Blood of Ambrose Read online

  “Good evening, Captain Lorn,” Morlock said coolly. “I trust you received our message.”

  “The Strange Gods seize you all, Ambrosian filth,” replied the Legionary. “I am here only at the King's command.”

  “Good for little Lathmar!” muttered Wyrth.

  “Then you know where the King is?” Genjandro asked.

  “I'll take you to him.”

  “No,” Morlock said. “Ambrosia is with him now, I guess. We await her return.”

  Lorn, breathing heavily, stared at Morlock. “Then I wait, too,” he said finally.

  “That may be unwise,” Morlock observed. “If—”

  He paused. In the interval they all heard the rhythmical crash of booted feet marching in the lane outside.

  “Please come in, Captain Lorn,” Morlock said. “Shut the door behind you. We have a decision to make.”

  The King was relieved when his captor proved to be his Grandmother rather than one of the faceless red Companions—but not very. He anticipated a tongue-lashing for various stupidities, whereas a Companion would, he supposed, merely kill or kidnap him.

  In fact, he was pleasantly surprised. His Grandmother simply set him down out of sight, grunted as if in pain, and pulled at her black gloves.

  “Grandmother,” he said haltingly, “your, your hands…”

  “Morlock and Wyrth patched me up,” she replied. “These gloves are Wyrth's making; with them I can do just about anything I need to—except scratch my palms, damn it!” She paused and asked, “Where is Lorn?”

  “I sent him to Genjandro's to find you.”

  “Good. Excellent. Then he's met up with Morlock by now. I was worried he might have gone down to deal with those creatures in the street.”

  “Why are they here? What do they want?”

  Ambrosia—a shadow in the sparse light from the window—shrugged crooked shoulders. “Something to do with you, of course. You're the man of the hour, Lathmar, if it delights you to think so.”

  It didn't. Lathmar stood in silence, trying to think of a reply that was both true and properly respectful, until his Grandmother spoke again.

  “We'd best get out of here, Lathmar. Come along. I've—”

  Her voice broke off. A sudden poignant intuition caused Lathmar to turn. In the open doorway stood the shape of a Companion. Its red robes were gray in the dim light, but there were faint red gleams in the gaping eyeholes of its mask.

  Ambrosia stepped in front of Lathmar, drawing as she did so the short curved blade strapped over her shoulders.

  “Gravedigger,” she said, “get out of my way. I am Ambrosia Viviana; I will not tell you twice.”

  The Companion did not retreat, but it did not move into the room either. Ambrosia advanced three paces cautiously, then—instead of cutting or thrusting with the blade, as Lathmar expected—she leapt forward with a chest-high kick.

  The Companion disappeared from the doorway, and they heard him strike the corridor wall outside. Ambrosia rushed out the door, Lathmar at her heels. They saw the robes of the Companion settling down in the dust of the hall floor. Apart from dust there was nothing beneath them.

  “A sending of some kind,” Ambrosia said. “God Creator! What a stench!”

  Lathmar, his throat clenching like a fist, could not reply.

  “We've no time to sort this out,” she continued. “Come along.”

  He followed her down the hallway to the stairwell. Glancing back, he saw a shadow standing in the doorway of the room he had shared with Lorn.

  “Grandmother,” he whispered.

  “Shut up.”

  They entered the stairwell. In the absolute darkness therein Ambrosia seized Lathmar's hand and led him upward. Beneath them, beneath the sound of their footsteps and their harsh breathing, Lathmar thought he heard something moving on the steps below.

  They reached the tenement's highest floor. The hallway there was narrower than on floors below, the ceiling lower. Ambrosia led the way to the end of the hall, where it was narrowest and lowest.

  “There doesn't seem to be anyone home,” Lathmar whispered as they went.

  Ambrosia laughed. “No? I'd bet there's someone standing behind every door we've passed. But don't trust in that. We could be killed as we stood here and no one would even holler for the night-watch.”

  “That's bad!” Lathmar replied. He was wondering how many of his people lived this way.

