The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Sure. Hang on a moment. Okay, fire away.’

  Miriam gave him her new e-mail and phone numbers. ‘Listen, I’ll mail in the copy in about an hour’s time. Is there anything else you’re looking for?’

  ‘Not right now.’ He sounded amused. ‘They sprang a major reorg on us right after our last talk, followed by a guerilla page-plan redesign; looks like that slot for a new columnist I mentioned earlier is probably going to happen. Weekly, op-ed piece on medical/biotech investment and the VC scene, your sort of thing. Can I pencil you in for it?’

  Miriam thought furiously. ‘I’m busier than I was right after I left The Weatherman, but I figure I can fit it in. Only thing is, I’ll need a month’s notice to start delivering, and I’d like to keep a couple of generic op-ed pieces in the can in case I’m called away. I’m going to be doing a lot of head-down stuff in the next year or so. It won’t stop me keeping up with the reading, but it may get in the way of my hitting deadlines once in a blue moon. Could you live with that?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he said. ‘I’m willing to make allowances. But you’re a pro. You’d give me some warning wherever possible, right?’

  ‘Of course, Steve.’

  ‘Okay. File that copy. Bye.’

  She put the phone down for a moment, eyes misting over. I’ve still got a real life, she told herself. This shit hasn’t taken everything over. She thought of Brill, trapped by family expectations and upbringing. If I could unhook their claws, I could go back to being the real me. Really. Then she thought about the rest of them. About the room at the Marriott, and what had happened in it. About Roland, and her. Maybe.

  She picked the phone up again. It was easier than thinking.

  Iris answered almost immediately. ‘Miriam, dear? Where have you been?’

  ‘Ma?’ The full weight of her worries crashed down on her. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you! Listen, I’m on to a story. It’s – ’ She struggled for a suitable metaphor. ‘It’s as big as Watergate. Bigger, maybe. But there’s people involved who’re watching me. I’d like to spend some time with you, but I don’t know if it would be safe.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’ She could hear her adoptive mother’s mind crunching gears even on the end of a phone. ‘So you can’t come and visit me?’

  ‘Remember what you told me about COINTELPRO, Ma?’

  ‘Ah, those were the days! When I was a young firebrand, ah me.’

  ‘Ma!’

  ‘Stuffing envelopes with Jan Six, before Commune Two imploded, picketings and sit-ins – did I tell you about the time the FBI bugged our phones? How we got around it?’

  ‘Mom.’ Miriam sighed. ‘Really! That student radical stuff is so old, you know?’

  ‘Don’t you old me, young lady!’ Iris put a condescending, amused tone in her voice. ‘Is your trouble federal, by any chance?’

  ‘I wish it was.’

  ‘Well then. I’ll meet you at the playground after bridge, an hour before closing time.’ Click.

  She’d hung up, Miriam realized, staring at her phone. ‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ she murmured. Never, ever, challenge a onetime SDS activist to throw a tail. She giggled quietly to herself, overcome by a bizarre combination of mirth and guilt – mirth at the idea of a late-fifties Jewish grandmother with multiple sclerosis giving the Clan’s surveillance agents the slip, and guilt, shocking guilt, at the thought of what she might have unintentionally involved Iris in. She almost picked up the phone to apologize, to tell Iris not to bother – but that would be waving a red rag at a bull. When Iris got it into her mind to do something, not even the FBI and the federal government stood much chance of stopping her.

  The playground. That’s what she’d called the museum, when she was small. ‘Can we go to the playground?’ she’d asked, a second-grader already eating into her parents’ library cards, and Iris had smiled indulgently and taken her there, to run around the displays and generally annoy the old folks reading the signs under the exhibits until, energy exhausted, she’d flaked out in the dinosaur wing.

  And bridge. Iris never played card games. That must mean . . . yes. The bridge over the Charles River. More confirmation that she meant the Science Museum, an hour before closing time. Right. Miriam grinned, remembering Iris’s bedtime stories about the hairy years under FBI surveillance, the times she and Morris had been pulled in for questioning – but never actually charged with anything. When she was older, Miriam realized that they’d been too sensible, had dropped out to work in a radical bookstore and help with a homeless shelter before the hardcore idiots began cooking up bombs and declaring war on the System, a System that had ultimately gotten tired of their posturing and rolled over in its sleep, obliterating them.

