The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Papers.’ She paused, weighing up the relative merits of peace of mind and a shotgun wound to the chest. ‘Damn it,’ she said shortly. ‘I need to go home. I need five minutes there. Paulie, take me home.’

  ‘Is that really smart?’ asked Paulette, knuckles tightening on the steering wheel.

  ‘No. It’s really not smart. But I need to grab some stuff, the disk with all your research on it. I’ll be about thirty seconds. We can ditch the car immediately afterwards. You willing to wait?’

  ‘Didn’t you say they’d staked you out?’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Brill asked, confused. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Miriam sighed. ‘My house. I haven’t been back to it since my fun-loving uncle had me kidnapped. Roland said it was under surveillance so I figured it would be risky. Now – ’

  ‘It’s even more risky,’ Paulette said vehemently. ‘In fact I think it’s stupid.’

  ‘Yes.’ Miriam bared her teeth, worry and anger eating at her. ‘But I need that disk, Paulie, it may be the best leverage I’ve got. We don’t have time for me to make millions in world three.’

  ‘Oh shit. You think it may come to that?’

  ‘Yeah, “oh shit” indeed.’

  ‘What kind of disk?’ Brill asked plaintively.

  ‘Don’t worry. Just wait with the car.’ Miriam focused on Paulette’s driving. The answer will be somewhere in the shoebox, she thought, desperately. And if Angbard had my ma snatched, I’ll make him pay.

  Familiar scenery rolled past, and a couple of minutes later they turned into a residential street that Miriam knew well enough to navigate blindfolded. A miserable wave of homesickness managed to penetrate her anger and worry: This was where she belonged, and she should never have left. It was her home! And it slid past to the left as Paulette kept on driving.

  ‘Paulie?’ Miriam asked.

  ‘Looking for suspicious-acting vehicles.’

  ‘Oh.’ Miriam glanced around. ‘Ma said there was a truck full of guys watching her.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Your mother spotted the truck. What did she miss?’

  ‘Got you.’ Miriam spared a sideways glance: Brill’s head was swiveling like a ceiling fan, but her expression was more vacant than anything else. Almost as if she was bored. ‘Want to drive round the block once more? When you get back to the house stop just long enough for me to get out, then carry on. Come back and pick me up in three minutes. Don’t park.’

  ‘You sure that you want to do this?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure, I just know that I have to.’

  Paulie turned the corner then pulled over. Miriam was out of the car a second before Paulette pulled away. There was nobody about – no parked occupied vans, no joggers. She crossed the road briskly, walked up to her front door, and remembered two things, in a single moment of icy clarity. Firstly, that she had no idea where her house keys might be, and secondly, that if there were no watchers that might be because –

  Uh-oh, she thought, and backed away from the front step, watching where her feet were about to go with exaggerated caution. A cold sweat broke out in the small of her back, and she shuddered. But fear of trip wires didn’t stop her carefully opening the yard gate, slipping around the side of the house, and up to the shed with the concealed key to the French windows at the back.

  When she had the key, Miriam paused for almost a minute at the glass doors, trying to get her hammering heart under control. She peered through the curtains, thoughtfully. They’ll expect me to go in the front, she realized. But even so . . . She unlocked the door and eased it open a finger’s width. Then she reached as high as she could, and ran her index finger slowly down the opening, feeling for the faint tug of a lethal obstruction. Finding nothing, she opened the door farther, then repeated the exercise on the curtains. Again: nothing. And so, Miriam returned to her home.

  Her study had been efficiently and brutally strip-searched. The iMac was gone, as were the boxes of CD-ROMs and the zip drive and disks from her desk. More obviously, every book in the bookcase had been taken down, the pages riffled, and dumped in a pile on the floor. It was a big pile. ‘Bastards,’ she said quietly. The pink and green shoe-box was gone, of course. Fearing the worst she tiptoed into her own hallway like a timid burglar, her heart in her mouth.

