Bang-bang:
The thud of bullets hitting masonry behind her was unmistakable. Miriam spat, then knelt and aimed deliberately at the shooter.
Can I do this
—rage filled her.
You tried to kill my mother!
She pulled the trigger. There was a cry, and the green patch stretched up then collapsed. She froze, about to shoot again, then straightened up.
“Stop! Police!” Whistles shrilled in the garden. “
Attention. Zone three breach.”
“That’s the south wall! What the fuck?” Miriam whispered. She keyed her walkie-talkie. “Status!”
“One down.” Brill, panting heavily. “Olga’s got the guy in the hall on the floor. They tried to shoot me.”
“Listen.” Whistles loud in the garden, flashlight beams just visible through the smoke. “Into the hall! Brill, can you drag the fucker? Get him upright? You take him and I’ll carry Olga.”
The sound of breaking glass came from the kitchen. Miriam darted back through the doorway and nearly ran straight into Olga.
“Quick!” Olga cried. “I can’t do it, my head’s still splitting. You’d better—”
“Shut the fuck up.” Miriam pushed her goggles up, grabbed Olga around the waist, and mashed a hand against the light switch. She fumbled with her left sleeve, saw the blurry outline clearly for a moment, tried to focus on it, and tightened her grip on Olga painfully. “Brill?”
“Do it!” Brill’s voice was edgy with tension and fear. More police whistles then a cry and more gunshots, muffled by the wall.
Miriam tensed and lifted, felt Olga grab her shoulders, and stared at her wrist. Her knees began to buckle under the weight:
Can’t keep this up for long,
she thought desperately. There was a splintering sound behind her, and the endless knotwork snake that ate its own tail coiling in the darkness as it reached out to bite her between the eyes. She fell forward into snow and darkness, Olga a dead weight in her arms.
Facing The Music
Miriam was freezing. She had vague impressions of ice, snow, and a wind coming in off the bay that would chill a furnace in seconds. She stumbled to her feet and whimpered as pain spiked through her forehead. “Ow.” Olga sat up. “Miriam, are you alright?” Miriam blinked back afterimages of green shapes moving at the far end of the room. She remembered her hot determination, followed by a cry of pain. She doubled over abruptly and vomited into the snow, moaning.
“Where’s the hut?” Olga demanded in a panicky voice. “Where’s the—”
“Goggles,” Miriam gasped. Another spasm grabbed her stomach.
This cold could kill us,
she thought through the hot and cold shudders of a really bad world-walk. “Use your goggles.”
“Oh.” Olga pulled them down across her eyes. “Oh!”
“Miriam?” Brill’s voice came from behind a tree. “Help!”
“Aaarh, aarh—”
Miriam stumbled over, twigs tearing at her face. It was snowing heavily, huge flakes the size of fingernails twisting in front of her face and stinging when they touched her skin. Brill was kneeling on top of something that thrashed around. “Help me!” she called.
“Right.” Miriam crashed to her knees in front of Brill, her stomach still protesting, and fumbled at her belt for another set of restraints. Brill had handcuffed the prisoner but he’d begun kicking and she was forced to sit on his legs, which was not a good position for either of them. “Here.”
“Lay
still,
damn you—”
“We’re going to have to make him walk. It’s that or we carry him,” Olga commented. “How big is he?”
“Just a kid. Just a goddamn kid.”
“Watch
out,
he may have friends out here!”
Miriam stood up and pulled her night-vision goggles back down. Brill and the prisoner showed up as brilliant green flames, Olga a hunched figure a few feet away. “Come on. To the cabin.” Together with Brill she lifted the prisoner to his feet—still moaning incoherently in what sounded like blind panic—and half-dragged him toward the hunting blind, which was still emitting a dingy green glow. The heat from the kerosene heater was enough to show it up like a street light against the frigid background.
It took almost ten minutes to get there, during which time the snow began to fall heavily, settling over their tracks. The prisoner, apparently realizing that the alternative was freezing to death slowly, shut up and began to move his feet. Miriam’s head felt as if someone was whacking on it with a hammer, and her stomach was still rebelling from its earlier mistreatment. Olga crept forward and hunted around in the dark, looking for signs of disturbance, but as far as Miriam could see they were alone in the night and darkness.
The hut was empty but warm as Brill and Miriam lifted the youth through the door. With one last effort they heaved him onto a sleeping mat and pulled the door shut behind them to keep the warmth in. “Right,” said Miriam, her voice shaking with exhaustion, “let’s see what we’ve got here.” She stood up and switched on the battery-powered lantern hanging from the roof beam.
“Please don’t—” He lay there shaking and shivering, trying to burrow away into the corner between the wall and the mattress.
“It speaks,” Brill observed.
“It does indeed,” said Miriam. He was shorter than she was, lightly built with straight dark hair and a fold to his eyes that made him look slightly Asian. And he didn’t look more than eighteen years of age.
