The Merchant’s War

She raised a hand. "If these people have stolen one nuke, who's to say they haven't stolen others?" She looked him in the eye and saw the fear beginning to take hold. "We might have found Matt's blackmail weapon. But this isn't over until we know that there aren't any others missing."

* * *

Rudi hung above the forest with the wind in his teeth, a shit-eating grin plastered across his face (what little of it wasn't numb with cold) and the engine of the ultralight sawing along behind his left ear like the world's largest hornet. The airframe buzzed and shuddered, wires humming, but the vibration was acceptable and everything was holding together about as well as he'd hoped for. Unlike a larger or more sophisticated airplane, the trike was simple and light enough for one world-walker to shift in a week of spare time: and now Rudi was reaping his reward for all the headaches, upsets, reprimands, and other cold-sweat moments he'd put into it. "On top of the world!" He yelled at the treetops a thousand feet below him. "Yes!"

The sky was as empty as a dead man's skull; the sun burned down, casting sharp shadows over his right shoulder. Hanging below the triangular wing, with nothing below his feet but a thin fiberglass shell, Rudi could almost imagine that he was flying in his own body, not dangling from a contraption of aluminum and nylon powered by a jumped-up lawn mower engine. Of course, letting his imagination get away from him was not a survival-enhancing move up here, a thousand feet above the forests that skirted the foothills of the Appalachians in this world-but he could indulge his senses for a few seconds between instrument checks and map readings, saving the precious memories for later.

"Is that the Wergat or the Ostwer?" he asked himself, seeing the glint of open water off to the northwest. He checked his compass, then glanced at the folded map. One advantage of using an ultralight: with an airspeed of fifty-live, tops, you didn't wander off the page too fast. A few minutes later he got it pinned down. "It's the Ostwer all right," he told himself, penciling a loose ellipse on the map-his best estimate of his position, accurate to within a couple of miles. "Hmm." He pushed gently on the control bar, keeping one eye on the air speed indicator as he began to climb.

The hills and rivers of the western reaches of the Gruin-markt spread out below Rudi like a map. Over the next half hour he crawled towards the winding tributary river-it felt like a crawl, even though he was traveling twice as fast as any race-bred steed could gallop- periodically scanning the landscape with his binoculars. Roads hereabout were little more than dirt tracks, seldom visible from above the trees, but a large body of men left signs of their own.

That's odd. He was nearly two thousand feel up, and a couple of miles short of the Ostwer-glancing over his left shoulder at a thin haze of high cloud that looked to be moving in-when a bright Hash on the ground caught his eye. He stared for a moment, then picked up his binoculars.

Out towards the bend in the river-after the merger that produced the Wergat, where the trees thinned out and the buildings and walls and fields of Wcrgalfurl sprouted- something flashed. And there was smoke over the town, a thin smudge of dirty brown that darkened the sky, like a latrine dug too close to a river. "Hmm." Rudi leaned sideways, banking gently to bring the trike round onto a course towards the smoke, still climbing (there was no sense in overflying trouble at low altitude on one engine), and took a closer look with his binoculars.

He was still several miles out, but he was close enough to recognize trouble when he saw it. The city gates were open, and one guard house was on fire-the source of the smoke.

"Rudi here, Pappa One, do you read?"

The reply took a few seconds to crackle in his earpiece: "Pappa One, we read."

"Overflying Wergatfurt, got smoke on the ground, repeat, smoke. Guard house is on fire. Over."

"Pappa One to Rudi, please repeat, over." "Stand by..."

Minutes passed, as Rudi cheeked his position against the river, and buzzed ever closer to the town and the palace three miles beyond it. The smoke was still rising as Rudi closed on the town, now at three thousand feet, safely out of range of arrows. He looked down, peering through binoculars, at a scene of chaos.

"Rudi here, Pappa One. Confirm trouble in Wergatfurt, cavalry force, battalion level or stronger. Cannon emplaced in town square, northeast guard tower on fire, tents outside city walls. Now heading towards Hjalmar Palace, over."

"Pappa One, Rudi, please confirm number of troops, over."

Rudi looked down. A flash caught his eye, then another one.