  It was much the same in the front hall. They’d even searched the phone books. A blizzard of loose papers lay everywhere, trampled underfoot. Drawers lay open, their contents strewn around. Furniture had been pulled out from the walls and shoved back haphazardly, and one of the hall bookcases leaned drunkenly against the opposite wall. At first sight she thought that the living room had gotten off lightly, but the damage turned out to be even more extensive – her entire music collection had been turned out onto the floor, disks piled in a loose stack.

  ‘Fuck.’ Her mouth tasted of ashes. The sense of violation was almost unbearable, but so was the fear that they’d taken her mother and found Paulie’s research disk as well. The money-laundering leads were in the hands of whoever had done this to her. Whoever they were, they had to know about the Clan, which meant they’d know what the disk’s contents meant. They were a smoking gun, one that was almost certainly pointing at the Clan’s east coast operations. She knelt by the discarded CD cases and rummaged for a minute – found The Beggar’s Opera empty, the CD-ROM purloined.

  She went back into the front hall. Somehow she slithered past the fallen bookcase, just to confirm her worst fear. They’d strung the wire behind the front door, connecting one end of it to the handle. If she hadn’t been in such a desperate hurry that she’d forgotten her keys, the green box taped crudely to the wall would have turned her into a messy stain on the sidewalk. Assassin number two is the one who likes Claymore mines, she reminded herself. Miriam couldn’t take any more. She blundered out through the French windows at the back without pausing to lock them, round the side of the house, and onto the sidewalk to wait for Paulie.

  Seconds later she was in the back of the car, hunched and shivering. ‘I don’t see any signs of anything going on,’ Paulie said quietly. She seemed to have calmed down from her state at Iris’s house. ‘What do you want to do now? Why don’t we find a Starbucks, get some coffee, then you tell us what you found?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Miriam closed her eyes.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Brill asked, concern in her voice.

  ‘No, I’m not all right,’ Miriam said quietly. ‘We’ve got to ditch the car, now. They trashed the place and left a tripwire surprise behind the front door. Paulie, the box of stuff my mother gave me was gone. And so was the disk.’

  ‘Oh shit. What are we going to do?’

  ‘I – ’ Miriam stopped. ‘I’m going to talk to Angbard. But not until I’ve had a few words with Roland.’ She pulled an expression that someone who didn’t know her might have mistaken for a smile. ‘He’s the one who told me about the surveillance. It’s time to clear the air.’

  PART EIGHT

  CAPITALISM FOR BEGINNERS

  INTERROGATIONS

  The city of Irongate nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians, soot-stained and smoky by day, capped at night by a sky that reflected the red glow of the blast furnaces down by the shipping canal. From the center of town, the Great North-East Railway spur led off toward the coastline and the branches for Boston and New London. West of the yards and north of the banked ramparts of the Vauban-pattern fortress sloped a gentle rise populated by the houses of the gentry, while at the foot of the slope clustered tight rows of workers’ estates.

  Irongate had started as a transport nexus at the crossing of the canal and the railways, but it had grown into a sprawling industrial city. The canal and its attendant lock system brought cargos from as far as the Great Lakes – and, in another time, another world, it was the site of a trading post with the great Iroquois Nation, who dominated the untamed continental interior between the Gruinmarkt and the empire of the West.

  There was a neighborhood dow
n in the valley, rubbing shoulders with the slums of the poor and the business districts, that was uncomfortable with its own identity. Some people had money but no standing in polite society, no title or prospects for social advancement. They congregated here, Chinese merchants and Jewish brokers and wealthy owners of bawdy houses alike, and they took pains to be discreet, for while New Britain’s laws applied equally to all men, the enforcers of those laws were only too human.

  Esau walked slowly along Hanover Street, his cane tapping the cobblestones with every other stride. It was early evening and bitterly cold with it, but the street sweepers had been at work and the electric street lamps cast a warm glow across the pavement. Esau walked slowly, foregoing the easy convenience of a cab, because he wanted time to think. It was vital to prepare himself for the meeting that lay ahead, both emotionally and intellectually.

