"The Revolution Business" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Reception committee

Baron Otto Neuhalle was afraid of very few things; the wrath of gods, the scorn of women, and the guns of his enemies were not among them. He was, however, utterly terrified of one man-Egon the First, former crown prince and now self-proclaimed monarch of Gruinmarkt. Egon was a handsome-faced, graceful, hale, and charismatic young man who had all the pity of a rattlesnake for those who failed him. Even if Otto hadn't failed yet, failure nevertheless looked disturbingly possible in light of the witch-clan's continuing occupation of the Hjalmar Palace. And the cloud of dust he could see from his vantage point near the brow of the hill was almost certainly the vanguard of Egon's army.

"Another hour, sir," said Anders, who had materialized at his elbow while he peered through the witch-bought "binoculars."

"Nonsense, they'll be three at least-" He blinked. "Wait. What will be another hour?"

"The ammunition, my lord."

"Scheisse…" Otto turned back to the castle, barely visible behind its banked ramparts on the other side of the moat and the sloped killing apron. Bodies littered the ground before it, and clouds of smoke still billowed from the gatehouse his men had latterly abandoned. He'd gotten two of the witch-clan's machine guns out of the gatehouse to cover his soldiers' retreat, but things hadn't gone well: The enemy forces had laid down a stupefying volume of fire, and they'd brought some kind of artillery with them, not honest cannon but an arquebus-sized tube that belched fingers of flame that exploded on impact. And his gunners, undertrained, had burned through their ammunition too fast. They weren't supposed to counterattack for at least a day. If it hadn't been for that flying spy… he shook his head. The buzzing witch-bird would cut less ice with his majesty than the heat-warped machine gun barrels and prematurely expended stockpiles of valuable, irreplaceable cartridges. "What word is there from Hern?"

"The waterway holds so far, my lord. That's recent."

Otto nodded thoughtfully. The castle's dependence for fresh water on a buried culvert leading to the nearby river was a weakness. If the new defenders were foolish enough to rely on the well, or the casks in the cellar… no, they're not inexperienced. He glanced at a nearby soldier. "You, March. Bring me paper. And pen. I have a report to write."

"My lord." March bowed and scurried back towards the hastily established headquarters tent.

And if I write well, will it save my neck? Otto suppressed a shudder. All told, it had been a good plan, and the witches had been on the back-foot for the past several weeks as the king's forces harried their homesteads and burned their crops-the plan to force them to counterattack in a place of his choosing, where they could be chopped up by the king's stealthily stolen machine guns and mines, was a good one. But the upstart clan of witchesturned-nobles had struck back viciously fast, and shown a good few surprises of their own, from the flying spy down. And they can walk through the shadow world, Otto reminded himself. Evidence of witchcraft, but he'd also seen a couple of them vanish in front of his own eyes: Otto was a believer. What could I do with an army like that? He raised his glasses again and peered at the castle. "Sir Anders," he said quietly. "A general order. Be on watch for the dog that fails to bark in the night. If any man notices that the enemy have fallen silent for more than a quarter of a bell, they are to send word to me immediately, regardless of the hour of day or night."

"Sir?" Anders raised a craggy brow.

"Who are we fighting, again?" Otto grinned sepulchrally as dawning understanding-and fear-crept across his hetman's face.

The dust cast up by the royal army crept closer over the next half hour as Otto scratched an abbreviated report, then sealed it in a hide tube and sent a messenger careening towards the vanguard. Occasionally he had one or another of his troops' pre-prepared positions light up the walls, or take careful aimed shots at the windows of the castle: The returning spasms of automatic fire were reassuringly solid, evidence that the enemy was not yet melting into shadows and mist that could reappear in his rear at any moment. Otto didn't waste his reprieve. His men were beginning to grumble about the amount of ditch-work he was making them dig, but his periodic rounds of the trenches and foxholes they were preparing kept the muttering under control. With a high, fine overcast to keep the sun off their necks, and no rain to bog them down, the weather wasn't giving them much to complain about-but if the witch-clan staged a breakout, or the king arrived to find the works incomplete, they'd have something to moan about for the rest of their lives, however short.

