The Merchants’ War

Interaction

As it happened, Mike didn’t get to go home that day—or the next. “You live on your own in a second-floor apartment, and you’ve got a lovely spiral fracture plus soft tissue injuries and a damaged Achilles tendon, Mr. Fleming. Listen, I’ll happily sign you out—if you fill in a criminal negligence waiver for me, first. But I really think it’s a bad idea right now. Maybe tomorrow, when we’ve got you a nice fiberglass box and a set of crutches, after we set you up with an appointment with physio. But if you check out today, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

The time passed slowly, with the inane babble of daytime TV as a laugh track, interrupted occasionally by nursing orderlies and interns checking up on him. Smith hadn’t left him any reading matter, classified or otherwise, and he was close to climbing the walls by the morning of the second day after Smith’s visit, when he had a surprise visitor: Judith Herz, the FBI agent who’d been sucked into Family Trade at the same time at Mike.

“Smith sent me. You’re checking out,” she said crisply, and dropped an overnight bag on the chair. “Here’s your stuff, I’ll be back in ten.”

She shut the door briskly, leaving Mike shaking his head. What got her so pissed? He opened the bag and pulled out the clothing. It was the stuff he’d been wearing over a week ago, before the CLEANSWEEP mission ran off the rails. He shook it out and managed to get the trouser leg over his cast without too much trouble. By the time Herz opened the door again, he was buttoning his jacket. “Yes?” he asked.

“I’m your lift.” She waved a key fob at him. “You going to be okay walking, or do you need a wheelchair?”

Mike frowned. “I’ll walk. Give me time, I’m not used to these things.” He eased his weight onto the crutches and took an experimental step forward. “Let’s go.”

She said nothing more all the way to the parking lot. As they neared a black sedan Mike’s impatience got the better of him. “You’re not in the taxi business. What’s the big problem?”

“I wanted to talk to you without eavesdroppers.” She squeezed the key fob: lights flashed and doors unlocked.

“Okay, talk.” Mike’s stomach twisted. Last time someone said that to me, he ended up dead.

She opened the passenger door. “Here, give me those, I’ll put them in the trunk.” A minute later she slid behind the wheel and moved off. “Your house is under surveillance.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She gave him a look. “Like that, is it? Care to explain why?”

“Because—” he stopped in mid-sentence “—what business of yours is it?”

She braked to a stop, near the end of the exit ramp, looking for a gap in the traffic. “It’d be kind of nice to know that I’ve been taken off hunting for a ticking bomb and told to stake out a colleague’s house for a good reason.” Her voice crackled with quiet anger.

Mike swallowed. Good cop, he realized. What to say…? “It’s not me you’re staking out. I’m expecting a visitor.”

“Okay.” She hit the gas hard, pushing out into a too-small gap in the traffic: a horn blared behind them for a moment, then they were clear. “But they’d better be worth it.”

Mike swallowed again. “Listen. You know the spooks are calling the shots. I got dragged off into fairyland, but you don’t have to follow me down the rabbit hole.”

“Too late. I’m in charge of the team that’s watching you. I just found out about it yesterday. If it’s not you, who am I meant to be keeping an eye open for?”

“Someone who may be able to tell us whether he was bluffing or if there really is a bomb—and if so, where he might have planted it.”

Herz swung left into the passing lane. “Good answer.” Her fingers tightened on the wheel. “That’s what I wanted to hear. Is it true?”

Mike took a deep breath. “The NIRT guys are still working their butts off, right?”

“Yes…”

“Then in the absence of a forensics lead or an in formant you’re not delivering much value-added, are you? They’re the guys with the neutron scattering spectrometers and the Geiger counters. You’re the detective. What did the colonel tell you to do?”

Herz took an on-ramp, then accelerated onto the interstate: “Stake you out like a goat. Watch and wait, twenty-four by seven. You’re supposed to tell me what to do, when to wrap up the case.”

“Hmm.” What have I gotten myself into here? “I really ought to get the colonel to tell me whether I can fill you in on a couple of codewords.”

Herz set the cruise control and glanced at him, sidelong. “He told me you’d been on something called CLEANSWEEP, and this is the follow-up.”

Mike felt the tension ease out of his shoulders. “I hate the fucking spook bullshit,” he complained. “Okay, let me fill you in on CLEANSWEEP and how I got my leg busted up. Then maybe I can help you figure out a surveillance plan…”

Miriam watched from the back room while Erasmus systematically looted his own shop. “Go through the clothing and take anything you think you’ll need,” he told her. “There’s a traveling case downstairs that you can use. We’re going to be away for two weeks, and we’ll not be able to purchase any necessities until we reach Fort Kinnaird.”

“But I can’t just—” Miriam shook her head. “Are you sure?”

“Whose shop is it?” He flashed her a cadaverous grin. “I’ll be upstairs. Got to fetch a book.”

The traveling case in the cellar turned out to be a battered leather suitcase. Miriam hauled it up into the back room and opened it, wrinkling her nose. It looked clean enough, although the stained silk lining, bunched at one side, made her wonder at its previous owner’s habits. She stuffed the contents of her valise into it, then scoured the rails in the back for anything else appropriate. There wasn’t much there: Erasmus had run down the stock of clothes since she’d last seen the inside of his shop. A search of the pigeonholes behind the counter yielded a fine leather manicure case and a good pen. She was tucking them into the case when Erasmus reappeared, carrying a couple of books and a leather jewelry case.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Stock I’m not leaving in an empty shop for two weeks.” He pulled another suitcase out from a cubby behind his desk and opened it: “I’m also taking the books to prove I’m their rightful owner, just in case.” It all went in. Then he opened the partition at the back of the counter and rummaged around inside. “You might want to take this…” He held a small leather box out to Miriam.

“What—” She flicked the catch open. The pistol was tiny, machined with the precision of a watch or a camera or a very expensive piece of jewelry. “Hey, I can’t take—”

“You must,” Burgeson said calmly. “Whether you ever need to use it is another matter, but I believe I can trust you not to shoot me by mistake, yes?”

She nodded, jerkily.

“Then put it away. I suggest in a pocket. The case and spare rounds can go—here.” He picked out the pistol then slipped the case through a slit in the lining of the suitcase that Miriam hadn’t even noticed. “It’s loaded with three rounds in the cylinder, the hammer is on the empty fourth chamber. It’s a self-arming rotary, when you pull the trigger it will cock the hammer—double action—do you see?” He offered it to her.

“I don’t—” She nodded, then took the pistol. “You really think I’ll need it?”

“I hope you won’t.” He glanced away, avoiding her gaze. “But these are dangerous times.”

He bustled off again, into the front of the shop, leaving Miriam to contemplate the pistol. He’s right, she realized with a sinking heart. She double-checked that the hammer was, indeed, on the empty chamber, then slipped it into her coat pocket just as Erasmus returned, clutching a wad of envelopes.

“You have mail.” He passed her a flimsy brown wrapper.

“I have—” She did a double take. “Right.” There was no postage stamp; it had been hand-delivered. She opened it hastily. The neat copperplate handwriting she recognized as Roger’s. The message was much less welcome:

Polis raided yr house, watching yr factory. Am being watched, can’t help. Think yr stuff is still where it was, locked in the office.

“Shit!”

She sat down hard on the wooden stool Erasmus kept in the back office.

“What troubles you?”

She waved the note at him. “I need to collect this stuff,” she said.

“Yes, but—” he read the note rapidly, his face expressionless. “I see.” He paused. “How badly do you need it?”

The moment she’d been half-dreading had arrived. How would Burgeson respond if she told him the unvarnished truth?

“Very.” She meshed her fingers together to avoid fidgeting. “The machine I need to collect has…well, it’s more than just useful to me. It stores pictures, and among them there’s a copy of the original knotwork design I need if I’m going to get back to my own world by myself. If I’ve got it, I’m not stuck with a choice between permanent exile here and a, a feudal backwater. Or going back to the Clan. If I do decide to make contact with them and ask to be taken in, it’s a bargaining lever that demonstrates my bona fides because I had a choice. And if I don’t, it gives me access to my own, my original, world. Where it’s possible to get hold of things like the medicine I got you.”

He waited for several seconds after she finished speaking. “That’s not all, is it?” he said gently.

She swallowed. “Are you planning on keeping me a prisoner here?” She asked. “Because that’s what denying me the ability to go back to the United States amounts to.”

“I’m not!” He began explosively, then stopped to draw a deep breath: “I apologize. I did not mean to imply that I thought you were going to cut and run.” He grimaced. “But there’s more to this device of yours than a mere pictographic representation, isn’t there?”

“Well, yes,” she admitted. “For one thing, it contains a copy of every patent filed in my home country over more than a century.” Erasmus gaped at her. “Why do you think I started out by setting up a research company?”

“But that must be—that’s preposterous!” He struggled visibly to grapple with the idea. “Such a library would occupy many shelf-feet, surely?”

“It used to.” Miriam felt a flash of hope. “But you saw the DVD player. Every second, that machine has to project thirty images on screen, to maintain the illusion of motion. How much storage do you think they take up? In my world, we have ways of storing huge amounts of data in very small spaces.”

“And such a library would be expensive,” he added speculatively.

“Not if it was old. And the cost of the storage medium was equivalent to, say, a reporter’s notebook.” Her patent database might not include anything filed in the past fifty years, but a full third of its contents were still novelties in New Britain.

“We must seem very primitive to you.” He was scrutinizing her, Miriam realized, with a guarded expression that was new and unwelcome.

