The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1)

by Charles Stross

  ‘You expect me to be surprised?’ Miriam shook her head. ‘Come on. Let’s get her up to our rooms and see she doesn’t – ’ a flashback to Matthias’s warning – ‘embarrass us further.’

  Brill helped steer Kara upstairs, and Miriam ensured that she was sat upright on a chaise longue, awake and complaining with a cup of tea, before retreating to her bedroom. She started to remove her cloak then remembered the hand-warmer, and the message Kara had passed her. She unrolled it and read:

  I have urgent news concerning the assassin who has been stalking you. Meet me in the orangery at midnight.

  Your obedient servant, Earl Roland Lofstrom

  ‘Shit,’ she mumbled under her breath. ‘Brill!’

  ‘Yes, Miriam?’

  ‘Help me undress, will you?’

  ‘What, right now? Are you going to bed?’

  ‘Not immediately,’ Miriam said grimly. ‘Our assassin seems to have gotten tired of trying to sneak up on me and is trying to reel me in like a fish. Only he’s made a big mistake.’ She turned to present her back. ‘Unlace me. I’ve got places to go, and it’d be a shame to get blood on this gown.’

  *

  Black jeans, combat boots, turtleneck, and leather jacket: a gun in her pocket and a locket in her left hand. Miriam breathed deeply, feeling naked despite everything. She felt as if the only thing she was wearing was a target between her shoulder blades.

  Across the room Brilliana looked worried. ‘Are you sure this is the right thing to do?’ she asked again. ‘Do you want me to come? I am trained using a pistol – ’

  ‘I’ll be fine. But I may have to world-walk in a hurry.’ I won’t be fine, Miriam corrected herself silently: But if I don’t deal with this trouble sooner or later, they’ll kill me. Won’t they? And the one thing an assassin wouldn’t be expecting would be for her – not one of the Clan-raised hotheads born with her hands on a pistol, but a reasonable, civilized journalist from a world where that sort of thing just didn’t happen – to turn on them. She hoped.

  Miriam hitched her day sack into place and checked her right pocket again, the one with the gun and a handful of spare cartridges. She didn’t feel fine: There were butterflies in her stomach.

  ‘If there’s a problem, I’ll stay the night on the other side, safely out of the way. But I need to know. I want you to wait half an hour, then take Kara around to Olga and sit things out with her there. With your gun, and Olga and her own guards in a properly doppelgängered area, you should be safe. But I don’t want her tripping and falling downstairs before we learn who gave her that note. D’you understand? Matthias promised to sort me out some guards tomorrow, but I don’t trust him. If he’s in on this – or just being watched – there’ll be an attempt on my life tonight. Except this time I think they got sloppy, expecting me to turn up for it like it’s an appointment. So I’m going to avoid it entirely.’

  ‘I understand.’ Brill stood up. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

  ‘Luck has nothing to do with it.’ Miriam took two steps toward the door, then pulled out her locket.

  Dizziness, mild nausea, a headache that clamped around her head like a vice. She looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed in the warehouse attic, other than the dim light getting dimmer and the bad smell from somewhere nearby. It was getting worse, and it reminded her of something.

  Miriam ducked behind a wall of wooden crates, her head pounding. She pulled the pistol out, slightly nervous at first. It was a double-action revolver, reliable and infinitely reassuring in the gloom. Stay away from guns, the training course had emphasized. But that was then, back where she was a journalist and the world made sense to rational people. But if they’re trying to kill you, you have to kill them first, was another, older lesson from the firearms instructor her father had sent her to. And here and now, it seemed to make more sense.

  Carefully, very slowly, she inched forward over the edge of the mezzanine floor and looked down. The ground floor of the warehouse was a maze of wooden cases and boxes. The mobile home that constituted the site office was blocked up in the middle of it. There was no sign of anybody about, none of the comforting noises of habitation.

  Miriam rose to a crouch and scurried down the stairs as quietly as she could. She ducked below the stairs, then from shadow to shadow toward the door. There was a final open stretch between the site office and the exit. Instead of crossing it, Miriam tiptoed around the wall of the parked trailer, wrinkling her nose at a faint, foul smell.