  The street was almost empty, the few pedestrians hurrying with hands thrust deep in coat pockets and hats pulled down. Esau passed a pub, a blare of brassy noise and a stench of tobacco smoke drifting from the doorway as it opened to emit a couple of staggering drunks. ‘Heya, slant-eye!’ one of them bellowed after him. Esau kept on walking steadily, but he tightened his grasp on the butt of the small pistol in his pocket. Don’t react, he told himself. You can kill him if he attacks you. Not before. Not that Esau looked particularly Oriental, but to the Orange louts of Irongate anyone who didn’t look like themselves was an alien. And reports of a white man killed by a Chinee would inflame the popular mood, building on the back of a cold winter and word of defeats in the Kingdom of Siam. The last thing Esau’s superiors needed right now was a pogrom on the doorstep of their East Coast headquarters.

  The betting shops were closed and the pawnbrokers shut, but between two such shops Esau paused. The tenement door was utterly plain, but well painted and solidly fitted. A row of bell-pulls ran beside a set of brass plaques bearing the names of families who hadn’t lived here in decades. Esau pulled the bottom-most bell-pull, then the second from the top, the next one down, and the first from the bottom, in practiced series. There was a click from the door frame and he pushed through, into the darkened vestibule within. He shut the door carefully behind him, then looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Esh’sh icht,’ he said.

  ‘Come on in,’ a man’s voice replied in accented English. The inner door opened on light and finery: a stairwell furnished with rich hand-woven carpets, banisters of mahogany, illuminated by gilt-edged lamps in the shape of naked maidens. The guard stationed beside the staircase bowed stiffly as soon as he saw Esau’s face. ‘You are expected, lord,’ he said.

  Esau ignored him as he ascended. The tenement block above the two shops had been cunningly gutted and rebuilt as a palace. The rooms behind the front windows – visible from the street as ordinary bedrooms or kitchens – were Ames rooms barely three feet deep, their floors and walls and furniture slanted to preserve the semblance of depth when seen from outside. The family had learned the need for discretion long ago. Fabulous wealth was no social antidote for epicanthic folds and dark skins in New Britain, and if there was one thing the mob disliked more than Chinee-men, it was rich and secretive criminal families of Chinee-men.

  Vermin, Esau thought of the two drunks who had harangued him outside the pub. Never mind. At the top of the staircase he bowed once to the left, to the lacquered cabinet containing the household shrine. Then he removed his topcoat, hat, and shoes, and placed them in front of the servant’s door to the right of the stairs. Finally he approached the door before the staircase, and knocked once with the head of his cane.

  The door swung open. ‘Who calls?’ asked the majordomo.

  ‘It is I.’ Esau marched forward as the majordomo bowed low, holding the door aside for him. Like the guard below, the majordomo was armed, a pistol at his hip. If the mob ever came, it was their job to buy the family time to escape with their lives. ‘Where can I find the honorable Eldest?’

  ‘He takes tea in the Yellow Room, lord,’ said the majordomo, still facing the floor.

  ‘Rise. Announce me.’

  Esau followed the majordomo along a wood-floored passage, the walls hung with ancient paintings. Some of them were legacies of home, but others, in the European renaissance style, bore half-remembered names. The majordomo paused at a door just beyond a Caravaggio, then knocked. After a whispered conversation two guards emerged – guards in family uniform this time, not New British street clothes. In addition to their robes and twin swords (in the style this shadow-world called ‘Japanese’, after a nation that had never existed in Esau’s family home), they bore boxy self-feeding carbines.

  ‘His lordship,’ said the majordomo. Both soldiers came to attention. ‘Follow me.’

  The majordomo and guards proceeded before Esau, gathering momentum and a hand’s count of additional followers as befitted his rank: a scribe with his scrolls and ink, a master of ceremonies whose assistant clucked over Esau’s suit, following him with an armful of robes, and a gaggle of messengers. By the time they arrived outside the Yellow Room, Esau’s quiet entry had turned into a procession. At the door, they paused. Esau held out his arms for the servants to hang a robe over his suit while the majordomo rapped on the door with his ceremonial rod of office. ‘Behold! His lordship James Lee, second of the line, comes to pay attendance before the elder of days!’

  ‘Enter,’ called a high, reedy voice from inside the room.

  Esau entered the Yellow Room, and bowed deeply. Behind him, the servants went to their knees and prostrated themselves.

