The Family Trade

“Shit,” she mumbled under her breath. “Brill!”

“Yes, Miriam?”

“Help me undress, will you?”

“What, right now? Are you going to bed?”

“Not immediately,” Miriam said grimly. “Our assassin seems to have gotten tired of trying to sneak up on me and is trying to reel me in like a fish. Only he’s made a big mistake.” She turned to present her back. “Unlace me. I’ve got places to go, and it’d be a shame to get blood on this gown.”

Black jeans, combat boots, turtleneck, and leather jacket: a gun in her pocket and a locket in her left hand. Miriam breathed deeply, feeling naked despite everything. She felt as if the only thing she was wearing was a target between her shoulder blades.

Across the room Brilliana looked worried. “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” she asked again. “Do you want me to come? I am trained using a pistol—”

“I’ll be fine. But I may have to world-walk in a hurry.” I won’t be fine, Miriam corrected herself silently: But if I don’t deal with this trouble sooner or later, they’ll kill me. Won’t they? And the one thing an assassin wouldn’t be expecting would be for her—not one of the Clan-raised hotheads born with her hands on a pistol, but a reasonable, civilized journalist from a world where that sort of thing just didn’t happen—to turn on them. She hoped.

Miriam hitched her day sack into place and checked her right pocket again, the one with the gun and a handful of spare cartridges. She didn’t feel fine: There were butterflies in her stomach. “If there’s a problem, I’ll stay the night on the other side, safely out of the way. But I need to know. I want you to wait half an hour, then take Kara around to Olga and sit things out with her there. With your gun, and Olga, and her own guards, in a properly doppelgängered area, you should be safe. But I don’t want her tripping and falling downstairs before we learn who gave her that note. D’you understand? Matthias promised to sort me out some guards tomorrow, but I don’t trust him. If he’s in on this—or just being watched—there’ll be an attempt on my life tonight. Except this time I think they got sloppy, expecting me to turn up for it like it’s an appointment. So I’m going to avoid it entirely.”

“I understand.” Brill stood up. “Good luck,” she said.

“Luck has nothing to do with it.” Miriam took two steps toward the door, then pulled out her locket.

Dizziness, mild nausea, a headache that clamped around her head like a vice. She looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed in the warehouse attic, other than the dim light getting dimmer and the bad smell from somewhere nearby. It was getting worse, and it reminded her of something. “Hmm.”

Miriam ducked behind a wall of wooden crates, her head pounding. She pulled the pistol out, slightly nervous at first. It was a self-cocking revolver, reliable and infinitely reassuring in the gloom. Stay away from guns, the training course had emphasized. But that was then, back where she was a journalist and the world made sense to rational people. But if they’re trying to kill you, you have to kill them first, was another, older lesson from the firearms instructor her father had sent her to. And here and now, it seemed to make more sense.

Carefully, very slowly, she inched forward over the edge of the mezzanine floor and looked down. The ground floor of the warehouse was a maze of wooden cases and boxes. The mobile home that constituted the site office was blocked up in the middle of it. There was no sign of anybody about, none of the comforting noises of habitation.

Miriam rose to a crouch and scurried down the stairs as quietly as she could. She ducked below the stairs, then from shadow to shadow toward the door.

There was a final open stretch between the site office and the exit. Instead of crossing it, Miriam tiptoed around the wall of the parked trailer, wrinkling her nose at a faint, foul smell.

The site office door was open and the light inside was on. Holding her gun behind her, she stood up rapidly and climbed the three steps to the door of the trailer. Then she looked inside.

“Fuck!”

The stench was far worse in here, and the watchman seemed to be smiling at her. Smiling? She turned away blindly, sticking her head out of the door, and took deep breaths, desperately trying to get her stomach back under control. Cultivate your professional detachment, she told herself, echoing a half-forgotten professor’s admonition from med school. Reflexes left over from anatomy classes kicked in. She turned back to the thing that had surprised her and began to make observations, rattled to her core but still able to function. She’d seen worse in emergency rooms, after all.

It was the old guy she’d met with the clipboard, and he was past any resuscitation attempt. Someone had used an extremely sharp knife to sever his carotid artery and trachea, and continued to slice halfway through his spine from behind. There was dried blood everywhere, huge black puddles of it splashed over walls and floor and the paper-strewn desk, curdling in great thick viscous lumps—the source of only some of the smell, for he’d voided his bowels at the same time. He was still lying on top of his tumbled chair, his skin waxy and—she reached out to touch—cold. At least twelve hours, she thought, gingerly trying to lift an arm still locked in rigor mortis, but probably no longer. Would the intense cold retard the processes of decay? Yes, a little bit. That would put it before my last trip over here, but after I saw Paulette.

“Goodfellas,” she whispered under her breath: It came out as an angry curse. During her night with Roland, someone had entered the warehouse, casually murdered the old man, climbed the stairs—breaking the hair—and then, what?

Brought the attacker who’d gone up on the roof and tried to attack Olga? Then he came back later, crossed over to the other side, and emptied a pistol into the dummy made of pillows lying in her bed? Gone away? Correlation does not imply causality, she reminded herself and giggled, shocked at herself and increasingly angry.

“What to do?” Well, the obvious thing was to use her most dangerous weapon. So she pulled out her phone and speed-dialled Roland.

“Yeah?” He picked up at the fourth ring.

“Roland, there’s a problem.” She realized that she was panting, breathing way too fast. “Let me catch my breath.” She slowed down. “I’m in the warehouse on the doppelgänger side of my rooms. The night watchman’s had his throat cut. He’s been dead for between twelve and thirty-six hours. And someone—did you send me a note by way of the reception on the other side, saying to meet you in the orangery at Palace Thorold?”

“No!” He sounded shocked. “Where are you?” She gave him the address. “Right, I’ll tell someone to get a team of cleaners around immediately. Listen, we’re wrestling alligators over here tonight. It looks like the Department of Homeland Security has been ru

“I get the message,” she interrupted. “Look, my headache is that I planted a hair across the top step when I came through last night, and it was broken when I went back over this morning. I’m fairly sure someone from the Clan came here, killed the watchman, headed up to the mezzanine that’s on the other side of my suite—breaking the hair—and crossed over. There was another attempt to kill me in my suite last night, Roland. They want me dead, and there’s something going down in the palace.”

“Wait there. I’ll be around in person as soon as I can get unstuck from this mess.”

Miriam stared at the phone that had gone dead in her hand,   paranoid   fantasies   playing   through   her   head.

“Angbard set me up,” she muttered to herself. “What if Roland’s in on it?” It was bizarre. The only way to be sure would be to go to the rendezvous, surprise the assassin. Who had come over from this side. Yes, but if they could get into her apartment, why bother with the silly lure?