  The site office door was open and the light inside was on. Holding her gun behind her, she stood up rapidly and climbed the three steps to the door of the trailer. Then she looked inside.

  ‘Damn!’

  The stench was far worse in here, and the watchman seemed to be smiling at her.

  Smiling? She turned away blindly, sticking her head out of the door, and took deep breaths, desperately trying to get her stomach back under control.

  Cultivate your professional detachment, she told herself, echoing a half-forgotten professor’s admonition from med school. Reflexes left over from anatomy classes kicked in. She turned back to the thing that had surprised her and began to make observations, rattled to her core but still able to function. She’d seen worse in emergency rooms, after all.

  It was the old guy she’d met with the clipboard, and he was past any resuscitation attempt. Someone had used an extremely sharp knife to sever his carotid artery and trachea, and continued to slice halfway through his spine from behind. There was dried blood everywhere, huge black puddles of it splashed over walls and floor and the paper-strewn desk, curdling in great thick viscous lumps – the source of only some of the smell, for he’d voided his bowels at the same time. He was still lying on top of his tumbled chair, his skin waxy and – she reached out to touch – cold. At least twelve hours, she thought, gingerly trying to lift an arm still locked in rigor mortis, but probably no longer. Would the intense cold retard the processes of decay? Yes, a little bit. That would put it before her last trip over here, but after she saw Paulette.

  ‘Wiseguys,’ she whispered under her breath: It came out as an angry curse.

  Someone had entered the warehouse, casually murdered the old man, climbed the stairs – breaking the hair – and then, what? Brought the attacker who’d gone up on the roof and tried to attack Olga? Then he came back later, crossed over to the other side, and emptied a pistol into the dummy made of pillows lying in her bed? Gone away? Correlation does not imply causality, she reminded herself and giggled, shocked at herself and increasingly angry.

  ‘What to do?’ Well, the obvious thing was to use her most dangerous weapon. So she pulled out her phone and speed-dialed Roland.

  ‘Miriam?’ He picked up at the fourth ring.

  ‘Roland, there’s a problem.’ She realized that she was panting, breathing way too fast. ‘Let me catch my breath.’ She slowed down. ‘I’m in the warehouse on the doppelgänger side of my rooms. The night watchman’s had his throat cut. He’s been dead for between twelve and thirty-six hours. And someone – did you send me a note by way of the reception on the other side, saying to meet you in the orangery at Palace Thorold?’

  ‘No!’ He sounded shocked. ‘Where are you?’ She gave him the address. ‘Right, I’ll tell someone to get a team of cleaners around immediately. Listen, we’re wrestling alligators over here tonight. It looks like the Department of Homeland Security has been running some traffic analysis on frequent fliers looking for terrorists and uncovered one of our – ’

  ‘I get the message,’ she interrupted. ‘Look, my headache is that I planted a hair across the top step when I came through last night, and it was broken when I went back over this morning. I’m fairly sure someone from the Clan came here, killed the watchman, headed up to the mezzanine that’s on the other side of my suite – breaking the hair – and crossed over. There was another attempt to kill me in my suite last night, Roland. They want me dead, and there’s something going down in the palace.’

/>   ‘Wait there. I’ll be around in person as soon as I can get unstuck from this mess.’

  Miriam stared at the phone that had gone dead in her hand, paranoid fantasies playing through her head.

  ‘Angbard set me up,’ she muttered to herself. ‘What if Roland’s in on it?’ It was bizarre. The only way to be sure would be to go to the rendezvous, surprise the assassin. Who had come over from this side. But if they could get into her apartment, why bother with the silly lure?

  ‘What if there are two groups sending assassins?’ she asked the night watchman. He grinned at her twice over. ‘The obvious one who is clearly a Clan member, and, and the subtle one – ’

  She racked her brains for the precise number of paces from the stairs up to her room to the back door opening into the grounds of the palace. Then she remembered the crates laid out below. The entrance will be next door, she realized. She jumped out of the trailer with its reek of icy death and dashed across to the far wall of the warehouse – the one corresponding to the main entrance vestibule of the palace. It was solid brick, with no doors. ‘Damn!’ She slipped around to the front door and out into the alley, then paced out the fifty feet it would take. Then she carefully examined the next frontage.

