The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (40 page)

‘Well.’ Matthias leaned across his desk. ‘It’s a pity the cargo is laid over in Svarlberg while a storm blows itself out, isn’t it?’

‘Damn.’ Roland looked annoyed. ‘That’s recent, I take it?’

‘Two days ago. I did a spot inspection myself. Impressed Vincenze to carry me across for the past week. I think you’d better warn Wolfe that F-12 is going to be at least four days
late, possibly as much as seven.’

‘Damn.’ A nod. ‘Okay, I’ll do that. Usual disclaimers?’

‘It’s in the warranty fine print.’ Neither of them cracked a smile. The Clan provided its own underwriting service – one that more than made up for the usurious transport
charges it levied. The customer code-named Wolfe would damn well swallow the four- to seven-day delay and smile, because the cargo would arrive, one way or another, which was more than could be
said for most of the Clan’s competitors. If it didn’t, the Clan would pay up in full, at face value, no question. ‘We have a reputation to guard.’

‘I’ll get onto it.’ Roland pulled out a small notebook and scribbled a cryptic entry in it. He caught Matthias staring. ‘No names, no pack drill.’ He tucked the
notebook away carefully.

‘It’s good to know you can keep a secret.’

‘Huh?’

‘There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.’ He didn’t smile. ‘Look at this.’ Reaching into a desk drawer, Matthias pulled out a slim file binder
and slid it across the desk. Roland rose and collected it, sat down, opened it, and tensed, frowning.

‘Page one. Our prodigal dresses for dinner. Nice ass, by the way.’

A glare from the sofa. If looks could kill, Matthias would be ashes blowing on the wind.

‘Turn over. That’s her, leaving her room, shot from behind. Someone ought to tell her she oughtn’t to leave security camera footage lying around like that, someone might steal
it. Turn over.’ Reluctantly, he turned over. ‘That’s her, in the passageway to a room in – ’ Matthias coughed discreetly into his fist. ‘And over, and oh dear,
there seems to be a camera behind the bathroom mirror, doesn’t there? I wonder how that got there. And now if you turn over, you’ll see that – ’

Roland slammed the folder shut with an inarticulate growl, then slapped it down on the desk. ‘What’s your point?’ he demanded, shaking with anger. ‘What the fuck do you
want! Spying on me – ’

‘Sit down,’ snapped Matthias.

Roland sat, shoulders hunched.

‘You’ve put me on the spot, did you know that? I could show this to Angbard, you realize. In fact, I should show it to him. I’ve got a duty to show it to him. But I
haven’t – yet. I could show it to Lady Olga, too, but I think neither you nor she would care about that unless I embarrassed her publicly. Which would raise too many questions. What in
Lightning Child’s name were you thinking of, Roland?’

‘Don’t.’ Roland hunched forward, eyes narrowed in pain.

‘If Angbard sees this, he will rip you a new asshole. To be fair, he might rip her a new asshole too, but she’s better positioned to survive the experience. You – ’ he
shook his head. ‘I see a long future for you as Clan ambassador to a tribe of hairy-assed savages. For as long as any Clan ambassador lasts in one of those posts.’

‘You haven’t told him, though.’ Roland stared at the floor in front of the desk, trying to hide his suspicions. Surely Matthias wouldn’t be telling him this if he was
just going to go straight to the duke?

‘Well, no.’ His interrogator fell silent for a while. ‘I’m not a robot, you know. Loyal servant, yes – but I have my own ambitions.’

‘Ambitions?’ Roland looked up, his expression strained.

‘The Clan doesn’t offer an ideal career track for such as I.’ He shrugged. ‘I expect you to understand that better than most of them.’

Roland licked his lips. ‘What do you want?’ he asked quietly. ‘What are you after?’

‘I’m after the status quo ante.’ He picked up the file and slid it into a desk drawer. ‘Your little servant lass made waves where she shouldn’t have. I want her out
of the picture: I hasten to add, this doesn’t mean dead, it just means invisible.’

‘You want her to disappear.’ For an instant, an expression of hope flickered across Roland’s face.

‘Possibly.’ He nodded. ‘I think you’d like that – if you went with her. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Damn you, three years was all I had . . . !’

‘If you do as I say, then the folder and its contents – and all the other copies – will vanish. And the Clan won’t be able to touch you ever again. Either of you. What do
you say?’

