Blood of Ambrose Read online

  “What do you make of that?” Urdhven demanded, pointing at one of the seven. Unlike the others it was armorless.

  “I'll tell you,” Urdhven continued, tired of waiting for the wheels to turn in Vost's skull. “It was Ambrosia who went to fetch the King; we know that much. She was either successful or not. In any case, she returned here. The soldiers attacked her and she killed them. Then she stripped that one there and put on his armor and surcoat. What did she do then?”

  “Headed for a gate,” Vost guessed. “In one of the regional garrisons—Sarkunden, maybe—she—”

  “Shut up. She did nothing of the kind.” Vost wilted visibly in the heat of Urdhven's fury, not understanding that the Protector was in fact angry with himself. He should have predicted this! “She headed straight for Ambrose. She's there now, possibly with the King in tow. She's trying to rescue her brother, just as he rescued her at Gravesend Field.

  “This is our chance, Vost. Ambrose is nearly empty, but they are there—all there in the same box. We must close the lid on them.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “I'll go ahead with the mounted troops mustered in the Great Market. You follow as soon as possible with reinforcements on foot. They must all be my sworn men—none from the City Legion; we don't want this to turn into a damn civil war. And, yes, send a company of my men to each of the city gates; have them watch for the Ambrosii. It was folly to concentrate our forces like this. But if we catch the game we've flushed, it'll be worth it.”

  They turned together toward the Great Market. Behind them the red-masked Companions of Mercy unconcernedly climbed aboard the death cart and drove away.

  * * *

  *“Twenty years”—the traditional time for retirement from the Legion.

  ithin the iron-barred cell, the monster that had been Wyrtheorn opened its weedy beard and laughed. The sound of the dwarf's voice rang overloud and echo-laden in the narrow corridor. The waist-deep water in which the dark-green figure crouched sent back mottled reflections from the red light of Ambrosia's torch. The King could not tell if the movements he could see in the marshy water were ripples, from Wyrth's motions, or illusions from the torch's flickering light, or whether there were creatures of some kind in the water. He was tempted to ask, then realized he didn't want to know.

  “No, madam,” Wyrth was saying. “My appearance is due to my captors, who ‘scrubbed the floor' with me, as they put it, before they secured my hands to the floor.”

  “So your hands are chained down there?”

  “Pinned. They have an apparatus something like a double-headed barbed spear; they drove one end through each hand and bolted it to the floor.”

  The helmet that caged Ambrosia's head nodded slowly. “I wonder if they have done likewise with Morlock.”

  Wyrth shook his shaggy head. “I couldn't say. They separated the three of us even before we reached Ambrose, as I've mentioned. But I won't slow your search down, if that's what you're thinking. I've had worse wounds in the field.”

  The dwarf's voice had grown not quite querulous, but curious. The King, too, was astonished to see his Grandmother so slow, so seemingly indecisive.

  “Wyrth…,” Ambrosia began, then fell silent.

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind. Face away, if you can. I'll pry—”

  “Stop!”

  Ambrosia stopped. She said nothing, but waited for the dwarf to speak again.

  Finally he did. “Very well, Lady Ambrosia. I can follow your reasoning, if I can't lead the way. You may not free me at this time.”

  “The risk is small. If—”

  “I beg your pardon, madam, for saying so, but that's horse-scut and you don't believe it. If you free me now we risk, at any moment, that the alarm will be raised against us. Since we do not know where Morlock is in this venerable pile, we can't know how long the search will be. Any delay may be too much. The risk, however small, is too great. I will stay.”

  Shocking the King, his Grandmother sheathed her sword. “We'll return for you, Wyrth.”

  “If possible, please do. If not, avenge my death, as my kin will be unable.”

  The stolen helmet nodded curtly, and the King's Grandmother turned away to walk back as they had come. The King stole a last glance at the dwarf (a stone figure in an abandoned fountain, hip-deep in stagnant water, covered with greenish moss) and hurried after her.

  When they were well away she observed to the King, “It was a bit of an insult, that last remark. His father and I swore kith in the far north, before he was born. And Morlock was raised in his clan; dwarves consider that an even closer tie than blood-kinship.”

  “Then aren't you breaking kith by leaving him?” Lathmar asked. Formal issues of kinship etiquette interested him.

  Ambrosia clenched her fist, unclenched it, and let her hand fall to her side. It was only then that the King realized she had been about to strike him, and he flinched, belatedly, uselessly. But when she spoke her voice was unshaken by anger.

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “But I'm not a dwarf. Nor was I raised among them, as Morlock was. My own people come first with me. I'd risk my own life to save Wyrth, but I won't risk Morlock's.”

  “You're risking mine,” the King observed.

  “You chose to come,” Ambrosia replied. “Because of Lorn.”

