The Hidden Family tmp-2

by Charles Stross

  “Is she serious?” he asked Miriam quietly.

  “Serious about me, and my faction.” Miriam frowned. “She’s not politicized, if that’s what you’re asking about. Sheltered upbringing, too. But she’s loyal to her friends and she has nothing to gain from the Emergency here. And she knows how to shoot.”

  “Good.” Erasmus nodded gravely. “I wouldn’t want you to be placing your life in the hands of a dizzy child.”

  “Placing my—what?”

  “Two strangers. Not constabulary or plainclothes thief-takers, one of them looking like a Chinee-man. They’ve been drinking in the wrong establishments this past week, asking questions. Some idiots, the kind who work the wrong side of the law—not politicals—these idiots have taken their money. Someone has talked, I’m sure of it. A name, Blackstones, was mentioned, and something about tonight. I wrote to you but obviously it hasn’t arrived.” He stared at her. “It’s a very deep pond you’re swimming in.”

  “Erasmus.” She stared right back. “I am going to make this world fit to live in by every means at my disposal. Believe me, a couple of gangsters playing at cracksman won’t stop me.”

  The curtain rustled. Olga stepped out, wearing a green two-piece outfit. “How do I look?” she asked, doing a twirl.

  “Alright,” said Miriam. “I think. I’m not the right person to ask for fashion tips.”

  “You look marvelous, my dear,” Erasmus volunteered gallantly. “With just a little work, a seamstress will have the jacket fitting perfectly. And with some additional effort, the patching can be made invisible.”

  “That’s about what I thought.” Olga nodded. “I’d rather not, though.” She grinned impishly. “What do you say?”

  “It’s fine,” said Miriam. She turned back to Burgeson. “Who leaked the news?” she asked.

  “I want to find out.” He looked grim.

  “Write to me, as I did to you, care of this man.” She wrote down Roger’s address on a scrap of card. “He works for me and he’s trustworthy.”

  “Good.” Erasmus stared at the card for a moment, lips working, then thrust it into the elderly cast-iron stove that struggled to heat the shop. “Fifty pounds weight. That’s an awful lot.”

  “We can move it in chunks, if necessary.”

  “It won’t be,” he said absent-mindedly, as if considering other things.

  “Miriam, dear, you really ought to try this on,” called Olga.

  “Oh, really.” Miriam rolled her eyes. “Can’t you—”

  “Did you ever play at avoiding your chaperone as a child?” Olga asked quietly. “If not, do as I say. The same man has walked past the outside window three times while we’ve been inside. We have perhaps five minutes at the outside. Maybe less.”

  “Oh.” She looked at Olga in surprise. “Okay, give it to me.” She turned to Burgeson. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to abuse your hospitality. I hope you don’t have anything illegal on the premises?”

  “No, not me. Not now.” He smiled a sallow smile. “My lungs are giving me trouble again, that’s why I locked up shop, yes? You’d better go into the back.”

  Olga threw a heavy pinafore at Miriam. “Quick, take off your jacket, put this on over your dress. That’s right. Lose the bonnet.” She passed Miriam a straw hat, utterly unsuited to the weather and somewhat tattered. “Come on, take this overcoat. You don’t mind?” She appealed to Burgeson.

  “My dear, it’s an education to see two different women so suddenly.” He smiled grimly. “You’d better put your old outfit in this.” He passed Miriam a Gladstone bag.

  “But we haven’t paid—”

  “The devil will pay if you don’t leave through the cellar as fast as you can,” Burgeson hissed urgently, then broke up in a fit of racking coughs. Miriam blinked. He needs antibiotics, she thought absent-mindedly.

  “Good-bye!” she said, then she led Olga—still stuffing her expensive jacket into the leather case—down the rickety steps into the cellar, just as the doorbell began to ring insistently.

  “Come on,” she hissed. Glancing round she saw Olga shift the bag to her left hand. Shadows masked her right. “Come on, this way.”

  She led Olga along a narrow tunnel walled with mildewed books, past a row of pigeonholes, and then an upright piano that had seen better days. She stopped, gestured Olga behind her, then levered the piano away from the wall. A dank hole a yard in diameter gaped in the exposed brickwork behind it, dimly lit from the other side. “Get in,” she ordered.

