Otto inhaled a mouth-watering stench of cooking meat and hot air and tried to collect his scattered wits. Something was holding his legs down. He couldn't see anything—just violet afterimages stubbornly refusing to fade when he screwed his eyes shut. Panicking, he tried to kick, but without vision he couldn't see the dead horse lying atop him. His back was a dull mass of pain where he'd fallen, and the smell—have they taken me down to Hel, the choosers of the slain? he wondered dizzily as he turned his damaged eyes towards the furious underside of the mushroom cloud.
Carl stared at the turbulent caul of smoke rising above the ridge-line and swallowed, forcing back the sharp taste of stomach acid at the back of his tongue. His head pounded, but his eyes were clear. Around him, soldiers stared slack-jawed at the ominous thunderhead. The predawn sky was just turning dark blue, but the fires ignited by the bomb brought their own light to the scene, so for the moment their faces were stained ruddy with a mixture of awe and fear.
"Is that what I think it is?" asked Helmut.
Baron Hjorth cleared his throat. "It can't be," he said confidently. "They're all supposed to be under lock . . . and key. . . ." He trailed off into an uncertain silence.
Carl took him by the elbow. More soldiers were spilling in out of the air, staggering or bending over in some cases—two world-walks in three hours was a brutal pace, even for the young and fit—and Carl had to step around them as he steered Oliver a hundred meters up the road in the direction of the castle. "That." He gestured. "Is. A mushroom cloud. Yes?"
Oliver blinked rapidly. "I think so." He swallowed. "I've never seen one before."
"Well. Where the fuck did it come from?"
"Don't ask me!" Oliver snarled. "1 didn't do it! God-ona-stick, what do you take me for? All our bombs are accounted for as of last Tuesday except for the one Matthias"—he stopped dead for a moment—"Oh dear."
"If that bastard Matthias—"
Oliver cut him off with a slashing gesture. "Trust me, Matthias is dead." He closed his eyes, composing himself. "This is someone else. Sending us a message." He opened his eyes. "How old is that . . . thing?"
Carl glanced up, uneasily sniffing the air: The tang of wood smoke spoke of pine trees on the reverse slope ignited by the heat flash. "I don't know. Not old—see the stem? It hasn't drifted." His guts loosened as he realized, if I'd timed this just a little later we'd still have been there. He licked his thumb and held it up. There was a faint breeze from the south, blowing towards the castle. "Um. What, if anything, do you know about fallout?"
"The poison rain these things shed? I think we should forget the Pervert and get your men out of here. Forced march. If you want to set up guns south of Wergatsfurt and catch any stragglers you're welcome to them, but if they were camped a mile yonder"—he gestured towards the cloud—"I don't know. They might have survived, if they dug in for the night. Although I don't give much for their chances if that fire starts to spread."
Carl grinned humorlessly. "Have you ever known the Pervert to refuse a chance to stab us in the back, my lord? Dawn attacks a speciality, remember?"
Oliver shook his head.
"Come." Carl turned his back on the cloud. "I'll leave two men to scout the area in an hour's time. The rest—let's hit the road. I'll have time to worry about whoever's sending us messages when I've hunted down and killed the last of the pretender's men."
Behind them a dark rain began to fall on the battlefield, fat drops
turbid with radioactive dust scorched from the stones of the castle and the bones of the men who had followed their usurper-king into the radius of the fireball. The survivors, burned and broken—those that could move—cupped their hands to catch the rain and drank greedily.
Otto Neuhalle, and the ten survivors of his company, were among them. They did not know—nor could they—that the man-portable nuclear weapon responsible for the fireball had a maximum yield of only one kiloton, and that such bombs are inherently dirty, and that this blast had been, by nuclear standards, absolutely filthy; that it had failed to consume even a tenth of its plutonium core, and had scooped up huge masses of debris and irradiated it before scattering it tightly around ground zero.
Dead men, drinking bitter rain.
6
realignments
If he's dead, we're so screwed."
Brill's fingers whitened on the steering wheel, but Miriam took Huw's gloomy appraisal as a conversational opportunity. They were coming less frequently today, as the reality of driving across a continent took hold. "Isn't that a little pessimistic?"
