“Angbard,” said Miriam. She shook her head. “Are you certain you don’t work for him?”

“Certain?” Olga frowned. “About as certain as I am that the sun rises in the east. Unless—” She looked annoyed. “—you are telling me that he has been using me?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment,” Miriam said, then changed the subject as fast as possible. Let’s just say Angbard’s definition of someone who works for him doesn’t necessarily match up to the definition of an employee in federal employment law. “I suppose you know about the extraordinary meeting?”

“I know he’s called one.” Olga looked at Miriam suspiciously. “That’s most unusual. Is it your fault?”

“Yup. Did you bring the dictaphone?”

“The what? Oh, your recording angel? Yes, it is in my bag. Paulie gave it to me, along with these battery things that it eats. Such a sweet child he is,” she added. “A shame we’ll have to hang him.”

“We—” Miriam caught herself. “Who, the Clan? Lin, or Lee, or whatever he’s called? I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“He knows too much about us,” Olga pointed out calmly. “Like the fact that we’re operating here. Even if he’s from the lost family, that’s not enough to save his life. They’ve been trying to kill you, Miriam, they’ve picking away at us for decades. They did kill Margit, and I have not forgiven them for that.”

“Lin isn’t guilty of that. He’s a kid who was drafted into his family’s politics at too early an age, and did what they told him to. The one who killed Margit is dead, and if anyone else deserves to get it in the neck it’s the old men who sent a boy to do a man’s job. If you think the Clan should execute him, then by the same yardstick his family had a perfect right to try to murder you. True?”

“Hunh.” Miriam watched a momentary expression of uncertainty cross Olga’s face. “This merciful mood ill becomes you. Where does it come from?”

“I told you the other day, there’s been too much killing,” Miriam repeated. “Family A kills a member of Family B, so Family B kills a Family A member straight back. The last killing is a justification for the next, and so it goes on, round and about. It’s got to stop somewhere, and I’d rather it didn’t stop with the extinction of all the families. Hasn’t it occurred to anyone that the utility of world-walking, if you want to gain wealth and power, is proportional to the square of the number of people who can do it? Network externalities—”

Olga looked at her blankly. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

Miriam sighed. “The mobile phones everyone carries in Cambridge. You’ve seen me using one, haven’t you?”

“Oh yes!” Olga’s eyes sparkled. “Anything that can get Angbard out of bed in the middle of the night—”

“Imagine I have a mobile phone with me right now, here on the table.” She pointed to the salt shaker. “How useful is it?”

“Why, you could call—oh.” She looked crestfallen. “It doesn’t work?”

“You can only call someone else who has a phone,” Miriam told her. “If you have the only phone in the world, it might as well be a salt shaker. If I have a phone and you have a phone we can talk to each other, but nobody else. Now, if everyone has a phone, all sorts of things are possible. You can’t do business without one, you can’t even live without one. Lock yourself out of your home? You call a locksmith round to let you in. Want to go to a restaurant? Call your friends and tell them where to meet you. And so on. The usefulness of a phone relates not to how many people have got them, but to how many lines you can draw between those people. And the Clan’s one real talent is—” she shrugged—”forget cargo, we can’t shift as much in a day as a single ox-drawn wagon. The real edge the Clan has got is its ability to transmit messages.”

“Like phones.”

Miriam could almost see the light bulb switch on over her head. “Yes. If we can just break out of this loop of killing, even if it costs us, if we can just start trading … think about it. No more messing around with the two of us running errands. No more worries about the amount we can carry. And nobody trying to kill us, which I’d call a not-insignificant benefit—wouldn’t you?”

“Nice idea,” said Olga. “It’s surely a shame the other side will kill you rather than listen.”

“Isn’t that a rather defeatist attitude?”

“They’ve been trying to keep the civil war going,” Olga pointed out. “Are you sure they did not intrigue it in the first place? A lie here and a cut throat there, and their fearsome rivals—we families—will kill each other happily. Isn’t that how it started?”

“It probably did.” Miriam agreed. “So? What’s your point? The people who did that are long since dead. How long are you going to keep slaughtering their descendants?”

“But—” Olga stopped. “You really do want him alive,” she said slowly.

“Not exactly. What I don’t want is him dead, adding to the bad blood between the families. As a corpse he’s no use to anyone. Alive, he could be a go-between, or an information source, or a hostage, or something.”

Miriam finished with her soup. “Listen, I have to go to the office, but tomorrow evening I need to be in Niejwein. At the Castle Hjorth. Lin, whoever he is, was from out of town. Chances are we can get there from here without being noticed by anyone in this world, at least anyone but Inspector Smith. This afternoon I’m going to the office. I suggest that tomorrow morning we catch the train to New London. That’s New York in my world. When we get there—how well do you know Niejwein? Outside of the palaces and houses?”

“Not so well,” Olga admitted. “But it’s nothing like as large as these huge metropoli.”

“Fine. We’ll go to the railway terminal, cross over, and walk in bold as brass. There are two of us and we can look after each other. Right?”

Olga nodded. “We’ll be back in my apartment by afternoon. It will be a small adventure.” She put her spoon down. “The council will meet on the morrow, won’t it? I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.”

“It’ll have to be good,” Miriam assured her. “It can’t be anything else.”

Extraordinary meeting

Two women sat alone in a first-class compartment as the morning train steamed through the wintry New England countryside. Puffs of smoke coughed past from the engine, stained dirty orange by the sun that hung low over icy woods and snow-capped farmland. The older woman kept her nose buried in the business pages of The London Intelligencer, immune to the rattle of track joints passing underneath the carriage. The younger woman in contrast started at every strange noise and stared out at the landscape with eyes eager to squeeze every detail from each passing town and village. Church steeples in particular seemed to fascinate her. “There are so many people!” Olga exclaimed quietly. “The countryside, it’s so packed!”

“Like home.” Miriam stifled a yawn as she read about the outrageous attempts of a consortium of robber barons from Carolingia to extract a royal monopoly on bituminous path-making, and the trial of a whaler’s captain accused of barratry. “Like home, ninety years ago.” She unbuttoned her jacket; the heating in the carriage was efficient but difficult to control.

“But this place is so rich!”

Miriam folded her paper. “Gruinmarkt will be this rich too, and within our lifetimes, if I have my way.”

“But how does it happen? How do you make wealth? Nobody here knows how the other world got so rich. Where does it come from?”

Miriam muttered to herself, “Teach a mercantilist dog new tricks …” She put the paper aside and sat up to face Olga. “Look. It’s a truism that in any land there is so much gold, and so much iron, and so much timber, and so many farmers, isn’t it? So that if you trade with a country, anything you take away isn’t there anymore. Your gain is their loss. Right?”