  “But—”

  “Do it!” She could already hear footsteps overhead.

  Olga crawled into the hole. “Keep going,” Miriam told her, then knelt down and hurried after her. She paused to drag the piano back into position, grunting with effort, then stood up.

  “Where are we?” Olga whispered.

  “Not safe yet. Come on.” The room was freezing cold, and smelled of damp and old coal. She led Olga up the steps at the end and out through the gaping door into a larger cellar, then immediately doubled back. Next to the doorway there was another one, this time closed. Another two stood opposite. Miriam opened her chosen door and beckoned Olga inside, then shut it.

  “Where—”

  “Follow me.” The room was dark until Miriam pulled out a compact electric flashlight. It was half full of lumber, but there was an empty patch in the wall opposite, leading back parallel to Burgeson’s cellar. She ducked into it and found the next tunnel, set in the wall below the level of the stacked firewood. “You see where we’re going? Come on.”

  The tunnel went on and on, twisting right at one point. Miriam held the flashlight in her mouth, proceeding on hands and knees and trying not to tear her clothes. She was going to look like a particularly grubby housemaid when she surfaced, she decided. She really hoped Olga was wrong about the visitor, but she had a nasty hunch that she wouldn’t be seeing Burgeson again for some time.

  The tunnel opened up into another cellar, hidden behind a decaying rocking horse, a broken wardrobe, and a burned bed frame with bare metal springs like skeletal ribs. Miriam stood up and dusted herself off as best she could, then made room for Olga. Olga pulled a face. “Ugh! That was filthy. Are you alright?”

  “Yes,” Miriam said quietly.

  “It was the same man,” Olga added. “About six and a half feet tall, a big bull with a bushy moustache. And two more behind him dressed identically in blue. King’s men?”

  “Probably. Sounds like Inspector Smith to me. Hmm. Hold this.” Miriam passed her the flashlight and continued to brush dirt and cobwebs out of the pinafore: It had started out white, and at best it would be gray by the time she surfaced. “Right, I think we’re just about ready to surface.”

  “Where?”

  “The next street over, in a backyard.” Miriam pulled the door open to reveal wooden steps leading up toward daylight. “Come on. Put the flashlight away and for God’s sake hide the gun.”

  They surfaced between brick walls, a sky the color of a slate roof above them. Miriam unlatched the gate and they slipped out, two hard-faced women, one in a maid’s uniform and the other in a green much-patched suit that had seen better days. They were a far cry from the dignified widow and her young companion who had called on Burgeson’s emporium twenty minutes earlier.

  “Quick.” Miriam guided Olga onto the first tram to pass. It would go sufficiently close to home to do. “Two fourpenny tickets, please.” She paid the conductor and sat down, feeling faint. She glanced round the tram, but nobody was within earshot. “That was too close for comfort,” she whispered.

  “What was it?” Olga asked quietly, sitting next to her.

  “We weren’t there. They can’t prove anything. There’s no bullion on Erasmus’s premises, and he’s a sick man. Unless we were followed from the works to his shop…” Miriam stopped. “He said some housebreakers were going to hit on us tonight,” she said slowly. “This is not good news.”

  “Housebreakers.” Olga’s face was a
mask of grim anticipation. “Do you mean what I think you intend to say? Blackguards with knives?”

  “Not necessarily. He said two men were asking around a drinking house for bravos who’d like to take their coin. One of them looked Oriental.”

  Olga tensed. “I see,” she said quietly.

  “Indeed.” Miriam nodded. “I think tonight we’re going to see some questions answered. Oriental, huh?” She grinned angrily. “Time to play host for the long-lost relatives…”

  The big stone house was set well back from the curving road, behind a thick hedge and a low stone wall. Its nearest neighbors were fifty yards away, also set back and sheltered behind stone walls and hedges. Smoke boiled from two chimneys, and the lights in the central hall burned bright in the darkness, but there were no servants. On arriving home Miriam had packed Jane and her husband Ronald the gardener off to a cheap hotel with a silver guinea in hand and the promise of a second to come against their silence. “I want no questions asked or answered,” Miriam said firmly. “D’you understand?”

