The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  But there were no curious farmers, of course. The soldiers who had ridden ahead with the morning sunrise had made it grimly clear that this procession was not to be witnessed; and in the wake of the savagery of spring and early summer’s rampage, those tenants who had survived unscathed were more than cooperative. So the hedgerows were mostly empty of curious eyes as the convoy creaked and squealed and neighed along the Linden Valley – curious eyes which might, if they were owned by unusually well-traveled commoners, recognize the emblems of the witch-families.

  The Clan was on the move, and nothing would be the same again.

  A covered wagon or a noble’s carriage is an uncomfortable way to travel at the best of times, alternately chill and drafty or chokingly, stiflingly hot (depending on the season), rocking on crude leaf springs or crashing from rut to stone on no springs at all, the seats a wooden bench (perhaps with a thin cushion to save the noble posterior from the insults of the road). The horsemen might have had a better time of it, but for the dust clouds flung up by the hooves of close to a hundred animals, and the flies. To exchange a stifling shuttered box for biting insects and mud that slowly clung to sweating man and horse alike was perhaps no choice at all. But one thing they agreed: It was essential to move together, and the path of least resistance was, to say the least, unsafe.

  ‘Why can’t we go to ’Mer’ca, Ma?’

  Helena voh Wu gritted her teeth as one carriage wheel bounced across a stone in the road. Tess, her second-youngest, was four years old and bright by disposition, but the exodus was taking its toll after two days, and the question came out as a whine. ‘We can’t go there any more, dear. I told you, it’s not safe.’

  ‘But it’s where Da goes when he travels?’

  ‘That’s different.’ Helena rested a hand lightly on the crib. Markus was asleep – had, in fact, cried himself to sleep after a wailing tantrum. He didn’t travel well. ‘We can’t go there.’

  ‘But why can’t we – ’

  The other occupant of the carriage raised her eyes from the book she had been absorbed in. ‘For Sky Lady’s love, leave your ma be, Tess. See you not, she was trying to sleep?’

  Helena smiled gratefully at her. Kara, her sister-in-law, was traveling with them of necessity, for her husband Sir Leon was already busied with the residual duty of the postal corvée; his young wife, her pregnancy not yet showing, was just another parcel to be transferred between houses in this desperately busy time. Not that Sir Leon believed the most outlandish warnings of the radical faction, but there was little harm in sending Kara for a vacation with her eldest brother’s family.

  Now Kara shook her head and glanced at Helena. The latter nodded, and Kara lifted Tess onto her lap, grunting slightly with the effort. ‘Once upon a time we could all travel freely to America, at least those of us the Postal Service would permit, and it was a wondrous place, full of magic and treasure. But that’s not where we’re going, Tess. There are bad men in America, and evil wizards; they are hunting our menfolk who travel there, and they want to hunt us all down and throw us in their deepest dungeons.’

  The child’s eyes were growing wider with every sentence. Helena was about to suggest that Kara lighten up on the story, but she continued, gently bouncing Tess upon her knee: ‘But don’t worry, we have a plan. We’re going on a journey somewhere else, to a new world like America but different, one where the k– where the rulers don’t hate and fear us. We’re going to cross over there and we’ll be safe. You’ll have a new dress, and practice your Anglischprache, and it’ll be a great adventure! And the bad men won’t be able to find us.’

  Tess looked doubtful. ‘Will the bad men get Da?’

  Helena’s heart missed a beat. ‘Of course not!’ she said hotly. Gyorg ven Wu would be deep underground, shuffling between doppelgängered bunkers with a full wheelbarrow as often as the blood-pressure monitor said was safe: a beast of burden, toiling to carry the vital necessities of life between a basement somewhere in Massachusetts and a dungeon or wine cellar beneath a castle or mansion in the Gruinmarkt. Ammunition, tools, medicine, gold, anything that Clan Security deemed necessary. The flow of luxuries had stopped cold, the personal allowance abolished in the wake of the wave of assassinations that had accompanied the horridness in the Anglischprache capital.

  ‘Your da is safe,’ Kara reassured the child. ‘He’ll come to see us soon enough. I expect he’ll bring you chocolate.’

