The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (9 page)

World-walking appeared to be a recessive-gene-linked trait, one whose carriers far outnumbered those who had the ability. To have the ability in full both parents must at least be carriers: the
three-generation-long braids knotted the Clan’s six inner families together, keeping the bloodlines strong, while the outer families occasionally threw up a cluster of world-walking siblings.
In the past hundred and fifty years – since the world Helge had grown up in as Miriam had industrialized – the Clan had used their ability to claw their way up from poor merchants to
the second seat of power in the kingdom. The ability to send messages from one side of the continent to another within a day gave their traders a decisive edge, as did the weapons and luxury goods
they were able to import from America.

The maids squeezed into the bench seat opposite Helge giggled as one wheel clattered off a pothole. She glanced at them irritably from behind her fan, unsure what the joke was, her Hochsprache
inadequate to follow the conversation. The carriage stank of leather and a faint aroma of stale sweat beneath the cloying toilet waters of the ladies. Helge used no such scents (it was
Miriam’s habit to bathe daily and wear as little makeup as possible), but Kara was sometimes overenthusiastic, the young Lady Souterne who traveled with them this evening seemed to think that
smelling like a brothel would guarantee her a supply of suitors, and as for the last Clan notables to borrow this coach from the livery stable attached to the palace . . .

The four horses harnessed to the coach – not to mention the outriders and the carriages in front – kicked up a fine brown dust, dried out by the hot summer afternoon. It billowed so
high that the occupants were forced to keep the windows of the carriage closed. They were thick slabs of rippled green glass, expensive as silver salvers but useful only insofar as they let beams
of dusty evening sunlight into the oppressively hot interior. Helge could barely make out the buildings opposite behind their high stone walls, the shacks and lean-tos of the porters and
costermongers and pamphleteers thronging the boulevard in front of them.

With a shout from the coachmen up top, the carriage turned off the boulevard and entered the drive up to the front of the Östhalle, passing cottages occupied by royal pensioners, galleries
and temporary marquees for holding exhibitions of paintings and tapestries, the wooden fence of a bear pit, and the stone-built walls around the barracks of the Royal Life Guards. People thronged
all around, the servants and soldiers and guards and bondslaves of the noble visitors mingling with the royal household in residence and with hawkers and beggars and dipsters and chancers of every
kind. A royal party could not transpire without a penumbra of leaky festivities trickling down to the grounds outside.

The carriage stopped. A clatter of steps and the door opened: four brass horns cut through the racket. ‘Milady?’ Kara asked. Helge rose first and clambered out onto the top step,
blinking at the slanting orange sunlight coming over the trees. For a moment she was sure she’d caught her dress on something – a hinge, a protruding nail – and that presently it
would tear; then she worried that a gust of wind would render her ridiculous on this exposed platform, until finally she recognized one of the faces looking up at her from below: ‘Sieur
Huw?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Milady? If it would please you to take my hand –’ he answered in English, accented but comprehensible.

She made it down the steps without embarrassing herself. ‘Sieur Huw, how kind of you.’ She managed to smile. Huw was another of those interchangeable youngbloods who infested Clan
security, hotheaded adolescent duelists who would have been quite intolerable if Angbard had not possessed the means to tame them. When they grew up sufficiently to stop seeking any excuse for a
brawl they could be useful; those who had two brain cells to rub together, doubly so. Huw was one of the latter, but Helge had only met him in passing and barely had his measure. Beanpole thin and
tall, with brown hair falling freely below his shoulders and a receding chin to spoil what might otherwise have been rugged good looks, Huw moved with a dangerous economy of motion that suggested
to those in his path that they had best find business elsewhere. But he wore neither sword nor gun at his belt today. Bearing arms in the presence of the king was a privilege reserved for the royal
household and its guards. ‘Where’s everything happening?’ she asked out of the side of her mouth.

‘Around the garden at the back. Most notables have arrived already but you are by no means late. We can go through the north wing, if you want to give the impression you’ve been here
discreetly all along,’ he offered.

‘I suppose you were looking for me,’ she said, half-jokingly.

