ‘So they were assassins? Just there to kill whoever turned up?’
‘Whoever turned up at the duty staff officer’s primary evacuation point, yes.’ The picture was clear enough. The evac point had been guarded by a lance of soldiers, two on the American side and six in the Gruinmarkt. The assassins had murdered the two guards in the state park, then planned on catching Earl Riordan and his colleagues as they arrived, one by one. They hadn’t anticipated a group who, forewarned, arrived expecting skullduggery. ‘I expect Lady d’Ost will try and find where they hid the bodies before she comes hither to report. Come on inside, my lady.’
The farmstead was a wreck. The guards had made a gesture towards clearing up, pushing the worst of the trashed furniture and shattered kitchenware up against one wall and sweeping the floor – the pretender’s cavalry had briefly used it as a stable – but the scorch marks of a fire that had failed to take hold still streaked the walls, and there was a persistent, faint aroma of rotting meat. The guards had brought out camp chairs and a folding table, and Riordan had set up his headquarters there, organizing the guards to man a shortwave radio and track unfolding events on a large map. He looked up as Miriam arrived. ‘Welcome, Your Majesty.’
‘How bad is it?’ Miriam asked.
‘We’re getting reports. The evac plan is running smoothly and I’ve ordered all stations to check out the other side for unwelcome visitors. Didn’t want to say why – things will be chaotic enough without setting off a panic about a civil war. The trouble is, we’re fifteen miles out of Niejwein – the eye of the storm – half a day’s ride; and I’m not happy about disclosing your location. In the worst case our enemies may have direction-finding equipment, and if they’ve got their hands on Rudy’s ultralight . . . we’ve got to sit tight as long as possible. I’ve ordered Helmut to bring a couple of lances here as soon as he’s nailed down the Summer Palace and I’ve put orders out for the arrest of the entire postal committee and, I regret to say, your grandmother. We can weed that garden at our leisure once we’ve got it fenced in. Unless you have any other suggestions?’
‘Yes.’ Miriam swallowed. ‘Is there any word of my mother? Or, or Dr. Griben ven Hjalmar? I think they’re in cahoots . . .’
Riordan glanced at one of his men and barked a question in Hochsprache too fast for Miriam to follow. The reply was hesitant. ‘No reports,’ he said, turning to Miriam. ‘I’ll let you know if anything turns up. I assume you’re talking about the duke’s special, ah, medical program?’ Miriam nodded. ‘I’m on it. Now, if you wouldn’t mind – ’ He looked pointedly at the security guard with the radio headset, who was waving urgently for attention.
‘Go to it.’ Miriam shuffled awkwardly aside, towards the doorway into the burned-out wing of the farmhouse. ‘What do we do now?’ she asked Olga.
‘We wait, my lady. And we learn. Or you wait, I have orders to send. Please.’ She gestured at the bedrolls on the hard-packed floor. ‘Make yourself comfortable. We may be here some time.’
*
Twenty years ago, in the rookeries of a town called New Catford, Elder Huan had known a young and dangerous radical – a Leveler and ranter called Stephen Reynolds.
In those days, Huan had been the public face of the family’s business involvements – a discreet railroad for money and dispatches that the underground made use of from time to time. Reynolds had been Huan Lee’s contact, and for a while things had gone swimmingly. Few organizations had as great a need for secrecy as the Leveler command, and indeed Huan had toyed with the idea of disclosing the family’s secret to him – for the family’s singular talent and the needs of the terrorists and bomb-throwers and other idealists were perfectly aligned, and the pogroms and lynchings of the English, tacitly encouraged by the government (who knew a good target for the mob’s ire when they saw it – and skin of the wrong color had always been one such), did nothing to endear the authorities to him. At least the revolutionaries preached equality and fraternity, and an end to the oppression of all races.
A series of unfortunate events had closed off that avenue before Huan started down it; raids, arrests, and executions of Leveler cells clear across the country. He, himself, had been forced to world-walk in a hurry, one jump ahead of the jackboots of the Polis troopers. And that had been the end of that. The first duty of the family was survival, then profit – martyrdom in the name of revolutionary fraternity wasn’t part of the package. In the wake of the raids he’d thought Stephen Reynolds dead – until he heard the name again, in a broadcast by the revolutionary propaganda ministry. Reynolds had survived and, it seemed, prospered in the council of the Radical Party.