  Miriam whistled tunelessly between her teeth and plugged her cellular modem card back into the notebook, ready to send in her feature article. Maybe Iris could teach her some useful techniques. The way things were going, she needed every edge.

  *

  A landscape of concrete and steel, damp and gray beneath a sky stained dirty orange. The glare of streetlamps reflected from clouds heavy with the promise of sleet or rain tomorrow. Miriam swung the rental car around into the parking lot, lowered her window to accept a ticket, then drove on in search of a space. It was damply cold outside, the temperature dropping with nightfall, but eventually she found a free place and parked. The car, she noted, was the precise same shade of silver-gray as Iris’s hair.

  Miriam walked around the corner and down a couple of flights of stairs, then through the entrance to the museum.

  Warm light flooded out onto the sidewalk, lifting her gloom. Paulette had brought Brill home earlier that afternoon, shaking slightly. The color- and pattern-enhanced marketing strategies of modern retail had finally driven Brill into the attack of culture shock Miriam had been expecting. They’d left Brill hunched up in front of the Cartoon Network on cable, so Paulette could give Miriam a lift to the nearest Avis rental lot. And now –

  Miriam pushed through the doors and looked around. Front desk, security gates, a huge human-powered sailplane hanging from the ceiling over the turnstiles, staff busy at their desks – and a little old lady in a powered wheelchair, whirring toward her. Not so little, or so old. ‘You’re late! That’s not like you,’ Iris chided her. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘That’s new,’ Miriam said, pointing to the chair.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Iris grinned up at her, impishly. ‘Did you know it can outrun a two-year-old Dodge Charger? If you know the footpaths through the park and don’t give the bastards time to get out and follow you on foot.’ She dropped the grin. ‘Miriam, you’re in trouble. What did I teach you about trouble?’

  Miriam sighed. ‘Don’t get into it to begin with, especially don’t bring it home with you,’ she recited, ‘never start a war on two fronts, and especially don’t start a land war in Asia. Yes, I know. The problem is, trouble came looking for me. Say, isn’t there a coffee shop in the food court, around the corner from the gift shop?’

  ‘I think I could be persuaded – if you tell me what’s going on.’

  Miriam followed her mother’s wheelchair along the echoing corridor, dodging the odd family group. It took them a few minutes, but finally Miriam got them both sorted out with drinks and a seat at a table well away from anyone else. ‘It was the shoebox,’ Miriam confessed. Iris had given her a shoebox full of items relating to her enigmatic birth-mother, found stabbed in a park nearly a third of a century ago. After all those years gathering dust in the attic the locket still worked, dumping Miriam into a world drastically unlike her own. ‘If you hadn’t given it to me, they wouldn’t be staking out your house.’

  ‘Who do you think they are?’

  ‘They call themselves the Clan. There are six families in the Clan, and they’re like this.’ She knotted her fingers together, tugged experimentally. ‘Turns out I’m, uh, well, how to put this? I’m not a Jewish princess. I’m a – ’

  ‘She was importa
nt,’ Iris interrupted. ‘Some kind of blue blood, right? Miriam, what does the Clan do that’s so secret you can’t talk but so important they need you alive?’

  ‘They’re – ’ Miriam stopped. ‘If I told you, they might kill you.’

  Iris raised an eyebrow. ‘I think you know better than that,’ she said quietly.

  ‘But – ’

  ‘Stop trying to overprotect me!’ Iris waved her attempted justification away. ‘You always hated it when I patronized you. So what is this, return-the-favor week? You’re still alive, so you have something on them, if I know you. So it follows that you can look after your old mother, right? Doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’ Miriam looked at her mother and sighed. ‘If I knew you’d be safe . . .’

