The Merchants’ War

“Be welcome, your grace. I had hoped to see you here. Rise, Otto. You are both welcome in this time of sorrow. I trust you have been apprised of the situation?” Niejwein’s left eyebrow levered itself painfully upwards.

“In outline,” Innsford conceded. “Otto was entertaining me in Oestgate when the courier reached us. We came at once.” They had ridden since an hour before dawn from thirty miles down the coast, nearly killing half a dozen mounts with their urgency. “Gunpowder and treason.” His lips quirked. “I scarcely credited it until I saw the wreckage.”

“His majesty blames the tinkers for bringing this down upon our heads,” Niejwein said bluntly.

“A falling out among thieves, perhaps?” Otto offered hopefully.

“Something like that.” Niejwein nodded, a secretive expression on his face. “His Majesty is most keen to inquire of the surviving tinkers the reason why they slew his father using such vile tools. Indeed, he views it as a matter of overwhelming urgency to purge the body of the kingdom of their witchery.”

“How many of the tinkers survived?” asked Innsford.

“Oh, most of them. Details are still emerging. But beside the death of his majesty’s father and his majesty’s younger brother—” Otto started at that point. “—it appears that his majesty is the only surviving heir for the time being.” Niejwein nodded to himself. “The queen mother is missing. Of the tinkers, the heads of three of their families were present, some eighteen nobles in total, including the bitch they planned to whelp by the Idiot—” Otto startled again, then contained himself. “—and sixty sundry gentles of other houses. The tinkers not being without allies.”

“But the main company of those families are untouched,” Innsford stated.

“For the time being.” Niejwein’s cheek twitched. Has he the palsy? Otto wondered. “As I said, his majesty—” Niejwein stopped and rose to his feet, turning to face one of the side panels. A moment later he dropped to one knee: Otto scrambled to follow suit.

“Rise, gentlemen.” Otto allowed himself to look up at his new monarch. The Pervert—no, forget you ever heard that name, on pain of your neck, he told himself—was every inch a prince: tall, hale of limb, fair of face, with a regal bearing and a knowing gleam in his eye. Otto, Baron Neuhalle, had known Egon since he was barely crawling. And he was absolutely terrified of him.

“Sire.” Innsford looked suitably grave. “I came as soon as I heard the news, to pledge myself to you anew and offer whatever aid you desire in your time of need.” Not grief, Otto noted.

Prince Egon—no, King Egon—smiled. “We appreciate the thought, and we thank your grace for your thoughtfulness. Your inclination to avoid any little misunderstandings is most creditable.”

“Sire.” Innsford nodded, suppressing any sign of unease.

Egon turned to Niejwein. “Is there any word of that jumped-up horse thief Lofstrom?” he asked offhandedly. Neuhalle kept his face still: to talk of Angbard, Duke Lofstrom, so crudely meant that the wind was blowing in exactly the direction Innsford had predicted. But then, it wasn’t hard to guess that the new monarch—who had hated his grandmother and never seen eye-to-eye with his father—would react viciously towards the single biggest threat to his authority over the kingdom.

“No word as yet, sire.” Niejwein paused. “I have sent out couriers,” he added. “As soon as he is located he will be invited to present an explanation to you.”

“And of my somewhat-absent chief of intelligence?”

“Nor him, sire. He was leading the party of the tinkers at the past evening’s reception, though. I believe he may still be around here.”

“Find proof of his death.” Egon’s tone was uncompromising. “Bring it to me, or bring him. And the same for the rest of the upstarts. I want them all rounded up and brought to the capital.”

“Sire. If they resist…?”

Egon glanced at Innsford. “Let us speak bluntly. The tinker vermin are as rich a target as they are a tough one, but they are not invulnerable and I will cut them down to size. Through magic and conspiracy, and by taking advantage of the good will of my forefathers, they’ve grown like a canker in my father’s kingdom. But I intend to put a stop to them. One tenth of theirs, your grace, will be yours if you serve me well. Another tenth for our good servant Niejwein here. The rest to be apportioned appropriately, between the Crown and its honest servants. Who will of course want to summon their families to attend the forthcoming coronation, and to take advantage of the security provided for them by the Royal Life Guards in this time of crisis.”

