Blood of Ambrose Read online

  The King was relieved when Genjandro said, “I don't see how,” because he thought he did and hoped he was wrong.

  “Eh? Oh, it's nothing to do with you, Genjandro. We'll gladly accept any help you might offer, but if I were you I wouldn't offer any. You've obviously got your own problems. The King and I have to go to Ambrose this night.”

  This was much as the King had suspected, but he couldn't refrain from yelping when his guess proved correct.

  His Grandmother turned on him fiercely, her white face stark with shadows in the lamplight. “You don't like that, do you? It doesn't matter if you like it or not. You're my key to the gates of Ambrose, and I'm going to turn you till the gates open or you break.”

  Genjandro, obviously concerned by this, began to utter a protest, and the King himself wanted to say something, he hardly knew what. Ambrosia listened abstractedly for a moment and then said distinctly, “Be quiet.”

  In the offended silence that ensued, Genjandro and the King noticed what Ambrosia had already heard: the stealthy fall of booted feet outside the shop door.

  Deliberately and with great presence of mind, Genjandro smashed his oil lamp against the wall. In an instant the burning oil set ablaze the wreckage on the floor below, lighting the whole room. Thus the soldiers who presently entered had to do so as individuals, rather than as the aggregate armed shadow they would have been in the dark room.

  When the first soldier appeared in the doorway (of course: a Protector's Man, the red lion splashed like blood across his dark surcoat), Ambrosia threw back her head and screamed; the memory of it lived in Lathmar's nightmares till the day he died. Then, brandishing the blade she had never sheathed, Ambrosia leapt into battle, hatred and happiness twisting the lines of her face. And then, just when it would do no good to anyone, the King recognized his Grandmother's oddly familiar mood. It was grief, in its maddest middle phase—the reckless destructive mood when you don't care if you live or die.

  The King had been that way, after the first shock of his parents' death. No one had noticed, of course. The recklessness of which he was capable was invisible to anyone else. But for a long time he would eat his meals before others tasted them, he would leave his doors unlocked at night. He could not sleep much, but he lay in bed—shutting his ears with his eyes—and let the assassin's blade come when it would.

  It didn't come, not then, and one by one he resumed his pitiful precautions. Grief is strong, but life is stronger. He would not have told this to his Grandmother because he knew that the griever hates life. Grief is love itself, wounded by loss, and life is just the emptiness that goes on afterward. It is terrible that such an emptiness can overcome the fullness of grief, and the King would never have inflicted this knowledge on anyone he loved. (It occurred to him, as she leapt eagerly toward death, that he loved his Grandmother.) But he would have delayed her or decoyed her, lied to her until she inflicted that knowledge on herself.

  Now it was too late for such gentle trickery. Ambrosia had gone to find her death on a bright thicket of blades and would no doubt find it. The King crouched down in the shadows of the high leaping flames and waited for death to find him.

  From there to Ambrose was just a journey of so many steps.

  *“What does blood cost?” The enclitic -me implies a negative answer to the question.

  he keeper of Ambrose's City Gate grunted, his oily face gleaming between the dark iron bars of the portcullis. “Whatcha want?” he snapped. “Gate's close'. Go ‘round ta Lonegate. Command's in Markethall Barracks. I guess it is. Anyway, no one here but the poisoners.”

  The raspy voice from behind the King responded irritably, “Damn you, you wobbly old winebag. Can't you see? I've got the King of the Two Cities by the scruff of the neck. High Command wants him locked up before the Ambrosians in the city have a chance to grab him back.”

  “Go ’round!” shouted the gatekeeper. “Go ‘round! No so'jers here. Ha'n't stood a watch in five years, wi' my leg. Not s'posed to open the gate till Pr'tect'r rides back. Now—”

  “You've got the key, haven't you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It's ten miles on foot to the Lonegate. I've got to go to the nearest bridge, through a city that's half in revolt, cross the bridge, then walk through open country until I get to the other side of Ambrose. And they've probably got some damn fool on duty who'll tell me to go back to the City Gate.”