  “Is it? I suppose it is. But they've got their own lives to think about. They've learned how to survive among the water gangs, the muggers, the corrupt watchmen, the thugs who prey on others for the pleasure of doing so. These people are tough, Lathmar, and they know what matters to them. They take no unnecessary risks because they meet and survive a hundred dangers in a day. Your best soldiers come from here, Lathmar—but they've got one flaw, from your point of view. They're realists, not loyalists like Lorn. They'll follow the strongest leader always.”

  “And I'm not the strongest.”

  “Not today. Look here, Lathmar, do you think you can lift me?” They had reached the hall's end.

  He had spent the long days exercising—there was little else to do—but he looked up at his towering Grandmother fearfully. “I—I—don't think so, Grandmother.”

  “We'll see. Turn around.”

  He did so, and she put her back against his, linking both their arms at the elbow. “Bend over,” she commanded, and he did so. Then she swung her legs off the floor and, lying with her black flat upon his, kicked at the low cracked ceiling. He staggered under the weight, the force of the blow. Plaster dust rained down on them.

  “Grandmother!” he shouted. “There's something there!” By “there” he meant the dark door of the unlit stairwell.

  “Save your breath!” she said, and kicked again. Chunks of plaster fell with the dust this time. Light was flickering within the King's eyes, and the world was changing shape. Ambrosia kicked again and the world came apart in a chaos of shattered plaster and broken wood. His legs gave way, and they both fell to the floor. He was not conscious of this, though, until she lifted him up. The hallway window was blocked with debris.

  “Grandmother,” he said groggily, “the window—”

  “Get up!” she commanded. “No—not on my hands. On my forearms. Up you go!” She fairly threw him toward the ragged ring of dark blue that was the sky, the hole she had kicked in the ceiling. Choking from the dust, he found his head in the open air. He scrabbled at the flat filthy roof of the tenement, but there was nothing to grab onto.

  “Lift yourself up!” she shouted.

  “Can't!” he screamed back.

  She placed her hand against his rump and pushed. The King of the Two Cities sprawled on the tenement roof. From the hole he heard a rush of footsteps in the hallway and sudden harsh laughter—his Grandmother's. Then came a burst of fire-bright light that left red afterimages in his eyes. When he could see again, his Grandmother was lifting herself through onto the roof.

  “Phlogiston!” she said, laughing, to his complete bewilderment. “Never leave home without a pocketful, Lathmar! Brothers are useful creatures, sometimes,” she added, even more mysteriously. As she rose to her feet he saw that she had drawn her sword again, and that the grip, broken in two, was trailing smoke in the night air.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I left him burning on the floor, with the tenants stamping out the fire—”

  “The tenants?”

  “Certainly. They fear fire more than a thousand gangsters, or the Strange Gods they swear by. Rightly, too, I'd say.” She sheathed her sword. “That was well done down there, Lathmar.”

  He felt ashamed and surprised all at once. He didn't remember her ever praising him before. “I did nothing,” he protested.

  “You did what you had to do. No one ever does more—many not so much.”

  “I could have done nothing else.”

  She responded with a cheerfully hair-raising obscenity. “You could have run,
or simply panicked, even if there was no use in it. You did well. Let's go.”

  The King followed her across the roof. The prospect of his city dizzied him as he approached the edge. The dim smoky light from myriads of lamps and torches faintly sketched in the successive ridges of skyline—crooked, angular, domed. It was breathtaking, vast, yet somehow constricting. It was as if he were seeing an entire universe at once—but a very small universe, which was closing in on him. He looked up at the low-hanging clouds and saw red light reflected there.

  “Is the city burning?” he asked.

  “No more than every night. Look here, Lathmar, can you jump across that?”

  “That” was the chasm between the roof they stood on and that of the next building. It was only a couple arm lengths across, but lit windows on both walls descending displayed its depth. Fear stopped his throat—he could feel the impact of the street on his flesh—but he knew he could make it. He nodded.

  “Good. We'll cross a few of these to break our trail, then tear through another roof and walk down to street level. Understand?”

  The King nodded.