‘As a matter of fact’ – his gaze slid across the footmen holding the huge doors open for them – ‘I was.’ He nodded, a minute gesture toward a bow, as he
crossed the threshold, then paused to bow fully before the coat of arms displayed above the floor. Miriam – remembering her manners as Helge – dropped a brief curtsey.
Are we being
watched?
she wondered. Then,
Who told Huw to wait for me?
Huw waited for her politely, then offered his arm. She took it, and they walked together into the central hall of the north
wing of the Östhalle.

The hall was a hollow cube, the walls supporting a wide staircase that meandered upward past three more floors beneath a ceiling glazed with a duke’s fortune in lead crystal. Other rooms
barely smaller than aircraft hangars opened off to either side, their windows open to admit the last of the evening sunlight. Discreet servants were already moving around the edges, lighting lamps
and chandeliers. Others, bearing platters loaded with finger food, moved among the guests. More youngbloods, looking slightly anxious without their swords. Clusters of women in silks and furs,
glittering with jewelry, enthusiastic girls shepherded by cynical matrons, higher orders attended by their ladies-in-waiting. Countess Helge paid barely any attention to her own retinue beyond a
quick check that Lady Kara and Lady Souterne and Kara’s maid Jenny and Souterne’s maid whoever-she-was were following. ‘I’m sure there are more interesting people for you to
wait upon,’ she said quietly, pitching her voice so that only Huw might hear it over the chatter of conversations around them. ‘I’m just a boring dried-up old countess with poor
manners and a sideline in business journalism.’

‘Ha-ha. I don’t think so. Your ladyship is modest beyond reproach. Would your ladyship care for an aperitif?’ He snapped his fingers at a servant bearing a salver laden with
glasses.

‘Obviously my company is so boring that it’s driving you to drink already,’ she said with a smile.

‘Milady?’ He held a glass out for her.

‘Thank you.’ Helge accepted the offered glass and sniffed.
Sherry
, or something not unlike it. A slight undertone of honeysuckle. Would they serve fortified wines here?
‘You were looking for me,’ she said, gently steering him back toward the far side of the hall and the garden party beyond. ‘Are you going to keep me on tenterhooks, wondering
why?’

Huw sniffed, his nostrils flaring. ‘I do confess that you would have to ask her grace your mother for an explanation,’ he said blandly. ‘It was at her urging that I made myself
available. I’m sure she has her reasons.’ He smiled, trying for urbanity and coming dangerously close to a smirk. ‘Perhaps she thought that a, ah, “boring dried-up old
countess with poor manners and a sideline in business journalism” might need a young beau on whose arm she might lean, thereby inducing paroxysms of jealousy among the youngsters who feel
themselves snubbed, or among those pullets who would imagine her a rival for their roosters?’

He repeated me word-perfect
, she thought, so astonished that she forgot herself and half-drained her glass instead of sipping from it. (It was a dry sherry, or something very similar.
Too dry for her taste.)
He looks like a chinless wonder with a line of witty patter but he’s got a memory like a computer
. She raised one eyebrow at him. ‘I’m not in the
market,’ she said, slowly and clearly.

‘I beg your pardon?’ He sounded genuinely confused, so that for a moment Helge almost relented. But the setup was too perfect.

‘I said, I’m not in the marriage market,’ she repeated. ‘So I’m no threat to anyone.’ With some satisfaction she noticed his cheeks flush. ‘Nice wine.
Fancy another one?’
If I’m going to be a boring dried-up old countess with poor manners I might as well make the most of it
, she resolved. Otherwise the evening promised to
drag.

‘I think I will,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I beg your pardon, I intended no disrespect.’

‘None taken.’ She finished her glass.
Better drink the next one more slowly
.

‘Her grace observed that you were looking for gentles with an interest in the sciences,’ Huw commented, half-turning to snag a fresh glass so that she had to strain to hear him.
‘Is that so?’

Oh
. The penny dropped and Miriam felt like kicking Helge for a moment. Trying to be two people at once was so confusing! ‘Maybe,’ she said guardedly. ‘I’m
thinking about trying to get a discussion group going. Just people talking to each other. Why do you ask?’