  It was a bonded warehouse. Iron bars fronted all the dust-smeared windows, and metal shutters hid everything within from view. The front door was padlocked heavily and looked as if nobody had opened it in years. ‘This has got to be it,’ she muttered, looking up at the forbidding facade. What better way to block off the entrance to a palace on the other side? Probably most of the rooms behind the windows were bricked off or even filled with concrete, corresponding to the positions of the secure spaces on the other side. But there had to be some kind of access to the public reception area, didn’t there?

  Miriam moved her locket to her left hand and pulled out her pistol. ‘Does this work in real life as well as in the movies?’ she asked herself as she probed around the chain. ‘Hmm.’ It was the work of a minute to return to the watchman’s trailer and another minute – carefully ignoring the silent occupant – to locate a pry bar. The lock put up a fight, but eventually Miriam managed to put all her weight on the bar, breaking it. She yanked it away, opened the bolt, and pushed the door in.

  An alarm began to jangle somewhere inside the building. She jumped, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. She found herself at one end of a dusty linoleum-floored corridor. A flick of a switch and the dim lights came on, illuminating a path into the gloom. It led past metal gates like jail cell doors, blocking access to rooms piled ceiling-high with large barrels. Miriam closed the door behind her and strode down the corridor as fast as she dared, hoping desperately that she was right about where it led. There was a reception room at the end, the cheap desks and chairs covered in dust sheets. At the far side there was a locked and bolted back door. It was about the right distance, she decided. Taking a deep breath, she raised her locket and focused on the symbol engraved inside it –

  – And she was cold, and the lights were out, and her skull felt as if she’d run headfirst into a brick wall. Snowflakes fell on her as she doubled over, trying to prevent the intense nausea from turning into vomiting. I did that too fast, she thought vaguely between waves of pain. Even with the beta-blockers. The process of world-walking seemed to do horrible things to her blood pressure. Good thing I’m not hypertensive, she thought grimly. She forced herself to stand up and saw that she was just in the garden behind the palace – outdoors.

  Anyone trying to invade the palace by way of the doppelgänger warehouse on the other side would find themselves under the guns of the tower above – if the defenses were manned. But it was snowing tonight, and someone obviously wanted as few witnesses around as possible . . .

  An iron gate in the wall behind her was the mirror image of the door to the warehouse office. ‘Orangery,’ she muttered through gritted teeth. She slid along the wall like a shadow, letting her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. The orangery was a familiar hump in the snow, but something about it was wrong: the door was ajar, letting the precious heat (and how many servants did it take to keep that boiler fed?) escape into the winter air.

  ‘Well, isn’t that just too cute,’ she whispered, tightening her grip on her pistol. Welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly, she thought. The style is all wrong. Assassin #1 breaks into my room and shoots up the bedding. Twice. Assassin #2 tries to bounce Olga into shooting me for him, then sends an RSVP on an engraved card. Assassin #3 shows me an open door. Which of these things is not like the other? She shivered – and not from the cold: The hot rage she’d been holding back ever since she’d first been abducted was taking hold.

  The wall at this end of the orangery was of brick, and the glassy arch of the ceiling was low, beginning only about ten feet up. Miriam gritted her teeth and fumbled for finger- and toeholds. Then she realized there was a cast-iron drain pipe, half-buried under the snow where the wall of the orangery met the corner of the inner garden wall. She put the pistol in her pocket and began to climb, this time with more confidence. On top of the wall she could look out across a corrugated sheet of whiteness – the snow was settling on the orangery faster than the heat from below could melt it.

  Leaning forward, she used her sleeve to rub a clear swath in the glass.

  Paraffin lamps shed a thin glow through the orangery, helping with the warmth and providing enough light to see by. To Miriam’s night-adapted vision it was like a glimpse into a dim subterranean hell. She hunted around and saw, just behind the door, a hunched shadow. After a minute of watching – during which time her hands began to grow numb – she saw the shadow move, shifting in position just like a man shuffling his feet in the cold draft from outside.