The shadows were beginning to lengthen across the apron in front of the castle (putting his snipers at a considerable disadvantage) when the first column of riders thundered up the valley floor and came to a stop by the guards. They didn't pause for long: After no small amount of shouting half a dozen of them walked on, mounts breathing heavily, towards the headquarters tent. Otto, who had been checking the second gun emplacement, steeled himself as he walked back downhill towards the group. He'd been expecting this moment, trying not to allow it to get in the way of his urgent defensive preparations for most of the day.

"Your Majesty." He bowed deeply, but without flourish.

"Otto." The golden boy's face was calm, but his eyes were stony. "Your tent, please. We will have words." The guards behind him sported strange black weapons, machine-pistols looted or stolen from the clan's dead.

"Yes, sire." He gestured towards the tent. "If you would follow me?"

"Certainly," Egon said, easily enough, but Otto had a hard time pretending to ignore the two guards who preceded them, or the two who took up stations beside the tent.

Inside the tent, the young king turned to face Otto. "What happened?" he asked. "In your own words."

"They counterattacked too early." Otto frowned. "We took the castle as planned. But we'd only been there for half a day when a witch-flying beneath a wing like a bat's-flew overhead. My men shot at him, but he got away. High up, high as an eagle. I redoubled my efforts to prepare the grounds, but only two hours later there was an explosion, then witch-troops everywhere. They came from inside the palace, as your majesty predicted, but they arrived before we were ready for them. Seven hours, I reckon, from our entry to their arrival."

"Seven hours…" Egon stared at Otto measuringly, although Otto couldn't guess whether it might be for a medal or a noose. "This flying witch. Describe what you saw."

Otto felt himself burst into chilly perspiration. "It made a buzzing noise, as of bees, only louder…" He described the ultralight haltingly, its arrival from the southwest and subsequent departure after overflying the castle.

"And three hours later they arrived in force," Egon said musingly. "What of your force did you recover?"

The next ten minutes were the hardest examination of Otto's life, as he explained the precise disposition of his withdrawal. "In the end, we lost two of the machine guns, and we have but four gun barrels left. We have also expended all but four belts of ammunition," he finished. "Of men, eighteen dead and twenty-three wounded. The defensive positions are nearly complete, although I do not propose to defend them past dawn tomorrow-too much risk of the witches infiltrating our lines. My men are at your disposal, sire."

Egon glanced at the rough map of the surrounding area on Otto's camp chair. "Flying spies. Some sort of artillery-that's a new twist." He nodded to himself. "They are still bottled up in there?"

"Yes, sire." Otto nodded back, reflexively. "I've detailed my men to tell me at once if the witches stop replying to our probing fire. But so far they're sitting tight. It's almost as if they can't simply walk away."

For the first time, the young king's poker face relaxed. "Well." His lips quirked. "You've done no worse than aught of our commanders might. And that flying witch-yes." He nodded briskly. "Bravely done, Baron Neuhalle." Then he smiled, and Otto's blood ran cold at the look in the royal eyes. "Something you might not know about the witches is that they have to use their magic sparingly-should they walk through the paths of the dead too frequently, they fall ill and die. By your own word it is barely a day since they retook the palace. Normally that would be enough time to allow them to escape, but I have intelligence that suggests to me a new possibility. Your men did succeed in dropping the culvert and poisoning the well, I trust?" Unsure where this was leading, Otto nodded. "Good." The king clapped his hands. "Krentz. Fetch Sir Geraunt and Baron Rolfuss."

"Sire." One of the bodyguards bowed, then ducked through the tent door; the other visibly tensed, watching Otto alertly.

"Your Majesty?" Otto tried not to let his own tension show.

"We're going to take them." Egon's eyes twinkled. "Because, you see, they are not only under siege here. They may be able to walk through the realm of the dead, but the dead, I am informed, have taken a dislike to them. They won't be able to escape this time. All that remains to be established is how we may dig them out of that castle. And my other intelligence suggests a solution."