  The King could not tell if the harshness in her voice came from scorn or pain. But he let the matter drop, even though what she had said was half true at best.

  Or had he chosen? Truly chosen? It was something to think about.

  Properly speaking, there are not three worlds but one: flesh and spirit, fused in action. But if that fusion is broken the world separates, not into two parts but three. There is spirit, there is matter, and there is the medium (called tal by those-who-know), which knits them together into mind.

  Separate the three realms, if you have the skill. Remember: three points in space may form a triangle, or a line. Do not form a triangle. Preserve the tal as a barrier between the greater realms. Remember: mind is the union of flesh and spirit. If you part the talic union between them your awareness will dissipate upward into spirit or downward into matter; either condition may be considered death. (There are deaths and deaths: beware the second death.) It isn't death you seek. Separate the realms: preserve their tension.

  The third realm, the realm of tal, then becomes a corridor down which you drift. You are neither conscious nor unconscious. You are dreaming, freed from the limits of flesh, not subject to the freedom of spirit, constrained by the freedom of the dream, the rapture of vision.

  From the corridor of dream you watched as the poisoner flayed your hand. It had the kind of gruesome interest a revenge tale used to have, told after supper in the High Hall back home under Thrymhaiam. But it did not concern you personally: the power to move that sodden flesh was within you: interwoven black-and-white fire flaring bright against the dim insubstantial backdrop of the world of matter.

  Presently you turn away, led by a secret intention to mark this place. It had some other purpose in your conscious mind, but the dream understands it in its own way. To mark the place of your own death. (The intention to kill you flares bright as a torch in the poisoner's dim patchwork skull.)

  Death and life are both marked by blood. Surveying the pool of fading blood forming beneath your vacant body, you sense the almost talic vibrance of the innumerable spicules of fire-to-be drenching the dark dying fluid.

  Put forth your hand: not the half-dead wounded hunk of meat that fascinates the poisoner: the black-and-white woven fire of the third realm, the strength and wisdom that move the hand of flesh to move. Put it forth; draw a dripping fistful of the sparkling fire-to-be. Depart, dreaming, through the open door like a ghost in an old story, dripping blood and fire.

  Ambrosia and the King had come at last to a level of the palace seven flights of stairs above the ground. Corridors were narrow, rooms were few, and the walls were palpably thick and heavy. It served as the base
of a rank of high-aspiring towers; Steng's poisoners had their quarters there—or so Ambrosia said that rumor had it.

  “But which tower holds Steng's chambers?” asked Ambrosia. “It's a fair guess that Steng himself is torturing Morlock, and in his own place. But if we pick the wrong tower we're lost; we won't have time to search them all.”

  The King said nothing. A strange somber mood was growing with him. Perhaps it was just weariness: it had been a horribly long night; he hardly had strength to shuffle along, and all his limbs seemed numb. Even his Grandmother's voice was just a buzzing in his ears, a voice in a dream, heard without understanding.

  It was as Ambrosia's voice sank to an empty murmur that the King became distracted by Morlock, peering at them through a pane of glass on the wall of the stairway at the far end of the corridor. Their eyes met, and Morlock turned away as Ambrosia's voice came through suddenly, clear as a thunderclap.

  “—think that the night will last forever? We've got to find Morlock!”

  The King's throat gurgled, like someone trying to speak in his sleep. Finally his mind and muscles responded to his will and he coughed out words: “I saw him. Just now.”

  “Did you?” said Ambrosia with polite interest. “Where?”

  “In the stairway—just now. He looked through the window in the wall, and he…he went away.”

  “Your vision is remarkable,” Ambrosia observed, “since I can't even see the wall, much less any pane of glass.”

  “But—” the King began, and stopped. He'd been about to explain that Morlock had been clearly visible, irradiated with motile tongues of black-and-white fire. Yet this did not seem as sensible when he tried to put it into words as it had when he had seen it.

  “In any case,” Ambrosia was continuing, “there are certainly no windows in those stairwells. I drew the plans of this palace myself, Lathmar, and laid many a stone with my own hands.”

  The King said nothing.

  Ambrosia eyed him narrowly through the mask of her visor, then seized him by the arm. “Come along. Just move your feet; we'll have a look.”

  Grimly unhappy, the King let himself be dragged along to the stairwell. As he had feared, there was no glass of any sort in the walls, and in addition the stairwell was thick with the stench of blood and smoke. The torture chambers, he thought, must be nearby. But he swore to himself he would say nothing about it; Ambrosia herself pretended not to notice the reek, he saw.

  “Lathmar,” she said finally, after searching the wall, “tell me again what you saw. Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  The King's eyes gaped in the dimness, struggling to see something that could account for his delusion. “That, I think,” he said, pointing.

  “What?”

  “It must have been light reflecting off that.”

  “Don't tell me what you think you saw, tell me—Wait. What are you pointing at?”