  ‘Right,’ she whispered tensely, feeling an intense flash of hatred for the figure on the other side, just as the door opened further and someone else came in.

  What happened then happened almost too fast to see – Miriam froze atop the window, unable to breathe in the cold air, her head throbbing until she wondered if she was coming down with a fullblown migraine. The shadow flowed forward behind the person who’d entered the orangery. There was a flurry of activity, then a body collapsed on the floor in a spreading pool of . . . of – Holy shit, thought Miriam, he’s killed him!

  Shocked out of her angry reverie, she slid back down the drainpipe, scraping hands and cheek on the rough stonework, and landed in a snowdrift hard enough that it nearly knocked the breath out of her. Fumbling for her pistol, she skidded toward the door and yanked it open. She brought the gun up in time to see a man turning toward her. He was dressed all in black, his face covered by a ski mask or something similar: The long knife in his hand was red with blood as he straightened up from the body at his feet. ‘Stop – ’ Miriam called. He didn’t stop, and time telescoped in on her. Two shots in the torso, two more – then the dry click of a hammer on a spent cartridge. The killer collapsed toward her and Miriam took a step back, wishing she hadn’t heard the sound of bullets striking flesh.

  Time caught up with her again. ‘Hey!’ She called out, heart lurching between her ribs like a frightened animal. A sense of gathering wrongness overcame her, as if what had just happened was impossible. Another old reflex caught up, and she stepped forward. ‘Gurney – ’ she bit her tongue. There were no gurneys here, no hemostats, no competent nurses to get the bleeding staunched and no defibrillators – and especially no packets of plasma and operating theaters in which to struggle for the victim’s life.

  She found herself an indefinite time later – probably only seconds had passed, although it felt like hours – staring down at a spreading pool of blood around her feet. Blood, and the body of a man, dressed from head to foot in black. A long curve-bladed knife lay beside him. Behind him – ‘Margit!’ It was Lady Margit, Olga’s chaperone. The fat lady had sung her last: There was nothing to be done. She still twitched, and maybe a modern ER room could have done something for her – but not here, no
t with a massive exsanguinating chest wound that had already stopped pumping. Probably severed the dorsal aorta or a ventricle, she realized. Oh hell. What was she doing here? For a moment, Miriam wished she believed in something – someone – who’d look after Margit. But there wasn’t time for that now.

  She turned back to the assassin. He was alive – but no, that was just residual twitching, too. She’d actually nailed him through the heart with her first two shots, the second double-tap turning his chest into a bloody mess. There was already a stench of excrement in the air as his bowels relaxed. She pulled back his hood. The assassin was shaven-headed and flat-faced: He looks Chinese, she realized with a mixture of astonishment and regret. She’d just killed a man, but – there was a chain around his neck.

  ‘What the hell?’ she asked through the haze of her headache and anxiety, then she pulled out a round sealed locket, utterly unadorned and plain. ‘Clan.’ She put it in her pocket and glanced at Margit’s cooling body. ‘What on earth possessed you to come down here at midnight?’ she asked aloud. ‘Was it a message for – ’ she trailed off.

  They’re after Olga, too, she realized, and with that realization came a sick fear. I have to warn Olga!

  Miriam left the orangery and headed toward the palace, half-empty this evening as its noble residents enjoyed the king’s hospitality. She wouldn’t be able to world-walk from her own rooms any more, but if Brilliana was in, they’d have a little chat. She knows more than she’s saying, Miriam realized.

  The implication was just beginning to sink in. ‘Wheels within wheels,’ she muttered. Her hands were shaking violently and the small of her back was icy cold with sweat from the adrenaline surge when she’d shot the assassin. She paused, leaning against the cold outside wall of the orangery while she tried to gather her composure. ‘He was here to kill me.’ The chill from the wall was beginning to penetrate her jacket. She dug around in her pocket for spare cartridges, fumbling as she reloaded the revolver. Got to find Olga. And Brill.