The house squatting behind the densely tree-clad hillside had seen better years, that much was clear: its wooden decking needed a fresh coat of paint, the shingled roof was silver and cracked behind the eaves, and the chain-link fence that surrounded the acre lot was rusted. But the padlock holding the gate closed was well-oiled, and as she followed Brill and her team of bright young adventurers up the front steps, Miriam spotted the discreet black dome of a CCTV camera lurking in the shadows of the verandah. That, at least, looked to be new and well-maintained.

"It's a safe house," Brill explained as she pushed buttons on an alarm system that was far fancier-and newer-than the building it was attached to. "We own a bunch of them, lease them out for short stays via a local Realtor, so there's a lot of turnover. There's always one free when we need it, and it doesn't look suspicious. We actually make money on the deal: We can buy the properties with spare capital and they're mostly going up."

Miriam glanced around as they entered the front hall. Dust tickled her nostrils; the husk of a dead beetle lay, legs upturned, in the middle of the floor. She wrinkled her nose. "What's the plan?"

"Oh, I just phoned the Realtor and told them I was a friend of the owner and we were taking it for two weeks." She held up a key. "There's some emergency gear stashed in the cellar, behind a false wall. Other than that, it's clean-the emergency gear's the kind of stuff a survival nut would have, nothing to attract special attention. The only real trouble we've ever had with these safe houses was when one of them was accidentally let to a meth dealer. We cleared them out good. The Sheriff's department like us." She said it with such evident satisfaction that Miriam shivered. For a meth dealer, setting up a clandestine lab in a Clan safe house was a bit like a fox setting up house in a grizzly's den. "You may want to take the front bedroom, milady. I'll get the air and hot water working and everyone else settled in, then we can talk."

Three hours later, Miriam felt a lot more human. Air conditioning! Proper showers! Toilets with lids and a handle you turned to flush, rather than yanking on a chain! It was almost like being home again. Brill had even, somehow, managed to find the time to scare up some clothes that fit her, so she didn't look totally weird. Well, Brill had been her lady-in-waiting for some months; as one of the odd jobs she did for the thin white duke-Miriam's uncle-knowing her measurements wasn't that odd. It was a shame she'd bleached her hair blond while she'd been on the run, Miriam told herself; the colors Brill had picked didn't match her new look, and besides, her roots were starting to show.

But I'm home. So, what now?

She sat on the edge of the bed, one leg of a very new pair of jeans dangling, and stared at the window. So unlike the stony castle casement she'd spent weeks staring at in a state of desperation, under house arrest and facing a forced political marriage as a lesser evil to paying the price of her earlier mistakes, but it was still a window in a house guarded by the Clan's traditions and rules. The formal betrothal had gone adrift in a sea of flame and gunfire, as crown prince Egon took exception to the idea of a Clan heiress marrying his younger (and retarded) brother; then she'd been running through the confusing political underworld of New Britain, too fast to think. But now-

It all depends on what else has been going on since I left. She sighed and began to work her other foot down the pants leg. Is Mom okay? She paused again. Brill said something about being under attack over here. Is Paulie okay? Paulette, her sometime PA, was an outsider to all this-but stuck in Cambridge, if the Clan was being attacked from outside, she could be in big trouble. Guilt by association: Some within the Clan would see her as a tool tainted by Miriam's low stock, while whatever agency was going after the Clan would assume the worst. I've got to find out, Miriam decided, and stood up just as there was a tentative knock at the door.

"Come in," she called, hastily buttoning up.

The door opened and Brilliana looked in. "Milady?"

"I'm nearly done here." Miriam glanced around. "Where did I put my shoes?" Handmade leather ankle-boots from New Britain wouldn't look too out of place, and shoes were the one thing Brill hadn't been able to buy for her. "Eh." They were hiding under the dressing table.

"I think we need to talk," Brilliana observed.