Roland licked his lips. ‘I thought this was blackmail.’

‘What makes you think it isn’t?’

PART SIX

LEARNED COUNSEL

The committee meeting was entering its third hour when the king sneezed, bringing matters to a head. His Excellency Sir Roderick was speaking at the time of the royal spasm.
Standing at the far end of the table, before the red velvet curtains that sealed off the windows and the chill of the winter afternoon beyond, Sir Roderick leaned forward slightly, clutching his
papers to his bony chest and wobbling back and forth as he recited. His colorless manners matched his startling lack of skin and hair pigmentation: He kept his eyes downcast as he regurgitated a
seemingly endless stream of reports from the various heads of police, correspondents of intelligence, and freelance informers who kept his office abreast of news.

‘I beg your pardon.’ A valet flourished a clean linen handkerchief before the royal nose. John Frederick blinked, his expression pained. ‘Ah-
choo
!’ Although not
yet in middle age, the king’s florid complexion and burgeoning waistline were already giving rise to worries among his physiopaths and apothecaries.

Sir Roderick paused, awaiting the royal nod. The air in the room was heavy with the smell of beeswax furniture polish, and a faint oily overlay from the quietly fizzing gas lamps.
‘Sire?’

‘A moment.’ John Frederick, by grace of God king-emperor of New Britain and ruler of the territories and dependencies thereof, took a fresh handkerchief and waved off his equerry
while anxious faces watched him from all sides. He breathed deeply, clearly battling to control the itching in his sinuses. ‘Ah. Where were we? Sir Roderick, you have held the floor long
enough – take a seat, we will return to you shortly. Lord Douglass, this matter of indiscipline among the masses troubles me. If the effects of the poor grain harvest last year are not
mitigated in the summer, as your honorable colleague forecasts’ – a nod at Lord Scotia, minister for rural affairs – ‘then there will be fertile soil for the ranters and
ravers to till next autumn. Is there any risk of a
domestic
upset?’

Lord Douglass ran a wrinkled hand across his thinning hair as he considered his reply. ‘As your majesty is doubtless aware – ’ He paused. ‘I had hoped to discuss this
matter after hearing from Sir Roderick. If I may beg your indulgence?’ At the royal nod, he leaned sideways. ‘Sir Roderick, may I ask you to rapidly summarize the domestic
situation?’

‘By your leave, your majesty?’ Sir Roderick cleared his throat, then addressed the room. ‘Your majesty, my right honorable friends, the domestic condition is currently under
control, but there are an increasing number of reports of nonconformist ranters in the provinces. In the past month alone the royal police have apprehended no less than two cells of Levelers, and
uncovered three illicit printers – one in Massachusetts, one in your majesty’s western New Provinces, and one in New London itself.’ A whisper ran around the table: It was an open
secret that the cellar press in the capital could print whatever they liked with only loose control, except for the most blatantly slanderous rumors and Leveler sedition. For there to be raids, the
situation must be far worse than normal. ‘This ignores the usual rumbling in the colonies and dominions. Finally, police operations uncovered a plot to blow up the Western Summer Palace at
Monterey – I would prefer not to discuss this in open cabinet until we have resolved the situation. Someone or something is stirring up Leveler activists, and there have been rumors of French
livres greasing the wheels of treason. Certainly it takes money to run subversive presses or buy explosives, and it must be coming from somewhere.’

Sir Roderick sat down, and Lord Douglass rose. ‘Your majesty, I would say that if adventures are contemplated overseas, and if this should coincide with a rise in the price of bread, the
introduction of new taxes and duties,
and
an outburst of Leveler ranting, I should not like to face the consequences without the continental reserves at Fort Victoria ready to entrain for
either coast, not to mention securing the loyalty of the local regiments in each parliamentary district.’

‘Well, then.’ The king frowned, his forehead wrinkling as if to withstand another fit of sneezing: ‘We shall have to see to such measures, shall we not?’ He leaned
forward in his chair. ‘But I want to hear more on this matter of where the homegrown thorns in our crown are obtaining their finances. It seems to me that if we can snip this odious weed in
the bud, as it were, and demonstrate to the satisfaction of our peers the meddling of the dauphin at work in our garden, then it will certainly serve our purposes. Lord Douglass?’

‘By all means, your majesty.’ The prime minister glanced at his minister for special affairs. ‘Sir Roderick, if you please, can you see to it?’

