The Merchants’ War

him, along with the queen, and one of his two daughters, by means of a petard.”

“They what?” Miriam sat down hard. “That’s crazy!”

“Yes, it was.” Erasmus nodded, calmly enough. “George Frederick himself pulled his dying father from the wreckage. He was already something of a reactionary, but not, I think, an irrational one—until the Black Fist murdered his parents.”

“But weren’t there guards, or something?” Miriam shook her head. What about the secret service? she wondered. If someone tried a stunt like that on a U.S. president it just wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be allowed to work. Numerous whack-jobs had tried to kill Clinton when he was in office: a number had threatened or actually tried to off the current president. Nobody had gotten close to a president of the United States since nineteen eighty-six. “Didn’t he have any security?”

“Oh yes, he had security. He was secure in the knowledge that he was the king-emperor, much beloved by the majority of his subjects. Does that surprise you? John Frederick goes nowhere without half a company of guards and a swarm of Polis agents, but his father relied on two loyal constables with pistols. They were injured in the attack, incidentally: one of them died later.”

He took a deep, shuddering breath, then another sip of the brandy. “The day after the assassination, a state of emergency was declared. Demonstrations ensued. On Black Monday, the seventeenth, a column of demonstrators marching towards the royal complex on Manhattan Island were met by dragoons armed with heavy steam repeaters. More than three hundred were killed, mostly in the stampede. We were…there, but on the outskirts, Annie and I. We had the boys to think of. We obviously didn’t think hard enough. The next day, they arrested me. My trial before the tribunal lasted eighteen minutes, by the clock on the courtroom wall. The man before me they sentenced to hang for being caught distributing our news sheet, but I was lucky. All they knew was that I’d been away from my workplace during the massacre, and I’d been limping when I got back. The evidence was merely circumstantial, and so was the sentence they gave me: twelve years in the camps.”

He took a gulp of the brandy and swallowed, spluttering for a moment. “Annie wasn’t so lucky,” he added.

“What? They hanged her?” Miriam leaned toward him, aghast.

“No.” He smiled sadly. “They only gave her two years in a women’s camp. I don’t know if you know what that was like…no? Alright. It was hard enough for the men. Annie died—” he stared into his glass “—in childbed.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Use your imagination,” Erasmus snapped. “What do you think the guards were like?”

“Oh god.” Miriam swallowed. “I’m so sorry.”

“The boys went to a state orphanage,” Erasmus added. “In Australia.”

“Enough.” She held up a hand: “I’m sorry I asked!”

The fragile silence stretched out. “I’m not,” Erasmus said quietly. “It was just a little bit odd to talk about it. After so long.”

“You got out…four years ago?”

“Nine.” He drained his glass and replaced it on the occasional table. “The camps were overfull. They got sloppy. I was moved to internal exile, and there was a—what your history book called an underground railway. ‘Erasmus Burgeson’ isn’t the name I was known by back then.”

“Wow.” Miriam stared at him. “You’ve been living under an assumed identity all this time?”

He nodded, watching her expression. “The movement provides. They needed a dodgy pawnbroker in Boston, you see, and I fitted the bill. A dodgy pawnbroker with a history of a couple of years in the camps, nothing serious, nothing excessively political. The real me they’d hang for sure if they caught him, these days. I hope you don’t mind notorious company?”

“I’m—” She shook her head. “It’s crazy.” You were writing for a newspaper, for crying out loud! Asking for voting rights and freedom of the press! And those are hanging offenses? “And if what you were campaigning for back then is crazy, so am I.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s the movement’s platform now? Is it still just about the franchise, and freedom of speech? Or have things changed?”

“Oh yes.” He was still studying her, she realized. “Eighty-six was a wake-up cry. The very next central council meeting that was held—two years later, in exile—announced that the existence of a hereditary crown was a flaw in the body politic. The council decreed that nothing less than the overthrow of the king-emperor and the replacement of their Lordships and Commons by a republic of free men and women, equal before the law, would suffice. The next day, the Commons passed a bill of attainder against everyone in the movement. A month after that the pope excommunicated us—he declared democracy to be a mortal sin. But by that time we already knew we were damned.”

Hot Pursuit

Another day, another Boston. Brill walked up the staircase to the front office and glanced around. “Where’s Morgan?” she demanded.

“He’s in the back room.” The courier folded his news sheet and laid it carefully on the desk.

“Don’t call ahead.” She frowned, then headed straight back to the other office, overlooking the back yard colocated with Miriam’s house’s garden in the other Boston, in New Britain.

The house—Miriam’s house, according to the deeds of ownership, not that it mattered much once she’d allowed her commercial submarine to surface in the harbor of the Clan’s Council deliberations—was a stately lump of shingle-fronted stonework with a view out over the harbor. But over here the building was distinctly utilitarian, overshadowed by a row of office towers. The architecture in New Britain was stunted by relatively high material and transport costs: planting fifty-thousand-ton lumps of concrete and steel on top of landfill was a relatively recent innovation in New Britain, and hadn’t corrupted their skyline yet. But this one was different.

Oskar was waiting outside the door to the rear office. He looked bored. The cut of his jacket failed to conceal his shoulder holster. “How long are you here for?”

“I came to see Morgan.” She stared him in the eye. “Then I need to cross over, get changed into native garb, and draw funds. I may be some time. It depends.”

“Cross over. Right.” Oskar twitched. “You know there’s a problem.”

“Problem?”

“You’d better ask the boss.” Oskar backed up, rapped on the door twice, then opened it for her.

“Who—” Morgan looked up. He had his feet up on the mahogany desk, a half-eaten burger at his right hand, and judging by his expression her appearance was deeply unwelcome.

“Hello there. Don’t let me keep you from your food.”

“Lady Brilliana!” He swung his feet down hastily, almost knocking his chair over in his hurry to stand up.

“Sit down.” She walked around the desk and pulled out the chair on his right, then sat beside him. “Oskar tells me there’s a problem. On the other side.”

Morgan twitched even more violently than Oskar had. “You’re telling me. Have you come to fix it?”

“Tell me about it first.”

“You haven’t—” He swallowed his words, but the look of dismay was genuine enough in her estimate.

“I need to cross over and run a search in New Britain,” she said evenly. “If there’s a problem with our main safe house in Boston, I need to know it.”

“The Polis—the security cops? They raided the house. We barely pulled everybody out in time.”

Brilliana swallowed a curse. “When was this?”

“Three days ago. I thought everyone knew—”

“Was it coordinated action?” she demanded.

Morgan shook himself, visibly trying to pull himself together. “I don’t think so,” he admitted. “The situation over there’s been going to the midden, frankly, and the Polis are running around looking for saboteurs and spies under every table. Six weeks ago they turned over the workshop and shut it down: some of the staff were arrested for sedition. We were already lying low—”

“What about Burgeson?” Brill demanded.

“Oh,” he said. “That.”