Huw closed the lid of his laptop and carefully unplugged the cable from the satphone. He slid them both into their pockets in the flight case before he replied. "It's not sounding good. They got him into the high dependency unit more than seventy-two hours after the initial intracerebral hemorrhage. He's still alive, but he's confused and only semiconscious and, uh, I've done some reading. More than forty percent of patients with that kind of hemorrhage die within a month."
Yul, sprawled across the van's third bench seat, chose that moment to emit a thunderous snore. Elena, who'd been lying asleep with her head in his lap, shuddered and opened her eyes, then yawned. "What?"
"He's not dead yet," Miriam observed tiredly. "He's not going to die of anything nonmedical, not with Olga looking out for him. And he's got the best treatment money can buy."
"Which is not saying a lot."
Brill hunched her shoulders behind the wheel, pulling out to inch past a big rig. "Listen, Huw, why don't you just shut up?" she snapped.
"Wha? . . ." Huw gaped.
"Hush, Brill, he doesn't know my uncle—his grace—like you do." Miriam glanced in her sunshade mirror and spotted Elena sitting up, clearly fascinated. "Sorry, but he's right. I hope he does pull through, but the odds aren't much better than fifty-fifty. And we ought to have some idea about what to do if we get there and . . ." She trailed off, diving back into her thoughts.
"I don't want to think about it," said Brill. "I'm sorry, Huw. I should not exercise myself over your words. Many will be thinking them. But I feel so helpless." She thumped the steering column. "I wish I could drive faster!"
"If you get pulled for speeding, and he does recover—" Elena began.
Miriam snorted. "Enough of that, kid. What's more important to you, Brill: getting there, or going fast? You don't want to get a traffic stop. Think of the poor cop's widow and orphans, if it helps."
"You are perfectly correct, as usual, milady." Brill sighed. "What other news, Sir Huw?"
"Um." Huw stretched, extending his legs under Miriam's seat and his arms backwards to touch the ceiling above his brother's head. "There's a condition red lockdown. Avoid commercial flights, avoid all contact with the authorities, avoid unnecessary travel, lock the doors and bar the windows. Something about a major battle near Wergatsfurt, and something really bad happening to the Pervert's army. Sounds like my Lord Riordan opened a can of whoop-ass or something. But you'd expect them to sound a little less tense if they'd nailed the bad guys properly, wouldn't you?"
"Not necessarily." Miriam sounded thoughtful. "If there's been an army running wild through the countryside in a civil war, it could take a long time for things to get back to normal. Look at Iraq: They went in weeks ago and it's still a mess, whether or not the President declared 'Mission Accomplished.'" She paused. "Egon could be down, but what about the rest of his vassals? The Duke of Niejwein, this that and the other baron or earl or whatever. It's not over until the council hammers out a settlement that ends the fighting." She rubbed her belly thoughtfully, then paused. "And I need to see a doctor." The test kit had been unequivocal, but the uncertainty over the sex of the fetus remained. "Then get a seat at the table before they decide I'm just one of the chess pieces."
"A chess piece with a posse!" Elena giggled.
"Not funny," Huw chided her.
Her moue mirrored Brill's, for an entirely different reason. "I suppose not," she said. "I was just joking."
"Bored now," Yul mocked, having woken up in the preceding minute or two. "Are we there yet?" he squeaked in a falsetto imitation.
"Bastard!" Elena thumped him over the head with a travel pillow.
"Children! . . ." Huw shook his head. "I'm sorry," he mouthed at Miriam by way of the mirror.
Miriam glanced sidelong at Brill. "How long have you known these reprobates?"
"Long enough to know they're just acting out because they're over here for the first time." She braced her arms across the steering wheel, slumping forward in evident boredom. "They get dizzy."
"Don't tell me you weren't like this on your first time out?" Miriam thought back to the first time she'd brought Brill over to Boston (her version of Boston—not the curious retarded twin in New Britain). She'd thought Brill was a naive ingenue and a scion of the outer families, not able to world-walk for herself, not realizing Angbard would never have turned her loose in Niejwein without planting one or more of his valkyries on her as spy and bodyguard.
