The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (2 page)

‘Yes, Mother.’

After a couple of minutes, the duchess spoke. ‘You’re not happy.’

‘No.’

‘And it’s not just – him.’

‘Correct.’ Her hem twitched once more before Helge managed to control the urge to tap.

The duchess sighed. ‘Do I have to drag it out of you?’

‘No, Iris.’

‘You shouldn’t call me that here. Bad habits of thought and behavior.’

‘Bad? Or just inappropriate? Liable to
send the wrong message
?’

The duchess chuckled. ‘I should know better than to argue with you!’ She looked serious. ‘The wrong message in a nutshell.
Miriam can’t go home, Helge
. Not now,
maybe not ever. Thanks to that scum-sucking rat-bastard defector the entire Clan network in Massachusetts is blown wide open and if you even
think
about going – ’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, there’ll be an FBI SWAT team staking out my backyard and I’ll vanish into a supermax prison so fast my feet won’t touch the ground. If I’m
lucky,’ she added bitterly. ‘So everything’s locked down like a Code Red terrorist alert; the only way I’m allowed to go back to our world is on a closely supervised courier
run to an underground railway station buried so deep I don’t even see daylight; if I want anything – even a box of tampons – I have to
requisition
it and someone in the
Security Directorate has to fill out a risk assessment to see if it’s safe to obtain; and, and . . .’ Her shoulders heaved with indignation.

‘This is what it was like the whole time, during the civil war,’ the duchess pointed out.

‘So people keep telling me, as if I’m supposed to be grateful! But it’s not as if this is my
only
option. I’ve got another identity over in world three and
– ’

‘Do they have tampons there?’

‘Ah.’ Helge paused for a moment. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said slowly. ‘But they’ve got cotton wool.’ She fumbled for a moment, then pulled out
a pen-sized voice recorder. ‘Memo: business plans. Investigate early patent filings covering tampons and applicators. Also sterilization methods – dry heat?’ She clicked the
recorder off and replaced it. ‘Thanks.’ A lightning smile that was pure Miriam flashed across her face. ‘I should be over there. World three is my project. I set up the company
and I ought to be managing it.’

‘Firstly, our dear long-lost relatives are over there,’ the duchess pointed out. ‘Truce or not, if they haven’t got the message yet, you could show your nose over there
and get it chopped off. And secondly . . .’

‘Ah, yes. Secondly.’

‘You know what I’m going to say. So please don’t shoot the messenger.’

‘Okay.’ Helge turned her head to stare moodily out of the nearest window. ‘You’re going to tell me that the political situation is messy. That if I go over there right
now some of the more jumpy first citizens of the Clan will get the idea that I’m abandoning the sinking ship, aided and abetted by my
delightful
grandmother’s whispering
campaign – ’

‘Leave the rudeness to me. She’s my cross to bear.’

‘Yes, but.’ Helge stopped.

Her mother took a deep breath. ‘The Clan, for all its failings, is a very democratic organization.
Democratic
in the original sense of the word. If enough of the elite voters
agree, they can depose the leadership, indict a member of the Clan for trial by a jury of their peers, issue bills of attainder – anything. Which is why appearances, manners, and social
standing are so important. Hypocrisy is the grease that lubricates the Clan’s machinery.’ Her cheek twitched. ‘Oh yes. While I remember, love, if you are accused of anything
never,
ever
, insist on your right to a trial by jury. Over here, that word does not mean what you think it means. Like the word
secretary
. Pah, but I’m woolgathering!
Anyway. My mother, your grandmother, has a constituency, Miri – Helge. Tarnation. Swear at me if I slip again, will you, dear? We need to break each other of this habit.’

Helge nodded. ‘Yes, Iris.’

The duchess reached over and swatted her lightly on the arm. ‘Patricia! Say my full name.’

‘Ah.’ Helge met her gaze. ‘All right. Your grace is the Honorable Duchess Patricia voh Hjorth d’Wu ab Thorold.’ With mild rebellion: ‘Also known as Iris
Beckstein, of 34 Coffin Street – ’

‘That’s enough!’ Her mother nodded sharply. ‘Put the rest behind you for the time being. Until – unless – we can ever go back, the memories can do nothing but
hurt us. You’ve got to live in the present. And the present means living among the Clan and deporting yourself as a, a countess. Because if you don’t do that, all the alternatives on
offer are drastically worse. This isn’t a rich world, like America. Most women only have one thing to trade: as a lady of the Clan you’re lucky enough to have two, even three if you
count the contents of your head. But if you throw away the money and the power that goes with being of the Clan, you’ll rapidly find out just what’s under the surface – if you
survive long enough.’