  “They tol' me—”

  “Did you say the poisoners were here?”

  The gatekeeper reluctantly admitted this.

  “Send for a poisoner—Steng, if he's here. Tell him Hundred-Leader Medric is at the gates with the royal prisoner.”

  “Steng's questioning…mmm…Steng's questioning…some…er…”

  “He's questioning the prisoners who were brought in earlier—through this gate. Isn't that so?”

  “Hmph. Hm. Yes.”

  “I've got the answer to his questions in my mitt. When I see him, I'll remember to tell him who sent me around to the back door with the royal prisoner. Then maybe he'll have some questions for you.”

  The gatekeeper puffed air through his lips and twisted his face. Then he disappeared into the shadows. Presently a clanking sound was heard, and the small door set into the portcullis swung open.

  “Come in, you foul-minded Protector's brat,” the gatekeeper's voice came out of the darkness.

  The King dragged his feet, but his captor fairly lifted him across the iron threshold. In the darkness within the gate, the keeper's voice came from behind them.

  “Know how I know you're the real thing, Protector-pup?”

  “I've got the King.”

  “I wouldn't know the King from a ripe melon. No, if you were trying to break in, you'd have tried to grab my throat while I was waggling my face at you through the bars, thinking I had the key on my person.” The door slammed shut behind them and locked. “You didn't even make a move at it. So you knew the key was hanging in the gatehouse, not around my tempting neck. Move on, straight ahead. You've been here before.”

  It was the King who went first; he had passed through this gate often, the last time as much a captive as he was now. But he did not really know the way—usually he was being led—and he often stumbled in the dark. He no longer even had his captor's guidance; the mailed glove had released its grip on his neck once they had stepped through the gate. Once they were through, the King reflected, rubbing his neck, it didn't matter anymore. Before him was a small guardroom with two tables and a number of chairs. Most of the flat surfaces were covered with wine jars and wide-mouthed drinking cans; there was a barrel of beer in the corner of the room, stale stinking foam drying on the floor underneath its tap.

  Soldierly voices echoed in the stone corridor behind him. The two entered the room in single file behind him, the gatekeeper bringing up the rear.

  “…might have been wrong about that,” the King's captor was saying. “Treason's our biggest worry in this business.”

  “Treason!” the old Legionary sneered. “You Protector-snots throw that word around like it still means something. You're lucky it doesn't. If it did you'd all be traitors, and your All-Leader with kin-blood on his hands the biggest of all—”

  “You're pretty free, there, old-timer.”

  “Not free enough!” said the gatekeeper, turning about to hang the gate keys on an iron hook protruding from the wall. “When the snow falls, that's my sashvetra*—I'm a twenty-winter man. I don't give a damn what happens after that, and not much what happens before.”

  “I hope you make it, old soldier,” the King's captor said.

  A change in the other's voice brought the Legionary wheeling about in suspicion. By that time the King's captor had seized the larger of the room's two tables by one leg and raised it to the ceiling, dumping the bottles and drinking cans to the floor; the King was sprayed by a beery reek. The Legionary stared open-mouthed as the table swung down and clipped him on the forehead. The King's captor dropped the
table and grabbed the unconscious gatekeeper as he slumped toward the stone floor.

  “Did you kill him?” the King asked.

  “No,” Grandmother replied.

  “Won't he talk when he awakes?”

  “You've become rather bloodthirsty tonight, Lathmar.”

  The King thought of the seven Protector's Men his Grandmother had slaughtered in his presence earlier, one of whose armor she presently wore. He had smelled the dead man's blood all through the long walk from Genjandro's shop. “No,” he said dimly. “Not that.”

  “Your point's a good one,” Ambrosia continued, “but you lack experience. A man who's been struck unconscious takes a long time to remember what's happened to him, if he ever does. He almost never does if he's been drinking. Besides, we'll fix it so that no one believes him if he does remember. Drag that table back where it was.”

  The King obeyed. When he had set it up, Ambrosia deftly kicked it over on its side with one foot. It looked as if the table had simply fallen over, spilling its contents. Then Ambrosia dragged the Legionary over, carefully draping his body so that the mark on his forehead aligned with the edge of the table; then she let the body sag to the ground.

