The Merchants' War: Book Four of the Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  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 demand 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 south-western, 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 hear he holds with the Blood Eagle for traitors.” His nose wrinkled: the kid had pissed himself. And fainted.

  “You mean to scare him to death, sir?” asked Magar, toeing the prone prisoner with professional disdain: “Because if so, I can go 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 just fall apart on me. 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.”

  “Aye, 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 at him. “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 (and, during particularly hot moments of a siege, 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 visitors. 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 are 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, successive generations of 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’s 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. It 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, 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 were generally less useful than swords, of which Neuhalle’s troop had many. Nor were they expecting 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 m
ore 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.

  “So, Mr. Fleming! We meet again.” She giggled, ruining the effect. It was unnecessary, in any case: the pistol in her lap more than made up for her lack of menace.

  “Jesus!” He staggered, nearly losing his balance.

  “Relax. I do not intend to shoot you. Are you well?”

  “I’m—” He bit back his first angry response. What are you doing in my house? That question was the elephant in the living room: but it wasn’t one he felt like asking the Russian princess directly, not while she was holding a gun on him. “No, not very.” He shuffled towards the sofa and lowered himself down into it. “I’m tired. Been shopping,” he added, redundantly. And how did you get past Judith’s watch team? “What brings you here?”

  “Patricia sent me to see how you were,” she explained, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for killer grannies from another dimension to send their ice-blonde hit-woman bodyguards to check up on him. “She was concerned that you might be unwell—your leg was hard to keep clean in the carriage.”

  “Yeah, right.” Mike snorted. “She’s got nothing but my best interests at heart.”

  Olga leaned forward, her eyes wide: “It is the truth, you know! You will be of little use to us if you die of battle fever. Are you well?”

  “I’m as well as—” he bit back the words, any man facing an armed home intruder—“can be expected. Spent a couple of days in hospital. Off work for the next several weeks.” He paused. “Getting about. A bit.”

  “Good.” Olga sat back, then made the pistol disappear: “Excuse me.” She looked apologetic. “Until I was sure it was you…”

  “That’s alright,” Mike assured her gravely. “I quite understand. We’re all paranoids together here.” A thought struck him. “How did you get in?”

  She smiled. “Your housekeeper is taking the day off.”

  “Ah.” Shit. Mike had a sharp urge to bang his head on the wall. Who’s staking who out? Of course, she’d had time to set everything up while he was in hospital; possibly even before they’d dropped him back in the right universe. The Russian princess and her world-walking friends could have been watching his apartment for days before Herz and her team moved in to set up their own surveillance op. They don’t work like the Mafia, they work like a government, he recalled. A feudal government. “So Pat—what did you call her? Sent you to check up on me. I thought she was going to mail me instead?”

  “Your mail is being intercepted,” Olga pointed out. “Consequently, we felt it best to talk to you in person. There is mail, too, and you can respond to it if you wish. Have you reported to your liege yet?”

  “Have I?” The sense of grinding gears was back: Mike forced himself to translate. “Uh, yes.” He nodded, stupidly. “I have a cellular phone for you. It’s off the official record. There’s a preprogrammed number in it that goes direct to my boss’s boss. He’s authorized to negotiate, and if necessary he can talk to the top. Office of the Vice President. But it’s all deniable, as I understand things.” He pointed at the paper bag on the side table. “It’s in there.”

  Olga didn’t move. “What guarantee have we that as soon as we dial the number, you assassins won’t locate the caller? Or that there isn’t a bomb in the earpiece?”

  “That’s—” Mike swallowed. “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not being silly. Just prudent.” She reached out and took the bag, removed the phone, and started to fiddle with the case. “We’ll be in touch. Probably not with this telephone, however.”

  “There are certain requirements,” Mike added.

  “What?” She froze, holding the battery cover in one hand.

  “The sample that Matthias provided.” He watched her minutely. “I’m told they’re willing to negotiate with you. But there’s an absolute precondition. Matt told us he’d planted a bomb, on a timer. We want it disarmed, and we want the pit. If it goes off, there’s no deal—not now, not ever.”

  Olga’s expression shifted slightly. She’s not a poker player, Mike realized. “A time bomb? I understand that is not good, but what do your lords think we can do about such a thing? Surely it’s no more than a minor…” She trailed off. “What kind of bomb?”