  ‘Shut up and listen, girl.’ Miriam shut up abruptly and stared at her. Iris was watching her with a peculiar intensity. ‘You are, by damn, going to tell me everything. Especially who’s after you, so that I know who to watch for. Because anyone who tries to get at you through me is going to get a very nasty surprise indeed.’ For a moment, Iris’s eyes were icy-cold, as harsh as the assassin in the orangery at midnight, two days before. Then they softened. ‘You’re all I’ve got left,’ she said quietly. ‘Humor your old ma, please? It’s been a long time since anything interesting happened to me – interesting in the sense of the Chinese proverb, anyway.’

  ‘You always told me not to gossip.’

  ‘Gossip is as gossip does. Keep your powder dry and your allies briefed.’

  ‘I’ll – ’ Miriam took a sip of her coffee. ‘Okay,’ she said, licking her dry lips. ‘This is going to take a long time to tell, but basically what happened was, I took the shoebox home and didn’t do anything with it until that evening. Which probably wasn’t a good thing, because . . .’

  She talked for a long time, and Iris listened, occasionally prompting her for more detail but mostly just staring at her face, intently, with an expression somewhere between longing and disgust.

  Finally Miriam ran down. ‘That’s all, I guess,’ she said. ‘I left Brill with Paulie, who’s looking after her. Tomorrow I’m going to take the second locket and, well, see if it works. Over here or over there.’ She searched Iris’s face. ‘You believe me?’ she asked, almost plaintively.

  ‘Oh, I believe you, kid.’ Iris reached out and covered her hand with her own: older, thinner, infinitely familiar. ‘I – ’ She paused. ‘I haven’t been entirely honest with you,’ she admitted. ‘I had an idea this was going to get weird before I gave you the box, but not like this. It seemed like a good time to pass it on when you began sniffing around their turf. Large-scale money laundering is exactly the sort of thing the, this Clan, would be mixed up in, and I suspected – Well, I expected you to come back and ask me about it sooner, rather than simply jumping in. Maybe I should have warned you.’ She looked at Miriam, searchingly.

  ‘It’s okay, Ma.’ Miriam covered Iris’s hand with her other.

  ‘No, it’s not okay,’ Iris insisted. ‘What I did was wrong! I should have – ’

  ‘Ma, shut up.’

  ‘If you insist.’ Iris gave her a curious half-smile. ‘This second knotwork design – I want to see that. Can you show me sometime?’

  ‘Sure.’ Miriam nodded. ‘Didn’t bring it with me, though.’

  ‘What are you going to do next?’

  ‘I’m – ’ Miriam paused. ‘I warned Angbard that if anybody touched a hair on your head, he was dead meat. But now there’s a second bunch after me, and I don’t have a hotline to their boss. I don’t even know who their boss is.’

  ‘Neither did Patricia,’ murmured Iris.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I’d have thought it was obvious,’ Iris pointed out quickly. ‘If she’d known, they wouldn’t have gotten near her.’ She shook her head. ‘A really bad business, that.’ For a moment she looked angry, and determined – the same expression Miriam had glimpsed in a mirror recently. ‘And it hasn’t gone away. Give me your secret phone number, girl.’

  ‘My secret – what?’

  ‘Okay, your dead-letter drop. So we can keep in touch when you go on your wanderings. You do want to keep your mom informed of what the enemies of freedom and civilization are up to, don’t you?’

  ‘Ma! Okay, here it is,’ she said, scribbling her new, sanitized cell number down on a piece of paper and sliding it over to Iris.

  ‘Good.’ Iris tucked it away quickly. ‘This locket you found – you think it goes somewhere else, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.’

  ‘To another world, where everything will of course be completely different.’ Iris shook her head. ‘As if two worlds wasn’t already one too many.’

  ‘And mystery assassins. Don’t forget the mystery assassins.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said her mother. ‘From what you’ve been telling me . . .’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t trust any of them. Not the Clan, not even the one you took to bed. They’re all – they sound like – a bunch of vipers. They’ll screw you as soon as you think you’re safe.’

  ‘Ma.’ Miriam began to blush. ‘Oh, I don’t trust them. At least, not to do anything with my best interests at heart.’

  ‘Then you’re smarter than I was at your age.’ Iris pulled on her gloves. ‘Give an old lady a lift home? Or at least, back to the woods? It’s a cold and scary night. Mind you, I may have forgotten to bring your red cloak, but any wolves who try to lay hands on this old granny will come off worse.’