  “Yes’m,” said Jane, bobbing her head skeptically. It was clear that she harbored dark suspicions about Olga, and was wondering if her mistress was perhaps prone to unspeakable habits: a suspicion that Miriam was happy to encourage as a decoy from the truth.

  “That’ll do,” Miriam said quietly, watching from the landing as they trudged down the road toward the tram stop and the six-fifteen service into town. “No servants, no witnesses. Right?”

  “Right,” Olga echoed. “Are you sure you want me to go through with this?”

  “Yes, I want you to do it. But do it fast, I don’t want to be alone longer than necessary. How are your temporary tattoos?”

  “They’re fine. Look, what you told me about Matthias. If Brill’s working for—”

  “She isn’t,” Miriam said firmly. “If she wanted me dead I’d be dead, okay? Get over it. If she’s hiding anything, it’s something else—Angbard, probably. Bring her over here and if the bad guys don’t show we’ll just dig out a bottle of wine and have a late-morning lie-in tomorrow, alright?”

  “Right,” Olga said dubiously. Then she headed downstairs, for the kitchen door and the walk to the spot beside the greenhouse where Miriam had cleared the snow away.

  Miriam watched her go, more apprehensive than she cared to admit. Alone in the house in winter, every creak and rustle seemed like a warning of a thief in the night. The heating gurgled ominously. Miriam retired to her bedroom and changed into an outfit she’d brought over on her last trip. The Velcro straps under her arms gave her some trouble, but the boots fitted well and she felt better for the bulletproof vest. With her ski mask on hand, revolver loaded and sitting on her hip, and night vision goggles strapped to her forehead, she felt even more like an imposter than she did when she was dressed up to the nines to meet the nobs. Just as long as they take me as seriously, she thought tensely. Then she picked up her dictaphone and checked the batteries and tape one last time—fully charged, fully rewound, ready for action. I hope this works.

  The house felt dreadfully empty without either the servants or Olga about. I’ve gotten used to having other people around, Miriam realized. When did that happen?

  She walked downstairs slowly, pausing on the landing to listen for signs of anything amiss. At the bottom she opened the door under the staircase and ducked inside. The silent alarm system was armed. Ronald the gardener had grumbled when she told him to bury the induction wire a foot underground, just inside the walls, but he’d done as she’d told him to when she reminded him who was paying. The control panel—utterly alien to this world—was concealed behind a false panel in the downstairs hall. She turned her walkie-talkie on, clipped the hands-free earphone into place, and continued her lonely patrol.

  It all depended on Brill, of course. And on Roland, assuming Roland was on the level and wasn’t one of them playing a fiendishly deep inside game against her. Whoever they were. She was reasonably sure he wasn’t—if he was, he’d had several opportunities to dispose of her without getting caught, and hadn’t taken any of them—but there was still a question mark hanging over Brill. But whatever game she was playing wasn’t necessarily hostile, which was why Olga had gone back over to the hunting hide to fetch her. The idea of not being able to trust Olga just made Miriam’s head hurt. You have to start somewhere, haven’t you? she asked herself. If she assumed Olga was on her side and she was wrong, nothing she did would make any difference. And Olga vouched for Brill. And three of them would be a damn sight more use than two when the shit hit the fan, as it surely would, sometime in the small hours.

  The big clock on the landing ticked the seconds away slowly. Miriam wandered into the kitchen, opened the door on the big cast-iron cooking range set against the interior wall, and shoveled coal into it. Then she turned the airflow up. It was going to be an extremely cold night, and even though she was warm inside her outdoor gear and flak jacket, Miriam felt the chill in her bones.

  Two men, one of them Chinese-looking, in the wrong pubs. She shook her head, remembering a flowering of blood and a long, curved knife in the darkness. The feel of Roland’s hands on her bare skin, making her go hot and cold simultaneously. Iris looking at her with a guarded, startled expression, as unmotherly as Angbard’s supercillious crustiness. These are some of my favorite things, butter-pat sized lumps of soft metal glowing luminous in the twilight of a revolutionary quartermaster’s shop: Glock automatics and diamond rings…

  Miriam shook herself. “Damn, if I wait here I’ll doze off for sure.” She stood up, raised the insulating lid on the range, and pushed the kettle onto the hot plate. A cup of coffee would get her going. She picked up her dictaphone and rewound, listening to notes she’d recorded earlier in the day.