“In some ways, yes.” She relaxed her hands. “In other ways—no, I don’t think so. And anyway, there are probably any number of other worlds out there that are as far beyond this one, or the one I came from, as this is beyond the Gruinmarkt. Where the Clan come from,” she clarified. “Bunch of medieval throwbacks.” Throwbacks who are your family, she reminded herself. “Look, from my point of view, I need to make sure I’ve got something, anything, that’ll stop them coming after me if they realize I survived the massacre.” Assuming they survived. “If I’ve got the laptop I can threaten to throw myself on the mercy of the security agencies in the U.S., whoever Mike is working for. Or I can claim loyalty and demonstrate that I didn’t do that, even though I could have. And if I don’t have anything to do with them I can use it to set up in business again, over here.”

“Do you plan to throw yourself on the mercy of your friend’s agency?” Erasmus asked, raising an eyebrow.

Miriam shuddered. “It’s a last resort,” she said slowly. “If the Clan come after me and try to kill me, they might be able to keep me alive.” But then again—Mike’s words came back to haunt her: They’re using world-walkers as mules, there’s a turf war inside the bureaucracy. Things might go really well. And then again, she might end up vanishing into some underground equivalent of Camp X-ray, into a nightmarish gulag that would make house arrest in Niejwein seem like paradise. “But I don’t want to risk it unless I have to.”

“So what are you going to do?” he asked gently. She blinked, and realized he was watching her hands. A double take: He gave me a pistol, she realized.

“I’m going to take back what’s mine,” she said calmly, “and I’m going to get clean away with it. Then we’re going to go on a long rail trip while the fuss dies down.” She stood up. “Do you mind if I go through your stock again? There’s some stuff I need to borrow…”

Two hours later, a mousy-looking woman in black trudged slowly past a row of warehouses and business premises, pushing a handcart. Her back hunched beneath an invisible load of despair, she looked neither left nor right as she trailed past an ominously quiet light metal works and a boarded-up fabric warehouse. The handcart, loaded with a battered suitcase and a bulging sack, told its own story: another of the victims of the blockade and the fiscal crisis, out on her uppers and looking for work, or shelter, or a crust before nightfall.

The streets weren’t deserted, but there was a lack of purposeful activity; no wagons loading and unloading bales of cloth or billets of mild steel, and a surfeit of skinny, down-at-heels men slouching, hands in pockets, from one works to another—or optimistically holding up crude signboards saying WILL WORK FOR FOOD. Some messages were universal, it seemed.

The woman with the handcart paused in the shadow of the textile mill, as if out of breath or out of energy on whatever meager rations she’d managed that morning. Her dull gaze drifted past a couple of idlers near the gates to a closed and barricaded glass factory: idlers a trifle better fed than the run of the mill, idlers wearing boots that—if she’d stopped to look—she might have noticed were suspiciously well-repaired.

A little further up the road, a shabby vendor with a baked potato stand was watching another boarded-up building. The woman’s gaze slid past him, too. After a minute or so she began to put one weary foot in front of another, and pushed her cart along the sidewalk towards the boarded-up works.

As she hunched over the handles of her cart, Miriam rubbed her wrist and squinted at the small pocket watch she’d wound around it. Any minute now, she told herself, half-sick with worry. The last time she’d tried something like this she’d ended up in Baron Henryk’s custody, guarded by cold-faced killers and under sentence of death. If she was wrong about the watchers, if there were more of them, this could end up just as badly.

From the alleyway running alongside the boarded-up workshop there was a crash and a tinkle of broken glass. Miriam shuffled slowly along, overtly oblivious as the potato-vendor left his stand and strolled towards the side of the building. Behind him the two idlers she’d tagged began to walk briskly in the opposite direction, setting up a pincer on the other end of the alley. She felt a flash of triumph. Now all it would take was for the street kids Erasmus had paid to do their job…

The watchers were out of sight. Miriam dropped the handles of her cart, grabbed her suitcase, and darted towards the workshop’s office doorway. A heavy seal and a length of rope held the splintered main door closed with the full majesty of the law, and not a lot besides: she grimaced and tugged hard at the seal, ducking inside as the door groaned and threatened to collapse on her. One minute only, she told herself. It might take them longer to work out that the urchins were a distraction, but she wasn’t betting on it.

Inside the entrance the building was dark and still, and cold—at least, as cold as anything got at this time of year. Moving fast, with an assurance born of having worked here for months, Miriam darted round the side of the walled-off office and felt for the door handle. It had always been loose, and her personal bet—that the Polis wouldn’t lock up inside a building they were keeping under surveillance—paid off. The door handle flexed as she stepped inside her former office, raising her suitcase as a barrier.

She needn’t have bothered. There was nobody waiting for her: nothing but the dusty damp smell of an unoccupied building. The high wooden stools lay adrift on the floor under a humus of scattered papers and overturned drawers. A flash of anger: The bastards didn’t need to do this, did they? But in a way it made things easier for her. Dealing with a stakeout by the secret police hereabouts was trivially easy compared to sneaking her laptop out past Morgan and making a clean getaway.

Thirty seconds. The nape of her neck was itching. Miriam stumbled across the overturned furniture, then bent down, fumbling in the leg well below one scribe’s position. The hidden compartment under the desk was still there: her hands closed on the wooden handle and pulled down and forward to open it. It slid out reluctantly, scraping loudly. She tugged hard, almost stumbling as it came out and the full weight of its contents landed on her arms.

The suitcase was on the floor. Forty-five seconds. She fumbled with the buckles for a heart-stopping moment, but finally the lid opened. Scooping the contents out of the hidden drawer—the feel of cold plastic slick against her fingertips—she swept them into the pile of bundled clothing within, then grabbed the bag by its handles. There was no time to buckle it closed: she picked it up in one hand and scurried back into the body of the empty works.

One minute. Was that a shout from outside? Miriam glanced briefly at the front door. Doesn’t matter, she thought: they’ll work it out soon enough. Moving by dead reckoning, her free hand stretched out to touch the wall beside her, she headed deeper into the building, following the deepening shadows. Another turn and the shadows began to lighten. At the end of the corridor she turned left and the grimy daylight lifted, showing her the dust and damage that had been brought to bear on her business, in the name of the law and by the neglect of her peers. It was heartbreaking, and she stopped, briefly unable to go on. I’ll rebuild it, she told herself. Somehow. The most important tools were in her suitcase, after all.

Then she heard them. A bang from the front door, low-pitched male voices, hunters casting around for the scent. Burgeson’s distraction had worked its purpose, but if she didn’t hurry, it would be all for nothing. Grimly determined, Miriam stepped into the abandoned workshop and gripped her suitcase. Standing beneath the skylight, she pulled the locket out of her pocket and narrowed her eyes, focusing on it and clearing her mind of everything else as the police agents stumbled towards her through the darkness.

This is it, she told herself. No more nice-guy Miriam. Next time someone tries to do this to me, I’m not going to let them live long enough to regret it.

And then the world changed.

Huw slept badly after he finished drafting the e-mail report to the duke. It wasn’t simply the noises Yul and Elena were making, although that was bad enough—young love, he reflected, was at its worst when there wasn’t enough to go round—but the prospects of what he was going to have to face on the morrow kept him awake long after the other had fallen asleep.

A new world. There couldn’t be any other explanation for the meteorological readings. Temperatures that low, that kind of subarctic coniferous forest, hadn’t been found in this part of the world since the last of the ice ages. The implications were enormous. For starters, this was the second new world that the Wu family’s knotwork could take a world-walker to. What happens if I use the original knot, from somewhere in this fourth world? Probably it takes me to yet another… even without discovering new topologies, ownership of both knotwork designs implied access to a lot more than three, or even four, worlds. The knots define a positional transformation in a higher order space. Like the moves of different pieces on a chessboard—able to go forward or backward, but if you used your bishop to make a move in one direction, then swapped your bishop for a rook, you could go somewhere else. It meant everything was up for grabs.

For over a century the Clan’s grandees had doppelgangered their houses—building defenses in the other world they knew of, to protect their residences from stealthy attack—without realizing that the Wu family could attack them from a third world. Now there was a fourth, and probably a fifth, a sixth…where would it end? Our core defensive strategy has just been made obsolete, overnight. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The Wu family knot was a simple mistake, the lower central whorl superimposed over the front of the ascending spiral, rather than hidden behind it. There would be other topologies, encoding different positional transformations. That much seemed clear to Huw, although he’d had to limit his forays into Mathematica to half an hour per day—trying to work out the knot structure was a guaranteed fast-track route to a migraine. There will be other worlds.

He lay awake long after Yul and Elena had dozed off, staring at the ceiling, daydreaming about exploration and all the disasters that could befall an unwary world-walker. We’ll need oxygen masks. (What if some of the worlds had never evolved photosynthesis, so that life was a thin scum of sulfur-reducing bacteria clustered around volcanic vents, at the bottom of a thick blanket of nitrogen and ammonia?) Trickster-wife, we may need space suits. (What if the planet itself had never formed?) Need to map the coastlines and relief, see if plate tectonics evolves deterministically in all worlds…

He blinked at the sunlight streaming in through the front window. How had it gotten to be morning? His mouth tasted of cobwebs and dust, but his head was clear. “Gaah.” There was no point pretending to sleep.

Someone was singing as he wandered through into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. It was Elena: she’d found the stash of kitchenware and was filling the coffee maker, warbling one of the more salacious passages of a famous saga to herself with—to Huw—a deeply annoying air of smug satisfaction.

