The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2)

by Charles Stross

  The cellar showed more signs of recent visitors: disturbed dust, a suspicious freshness to the air. She glanced around tensely, aiming the flashlight left-handed at the nooks and crannies of the cellar. The floor . . . She focused the beam, following a scuffed trail in the dust. It led through a side door into another cellar full of furniture, and dead-ended against a wooden cabinet full of labeled cloth bundles. Brill walked towards it. The back of the cabinet was dark, too dark. ‘Clever,’ she muttered, peering past a bundle: there was a gap between the cabinet and the side wall, and behind it, she saw another wall – two feet farther in. The smell of dust, and damp, and something else – something oily and aromatic, naggingly familiar – tugged at her nostrils. She took a sharp breath, then slipped behind the cabinet and edged along it, through the hole in the bricks at the other end of the cellar, into the tunnel. There was a side door into another, hidden back room: the smell was stronger here. Tarpaulins covered wooden barrels, a thin layer of dust caking them. She raised a cover, glanced inside, and nodded to herself. If someone – Burgeson? Miriam? – hadn’t left the back door open, the smell wouldn’t have given it away, but down here the stink of oiled metal was almost overpowering. She let the tarp fall, then slid back out of the concealed storeroom. Miriam keeps dangerous company, she reminded herself, her lips quirking. Maybe that’s no bad thing right now.

  But it certainly wasn’t a good thing, and as she turned to lock the front door she paid careful attention to the reflections in the window panes in front of her. Maybe it was pure coincidence that a fellow in a threadbare suit was lounging at the corner of the alley, and maybe it wasn’t, but with at least twenty rifles stashed in that one barrel alone, Brill wasn’t about to place any bets. She walked away briskly, whistling quietly to herself – let any watchers hurry to keep up – and turned left into the high street. There were more people here, mostly threadbare men hanging around the street corners in dispirited knots, some of them holding out hats or crudely lettered signs. She paused a couple of doors down the street to glance in a shop window, checking for movement behind her. Alley Rat was trying to look inconspicuous about fifty feet behind her, standing face-to-cheek with one of the beggars who wore a shapeless cloth hat and frayed fingerless gloves as gray as his face.

  I’ve acquired a tail. Brill tensed, glancing up the street. ‘How annoying,’ she murmured aloud. There were no streetcars in sight, but plenty of alleyways. Worse than annoying, she added to herself as she thrust her right hand into her bag. Try to shed him, first . . .

  She started moving again, hurrying, letting her stride lengthen. She glanced over her shoulder – there was no advantage in hiding her awareness now, if she needed cover from civilians she could just say she was being chased – and spotted Mr. Threadbare and Mr. Hat blundering towards her, splitting in a classic pincer. Most of the bystanders had evaporated or were feigning inattention – nobody wanted to be an audience for this kind of street theater. Brill took a deep breath, stepped backwards until she came up against the brick wall of a shop, then held her handbag out towards Mr. Hat, who was now less than twenty feet away. ‘Stop right there,’ she said pleasantly, and when he didn’t, she shot him twice. The handbag jerked, but the suppressor and the padding kept the noise down to the level of an enthusiastic handclap. She winced slightly and shook her wrist to dislodge a hot cartridge as Mr. Hat went to one knee, a look of utter surprise on his face, and she spun sideways to bear on Mr. Threadbare. ‘Stop, I said.’

  Mr. Threadbare stopped. He began to draw breath. She focused on him, noting absently that Mr. Hat was whimpering quietly and slumping sideways against a shopfront, moving one hand to his right thigh. ‘Who do you think – ’

  Brill jerked her hand sideways and shot Mr. Hat again. He jerked and dropped the stubby pistol he’d been drawing, and she had her bag back on Mr. Threadbare before he could reach inside his jacket. ‘If you want to live, you will walk ten feet ahead of me,’ she said, fighting for calm, nerves screaming: Where’s their backup? Clear the zone! ‘Move.’

  Mr. Threadbare twitched at Mr. Hat: ‘But he’s – ’

  An amateur. Brill tensed up even more: amateurs were unpredictable. ‘Move!’