“Check him for an amulet,” said Miriam.
“Right, you—got it!” A moment of struggle and Brill straightened up, holding out a fist from which dangled a chain. “Which version is it?”
Miriam glanced in it, then looked away. “The second variation. For world three.” She stuffed it into a pocket along with the other. “You.” She looked down at the prisoner. “What’s your name?”
“Lin—Lin.”
“Uh-huh. Do you have any friends out in this storm, Mr. Lin Lin?” Miriam glanced at the door. “Before you answer that, you might want to think about what they’ll do to you if they found us here. Probably shoot first and ask questions later.”
“No.” He lay back. “It’s Lee.”
“Lin, or Lee?”
“I’m Lin. I’m a Lee.”
“Good start,” said Brill. She stared malevolently at him. “What were you doing breaking into our house?”
Lin stared back at her without saying anything.
“Allow me,” Miriam murmured. Her headache was beginning to recede. She fumbled in her jacket, pulled out a worryingly depleted strip of tablets, punched one of them out, and swallowed it dry. It stuck in her throat, bitter and unwanted.
“Listen, Lin. You invaded my house. That wasn’t very clever, and it got at least one of your friends shot. Now, I have some other friends who’d like to ask you some questions, and they won’t be as nice about it as I am. In about an hour we’re going to walk to another world, and we’re going to take you with us. It’s a world your family can’t get to, because they don’t even know it exists. Once you’re there, you are going to be
stuck.
My friends there will take you to pieces to get the answers they want, and they will probably kill you afterwards, because they’re like that.”
Miriam stood up. “You have an hour to make up your mind whether you’re going to talk to me, or whether you’re going to talk to the Clan’s interrogators. If you talk to me, I won’t need to hurt you. I may even be able to keep you alive. The choice is yours.”
She glanced at Brill. “Keep an eye on him. I’m going to check on Olga.”
As she opened the door she heard the prisoner begin to weep quietly. She closed it behind herself hastily.
Miriam keyed her walkie-talkie. “Anyone out there? Over.”
“Just me,” replied Olga. “Hey, this wireless talkie thing is great, isn’t it?”
“See anyone?”
“Not a thing. I’m circling about fifty yards out. I can see you on the doorstep.”
“Right.” Miriam waved. “I just read our little housebreaker the riot act.”
“Want me to help hang him?”
“No.” Miriam could still feel the hot wash of rage at the intruder in her sights, and the sense of release as she pulled the trigger. Now that the anger had cooled, it made her feel queasy. The first time she’d shot someone, the killer in the orangery, she’d barely felt it. It had just been something she had to do, like stepping out of the path of an onrushing juggernaut: He’d killed Margit and was coming at her with a knife. But this, the lying in wait and the hot rush of righteous anger, left her with a growing sense of appalled guilt the longer she thought about it.
It was avoidable,
wasn’t it? “Our little housebreaker is just a chick. He’s crying for momma already. I think he’s going to sing like a bird as soon as we get him to the other side.”
“How are you doing?” asked Olga. “You came through badly.”
“Tell me about it.” Miriam shuddered. “The cold seems to be helping my head. I’ll be ready to go again in about an hour. Yourself?”
“I wish.” Olga hummed to herself. “I never had that headache pill.”
“Come over here, then,” said Miriam. “I’ve got the stuff.”
“Right.”
They converged on a tree about five yards from the hut. Miriam stripped off a glove and fumbled in her pocket for the strip of beta blockers and the bottle of ibuprofen. “Here. One of each. Wash it down with something, huh?”
“Surely.” Miriam waited in companionable silence while Olga swallowed, then pulled out a small hip flask and took a shot.
“What’s that?”
“Spiced hunter’s vodka. Fights the cold. Want some?”
“Better not, thanks.” Miriam glanced over her shoulder at the hut. “I’m giving him an hour. The poor bastard thinks I’m going to give him to Angbard to torture to death if he doesn’t tell me everything I want to know immediately.”
“You aren’t going to do that?” Olga’s expression was unreadable behind her bulky headset.
“Depends how angry he makes me. There’s been too much killing already, and it’s been going on for far too long. We’re going to have to stop sooner or later, or we’ll run out of relatives.”
“What do you mean, relatives? He’s the enemy—”
“Don’t you get it yet?” Miriam said impatiently. “These guys, the strangers who pop out of nowhere and kill—they’ve got to be blood relatives somewhere down the line. They’re world-walkers too, and the only reason they go between this world and New Britain, instead of this world and the USA, is because that’s the pattern they use. I’m thinking they’re descended from that missing branch of the first family, the brother who went west and disappeared, right after the founder died.”