“Humph.” He rummaged in the cupboard for a glass but came up with a chipped coffee mug instead. Rinsing it under the cold water tap, he asked, “Ready to face the day?”

“Oh yes!” She trilled, closing up the machine. She turned and grinned at him impishly. “It’s a wonderful day to explore a new world, don’t you think?”

“Just as long as we don’t leave our bones there.” Huw took a gulp of the slightly brackish tap water. “Yuck.” Ease up, she’s just being exuberant, he told himself. “Where’s Yul?”

“He’s still getting dressed—” She remembered herself and flushed. “He’ll be down in a minute.”

“Good.” Huw pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. Memo to self: do not taunt little brother’s girlfriend, little brother will be tetchy. “Coffee would be good, too, thanks,” he added.

“What are we going to do today?” she asked, eyes widening slightly.

“Hmm. Depends.”

“I was thinking about doing breakfast,” rumbled Hulius, from the doorway.

“That—” Huw brightened “—sounds like a great idea. Got to wait for the duke’s say-so before we continue, anyway,” he added. “Breakfast first, then we can get ready for a camping trip.”

Huw drove into town carefully, hunting for the diner he’d spotted the day before. He steered the youngsters to a booth at the back before ordering a huge breakfast—fried eggs, bacon, half a ton of hash browns, fried tomatoes, and a large mug of coffee. “Go on, pig out,” he told Elena and Hulius, “you’re going to be sorry you didn’t later.”

“Why should I?” asked Elena, as the waitress ambled off towards the kitchen. “I’ll be sorry if I’m fat and ugly before my wedding night!”

Huw glanced at his brother: Yul was studiously silent, but Huw could just about read his mind. Not the sharpest knife in the box… “We’re going back to the forest,” Huw explained laboriously, “and we’re staying there for at least one night, maybe two, in a tent. It’s going to be very cold. Your body burns more calories when you’re cold.”

“Oh!” She glared at him. “Men!” Yul winked at him, then froze as the waitress reappeared with a jug of coffee. “No sense of humor,” she humphed.

“Okay, so we’re humor-impaired” Huw started on his hash browns. “Listen, we—” he paused until the waitress was out of earshot “—it depends what orders we receive, alright? It’s possible his grace will tell me to sit tight until he can send a support team…but I don’t think it’s likely. From what I can gather, we’re shorthanded everywhere and anyone who isn’t essential is being pulled in for the corvee, supporting security operations, or running interference. So my best bet is, he’ll read my report and say ‘carry on.’ But until I get confirmation of that, we’re not going across.”

Elena stabbed viciously at her solitary fried egg. “To what end are we going?”

“To see if that stuff Yul found really is the remains of a roadbed. To look around and get some idea of the vegetation, so I can brief a real tree doctor when we’ve got time to talk to one. To plant a weather station and seismograph. To very quietly see if there’s any sign of inhabitation. To boldly go where no Clan explorer has gone before. Is that enough to start with?”

“Eh.” Yul paused with his coffee mug raised. “That’s a lot to bite off.”

“That’s why all three of us are going, this time.” Huw took another mouthful. “And we’re all taking full packs instead of piggybacking. That ties us down for an hour, minimum, if we run into trouble, but going by your first trip, there didn’t seem to be anybody home. We might have wildlife trouble, bears or wolves, but that shouldn’t be enough to require an immediate withdrawal. So unless the duke says ‘no,’ we’re going camping.”

They managed to finish their breakfast without discussing any other matters of import. Unfortunately for Huw, this created a zone of silence that Elena felt compelled to fill with enthusiastic chirping about Christina Aguilera and friends, which Hulius punctuated with nods and grunts of such transparently self-serving attentiveness that Huw began to darkly consider purchasing a dog collar and leash to present to his brother’s new keeper.

Back at the rented house, Huw got down to the serious job of redistributing their packs and making sure everything they’d need found a niche in one rucksack or another. It didn’t take long to put everything together: what took time was double-checking, asking what have I forgotten about that could kill me? When finally they were all ready it was nearly noon.

“Okay, wait in the yard,” said Huw. He walked back inside and reset the burglar alarm. “Got your lockets?” This time there was no need for the flash card, no need to keep all their hands free for emergencies. “On my mark: three, two, one…”

The world shifted color, from harsh sunlight on brown-parched grass to overcast pine-needle green. Huw glanced round. A moment earlier he’d been sweating into his open three-layer North Face jacket: the chill hit him like a punch in the ribs and a slap in the face. There were trees everywhere. Elena stepped out from behind a waist-high tangle of brush and dead branches and looked at him. A moment later Hulius popped into place, his heavy pack looming over his head like an astronaut’s oxygen supply. “All clear?” Huw asked, ignoring the pounding in his temples.

“Yup.” Yul hefted the meter-long spike with the black box of the radio beacon on top, and rammed it into the ground.

“It looks like it’s going to rain,” Elena complained, looking up at the overcast just visible between the treetops. “And it’s cold.”

Huw zipped his jacket up, then slid his pack onto the ground carefully. “Yul, you have the watch. Elena, if you could start unpacking the tent?” He unhooked the scanner from his telemetry belt and set it running, hunting through megahertz for the proverbial needle in a thunderstorm, then began to unpack the weather station.

“I have the watch, bro.” Yul’s backpack thudded heavily as it landed in a mat of ferns, followed by the metallic clack as he chambered a round in his hunting rifle. “No bear’s going to sneak up on you without my permission.”

“I’m so glad.” Huw squinted at the scanner, then nodded. “Okay, nothing on the air. Radio check. Elena?”

“Oh, what? You want—the radio?”

“Go ahead.”

Elena reached into her jacket pocket and produced a walkie-talkie. “Can you hear me?”

Huw winced and turned down the volume. “I hear you. Your turn, Yul—” Another minute of cross-checks and he was happy. “Okay. Got radio, got weather station, acquired the beacon. Let’s get the tent up.”

The tent was a tunnel model, with two domed compartments separated by a central awning, for which Huw had a feeling he was going to be grateful. Elena had already unrolled it: between them they managed to nail the spikes in and pull it erect without too much swearing, although the tunnel ended up bulging in at one side where it wrapped around an inconveniently placed trunk.

Huw crossed the clearing then, stretching as high as he could, slashed a strip of bark away from the trunk of the tree nearest the spike. Then he turned to Yul. “Where was that chunk of asphalt?”

“That way, dude.” Hulius gestured down the gentle slope. The trees blocked the line of sight within a hundred meters. “Want to go check it out?”

“You know it.” Huw’s stomach rumbled. Going to have to find a stream soon, he realized, or send Elena back over to fill up the water bag. “Lead off. Stay close and stop at twenty so I can mark the route.”

It was quiet in the forest, much too quiet. After a minute, Huw realized what he was missing: the omnipresent creaking of the insect chorus, cicadas and hopping things of one kind or another. Occasionally a bird would cry out, a harsh cawing of crows or the tu-whit tu-whit of something he couldn’t identify marking out its territory. From time to time the branches would rustle and whisper in the grip of a breeze impossible to detect at ground level. But there was no enthusiastic orchestra of insects, no rumble of traffic, nor the drone of engines crawling across the upturned bowl of the empty sky. We’re alone, he realized. And: it feels like it’s going to snow.

Yul stopped and turned round. He grinned broadly and pointed at the nearest tree. “See? I’ve been here before.”

Huw nodded. “Good going.” His headache eased slightly. “How much farther is it?”

“About six markers, maybe a couple of hundred meters.”

“Right.” Huw glanced round at Elena. “You hear that?”

“Sure.” She chewed rhythmically as she reached up with her left hand to flick a stray hair away from her eyes. She didn’t move her right hand away from the grip on the P90, but kept scanning from side to side with an ease that came from long practice—she’d done her share of summer training camps for the duke.

“Lead on, Yul.” Huw suppressed a shiver. Elena—was she really as brainless as she’d seemed over breakfast? Or was she another of those differently socialized Clan girls, who escaped from their claustrophobic family connections by moonlighting as manhunters for ClanSec? He hadn’t asked enough questions when the duke’s clerk had gone down his list of names and suggested he talk to her. But the way she moved silently in his footsteps, scanning for threats, suggested that maybe he ought to have paid more attention.

Ten, fifteen minutes passed. Yul stopped. “Here it is,” he said quietly.

“I have the watch.” Elena turned in a circle, looking for threats.

“Let me see.” Huw knelt down near the tree Hulius had pointed to. The undergrowth was thin here, barely more than a mat of pine needles and dead branches, and the slope almost undetectable. Odd lumpy protuberances humped out of the ground near the roots of the tree, and when he glanced sideways Huw realized he could see a lot farther in one direction before his vision was blocked by more trees. He unhooked the folding trench shovel from his small pack and chopped away at the muck and weedy vegetation covering one of the lumps. “Whoa!”

Huw knew his limits: what he knew about archeology could be written on the sleeve notes of an Indiana Jones DVD. But he also knew asphalt when he saw it, a solid black tarry aggregate with particles of even size—and he knew it was old asphalt too, weathered and overgrown with lichen and moss.

“Looks like a road to me,” Yul offered.

“I think you’re right.” Huw cast around for more chunks of half-buried roadstone. Now that he knew what he was looking for it wasn’t difficult to find. “It ran that way, north-northeast, I think.” Turning to look in the opposite direction he saw a shadowy tunnel, just about as wide as a two-lane road. Some trees had erupted through the surface over the years, but for the most part it had held the forest at bay. “Okay, this way is downhill. Let’s plant a waypoint and—” he looked up at the heavy overcast “—follow it for an hour, or until it starts to rain, before we head back.” He checked his watch. It was just past two in the afternoon. “I don’t want to get too far from base camp today.”

