“Not yet, sir. Ah, your companions. If you don’t mind—”
Elena and Yul climbed down from the cart and consented to be inspected and compared to their photographs. “Is it that bad?” She asked brightly, shaking out her skirts.
“Some of Lord Ganskwert’s retainers attacked the house at Doveswood last night, using a carriage and disguises to cover their approach. Three dead, plus the traitors of course. We can’t be too careful.”
“Indeed.” Elena grinned alarmingly, and flashed the sergeant a glimpse of what she had inside her capacious shoulder bag. He blanched. “Sleep tight!” She added, “We’re on your side!”
“Lightning Child, can’t you keep it to yourself for even a minute?” Huw complained. To the sergeant: “We won’t be staying overnight—we’re wanted by Her Majesty, as soon as possible.”
“Ah, we’ll do our best, sir. I’ll have to confirm that first.” His tone didn’t brook argument.
“We can wait awhile,” Huw conceded. “Got to sort out the horses first, grab something to eat if possible, that sort of thing.”
“There is bread and sausages in the kitchen. If you’d like to wait inside I can have my men deal with your mounts? I take it they’re security livery?”
“Yes,” Huw confirmed. “All yours.” He handed his reins to the man. “We’ll be inside if you need us.”
“Excellent,” added Yul, following his elder brother towards the farm building.
Huw and his small team had been well away from the excitement when the putsch by the conservatives and the lords of the Postal Service broke; following up a task assigned to him by Angbard, Duke Lofstrom, back before his stroke—the urgency of which had only become greater since. Huw had been in a rented house outside Macon, recovering from an exploration run, when Elena had erupted into the living room shouting about something on the television and waking up Yul (who had a post-walk hangover of doom). He’d begun to chastise her, only to fall silent as the mushroom cloud, red-lit from within, roiled skyward behind a rain of damaged-camera static.
They’d spent the first hour in shock, but then had come Riordan’s Plan Black; and that had presented Huw with a problem, because they were nearly a thousand miles from the nearest evacuation point. Flights were grounded; police and national guard units were hogging the highways. It had taken them three days to make the drive, avoiding interstates and major cities. Finally they’d reached the outskirts of Providence and crossed over, taking another four days to finish the journey from Huw’s family estates to this transit point, barely seventy miles away. A thousand miles—two hours by air. Or three days by back roads in the United States. Seventy miles—four days, in the Gruinmarkt. It was an object lesson in the source of the Clan’s power—and a warning.
They didn’t have long to wait; true to his word, the sergeant ducked in through the kitchen door barely half an hour later. “By your leave, sir, we have confirmed your permission to travel. If you are ready to go now…?”
“I suppose so,” said Yul, reluctantly setting aside a mug of game soup and a half-eaten cornbread roll. Elena was already on her feet, impatient; Huw set down his wine—a half-drained glass, itself exotic and valuable in this place—and stood.
“Have you got a level stage?” he asked. “We need to take the cart’s contents.”
“We have something better, sir.” The guard turned and headed towards the barn. Huw followed him. Opposite the stalls—he saw a lad busily rubbing down the horses—someone had installed a raised platform, planks stretched across aluminum scaffolding. A ramp led up to it, and at the bottom—
“That’s a
Three big supermarket trolleys waited for them, loaded up with bags. “The regular couriers will bring them back once you unload them,” said the sergeant. He picked up his clipboard. “In view of the current troubles we have no postmaster, but I’m keeping score. For later.”
“All right.” Huw set his hands to one of the trolleys and pushed it up the ramp. “What’s the other side like?”