  “I see,” the King said. “If he tells his story, people will just think he tripped, being drunk, and struck his head on the table. And his story…”

  “Will be thought a lie or a dream. Right.”

  “That's why you kept him from falling,” the King observed. “You didn't want any unexplained bruises on the back or side of his head.”

  “Right again.”

  The King had thought she was being humane. He'd gotten to like the old soldier in the few moments he'd known him. He wished he could look forward to a sashvetra that would free him from the eternal intrigues and treacheries of imperial succession. He disliked his Grandmother's ruthlessness, and something of this must have shown in his face, for she took him by the shoulder.

  “Look here, Lathmar,” she said, “let's see where we stand. I'm here to rescue my brother Morlock and my friend Wyrtheorn, and I don't much care how I do it. I've obliged you to accompany me because I needed you to get in, and because you owe them more than you may be aware of. But if you want to stay here, or take your chances alone inside Ambrose, or out in the city—that's up to you.”

  The King was furious. He turned his face away from the battered visor of the Protector's Man Ambrosia had slain. “And now,” he said finally, “you don't need me. I'll be in the way. Your guise as a Protector's Man will take you unnoticed anywhere in Ambrose. But if anyone sees you with the King, you will be noticed; questions will be asked. I make your task harder, and so you generously offer…” His voice trailed off.

  Ambrosia removed the helmet. Her face held no hostility. In fact, she seemed to smile in approval. “You have a gift for balancing the books, Lathmar. What you say is true: what I have to do will be easier if you're not around. Nonetheless (put this in your books, boy) I will bring you along, if you wish to come. Because it is your right to act with me in this.”

  “I'll come,” said the King. “Because of Lorn. You don't say anything about him. But you're wrong about him. He tried to warn me about you!” He spoke desperately, aware of his own incoherence.

  “I've no doubt his warning was a good one,” Ambrosia conceded, “for himself. For you, Lathmar, things are different. You are one of us.”

  “I'm not,” the King whispered, frightened by his defiance. “I'll never be like you.”

  Ambrosia shrugged her twisted shoulders. “So much the worse for you then, my friend,” she said, and covered her face with the stolen helmet.

  Poisoning is a science, but torture is an art. The goal of the poisoner is simply to attain a physical goal, the death of the patient. The goal of the torturer is to destroy the personality of the patient without achieving the patient's death. Hence the torturer, unlike the poisoner, has to attend to the individual identity of the patient. This was the theory under which Steng, a poisoner turned torturer, operated, and he had attained some success.

  That was why he had started on this patient's hands. The patient had been raised by dwarves, Steng knew, and the dwarves have a peculiar reverence for the hands. The maker of things, the Master of Making, is the person whom all dwarves revere. And hands are the organs of physical creation. After death, a dwarf's face is left bare, but his hands are covered.

  It was with this in mind, then, that once the patient had been hung from the ceiling by his ankles, Steng had patiently and carefully flayed half of the patient's left hand, in full view of the patient. He had made a good job of it, stopping at the wrist so the manacle wouldn't get in his way, clipping a poisonous zarm-beetle every now and then to an exposed bundle of nerves, leaving the skin hanging from the bloody meat of the living hand. He had been careful not to let the blood of the patient get on his hands or clothes, for he hated a mess.

  Really, it had been a very workmanlike job, and Steng was annoyed to find that it was not appreciated. Looking up to make some jovial comment, he saw that his patient's eyes were closed. Lifting one of the eyelids, he saw that the patient's pupil had constricted almost to invisibility, and that the pale gray iris was glowing faintly in the dim light. The patient was no longer respirating, but was clearly not dead either.

  Steng could not tell whether this was the rapture of vision or mere withdrawal. (He was not a master of Seeing, and he hesitated to consult the one he knew.) But the patient's tal-self was not present to engage with the suffering Steng was inflicting on him.