Hulius rammed another transponder spike into the earth by the road and Huw scraped an arrow on the nearest tree, pointing back along their path. The LED on top of the transponder blinked infrequently, reassuring them that the radio beacon was ready and waiting to guide them home. For the next half hour they plodded along the shallow downhill path, Hulius leading the way with his hunting rifle, Elena bringing up the rear. Once they were on the roadbed, it was easy to follow, although patches of asphalt had been heaved up into odd mounds and shoved aside by trees over the years—or centuries—for which it had been abandoned. Something about the way the road snaked along the contours of the shallow hillside tickled Huw’s imagination. “It was built to take cars,” he finally said aloud.

“Huh? How can you tell?” asked Yul.

“The radius of curvature. Look at it, if you’re on foot it’s as straight as an arrow. But imagine you’re driving along it at forty, fifty miles per hour. See how it’s slightly banked around that ridge ahead?” He pointed towards a rise in the ground, just visible through the trees.

They continued in silence for a couple of minutes. “You’re assuming—” Yul began to say, then stopped, freezing in his tracks right in front of a tree that had thrust through the asphalt. “Shit.”

“What?” Huw almost walked into his back.

“Cover,” Yul whispered, gesturing towards the side of the track. “It’s probably empty, but…”

“What?” Huw ducked to the side of the road—followed by Elena—then crept forward to peer past Yul’s shoulder.

“There,” said Hulius, raising one hand to point. It took a moment for Huw to recognize the curving flank of a mushroom-pale dome, lightly streaked with green debris. “You were looking for company, weren’t you? I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”

It wasn’t the first time Miriam had hidden in the woods, nursing a splitting headache and a festering sense of injustice, but familiarity didn’t make it easier: and this time she’d had an added source of anxiety as she crossed over, hoping like hell that the Clan hadn’t seen fit to doppelganger her business by building a defensive site in the same location in their own world. But she needn’t have worried. The trees grew thick and undisturbed, and she’d made sure that the site was well inland from the line the coast had followed before landfill in both her Boston and the strangely different New British version had extended it.

She’d taken a risk, of course. Boston and Cambridge occupied much the same sites in New Britain as in her own Massachusetts, but in the Gruinmarkt that area was largely untamed, covered by deciduous forest and the isolated tracts and clearings of scattered village estates. She’d never thought to check the lay of the land colocated with her workshop, despite having staked out her house: for all she knew, she might world-walk right into the great hall of some hedge lord. But it seemed unlikely—Angbard hadn’t chosen the site of his fortified retreat for accessibility—so the worst risk she expected was a twisted ankle or a drop into a gully.

Instead Miriam stumbled and nearly walked face-first into a beech tree, then stopped and looked around. “Ow.” She massaged her forehead. This was bad: she suddenly felt hot and queasy, and her vision threatened to play tricks on her. Damn, I don’t need a migraine right now. She sat down against the tree trunk, her heart hammering with the release of tension. A flash of triumph: I got away with it! Well, not quite. She’d still have to cross back over and meet up with Erasmus. But there were hours to go, yet…

The nausea got worse abruptly, peaking in a rush that cramped her stomach. She doubled over to her right and vomited, whimpering with pain. The spasms seemed to go on for hours, leaving her gasping for breath as she retched herself dry. Eventually, by the time she was too exhausted to stand up, the cramps began to ease. She sat up and leaned back against the tree, pulled her suitcase close, and shivered uncontrollably. “I wonder what brought that on?” She mumbled under her breath. Then in an effort to distract herself, she opened the case.

The contents of the hidden drawer were mostly plastic and base metal, but they gleamed at her eyes with more promise than a chest full of rubies and diamonds. A small Sony notebook PC and its accessories, a power supply and CD drive. With shaking hands she opened the computer’s lid and pushed the power button. The screen flickered, and LEDs flashed, then it shut down again. “Oh, of course.” The battery had run down in the months of enforced inactivity. Well, no need to worry: New Britain had alternating current electricity, and the little transformer was designed for international use, rugged enough to eat their bizarre mixture of frequency and voltage without melting. (Even though she’d had a devil of a time at first, establishing how the local units of measurement translated into terms she was vaguely familiar with.)

Closing the suitcase, she felt the tension drain from her shoulders. I can go home, she told herself. Any time I want to. All she had to do was walk twenty-five paces north, cross over again at the prearranged time, and then find an electric light socket to plug the computer into. “Huh.” She glanced at her watch, surprised to discover that fifty minutes had already passed. She’d arranged to reappear in three hours, the fastest crossing she felt confident she could manage without medication. But that was before the cramps and the migraine had hit her. She stood up clumsily, brushed down her clothes, and oriented herself using the small compass she’d found among Burgeson’s stock. “Okay, here goes nothing.”

Another tree, another two hours: this time in the right place for the return trip to the side alley behind the workshop. Miriam settled down to wait. What do I really want to do? she asked herself. It was a hard question to answer. Before the massacre at the betrothal ceremony—already nearly a week ago—she’d had the grim luxury of certainty. But now…I could buy my way back into the game, she realized. The Idiot’s dead so the betrothal makes no sense anymore. Henryk’s probably dead, too. And I’ve got valuable information, if I can get Angbard’s ear. Mike’s presence changed everything. Hitherto, all the Clan’s strategic planning and internecine plotting had made the key assumption that they were inviolable in their own estates, masters of their own world. But if the U.S. government could send spies, then the implications were likely to shake the Clan to its foundations. They’ve been looking for the Clan for years, she realized. But now they’d found the narcoterrorists—one world’s feudal baron is another world’s drug lord—the whole elaborate game of charades that Clan security played was over. The other player could kick over the card table any time they wanted. You can doppelganger a castle against world-walkers, but you can’t stop them crossing over outside your walls and planting a backpack nuke. In an endgame between the Clan and the CIA or its world-walking equivalent, there could be only one winner.

“So they can’t win a confrontation. But if they lose…” She blinked. They had Iris, Patricia, her mask-wearing mother. Could I let her go? The thought was painful. And then there were others, the ones she could count as friends. Olga, Brill, poor innocent kids like Kara. Even James Lee. She could cut and run, but she’d be leaving them to—no, that’s not right. She shook her head. Where did this unwelcome sense of responsibility come from? Damn it, I haven’t gone native! But it was too late to protest: they’d tied her into their lives, and if she just walked out on them, much less walked willingly into the arms of enemies who’d happily see them all dead or buried so deep in jail they’d never see daylight, she’d be personally responsible for the betrayal.

“They’ll have to go.” Somewhere beyond the reach of a government agency that relied on coerced and imprisoned world-walkers. “But where?” New Britain was a possibility. Her experiment in technology transfer had worked, after all. What if we went overt? She wondered. If we told them who we were and what we could do. Could we cut a deal? Build a military-industrial complex to defend against a military-industrial complex. The Empire’s under siege. The French have the resources to… she blanked. I don’t know enough. A tantalizing vision clung to the edges of her imagination, a new business idea so monumentally vast and arrogant she could barely contemplate it. Thousands of world-walkers, working with the support and resources of a continental superpower, smuggling information and ideas and sharing lessons leeched from a more advanced world. I was thinking small. How fast could we drag New Britain into the twenty-first century? Even without the cohorts of new world-walkers in the making that she’d stumbled across, the product of Angbard’s secretive manipulation of a fertility lab’s output, it seemed feasible. More than that: it seemed desirable. Mike’s organization will assume that any world-walker is a drug mule until proven otherwise. It won’t be healthy to be a world-walker in the USA after the shit hits the fan. We’ll need New Britain.

Miriam shook herself and checked her watch. The hours had drifted by: the shadows were lengthening and her headache was down to a dull throb. She stood up and dusted herself down again, picked up her suitcase, and focused queasily on the locket. “Once more, with spirit…”

Bang.

Red-hot needles thrust into her eyes as her stomach heaved again: a giant gripped her head between his hands and squeezed. Cobblestones beneath her boots, and a stink of fresh horseshit. Miriam bent forward, gagging, realizing I’m standing in the road—and a narrow road it was, walled on both sides with weathered, greasy brickwork—as the waves of nausea hit.

Bang.

Someone shouted something, at her it seemed. The racket was familiar, and here was a car (or what passed for one in New Britain) with engine running. Hands grabbed at her suitcase: she tightened her grip instinctively.

“Into the car! Now!” Erasmus, she realized fuzzily.

“’M going to be sick—”

“Well you can be sick in the car!” He clutched her arm and tugged.

Bang.

Gunshots?

She tottered forward, stomach lurching, and half-fell, half-slid through the open passenger compartment leg well, collapsing on the wooden floor. The car shuddered and began to roll smoothly on a flare of steam.

BANG. Someone else, not Erasmus, leaned over her and pulled the trigger of a revolver, driving sharp spikes into her outraged ear drums. With a screech of protesting rubber the car picked up speed. BANG. Erasmus collapsed on top of her, holding her down. “Stay on the floor,” he shouted.

The steam car hit a pothole and bounced, violently. It was too much: Miriam began to retch again, bringing up clear bile.