  “Jump!” Ambrosia said.

  The King jumped.

  Before the night was over the King found himself wishing he had missed the jump and gone down in a red smash beside the tenement. “It would have been better than this!” he muttered to himself. He thought his words would be lost in the tramp of soldier's boots behind him, but the mailed fist gripping his neck tightened painfully. “None o' that!” a harsh voice said in his ear.

  They marched up the broad gleaming street to the City Gate of Ambrose.

  “Hey, watchman!” the same harsh voice behind him called out. “Open this gate or I'll have your balls for breakfast!”

  The road to captivity and Ambrose had begun on the way back to Genjandro's shop. Ironically, the King had been delighted. They took back alleys and deserted streets to avoid notice, and soon after they reached the ground the heavy clouds had begun a steady drenching storm that promised to last all night. The King had never been so cold, nor so physically uncomfortable. Nor, indeed, so happy. The danger, it seemed, was past; he was free and abroad in his city; he was with his Grandmother again. He could not imagine what was before him (fortunately, as it proved), so he didn't try. He simply reveled in the wild air, the bright blackness of the wet streets in the storm.

  The first intrusive doubt that all was not well came when they had to dodge a column of armed soldiers marching up a lane leading away from the Great Market. Grandmother heard their boots long before he did and pulled him along with her into a stairwell that led to a door below street level. They watched from the shadows as the soldiers marched past, the red lion of the Protector on their black banner and their shields.

  “Protector's Men!” his Grandmother muttered when they had passed. “Something's stirring, and I don't like it, Lathmar. Maybe they're just patrolling the city. But that's more normally left to your City Legion, from all I hear.”

  “They're not mine,” the King said, but he thought of Lorn.

  “Hmph. If Urdhven agreed you'd be a good deal safer. So would they. Be quiet a moment, boy.” Hardly a moment had passed when she spoke again. “We won't risk the market,” she decided. “If something's afoot and it's nothing to do with us, we still might be caught in the open. And if they're looking for us, we mustn't give them the chance they're wanting.”

  So she led him around the Great Market by side streets, a long weary way in the rain. His exaltation had cooled by then, but he said nothing in complaint. The way was made longer (and filthier) because at every untoward sound, Ambrosia hid them somewhere along the street. But the King did not complain of this either, even though they once burrowed into a pile of street-side trash and once climbed straight up the crumbling brick wall of a half-ruined building. Too often her suspicions were correct: they were passed many times by troops of soldiers, never less than a dozen together, and once by as many as a half thousand marching, rank on rank. They bore no torches in the rain, but above them all flew the Protector's standard, the red lion black as a wound in the blue bursts of lightning.

  “They must have had a whole quarter of the city isolated,” Ambrosia whispered to Lathmar after the hundreds passed. “I suppose it started after I left Genjandro's—you can't move this many troops in a city without causing an uproar, and I'd heard nothing.”

  “Why are they moving again?” the King asked.

  “They found what they were looking for. Or they've given up.” In the shadows Ambrosia's mouth was a grim dark line.

  “But would they give up so soon?” the King wondered.

  “No!” Ambrosia shouted, and the King kept quiet after that.

  Finally they arrived at Genjandro's shop. It was not hard for the King, who had never seen the place, to pick it out of the shops lining the street. Peering out alongside his Grandmother in the issue of a narrow alley, he guessed it was the shop whose shutters had been torn from the windows, whose door lay shattered in the street.

  “This looks like grim business,” Ambrosia observed coolly. “Come along, Lathmar.”

  “Grandmother, wait!” the King hissed, seizing her arm.

  She looked at him impassively.

  “Won't there be someone watching the shop…waiting for us?” the King asked.

  “That's very good thinking, Lathmar,” his Grandmother said, her tone cold and distant. “You're probably correct. I'm going in anyway, though. You may stay here, if you like.”

  Tongue-tied, he stared at her and then followed as she walked away. Her behavior was strange to him, but familiar, too, in a way he could not name.