“It’s in a cellar.” The sergeant looked disapproving. “Good thing too. You don’t want to be seen coming and going over there—it’s a real zoo. But you’ll be safe enough here.” He caught Huw’s raised eyebrow and nodded. “I’ll go first, see if I don’t.” He climbed onto the platform and waited while Yulius and Elena pushed their laden trolleys up the ramp. “Here, you let me take that one, young miss. Why don’t you ride for once?” Laying one hand on the trolley’s metal frame, he reached up and tugged a cord leading to a blind on the opposite wall. The blind rose—
The basement was brick-walled, and the ceiling low, but the Clan’s surveyors had done their job well and the raised floor was a perfectly level match for the platform in the barn. As Huw hauled the first of his suitcases out of the trolley, trying to ignore the nausea and migrainelike headache, he heard voices from the top of the staircase: Elena, and someone else, someone familiar and welcome.
“My lady Brilliana,” he said. He deposited his case beside the top step—the cellar stairs surfaced in what seemed to be a servants’ pantry—and bowed. “I’m glad to see you.”
“Sir Huw! How wonderful to see you, too.” She smiled slightly more warmly than was proper: Huw held himself in check, ignoring the impulse to hug her to him. He’d been worried about her for the past week; to find her here, her hair in blond curls, dressed after last year’s New London mode, lifted a huge weight from his heart. Brilliana was an officer of the duke’s intelligence directorate and the queen-widow’s chief of staff—and something more to Huw. She held out her hand, and, somewhat daringly, he bent to kiss it. “Have you had a troublesome time?” she asked, gripping his fingers.
“Not as bad as some.” Huw straightened up, then gestured at the bags: “I bought the books Miriam wanted. And a few more besides. Yul is”—footsteps creaked on the stairs and he stepped aside as his brother hauled two more suitcases over the threshold—“here, too.”
“And all these damned bits of paper,” his brother complained, shoving the cases forward. “Lightning Child damn them for a waste of weight—” He stepped forward, out of the path of the sergeant from the other side of the transit post, who heaved another two bags towards Huw.
“Trig tables,” Huw added. “Have you any idea how hard it is to find five-digit trigonometry tables in good condition? Nobody’s printed them for years. I also threw in a couple of calculators—I found a store with old stock HP-48GXs and a thermal printer, so I bought the lot. They take rechargeable batteries so the only scarce resource is the thermal paper,” he added defensively. “I’m still running the one I bought for my freshman year—they run forever.”
“Oh, Huw.” Brill shook her head, still smiling. “Listen, I’m sure it’s a good idea! It’s just”—she glanced over her shoulder—“we may not be able to resupply at will, and you know how easily computers break.”
“These aren’t computers; they’re programmable calculators. But they might as well be mainframes, by these people’s standards.” He was burbling, he realized: a combination of post-world-walking sickness and the peculiar relief of finding Brill alive and well in the wake of the previous week’s events. “Sorry. Been a stressful time. Is Miriam—”
“She’s in bed upstairs. Resting.” An unreadable expression flickered across Brill’s face. “I’ll give you the tour, if you like. Who else…?”
“Me, ma’am.” The sergeant reappeared, carrying two more suitcases, wheezing somewhat. “One more to go, sirs, ladies.”
“No need to overdo it, Marek, the last cases will wait half an hour if you want to put your feet up.” Brill’s concern was obvious: “You’ve already been over today, haven’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am, but it needs moving and we’re shorthanded—”
“You’ll be even more shorthanded if you work yourself into a stroke! Go and sit yourself down in the parlor with a mug of beer and a pill until your head clears. Go on, I’ll get Maria to look after you—” Brill dragged the sergeant out of the servants’ stairwell, seemingly by main force of will, then returned to lead Huw into the downstairs lounge. “He’s right that they’re badly undermanned over there, but he insists on trying to do everything,” she said apologetically. “There’s too much of that around here.”
“Too much of it
“Yes, how is she?” Huw began, then stopped. Brill’s expression was bleak. “Oh. Oh
“The lady Helge is perfectly all right.” Brilliana’s voice was emotionless. “But she’s very tired and needs time to recover.”
“Recover from what?” Yul chipped in before Elena could kick his ankle.
“Her express instructions are that you are to tell no one,” Brill continued, looking Huw straight in the eye.