“Shit.” It was the shooter on the back seat, wrinkling his face in disgust. “I think that’s—” he paused “—no, they’re trying to follow us on foot.” The driver piled on the steam, then flung their carriage into a wide turn onto a public boulevard. The shooter sat down hard, holding his pistol below seat level, pointing at the floor. “Can you sit up?” he asked Miriam and Erasmus. “Look respectable fast, we’re hitting Ketch Street in a minute.”

Erasmus picked himself up. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice shaky. Miriam waited for a moment as her stomach tried to lurch again. “Are you all right?”

“Head hurts,” she managed. Arms around her shoulders lifted her to her knees. “My suitcase…”

“On the parcel shelf.”

More hands from the other side. Together they lifted her into position on the bench seat. The car was rattling and rocking from side to side, making a heady pace—almost forty miles per hour, if she was any judge of speed, but it felt more like ninety in this ragtop steamer. She gasped for air, chest heaving, trying to get back the wind she’d lost while she was throwing up. “Are you alright?” Burgeson asked again. He’d found a perch on the jump seat opposite, and was clutching a grab-strap behind the chauffeur’s station on the right of the cockpit.

“I, it never hit me like that before,” she admitted. Amidst the cacophony in her skull she found a moment to be coldly terrified: world-walking usually caused a blood pressure spike and migraine-like symptoms, but nothing like this hellish nausea and pile-driver headache. “Something’s up with me.”

“Did you get what you wanted?” he pressed her. “Was it worth it?”

“Yeah, yes.” She glanced sideways, tiredly. “We haven’t been introduced.”

“Indeed.” Erasmus sent her a narrow-eyed look. “This is Albert. Albert, meet Anne.”

Gotcha. “Nice to meet you,” she said politely.

“Albert” nodded affably, and palmed his revolver, sliding it into a pocket of his cutaway jacket. “Always nice to meet a fellow traveler,” he said.

“Indeed.” Fellow traveler, is it? She fell silent. Burgeson’s political connections came with dangerous strings attached. “What’s with the car? And the rush?”

“You didn’t hear them shooting at us?” Erasmus looked concerned, as if questioning her sanity.

“I was busy throwing up. What happened?”

“Stakeout,” he said. “About ten minutes after your break-in they surrounded the place. If you’d come out the front door—” The brisk two-fingered gesture across his throat made the message all too clear. “I don’t know what you’ve stirred up, but the Polis are very upset about something. So I decided to call in some favors and arrange a rescue chariot.”

“Albert” nodded. “A good thing too,” he said darkly. “You’ll excuse me, ma’am.” He doffed his cap and began to knead it with his fingers, turning it inside out to reveal a differently patterned lining. “I’ll be off at the next crossroads.” Erasmus turned and knocked sharply on the wooden partition behind the chauffeur: the car began to slow from its headlong rush.

“Where are we—” Miriam swallowed, then paused to avoid gagging on the taste of bile “—where are we going?”

The car slowed to a near halt, just short of a streetcar stop. “Wait,” said Erasmus. To “Albert” he added: “The movement thanks you for your assistance today. Good luck.” “Albert” nodded, then stepped onto the sidewalk and marched briskly away without a backward glance. The car picked up speed again, then wheeled in a fast turn onto a twisting side street. “We’re going to make the train, I hope,” Erasmus said quietly. “The driver doesn’t know which one. Or even which station. I hope you can walk.”

“My head’s sore. But my feet…” She tried to shrug, then winced. Only minutes had passed, but she was having difficulty coming to terms with the ambush. “They were trying to kill me. No warnings.”

“Yes.” He raised one eyebrow. “Maybe your friend was under closer surveillance than he realized.”

Miriam shuddered. “Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.

It took them a while to make their connection. The car dropped them off near a suburban railway platform, from which they made their way to a streetcar stop and then via a circuitous route Erasmus had evidently planned to throw off any curious followers. But an hour later they were waiting on a railway platform in downtown Boston, not too far from the site of Back Bay Station in Miriam’s home world. Geography dictates railroads, she told herself as another smoky locomotive wheezed and puffed through the station, belching steam towards the arched cast-iron ceiling trusses. I wonder what else it dictates? The answer wasn’t hard to guess: she’d seen the beggars waiting outside the ticket hall, hoping for a ride out west. Erasmus nodded to himself beside her, then tensed. “Look,” he said, “I do believe that’s ours.”

Miriam glanced towards the end of the long, curving platform, through the thin haze of steam. “Really?” The long ant column of carriages approaching the platform seemed to vanish into the infinite distance. It was certainly long enough to be a transcontinental express train.

“Carriage eleven, upper deck.” He squinted towards it. “We’ve got a bit of a walk…”

The Northern Continental was a city on wheels—wheels six French feet apart, the track gauge nearly half as wide again as the ordinary trains. The huge double-deck carriages loomed overhead, brass handrails gleaming around the doors at either end. Burgeson’s expensive passes did more than open doors: uniformed porters took their suitcases and carried them upstairs, holding the second and third class passengers at bay while they boarded. Miriam looked around in astonishment. “This is ridiculous!”

Erasmus smiled lopsidedly. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s not that—” Miriam walked across to the sofa facing the wall of windows and sat down, bemused. The walls of the compartment were paneled in polished oak as good as anything Duke Angbard had in his aerie at Fort Lofstrom, and if the floor wasn’t carpeted in hand-woven Persian rugs, she was no judge of carpet. It reminded her of the expensive hotels she’d stayed at in Boston, when she’d been trying to set up a successful technology transfer business and impress the local captains of industry. “Does this convert into a bed, or…?”

“The bedrooms are through there.” Erasmus pointed at the other end of the lounge. “The bathroom is just past the servants’ quarters—”

“Servants’ quarters?”

Erasmus looked at her oddly. “Yes, I keep forgetting. Labor is expensive where you come from, isn’t it?”

Miriam looked around again. “Wow. We’re here for the next three or four days?”

A distant whistle cut through the window glass, and with a nearly undetectable jerk the carriage began to move.

“Yes.” He nodded. “Plenty of time to take your shoes off.”

“Okay.” She bent down automatically, then blinked stupidly. “This doesn’t come cheap, does it?”

“No.” She heard a scrape of chair legs across carpet and looked up, catching Erasmus in the process of sitting down in a spindly Queen Anne reproduction. He watched her with his wide, dark, eyes, his bearing curiously bird like. Behind him, Empire Station slid past in ranks of cast-iron pillars. “But one tends to be interfered with less if one is seen to be able to support expensive tastes.”

“Right…so you’re doing this, spending however much, just to go and see a man about a book?”

A brief pause. “Yes.” Erasmus smiled faintly.

Miriam stared at him. And you gave me a gun to carry? Either you’re mad, or you trust me, or… she couldn’t complete the sentence: it was too preposterous. “That must be some book.”

“Yes, it is.” He nodded. “It has already shaken empires and slain princes.” His cheek twitched at some unspoken unpleasantness. “I have a copy of it in my luggage, if you’d like to read it.”

“Huh?” She blinked, stupidly. “I thought you said you were going to see a man about a book? As in, you were going to buy or sell one?”

“Not exactly: perhaps I should have said, I’m going to see a man about his book. And if all goes well, he’s going to come back east with us.” He glanced down at his feet. “Does Sir Adam Burroughs mean anything to you?”

Miriam shook her head.

“Probably just as well,” Erasmus muttered to himself. “I think you ought to at least look at the book, after dinner. Just so you understand what you’re getting into.”

“Alright.” She stood up. “Is there an electrical light in the bedroom? I need to plug my machine in to charge…”

The fridge was half empty, the half-and-half was half past yogurt, and Oscar thought he was a burglar. That was the downside of coming home. On the upside: Mike could finally look forward to sleeping in his own bed without fear of disturbances, he had a crate of antibiotics to munch on, and Oscar hadn’t thrown up on the carpet again. Home. Funny place, where are the coworkers and security guards? Out on the street, obviously. Mike watched Herz drive off from the porch, then closed the door and went inside.

The crutches got in the way, and the light bulb in the hallway had blown, but at least Oscar wasn’t trying to wrap his furry body around the fiberglass cast in a friendly feline attempt to trip up the food ape. Yet. Mike shuffled through into the living room and lowered himself into the sofa, struggled inconclusively with the one shoe he was wearing, and flicked on the TV. The comforting babble of CNN washed over him. I need some time out, he decided. This being hospitalized shit is hard work. Spending half an hour as a couch potato was a seductive prospect: a few minutes later, his eyelids were drooping shut.

Perhaps it was the lack of hospital-supplied Valium, but Mike—who didn’t normally remember his dreams—found himself in a memorable but chaotic confabulatory realm. One moment he was running a three-legged race through a minefield, the sense of dread almost choking him as Sergeant Hastert’s corpse flopped drunkenly against him, one limp arm around his shoulders; the next, he was lying on a leather bench seat, unable to move, opposite Dr. James, the spook from head office. “It’s important that you find the bomb,” James was saying, but the cranky old lady on the limousine’s parcel shelf was pointing a pistol at the back of his head. “Matthias is a traitor; I want to know who he was working for.”

He tried to open his mouth to warn the colonel about the old madwoman with the gun, but it was Miriam crouching on the shelf now, holding a dictaphone and making notes. “It’s all about manipulating the currency exchange rates,” she explained: then she launched into an enthusiastic description of an esoteric trading scam she was investigating, one that involved taking greenbacks into a parallel universe, swapping them for pieces of eight, and melting them down into Swiss watches. Mike tried to sit up and pull Pete out of the line of fire, but someone was holding him down. Then he woke up, and Oscar, who’d been sitting on his chest, head-butted him on the underside of his chin.