  PAWNBROKER

  ‘It’s no good,’ said Miriam, rubbing her forehead. ‘All I get is crossed eyes, blurred vision, and a headache. It doesn’t work.’ She snapped the assassin’s locket closed in frustration.

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t work here,’ Brill suggested. ‘If it’s a different design?’

  ‘Maybe. Or then again, it’s a different design and it came through on the other side. How do I know where I’d end up if I did get it to work here?’ She paused, then looked at the locket. ‘Maybe it wasn’t real clever of me to try that here,’ she said slowly. ‘I really ought to cross over before I try it again. If there’s really a third world out there, how do we know there isn’t a fourth? Or more? How do we know that using it twice in succession brings you back to the place you departed from – that travel using it is commutative? It raises more questions than it answers, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes – ’ Brill fell silent.

  ‘Do you know anything about this?’ Miriam asked.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t – they never spoke about the possibility. Why should they? It was as much as anyone could do to travel between this world and the other, without invoking phantoms. Would testing a new sigil not be dangerous? If it by some chance carried you to another world where wild animals or storms waited . . .’

  ‘Someone must have tried it, mustn’t they?’

  ‘You would have to ask the elders. All I can tell is what I was told.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Miriam rubbed her forehead again, ‘if it works, it’ll be one hell of a lever to use with Angbard. I’ll just have to take this one and cross over to the other side before I try to go wherever its original owner came from. Then try from there.’

  ‘Can you do that?’ Brill asked.

  ‘Yes. But just one crossing gives me a cracking headache if I don’t take my pills. I figure I can make two an hour apart. But if I run into something nasty on the far side – wherever this one takes me – I’ll be in deep trouble if I need to get away from it in a hurry.’

  Malignant hypertension wasn’t a term she could use with Brill, but she’d seen what it could do to people. In particular she’d seen a middle-aged man who’d not bothered to take his antihypertensives. She’d been in the emergency room when the ambulance brought him in, eyes open and nobody home after the massive stroke. She’d been there when they turned the ventilator off and filled out the death certificate. She shook her
head. ‘It’ll take careful planning.’

  Miriam glanced at the window. Snow drifted down from a sky the color of shattered dreams. It was bitterly cold outside. ‘What I should do is go across, hole up somewhere and catch some sleep, then try to cross over the next day so I can run away if anything goes wrong. Trouble is, it’s going to be just as cold on the other side as it is here. And if I have to run away, I get to spend two nights camping in the woods, in winter, with a splitting headache. I don’t think that’s a really great idea. And I’m limited to what I can carry.’

  When’s Paulie due back? she wondered. She’ll be able to help.

  ‘What about a coaching house?’ Brill asked, practical-minded as ever.

  ‘A coaching – ’ Miriam stopped dead. ‘But I can’t – ’

  ‘There’s one about two miles down the road from Fort Lofstrom.’ Brill looked thoughtful. ‘We dress you as a, an oracle’s wife, summoned to a village down the coast to join your husband in his new parish. Your trap broke a wheel and – ’ She ran down. ‘Oh. You don’t speak Hoh’sprashe.’

  ‘Yup.’ Miriam nodded. ‘Doesn’t work well, does it?’

  ‘No.’ Brill wrinkled her nose. ‘What a nuisance! We could go together,’ she added tentatively.

  ‘I think we’ll have to do that,’ said Miriam. ‘Probably I play the deaf-mute mother and you play the daughter – I try to look older, you to look younger. Think it would work?’

  From Brilliana’s slow nod she realized that Brill did – and wasn’t enthusiastic about it. ‘It might.’

  ‘It would also leave you stranded in the back of beyond up near, where was it, Hasleholm, if I don’t come back, wouldn’t it?’ Miriam pointed out. ‘On the other hand, you’d be in the right place. You could make your way to Fort Lofstrom and tell Angbard what happened. He’d take care of you,’ she added. ‘Just tell him I ordered you to come along with me. He’ll swallow that.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back,’ Brilliana said evenly. ‘Not until I’ve seen more of this wonderful world.’