“Oh, I believe you, kid.” Iris reached out and covered her hand with her own: older, thinner, infinitely familiar. “I—” She paused. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she admitted. “I had an idea this was going to get weird before I gave you the box, but not like this. It seemed like a good time to pass it on when you began sniffing around their turf. Large-scale money laundering is exactly the sort of thing the, this Clan, would be mixed up in, and I suspected—well. I expected you to come back and ask me about it sooner, rather than simply jumping in. Maybe I should have warned you.” She looked at Miriam, searchingly.
“It’s okay, Ma.” Miriam covered Iris’s hand with her other.
“No, it’s not okay,” Iris insisted. “What I did was wrong! I should have—”
“Ma, shut up.”
“If you insist.” Iris watched her with a curious half-smile. “This second knotwork design—I want to see that. Can you show me sometime?”
“Sure.” Miriam nodded. “Didn’t bring it with me, though.”
Her mother nodded. “What are you going to do next?”
“I’m—” Miriam sighed. “I warned Angbard that if anybody touched a hair on your head, he was dead meat. But now there’s a second bunch after me, and I don’t have a hotline to their boss. I don’t even know who their boss is.”
“Neither did Patricia,” murmured Iris.
“What did you say?”
“I’d have thought it was obvious,” Iris pointed out quickly. “If she’d known, they wouldn’t have gotten near her.” She shook her head. “A really bad business, that.” For a moment she looked angry, and determined—the same expression Miriam had glimpsed in a mirror recently. “And it hasn’t gone away.” She snorted. “Give me your secret phone number, girl.”
“My secret—what?”
Iris grinned at her. “Okay, your dead-letter drop. So we can keep in touch when you go on your wanderings. You do want to keep your old mom informed of what the enemies of freedom and civilization are up to, don’t you?”
“Ma!” Miriam smiled right back. “Okay, here it is,” she said, scribbling her new, sanitized mobile number down on a piece of paper and sliding it over to Iris.
“Good.” Iris tucked it away quickly. “This locket you found—you think it goes somewhere else, don’t you?”
“Yes. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.”
“To another world, where everything will of course be completely different.” Iris shook her head. “As if two worlds wasn’t already one too many.”
“And mystery assassins. Don’t forget the mystery assassins.”
“I’m not,” said her mother. “From what you’ve been telling me…” She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t trust any of them. Not the Clan, not even the one you bedded. They’re all—they sound like—a bunch of vipers. They’ll screw you as soon as you think you’re safe.”
“Ma.” Miriam began to blush. “Oh, I don’t trust them. At least, not to do anything with my best interests at heart.”
“Then you’re smarter than I was at your age.” Iris pulled on her gloves.
“Give an old lady a lift home? Or at least, back to the woods? It’s a cold and scary night. Mind you, I may have forgotten to bring your red cloak, but any wolves who try to lay hands on this old granny will come off worse.”
Pawnbroker
It’s no good,” said Miriam, rubbing her forehead. “All I get is crossed eyes, blurred vision, and a headache. It doesn’t work.” She snapped the assassin’s locket closed in frustration.
“Maybe it doesn’t work here,” Brill suggested. “If it’s a different design?”
“Maybe.” Miriam nodded. “Or then again, it’s a different design and it came through on the other side. How do I know where I’d end up if I did get it to work here?” She paused, then looked at the locket. “Maybe it wasn’t real clever of me to try that here,” she said slowly. “I really ought to cross over before I try it again. If there’s really a third world out there, how do we know there isn’t a fourth? Or more? How do we know that using it twice in succession brings you back to the place you departed from—that travel using it is commutative? It raises more questions than it answers, doesn’t it?”
“Yes—” Brill fell silent.
“Do you know anything about this?” Miriam asked.
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t—they never spoke about the possibility. Why should they? It was as much as anyone could do to travel between this world and the other, without invoking phantoms. Would testing a new sigil not be dangerous? If it by some chance carried you to another world where wild animals or storms waited…”
“Someone must have tried it.” Miriam frowned. “Mustn’t they?”
“You would have to ask the elders,” Brill offered. “All I can tell is what I was told.”
“Well, anyway,” Miriam rubbed her forehead again, “if it works, it’ll be one hell of a lever to use with Angbard. I’ll just have to take this one and cross over to the other side before I try to go wherever its original owner came from. Then try from there.”
“Can you do that?” Brill asked.
“Yes. But just one crossing gives me a cracking headache if I don’t take my pills. I figure I can make two an hour apart. But if I run into something nasty on the far side—wherever this one takes me—I’ll be in deep trouble if I need to get away from it in a hurry.”
Malignant hypertension wasn’t a term she could use with Brill, but she’d seen what it could do to people. In particular she’d seen a middle-aged man who’d not bothered to follow the dietary guidelines after his HMO doctor prescribed him an ancient and dubious monoamine oxidase inhibitor. He’d flatlined over the cheese board at a birthday party, the glass of sparkling white wine still at hand. She’d been in the emergency room when the ambulance brought him in, bleeding from nose and eyes. She’d been there when they turned the ventilator off and filled out the death certificate. She shook her head. “It’ll take careful planning.”
Miriam glanced at the window. Snow drifted down from a sky the color of shattered dreams. It was bitterly cold outside. “What I should do is go across, hole up somewhere and catch some sleep, then try to cross over the next day so I can run away if anything goes wrong. Trouble is, it’s going to be just as cold on the other side as it is here. And if I have to run away, I get to spend two nights camping in the woods, in winter, with a splitting headache. I don’t think that’s a really great idea. And I’m limited to what I can carry.”
When’s Paulie due back? she wondered. She’ll be able to help.
“What about a coaching-house?” Brill asked, practical-minded as ever.
“A coaching—” Miriam stopped dead. “But I can’t—”
“There’s one about two miles down the road from Fort Lofstrom.” Brill looked thoughtful. “We dress you as a, an oracle’s wife, summoned to a village down the coast to join your husband in his new parish. Your trap broke a wheel and—” She ran down. “Oh. You don’t speak hoh’sprashe.”
“Yup.” Miriam nodded. “Doesn’t work well, does it?”
“No.” Brill wrinkled her nose. “What a nuisance! We could go together,” she added tentatively.
“I think we’ll have to do that,” said Miriam. “Probably I play the mute mother and you play the daughter—I try to look older, you to look younger. Think it would work?”
From Brilliana’s slow nod she realized that Brill did—and wasn’t enthusiastic about it. “It might.”