  Mr. Threadbare moved jerkily, like a puppet in the hands of a trainee. He couldn’t take his eyes off Mr. Hat, who was bleeding quite copiously. Brill circled round the target and toed the gun away from him, in the direction of the gutter. Then she gestured Mr. Threadbare ahead of her, along the sidewalk. For a miracle, nobody seemed to have noticed the noise. Mr. Threadbare shuffled slowly: Brill glanced round quickly, then nodded to herself. ‘Turn left into the next alleyway.’

  ‘But you – ’

  She closed the gap between them and pushed the gun up against the small of his back. ‘Don’t look round. Keep walking.’ He was shaking, she noticed, and his voice was weak. ‘Left here. Stop. Face the wall. Closer. That’s right. Raise your right hand above your head. Now raise your left.’ Nobody in the alley, no immediate witnesses if she had to world-walk. ‘Who do you work for?’

  ‘But I –’ He flinched as brick dust showered his face.

  ‘That’s your last warning. Tell me who you work for.’

  ‘Red Hand thief-taker’s company. You’re in big trouble, miss, Andrew was a good man and if you’ve killed – ’

  ‘Be quiet.’ He shut up. ‘You tailed me. Why?’

  ‘You burgled the pawnbroker’s – ’

  ‘You were watching it. Why?’

  ‘We got orders. The Polis – ’

  Thief-takers – civilian crime prevention, mostly private enterprise – working for the polis – government security? ‘What were you watching for?’ she asked.

  ‘Cove called Burgeson, and some dolly he’s traveling with. He’s wanted, under the Sedition Act. Fifty pounds on his head and the old firm’s taking an interest, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it now?’ Brill found herself grinning, teeth bared. In the distance, a streetcar bell clanged. ‘Kneel.’

  ‘But I told you – ’

  ‘I said, kneel. Keep your hands above your head. Look away, dammit, that way, yes, over there. I want you to close your eyes and count to a hundred, slowly. One, two, like that, I’ll be counting too. If you leave this alley before I reach a hundred, I may shoot you. If you open your eyes before I reach a hundred, I may shoot you. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, but – ’

  ‘Start counting. Aloud and slowly if you value your life.’

  On the count of ten, Brill backed away towards the high street. Seeing Mr. Threadbare still counting as fervently as a priest telling his rosary, she turned, lowered her handbag, and darted out into the open. The streetcar was approaching: Mr. Hat lolled against a wall like an early drunk. She held her arm out for the car, forcing her cheeks into an aching smile. Miriam, what have you gotten yourself into this time?

  *

  The Hjalmar Palace fell, as was so often the case, to a combination of obsolescent design, treachery, and the incompetence of its defenders. And, Otto ven Neuhalle congratulated himself, only a little bit of torture.

  About three hundred years ago, the first lord of Olthalle had built a stone tower on this site, a bluff overlooking the meeting of two rivers – known in another world as the Assabet and Sudbury – that combined to feed the Wergat, gateway to the western mountains. Over the course of the subsequent decades he and his sons had fought a bitter grudge war, eventually driving the Musketaquid wanderers west, deeper into the hills and forests of the new lands where they’d not trouble the ostvolk. But then there’d been a falling out among the coastal settlements in the east. An army had marched up the river and burned out the keep and its defenders, leaving smoking ruins and a new lentgrave to raise the walls afresh. He learned from his predecessor’s mistake, and built his walls thick and high.

  More years passed. The Olthalle tower sprouted a curtain wall with five fine round bastion towers and a gatehouse larger than the original keep. Within the grounds, airy palace w
ings afforded the baron’s family a measure more comfort than the heavily fortified castle. The barons of Olthalle fell on hard times, and seventy years earlier the Hjalmars had married into the castle, turning it into a gathering place for the clan of recently ennobled tinker families. They’d bridged the Wergat, levying tolls, then they’d driven a road into the hills to the west and wrestled another fortune from the forests. The town of Wergatfurt had grown up a couple of miles downstream, a thriving regional market center known for its timber yards and smithies. His majesty had been unable to leave such a vital asset in the hands of the witches – the Hjalmar estates were a geopolitical dagger aimed at the heart of his kingdom. And so, it had come to this . . .

