The Merchants’ War

“Calm down, it’s not going to happen. We’ve already made sure of that.”

“Oh. Okay.” Jesus. If that’s the good news—

“Funny thing about the timer, though,” Rand said meditatively. “Sloppy wiring, dry joints where they soldered it to…well, the battery ran down a long time ago. Judging by the dust it’s been there for years.”

“Timer?”

“Yes.” Rand shook himself. “It was on a timer,” he explained. “Should have gone off ages ago, taking Boston and most of Cambridge with it. Probably back during the Bush I or Reagan administrations, at a guess. Maybe even earlier.”

“Holy, uh, wow.”

“Yes, I can see why you might say that.” Rand nodded. “And we are going to have real fun combing the inventory to find out how this puppy managed to wander off the reservation. That’s not supposed to happen, although I can hazard some guesses…”

“Huh. Six—did you say it weighs six thousand pounds?” Herz stared at the nuclear weapons engineer.

“Well, of course it does; did you think air-dropped multimegaton hydrogen bombs were small enough to fit in a back pocket? Why do you think we ship them around in B-52s?”

“Uh.” She took a deep breath. “And it’s a, like, a single unit? You couldn’t dismantle it easily?”

“No, I don’t think so. We’ll need to truck it away intact and examine it for—”

“Then we’ve messed up.”

“What makes you say that?” Rand sounded offended.

“Because it’s too big. A world-walker can’t haul something any larger than they can lift. So it doesn’t belong to the Clan.”

“Oh,” said Rand. He sounded at a loss for words.

“You can say that again.” Judith turned to head back to the hole in the wall. “Listen, I’ve got to go, this isn’t Family Trade business anymore, okay? Run it through the normal NIRT channels, I’ve got to go report to the colonel now. See you around.” And with that, she ducked through the hole in the lockup wall, and headed back to the car park. Rich was waiting next to the truck. “Come on,” he said, waving at her car.

“What’s the story?”

“It’s a nuke, but it’s not our nuke,” Herz said as she started the car.

“Oh.”

“Yes. Come on, I’ve got to get back to the office and report to Eric.”

“Shit.”

“Language, please.” Judith put the car in gear and crept out of the parking lot, leaving the gray NIRT van and the orange rubber-suited atomic bomb disposal specialists behind like a bad memory. “What a way to start the week.” Somewhere out there in the city there was supposed to be another bomb. One that was activated four months earlier by Matt, when he defected from the Clan, as an insurance policy to hold over the Family Trade Organization’s head. But Matt was dead, and Mike Fleming had failed to wheedle the location of the bomb out of him before he died—all they knew was, it was on a one-year countdown, and they had maybe two hundred days left to find it before they had to evacuate three or four million folks from Boston and Cambridge to avoid a disaster that would make 9/11 look like a parking violation.

Miriam had run through the emotional gamut in the past six hours, oscillating wildly between hope and terror, despair and optimism. Being taken out of the cellar room and escorted up to the top of this rickety pile of brick and lath by a pair of thugs, and ushered into a garret where a middle-aged woman with a kindly face and eyes like a hanging judge sat at a writing desk, and then being expected to give an account of herself, was more than Miriam was ready for. All she had to vouch for this woman was Erasmus Burgeson’s word: and there was a lot more to the tubercular pawnbroker than met the eye. He had some very odd friends, and if he’d misread her when he suggested she visit this “Lady Bishop,” then it was possible she’d just stuck her head in a noose. But on the other hand, Miriam was here right now, and there were precious few alternatives on offer.

“I’d quite understand if you thought I was mad,” Miriam said, shivering slightly—it was not particularly warm in this drafty attic room. “I don’t really understand everything that’s going on myself. I mean, I thought I did, but obviously not.” She felt her cheek twitch involuntarily.

Margaret Bishop leaned forward, her expression concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked.

Miriam twitched again. “No, I’m—” She took a deep breath. “A few bruises, that’s all. And I’m lucky to be alive, people have been trying to kill me all evening.” She took another deep breath. “Sorry…”

“Don’t be.” Lady Bishop rose to her feet and opened the door a crack. “Bring a pot of coffee, please. And biscotti. For two.” She closed it again. “Would you like to tell me about it? Start from the beginning, if you please. Take your time.” She sat down again. “I must apologize for the pressure, but I really need to know everything if I am to help you.”

“You’d help me?” Miriam blinked.

“You’ve been very helpful to us in the past. We tend to be suspicious, with good reason—but we look after our friends.” Lady Bishop looked at her gravely. “But I need to know more about you before I make any promises. Do you understand?”

Miriam’s vision blurred: for a moment she felt vertiginous, as if the stool she sat upon was half a mile high, balanced in a high wind. Relief combined with apprehension washed over her. Not alone —it was like waking suddenly from a nightmare. The world had been narrowing around her like a prison corridor for so long that the idea that there might be a way out, or even people who would help her willingly, seemed quite alien for a moment. Then the dizziness passed. “I’ll tell you everything,” she heard herself saying, in a voice hoarse with gratitude. “Just don’t expect too much.”

“Take your time.” Lady Bishop sat back on her chair and waited while Miriam composed herself. “We’ve got all night.”

“There are at least three worlds.” Miriam squeezed her tired eyes shut as she tried to fumble her way towards an explanation. “I’m told there may be more, but nobody knows how to reach them. The people who can reach them…they’re my relatives, apparently. It’s a hereditary talent. It’s what geneticists call a recessive trait, meaning you can’t inherit it unless it was present in both sides of your family tree. It’s difficult to do—painful if you do it too often, and you need a focus, a kind of knotwork design to look at to make it work—but it’s made the families, the people who have the ability, rich. The world they live in is very backward, almost medieval: something went wrong, some blind alley in history a couple of thousand years ago, but they’ve risen into the nobility of the small feudal kingdoms that exist up and down the New England coastline.

“I’m…I’m an outsider. About fifty years ago the families started killing one another, there was a huge blood feud—what they called a civil war. My mother, who was pregnant at the time, was on the losing side of an ambush: she fled to the, the other of the three worlds we know about. Uh, I should have explained that the Clan families didn’t know about this one at the time. There’s a lost offshoot family of the Clan who ended up here more than a hundred years ago, who can travel from here to the Clan’s world: they were the ones who kept the civil war going by periodically assassinating Clan leaders and pointing the evidence at the other families. The other world, the one I grew up in, is very different from either this one or the one the Clan comes from.”

There was a knock on the door. Miriam paused while one of the guards came in and deposited a tray on the table where Lady Bishop had been working on her papers. The coffee pot was silver, and the smell drifting from it was delicious. “May I…?”

“Certainly.” Margaret Bishop poured coffee into two china mugs. “Help yourself to the biscotti.” The guard departed quietly. “Tell me about your world.”

“It’s—” Miriam frowned. “It’s a lot less different from yours than the Clan’s world is, but it’s still very different. As far as I can tell, they were the same until, um, 1745. There was an uprising in Scotland? A Prince Charles Stuart? In my world he marched on London and his uprising was defeated. Savagely. A few years later a smoldering war between Britain and France started—and while France eventually won a paper victory, there was no invasion of England. The wars between France and Britain continued for nearly eighty years, ending with the complete defeat of France and the British dominating the oceans.”

Lady Bishop shook her head. “What is the state of the Americas in this world of yours?” she asked.

“There was a revolution…Why, is it important?”

“No, just fascinating. So, continue. Your world is very different, it seems, but from a more recent point of