Olga looked puzzled. “You think they’re the sixth family?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, and I don’t yet know why they’re trying to start up the civil war again. But don’t you think we owe it to ourselves to find out what’s going on before we hand him over to the thief-takers for hanging?”
Olga rubbed her head. “This is going to be the most
fascinating
Clan council in living memory,” she said.
“Come on.” Miriam waved at the hut. “Let’s get moving. I think it’s time we dragged Roland into this.”
* * *
One o’clock in the morning.
Ring ring …
“Hello?” Roland’s voice was furred with sleep.
“Roland? It’s me.”
“Miriam, you do pick your times—”
“Not now. Got a family emergency.”
“Emergency? What kind?” She could hear him waking up by the second.
“Get a couple of soldiers who you trust, and a safe house.
Not
Fort Lofstrom or its doppelgänger, it needs to be somewhere anonymous but secure on this side. It
must
be on this side. We’ve got a prisoner to debrief.”
“A prisoner? What kind—”
“One of the assassins. He’s alive, terrified, and spilling his guts to Olga right this moment.” Olga was in the back office with Lin and Miriam’s dictaphone, playing Good Cop. Lin was chattering, positively manic, desperate to tell her everything she wanted. Lin wasn’t even eighteen. Miram felt ashamed of herself until she thought about what he’d been involved in. Boy soldiers, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, recruited to defend their family’s honor against the children of the hostile elder brothers—elder brothers who had stolen their birthright many generations ago, abandoning them to the nonexistent mercy of the western empire.
“He needs to be kept alive, and that means keeping him away from the security leak in Angbard’s operation. And, uh, your little friend, assuming they’re not one and the same person. Someone there is working with this guy’s people. And here’s another thing: I want a full DQ Alpha typing run on a blood sample, and I want it compared to as many members of the Clan—full members—as you can get. I want to know if he’s related, and if so, how far back it goes.”
And I want him out of here before Paulette shows up in the morning,
Miriam thought. Paulie was a good friend and true, but some things weren’t appropriate for her to be involved in. Like kidnapping.
“Okay, I’ll sort it. Where do I go?”
“You come here.” Miriam rattled off directions, mentally crossing her fingers. “I’ve got a new amulet for you, one that takes you from the other side to world three, my hideaway. Watch out, it is
very
different, as different from this world as you can imagine.”
“Okay—but you’d better be able to explain why if the duke starts asking questions. I’ll roust Xavier and Mort out of bed and be round in an hour. They’ll keep their mouths shut. Is there anything else you need?”
“Yeah.” Miriam licked her lips. “Is Angbard over here?”
“I think so.”
“I’ve got to call him right away. Then I’m probably going to be gone before you get here. Got to go back to the far side to clean up the mess when the little prick broke into my house.”
“He broke in—hey! Are you alright?”
“I’m alive. Olga and Brill can fill you in. Got to go. Stay safe.” She rang off before she could break down and tell him how much she wanted to see him.
Cruel fate…
the next number was preprogrammed as well.
“Hello?” A politely curious voice.
“This is Helge Lofstrom-Hjorth. Get me Angbard. This is an emergency.”
“Please hold.” No messing around this time, Miriam noted. Someone was awake at the switchboard.
“Angbard here.” He sounded amused rather than tired. “What is it, Miriam? Having trouble sleeping?”
“Perhaps. Listen, the Clan summit on Beltaigne is three months away. Is there a procedure for bringing it forward, calling an extraordinary general meeting?”
“There is, but it’s most unusual—nobody has done it in forty years. Are you sure you want me to do this for you? Without a good reason, there are people who would take it as a perfect opportunity to accuse you of anything they can think of.”
“Yes.” Miriam took a deep breath. “Listen. I know you’ve got my mother.” Dead silence on the phone. She continued: “I don’t know why you’re holding her, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt—for now. But I need that meeting, and she needs to be there. If she isn’t, you’re going to be in deep shit. I’m going to be there, too, and it has to be
now,
in a couple of days’ time, not in two months, because we’ve got a prisoner and if you’ve not found your leak yet the prisoner will probably be dead before Beltaigne.”
“A prisoner—” he hissed.
“You told me about a child of the founder who went west,” Miriam said, very deliberately. “I’ve found his descendants. They’re the ones who tried to kill Patricia and who’ve been after Olga and me. And I figure they may be messed up with the mole in your security staff. You want to call this emergency meeting, Angbard, you
really
want to do this.”
“I believe you,” he said after a momentary pause, in a tone that said he wished he didn’t. “How extraordinary.”
“When is it going to be ready?”
“Hmm.” A pause. “Count on it in four days’ time, at the Palace Hjorth. Any sooner is out of the question. I’ll have to clear down all nonessential mail to get the announcement out in time—this will cost us a lot of goodwill and money. Can you guarantee you’ll be there? If not, then I can’t speak for what resolutions will be put forward and voted through by the assembled partners. You have enemies.”