  “The family founder had six sons. Five of them had families and the Clan is the result. The sixth—what happened to him? Angbard said he went west and vanished. Suppose—suppose he did. Reached the western empire, that is, but did so poor, destitute, out of luck. Along the way he lost his talisman, the locket with the knotwork. If he had to re-create it from memory, so he could world-walk, would be succeed? Would I? I know what happens when I look at the knot, but can I remember exactly what shape it is, well enough to draw it? Let’s try.”

  Whirr. Click. New memo. “Nope. I just spent ten minutes and what I’ve drawn does nothing for me. Hmm. So we know that it’s not that easy to recreate from memory, and I know that if you look at the other symbol you go here, not home. Hmm again.”

  Whirr. Click. New memo. “I just looked at both lockets. Should have done it earlier, but it’s hard to see them without zoning out and crossing over to the other world. The knots—in the other one, there’s an arc near the top left that threads over the outer loop, not under it, like in the one Iris gave me. So it looks like the assassin’s one is, yeah, a corruption of the original design. So maybe the lost family hypothesis is correct.”

  Whirr. Click. New memo. “Why didn’t they keep trying different knots until they found one that worked? One that let them make the rendezvous with the other families?”

  Whirr. Click. New memo. “It’s a bloodline thing. If you know of only one other universe, and if you know the ability to go there runs in the family, would you necessarily think in terms of multiple worlds? Would you realize you’d mis-remembered the design of the talisman? Or would you just assume—the West Coast must have looked pretty much the same in both versions, this world and my own back then—that you’d been abandoned by your elder brothers? Scumbags.”

  Whirr. Click. New memo. “Why me? Why Patricia? What was it about her ancestry that threatened them? As opposed to anyone else in the Clan? Did they just want to kill her to restart the blood feuds, or was there something else?”

  Whirr. Click. New memo. “What do they want? And can I use them as a lever to get the Clan to give me what I want?”

  The door around the back of the scullery creaked as it opened.

  Miriam was on her feet instan
tly, back to the wall beside the cooker, pistol in her right hand. Shit, shit—she froze, breath still, listening.

  “Miriam?” called a familiar voice, “are you there?”

  She lowered her gun. “Yes!”

  Olga shuffled inside, looking about a thousand years older than she had an hour before. “Oh, my head,” she moaned. “Give me drugs, give me strong medicine, give me a bone saw!” She drew a finger across her throat, then looked at Miriam. “What is that you’re wearing?” she asked.

  “Hello.” Brilliana piped up behind her. “Can I come in?” She looked around dubiously. “Are you sure this is another world?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Miriam said tersely. “Here. Take two of these now. I’ll give you the next two when it’s time.” She passed the capsules to Olga, who dry-swallowed them and pulled a face. “Get a glass of water.” Miriam looked at Brill. “Did you bring—”

  Brill grinned. “This?” she asked, hefting a stubby looking riot gun.

  “Uh, yeah.” Miriam froze inside for a moment, then relaxed. She fixed Brill with a beady eye. “You realize an explanation is a bit overdue?”

  “An explan—oh.”

  “It doesn’t wash, Brill,” she said evenly. “I know you’re working for someone in Clan security. Or were you going to tell me you found that cannon in a cupboard somewhere?”

  Olga had taken a step back. Miriam could see her right hand flexing. “Why don’t you go upstairs and get dressed for the party?” Miriam suggested.

  “Ah, if you think so.” Olga looked at her dubiously.

  “I do.” Miriam kept her eyes on Brill, who stared back unwavering as Olga swept past toward the staircase. “Well?”

  “I got word to expect you two days before you arrived in Niejwein,” Brill admitted. “You didn’t really expect Angbard to hang you out to dry, did you? He said, and I quote, ‘Stick to her like glue, don’t let her out of your sight on family territory, and especially don’t give Baron Hjorth an opportunity to push her down a stairwell.’ So I did as he said,” she added, her self-satisfaction evident.