"Yes." Miriam bent over and began working on her left foot. "What exactly has been going on since the, the banquet?" Her brain began to catch up with her earlier thoughts: "My mother-is she alright? What about the duke? My grandmother-"

"It's a mess," Brill said wryly. She perched on the stool by the table. "We're not sure exactly how long Egon had been planning it for, but he used Henryk's scheme"-the plan to forcibly marry Miriam into the Gruinmarkt's royal dynasty-"as leverage to get a bunch of the backwood peers behind him. He's declared the entire Clan outlaw and placed a price on our heads, and is promising half our estates to those nobles who back him. It's turned into a messy civil war and Angbard's had his hands tied trying to defend individual holdings instead of going after the pretender's army. While all that was going on, we've had some disturbing-well, a couple of couriers have gone missing over the past six months. Missing with no explanation, no hint of trouble. Not only did the bastard Matthias rat us out to the Drug Enforcement Agency, now there's some sort of secret government cross-agency committee trying to hunt us down. Everyone on this side has had to activate their emergency cover plans. And the really bad news is that this agency managed to sneak a couple of agents into the Gruinmarkt, which means it's serious."

"Yes, I know." Miriam sat up and took a deep breath. "I told you about meeting Mike, didn't I?" She'd once had a thing going with Mike Fleming. Odd, it seemed an awfully long time ago. "He got me out of the palace alive." She shrugged. "He was unexpectedly honest." Another deep breath. "Told me that if I wanted to join the federal witness protection program…"

The words hung in the air for a few seconds. Finally, Brilliana nodded. "We know. And it will count for much when it comes to the Council's attention, I think," she said slowly. A longer pause. "Olga and your mother have been talking to him. Trying to negotiate a, a temporary cease-fire. But things are really bad. They believe we've stolen a nuclear weapon, and they want it back."

"Jesus." Miriam shook her head. "Why would they think that?" She looked at Brill, aghast. "Hang on. They believe the Clan has stolen a nuke? Why? Why would they believe that? Has Angbard- He'd have to be mad! Tell me he hasn't?"

Brill looked uncomfortable. "Angbard hasn't stolen a nuke. But they leave them in undoppelgangered bunkers; is that not a temptation?"

"Tell me." Miriam shoved her hair back from her face. "Has someone in the Clan actually gone and stolen a nuclear weapon? How? I mean, I thought they were too big to carry-"

"Not one," Brill said, then bit her lip. "Six, we think. Maybe more. They're backpack devices, part of the inactive inventory-the CIA asked for them, originally."

Aghast, Miriam stared at her. "Is that why they're all over us?"

Brill nodded.

"Then who-"

"Oliver, Earl Hjorth, is the key-holder designated by the Clan committee."

"Jesus, why him?" The thought of what might happen if the feds discovered the Clan had haunted Miriam ever since she'd learned about her own ancestry; what they might do if they thought the extradimensional narcoterrorists had nuclear weapons didn't bear thinking about. And Baron Oliver was about the worst person she could think of to be holding them-an unregenerate backwoodsman and dyed-in-the-wool conservative faction member. "And they can get their own people into the Gruinmarkt, can't they."

"There's more bad news," Brill added after a moment.

"Why don't you come downstairs? Then Huw can deliver it himself."

Elena sprawled across the sofa in the living room, pulling an oiled cleaning cloth through the breech of her P90. "Find another channel, minion," she drawled without looking up. "I can't stand Friends."

"As you wish, my princess." Yul, hulking and fair-haired as any Viking warrior, carefully squeezed the remote. Advertisements and sitcoms strobed across the eviscerated guts of the machine pistol on the coffee table until he arrived at MTV. "Ah, that is better." Marilyn Manson strutted and howled through the last tour on earth; Elena pulled a face. "Manly music for martial-" an oily rag landed on his head.

"Children."

Elena glanced round, pulled a face. "He started it!"

"Sure." Huw stood in the doorway, trying not to smile. "Did you get the Internet working?"

"Something's wrong with it," Yul said apologetically.