  Helena cast her a reproving look – chocolate was an expensive import to gift on a child – but Kara caught her eye and shook her head slightly. The effect of the word chocolate on Tess was remarkable. ‘Want chocolate!’ she exclaimed. ‘All the chocolate!’

  Kara smiled over Tess’s head, then grimaced as one of the front wheels thumped over the edge of a rut and the carriage crashed down a few inches. Markus twitched, clenched a tiny fist close to his mouth uneasily as Helena leaned over him. ‘I wish we had a smoother road to travel,’ she said quietly. ‘Or that we could walk from nearer home.’

  ‘The queen’s men have arranged a safely defended house,’ Kara reminded her. ‘They wouldn’t force us to travel this way without good reason. She wouldn’t let them.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Her Majesty.’ An odd look stole across her face, one part nostalgia to two parts regret. ‘I was one of her maids. She was very wise.’

  So you never tire of reminding us, Helena thought, but held her tongue; with another enervating day’s drive ahead, there was nothing to gain from picking a fight. Then Tess chirped up again: ‘Tell me about the queen?’

  ‘Surely.’ Kara ruffled her hair. ‘Queen Helge was the child of Duke Alfredo and his wife. One day when she was younger than your brother Markus, when her parents were traveling to their country estates, they were set upon by assassins sent by – ’

  Helena half-closed her eyes and leaned against the wall of the carriage, looking out through the open window at the tree line beyond the cleared roadside strip. I wonder if this is what it was like for Helge’s mother, she wondered. She escaped just ahead of her attackers, didn’t she? I wonder if we’ll be so lucky . . .

  *

  Arranging a meeting was much easier the second time round. Miriam handed Sir Alasdair a hastily scribbled note for the telautograph office to dispatch: NEED TO TALK URGENTLY TOMORROW AGREED LOCATION STOP. One of Alasdair’s men, and then the nearest post office, did the rest.

  Not that imperiously demanding a conversation with the commissioner for propaganda was a trivial matter; receiving it in New London only two hours after it was transmitted, Erasmus swore under his breath and, before departing for his evening engagement – dinner with Victor McDougall, deputy commissioner for press approval – booked a compartment on the morning mail train to Boston, along with two adjacent compartments for his bodyguards and a communications clerk. By sheer good luck Miriam had picked the right day: He could see her and, provided he caught the following morning’s train for the return journey, be back in the capital in time for the Thursday Central Committee meeting. ‘This had better be worth it,’ he muttered to himself as he clambered into the passenger compartment of his ministerial car for the journey to McDougall’s home. However, it didn’t occur to him to ignore Miriam’s summons. In all the time he’d known her, she’d never struck him as being one to act impetuously; if she said something was urgent, it almost certainly was.

  Attending the meeting was also easier, second time round. The morning after James Lee’s visit, Miriam rose early and dressed for a public excursion. She took care to look as nondescript as possible; to be mistaken for a woman of particular wealth could be as dangerous here as to look impoverished, and the sartorial class indicators were much more sharply defined than back in the United States. ‘I’m ready to go whenever you’ve got cover for me,’ she told Sir Alasdair, as she entered the front parlor. ‘Two guards, one car, and a walkie-talkie.’

  ‘Emil and Klaus are waiting.’ Sir Alasdair didn’t smile. ‘They’ll park two streets away
and remain on call.’ He gestured at the side table: ‘Lady d’Ost prepared a handbag for you before she went out.’

  ‘There’s no – ’ Miriam paused. ‘You think I’ll need this?’ She lifted the bag, feeling the drag of its contents – a two-way radio and the dense metallic weight of a pistol.

  ‘I hope you won’t. But better safe than unsafe.’

  The steamer drove slowly through the streets and neighborhoods of a dense, urban Boston quite unlike the city Miriam had known; different architecture, different street names, different shops and businesses. There were a few more vehicles on the roads today, and fewer groups of men loitering on street corners; they passed two patrols of green-clad Freedom Rider militiamen, red armbands and shoulder-slung shotguns matching their arrogant stride. Policing and public order were beginning to return to the city, albeit in a very different shape. Posters had gone up on some of the high brick walls: the stern-jawed face of a balding, white-haired man. CITIZEN BURROUGHS SAYS: WE WORK FOR FREEDOM! Miriam hunched her shoulders against an imperceptible chill, pushing back against the bench seat. Erasmus had spoken glowingly of Citizen Burroughs. She found herself wishing fervently for him to be right, despite her better reservations.