  ‘Rise, great-nephew,’ said the elder. ‘Approach me.’

  Esau – James Lee – approached his great-uncle. The elder sat cross-legged upon a cushioned platform, his wispy beard brushing his chest. He lacked the extravagant fingernails or long queue that popular mythology in this land imagined the mandarin class to have. Apart from his beard, his silk robes, and a certain angle to his cheekbones, he could pass for any beef-eating New Englishman. The family resemblance was pronounced. This is how I will look in fifty years, James Lee thought whenever he saw the elder. If our enemies let me live that long.

  He paused in front of the dais and bowed deeply again, then once to the left and once to the right, where his great-uncle’s companions sat in silence.

  ‘See, a fine young man,’ his great-uncle remarked to his left. ‘A strong right hand for the family.’

  ‘What use is a strong right hand, if the blade of the sword it holds is brittle?’ snapped his neighbor. James held his breath, shocked at the impudence of the old man – his great-uncle’s younger brother, Huan, controller of the eastern reaches for these past three decades. Such criticism might be acceptable in private, but in public it could only mean two things – outright questioning of the Eldest’s authority, or the first warning that things had gone so badly awry that honor called for a scapegoat.

  ‘You are alarming our young servant,’ the Eldest said mildly. ‘James, be seated, please. You may leave,’ he added, past Esau’s shoulder.

  The servants bowed and backed out of the noble presence. James lowered himself carefully to sit on the floor in front of the elders. They waited impassively until the doors thumped shut behind his back. ‘What are we to make of these accounts?’ asked the Eldest.

  ‘The accounts . . .?’ Esau puzzled for a moment. This was all going far too fast for comfort. ‘Do you refer to the reports from our agent of influence, or to the – ’

  ‘The agent.’ The Eldest shuffled on his cushion. ‘A cup of tea for my nephew,’ he remarked over his shoulder. A servant Esau hadn’t noticed before stepped forward and placed a small tray before him.

  ‘The situation is confused,’ Esau admitted. ‘When he first notified me of the re-emergence of the western alliance’s line I consulted with Uncle Stork, as you charged me. My uncle sent word that the orders of your illustrious father were not discharged satisfactorily and must therefore be carried out. Unfortunately, the woman’s existence was known far and wi
de among the usurpers by this time, and her elder tricked us, mingling her party with other women of his line so that the servants I sent mistook the one for the other. Now she has gone missing, and our agent says he doesn’t know where.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the ancient woman at the Eldest’s right hand. The Eldest glanced at her, and she fell silent.

  ‘Our agent believes that the elder Angbard is playing a game within the usurper clan,’ Esau added. ‘Our agent intended to manipulate her into a position of influence, but controlled by himself – his goal was to replace Angbard. This goal is no longer achievable, so he has consented to pursue our preferences.’

  ‘Indeed,’ echoed Great-Uncle Huan, ‘that seems the wisest course of action at this time.’

  ‘Stupid!’ Esau jerked as the Eldest’s fist landed on a priceless lacquered tray. ‘Our father’s zeal has bound us to expose ourselves to their attack, lost a valued younger son to their guards, and placed our fate in the hands of a mercenary – ’

  ‘Ah,’ sighed the ancient woman. The Eldest subsided abruptly.

  ‘Then what is to be done?’ asked Uncle Huan.

  ‘Another question,’ said Esau’s great-uncle, leaning forward. ‘When you sent brothers Kim and Wu after the woman they both failed to return. What of their talismans?’

  James Lee hung his head. ‘I have no news, Eldest.’ He closed his eyes, afraid to face the wrath he could feel boiling on the dais before him. ‘The word I received from our agent Jacob is that no locket was found on either person. That the woman Miriam disappeared at the same time seems to suggest – ’ His voice broke. ‘Could she be of our line, as well?’ he asked.

  ‘It has never happened before,’ quavered the ancient woman next to the Eldest.

  He turned and stared at her. ‘That is not the question, aunt,’ he said, almost gently. ‘Could this long-lost daughter of the western alliance have come here?’ he asked Esau. ‘None of them have ever done so before. Not since the abandonment.’