"Order! Order, I say!"
"Thank you, my lord. If I may continue?"
(Pause.)
"Matthias yen Holtzbrinck was trusted. Nobody suspected him! He was Duke Lofstrom's keeper of secrets. I must confess that in all fairness I thought him a man of the utmost probity. Be that as it may, Matthias ordered the removal of one of the weapons, and then hid it somewhere. We don't know where because he covered his tracks exceedingly welclass="underline" Perhaps one of the dead could tell us, but… anyway. Need I explain what the king-president's men thought of their ultimate witch-weapon being stolen? I think we can guess. My sources tell me that they began negotiations with the duke with a threat, and that their spies have already been apprehended in the Gruinmarkt. Don't look so shocked. Did you think our missing soldiers had betrayed us and sought refuge? Captivity and slavery-they have ways of compelling a world-walker"-(muttering)-"We face a determined enemy, and they showed just how determined they were at the Hjalmar Palace."
"Then it was an atomic bomb?"
"Yes."
(Uproar. Three minutes
"Order! Order, I say!"
"My lady? You have the floor."
"This is insupportable! Gentlemen, we have known for many years that one day the Anglischprache would learn of our existence. But we cannot allow them to, to think they can tamper at will in our affairs! Sending, without warning, an atomic bomb, into a castle invested only hours earlier by the pride of our army, is a base and ignoble act. It is dishonorable! To live with this threat hanging over us is intolerable, and I submit that it is unthinkable to negotiate as one ruler to another with a king-president who would deliver such a stab in the back. If negotiations were in hand then they acted with base treachery. We act, now, as the largest faction of the Clan, and as rulers of the kingdom of Gruinmarkt, though the peace is not yet settled. We must secure our kingdom from this threat; if there is one thing I have learned in more than sixty years of politics and thirty years of war, it is that you cannot sleep peacefully unless your neighbor can be relied on to obey the same law as you do. The Americans are now, like it or not, our neighbors. We must therefore compel them to obey the law of kings."
"My lady. What are you suggesting?"
(Coldly.) "One act of treachery deserves another. Do we not have arms? Do we not have a kingdom to defend? The American king-president-or rather, the power behind his throne-has declared war upon us and through us upon our domain and all those who live in it. We must make it clear that we will not be trifled with. The time for petty affairs of finance and customs is over. We must hurt the Americans, and hurt them so badly that their next king will not meddle lightly in our affairs.
"My lords. We have, in the course of this civil war, already found it necessary to kill one self-proclaimed king: even, one who would have reigned by blessing of the Sky Father. We must not, now, balk at the death of another lord who is an even greater danger to us than the Pervert. We must settle this matter with the Americans before they think to send their atomic bombs into the heart of Niejwein, aye, and every stronghold and palace in the land. And the best way to compel their rulers to negotiate in good faith is to demonstrate our strength with utmost clarity. My lords, you must decapitate the enemy. There is no alternative…"
(Uproar.)
END RECORDING
8
There was a country estate, untouched by war, separated from the clinic in Springfield by about three blocks and two-and-a-half thousand years of divergent history. Brill had picked up a courier from somewhere nearby and driven Miriam round to a safe house on a quiet residential street; whereupon the courier had carried her across, back into the depths of someone else's history.
It was, in many respects, like her time as an involuntary guest of Baron Henryk. There was no electricity in the great stonewalled house, and no central heating or water on tap, and she was surrounded by servants who spoke to her only in hochsprache. Brill had left her in the hands of the maidservants, and she'd felt an unpleasant tension as the chattering women dressed her in clothes from the landholder's wife's chests. Trapped again: She felt a quite unexpected sense of panicky claustrophobia rising as they fussed over her. It had been hard to stand still, giving no sign of her urge to bolt and run: She forced herself to recall Brill's oath. She won't leave me here, she told herself.
To distract herself she fought her unease by trying to puzzle out their story. The landholder, she eventually concluded, was away in the wars, a relative of the Clan families: He'd sent his dependents to safety for the duration, leaving the staff behind with instructions to look after whomever the council billeted on them. Which meant they were expecting to host one Lady Helge, house and braid and surname unspecified, not Miriam-a woman from another world. You let yourself get trapped again, a little corner of her worried. They laid out a trap and let you walk right into it.
But there were significant differences from Henryk's idea of hospitality, despite the primitive amenities and unwanted expectations. Her bedroom door had a lock, but she had her own key. The afternoon after her arrival, trying to dispel the anxiety and claustrophobia of being Helge again, she'd ventured from her room to look around the grand hall and the main rooms of the estate. When she'd returned she found the battered suitcase she'd borrowed from Erasmus sitting beside the canopy bed. A quick inspection with shaking hands revealed her laptop and the revolver Burgeson had given her. And not only had they let her keep the locket James Lee had given her-Brill had winked, and given her a second, smaller locket on a gold bracelet. None of these things were of any immediate use, but collectively they conveyed a powerful message: The trap has a key, and you are not a prisoner.
She'd sat on the bed, holding the laptop and shaking, carefully stifling her sobs of relief lest the servants waiting outside take fright. When she'd calmed down sufficiently to function again, she checked over the small pistol, reloading it with ammunition from its case. She let the hammer down on an empty cylinder, and slid it into a pouch she'd found cunningly stitched inside the cuff of her left sleeve; I can make this work, she told herself. I've got to make this work. The one common drawback of both her own plan, and her mother's, was that they depended on her living as the Countess Helge voh Thorold d'Hjorth. Not playacting in fancy dress, but actually being a lady of the Gruinmarkt-at least unless and until Iris's hastily improvised junta secured its grip on power, or the US military figured out a way to claw a hole in the wall between the worlds. Which could happen tomorrow-or in ten years' time.
The alternatives were all worse: a gamble on the questionable mercies of the DEA's witness protection scheme, an even riskier gamble on Erasmus and his ruthless political allies. Between her mother's Machiavellian proposal and the naïve optimism of the young progressive faction, there was at least some room for her to get a grip on events. "As long as Henryk doesn't rise from the dead I'll be alright," she muttered under her breath. (Keep telling yourself that, mocked her inner skeptic. They'll find some other way to screw you…)
If Roland were still alive, and had actually been the knight in shining armor he'd looked like at first, she wouldn't have to sort everything out for herself. But first he'd disappointed her, then he'd died trying to live up to her expectations, and now there was nothing to do but press on regardless. No more heroes, she resolved. I'm going to have to do this all on my own again, damn it. Which, semi-randomly, reminded her of the old song. "What do I have to do to get a CD player in here?" she asked herself, and managed a croak of laughter.
A tentative voice piped up somewhere behind her, near the door: "Milady, are you alright?"