This didn’t entirely surprise Elder Huan. As he had described it to his brothers, some time later, ‘The man is a rat – sharp as a wire, personally courageous, and curious. The Polis will have a hard time taking him.’ And now the fox was in charge of a hen coop of no small size, having emerged in charge of the Annapolis Freedom Riders, then promoted to organize the Bureau of Internal Security that the party had formed to replace the reactionary and untrustworthy Crown Polis.
Now Elder Huan – through conduits and contacts both esoteric and obscure – had arranged for a meeting with the man himself. The agenda of the meeting was to be the renewal of an old alliance. And Elder Huan intended to make Reynolds an offer that would secure the safety of the family throughout the current crisis.
*
For his part, Reynolds – a thickset fellow with brown hair, thinning at the crown, and half-moon pince-nez that gave him an avuncular appearance even when supervising interrogations – was looking forward to the meeting for entirely the wrong reasons.
‘I want you and two squads to be ready outside the front door. Place another squad round the back. Plain clothes, two steamers ready for backup.’ He smiled, not warmly. Brentford, his secretary, nodded and scribbled in his notebook. ‘You should arrest everyone in the building or leaving it after my departure, unless I indicate otherwise by displaying a red kerchief in my breast pocket. Special Regime Blue, with added attention. The charges will be resisting arrest, treason, membership of a proscribed organization, and anything else that occurs to you. Have the Star Tribunal ready to sit on them and I’ll sign off on the execution warrants immediately. Do you have that?’
Brentford nodded, impassive. These were not unusual orders; Citizen Reynolds took a very robust approach to dealing with subversives. ‘The, ah, exception, sir? Do you have any other instructions to deal with that case?’
‘No.’ Reynolds made a fist, squeezing. ‘If anything comes up I’ll handle it myself.’
‘The danger, sir – ’
‘They’re petty smugglers and racketeers, citizen. I dealt with them before, during the Long Emergency; it’s almost a certainty that they want to deal themselves a hand at the table, in which case they’re in for a short, sharp surprise. I merely reserve the final judgment in case there’s something more serious at hand.’ He stood, behind his desk, and straightened his uniform tunic, flicking invisible dust motes from one black lapel. ‘Plain clothes, I say again. I’ll see you at eight.’
Reynolds strode to the door as Brentford saluted. He didn’t look back. Brentford was a reliable party man, a typical functionary of the new organization: He’d do as he was told, and look up to Reynolds as a bluff fellow who led from the front, as long as he occasionally indulged in eccentricities such as periodically going into the field to gather up nests of vipers and traitors with his own hands.
Reynolds didn’t smile at the thought. There were risks attached to this behavior, and he didn’t h
old with taking risks unless there was something he held to be personally important at stake. Maintaining his carefully constructed public image was all very well, but placing himself in front of a desperate fugitive’s knife was . . . it was undignified. On the other hand, sometimes it was necessary to deal with former Polis informers himself, to ensure that they courageously swallowed their suicide pills or jumped out of a high window. He considered it to be a small mercy – far less unpleasant than what fate held in store for them in the ungentle hands of his enthusiastic staff in Interrogations and Inquiries.
Citizen-Commissioner Stephen Reynolds was more than willing to go into the field in person and meet past friends – especially if it meant that he could silence them before they could spill their guts to the interrogators in the BIS basements.
*
The venue Elder Huan had chosen for the meeting was a tiny front-room bar in a public house in Menzies Gate, a run-down suburb on the edge of what, in another world, would be called Brooklyn. His foot soldiers had paid the owner handsomely to take his wife and six children and two servants and move out for the night: a three-month amnesty from protection money, and a wallet bulging with ration coupons. ‘I want privacy,’ Huan had told One-Eye Cho, ‘and I want a safe exit. See to it.’ The pub, unbeknownst to its owner, was collocated with a trackless forest clearing in the northern Sudtmarkt – one carved out with sweat and axe and saw by Cho’s sons. Elder had dealt with Reynolds before, and with the Polis, and was under no illusions about the hazards of dining with devils in Secret Security Police uniforms. ‘Place two reliable bearers in the exit, and two armed guards. Find someone who can pass as white, and put him behind the bar with a shotgun to cover my retreat. He can be the bartender. Put another in the kitchen, who can at least provide cold cuts and soup if our guest is hungry.’
The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) Page 38