Neuhalle shrank inwardly, aghast. He wants hostages of us? He found himself nodding involuntarily. To do aught else would be to brand himself as a rebel, and it seemed that Egon had no intention of being the bluntest scythe in the royal barn: but to start a reign with such an unambiguous display of mistrust boded ill for the future.

“We are your obedient servants,” Innsford assured him.

“Good!” Egon smiled broadly. “I look forward to seeing your lady wife in the next week or two, before the campaign begins.”

“Campaign—” Neuhalle bit his tongue, but the prince’s eyes had already turned to him. And the prince was smiling prettily, as if all the fires of Hel didn’t burn in the imagination concealed by that golden boy’s face.

“Why, certainly there shall be a campaign,” Egon assured him, beaming widely. “There will be no room for sedition in our reign! We shall raise the nobility to its traditional status again, reasserting those values that have run thin in the blood of recent years.” He winked. “And to rid the kingdom of the proliferation of witches that have corrupted it is but one part of that program.” He gestured idly at the wooden framework taking place on the lawn outside the pavilion. “It’ll make for a good show at the coronation, eh?”

Neuhalle stared. What he had thought to be the framework of a temporary palace was, when seen from this angle, the platform and scaffold of a gallows scaled to hang at least a dozen at a time. “I’m sure your coronation will be a great day, sire,” he murmured. “Absolutely, a day to remember.”

A damp alleyway at night. Refuse in the gutters, the sickly-sweet stench of rotting potatoes overlaying a much nastier aroma of festering sewage. Stone walls, encrusted in lichen. The chink of metal on cobblestones, and a woman’s high, clear voice echoing over it: “I don’t believe this. Shit! Ouch.”

The woman had stumbled out of the shadows mere seconds ago, shaking her head and tucking away a small personal item. She wore a stained greatcoat over a black dress of rich fabric, intricate enough to belong on a stage play or in a royal court, but not here in a dank dead end: as she looked around, her forehead wrinkled in frustration, or pain, or both. “I could go back,” she muttered to herself, then took a deep breath: “or not.” She glanced up and down the alley apprehensively.

Another chink of metal on stone, and a cracked chuckle: “Well, lookee here! And what’s a fine girl like you doing in a place like this?”

The woman turned to stare into the darkness where the voice had spoken from, clutching her coat around her.

Another chuckle. “Let’s ask her, why don’t we?”

The woman—Countess Helge voh Thorold d’Hjorth, to her vast and squabbling extended family, plain Miriam Beckstein to herself—took a step backwards then stopped, brought up against the crumbling brick wall. Figures solidified out of the shadows beyond the flickering gaslight glow from the end of the alleyway. Her gaze darted across them as she fumbled with the pockets of her coat.

“Heya, pretty lady, what have you got for a growing boy?”

“Show us your tits!”

Miriam counted three of them as her eyes adapted to the darkness. It helped that she’d just stepped over, across a gap thinner than an atom—or greater than 10¹⁰²⁸ meters, depending how you measured it—from a lawn outside a burning palace, the night punctuated by the roar of cannon and the staccato cracking of the guards’ pistols. Three of them, she realized, a sick tension in the pit of her stomach, one of them’s on the ground, crouching, or…?

The standing figure came closer and she saw that he was skinny and short, not much more than a boy, bow- legged, his clothing ragged. At five foot six Miriam didn’t think of herself as tall, but she could almost look down on the top of his head. Unfortunately this also gave her a good view of the knife clutched in his right hand.

Desperation and a silvery edge of suppressed rage broke her paralysis. “Fuck off!” She stepped forward, away from the wall, hands balling into fists in her black velvet gloves. “Right, that’s it. I’ve had enough!”