The hut was empty but warm as Brill and Miriam lifted the youth through the door. With one last effort they heaved him onto a sleeping mat and pulled the door shut behind them to keep the warmth in. “Right,” said Miriam, her voice shaking with exhaustion, “let’s see what we’ve got here.” She stood up and switched on the battery-powered lantern hanging from the roof beam.

“Please don’t—” He lay there shaking and shivering, trying to burrow away into the corner between the wall and the mattress.

“It speaks,” Brill observed.

“It does indeed,” said Miriam. He was shorter than she was, lightly built with straight dark hair and a fold to his eyes that made him look slightly Asian. And he didn’t look more than eighteen years of age.

“Check him for an amulet,” said Miriam.

“Right, you—got it!” A moment of struggle and Brill straightened up, holding out a fist from which dangled a chain. “Which version is it?”

Miriam glanced in it, then looked away. “The second variation. For world three.” She stuffed it into a pocket along with the other. “You.” She looked down at the prisoner. “What’s your name?”

“Lin—Lin.”

“Uh-huh. Do you have any friends out in this storm, Mr. Lin Lin?” Miriam glanced at the door. “Before you answer that, you might want to think about what they’ll do to you if they found us here. Probably shoot first and ask questions later.”

“No.” He lay back. “It’s Lee.”

“Lin, or Lee?”

“I’m Lin. I’m a Lee.”

“Good start,” said Brill. She stared malevolently at him. “What were you doing breaking into our house?”

Lin stared back at her without saying anything.

“Allow me,” Miriam murmured. Her headache was beginning to recede. She fumbled in her jacket, pulled out a worryingly depleted strip of tablets, punched one of them out, and swallowed it dry. It stuck in her throat, bitter and unwanted.

“Listen, Lin. You invaded my house. That wasn’t very clever, and it got at least one of your friends shot. Now, I have some other friends who’d like to ask you some questions, and they won’t be as nice about it as I am. In about an hour we’re going to walk to another world, and we’re going to take you with us. It’s a world your family can’t get to, because they don’t even know it exists. Once you’re there, you are going to be stuck. My friends there will take you to pieces to get the answers they want, and they will probably kill you afterwards, because they’re like that.”

Miriam stood up. “You have an hour to make up your mind whether you’re going to talk to me, or whether you’re going to talk to the Clan’s interrogators. If you talk to me, I won’t need to hurt you. I may even be able to keep you alive. The choice is yours.”

She glanced at Brill. “Keep an eye on him. I’m going to check on Olga.”

As she opened the door she heard the prisoner begin to weep quietly. She closed it behind herself hastily.

Miriam keyed her walkie-talkie. “Anyone out there? Over.”

“Just me,” replied Olga. “Hey, this wireless talkie thing is great, isn’t it?”

“See anyone?”

“Not a thing. I’m circling about fifty yards out. I can see you on the doorstep.”

“Right.” Miriam waved. “I just read our little housebreaker the riot act.”

“Want me to help hang him?”

“No.” Miriam could still feel the hot wash of rage at the intruder in her sights, and the sense of release as she pulled the trigger. Now that the anger had cooled, it made her feel queasy. The first time she’d shot someone, the killer in the orangery, she’d barely felt it. It had just been something she had to do, like stepping out of the path of an onrushing juggernaut: He’d killed Margit and was coming at her with a knife. But this, the lying in wait and the hot rush of righteous anger, left her with a growing sense of appalled guilt the longer she thought about it. It was avoidable, wasn’t it? “Our little housebreaker is just a chick. He’s crying for momma already. I think he’s going to sing like a bird as soon as we get him to the other side.”

“How are you doing?” asked Olga. “You came through badly.”

“Tell me about it.” Miriam shuddered. “The cold seems to be helping my head. I’ll be ready to go again in about an hour. Yourself?”

“I wish.” Olga hummed to herself. “I never had that headache pill.”

“Come over here, then,” said Miriam. “I’ve got the stuff.”

“Right.”

They converged on a tree about five yards from the hut. Miriam stripped off a glove and fumbled in her pocket for the strip of beta blockers and the bottle of ibuprofen. “Here. One of each. Wash it down with something, huh?”

“Surely.” Miriam waited in companionable silence while Olga swallowed, then pulled out a small hip flask and took a shot.

“What’s that?”

“Spiced hunter’s vodka. Fights the cold. Want some?”

“Better not, thanks.” Miriam glanced over her shoulder at the hut. “I’m giving him an hour. The poor bastard thinks I’m going to give him to Angbard to torture to death if he doesn’t tell me everything I want to know immediately.”

“You aren’t going to do that?” Olga’s expression was unreadable behind her bulky headset.

“Depends how angry he makes me. There’s been too much killing already, and it’s been going on for far too long. We’re going to have to stop sooner or later, or we’ll run out of relatives.”

“What do you mean, relatives? He’s the enemy—”

“Don’t you get it yet?” Miriam said impatiently. “These guys, the strangers who pop out of nowhere and kill—they’ve got to be blood relatives somewhere down the line. They’re world-walkers too, and the only reason they go between this world and New Britain, instead of this world and the USA, is because that’s the pattern they use. I’m thinking they’re descended from that missing branch of the first family, the brother who went west and disappeared, right after the founder died.”

Olga looked puzzled. “You think they’re the sixth family?” she asked.

“I’m not sure, and I don’t yet know why they’re trying to start up the civil war again. But don’t you think we owe it to ourselves to find out what’s going on before we hand him over to the thief-takers for hanging?”

Olga rubbed her head. “This is going to be the most fascinating Clan council in living memory,” she said.

“Come on.” Miriam waved at the hut. “Let’s get moving. I think it’s time we dragged Roland into this.”

One o’clock in the morning. Ring ring … “Hello?” Roland’s voice was furred with sleep.

“Roland? It’s me.”

“Miriam, you do pick your times—”

“Not now. Got a family emergency.”

“Emergency? What kind?” She could hear him waking up by the second.

“Get a couple of soldiers who you trust, and a safe house. Not Fort Lofstrom or its doppelgänger, it needs to be somewhere anonymous but secure on this side. It must be on this side. We’ve got a prisoner to debrief.”

“A prisoner? What kind—”

“One of the assassins. He’s alive, terrified, and spilling his guts to Olga right this moment.” Olga was in the back office with Lin and Miriam’s dictaphone, playing Good Cop. Lin was chattering, positively manic, desperate to tell her everything she wanted. Lin wasn’t even eighteen. Miram felt ashamed of herself until she thought about what he’d been involved in. Boy soldiers, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, recruited to defend their family’s honor against the children of the hostile elder brothers—elder brothers who had stolen their birthright many generations ago, abandoning them to the nonexistent mercy of the western empire.

“He needs to be kept alive, and that means keeping him away from the security leak in Angbard’s operation. And, uh, your little friend, assuming they’re not one and the same person. Someone there is working with this guy’s people. And here’s another thing: I want a full DQ Alpha typing run on a blood sample, and I want it compared to as many members of the Clan—full members—as you can get. I want to know if he’s related, and if so, how far back it goes.”