The Merchants’ War

you’re just going to burn me anyway, aren’t you?” He glared at Otto with all the hollow bravado he could muster. “I’m no traitor!”

“Perhaps.” Otto glanced towards the stand of trees that concealed his position from the castle’s outermost watch-towers. “But you’re not one of them, either. You don’t have their blood-spell, you’d never have inherited their wealth, all you are to them is a servant. A dead, loyal servant—the moment my men find another straggler who’s willing to listen to reason.” He turned back to the prisoner. “It’s quite simple. Show me the way in and I’ll have Magar here turn you loose in the woods, a mile downstream of here. We never met, and nobody saw you. Or.” He shrugged: “We hold you for the king. I hear he’s a traditionalist; takes a personal interest in the old folkways. And he doesn’t approve of people who put his arms-men to the trouble of laying siege to a castle. If you’re lucky he’ll hang you.” Otto paused for effect. “I hear he holds with the Blood Eagle for traitors.” His nose wrinkled: the kid had pissed himself. And fainted.

“You mean to scare him to death, sir?” asked Magar, toeing the prone prisoner with professional disdain: “Because if so, I can go fetch a burial detail…”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” Otto peered at the unconscious boy. The Pervert’s carefully cultivated reputation for perpetrating unspeakable horrors on people who crossed him had certainly come in useful on this campaign, he reflected: All I have to do is hint about his majesty and they just fall apart on me. It was an interesting lesson. “You understand that when I said you’d turn him loose in the woods, I didn’t promise that you wouldn’t kill him.”

“Aye, I got that much, sir.” The boy was twitching. Magar kicked him lightly in the ribs. “You, wake up.”

Otto bent over the prisoner, so that when the lad opened his eyes there’d be no escape. “What’s it to be?” Otto asked, not unkindly. “Do you want to—” He straightened up and looked over the boy’s head. “—time’s up, looks like we’ve got another prisoner coming in—”

“I’ll show you! I’ll show you!” The boy was almost hysterical, tears of terror flowing down his cheeks.

“Really?” Otto smiled at him. “Thank you. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”

The problem with castles was not that they were hard to get into, but that they tended to be equally hard to get out of. And people take shortcuts.

To enter the Hjalmar Palace by road, a polite visitor would ride across the well-manicured apron in front of the walls, itself a killing zone two hundred meters across, then up the path to the gatehouse. There was a moat, of course, a ten-meter-wide ditch full of water diverted from the river (and, during particularly hot moments of a siege, layered in burning oil). A stone bridge spanned half the width of the moat. The gatehouse was a small castle in its own right, four round towers connected by stone walls a meter thick, and its wooden drawbridge was a welcome mat that could be withdrawn back to the castle side of the moat if the occupants weren’t keen on entertaining visitors. In case that wasn’t a sufficiently pointed deterrent to intruders, the bridge towers were topped by steel shields and the ominous muzzles of belt-fed machine guns, and the drawbridge itself opened into a zigzagging stony tunnel blocked at several choke points by metal grilles, and covered from above by a killing platform from which the defenders could rain molten lead.

And that was before the visitors reached the outer walls, which in addition to the usual glacis and arrow slits, had acquired (under the custody of the Hjalmar branch of the Clan) such luxuries as imported razor wire, claymore mines, and defenders with automatic weapons.

But such defenses are inconvenient. To leave the central keep by the front door required a descent down a steep flight of steps, a march around half the circumference of the tower, then the traversal of a murder tunnel through the foundations of one of the inner bastions, then a ride halfway along the circular road that lined the inner wall, then another murder tunnel, then the gatehouse, four portcullises, and the drawbridge—it could take half an hour on foot. And so, successive generations of defenders had come up with shortcuts. They’d installed sally ports in the bases of bastions to allow raiding parties to enter and leave. Toilet outfalls venting over the moat could, at a pinch (and with nose held tight) serve for a hasty exit. A peacetime road battered through the wall, straight into the stable yard, ready to be blocked by a deadfall of boulders at the first alarm. And then there were the usual over- the-wall quick routes out for soldiers and servants in search of an evening’s drinking and fucking in the beer cellars of Wergatfurt.