  The festivities had started at dawn, when Sir Markus, beater for the royal hunt, had led his levies up to the gates of Wergatfurt and laid his demands before the burghers of the town. Open the gates to the royal army, accept the Thorold Palace edicts, surrender any witches and their get, and be at peace – or defy the king, and suffer the consequences. He had put on a brave show, but (at Otto’s urging) had carefully not placed troops on the town’s southwestern, upstream, side. And he’d given them until noon to answer his demands.

  Of course, Otto’s men were already in position in the woods, half a kilometer short of the palace itself. And when they brought the first of the captives to him in early afternoon, bound so tight that the fellow could barely move, he had found Otto in an uncharacteristically good humor. ‘You’re Griben’s other boy, aren’t you? What a surprising coincidence.’

  ‘You –’ The lad swallowed his words. Barely old enough to be sprouting his first whiskers, barely old enough to know enough to be afraid: ‘What do you want?’

  Otto smiled. ‘An excuse not to hang you.’

  ‘I don’t know –’ The boy’s brow furrowed, then the meaning of Otto’s words sank in. ‘Lightning’s blood, you’re just going to burn me anyway, aren’t you?’ He glared at Otto with all the hollow bravado he could muster. ‘I’m no traitor!’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Otto glanced towards the stand of trees that concealed his position from the castle’s outermost watch-towers. ‘But you’re not one of them, either. You don’t have their blood-spell, you’d never have inherited their wealth, all you are to them is a servant. A dead, loyal servant – the moment my men find another straggler who’s willing to listen to reason.’ He turned back to the prisoner. ‘It’s quite simple. Show me the way in and I’ll have Magar here turn you loose in the woods, a mile downstream of here. We never met, and nobody saw you. Or.’ He shrugged: ‘We hold you for the king. I hear he’s a traditionalist; takes a personal interest in the old folkways. And he doesn’t approve of people who put his arms-men to the trouble of laying siege to a castle. If you’re lucky he’ll hang you.’ Otto paused for effect. ‘I gather he holds with the Blood Eagle for traitors.’ His nose wrinkled: the kid had pissed himself. And fainted.

  ‘Do you mean to scare him to death, sir?’ asked Magar, toeing the prone prisoner with professional disdain: ‘Because if so, I can fetch a burial detail . . .’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’ Otto peered at the unconscious boy. The Pervert’s carefully cultivated reputation for perpetrating unspeakable horrors on people who crossed him had certainly come in useful on this campaign, he reflected: All I have to do is hint about his majesty and they fall apart on me like overcooked pullets. It was an interesting lesson. ‘You understand that when I said you’d turn him loose in the woods, I didn’t promise that you wouldn’t kill him?’

  ‘A ye, I got that much, sir.’ The boy was twitching. Magar kicked him lightly in the ribs. ‘You, wake up.’

  Otto bent over the prisoner, so that when the lad opened his eyes there’d be no escape. ‘What’s it to be?’ Otto asked, not unkindly. ‘Do you want to –’ He straightened up and looked over the boy’s head. ‘– time’s up, looks like we’ve got another prisoner coming in – ’

  ‘I’ll show you! I’ll show you!’ The boy was almost hysterical, tears of terror flowing down his cheeks.

  ‘Really?’ Otto smiled. ‘Thank you. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?’

  *

  The problem with castles was not that they were hard to get into, but that they tended to be equally hard to get out of. And people take shortcuts.

  To enter the Hjalmar Palace by road, a polite visitor would ride across the well-manicured apron in front of the walls, itself a killing zone two hundred meters across, then up the path to the gatehouse. There was a moat, of course, a ten-meter-wide ditch full of water diverted from the river (that, during particularly hot moments of a siege, could be layered in burning oil). A stone bridge spanned half the width of the moat. The gatehouse was a small castle in its own right, four round towers connected by stone walls a meter thick, and its wooden drawbridge was a welcome mat that could be withdrawn back to the castle side of the moat if the occupants weren’t keen on entertaining guests. In case that wasn’t a sufficiently pointed deterrent to intruders, the bridge towers were topped by steel shields and the ominous muzzles of belt-fed machine guns, and the drawbridge itself opened into a zigzagging stony tunnel blocked at several choke points by metal grilles, and covered from above by a killing platform from which the defenders could rain molten lead.