  Mike said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.

  “Why would he plant a bomb?” she persisted. “I don’t see what he could possibly hope to achieve.”

  Too much subtlety, maybe. “He brought a sample of plutonium with him when he wanted to get our attention. It worked.”

  “A sample of ploo-what?” Her expression of polite incomprehension would have been hilarious in any other context.

  “Oh, come on! What world did you—” Mike stopped dead. Whoops. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said coolly.

  He boggled for a moment, as understanding sank in. She’s not from around these parts, is she? “Do you know what an atom bomb is?”

  “An atom bomb?” She looked interested. “I’ve seen them in films. An ingenious fiction, I thought.” Pause. “Are you telling me they’re real?”

  “Uh.” You’re really not from around here, are you? On the other hand, if you stopped a random person in a random third-world country and asked them about atom bombs and how they worked, what kind of answer would you get? He licked his lips. “They’re real, all right. Matthias had a sample of plutonium.” No sign of recognition. “That’s the, the explosive they run on. It’s very tightly controlled. Even though the amount he had is nothing like enough to make a bomb, it caused a major panic. Then he claimed to actually have a bomb. We want it. Or we want the rest of your plutonium, and we want to know exactly how and where you got it so that we can verify there’s no more missing. That’s a nonnegotiable precondition for any further talks.”

  “Huh.” She frowned. “You are serious about this. How bad could such a bomb really be? I saw The Sum of All Fears but that bomb was so magically powerful—”

  “The real thing is worse than that.” Mike swallowed. He’d spent the past couple of weeks deliberately not thinking about Matt’s threat, trying to convince himself it was a bluff: but Judith had told him about the broken nightmare they’d found in the abandoned warehouse, and it wasn’t helping him get to sleep.

  “Assuming Matthias wasn’t bluffing, and planted a real atom bomb near Faneuil Hall. Make it a small one. Imagine it goes off right now.” He gestured at the window. “It’s miles away, but it’d still blow the glass in, and if you were looking at it directly, it would burn your eyes out. You’d feel the heat on your skin, like sticking your head into an open oven door. And that’s all the way out here.” If it was the size of the one Judith found, Boston and Cambridge would be a smoking hole in the coastline—but multimegaton H-bombs weren’t likely to go world-walking and were in any case unlikely to ex
plode if they weren’t maintained properly. “We don’t want to lose Boston. More importantly, you don’t want us to lose Boston. Because if we do—” he noticed that she was looking pale “—you saw the reaction to 9/11, didn’t you? I guarantee you that if someone nukes one of our cities, the response will be a thousand times worse.”

  “I—I don’t know.” The Russian princess was clearly rattled: “I was not aware of this. This bomb that Matthias claimed to—I don’t know about it.” She shook her head. “I will have to tell Patricia. We’ll have to investigate.”

  “You will? No shit.” Mike didn’t even try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “This other faction in your clan—if it’s theirs, they’re playing with fire. Maybe they don’t understand that.”

  She finished extracting the battery from the mobile phone. “You said that this, it goes to the vice president?”

  “To one of his staff,” Mike corrected her.

  “We’ll be in touch.” She slid it into a pocket gingerly, as if it might explode. “I will see you later.” She stood up briskly and walked into the front hall, and between one footstep and the next she vanished.

  Mike stared at the empty passage for a moment, then shook his head. The shakes would cut in soon, but for now all he could feel was a monstrous sense of irony. “What a mess,” he muttered. Then he reached for the phone and dialed Colonel Smith’s number.

  The dome was huge, arching overhead like the wall of a sports stadium or the hull of a grounded Zeppelin. Small, stunted trees grew in the gap in its wall, their trunks narrow and tilted towards the thin light. Mud and rubble had drifted into the opening over the years, and the dripping trickle of water suggested more damage deep inside. Huw shuffled forward with arthritic caution, poking his Geiger counter at the ground, the rocks, the etiolated trees—treating everything as if it might be explosive, or poisonous, or both. The results were reassuring, a menacing crackle that rarely reached the level of a sixty-cycle hum, much less the whining squeal of real danger.