  “But it doesn't matter!” he told his patient. “You've gone far away into the tal-realms. But your source is still here in this body. If I damage it enough you will have to return. You won't have the strength to remain where you are.”

  There was no answer, of course.

  “You're a coward, you know! A coward!” Steng found himself shaking with—with anger, of course. That would never do. He went to the door of his tower chamber and sent the attendant off to fetch a hot drink. Then he sat and drank and calmed himself by watching Morlock's blood gather along his flayed fingertips and spatter on the stone floor.

  The light of Ambrosia's torch fell, red and gold, on the squalor of an abandoned guard post. “The palace is a shell,” she remarked. “Practically every soldier in the city must be pounding a beat in or near the Great Market.”

  “They think—” the King began.

  “They think they can catch water in a sieve. Bad tactics, as my esteemed brother would say.”

  “They caught your brother with those tactics,” the King observed, greatly daring.

  Ambrosia turned toward him, masked by the helmet visor but still clearly angry. Then she shrugged and laughed. “Well said, Lathmar. But it wasn't Morlock they wanted, nor can he give them what they want, which is you, so it's still bad tactics. Besides, what if the Khroi attacked? Ambrose is the key to the city, and your Protector has left it almost unguarded—just the poisoners and their thugs, it seems. Stupid of him—and worth remembering. Well, let's go.” She kicked aside a pornographic book and the remains of an unfinished meal and passed through the post to the corridor it guarded.

  The rooms along the corridor had been storage space, but a few decades ago river water had begun to seep into them. Rather than fix the problem, the late Emperor, Lathmar's father, had seen fit to convert the rooms to prison cells, which were increasingly in demand in those days. (It was the beginning of Lord Urdhven's influence over his brother-in-law, some said.)

  The air in the hallway was dank and foul; grayish darkness grew upon the walls and floor. As she entered the corridor Ambrosia raised her torch high and gazed fixedly at the moss on the floor.

  “Someone has passed this way, recently,” she said quietly. “Not a soldier, I think. Still, they must patrol the corridor at intervals.”

  “So there's something to guard.”

  “Probably Urdhven's wine cellar. Watch behind us, Lathmar, and keep quiet.”

  A fain
t sardonic chuckle echoed in the corridor before them. “The suggestion comes a bit late, madam, if you don't mind my saying so,” a bodiless voice remarked.

  Lord Urdhven watched moodily as Companions of Mercy hauled corpses out of the smoking ruin that had once been Genjandro's shop. The walls of the building still stood, but the roof had collapsed and fumes still poured from the hole upward into the dark humid air.

  “It's lucky there was so much rain,” Vost remarked. “We might have lost the whole quarter to fire.”

  Idiot, Urdhven thought with weary impatience. What a blessing such a fire would have been! How easy it would have been to lose the body of the little King in the general destruction! How the city would have rallied behind him, the Protector, as he and his men fought the blaze! What a pogrom of the Protector's enemies could have followed, accused and condemned as pro-Ambrosian arsonists! It was a lost opportunity, but Vost would never see it. If only Vost were more like Steng, or Steng a little like Vost.…But each tool had its purpose, he reminded himself wryly.

  Urdhven noticed that the Companions were preparing to depart. “Wait!” he barked at them, and crossed over to the death cart. He reached it before he noticed that Vost, open-mouthed, had not followed. He motioned impatiently for his henchman to come over, but even as he did so his mind was alive to the situation's possibilities.

  Vost, peasantish town man that he was, looked on the Company of Mercy with awe and terror. He never would have dared to interfere with them, nor would they have paid him the least attention if he did dare. It was different with Urdhven, of course, and perhaps he could make some use of that sometime. Not on Vost, of course: his mastery of Vost was complete. But on others whom it would be useful to impress with a casual gesture of power.…

  All this in the moments it took Vost to follow in his master's footsteps, braving the gauntlet of the hulking red-shrouded Companions.

  “What do you see?” Urdhven demanded.

  Vost's face twisted with revulsion as he faced the charred crumbling meat in the death wagon. “Seven bodies—urrr. It was so many soldiers we set to watch on the shop.”