  And that was before the visitors reached the outer walls, which in addition to the usual glacis and arrow slits, had acquired (under the custody of the Hjalmar branch of the Clan) such luxuries as imported razor wire, claymore mines, and defenders with automatic weapons.

  But such defenses were inconvenient. To leave the central keep by the front door required a descent down a steep flight of steps, a march around half the circumference of the tower, then the traversal of a murder tunnel through the foundations of one of the inner bastions, then a ride halfway along the circular road that lined the inner wall, then another murder tunnel, then the gatehouse, four portcullises, and the drawbridge – it could take half an hour on foot. And so the defenders had come up with shortcuts. They’d installed sally ports in the bases of bastions to allow raiding parties to enter and leave. Toilet outfalls venting over the moat could, at a pinch (and with nose held tight) serve for a hasty exit. A peacetime road battered through the wall, straight into the stable yard, ready to be blocked by a deadfall of boulders at the first alarm. And then there were the usual over-the-wall quick routes out for soldiers and servants in search of an evening of drinking and fucking in the beer cellars of Wergatfurt.

  In the case of the Hjalmar Palace, the weak point in its defenses was the water supply. The water supply had to feed the moat, if attackers tried to dam it off from the river: it also had to keep the defenders in drinking water. Some tactical genius a century or two earlier had dug a trench nearly two hundred meters long, under the curtain wall to the river. He’d lined it with stone, floored it with fired clay pipe, then roofed it over and buried it. The aquaduct wasn’t just a backup water supply: it was a tactical back door for raiding parties and scouts, a fire escape for the terminally paranoid. The stone blockhouse on the upstream slope of the hill was overgrown with bushes and trees, nearly invisible unless you knew what you were looking for, and when properly maintained – as it was, now – it was guarded by sentries and booby traps. An intruder who didn’t know the word of the day, or the positioning of the trip wires for the mines embedded in the walls of the tunnel, or the different code word for the guards in the waterhouse attached to the walls of the inner keep, would almost certainly die.

  Unfortunately for the roughly one hundred guards, stable hands, cooks, smiths, carpenters, dog handlers, lamplighters, servants, and outer family members sheltering behind those walls, thanks to his prisoner Baron Otto ven Neuhalle knew all of these things, and more.

  Even more unfortunately for the defenders, one of the unpalatable facts of life is that in close quarters – at ranges of less than three meters – firearms are generally less useful than swords, of which Neuhalle’s troops had many. Nor were they expecti
ng an attacking force armed with machine guns of their own to appear on the walls of the keep itself.

  By the time night fell, his troops were still winkling the last few stubborn holdouts out of their stony shells, but the Hjalmar Palace was in his hands.

  And now to start building the trap, Otto told himself, as he summoned his hand-men to him and told them exactly what was needed.

  *

  The first day at home was the worst. Mike was still getting used to the plastic cocoon on his leg, not to mention being short on clean clothes, tired, and gobbling antibiotics and painkillers by the double handful. But a second night in his own bed put a different complexion on things. He awakened luxuriously late, to find Oscar curled up on the pillow beside him, purring.

  The fridge was no more full than it had been the day before, but the grocery bag Smith had dumped in the kitchen turned out to be full of honest-to-god groceries, a considerate touch that startled Mike when he discovered it. He might be a hyperactive hard-ass, but at least he cares about his people, Mike decided. He fixed himself a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese and black coffee, then tried to catch up on the lighter housework, running some clothes through the washing machine and doing battle with the shower again – this time more successfully. I must be getting better, he told himself optimistically.

  Around noon, he got out of the house for a couple of hours, driven stir-crazy by the daytime TV. It took him nearly ten minutes to get the car seat adjusted, and an hour of hobbling around Barnes and Noble and a couple of grocery stores left him feeling like he’d run a marathon, but he made it home uneventfully. Then he discovered that he hadn’t figured on carrying the grocery sacks and bag of books and magazines up the front steps. He ended up so exhausted that by the time he got the last bag in and closed the door he was about ready to drop. He hobbled into the lounge clutching the bookbag, and lowered the bag onto the coffee table before he realized the lounger was already occupied.