The Merchant’s War

The one standing behind him took one look at her as if he'd seen a ghost, then turned tail and fled. "Doan' leave me!" wailed the third in a thick accent, waving spidery arms at the ground: there was a rattling noise. Miriam stared. He's got no legs, she realized as he pawed at the ground with hands like oars, scooting away on a crude cart. Why did the other one run -she put a hand to her chest. There was a rip in her stolen coat. That's funny. She frowned, stuck a finger through the hole, and felt the matching rip in the outer fabric of her dress where the knife had slid across the boned front. "Damn!" She looked down. The little guy with the knife lay at her feet, twitching and gasping for breath. The knife lay beside him in the gutter: the blade was about three inches long and wickedly sharp. "You little shit!" She hauled up her skirts and kicked him in the ribs with all her might. Then she knelt down and took the knife.

The red haze of fury began to clear. She looked at the moaning figure on the cobblestones and shuddered, then stepped round him and quickly walked to the end of the alleyway. Cold sweat slicked her spine, and her heart pounded so hard it seemed about to burst. I could have been killed, she thought dizzily, tugging her coat into place with jerky motions, her hands shaking with the adrenaline aftershock. It wasn't the first time, but it never failed to horrify her afterwards. She moved unconsciously towards the street lights, panicky-tense and alert for any sign that knife-boy's friends had stopped running and were coming back for her. He tried to stab me! She felt sick to the pit of her stomach, and her usual post-world-walking headache had intensified unbearably, thumping in time with her pulse. I've got to get help, she realized. Got to find Erasmus.

Miriam had grown up in Boston, in the United States of America, in a world where things made sense. Random spavined beggars in alleyways didn't try to gut you like a fish. There was no king-emperor in New York- New London, as they called it over here, in this world- no zeppelins, either. She'd had a job as an investigative journalist working for a leading tech business magazine, and a mother who she knew had adopted her when she was a baby, and a solid sense of her own identity. But it had all gone out of the window nine months ago, when she'd discovered that she was a long-lost relative of the Clan, a tight-knit body of world-walkers from another, far more primitive world.

The Medicis of their timeline, the Clan traded between worlds, parallel universes Miriam had heard them called. Which was bad news because the Gruinmarkt, where they came from, hadn't progressed much past a high-medieval civilization of marcher kingdoms up and down the eastern seaboard; in the world of the United States, the Clan was the main heroin connection for New England. Miriam's ingrained habit of sticking her nose into any business that took her interest-especially when it was explicitly forbidden-had landed her in a metric shitload of trouble with the Clan. And things had gotten even worse with the shockingly unexpected light at the Summer Palace in Niejwein. Miriam had ducked out (with the aid of a furtively acquired world-walking locket) and ended up here, in New London. In another world that made little sense to her-but where she did, at least, speak the language passably well.

I've got to find Erasmus, she told herself, holding onto the thought as if it was a charm to ward off panic. The twisting road at the end of the alleyway was at least lit by rusting gas lamps. There was nobody in sight, so she put on a burst of speed, until she rounded a curve to see a main road ahead, more lights, closed shop fronts, a passing streetcar grinding its wheels on the corner with a shower of sparks from the overhead pickups. Whoa. She slowed, eyebrows furrowed, shoulders tensing as if there was a target pasted right above her spine-tit the base of her neck. I can't go anywhere like this...!