The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (37 page)

‘Get moving, girl,’ she told herself as she pushed off the wall and headed back toward the palace. ‘There’s no time to lose . . .’

PART FIVE

ENCOUNTER

The snow was falling thickly when Miriam reached the wall of the orangery, and she was shivering despite her leather jacket. It was dark, too, in a way that no modern city ever
was – there were no streetlights to reflect off the clouds, she realized, as she fumbled with her pocket flashlight. The gate was shut, and she had to tug hard to open it. Beyond the gate,
the vast width of the palace loomed out of the snow, row upon row of shuttered windows at ground level.

‘Damn,’ Miriam muttered in the wind. There were no guards. Wasn’t this the east wing, under the Thorold tower, where Olga was living? She glanced up at the towering mass of
stonework. The entrances were all round the front, but she’d attract unwelcome attention going in the main door. Instead she trudged over to the nearest window casement. ‘Hey –
’

It wasn’t a shuttered window: It was a doorway, designed to blend in with the building’s rear aspect. There was a handle and a discreet bell-pull beside it.

Cursing the architectural pretensions of whoever had designed this pile, Miriam tugged the rope. Something clanged distantly, behind the door. She stepped sideways and steeled herself, raising
her pistol with a sick sense of anticipation in her stomach.

Rattling and creaking. A slot in the door, near eye level, squeaked as it moved aside. ‘Wehr ish – ’ quavered a hoarse voice.

‘Unlock the door and step back now,’ Miriam said, aiming through the slot.

‘Sisch!’

‘
Now
.’ A click. Two terrified eyes stared at her for a moment, then dropped from view. Miriam kicked the door hard, feeling the impact jar through her foot.

For a miracle, the elderly caretaker had dropped the latch rather than shooting the bolt before he ran: Instead of falling flat on her ass with a sore ankle, Miriam found herself standing in a
dark hallway facing a door opposite.
Did he understand me?
She wondered. No time for that now. She darted forward, pulling the door closed behind her as she headed for the other end of the
short hall.

There she paused. There was a narrow staircase beside her, heading up into the recesses of the servants’ side of the wing, but the old guy who’d let her in – gardener or
caretaker? – had vanished through the door into the reception room off to one side. Which made her decision for her. Miriam took the stairs two at a time, rushed past the shut doors on the
first landing as lightly as she could and only paused on the second landing.

‘Where is everybody?’ she whispered aloud. There should be guards, bells ringing, whatever – she’d just barged in and instead of security all she’d encountered was
a frightened groundskeeper. The butterflies in her stomach hadn’t gone away: if anything they were stronger. Either her imagination was working overtime or something was very wrong.

There were doors up here, doors onto cramped rooms used by the servants, but also a side door onto the main staircase that crawled around the walls of the tower’s core, linking the suites
of the noble residents. It was chilly, and the solitary oil lamp mounted in a wall bracket hardly lightened the shadows, but it was enough to show Miriam which way to go. She pushed the side door
open and stepped out onto the staircase to get her bearings. It was no brighter in the main hall: the great chandelier was unlit and the lamps on each landing had been turned right down. Still, she
was just one flight of stairs below the door to Olga’s chambers. She was halfway to the landing before she noticed something wrong with the shadows outside the entrance. The door was open.
Which meant, if Brill had gotten through in time –

Miriam crept forward. The door was ajar, and something bulky lay motionless in the shadows behind it. The reception room it opened onto was completely dark, but instinct told her it wasn’t
empty. She paused beside the entrance, her heart hammering as she waited for her eyes to adjust.
If it’s another hit, that would explain the lack of guards,
she thought. Memories of
a stupid corporate junket – a ‘team building’ paintball tournament in a deserted office building that someone in HR thought sounded like fun – welled up, threatening her
with a sense of déjà vu. Very slowly, she looked round the edge of the door frame.

Something or someone clad in light-absorbing clothes was kneeling in front of the door at the far end of the room. Another figure stood to one side, the unmistakable outline of some kind of
submachine gun raised to cover the door.

They had their backs to her.
Sloppy, very sloppy
, she thought. Unless they knew there was nobody else in this wing because they’d all been sent away.

The inner door creaked and the kneeling figure stood up and flowed to one side.

