The Trade of Queens

disquieted. He’d seen what the Pervert’s army had left of the pretty little country house he’d bought, kicked the blood and ashes of Oest Hjalmar from his heels for a final time after he’d made the surviving peasants build a cairn from the ruins. He’d done his bit for Henryk, insuring the rebellious cow got knocked up on schedule for the handfasting after she stuck her nose in one too many corners where it didn’t belong; how was he to know the Pervert would respond by committing regicide, fratricide, patricide, homicide, and generally going apeshit?

But after that, things went even more askew. Somehow Angbard’s minions had conspired to put her on the fucking throne, the throne!—of all places—with a Praetorian guard of hardline progressivist thugs. And she knew. She’d dug and dug until she’d turned up the breeding program, figured out what it was for—almost as if she’d been pointed at it by someone. Figured out that Angbard had asked him to set up the liaison with the clinic, no doubt. Figured out that what was going on was a power struggle between the old bitches who arranged the marriage braids and the macho phalangist order of the Clan Security organization. Figured out that he was the fixer, the enabler, the Clan’s own medic and expert in reproductive technology who had given Angbard the idea, back when he was a young and foolish intern who didn’t know any better.…

His idea. The power of it still filled his age-tempered heart with bitter awe: The power to raise an army of world-walkers, to breed them and train them to obedience could have made him the most powerful man in the six—now unhappily seven—families. If he’d waited longer, realized that he stood on the threshold of his own success, he’d never have sought Angbard’s patronage, much less learned to his dismay how thoroughly that put him under the thin white duke’s thumb.

Stolen. Well he had, by god—by the Anglischprache’s dead god on a stick, or by Lightning Child, or whichever thrice-damned god really mattered (and who could tell)—he had stolen it back again. The bitch-queen Helge might have it in for him, and her thugs wouldn’t hesitate with the hot knives if they ever discovered his role in Hildegarde’s little gambit—but that was irrelevant now. He had the list. And he had a copy of the lost, hidden family’s knotwork emblem, a passport for travel to New Britain. And lastly, he had a piece of paper with a name and address on it.

James Lee had done his job well, during his exile among the Clan.

Finally satisfied with his appearance, Dr. ven Hjalmar walked to the door and opened it an inch. “I’m ready to go,” he said quietly.

Of the two stout, silent types standing guard, one remained impassive. The other ducked his head, obsequious—or perhaps merely polite in this society; Griben was no judge of strange mores—and shuffled hastily towards the end of the corridor.

The doctor retreated back to his room to wait. These were dangerous times, to be sure, and he had nearly fallen foul of muggers on his way here as it was; the distinction between prison guard and bodyguard might be drawn arbitrarily fine. In any case, the Lees had done him the courtesy of placing him in a ground-floor room with a window overlooking a walled garden; unless Clan Security was asleep at the switch and the Lees had been allowed to set up doppelganger installations, he was free to leave should he so choose. Of course, that might simply be yet another of their tests.…

There was a knock; then the door opened. “Good afternoon, Doctor.”

Ven Hjalmar nodded affably. “And the same to you, sir.” The elders were clearly taking him seriously, to have sent James Lee to conduct him to this meeting. James was one of the principal heirs. One-quarter ethnic Han by descent, he wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows in the other Anglische world: but the politics of race and ethnicity were very different here, and the Lee family’s long sojourn on the west coast of the Clan’s world among the peasants of the Middle Empire had rendered them conspicuous in the whitebread northeast of New Britain. “Chinese gangsters” was perhaps the nicest term the natives had for them, and despite their considerable wealth they perforce kept a low profile—much like Griben himself. “I trust it is a good afternoon?”

“I’ve had worse.” Lee held the door open. “The elders are waiting to hear your proposal in person, and there’s always the potential for—misunderstandings, in such circumstances. But we are all men of goodwill, yes?”

“Yes.” Ven Hjalmar smiled tightly. “And we all hold valid insurance policies. After you, no, I must insist. …”

*   *   *

The Lee family had fallen out of contact with the rest of the Clan most of two centuries ago—through betrayal, they had thought, although the case for cock-up over conspiracy was persuasive—and in that time they had come to do things very differently. However, some aspects of the operation were boringly familiar: an obsession with the rituals of hierarchy, pecking order, and tiresome minutiae of rank. As with the Clan, they relied on arranged marriages to keep the recessive genetic component of the world-walking trait strong. Like the Clan, they had fractured into a loose formation of families, first and second cousins intermarrying, with a halo of carriers clinging to their coattails. (Again, like the Clan, they practiced a carefully controlled level of exogamy, lest inbreeding for the world-walking trait reinforce other, less desirable ones.) Unlike the Clan, Mendelian genetics had made a late arrival—and actual modern reproductive genetics as practiced in the clinics of America was an unknown black art. Or so ven Hjalmar believed; in fact, he was betting his life on it.

*   *   *

“Speak to me of this breeding program,” said the old man on the mattress.

Ven Hjalmar stared at his beard. It straggled from the point of his chin, wispy but not too wispy, leaving his cheeks bare. Is that spirit gum? he wondered. The cheeks: There was something unnatural about their smoothness, as if powdered, perhaps to conceal the pattern of stubble. It would make sense perhaps, in an emergency, to be able to shed the formal robes, queue, and beard, to dissolve in the crowd.… “It was established by the Clan’s security division a generation ago,” he said slowly. “Normally the, the braid of marriages is managed by the elder womenfolk, matchmakers. But with a civil war only just dying down, the Clan’s numbers were diminished drastically.” It was surprisingly easy to slip into the habit of speaking of them as a third party, as them not us. Another creeping sign of exile.

“In America, to which they have access, medical science is very much more advanced than in the Gruinmarkt—or in New Britain. Childless couples can make discreet use of medical services to arrange for a child to be born, with one or other parent’s genes”—he used the alien word deliberately, throwing it into conversation without explanation—“to the wife, or to a host mother for adoption. The duke came to an arrangement with such a clinic, to discreetly insure that a number of such babies were born with the ability to pass on the world-walking gene to their own offspring. Records were kept. The plan was to approach the female offspring, as adults, and offer to pay them to be host mothers—paid handsomely, to bear a child for adoption. A child who would, thanks to the clinic, be a true world-walker, and be fostered by the Clan.”

The old lady to the right of the bearded elder tugged her robe fastidiously. Despite the cultivated air of impassivity, the stench of her disapproval nearly made the doctor cough. “They are unmarried, these host mothers?” she asked querulously.

Ven Hjalmar nodded. “They do things very differently in the United States,” he added.

“Ah.” She nodded; oddly, her disapproval seemed to have subsided. Must be some local custom.… He took note of it, nervously.

“As you can imagine, the Clan’s, ah, matchmakers”—he’d nearly said old women but caught himself at the last moment—“did not know of this scheme. It undermined their authority, threatening their rank and privilege. Furthermore, if it went to completion it would hugely undermine the noble families, for these new world-walkers would be brought into the Clan by the duke’s security apparatus, with no hereditary ties to bind them to the braids. The scheme found favor with the radical reformers who wished to integrate the Clan more tightly into America, but to those of us who had some loyalty to the old ways”—or who preferred to be bigger fish in a smaller pond—“it was most suspicious.”

The old man—Elder Huan, James Lee had whispered in his ear as they approached the chamber—nodded. “Indeed.” He fixed ven Hjalmar with a direct and unwavering gaze that was entirely at odds with the image he had maintained throughout the audience up to this point, and asked, “What do you want of us, Doctor?”

Ven Hjalmar did a double take. “Uh, well, as a doctor, the duke commanded my attendance. I obeyed, with