  She drew her sword as she approached the empty doorway and entered with casual wariness. He followed almost as quickly, more afraid of the open street than the hidden but doubtful menace of the ransacked shop.

  In truth, there was nothing inside more dangerous than darkness and broken furniture. Lathmar stayed at the windows and watched the empty street while Ambrosia rummaged about and searched the place. She disappeared for an alarmingly long time into the back of the place, but presently returned to report, “They didn't even loot the place. Pretty businesslike for Protector's scum. Over here, Your Majesty, if you please.”

  The King went where she directed, his face burning in the darkness because of the scorn and fury in her voice. He was surprised: Grandmother, though often brutal, was never, never unfair. But he was not very surprised. Her anger made sense to him somehow. It was not right, but it was wrong in a way he felt he understood.…

  Grandmother's silhouette in the dark casually hurled aside a heavy stone-topped counter, and the crash startled the King out of his thoughts. As he approached she was pulling stones from the floor where the counter had stood. He stood gaping, guessing at his Grandmother's actions (for she was a shadow among shadows, bent down to the floor) by the sounds they made. Presently he heard her brushing loose earth away. Then she stood up and pressed something in his hands: the handle of a dagger. (He saw the blade's edge gleaming in the faint light from the broken windows.)

  “There,” she said. “If anyone comes out you don't like, stick that in him.”

  “Out?” he said stupidly, and then he understood. There was a chamber hidden beneath the shop floor.

  “Out!” she affirmed. Then she bent down and seized something on the floor. He heard her grunt of exertion and the rasp of stone against stone.

  Lines of blazing light appeared on the ground, forming three sides of a square. His Grandmother stood before the widest of the three, grimacing as she heaved at a large ringbolt. Placing one hand under the lip of the stone she was lifting, she hurled it back with a negligent crash.

  In the wake of this noise the King heard a gentle coughing; it seemed to rise with the light blazing from the incandescent hole in the floor.

  “You shouldn't have lit your lamp, Genjandro,” the King heard his Grandmother say. “Don't blame me if your lungs are purple with smoke.”

&n
bsp; “On the contrary, madam,” said a polite-voiced shadow rising from the light. “I had no intention of waiting, perhaps for days, only to die in the dark. I knew you would come tonight before the sixth hour, or you would not come at all. If the smoke killed me after that, why so much the better: so much less of a cruel wait.”

  “Now, now, Genjandro, will you defy the proverb and talk of death to the King? Because standing beside me is your lawful sovereign, Lathmar the Seventh.”

  “Truly? Ah, Your Majesty, I am most signally honored—”

  The King could sense no irony in the merchant's tone. (He had nothing else to go by, as Genjandro was still almost invisible in the intolerable brightness of the dim oil lamp he carried in his hand.) But he could sense the corrosive amusement bubbling up in Ambrosia without even glancing at her, and when Genjandro's form looked to make some courtly gesture, perhaps to kneel, the King cried out, “Oh, please don't bother yourself. I'll be glad to accept your homage at any more fitting time.”

  “As Your Majesty wishes. Perhaps it would be best if we departed as soon as possible—”

  “But that won't be possible,” Ambrosia cut in, “until we decide where we are going. Where are Morlock and Wyrtheorn, Genjandro?”

  “I assumed you had guessed, my lady. The Legionary captain, Lorn, arrived just after sunset, with an army of Protector's Men at his heels.”

  “So quickly, eh? You think—”

  “I think it was a coincidence. Otherwise I would not be here. It was after Lorn arrived that the others hid me in the floor. The Protector's Men broke in and, I assume, took the others prisoner. Certainly they would not have left me here, if—”

  “Lorn is no traitor!” Lathmar protested. “He might have turned me over to Urdhven at any time—”

  “You're both off the mark,” Ambrosia said harshly. “Genjandro, they would have left you as bait for us. And Lathmar, Lorn would not have been betraying you by informing on us. You haven't understood your soldier yet, that's obvious.”

  “How—”

  “Shut up. We'll leave the question of Lorn unsettled. The main thing is: Morlock and Wyrtheorn are in Ambrose. That determines our course of action.”