"Ah, well." Huw shrugged and walked over to the armchair, where a laptop trailed bits of many-colored spaghetti towards the wall. "I'll sort it out. Got to report in." Expecting Yul or Elena to do anything technical had been a forlorn hope. Am I the only competent person around here? he wondered. Dumb question: While he'd been studying in schools and colleges in the United States under a false identity, Yul had been bringing joy to their backwoods father's heart, riding and hunting and being a traditional son on their country estate in the western marches of the Gruinmarkt; and Elena had been under the stifling constraints of a noble daughter, although she'd kicked up enough of a fuss that her parents had allowed her to escape into Clan Security, leaving them with one less dowry to worry about. Which left Huw as the guy who knew one end of an Internet router and a secure voice-over IP connection from another, and Yul and Elena as the armed muscle to watch over him when they weren't engaging in risky post-adolescent high-jinks-risky because the older generation weren't many years past fighting blood feuds over that sort of thing.

It took him a few minutes, some scrabbling with cables, and a reboot to get everything working properly, but Huw was setting up the encrypted link to the ClanSec e-mail hub and looking forward to checking in when he heard footsteps.

"Yes?" He glanced round. It was Miriam. She looked-not tired, exactly, but careworn. And something else.

"Brill tells me we need to talk," she said, then glanced across the room at the sofa.

"She said-"Huw's larynx froze for a few seconds as he stared at her. The first time he'd met her, gowned and bejeweled at a royal reception, she'd been turned out in the very mode of Gruinmarkt nobility; then earlier, when Lady Brilliana had so rudely yanked him (and Yul, and Elena) away from his survey, she'd been wearing an outlandish getup. Now she looked-at ease, he decided. This is her. She isn't acting a part. How interesting. "Ah. Well, she did, did she?"

"She said." Miriam leaned on the back of his chair. "You've been exploring. Whatever that means." She sounded bored, but there was a glint in her eye.

"Uh, yeah." Huw leaned forward and shut the laptop's lid. "Why don't we go fix something to drink?" He glanced sidelong at Yul and Elena, who were sitting on the sofa, bickering amiably over the gun, their heads leaning together. "Somewhere quieter." The TV howled mournfully, recycling the sound track of a guitar in torment.

The kitchen was bland, basic, and undersupplied-they'd traveled light and hadn't had time to buy much more than a bunch of frozen pizzas-but there was coffee, and a carton of half-and-half, and a coffee maker. Huw busied himself filling it while Miriam searched the cupboards for mugs. "How did you go about it?" she asked, finally.

Huw took a deep breath. "Systematically. We haven't started de-convoluting the knotwork"-the two worlds to which the Clan's members could walk were distinguished by the use of a different knot that the world-walker had to concentrate on-"but I'm pretty sure we'll start finding others once we do. The fourth world we found-it's accessed from this one, if you use the Lee's knot. We couldn't get through to it in New England, but it worked down south; I think it may be in the middle of an ice age."

"Did you find anyone? People, I mean?"

"Yes." Huw paused as the coffee maker coughed and grumbled to itself. "Their bones. A big dome, made out of something like, like a very odd kind of concrete. Residual radioactivity. A skull with perfect dentistry, bits of damaged metalwork, fire escapes or gantries or something, that I'll swear are made out of titanium. It's clearly been there decades or centuries. And then there's the door."

"Door?"

"Yul hit it with an axe. Nearly killed us-there was hard vacuum on the other side."

"Whoops." Miriam pulled out a stool and sat down at the breakfast bar. "Too fast. Vacuum? You think you found a door onto another world?"

"We didn't stick around to make sure," Huw said drily. "But it didn't stop sucking after a couple of minutes. Last time we saw the dome, it was surrounded by fog."

"Oh my." Her shoulders were shaking. "God."

Huw watched her, not unsympathetically. He'd had more than a day to get used to the idea: If Lady Brilliana was right-and his own judgement was right-and Miriam was fit to lead them…

"That changes a lot of things," she said, looking straight at him. "If it is a door to another world… how do you think it works?"

Huw shrugged again. "We are cursed by our total ignorance of our family talent's origins," he pointed out. "But what we seem to have is a trait that can be externally controlled-that's what the knot's for-and I figure if it turns out that other knots take us to other worlds, then it's no huge leap to conclude that it was engineered for a purpose. I don't think anyone's looked inside us-I figure the mechanism, if there is one, has got to be something intracellular-but the fact that it's controllable, that we don't world-walk at random when we look at a maze or a fractal generator on a PC, screams design. This door? There's more stuff in that dome, lots more, and it looks like wreckage left behind by a civilization more advanced than this one." He pointed at the coffee maker. "Think what a peasant back home would make of that? You know, and I know, what it is and how it works, because we went to school and college in this country." He pulled the jug out and poured two mugs of coffee. "Electricity. But to a peasant…"

"Magic." The word hung in the air as Miriam poured milk into both mugs.

