The Revolution Business

world-walk'and so they planned to breed from him a king who would be one of their own. Egon took as dim a view of this marriage as you would expect, and the result was bound to be messy. Although I did not realize how drastically he would react at the time.'

He reached out and picked up the cup of tea, then took a sip before continuing.

'I intervened at the betrothal by presenting the eastern hei rHelge, as they call her, Miriam, in her own tongue-with a locket containing our house sigil. She had made it clear that she felt no filial piety, and wished to escape. I therefore concluded that there was no reason to kill her if it was her heart's desire to do what we wanted: I merely gave her the means. I confess that I did not anticipate Egon's attempt to massacre everybody at the ceremony-but by now either she's dead or in exile, so our goal is achieved without her blood on our hands.'

'About the massacre.' Great-Uncle Huan leaned forward. 'You were present, were you not?'

James nodded.

'How did you escape?'

Another sip of tea: 'The situation was confused. When Egon's men detonated a petard beneath the palace and then attacked, the royal life guards fought back. While this was going on, those of the Clan's leaders who were present made themselves scarce. They left their dead behind. I hid under a table until I could get out, using my spare sigil.' With one hand, James reached into the sleeve of his robe. Now or never. He pulled out a small gilded locket on a fine chain. 'Before I left, I removed this from the body of a dead baron. It's the authentic sigil of the eastern Clan. I have tested it myself.' He laid it on the dais before the eldest. 'I brought it here directly.'

He sat back to wait, straining to reveal no sign of his inner tension. It's like trying not to think of invisible elephants, Helge's mother Patricia had told him with a twinkle in her eyes. All you have to do is learn to ignore the elephant in the room. Which was perfectly true, but when the elephant in question was the huge lie you'd just told the patriarch of your family, that was easier said than done. The background was true enough, if one chose to overlook some judicious omissions. But his escape-that was another matter. Yes, he'd hidden under a table, shivering and concussed. But it had been one of the eastern Clan's soldiers who'd carried him across to that strange doppelganger city of New York, and it had been a very much alive Lady Olga Thorold who had gifted him with the locket, in return for certain undertakings. Because, when you got down to it, sometimes treachery was a two-way street.

The elders stared at the locket greedily but with trepidation, as if it might bite. 'This is definitely the sigil of the eastern Clan?' the eldest asked, in a tone of almost superstitious disbelief. 'Have you compared it to our own?'

James stifled a gasp of relief. 'Not directly, uncle,' he admitted. 'It allowed me to travel, and its bite is the same-I think it subtly different, but I thought it best to leave the comparison to someone who knows nothing of our ways.'

The eldest nodded thoughtfully, then looked up. 'Leave us,' he said, encompassing everyone in the room but his brother, his brother's wife, and James. There was a mass exodus towards the doors at the back of the day room as various servants and no few guards bowed themselves out, but presently the shuffling and whispering died down. Finally, his great-uncle spoke again. 'Do they know you live, nephew?'

The implied claim in his familial loyalty nearly made James overlook the implicit threat in the question. 'I don't believe so, uncle, but I may be mistaken,' he said politely. 'I stand ready to return to them if you so order it.' He might have said more, but instead bit his lower lip, waiting. He'd spent more than six months living among the eastern families as a hostage: His disappearance might be taken as a sign of treachery. Might. Except the events of that fateful night a week ago would make a perfect excuse for absence-one that would be accepted, unquestioned, if Olga was in a position to hold her patron to his side of their bargain. On the other hand, if he returned to the Clan too soon he'd be unable to make good his side of their pact. It was, all in all, a delicate situation.

'You broke their parole.' Great-Uncle Huan's eyes narrowed accusingly.

'He had good reason,' Number One Wife remonstrated.

'Humph.' Huan slouched sideways on his cushion. 'Still looks bad.'