"My first time out was"—Brill looked pensive—"I was twelve, I think. But I had a false identity in my own name by the time I was fourteen. Thanks to the duke. He believed in starting them early."
"Lucky cow." Elena giggled again.
I am trapped on a school bus in the middle of flyover country with a bunch of overarmed and undersocialized postadolescents, Miriam realized, and there's no way out. She sighed. "Starting what early?"
"Starting the doppelganger identities. It's only sensible, you know. He wanted to put as many of us as possible through the right kind of finishing school—Harvard, Yale, the Marine Corps—in case we ever have to evacuate."
"Evacuate." The gears whirred in Miriam's head. "Evacuate the Gruinmarkt?" If that was even on the menu—"Why hasn't it already happened?"
"Would you voluntarily abandon your home? Your world?" Brill looked at her oddly.
"Urn. It's home, right?" The idea resonated with her own experience. "But there are no decent roads, no indoor plumbing, hedge-lords with pigs in their halls, a social setup out of the dark ages—why would you stay?"
"Home is where everyone you know is," said Brill. "That doesn't mean you've got to love it—you know my thoughts, my lady! What you can't do is ignore it."
Miriam fell silent for a couple of minutes, thinking. She'd had a taste of living another life in another world—but it had strings attached, and not ones to her liking, in Baron Henryk's captivity. Then she'd escaped during the debacle at the betrothal, and considered making a run for it when she was in New Britain; thought hard about going native, dropping out, leaving everything behind for a false identity. New Britain had big drawbacks, especially compared to home, but at least it was free of reactionary aristocrats who wanted to turn her into a dynastic slave. And if she'd done it, it would have been through her own choice. But I decided to come back, she realized. I've got a family and while I was busy being independent they got their claws into me.
"What do you need a doppelganger identity for, then?" She paused. "I mean, if all it's for is to maintain a toehold identity in this world . . ."
"Identity is a lever," Huw said gnomically. "The fulcrum is world-walking."
"But what do you want a lever for?" Miriam persisted.
"So we can move the world!" Brill straightened her back, looking straight ahead.
Then Elena chirped up again: "Are we nearly there, yet?"
In the end, it took them eighty-five hours to make a journey that would have taken a day if they'd been able to fly direct. Eighty-five hours and two changes of vehicle and three changes of plates, driving licenses, and other ID documents—care of certain arrangements the Clan maintained with local contractors.
With five drivers available they could have shaved a couple of hours off if they hadn't changed vehicles and taken certain other precautions, and a whole eight hours if Miriam hadn't insisted on stopping for the night at a motel outside Syracuse. "I am going to visit the duke tomorrow," she pointed out. "I need to sleep properly, I need a shower, and I need to not look like I've been sleeping in a van for a week, because I don't know who else will be visiting the duke. This is politics. Do you have a problem with that?"
"No," Brill agreed meekly—and the morning after the motel stop they lost another two hours in a strip mall, hunting suitable shoes, a business suit, and some spray to keep Miriam's bleached hair from going in all directions.
"How do I look?" asked Miriam.
"Scary," Brill admitted after a pause. "But it'll do."
"You think so?"
"Stop worrying. If any knave denigrates your topiary, I'll shoot him."
Miriam gave her an old-fashioned look as she climbed in the cab of the new van, but Brilliana was obviously in high spirits—probably in anticipation of their arrival. It's alright for her, she's not the one who has to confront them, Miriam reminded herself. She's not the one with the unwanted pregnancy. Her stomach burned with acid indigestion, product of stress and too much Diet Pepsi. "Let's go," she told Huw (for it was his turn behind the wheel). "I want to get this over with."
Cerebrovascular incidents were a familiar and unpleasant problem for the Clan: World-walking induced abrupt blood-pressure spikes, and far too many of their number died of strokes. But Miriam still had to grapple with her disbelief as Huw pulled up outside a discreet, shrub-fronted clinic in the outskirts of Springfield. "Forty beds? All of them?"
"Yes, milady." Huw reached for the parking brake. "It's the price of doing business."