‘But there’s no limit to the amount of shit!’ the younger woman burst out, then clapped a hand to her face as if to recall the unladylike expostulation.

‘Don’t chew your nails, dear,’ her mother said automatically.

*

It had started midmorning. Miriam (who still found it an effort of will to think of herself as Helge, outside of social situations where other people expected her to
be
Helge) was tired and irritable, dosed up on ibuprofen and propranolol to deal with the effects of a series of courier runs the day before when, wearing jeans and a lined waterproof jacket heavy
enough to survive a northwest passage, she’d wheezed under the weight of a backpack and a walking frame. They’d had her ferrying fifty-kilogram loads between a gloomy cellar of
undressed stone and an equally gloomy subbasement of an underground car park in Manhattan. There were armed guards in New York to protect her while she recovered from the vicious migraine that
world-walking brought on, and there were servants and maids in the palace quarters back home to pamper her and feed her sweetmeats from a cold buffet and apply a cool compress for her head. But the
whole objective of all this attention was to soften her up until she could be cozened into making another run.
Two
return trips in eighteen hours. Drugs or no drugs, it was brutal: without
guards and flunkies and servants to prod her along she might have refused to do her duty.

She’d carried a hundred kilograms in each direction across the space between two worlds, a gap narrower than atoms and colder than light-years. Lightning Child only knew what had been in
those packages. The Clan’s mercantilist operations in the United States emphasized high-value, low-weight commodities. Like it or not, there was more money in smuggling contraband than works
of art or intellectual property. It was a perpetual sore on Miriam’s conscience, one that only stopped chafing when for a few hours she managed to stop being Miriam Beckstein, journalist, and
to be instead Helge of Thorold by Hjorth, Countess. What made it even worse for Miriam was that she was acutely aware that such a business model was stupid and unsustainable. Once, mere weeks ago,
she’d had plans to upset the metaphorical applecart, designs to replace it with a fleet of milk tankers. But then Matthias, secretary to the Duke Angbard, captain-general of the Clan’s
Security Directorate, had upset the applecart first, and set fire to it into the bargain. He’d defected to the Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States of America. And whether or not
he’d held his peace about the real nature of the Clan, a dynasty of world-walking spooks from a place where the river of history had run a radically different course, he had sure as hell shut
down their eastern seaboard operations.

Matthias had blown more safe houses and shipping networks in one month than the Clan had lost in the previous thirty years. His psycho bagman had shot and killed Miriam’s lover during an
attempt to cover up the defection by destroying a major Clan fortress. Then, a month later, Clan security had ordered Miriam back to Niejwein from New Britain, warning that Matthias’s allies
in that timeline made it too unsafe for her to stay there. Miriam thought this was bullshit, but bullshit delivered by men with automatic weapons was bullshit best nodded along with, at least until
their backs were turned.

Midmorning loomed. Miriam wasn’t needed today. She had the next three days off, her corvée paid. Miriam could sleep in, and then Helge would occupy her time with education. Miriam
Beckstein had two college degrees, but Countess Helge was woefully uneducated in even the basics of her new life. Just learning how to live among her recently rediscovered extended family was a
full-time job. First, language lessons in the Hochsprache vernacular with a most attentive tutor, her lady-in-waiting Kara d’Praha. Then an appointment for a fitting with her dressmaker,
whose ongoing fabrication of a suitable wardrobe had something of the quality of a Sisyphean task. Perhaps if the weather was good there’d be a discreet lesson in horsemanship (growing up in
suburban Boston, she’d never learned to ride): otherwise, one in dancing, deportment, or court etiquette.