'Appearances are everything,' the eldest agreed. 'Nephew, we will think on this. I believe, however, it would be for the best if you wrote a letter to the eastern Clan's elders, perhaps to the white duke himself, explaining your absence. Apologize, remind him of the circumstances that caused you to flee, and ask whether their security will be able to guarantee your safety upon your return.' He smiled, evidently amused. 'Shame them for forcing you into an act of cowardice.'

James bowed his head. 'I'll do that.' He paused. 'Do you expect me to return?'

'Only if they can guarantee your safety.' Eldest's smile widened. He picked up the locket. 'You've done excellent work already, my nephew. I wish we'd been able to persuade them to provide bed, board, and bodyguards for our spies back in my father's day. It would have made things so much more entertaining…'

The sun had long since set behind the battlements of the Hjalmar Palace, and the besieging forces had settled down to intermittent sniping, seemingly intent on making the defenders keep their heads down. Which might be good news or bad news, Lady Olga thought, depending on whether they were doing so to conserve ammunition for an attack, or simply planning on keeping the Clan security force bottled up indefinitely. The former seemed likely: The usurper had demonstrated a dismaying talent for keeping the Clan on the back foot.

Not that a prolonged siege was in any way preferable. The usurper's army had taken the castle by stealth, planted explosives, and nearly succeeded in mousetrapping the Clan's inevitable counterattack. Only the extreme paranoia of Clan security's leadership (who had prepared a secret way in, against the possibility of treachery) and the professionalism of their assault team (who had found and defused the explosive charges) had stopped them massacring the counterattack. But the situation was far from resolved. Egon's men had an unpleasant additional surprise for the Clan forces, in the shape of a handful of machine guns-presumably looted from some Clan arms dump earlier in the war-dug in on top of the castle's gatehouse. The enemy were still clinging on to the gatehouse- largely because Clan security didn't have enough spare troops to mount a frontal attack on what was effectively a small castle in its own right-and so they were forced to keep their heads down and stay away from the front windows of the inner keep.

What the enemy weren't to know was that the Clan's main mobile strength was bottled up in the castle: The doppelganger site in the United States was knee-deep in Special Forces troops, for the secret cross-agency task force set up to track down the Clan had spotted their hastily prepared operation and brought the hammer down hard.

And that was the good news.

Olga turned and paced back across the width of the stone-flagged hall, past the map-strewn table and the improvised command and control station where hollow-eyed radio technicians tried to pull useful information together from the walkie-talkie equipped guards on the outer hard-points, to the cluster of men standing around the foot of the table. 'Earl Hjorth. Earl Wu. Lieutenant Anders.' She nodded and smiled agreeably, trying to maintain a facade of confidence. Angbard's valkyrie, they called her behind her back; a nickname freighted with significance, and one she'd have to work doubly hard to live up to when they learned the truth. 'What word from Riordan?' she asked.

'Nothing in the past ten minutes.' Carl, Earl of Wu by Hjorth, and captain of the Clan's security service, rubbed his mustache. A blunt, bulky fellow, his usually ruddy features showed signs of sagging under the burden of responsibility that had landed on his shoulders. 'Riordan tells me the plane's not equipped for night flying and they're running short of fuel-we're at the extremity of its flight radius, and they didn't have much stockpiled.

It's not a real airborne detachment: We wouldn't have it at all except that Rudi pursued his hobby despite official discouragement… Well, that's a question for another time. Right now, we're not getting anything in or out tonight. I've got guards with infrared sights on all four bastions and the gatehouse, with continuous radio coverage and M249 sections to cover the approaches, but the enemy have got the sally ports pinned down, and they brought down the riverside culvert so we can't sneak anyone out that way. All the early warning we've got is what we can see from the walls.'

'That's going to do us a lot of good if the pretender shows up with an army in the middle of the night,' Oliver, Earl Hjorth, said sharply.

'I don't think that's very likely,' pointed out Sir Helmut Anders, a portly figure in the camouflage surcoat he wore over his body armor. 'He can't be closer than Wergatsfurt and it'll take him a day to move a large force from