She glanced at him sharply, but his expression was deadly serious. "Nobody knows why, I suppose?"
"Indeed." The engine stopped. "It's on my research list. A way down." He swallowed. "I suppose you're going to say, because I'm young."
"No, it's more like I was thinking, it might tell us something about the family talent," Miriam replied. She dabbed at a stray wisp of hair in the mirror, split ends mocking her. "I knew it was a problem. I didn't realize it was this big a problem, though. There's too much to do, isn't there?"
"I'm working on it," Huw said soberly. "It's just that my to-do list is eight years long."
"I beg your pardon, Miriam." Brill sounded as tense as she felt. "Visitors hours . . ."
"Alright." Miriam opened her door and carefully climbed down from the van. She pulled a face as she caught her reflection in the mirror: Appearances counted for a lot when dealing with the elders and the formal Clan hierarchy. "I look a mess. Let's get on with this."
Behind her, Yul and Elena were dismounting. "With your permission, I'll take point, my lady." Elena winked at her as she swung a sports bag over her shoulder. "I think you look just fine."
Miriam looked at Brill in mute appeal. "Let her do it, it's what she does best," Brill replied. "Yul, rear guard. Huw? Lock up and let's go." All of them, Miriam realized, were armed—but Elena was the one with the serious firepower in her bag. What am I doing here? she asked herself as they crossed the car park towards the doors to reception: How did I get into this mess? Unfortunately, that question was easy enough to answer: Mom dumped me in at the deep end, sink or swim. Iris had raised her in the United States in ignorance of the Clan families, for her own reasons—reasons that could be viewed as cold-bloodedly calculating rather than compassionate, depending on whether Iris thought of herself as a player or a fugitive. Not that she could hate Iris—or Patricia, to her extended family—either way; her mother had been under enormous pressure at the time. But I wish she'd prepared me better.
Getting into the small and very exclusive hospital that the Clan maintained for their brainstruck was not a simple matter of walking up to the reception desk and saying, "Hello, I've come to visit Angbard Lofstrom." Even leaving aside the small matter of the DEA's most wanted list and the question of his place on it, Angbard had enemies, many of whom might well consider hospital visiting hours to be the perfect time to even up old scores. So Miriam was unsurprised when her introductory statement of intent, "Hello, I've come to visit Angbard Lofstrom," res
ulted in the ornamental receptionist staring vacuously up at her as if she'd demanded money with threats. A serious-faced young man whose dark suit was cut to conceal his sidearm bounced out from behind a glass screen off to one side, sized them up, then relaxed momentarily. "Wer' isht?" he demanded.
Brill replied in machine-gun hochsprache, too fast for Miriam to catch. The young man looked surprised, but mildly relieved as he replied. Then he turned to Miriam. "My lady, if you please"—he pointed at a seating area off to one side—"to wait there in?" His English was heavily accented.
"Ja—" Brill replied at length. "Bertil says he needs to check our identities before he can let us in," she explained to Miriam. "He knows who we are."
"Good." Miriam allowed herself to be led to the waiting area. "Any idea how long? . . ."
"Not long." Brill didn't bother sitting down. "They'll just need time to make sure we didn't bring any unwanted company." Her posture was relaxed, but Miriam couldn't help noticing the way her eyeballs flickered from doors to windows.
A minute passed before another of the dark-suited security guards came in through a door behind the receptionist's desk. They always look like Mormon missionaries, Miriam noted, or Secret Service agents. That's a weakness, isn't it? Angbard's guidelines for looking inconspicuous had evolved decades earlier; after her weeks on the run and the tutorial in escape and evasion she'd received from the Leveler underground, their uniform consistency now struck her as a weakness, like wearing a flashing neon sign advertising Clan operation here.
"My lady?" The new guy walked straight over to Miriam and half bowed to her. "If you would come this way, please?"
"I'm bringing my companions," she said.
"Ah." His eyes focused on Elena's shoulder bag. "I would like to see that, please."
Elena looked as if she was about to object. Miriam shook her head. "Show him."
The Revolution Business: Book Five of the Merchant Princes Page 14