  Miriam covered the last hundred yards, from the deceptive safety of the car to the door of Burgeson’s tenement building, feeling naked despite the contents of her bag and the presence of her backup team. It was odd: She couldn’t see any bodyguards or observers, but just knowing Erasmus wouldn’t be able to travel alone left her feeling watched. This time, however, she had a key. After turning it in the lock, she hastily closed the door behind her and climbed the stairway Burgeson’s apartment shared with half a dozen other dwellings.

  His front door was locked. Miriam examined it carefully – it had become a habit, a kind of neurotic tic she’d picked up in the year-plus since she’d discovered her distinctly paranoid heritage – then opened it. The flat was much as it had been on her last visit; dustier, if anything, sheets covering most of the furniture. Erasmus wasn’t here yet. For no reason she cared to examine too closely, Miriam walked from room to room, carefully opening doors and looking within. The bedroom: dominated by a sheeted bed, walled with bookcases, a fireplace still unraked with white ash caked and crumbling behind the grate. A former closet, a crude bolt added inside the door to afford a moment’s privacy to those who might use the flushing toilet. The kitchen was big and empty, a tin bath sitting in one corner next to the cold coal-fired cooking range. There wasn’t much here to hang a personality on, aside from the books: Burgeson kept his most valued possessions inside his head. The flat was a large one by local standards – family-sized, suitable for a prosperous shopkeeper and his wife and offspring. He must have rattled around in it like a solitary pea in a pod. Odd, she thought. But then, he was married. Before the last clampdown. The lack of personal touches . . . How badly did it damage him? She went back to the living room, which with its battered piano and beaten-up furniture gave at least a semblance of domestic clutter.

  It was distinctly unsettling to her to realize how much she didn’t know. Before, when she’d been an unwilling visitor in the Gruinmarkt and an adventurer exploring this strange other-Boston in New Britain, she’d not looked too deep beneath surface appearances. But now – now she was probably going to end her days living in this nation on the other side of time – and the thought of how little she knew about the people around her troubled her.

  Who are you dealing with and how do you know whether you can trust them? It seemed to be the defining paradox of her life for the past year or so. They said that blood was thicker than water, but in her experience her relatives were most likely to define themselves as enemies; meanwhile, some who were clearly supposed to be her enemies weren’t. Mike Fleming should have shanghaied her to an interrogation cell; instead, he’d warned her off. Erasmus – she’d originally trusted him as far as she could throw him; now here she was, waiting for him anxiously in an empty apartment. And she’d wanted to trust Roland, but he’d been badly, possibly irreparably, broken. She sniffed, wrinkling her nose, eyes itching – whether from a momentary twist of sorrow or a whiff of dust rising from the sofa, she couldn’t say.

  The street door banged, the sound reverberating distantly up the stairwell. Miriam stood, moving her hand to the top of her handbag, just in case. She heard footsteps, the front door opening, familiar sounds – Burgeson breathed heavily, moved just so – and she stood up, just in time to meet him in the living-room doorway.

  ‘You came,’ she said, slightly awkwardly.

  ‘You called.’ He looked at her, head tilted sidelong. ‘I could hardly ignore you and maintain that cover story?’

  ‘Yes, well – ’ She caught her lower lip between her teeth: What will the neighbors say? ‘The commissioner is visiting his mistress again’? – ‘I couldn’t exactly come and fetch you, could I? Hey, get your breath back. Do you have time to stay?’

  ‘I can spare a few hours.’ He walked past her and dragged a dust sheet off the battered sofa. ‘I really need to sell up. I’m needed in the capital almost all the time; can’t stay here, can’t run the shop from two hundred miles away.’ He sounded almost amused. ‘Can I interest you in a sherry?’

  ‘You can.’ The thought of Erasmus moving out, moving away, disturbed her unaccountably. As he rummaged around the sideboard, she sat down again. ‘A sherry would be nice. But I didn’t rattle your cage just for a drink.’