Now there was another gun.
This is so not good
, Miriam realized queasily. She was going to have to do something. Visions of the assassin in the orangery raising his knife and moving
toward her – the two before her were completely focused on the door, preparing to make their move.

Then one of them looked round.

Afterward, Miriam wasn’t completely sure what had happened. Certainly she remembered squeezing the trigger repeatedly. The evil sewing-machine chatter of automatic fire wasn’t hers,
as it stitched a neat line of holes across the ceiling. She’d flinched, dazzled and deafened by the sudden noise, and there’d been more hammering and she’d fallen over, rolling
aside as fast as she could, then what sounded like a different gun. And silence, once she discounted the ringing in her ears.

‘Miriam?’ called Olga. ‘Is that you?’

I’m still alive
, she realized. Taking stock: If she was still alive, that meant the intruders weren’t. ‘Yes,’ she called faintly. ‘I’m out here.
Where are you?’

‘Get in here.
Quickly.
’

She took no second warning. Brill crouched beside the splintered wreckage of the door, a brilliant electric lamp held in one hand, while Olga stood to the other side. Her face cast sharp shadows
that flickered across the walls as she scanned the room, gun raised. ‘I am going to have harsh words with the baron,’ she said calmly as Miriam scurried toward them. ‘The guards
he assigned me appear to have taken their leave for the evening. Perhaps if I flog a few until the ivory shows, it will convince him of my displeasure.’

‘They’re not to blame,’ Miriam said hoarsely, feeling her stomach rise. The smell of burned cordite and blood hung in the air. ‘Brill?’

‘I brought Kara hither, my lady. I did as you told me.’

‘She did.’ Olga nodded. ‘To be truthful, we did not need your help with such as these.’ She jerked a thumb at the darkened corner of the room. ‘There’s an
alarm that Oliver does not know of, the duke insisted I bring it.’ The red eye of an infrared motion sensor winked at Miriam. ‘But I am grateful for the warning,’ she added
graciously.

‘I – ’ Miriam shuddered. ‘In the orangery. An assassin.’

‘What?’ Olga looked at her sharply. ‘Who – ’

‘They killed Margit. Sent a note to lure me there, but I was expecting trouble.’

‘That’s terrible!’ Brill looked appalled: The light swayed. ‘What are we going to – ’

‘Inside,’ Olga commanded. Brill retreated, and after a moment Miriam followed her. ‘Close the door!’ Olga called, and after a moment a timid serving maid scurried forward
and began to yank on it. ‘When it’s shut, bar it Then get that chest braced across it,’ Olga added, pointing to a wardrobe that looked to Miriam’s eyes to be built from most
of an oak tree. She stopped and turned to Miriam. ‘This was aimed at you, not me,’ she said calmly, lowering her machine pistol to point at the floor. ‘They’re getting
overconfident. Margit – ’ she shook her head – ‘Brilliana told me of the note, you are lucky to have escaped.’

‘What am I going to do?’ Miriam asked. She felt dizzy and sick, the room spinning around her head. There was a stool near the fireplace: She stumbled toward it tiredly and sat down.
‘Who sent them?’

‘I don’t know,’ Olga said thoughtfully.

A door in the opposite wall opened and Kara rushed in. ‘My lady! You’re hurt?’

‘Not yet,’ Miriam said, waving her away tiredly. ‘The killer in the orangery was of the Clan, he had a locket,’ she said.

‘That could tell us which braid he came from,’ Olga said. ‘Have you got it?’

‘I think – yes.’ Miriam pulled it out and opened it. ‘Oh.’

‘What is it?’ asked Olga, leaning close. ‘Oh my.’

Miriam stared at the locket. Inside it was a design like the knot-work pattern she was learning to loathe – but this one was subtly wrong. Different. A couplet with a different rhyme. One
that she knew, instinctively, at a gut level, would take her somewhere else if she stared at it too long and hard. Not to mention making her blood pressure spike so high it would give her an
aneurysm if she tried it in the next few hours.

She snapped it shut again and looked up at Olga. ‘Do you know what this means?’ she asked.

Olga nodded very seriously. ‘It means you and Brilliana will have to disappear,’ she said. ‘These two – ’ a sniff and a nod at the barricaded doorway –
‘are of no account, but this – ’ a glance at the locket – ‘might be the gravest threat to the Clan in living memory.’ She frowned uncertainly. ‘I had not
imagined that such a thing might exist. But if it does – ’

‘ – They must stop at nothing to kill anyone who knows they exist,’ said Brill, completing the thought for her. She looked at Miriam with bright eyes. ‘Will you take me
with you wherever you go, mistress? You’ll need someone to guard your back . . .’

