The Trade of Queens

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Book: Read The Trade of Queens for Free Online
Authors: Charles Stross
you in on what’s been going on.…”

Evacuation
    The marcher kingdoms of the East Coast, from the Nordtmarkt south, were scantily populated by American standards: The Gruinmarkt’s three to four million—there was no exact census—could handily live in New York City with room to spare. The Clan and their outer families (related by blood, but not for the most part gifted with the world-walking talent) were at their most numerous in the Gruinmarkt, but even there their total extended families barely reached ten thousand souls. The five inner families had, between them, a couple of thousand adult world-walkers and perhaps twice that many children (and some seniors and pregnant women for whom world-walking would be a hazardous, if not lethal, experience).
    At one point in the 1930s, American style, the inner families alone had counted ten thousand adult world-walkers; but the Clan’s long, festering civil war had been a demographic disaster. To an organization that relied for its viability on a carefully husbanded recessive gene, walking the line between inbreeding and extinction, a series of blood feuds between families had sown the seeds of collapse.
    Nearly twenty years ago, Angbard, Duke Lofstrom, the chief of the Clan’s collective security agency, had started a program to prevent such a collapse from ever again threatening the Clan. He’d poured huge amounts of money into funding a network of fertility clinics in the United States, and the children of that initiative were now growing to adulthood, ignorant of the genes (and other, more exotic intracellular machinery) for which they were carriers. Angbard’s plan had been simple and direct: to approach young female carriers selected from the clinics’ records, and pay them to act as host mothers for fictional infertile couples. The result was to be a steady stream of world-walkers, raised in the United States and not loyal to the quarreling families, who could be recruited in due course. Miriam, Helge, had been raised in Boston by Angbard’s sister as an experiment in cultural assimilation, not to mention a political insurance policy: Other children of the Clan had been schooled and trained in the ways and knowledge of the exotic West.
    But Angbard had planned on being around to coordinate the recruitment of the new world-walkers. He hadn’t expected Matthias’s defection, or the exposure of the clinics to hostile inspection, and he hadn’t anticipated the reaction of the Auld Bitches, the gaggle of grandmothers whose carefully arranged marriages kept the traditional Clan structure afloat. Their tame gynecologist, Dr. ven Hjalmar, was a stalwart of the conservative club. He’d been the one who, at Baron Henryk’s bidding, had arranged for Helge’s involuntary pregnancy. He’d also acquired the breeding program records for his faction and, most recently, taken pains to ensure that Angbard would never again threaten their prestige as gatekeepers of the family trade. And now the surviving members of the Clan’s conservative clique—the ones who hadn’t been massacred by Prince Egon at the ill-fated betrothal feast—were cleaning up.
    On that July morning, approximately one in every hundred world-walkers died.
    In his private chambers in the Ostrood House, Baron Julius Arnesen was shot dead by Sir Gavaign Thorold.
    Lord Mors Hjalmar, his eldest son Euen, and wife Gretyl were blown up by a satchel charge of PETN delivered by a courier who, not being a member of the clique responsible, also died in the blast—neither the first nor the last collateral casualty.
    There were other, less successful assassination attempts. The young soldier detailed to slay Sir Helmut Anders had second thoughts and, rather than carrying out his orders, broke down and confessed them to his commander. The assault team targeting Earl-Major Riordan arrived at the wrong safe house owing to faulty intelligence,

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