"So." He chose his words carefully. "What do you think it means?"

"Oh boy." Miriam stared at her coffee mug, then blew on it and took a first sip. "Where do you want me to start? If nothing else, it makes all the Clan's defensive structures obsolete overnight. One extra universe is useful, two is embarrassing, three extra universes implies… more. Which means, assuming there are more, that doppelgangered houses stop being effectively defended." Doppelgangering-the practice of building defenses in the other worlds, physically colocated with the space occupied by the defended structure, in order to stop hostile world-walkers gaining access-was a key element in all the Clan families' buildings. But you could build an earth berm or a safe house in one parallel universe-how could you hope to do it if there were millions? "And then… well. I tried telling the Council their business model was broken, but I didn't realize how broken it was."

"Really?" Huw leaned forward.

"Really." She put her mug down. "The-hell, I'm doing it again. Distancing. We got rich in the Gruinmarkt by exploiting superior technology-being able to move messages around fast, make markets, that kind of thing. And we got rich in this world"-she glanced at the window, which opened out onto an unkempt yard-"by smuggling. But what they were really doing was exploiting a development imbalance. Making money through a monopoly on superior technology-okay, call it a family talent, and it may be something you can selectively breed for, but if you're right and it's a technology, then it's not a monopoly anymore."

"Uh." Huw took a mouthful of coffee. "What's your reasoning?"

"Well. You're the one who just told me you thought our ability was artificial? And we've established that someone else-let's take your door into a vacuum realm as a given-has a way of moving stuff between time lines-yes, I'm going to take the idea that we're in a bunch of parallel universes that branch off each other as a given. New Britain really rubs your nose in it-and I think if they can just open a door then we have to admit that what the Clan can do? The postal corvée? Is a joke."

Miriam closed her eyes for a moment. "The Council are so not going to want to hear this. And it's not the worst of it."

"There's more?" Huw stared at her, fascinated. Have you figured out the other thing?…

"Okay, let's speculate wildly. There are other people out there who can travel between parallel worlds. They're better at it than us, and they know what they're doing. That's really bad, right there, but not necessarily fatal. However… we've been pointedly ignoring, all along, the fact that what we do isn't magical. It's not unique. It's like, after 1945, the government pretended for a few years that making nuclear weapons was some kind of big secret. Then the Russians got the bomb, and the Brits, and the Chinese, and before you can blink we're worrying about the North Koreans, or the Iranians. What the Clan Council needs to worry about is the US government-who they've spent the past few decades systematically getting mad at them-and who now know we exist. What do you think?"

"But we don't know how the world-walking mechanism works. It's got to take them time-"

Miriam took another mouthful of coffee. "They've had seven or eight months, Huw. That's how long it's been since Matthias went over the wall. And there's"-she paused, as if considering her words-"stuff that's happened, stuff that will turn hunting us down into a screaming crash priority, higher than al Qaida, higher than the Iraq occupation. They've got to be throwing money at…" She trailed off.

"I don't think they'll have got anywhere yet." Huw reached for the coffee pot again, emptying the dregs into their mugs. "It takes time to organize a research project and they'll be doing it under conditions of complete secrecy."

"Yes, but they've already got the big national laboratories. And if they've got captive Clan members they're starting from where the Clan stood, as of forty-eight hours ago. And they could have started months ago! It all depends on whether the problem they're trying to crack is a hard one or an easy one. If we've got some kind of mechanism that lets us do this, then it's designed to replicate, and there's got to be some sort of control system wired into our brains-are you telling me nobody has put bits of a Clan member under an electron microscope before to look for anomalies?"

"You've met enough of your cousins by now. How many brain surgeons did you spot?" Huw looked defensive. "It wasn't a high priority."