“Thanks, buddy.” Oscar head-butted him again, then made a noise like a dying electric shaver. Mike figured his bowl was empty. He took stock: his head ached, he had pins and needles in one arm, the exposed toes of his left foot were cold to the point of numbness, and the daylight outside his window was in short supply. “Come here, you.” He reached up to stroke the tomcat, who was clearly intent on exercising his feline right to bear a grudge against his human whenever it suited him, and not a moment longer. For a moment he felt a bleak wave of depression. The TV was still on, quietly babbling inanities from the corner of the room. How long is this going to take? Mrs. Beckstein had said it could be weeks, and with Colonel Smith tasking him with being her contact, that could leave him stuck indoors here for the duration.

He pushed himself upright and hobbled dizzily over to the kitchen phone—the cordless handset had succumbed to a flat battery—and dialed the local pizza delivery shop from memory. Working out what the hell to do with this surfeit of time (which he couldn’t even use for a fishing trip or a visit to his cousins) could wait ’til tomorrow.

The next morning, the long habit of keeping office hours—despite a week of disrupted sleep patterns—dragged Mike into unwilling consciousness. He took his antibiotics, then spent a fruitless half-hour trying to figure out how to shower without getting water in his cast, which made his leg itch abominably. This is hopeless, he told himself, when the effort of trying to lift an old wooden stool into the shower left him so tired he had to sit down: I really am ill. The infection—thankfully under control—had taken out of him what little energy the torn-up and broken leg had left behind. The difficulty of accomplishing even minor tasks was galling, and sitting at home on full pay, knowing that serious, diligent people like Agent Herz were out there busting their guts to get the job done made it even worse. But there was just about nothing he could do that would contribute to the mission, beyond what he was already doing: sitting at ground zero of a stakeout.

Mike had never been a loafer, and while he was used to taking vacations, enforced home rest was an unaccustomed and unwelcome imposition. For a while he thought about getting out and picking up some groceries, but the prospect of getting into the wagon and driving with his left leg embedded in a mass of blue fiberglass was just too daunting. Better wait for Helen, he decided. His regular cleaner would be in like clockwork tomorrow—he could work on a shopping list in the meantime. There’s got to be a better way. Then he shook his head. You’re sick, son. Take five.

Just after lunchtime (a cardboard-tasting microwave lasagna that had spent too long at the bottom of the chest freezer), the front doorbell rang. Cursing, Mike stumbled into the hall, pushing off the walls in a hurry, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t get impatient and leave before he made it. He paused just inside the vestibule and checked the spy hole, then opened the door. “Come in!” He tried to take a step back and ended up leaning against the wall.

“No need to put on a song and dance, Mike, I know you feel like shit.” Smith nodded stiffly. “Go on, take your time. I’ll shut the door. We need to talk about stuff.” He was carrying a pair of brown paper grocery bags.

“Uh, okay.” Mike pushed himself off from the wall and half-hopped back towards the living room. The crutch would have come in handy, but he knew his way around well enough to use the furniture and door frames for support. “What brings you here?” He called over his shoulder. “I thought I was meant to be taking it easy.”

“You…are.” Smith glanced around as he came into the main room. Not used to visiting employees at home, Mike realized. “But there’s some stuff we need to talk about.”

I do not need this, Mike lowered himself onto the sofa. “You couldn’t tell me in the hospital?” he asked.

“You were still kind of crinkle-cut, son. And there were medics about.”

“Gotcha.” Mike waved at the door to the kitchen. “I’d offer you a coffee or something but I’m having a hard time getting about…”

“That’s alright.” Smith put one of the grocery bags down on the side table, then walked over to the kitchen door and put the other on the worktop inside. Then he made a circuit of the living room. He held his hands tightly behind his back, as if forcibly restraining himself from checking for dust on top of the picture rail. “I won’t be long.”

“Are we being monitored?”

Smith glanced at him. “I sure hope so.” He gestured at the walls. “Not on audio, but there’s a real expensive infrared camera out there, son, and a couple of guys in a van just to keep an eye on you.”

“There are?” Mike knew better than to get angry. “What are they expecting to see?”

“Visitors who don’t arrive through the front door.” Smith slung one leg over the arm of the recliner and leaned on it, inspecting Mike pensively.

“Oh, right.” For a second, Mike felt the urge to kick his earlier self for passing on absolutely everything he’d learned. The impulse passed: he’d been fever-ridden, and anyway it was what he was supposed to do. But still, if he hadn’t done so, he wouldn’t be stuck out here under virtual house arrest. He might be back in hospital, with no worries about groceries. And besides, Smith had a point. “You might want to warn them I’m expecting a housekeeper to show tomorrow—she drops by a couple of times a week.”

“I’ll tell them.” Smith paused. “As it happens, I know you’re not being listened in on, unless you lift the receiver on that phone—I signed the wiretap request myself. There’s stuff we need to talk about, and this place is more private than my office, if you follow my drift.”

“I’m not being listened in on right now? Suits me.” Mike leaned back in the sofa. “Talk away. Sorry if I don’t, uh, if I’m not too focused: I feel like shit.”

“Yes, well.” Smith glanced at him. “That’s why you’re on sick leave. You may be interested to know that your story checks out: that is, Beckstein’s mother disappeared six months ago. Her house is still there, the bills are being paid on time, but there’s nobody home. We haven’t gotten a trace on her income stream so far; her credit cards and bank account are ordinary enough, but the deposits are coming in from an offshore bank account in Liechtenstein and that’s turning out to be hard to trace. Anyway, I think we can confirm that she’s one of them.” He stood up again and paced over to the kitchen door then back, as if his legs were incapable of standing still. “This is a, a tactical mess. We’d hoped to get at least a few successful contacts in place before our ability to operate in fairyland was blown. What this means is that they, uh, Beckstein senior’s faction, are going to be alert for informants from now on. On the other hand, if they’re willing to talk we’ve got an—admittedly biased—HUMINT source to develop. Contacts, in other words.”

Mike stared at him. Smith was just about sweating bullets. “Who do we talk to in the Middle East?” he asked. “I mean, when we want to know what al-Qaeda is planning?”

“That’s a lot more accessible. This, these guys, it’s like China in the fifties or sixties.” Smith looked as if he was sucking on a lemon. “Look.” He picked up the second grocery bag and handed it to Mike. “This stuff is strictly off the books because, unfortunately, we’re off the map here, right outside the reservation.”

“What—” Mike upended the bag and boxes fell out. A mobile phone, ammunition, a pistol. “The fuck?”

“Glock 18, like their own people use. The phone was bought anonymously for cash. Listen.” Smith hunkered down in front of him, still radiating extreme discomfort. “The phone’s preprogrammed with Dr. James’s private number. This is running right from the top. If you have to negotiate with them, James can escalate you all the way to Daddy Warbucks.”

Mike was impressed, despite himself. They’re briefing the vice president? “What’s the gun for?”

“In case the other faction come calling for you.”

Shit. “Hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted. “What do you want me to do?”

Smith took a deep breath. “Find out if GREENSLEEVES was blowing smoke. If all he had was a couple of slugs of hot metal, that’s still bad—but right now it would be really good if we could call off the NIRT investigation. On the other hand, you might want to point out to the Beckstein faction what would happen if one of our cities goes up.”

“Huh. What would happen? What could we do, realistically?” Mike stared at him.

Smith paused for a few seconds. “I’m just guessing here, you understand. I’m not privy to that information. But my guess is that we would be very, very angry—for all of about thirty minutes.” He swallowed. “And then we’d retaliate in kind, Mike. The SSADM backpack nukes have been out of inventory since the early seventies and the W54 cores were retired by eighty-nine, but they don’t have to stay that way. The schematics are still on file and if I were a betting man I’d place a C-note on Pantex being able to run one up in a few weeks, if they haven’t done so already. Daddy Warbucks and the Wolfman are both gung-ho about developing a new generation of nukes. It could get really ugly really fast, Mike. A smuggler’s war, tit for tat. But we’d win, because they’ve got better logistics but we’ve got a choke hold on the weapons supply. And if it comes to it, I don’t think we’d hold back from making it a war of extermination. It’s not hard to stick a cobalt jacket on a bomb when there’s zero risk of the fallout coming home.”

“Wow, that’s ugly all right.” 9/11 had been bad enough: the nightmare Smith was dangling before him was infinitely worse. “Anything else?”

“Yep.” The colonel stood up. “From now on, until you’re through with this thing or we call it off, you’re in a box. We don’t want you in day-to-day contact with the organization. The less you know, the less you can give away.”

“But I—oh. You’re thinking, if they kidnap me—”

“Yes, that’s what we’re afraid of.”

“Right.” Mike swallowed. “So. I’m to tell Mrs. Beckstein about Matt’s bomb threat, and we either want it handed over right now, or convincing evidence that he was bluffing. Otherwise, they’re looking at retaliation in kind. What else?”

“You give her the mobile phone and tell her who it connects to. There’s a deal on the table that she might find interesting.” Smith nodded to himself. “And there’s one other thing you can pass on at the same time.”

“Yes?”

“Tell her we’re working on the world-walking mechanism. Her window of opportunity for negotiation is open right now—but if she waits too long, it’s going to slam shut.” He stood up. “Once we aren’t forced to rely on captured couriers, as soon as we can send the 82nd Airborne across, we aren’t going to need the Clan any more. And we want her to know that.”