‘I was hoping – well, I’m going stale here. You know about the heightened security state, I believe? I don’t know much about your background – I was forced to
interrupt my studies and return here.’ He grimaced. ‘It’s summer recess on the other side, so I’m not losing much ground – except access to the labs and to the college
facilities – but if it goes on much longer I’m going to have to take a year out. And you’re right in one supposition, my father’s been pressing me to complete my studies and
settle down, take a wife, and accept a postal rank. It’s only the generosity of the debating society that’s allowed me to keep working on my thesis this far.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Miriam, wearing the Helge identity like a formal dress, steered her interviewee around a small knot of talkative beaux and through a wide-open doorway, through a state
dining room where a table set for fifty waited beneath a chandelier loaded with a hundred candles. ‘Well, I don’t know that I could say anything on your behalf that would help you
– but if it’s any consolation, I know the feeling. We’re cut off and isolated here. For all that we’re a social elite, the intellectual climate isn’t the most
stimulating. I was hoping to find people who’d be interested in helping organize a series of monthly lectures and weekly study group meetings. What were – are – you
studying?’

‘I’m midway through a master’s in media arts and sciences,’ Huw admitted, sounding slightly bashful about it. ‘Working on fabrication design templates.’

‘Oh.’ It sounded deathly boring. Miriam switched off as they threaded their way around a gaggle of female courtiers attending on some great lady. ‘What does that involve? What
college did you say you were studying at?’

‘The MIT Media Lab. We’re working on a self-contained tool kit for making modern electronic devices in the field – I say! Are you all right?’

Miriam wordlessly passed him her glass then fumbled with a silk handkerchief for a few seconds. ‘I’m okay. I think.’
Apart from the after-effects of wine inhalation
.
She dabbed at her sleeve, but the worst seemed to have missed it. ‘Tell me more . . .’

‘Sure. I’m doing a dissertation project on the fab lab – it’s a workbench and tool kit that’s designed to do for electronics what a blacksmith’s forge or a
woodworking shop does for ironmongery or carpentry. You’ll be able to make a radio, or an oscilloscope, or a protocol analyzer or computer, all in the field. Initially it’ll be able to
make all of its own principal modules from readily available components like FPGAs and PCB stock – we’re working with the printable circuitry team who’re trying to use
semiconductor inks in bubble-jet printers to print on paper, for example. I was looking into some design modularity issues – to be blunt, I want to be able to take one home with me. But
there’s a long way to go – ’

By the time they fetched up in the huge marquee at the rear of the palace, two drinks and forty-something invitations later, Miriam was feeling more than a little light-headed. But her
imagination was running full tilt; Huw had taken to the idea of monthly seminars like a duck to water and suggested half a dozen names of likely participants along the way, all of them young inner
family intellects, frustrated and stifled by the extreme conservativism that infused the Clan’s structures. Most of them were actively pursuing higher education in America, but had been
blocked off from their studies by the ongoing security alert. Most of them were names she’d never heard of, second sons or third daughters of unexceptional lineage – not the best and
the brightest whose dossiers Kara was familiarizing her with. Huw knew them by way of something he called the debating society, which seemed to be a group of old drinking buddies who occasionally
clubbed together to sponsor a gifted but impecunious student. It was, Miriam reflected, absolutely typical of the Clan that the sons and daughters with an interest in changing the way their society
worked were the ones who were furthest from the levers of power, their education left to the grace and charity of dilettantes.

Most of the introductions were not Clan-related in any way, however. As the evening continued, both her smile and her ability to stay in character as the demure blue-blooded Countess Helge
became increasingly strained. Huw had other obligations of a social nature to fulfill and took his leave sooner than she’d have liked, leaving her to face the crowds with only occasional
support from Kara. Sieur Hyvert of this and Countess Irina of that bowed and curtseyed respectively and addressed her in Hochsprache (and once, in the case of a rural backwoods laird in
Loewsprache, confusing her completely), and as the evening wore on she was gripped with a worrying conviction that she was increasingly being greeted with the kindly condescension due an idiot, a
mental defective – by those who were willing to speak to her at all. There were political currents here that she was not competent to navigate unaided. English was not the language of the
upper class but the tongue the Clan families used among themselves, and her lack of fluency in Hochsprache marked her out as odd, or stupid, or (worst of all) alien. Some of the older established
nobility seemed to take the ascendancy of the Clan families as a personal affront. After one particularly pained introduction, she stifled a wince and turned round to hunt for her
lady-in-waiting.