"Well it is, now. Because if they can figure out what makes us world-walk, they're probably halfway to mass-producing it. Given they've got scouts in the Gruinmarkt-"

"They've got what?" Huw sat bolt-upright.

"Eh." Miriam cocked her head to one side. "Forget I said that?"

"Sure… can I finish your sentence?"

"Um…"

"Right now, any scouts they can send our way are going to be riding piggyback. Lightning Child knows how they're making the couriers cooperate, but nothing would surprise me: The current administration are so Machiavellian they make Prince Egon like a White House intern. But what you're speculating about is how long we've got until there's a large-scale incursion." Her expression made him look for other words. "Invasion. Is that what you're thinking?"

Miriam nodded. "I- No, we-have got to talk to Angbard, and fast. Whatever the prince has been up to back, uh, home"-he spotted the moment's deliberation before she chose the word-"it's a sideshow compared to what's coming. I don't know how long we've got, but I'd guess it's going to be weeks to months, not months to years." She pushed her empty mug away. "Do you have Google on that laptop of yours?"

"What are you thinking of trawling for?"

"News items. Foreign stuff, not more shit about Paris Hilton's funeral; I want to hear about anything that suggests that State is planning a hasty exit from Iraq. They're not going to try and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and invade the Gruinmarkt simultaneously, are they?" She slid off her bar stool, visibly jittery. Iraq had been a ghastly object lesson in what the current administration could do to people they didn't like: the increasingly desperate pleas of the coup plotters after they deposed Saddam, the cringing threats of gas attacks in event of invasion-and in response, the huge B52 raids on Baghdad. All of it had been calculated to send a message, this is what you get if you mess with us.

"Depends." Huw reached over and switched off the coffee maker. "Don't they have some kind of doctrine about being able to fight two wars simultaneously, anywhere on the planet? And the supply lines to the Gruinmarkt are real short, if they can build a world-walking machine. Or gate."

"And mostly they'd be up against irregulars with muskets. They could roll over in their sleep and crush us, if-"

A door slammed in the passage. Moments later, Brill darted into the kitchen. "Oh. There you are!" Visibly agitated, she focused on the coffee pot. "Ah, you emptied it. Huw. Have you brought the e-mail service to life?"

"Not yet, I was going to-"

"Scheisse." Brill glanced aside. "I'm sorry, milady. The news is bad. I must get in touch right away. Huw, if you would be so good-"

"What's happened?" demanded Miriam.

"My pager ordered me to call in, in the clear-maximum urgency. It's the duke, my lady. I'm afraid there's been an accident."

There was a room on one of the upper floors of the Hjalmar Palace with a huge canopied bed in it, and the bed stank of death and uncontrolled bowels. Lady Olga sat on the edge of the bed and spoke to its occupant, as a medic cleaned him and a soldier stood by waiting to replace the fouled sheets.

He'd been strong once, and clever and ruthless, a bulwark for his allies and a terror to his faction's foes, during the years of madness when the Clan's member families had engaged in a bloody succession of mortal feuds. Then, as the madness receded, he'd helped broker a series of treaties-some on paper, others cemented by blood in marriage-to disarm the worst of the remaining hostilities. He'd risen to dominate the Clan's external security apparat, modernizing it and turning it into the glue that bound the new settlement together. The hammer of the council, his combination of force and guile had cowed the hotheads and brought the wily to his table. But he was just one man-now paralyzed on one side and barely conscious, lonely and adrift in what might be his deathbed.

"We're holding out," she said quietly, touching his immobile left hand, hoping against hope for a reaction. "Earl Fredryck's observers report that the federal presence at the doppelganger site is continuing, but all our people made it across ahead of the siege. We have plenty of ammunition. The monarchists dropped the culvert from the river, and attempted to poison the well, but the osmotic purifier is working. Earl Riordan reports that the pretender's army is encamped athwart the valley just downriver of the bend, `tween here and Wergatsfurt. The scouts are already preparing a route for us through New Britain, once Riordan's men have manufactured a sufficiency of knotwork badges."