In Otto’s opinion one camp was much like another: the only difference was how far the stink stretched. His majesty’s camp was better organized than most, but with three times as many men it paid to pay attention to details like the latrines. King Egon might not like the tinkers, but he was certainly willing to copy their obsession with hygiene if it kept his men from the pest. And so Otto rode with his retinue, tired and dusty from the road, past surprisingly tidy rows of tents and the larger pavilions of their eorls and lords, towards the big pavilion at the heart of the camp—in order to ask the true whereabouts of his majesty.

The big pavilion wasn’t hard to find—the royal banner flying from the tall mast anchored outside it would have been a giveaway, if nothing else—but Otto’s eyes narrowed at the size of the guard detachment waiting there. Either he mistrusts one of his own, or the bluff is doubled, he thought. Handing his horse’s reins to one of his hand-men he swung himself down from the saddle, wincing slightly as he turned towards the three guards in household surcoats approaching from the side of the pavilion. “Who’s in charge here?” he demanded.

“I am.” The tallest of them tilted his helmet back.

Otto stiffened in shock, then immediately knelt, heart in mouth with fear: “My liege, I did not recognize you—”

“You weren’t meant to.” Egon smiled thinly. “No shame attaches. Rise, Otto, and walk with me. You brought your company?”

“Yes—all who are fit to ride. And your messenger, Sir Geraunt.”

“Good.” The king carefully shifted the strap on his exotic and lethal weapon, pointing the muzzle at the ground as he walked around the side of the tent. Otto noticed the two other house hold guards following, barely out of earshot. They, too, carried black, strangely proportioned witch weapons. “I’ve got something to show you.”

“Sire?” Behind him, Heidlor was keeping his immediate bodyguard together. Good man. The king’s behavior was disturbingly unconventional—

“The witches can walk through another world,” remarked Egon. “They can ambush you if you keep still and they know where you are. Armies are large, they attract spies. Constant movement is the best defense. That, and not making a target of one’s royal self by wearing gilded armor and sleeping in the largest tent.”

Ah. Otto nodded. So there was a reason for all this strangeness, after all. “What would you have me do, sire?”

Behind the royal pavilion there was a hummock of mounded-up earth. Someone—many someones—had labored to build it up from the ground nearby, and then cut a narrow trench into it. “Pay attention.” His majesty marched along the trench, which curved as it cut into the mound. Otto followed him, curious as to what his majesty might find so interesting in a heap of soil. “Ah, here we are.” The trench descended until the edges were almost out of reach above him, then came to an abrupt end in an open, circular space almost as large as the royal pavilion. The muddy floor was lined with rough-cut planks: four crates were spaced around the walls, as far apart as possible. The king placed a proprietorial hand on one of the crates. “What do you make of it?”

Otto blanked for a moment. He’d been expecting something, but this…“Spoils?” he asked, slowly.

“Very good!” Egon grinned boyishly. “Yes, I took these from the witches. Hopefully they don’t realize they’re missing, yet. Tonight, another one should arrive.”

“But they’re—” Otto stared. “Treasure?” His eyes narrowed. “Their demon blasting powder?”

“Something even better.” A low metal box, drab green in color, lay on the planking next to the crate. Egon bent down and flicked open the latches that held the lid down. “Behold.” He flipped the lid over, to reveal the contents—a gun.

“One of the tinkers’,” Otto noted, forgetting to hold his tongue. “An arms dump?”

“Yes.” Egon straightened up. “My sources told me about them, so I had my—helpers—go looking.” He looked at Otto, his face unreadable. “Twenty years ago, thirty years ago, the witch families handed their collective security to the white duke. He standardized them. Their guns, your pistol—” he gestured at Otto’s holster—“when you run out of their cartridges, what will you do?”

Otto shrugged. “It’s a problem, sire. We can’t make anything like these.”

Egon nodded. “They have tried hard to conceal a dirty little secret: the truth is, neither can they. So they stockpile cartridges of a common size and type, purchased from the demons in the shadow world. Your pistol uses the same kind as my carbine. But they kept something better for themselves. This is a, an M60, a machine gun.” He pronounced the unfamiliar, alien syllables carefully. “It fires bigger bullets, faster and farther. It outranges my six pounder carronades, in fact. But it is useless without cartridges, big ones that come on a metal belt. And they are profligate with ammunition. So the duke stockpiled cartridges for the M60s, all over the place.”

Otto looked at the gun. It was bigger than the king’s MP5, almost as long as a musket. Then he looked at the crate. “How much do you have, sire?”

“Not enough.” Egon frowned. “Four crates, almost eighty thousand rounds, six guns. And some very fine blasting powder.”

“Only six—” Otto stopped. “They haven’t noticed?”

The king lowered the lid back on top of the gun. “Ten years ago, the witches began to re-equip with a better weapon.” He patted the MP5: “These are deadly, are they not? But it is a side-arm. They held the M60s to defend their castles and keeps. But they’re heavy and take a lot of ammunition. They have a new gun now, the SAW. And it takes different ammunition, lighter, with a shorter range—still far greater than anything we have, though, near as far as a twelve pounder can throw shot, and why not? A soldier with one of the new demon-guns can carry twice as much ammunition, and war among the witches is always about mobility. So they gradually forgot about the M60s, leaving the crates of ammunition in the cellars of their houses, and they forgot about the guns, too.” The royal smile reappeared. “But their servants remembered.”

“Sire. How would you have me use these guns?”

The royal smile broadened.

“The foe has been informed, by hitherto unimpeachable sources, that I will be attacking Castle Hjorth in the next week. They will concentrate in defense of the castle, which as the gateway to the Eagle hills would indeed be a prize worth capturing. Baron Drakel, who is already on his way there at the head of a battalion of pike and musketry, has the honor of ensuring that the witches have targets to aim their fire at. Meanwhile, the majority of the forces camped here will leave on the morrow for the real target. Your task is to spend a day with your best hand-men, and with my armorers, who will remain behind, instructing you in the use of the machine guns, and the explosives. Then you will follow the main force, who will not be aware of your task.”

“Sire! This is a great honor, I am sure, but am I to understand that you do not want to bring these guns to bear in the initial battle?”

“Yes.” Egon stared at the baron, his eyes disturbingly clear. “There are traitors in the midst of my army, Otto. I know for a fact that you are not one of them—” Otto shuddered as if a spider had crawled across his grave “—but this imposes certain difficulties upon my planning.”

Otto glanced round. The two royal bodyguards stood with their backs to him. “Sire?”

“The witches cannot be defeated by conventional means, Otto. If we besiege them, they can simply vanish into their shadow world. There they can move faster than we can, obtain weapons of dire power from their demonic masters, and continue their war against us. So to rid my kingdom of their immediate influence, I must render their castles and palaces useless as strong points.”

Egon paced around the nearest ammunition crate. “At the outset, I determined to pin them down, forcing them to defend their holdings, to prove to my more reluctant sworn men that the witches are vulnerable. Your raids were a great success. For every village you put to the sword, another ten landholders swore to my flag, and for that you will be rewarded most handsomely, Otto.” His eyes gleamed. “But to allow you to live to a ripe old age in your duchy—” he continued, ignoring Otto’s sharp in-take of breath “—we must force the witches to concentrate on ground of our choice, and then massacre them, while denying them the ability to regroup in a strong place. To that end, it occurs to me that a castle can be as difficult to break out of as it is to break in to—especially if it is surrounded by machine guns. This is a difficult trick, Otto, and it would be impossible without the treachery of their servitors and hangers-on, but I am going to take the Hjalmar Palace—and use it as an anvil, and you the hammer, to smash the witches.”

Traveling across New Britain by train in a first-class suite was a whole lot less painful than anything Amtrak or the airlines had to offer, and Miriam almost found herself enjoying it—except for the constant nagging fear of discovery. Discovery of what, and by whom, wasn’t a question she could answer—it wasn’t an entirely rational fear. I still feel like an impostor everywhere I go, she realized. Erasmus’s attempts to engage in friendly conversation over dinner didn’t help, either: she’d been unable to make small talk comfortably and had lapsed into a strained, embarrassed silence. The tables in the wide-gauge dining car were sufficiently far apart, and the noise of the wheels loud enough, that she wasn’t worried about being overheard: but just being on display in public made her itch as if there was a target pinned to her back. The thing she most wanted to ask Erasmus about was off-limits, anyway—the nature of the errand that was taking a lowly shop keep er haring out to the west coast in the lap of luxury. I’m going to see a man about his book? That must be some book—this journey was costing the local equivalent of a couple of around-the-world airline tickets in first class, at a time when there were soup kitchens on the street corners and muggers in the New London alleyways who were so malnourished they couldn’t tackle a stressed-out woman.

That was more than enough reason to itch. Things had gone bad in New Britain even faster than they had in her own personal life, on a scale that was frightening to think about. But the real cause of her restlessness was closer to home. Sooner or later I’m going to have to stop drifting and do something, she told herself. Relying on the comfort of near-strangers—or friends with secret agendas of their own—rankled. If only I had that laptop working! Or I could go home and call Mike. Set things moving. And then—her imagination ran into a brick wall.

After dinner they returned to the private lounge, and Miriam managed to unwind slightly once they were on their own. There was a wet bar beside the window, and Erasmus opened it: “Would you care for a brandy before bed?”

“That would be good.” She sat down on the chaise. “They really overdid the dessert.”

“You think so?” He shook his head. “We’re traveling in style. The chef would be offended if we didn’t eat.”