*

Two hours later.

Painkillers and beta-blockers are wonderful things, Miriam reflected as she glanced over her shoulder at Brill. She’d managed to relax slightly as Olga organized a cleanup, marshaling a
barricade inside the doorway and chivvying Kara and the servants into making themselves useful. Then Olga had pointed out in words of one syllable what this meant: that two factions, at least one
of them hitherto unknown, were after her, and it would be a good idea to make herself scarce. Finally, still feeling fragile but now accommodating herself to the idea, Miriam had crossed over. With
her passenger. Who wore a smart business suit and an expression of mild bemusement. ‘Where are we?’ asked Brill.

‘The doppelgänger warehouse.’ Miriam frowned as she transferred her locket to her left hip pocket ‘Other side from my own chambers. Someone should have cleaned up by
now.’

Fidgeting in her pocket, she pulled out some cartridges. She shuffled quietly closer to the edge of the mezzanine and looked over the side as she reloaded her pistol.

‘This wasn’t what I expected,’ the younger woman said in hushed tones, staring up at the dim warehouse lights.

‘Stay quiet until I’ve checked it out.’ She let a sharp note creep into her voice. ‘We may not be alone here.’

‘Oh.’

Miriam crept to the edge of the platform and looked down. There was no sign of movement below, and the front door of the warehouse – past the dismounted trailer that served as a site
office – was shut. ‘Wait here. I’ll call you down when it’s safe,’ she said.

‘Yes, Miriam.’

She took a deep breath, then darted down the stairs lightly, her gun raised.

Nobody shot at her from concealment. She reached the bottom step and paused for a couple of seconds before stepping off the metal staircase onto dusty wooden floorboards, then duck-walked over
to the side of the site office, out of sight from its windows and the door. Creeping again, she sidled around the wall of the trailer and crouched next to the short flight of steps leading into it.
She spent about a minute staring at the threshold, then stood up slowly, lowered her gun, and carefully returned it to her jacket pocket. She rubbed her forehead, then turned. ‘You can come
down now, as long as you come right over here. Don’t touch anything with your hands.’

Brilliana stood up and dusted herself off, lips wrinkling in distaste as she tried to shake the warehouse cobwebs from the sleeve of her jacket. Then she walked down the stairs slowly, not
touching the guard rail. Her back was straight, as if she was making a grand entrance rather than a low-life departure.

Miriam pointed at the steps to the trailer. ‘Don’t, whatever you do, even think about going in there,’ she warned. Her expression was drawn. Brill sniffed, conspicuously, then
pulled a face in disgust.

‘What happened there?’

‘Someone was killed,’ Miriam said quietly. Then she bent down and pointed to something in the threshold. ‘Look. See that wire? It’s hair-thin. Don’t touch
it!’

‘What wire – oh.’

A fine wire was stretched across the threshold, twelve inches above the floor.

‘That wasn’t here when I came this way three hours ago,’ said Miriam. ‘And nobody’s been to clear up what’s inside. Going from what Roland was telling me,
that means that first, this is a trap, and second, it’s not the kind where someone’s going to jump out and start shooting at us, and third, if you touch that wire, we probably both die.
Wait here and don’t move or touch anything. I’m going to see if they’re belt-and-braces people.’

Miriam shuffled gingerly over toward the big wooden doors of the warehouse – there was a smaller access door set in the side of one of them – with her eyes focused on the ground in
front of her, every step of the way. Brill stayed where she was obediently, but when Miriam glanced at her, she was staring up at the lights, an odd expression on her face. ‘I’m over
here,’ she said. ‘I’m really on the other side!’

Miriam reached the inner door, bent low, looked up, and made a hissing noise through her teeth. ‘Damn!’

‘What is it?’ called Brill, shaking herself.

‘Another one,’ Miriam replied. Her face was ghost-white. ‘You can come over here and look. This is the way out.’

‘Oh.’ Brill walked over to the door, stopping short at Miriam’s warning hand gesture. She followed Miriam’s pointing finger, up at something in the shadows above the
door. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.