  ‘I didn’t imagine you would.’ He found a bottle, splashed generous measures into two mismatched wineglasses, and brought one over to her. He seemed to be in high spirits, or at least energized. ‘Your health?’ He sat down beside her and she raised her glass to bump against his. ‘Now, what motivated you to bring me to town?’

  They were sitting knee-to-knee. It was distracting. ‘I had a visitor yesterday,’ she said carefully. ‘One of the, the other family. The Lees. He had some disturbing news that I thought you needed to know about.’

  ‘Could you have wired it?’ He smiled to take the sting out of the question.

  ‘I don’t think so. Um. Do you know a Commissioner Reynolds? In Internal Security?’ Nothing in his facial expression changed, but the set of his shoulders told her all she needed to know. ‘James Lee came to me because, uh, he’s very concerned that his uncle, the Lee family’s elder, is cutting a deal with Reynolds.’

  Now Burgeson’s expression changed: He was visibly struggling for calm. He placed a hand on her knee. ‘Please, do carry on.’

  Miriam tried to gather her thoughts, scattered by the unexpected contact. ‘The Lees have had a defector, a renegade from our people. One with a price on his head, Dr. ven Hjalmar. Ven Hjalmar has stolen a list of – look, this is going to take a long time to explain, just take it from me, it’s bad. If the Lees can get the breeding program database out of him, they can potentially give Reynolds a couple of thousand young world-walkers within the next twenty years. There are only about a hundred of them right now. I don’t like the sound of Reynolds, he’s the successor to the old Polis, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’ Burgeson nodded. ‘It’s a very good thing you didn’t wire me. Damn.’ He took another breath, visibly rattled. ‘How much do the Lees know? About your people?’

  ‘Too much for comfort.’ Despite the summer humidity, Miriam shivered. ‘More to the point, ven Hjalmar is a murderous bastard who picked the losing side in an internal fight. I told you about what happened to, to me before I escaped – ’

  ‘He’s the doctor you mentioned. Yes?’ She felt him tense.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that tells me all I need to know just now. You say he’s met Stephen Reynolds?’

  ‘That’s what James Lee says. Listen, I’m not a reliable source; I don’t usually bear grudges but if I run into the doctor again . . . and then there’s the question of whether James was telling the – ’

  ‘Did he have any obvious reason to lie to you?’ Burgeson looked her in the eye. ‘Or to betray
confidences?’

  Miriam took a sip from her glass. Now Erasmus knew, she felt unaccountably free. ‘I met him while I was being held prisoner. He was a hostage against his parents’ behavior after the truce – yes, that’s how the noble families in the Gruinmarkt do business. He helped me get away. I think he’s hoping I can save his people from what he sees as a big mistake.’

  ‘Very well.’ He took his hand away: She felt a momentary flash of disappointment. ‘I’m sorry. He was right to be afraid. Reynolds is not someone I would want to put any great faith in. Do you know what the Lee elders have in mind?’

  ‘Spying. People who can vanish from one place and reappear in another.’ Miriam shrugged. ‘They don’t have access to the United States, at least not yet, not without the doctor – they don’t have the technology transfer capability I can give you, and they don’t have the numbers yet. But they do have a track record as invisible assassins.’ She put the glass down on the floor. ‘How afraid should I be?’

  ‘Very.’ He took her hand as she straightened up, leaning close; his expression was foreboding. ‘He’s having me followed, you know.’

  ‘What, he – ’

  ‘Listen.’ He leaned closer, pitching his voice low: ‘I’ve met men like Reynolds before. As long as he thinks I’m in town to see my mistress he’ll be happy – he thinks he’s got a hand on my neck. But you’re right, he’s dangerous, he’s an empire-builder. He’s got a power base in Justice and Prisons and he’s purging his own department and, hmm, the books you lent me – made me think of Felix Dzerzhinsky or Heinrich Himmler. Expert bureaucrats who build machineries of terror inside a revolutionary movement. But he doesn’t have absolute power yet. He may not even have realized how much power he has at his fingertips. Sir Adam doesn’t realize, either – but I’m in a position to tell him. Reynolds isn’t invulnerable but he is dangerous, and you have just given me a huge problem, because he is already watching me.’