‘Of course, my lord.’ The minister inclined his head toward his monarch. ‘As soon as we have something more than rumor and suspicion, I will place it before your
majesty.’

‘Now if we may return to the agenda?’ The prime minister suggested.

‘Certainly.’ The king nodded his assent, and Lord Douglass cleared his throat, to continue with the next point on an afternoon-long agenda. The meeting continued and in every way
beside the sneezing fit it seemed a perfectly normal session of the Imperial Intelligence Oversight Committee, held before His Imperial Majesty John the Fourth, king of New Britain and dominions,
in the Brunswick Palace on Manhattan Island in the early years of the twenty-first century. Time would show otherwise . . .

*

On the other side of a flipped coin’s fall, in an office two hundred miles away in space and perhaps two thousand years away from the court of King John in terms of
historical divergence, another meeting was taking place.

‘A shoot-out.’ The duke’s tone of voice, normally icily deliberate, rose slightly as he abandoned his chair and began to pace the confines of his office. He paused beneath a
pair of steel broadswords mounted on the wall above a battered circular shield. ‘In the summer palace?’ His tone hardened. ‘I find it hard to believe that this was allowed to
happen.’ He looked up at the swords. ‘Who was supposed to be in charge of her guard?’

The duke’s secretary – his keeper of secrets – cleared his throat. ‘Oliver, Baron Hjorth, is of course responsible for the well-being of all beneath his roof. In
accordance with your orders I requested that he see to Lady Helge’s security.’ A moment’s pause to let the implication sink in. ‘Whether he complied with your orders bears
investigation.’

The duke stopped pacing, standing in front of the broad picture windows that looked out across the valley below the castle. Heavily forested and seemingly empty of human habitation, the river
valley ran all the way to the coast, marking the northern border of the sprawling kingdom of Gruinmarkt from the Nordmarkt neighbors to the north. ‘And the Lady Olga?’

‘She protests in the strongest terms, my lord.’ The secretary shrugged slightly, his face expressionless. ‘I sent Roland to attend to her personally, to ensure she is
adequately protected. For what it’s worth, there were no identifying marks on the bodies. No tattoos, no indications of who they were. Not Clan. But they had weapons and equipment from the
other side and I am – startled – that Lady Olga, even with help from our runaway, survived the incident.’

‘Our
runaway
is my niece, Matthias,’ the duke reminded his secretary. ‘A rather extraordinary woman.’ His expression hardened. ‘I want tissue samples,
photographs, anything you can come up with. For the hit squad. Get them processed on the other side, run them across the FBI most-wanted database, pull whatever strings you can find, but I want to
know who they were and who they thought they were working for. And how they got there. The palace was supposed to be securely doppelgängered. Why wasn’t it?’

‘Ah. I have already looked into that.’ Matthias waited.

‘Well then?’ The duke clenched his hands.

‘About three years ago, Baroness Hildegarde ordered our agents – via the usual shell company – to let out one side of the doppel-gänger facility to a secondary Clan-owned
shipping company she was setting up. It was all above board and conducted in public at Beltaigne, approved in full committee, but the shipping company moved away a year later to more suitable
purpose-built facilities, and they in turn sublet the premises. It was walled off from the original bonded store and converted into short-lease storage, leaving it wide open. Purely coincidentally,
it covered the New Tower, and parts of the west wing of the palace were left undoppelgängered. Helge wouldn’t have known enough to recognize this as unusual, but it left most of her
suite wide open to attack by world-walkers.’

‘And where was Oliver, Baron Hjorth, while this was going on?’ the duke asked, deceptively mildly. A failure to doppelgänger the palace correctly – to ensure that it was
physically collocated with secure territory in the other universe to which the world-walking and occasionally squabbling members of the Clan had access – was not a trivial oversight, not
after the bloody civil war that had killed three out of every four members of the six families only a handful of decades ago.

‘He was worrying about roofing costs, I imagine.’ Matthias shrugged again, almost imperceptibly. ‘If he even knew about it. After all, what does security matter if the building
caves in?’

‘If.’ The duke frowned. ‘That slime-weasel Oliver is in Baroness Hildegarde’s pocket, you mark my words. An unfortunate coincidence that they can both deny responsibility
for, and Helge is left facing assassins? It’s almost insultingly convenient. She’s getting slack – we shall have to teach her a lesson in manners.’