The duke made an odd noise in the back of his throat, something between a cluck and a gurgle. Olga leaned close, trying to discern words. His eyes rolled, agitated: "Guh-uh…"

"Fear not, we have prepared for you." A fireman's carry and a hike in the dark-then, if he survived the one kilometer haul, a stealthy transit back to the American side, land of neurological wards and intensive care facilities, where a private ambulance would be waiting to whisk him to a hospital bed. "The body of the force will return, taking the Pervert's army in the rear if he's still encamped. And should he occupy the palace, we have a warm welcome prepared for him."

Olga was of the opinion that it was better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission; and in any event, the warm welcome in question was one with a short expiry date-shorter than ever, now that she'd learned what that thrice-cursed bastard idiot Matthias had told the DEA, or whoever they were. And what Otto had been doing was the icing on a very unpalatable cake. To his credit, he'd actually volunteered the information. "Baron Henryk never put his faith in intangibles," he'd explained. "He wanted to see these mythical nuclear weapons. He wanted to own them. He argued about it with the duke, but then the duke changed his mind-one suspects Matthias forged his signature on the letter-and so the baron set me to oversee Matthias on organizing the theft. It was meant to be a harmless shell game, and additional leverage in council. Nobody had looked at them for more than eight years! How were we to know Matthias would sell his story to the outlanders?"

"Guh. Uh. Pa. Pat. Uh." He was clearly trying to say something. Alerted, Olga leaned closer.

"Please, I ask you, try to speak slowly. Is it a person?"

"Uh!"

"Patricia?" It was the obvious name: his half sister, mother of Helge, the wayward wildcat orphan and loose cannon who called herself Miriam.

"Yuh."

"Oh! Good. Do you want to see her?" That could be difficult. Like most of the Clan's elders who were familiar with American culture, she'd vanished into a deep cover identity when the shit hit the fan, and trying to bring her over could draw attention to her.

"Nuh."

"Alright." Olga racked her mind for options. "Do you have a message for her? Or about her? Hang on, if it's a message for her, blink once? About her, twice?"

One blink.

Olga sat up, heart hammering. He's still inside there. A hot flush of relief washed over her: The idea that Angbard, Duke Lofstrom, had lost his mind had been too terrible to voice, or even think. Paralyzed, deathly sick, but still the will to control went on… "Can you spell it out? One for no, two for yes?"

Blink-blink.

"Milady, he looks very weak to me-" The first-aider sounded worried.

"He's the best judge of his condition," she said sharply. "And if he has a message of such import, he must give it. Have you pen and paper?"

"Uh, yes, milady."

"Then take a note."

It took half an hour, but they extracted two sentences from the duke before the corpsman's entreaties began to sway Olga. False starts and mistakes made it a frustrating process-but his words dispelled any remaining fear she had for his mind. Finally, she sighed and stood up. "I'll see it gets to her," she reassured the duke. "Tomorrow, we'll get you to a proper hospital bed. I must go now." She bowed and stepped back, then took the sheet of paper from the corpsman's pad. "You heard nothing," she warned him. "This must go no further. And the duke needs to rest now."

"Milady." He bowed as she left the room and hurried towards the improvised communications center downstairs.

Carl, Earl of Wu by Hjrorth-and the commander of the small army currently encamped in the castle-looked up as she entered. By a miracle, Oliver, Earl Hjorth, was absent. "What news?"

"Nothing bad." She hurried to his side at the map table. "He's sleeping now," she continued quietly, "but he's very weak. The good news is, he has his senses. He gave me a message to relay to Patricia Thorold-Hjorth by any means necessary."

"He's talking?…" Carl's fist clenched.

"Do not hope for too much. It took much work to say this much." She passed him the note. "Please, send this by way of Earl Riordan. There is no way of knowing how long it will take to reach her, and I fear it may be urgent. I'd advise keeping it from Earl Oliver."

"Alright." Carl took the piece of paper and stared at it. "What does it mean?"

"You'll find out," Olga assured him. "In good time."

TELL PATRICIA GIVE CLINIC RECORDS TO HELGE. GET HELGE IN FRONT OF COUNCIL. MY WORD, HER PLAN B ONLY WAY FORWARD NOW.