Miriam was bored and anxious, itching to get back to her start-up venture in the old capital of New Britain where she’d established a company to build disk brakes and pioneer automotive
technology transfer. New Britain was about fifty years behind the world she’d grown up in, a land of opportunity for a sometime tech journalist turned entrepreneur. Helge, however, was
strangely fascinated by the minutiae of her new life. Going from middle-class, middle-American life to the rarefied upper reaches of a barely postfeudal aristocracy meant learning skills
she’d never imagined needing before. She was confronting a divide of five hundred years, not fifty, and it was challenging.

She’d taken the early part of the morning off to be Miriam, sitting in her bedroom in jeans and sweater, her seat a folding aluminum camp chair, a laptop balanced on her knees and a mug of
coffee cooling on the floor by her feet.
If I can’t do, I can at least plan
, she told herself wryly. She had a lot of plans, more than she knew what to do with. The whole idea of
turning the Clan’s business model around, from primitive mercantilism to making money off technology transfer between worlds, seemed impossibly utopian – especially considering how few
of the Clan elders had any sort of modern education. But without plans, written studies, costings and risk analyses, she wasn’t going to convince anyone. So she’d ground out a couple
more pages of proposals before realizing someone was watching her.

‘Yes?’

‘Milady.’ Kara bent a knee prettily, a picture of instinctive teenage grace that Miriam couldn’t imagine matching. ‘You bade me remind you last week that this eve is the
first of summer twelvenight. There’s to be a garden party at the Östhalle tonight, and a ball afterward beside, and a card from her grace your mother bidding you to attend her this
afternoon beforehand.’ Her face the picture of innocence she added, ‘Shall I attend to your party?’

If Kara organized Helge’s carriage and guards then Kara would be coming along too. The memories of what had happened the last time Helge let Kara accompany her to a court event nearly made
her wince, but she managed to keep a straight face: ‘Yes, you do that,’ she said evenly. ‘Get Mistress Tanzig in to dress me before lunch, and my compliments to her grace my
mother and I shall be with her by the second hour of the afternoon.’ Mistress Tanzig, the dressmaker, would know what Helge should wear in public and, more important, would be able to alter
it to fit if there were any last-minute problems. Miriam hit the save button on her spreadsheet. ‘Is that the time? Tell somebody to run me a bath; I’ll be out in a minute.’

So much for the day off
, thought Miriam as she packed the laptop away.
I suppose I’d better go and be Helge
. . .

*

‘Have you thought about marriage?’ asked the duchess.

‘Mother! As if!’ Helge snorted indignantly and her eyes narrowed. ‘It’s been about, what, ten weeks? Twelve? If you think I’m about to shack up with some golden boy
so soon after losing Roland – ’

‘That wasn’t what I meant, dear.’ ‘What do you mean, then?’

‘I meant . . .’ The duchess glanced at her sharply, taking stock: ‘The, ah, noble institution. Have you thought about what it
means
here? And if so, what did you
think?’

‘I thought’ – puzzlement wrinkled Helge’s forehead – ‘when I first arrived, Angbard tried to convince me I ought to make an alliance of fortunes, as he put
it. Crudely speaking, to tie myself to a powerful man who could protect me.’ The wrinkles turned into a full-blown frown. ‘I nearly told him he could put his alliance right where the
sun doesn’t shine.’

‘It’s a good thing you didn’t,’ her mother said diplomatically.

‘Oh, I know that now! But the whole deal here creeps me out. And then.’ Helge took a deep breath and looked at the duchess: ‘There’s you, your experience. I really
don’t know how you can stand to be in the same room as her grace your mother, the bitch! How she could – ’

‘Connive at ending a civil war?’

‘Sell off her daughter to a wife-beating scumbag is more the phrase I had in mind.’ Helge paused. ‘Against her wishes,’ she added. A longer pause. ‘Well?’

‘Well,’ the duchess said quietly. ‘Well, well. And well again. Would you like to know how she did it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Well, whether you want to or not, I think you need to know,’ Iris – Patricia, the duchess Patricia, said. ‘Forewarned is forearmed, and no, when I was your age –
and younger –
I
didn’t want to know about it, either. But nobody’s offering to trade you on the block like a piece of horseflesh. I should think the worst they’ll
do is drop broad hints your way and make the consequences of noncooperation irritatingly obvious in the hope you’ll give in just to make them go away. You’ve probably got enough clout
to ignore them if you want to push it – if it matters to you enough. But whether it would be
wise
to ignore them is another question entirely.’