In the case of the Hjalmar Palace, the weak point in its defenses was the water supply. The water supply had to feed the moat, if attackers tried to dam it off from the river: it also had to keep the defenders in drinking water. Some tactical genius a century or two earlier had dug a trench nearly two hundred meters long, under the curtain wall to the river. He’d lined it with stone, floored it with fired clay pipe, then roofed it over and buried it. It wasn’t just a backup water supply: it was a tactical back door for raiding parties and scouts, a fire escape for the terminally paranoid. The stone blockhouse on the upstream slope of the hill was overgrown with bushes and trees, nearly invisible unless you knew what you were looking for, and when properly maintained—as it was, now—it was guarded by sentries and booby traps. An intruder who didn’t know the word of the day, or the positioning of the trip wires for the mines embedded in the walls of the tunnel, or the different code word for the guards in the waterhouse attached to the walls of the inner keep, would almost certainly die.

Unfortunately for the roughly one hundred guards, stable hands, cooks, smiths, carpenters, dog handlers, lamplighters, servants, and outer family members sheltering behind those walls, Baron Otto ven Neuhalle knew all of these things, and more.

Even more unfortunately for the defenders, one of the unpalatable facts of life is that in close quarters—at ranges of less than three meters—firearms were generally less useful than swords, of which Neuhalle’s troop had many. Nor were they expecting an attacking force armed with machine guns of their own to appear on the walls of the keep itself.

By the time night fell, his troops were still winkling the last few stubborn holdouts out of their stony shells, but the Hjalmar Palace was in his hands.

And now to start building the trap, Otto told himself, as he summoned his hand- men to him and told them exactly what was needed.

The first day at home was the worst. Mike was still getting used to the plastic cocoon on his leg, not to mention being short on clean clothes, tired, and gobbling antibiotics and painkillers by the double handful. But a second night in his own bed put a different complexion on things. He awakened luxuriously late, to find Oscar curled up on the pillow beside him, purring.

The fridge was no more full than it had been the day before, but the grocery bag Smith had dumped in the kitchen turned out to be full of honest-to-god groceries, a considerate touch that startled Mike when he discovered it. He might be a hyperactive hard-ass, but at least he cares about his people, Mike decided. He fixed himself a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese and black coffee, then tried to catch up on the lighter housework, running some clothes through the washing machine and doing battle with the shower again—this time more successfully. I must be getting better, he told himself optimistically.

Around noon, he got out of the house for a couple of hours, driven stir-crazy by the daytime TV. It took him nearly ten minutes to get the car seat adjusted, and an hour of hobbling around Barnes and Noble and a couple of grocery stores left him feeling like he’d run a marathon, but he made it home uneventfully. Then he discovered that he hadn’t figured on carrying the grocery sacks and bag of books and magazines up the front steps. He ended up so exhausted that by the time he got the last bag in and closed the door he was about ready to drop. He hobbled into the lounge clutching the bookbag, and lowered the bag onto the coffee table before he realized the lounger was already occupied.

“So, Mr. Fleming! We meet again.” She giggled, ruining the effect. It was unnecessary, in any case: the pistol in her lap more than made up for her lack of menace.

“Jesus!” He staggered, nearly losing his balance.

“Relax. I do not intend to shoot you. Are you well?”

“I’m—” He bit back his first angry response. What are you doing in my house? That question was the elephant in the living room: but it wasn’t one he felt like asking the Russian princess directly, not while she was holding a gun on him. “No, not very.” He shuffled towards the sofa and lowered himself down into it. “I’m tired. Been shopping,” he added, redundantly. And how did you get past Judith’s watch team? “What brings you here?”

“Patricia sent me to see how you were,” she explained, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for killer grannies from another dimension to send their ice-blonde hit-woman bodyguards to check up on him. “She was