“They won’t let you,” Mike said tiredly.
“Want to bet? Remember the sample of metal I gave you, from the duke’s private stockpile?”
The plutonium ingot. Mike could see it coming, like a driver stalled on a level crossing at night staring into the lights of an oncoming freight train. He blinked tiredly, trying to focus his double vision. “What, the, the—”
“There are gadgets,” Matthias explained. “An explosive device made with this magic metal of yours. The current duke’s father stole several of them three decades ago . . . anyway. I have the keys to the stockpile. They are held in storage areas in cities across the United States. It is the Clan’s ultimate deterrent, if you like: they were much more paranoid during the, the seventies when the civil war was being fought. The active one is on a timer, a very long timer, but if the battery runs down, it will explode. The battery is good for a year. I thought, when I came to you months ago, you would let me out in time and I would reset it and that would be all, an insurance policy against your good intentions, nothing more. But now”—he looked irritated—“you leave me no alternative.”
“Oh Jesus.” Mike stared at him. “Tell me you didn’t.”
Matt shook his head. “But I did. Or at least, you cannot prove that I didn’t. So, you see, as soon as you are ready to stand, we will go down and talk to your boss, yes? And you will explain that you have to drive me somewhere. And you and I, we will go and I will get lost. But before I go, I will take you to the lockup and you will wait with the device, of course, until it can be defused, and we will all be happy and nobody will be hurt. Yes?”
“You’ll tell me where it is?” Mike demanded.
“Of course.” Matt smiled like a shark. “I know where the others are, too. They aren’t active yet—if you do not follow me, I will not need to use them, no?”
Three images of a satanically smirking Matt hovered in front of Mike’s nose: the back of his neck prickled in a cold sweat. I’m going to be sick, he realized. I’m probably concussed. The idea that the Clan had planted atomic bombs in storage lockers across the United States was like something out of a bad thriller—like the idea Islamic terrorists would crash hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, before 9/11. Oh Jesus, I’ve got to tell someone! “I feel sick.”
“I know.” Matt peered at him. “Your eyes, the pupils are different sizes. Stand up now. It is very important you do not go to sleep.” Matt straightened up and took a step back. Mike pushed against the panel behind him and shoved himself upright, wobbling drunkenly. “To the elevators,” said Matt, gesturing with Mike’s own stolen gun.
What have I forgotten? Mike wondered dizzily. He stumbled and lurched toward the doorway. Feel sick . . .
“Elevator first. There is a telephone there, no?”
“Mmph.” His stomach heaved: he tried desperately not to throw up.
“Go on.”
Mike stumbled on down the corridor. He was certain he’d forgotten something, something important that had been on his mind before he got distracted, before the slab of window landed on him and Matt made his outrageous claim about the nuclear time bomb. Matt closed the door on the room with the damaged windows behind him, an unconscious slave to habit. Mike leaned against the wall, head down.
“What is it?” Matt demanded, pausing.
“I don’t feel so well—” What’s going to happen? Mike had a nagging sense that it was right on the tip of his tongue. Then his stomach gave a lurch. “Ugh.”
Matt took a step back, standing between Mike and the elevator core. He blinked, disgustedly. “Get it over with.”
“Going to be—” Mike never finished the sentence. A giant’s fist grabbed him under the ribs and twisted, turning his throat into a fire hose. He doubled over, emptying his guts across the carpet and halfway up the wall opposite.
Matt’s face twisted in disgust. “You’re no use to me like that. Wait here.” The next door along was a restroom. “I’ll get you some towels—”
There was a ringing in Mike’s ears, and a hissing. His guts stopped heaving, but he felt unaccountably tired. What have I forgotten? he asked himself, as he sat down and leaned against the wall. He felt his eyes closing. Something hard-edged was digging into his ribs. Oh, that. Must be time, then. He could put the mask on again in a few minutes, couldn’t he? Just a quick nap . . . Almost without willing it he felt his hand fumbling for the respirator, dragging it out of his inside pocket. His hands felt incredibly hot, but not in a painful way—it was like the best, most wonderful warm bath he’d ever had, all concentrated in his extremities. He never wanted it to stop. But that was all right: he managed to raise the mask to his face, doubling over to get his head low enough to reach, and inhaled through the filter. I wonder if Matt heard Eric’s announcement? he thought dizzily. If he was outside the building, at the time . . .
He was still breathing through the respirator when they found him twenty minutes later, put him on a stretcher, and hauled him off to hospital in an ambulance with blaring siren and flashing lights. But it took them another ten minutes to find Matthias—and by then it was five minutes too late to ask him whether he’d been bluffing.
ULTIMATUM
Miriam found it hard to believe that she’d never attended a wedding among the great families of the Gruinmarkt in the months she’d been living among them. After a sleepless night, she chivvied her maids into helping her into the outfit Kara had picked from her wardrobe, then waited impatiently, tapping her toes while the ferret rousted out the sedan chair crew.
Another tedious, uneven magical mystery tour: another bland mansion with walled grounds, somewhere else in the city. Miriam straightened her back as the ferret and his guards waited. “This way,” he indicated, nodding toward a narrow passageway. “You will wait at the back, behind the wooden screen. You will say nothing during the ceremony. Observe, do not interfere or it will be the worse for you. I will fetch you from the reception afterward.”
“Worse?” she asked—rhetorically, for she had a very good idea what he meant. “All right.” She stuck her nose in the air and marched down the corridor as though her guards didn’t exist, as if she were attending this function of her own accord, and the occasion were a happy one.
The passage led to a small chapel, located near the back of the building in the oldest construction. The walls were of undressed stone, woodwork blackened with age. Her first surprise was that it was tiny, barely larger than her reception room. Her second surprise was the altar, and the brightly painted statues behind it. She’d have taken them for saints, but the iconography was wrong—no trinity here, but a confusing family tree of bickering authorities, a heavenly bureaucracy with responsibility for everything from births, marriages, and deaths to law enforcement, tax returns, and the afterlife. The post-migration Norse-descended tribes who had eventually settled the eastern seaboard of North America in this world had adopted the Church of Rome, but the Church of Rome hadn’t adopted Christianity, or Judaism, or anything remotely monotheistic. The Church here was a formalization and outgrowth of the older Roman pantheon, echoes of which had survived in the Catholic hierarchy of saints, the names and roles of the gods updated for more recent usage with a smattering of Norse add-ons. But no blood-eagles, Miriam thought, as she walked past the pews of menfolk to take her place behind the wooden latticework screen at the back, behind the women of the two households.