“Really?” She accepted the glass he offered. “Hmm.” She sniffed. “Interesting.” A sip of brandy and her stomach had something else to worry about: “I’d get fat fast if we ate like that regularly.”

“Fat?” He looked at her oddly. “You’ve got a long way to go before you’re fat.”

Oops. It was another of those momentary dislocations that reminded Miriam she wasn’t at home here. New British culture held to a different standard of beauty from Hollywood and the New York catwalks: in a world where agriculture was barely mechanized and shipping was slow, plumpness implied wealth, or at least immunity from starvation. “You think so?” She found herself unable to suppress a lopsided smile of embarrassment, and dealt with it by hiding her face behind the brandy glass.

“I think you’re just right. You’ve got a lovely face, Miriam, when you’re not hiding it. Your new hairstyle complements it beautifully.”

He looked at her so seriously that she felt her ears flush. “Hey! Not fair.” A sudden sinking feeling, Is that what this is about? He gets me alone and then—

“I’m—” He did a double-take. “Oh dear! You—Did I say something wrong?”

Miriam shook her head. He seemed sincere: Am I misunderstanding? “I think we just ran into an etiquette black hole.” He nodded, politely uncomprehending. “Sorry. Where I come from what you said would be something between flattery and an expression of interest, and I’m just not up to handling subtlety right now.”

“Expression of…?” It was his turn to look embarrassed. “My mistake.”

She put the glass down. “Have a seat.” She patted the chaise. Erasmus looked at it, looked back at her, then perched bird-like on the far end. Better change the subject, she told herself. “You were married, weren’t you?” she asked.

He stared at her as if she’d slapped him. “Yes. What of it?”

Whoops. “I, uh, was wondering. That is. What happened?”

“She died,” he said tersely. He glanced at the floor, then raised his brandy glass.

Miriam’s vision blurred. “I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s not your fault.” After a long moment, he shrugged. “You had your fellow Roland. It’s not so different.”

“What—” she swallowed “—happened to her?” How long ago was it? she wondered. Sometimes she thought she’d come to terms with Roland’s death, but at other times it still felt like yesterday.

“Twenty years ago. Back then I had prospects.” He raised an eyebrow as if considering his next words. “Some would say, I threw them away. The movement—well.”

“The movement?”

“I was sent to college, by my uncle—my father was dead, you know how it goes—to study for the bar. They’d relaxed the requirements, so dissenters, freethinkers, even atheists, all were allowed to affirm and practice. His majesty’s father was rather less narrow than John Frederick, I don’t know whether that means anything to you. But anyway…I had some free time, as young students with a modest stipend do, and I had some free thoughts, and I became involved with the league. We had handbills to write and print and distribute, and a clear grievance to bring before their lordships in hope of redress, and we were optimistic, I think. We thought we might have a future.”

“The league? You had some kind of political demands?” Miriam racked her brains. She’d run across mention of the league—league of what had never been clear—in the samizdat history books he’d loaned her, but only briefly, right at the end, as some sort of hopeful coda to the authorial present.

“Yes.” He looked distant. “Little things like a universal franchise, regardless of property qualifications and religion and marital status. Some of the committee wanted women to vote, too—but that was thought too extreme for a first step. And we wanted a free press, public decency and the laws of libel permitting.”

“Uh.” She closed her mouth. “But you were…”

The frown turned into a wry smile. “I was a young hothead. Or easily led. I met Annie first at a public meeting, and then renewed her acquaintance at the People’s Voice where she was laying type. She was the printer’s daughter, and neither he nor my uncle approved of our liaison. But once I received my letters and acquired a clerk’s post, I could afford to support her, which made her father come round, and my uncle just muttered darkly about writing me out of his will for a while, and stopped doing even that after the wedding. So we had a good four years together, and she insisted on laying type even when the two boys came along, and I wrote for the sheets—anonymously, I must add—and we were very happy. Until it all ended.”

Miriam raised her glass for another sip. Somehow the contents had evaporated. “Here, let me refill that,” she said, taking Erasmus’s glass. She stood up and walked past him to get to the bar, wobbling slightly as the carriage jolted across a set of points. “What went wrong?”

“In nineteen eighty-six, on November the fourteenth, six fine fellows from the northeast provinces traveled to the royal palace in Savannah. There had been a huge march the week before in New London, and it had gone off smoothly, the petition of a million names being presented to the black rod—but the king himself was not in residence, being emphysemic. That winter came harsh and early, so he’d decamped south to Georgia. It was his habit to go for long drives in the country, to take the air. Well, the level of expectation surrounding the petition was high, and rumors were swirling like smoke: that the king had read the petition and would agree to the introduction of a bill, that the king had read the petition and threatened to bring home the army, that the king had this and the king had that. All nonsense, of course. The king was on vacation and he refused to deal with matters of state that were anything less than an emergency. Or so I learned later. Back then, I was looking for a progressive practice that was willing to take on a junior partner, and Annie was expecting again.”

Miriam finished pouring and put the stopper back in the decanter. She passed a glass back to him: “So what happened?”

“Those six fine gentlemen were a little impatient. They’d formed a ring, and they’d convinced themselves that the king was a vicious tyrant who would like nothing more than to dream up new ways to torment the workers. You know, I think—judging by your own history books—how it goes. The mainstream movement spawns tributaries, some of which harbor currents that flow fast and deep. The Black Fist Freedom Guard, as they called themselves, followed the king in a pair of fast motor carriages until they learned his habitual routes. Then they assassinated him, along with the queen, and one of his two daughters, by means of a petard.”

“They what?” Miriam sat down hard. “That’s crazy!”

“Yes, it was.” Erasmus nodded, calmly enough. “George Frederick himself pulled his dying father from the wreckage. He was already something of a reactionary, but not, I think, an irrational one—until the Black Fist murdered his parents.”

“But weren’t there guards, or something?” Miriam shook her head. What about the secret service? she wondered. If someone tried a stunt like that on a U.S. president it just wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be allowed to work. Numerous whack-jobs had tried to kill Clinton when he was in office: a number had threatened or actually tried to off the current president. Nobody had gotten close to a president of the United States since nineteen eighty-six. “Didn’t he have any security?”

“Oh yes, he had security. He was secure in the knowledge that he was the king-emperor, much beloved by the majority of his subjects. Does that surprise you? John Frederick goes nowhere without half a company of guards and a swarm of Polis agents, but his father relied on two loyal constables with pistols. They were injured in the attack, incidentally: one of them died later.”

He took a deep, shuddering breath, then another sip of the brandy. “The day after the assassination, a state of emergency was declared. Demonstrations ensued. On Black Monday, the seventeenth, a column of demonstrators marching towards the royal complex on Manhattan Island were met by dragoons armed with heavy steam repeaters. More than three hundred were killed, mostly in the stampede. We were…there, but on the outskirts, Annie and I. We had the boys to think of. We obviously didn’t think hard enough. The next day, they arrested me. My trial before the tribunal lasted eighteen minutes, by the clock on the courtroom wall. The man before me they sentenced to hang for being caught distributing our news sheet, but I was lucky. All they knew was that I’d been away from my workplace during the massacre, and I’d been limping when I got back. The evidence was merely circumstantial, and so was the sentence they gave me: twelve years in the camps.”

He took a gulp of the brandy and swallowed, spluttering for a moment. “Annie wasn’t so lucky,” he added.

“What? They hanged her?” Miriam leaned toward him, aghast.

“No.” He smiled sadly. “They only gave her two years in a women’s camp. I don’t know if you know what that was like…no? Alright. It was hard enough for the men. Annie died—” he stared into his glass “—in childbed.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Use your imagination,” Erasmus snapped. “What do you think the guards were like?”

“Oh god.” Miriam swallowed. “I’m so sorry.”

“The boys went to a state orphanage,” Erasmus added. “In Australia.”

“Enough.” She held up a hand: “I’m sorry I asked!”

The fragile silence stretched out. “I’m not,” Erasmus said quietly. “It was just a little bit odd to talk about it. After so long.”

“You got out…four years ago?”

“Nine.” He drained his glass and replaced it on the occasional table. “The camps were overfull. They got sloppy. I was moved to internal exile, and there was a—what your history book called an underground railway. ‘Erasmus Burgeson’ isn’t the name I was known by back then.”

“Wow.” Miriam stared at him. “You’ve been living under an assumed identity all this time?”

He nodded, watching her expression. “The movement provides. They needed a dodgy pawnbroker in Boston, you see, and I fitted the bill. A dodgy pawnbroker with a history of a couple of years in the camps, nothing serious, nothing excessively political. The real me they’d hang for sure if they caught him, these days. I hope you don’t mind notorious company?”

“I’m—” She shook her head. “It’s crazy.” You were writing for a newspaper, for crying out loud! Asking for voting rights and freedom of the press! And those are hanging offenses? “And if what you were campaigning for back then is crazy, so am I.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s the movement’s platform now? Is it still just about the franchise, and freedom of speech? Or have things changed?”

“Oh yes.” He was still studying her, she realized. “Eighty-six was a wake-up cry. The very next central council meeting that was held—two years later, in exile—announced that the existence of a hereditary crown was a flaw in the body politic. The council decreed that nothing less than the overthrow of the king-emperor and the replacement of their Lordships and Commons by a republic of free men and women, equal before the law, would suffice. The next day, the Commons passed a bill of attainder against everyone in the movement. A month after that the pope excommunicated us—he declared democracy to be a mortal sin. But by that time we already knew we were damned.”