Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

Miriam had run through the emotional gamut in the past six hours, oscillating wildly between hope and terror, despair and optimism. Being taken out of the cellar room and escorted up to the top of this rickety pile of brick and lath by a pair of thugs, and ushered into a garret where a middle-aged woman with a kindly face and eyes like a hanging judge sat at a writing desk, and then being expected to give an account of herself, was more than Miriam was ready for. All she had to vouch for this woman was Erasmus Burgeson's word: and there was a lot more to the tubercular pawnbroker than met the eye. He had some very odd friends, and if he'd misread her when he suggested she visit this "Lady Bishop," then it was possible she'd just stuck her head in a noose. But on the other hand, Miriam was here right now, and there were precious few alternatives on offer.

"I'd quite understand if you thought I was mad," Miriam said, shivering slightly-it was not particularly warm in this drafty attic room. "I don't really understand everything that's going on myself. I mean, I thought I did, but obviously not." She felt her cheek twitch involuntarily.

Margaret Bishop leaned forward, her expression concerned. "Are you all right?" she asked.

Miriam twitched again. "No, I'm-" She took a deep breath. "A few bruises, that's all. And I'm lucky to be alive, people have been trying to kill me all evening." She took another deep breath. "Sorry..."

"Don't be." Lady Bishop rose to her feet and opened the door a crack. "Bring a pot of coffee, please. And biscotti. For two." She closed it again. "Would you like to tell me about it? Start from the beginning, if you please. Take your time." She sat down again. "I must apologize for the pressure, but I really need to know everything if I am to help you."

"You'd help me?" Miriam blinked.

"You've been very helpful to us in the past. We tend to be suspicious, with good reason-but we look after our friends." Lady Bishop looked at her gravely. "But I need in know more about you before I make any promises. Do you understand?"

Miriam's vision blurred: for a moment she felt vertiginous, as if the stool she sat upon was half a mile high, balanced in a high wind. Relief combined with apprehension washed over her. Not alone -it was like waking suddenly from a nightmare. The world bad been narrowing around her like a prison corridor for so long that the idea that there might be a way out, or even people who would help her willingly, seemed quite alien for a moment. Then the dizziness passed. "I'll tell you everything," she heard herself saying, in a voice hoarse with gratitude. "Just don't expect too much."

"Take your time." Lady Bishop sat back on her chair and waited while Miriam composed herself. "We've got all night."

"There are at least three worlds." Miriam squeezed her tired eyes shut as she tried to fumble her way towards an explanation. "I'm told there may be more, but nobody knows how to reach them. The people who can reach them... they're my relatives, apparently. It's a hereditary talent. It's what geneticists call a recessive trait, meaning you can't inherit it unless it was present in both sides of your family tree. It's difficult to do-painful if you do it too often, and you need a focus, a kind of knotwork design to look at to make it work-but it's made the families, the people who have the ability, rich. The world they live in is very backward, almost medieval: something went wrong, some blind alley in history a couple of thousand years ago, but they've risen into the nobility of the small feudal kingdoms that exist up and down the New England coastline.

"I'm... I'm an outsider. About fifty years ago the families started killing one another, there was a huge blood feud-what they called a civil war. My mother, who was pregnant at the time, was on the losing side of an ambush: she fled to the, the other of the three worlds we know about. Uh, I should have explained that the Clan families didn't know about this one at the time. There's a lost offshoot family of the Clan who ended up here more than a hundred years ago, who can travel from here to the Clan's world: they were the ones who kept the civil war going by periodically assassinating Clan leaders and pointing the evidence at the other families. The other world, the one I grew up in, is very different from either this one or the one the Clan comes from."

There was a knock on the door. Miriam paused while one of the guards came in and deposited a tray on the table where Lady Bishop had been working on her papers. The coffee pot was silver, and the smell drifting from it was delicious. "May I...?"

"Certainly." Margaret Bishop poured coffee into two china mugs. "Help yourself to the biscotti." The guard departed quietly. "Tell me about your world."

"It's- " Miriam frowned. "It's a lot less different from yours than the Clan's world is, but it's still very different. As far as I can tell, they were the same until, urn, 1745 There was an uprising in Scotland? A Prince Charles Stuart? In my world he marched on London and his uprising was defeated. Savagely. A few years later a smoldering war between Britain and France started-and while France eventually won a paper victory, there was no invasion of England. The wars between France and Britain continued for nearly eighty years, ending with the complete defeat of France and the British dominating the oceans."

Lady Bishop shook her head. "What is the state of the Americas in this world of yours?" she asked.

'There was a revolution... Why; is it important?"

"No, just fascinating. So, continue. Your world is very different, it seems, but from a more recent point of change?"

"Yes." Miriam took a mouthful of coffee. "Something went wrong here. I think it was something to do with the French administration of England after the invasion, in the eighteenth century. In my world, a lot of the industrialization you've had here in the past hundred years happened in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in England. Over in this world it started late and it's still happening here, in New Britain. Things are further ahead in the United States, the nation on this continent where I come from. And in other countries in the other world. That doesn't mean things are necessarily better-they've got big problems, too. But no kings, at least not many: most countries got rid of them over the past century. And better science and technology. Cures for tuberculosis."

"How do your relatives, this Clan, account for their power? I'd have thought that if they live in a backward society it would be difficult to rise."

Miriam put her mug down. "They're smugglers," she said bluntly. "In their own world, they arc the only people who can get messages across the continent in anything less than weeks. They use the U.S. postal service to accomplish miracles, in the terms of their own world. And they've got modern firearms and lots of toys, because in ny world they smuggle illegal drugs: they can guarantee o get them past the Coast Guard and police and border patrols. They're immensely rich merchant princes. But they're trapped by the society they live in. The old nobility don't accept them, the peasants resent them, and the crown-" She shook her head, unable to continue.

"You said someone tried to kill you today. Which world did this happen in?"

"The Clan's," Miriam said automatically. She picked her mug up, took a sip, rolled it nervously between her palms. "I, when they discovered me, I needed to figure out a way to make some space for myself. I'm not used to having a big extended family who expect me to fit in. And there aren't enough of them. They wanted me to marry for political reasons. I tried to-hell, I made a big mistake. Tried to get political leverage, to make them leave me alone. Instead I nearly got myself killed. They left the, the political marriage as a compromise, a way out. Tonight was meant to be the official betrothal. Instead..."