The Merchant’s War

"Is there any word from Earl Riordan?" The duke turned his attention towards a plump fellow at the far side of the table.

"Last contact was fifty-two minutes ago, sir," he said,

without even bothering to check the laptop in front of him. "Coming up in eight. I can expedite that if you want..."

"Not necessary." The duke shook his head, then looked back at Helmut. "Tell me what you know."

Helmut shrugged. Despite the full suit of armor, the gesture was virtually silent-there was neoprene in all the right places, another of the little improvements ClanSec had made to their equipment over the years. World-walkers were valuable enough to be worth the cost of custom-fitted armor, and they hadn't been idle in applying new ideas and materials to the classic patterns. "Stands to reason, he's hit the Hjalmar Palace, or you wouldn't have called us out. Is there any word from Wergatsfurt or Ostgat?"

The duke inclined his head. "Wergatsfurt is taken. Ostgat hasn't heard a whisper, as of-" He snapped his fingers.

"Thirty- seven minutes ago," said the ice blonde. She sounded almost bored.

"So we were strung out with a feint at Castle Hjorth and the Rurval estates, but instead he's concentrated eighty miles away and hit the Hjalmar Palace," summarized Helmut. He glanced around at the scaffolding that was going up. "It's fallen?"

"Within minutes," Angbard confirmed. He was visibly fuming, but keeping a tight rein on his anger.

"Treachery?"

"That's my concern," said the duke, with such icy restraint that Helmut backed off immediately. The blonde, however, showed no sign of surprise: she studied Helmut with such bland disinterest that he had to suppress a shudder.

So we've got a leak, he realized with a sinking feeling. It didn't stop with Matthias, did it? "Should I assume that the intruders know about doppelganger defenses?" He glanced round. "Should I assume they have world-walkers of their own?"

"Not the latter, Gray Witch be thanked." Angbard hesitated. "But it would be unwise to assume that they don't know how to defend against us, so every minute delayed increases the hazard." He reached a decision. "We can't afford to leave it in their hands, any more than we can afford to demolish it completely. Our options are therefore to go in immediately with everything we've got to hand, or to wait until we have more forces available and the enemy has had more time to prepare for us. My inclination is towards the immediate attack, but as you will be leading it, I will heed your advice."

Helmut grimaced. "Give me enough rope, eh? As it happens, I agree with you. Especially if they have an informant, we need to get in there as fast as possible. Do we know if they are aware of the treason room?"

"No, we don't." Angbard's expression was thunderous. "If you wish to use it, you will have to scout it out."

"Aye, well, there are worse prospects." Helmut turned on his heel and raised his voice. "Martyn! Ryk! To me. I've got a job for you!" Turning back to the duke, he added: "If the treason room is clear, we'll go in that way, with diversions in the north guard room and the grand hall. Otherwise, my thinking is to assault directly through the grand hall, in force. The higher we go in-"he glanced up at the scaffolding, then over to the hydraulic lift that two guards were bringing in through the front of the tent"-the better I'll like it."

* * *

Motion sickness was a new and unpleasant experience to Miriam, but she figured it was a side effect of spending days on end aboard a swaying express train. Certainly it was the most plausible explanation for her delicate stomach. She couldn't wait to get solid ground under her feet again. She'd plowed through about half the book by Burroughs, but it was heavy going; where some of the other Levcler tracts she'd read had been emotionally driven punch-in-the-gut diatribes against the hereditary dictators, Burroughs took a far drier, theoretical approach.

He'd taken up an ideological stance with roots Miriam half-recognized-full of respectful references to Voltaire, for example, and an early post-settlement legislator called Franklin, who had turned to the vexatious question of the rights of man in his later years-and had teased out a consistent strand of political thought that held the dictatorship of the hereditary aristocracy to be the true enemy of the people. Certainly she could see why Burroughs might have been exiled, and his books banned, by the Hanoverian government. But the idea that he might be relevant to the underground still struck her as peculiar. Do I really want to get involved in this? she asked herself. It was all very well tagging along with Erasmus until she could get her hands on her laptop again and zip back to the United States, but the idea of getting involved in politics made her itch. Especially the kind of politics they had here.