  “The smear of blood on the wall. It—” But looking again, he saw no blood. The reek of it was fading, gone, had never been there. “I don't see it now,” he concluded lamely.

  “Well, where was it?” Ambrosia's voice was matter-of-fact.

  The King pointed again, feeling foolish. His Grandmother put out a mailed glove and traced her finger on the wall. It left a thin guttering stroke of flame behind it that soon expired. But as it did so the reek of blood and fire was back in the King's nostrils.

  “Ah!” Ambrosia exclaimed, sounding pleased. She put her palm flat against the stone and swept it back and forth. A pale shower of reddish sparks leapt out from the wall; the King again saw a patch of blood, outlined in fire that instantly faded.

  “What is it? Is it real?” the King demanded.

  “Yes. Quite real: it is the blood of an Ambrosius. Only ours sheds fire in quite this way. Which way was Morlock going, up or down?”

  “Down. That is—”

  “Don't think. Just answer. He was going down?”

  “Y-Yes.”

  “We go up, then. I don't know if the rapture will take you again, Lathmar, but if you notice anything that seems strange to you, tug on my sleeve. Don't be surprised if you can't speak: reason and rapture are always at odds.”

  “What—?”

  “This is a bad time for a lesson in magic, Lathmar, and the Sight is a bad gift to give a ruler, in any case. We see too much and feel too much as it is. Go on: lead the way, little King.”

  Silent, empty of rapture or reason, the little King wearily led the way upward.

  After some conversation with his assistant poisoner, Steng returned to his chamber. His mouth was sticky with warm sherbet, and his mind was more purposeful, more resolute. This would be the end of the game, one way or the other. Morlock would or would not tell him what he wanted to know; he would or would not rise in the Protector's estimation for this. But either way: at the day's end he would have tortured, degraded, and killed a master of Making, famous even among those-who-know, a dark legend among those who did not. He wondered what it would feel like to have done that; he looked forward to the sensation.

  Lost in his reverie of blood he did not notice the faint traces of smoke in the air as he approached the chamber door. They were, indeed, slight, but a normally alert Steng would have caught them. He waved aside the deaf-mute guard, ignoring the urgent gestures the guard made at him. He threw open his chamber door, a derisively pleasant remark at his lips.

  The room was an image of chaos: filled with clouds of dark smoke, lit within by dim flames clinging to the floor. Morlock's form—a dark constant in the flickering red gloom—hung as before from the chamber ceiling. Steng plunged forward with a curse, snatching the woven rug from inside the doorway as he ran and hurling it down on the patch of guttering flames on the floor.

  Steng screamed as a spray of corrosive liquid leapt up from the floor, searing his right arm and setting his capacious sleeve on fire. He batted out the flames in his clothing, staggering back in confusion. He was totally at a loss, fearfully expecting at any moment his death-stroke from some strange Ambrosian magic.

  Into the emptiness of his mind came the slow persistent sound of dripping. He listened for a moment, absorbed, utterly unaware of what he was hearing. Then he knew: it was the sound of Morlock's blood, still dripping from his open wounds. Finally the smoke and fire lost their mystery.

  It must be true what people said—that the secret of the Ambrosian immunity to fire lay in their blood, which drew the fire from their flesh, and which could itself start fires, when spilled. It was said to be a poison as well.

  Steng was tempted to keep Morlock alive a while longer to do some experiments. It would be dangerous, of course, and there was always the possibility of using Ambrosia to the same end. When he came to the question, though, he found he feared Ambrosia more than this Morlock fellow.

  In any case, the thing to do now was to clean up the mess. He turned to fetch his guard and noticed with some gratification that the man was already approaching him: finally something was going well on this dreadful night. Something of nightmare remained in the scene, or in Steng's own mind. Some trick of the light or the smoke made it seem the man approaching was headless, his slow uncertain steps the movements of a body about to collapse.…

  Steng stared open-mouthed as the body of his deaf-mute guard fell in a heap on the floor. Beyond it, the doorway filled with a figure in the surcoat and armor of a Protector's Man. But it was no man. The little room was already echoing with the fierce, pitiless laughter of the royal ancestress, Ambrosia Viviana.

  Although perfectly capable of fear, Steng did not then feel it. It was something beyond fear: a stark blank realization of his powerlessness. That, along with the smoke fumes, the poison of Morlock's blood, and simple shock overthrew his last vestiges of strength, and he fell unconscious on the dead body of his dead protector, like a stone or a broken toy or any lifeless thing.

  When Ambrosia saw Steng fall she wasted no more thought on him. Glancing around, she saw the contents of Morlock's pack sprea
d out over a nearby table. She went over to gather tools, then returned, drawing a three-legged chair with her. Standing on the chair she used the tools to shatter the hinges on the manacles imprisoning Morlock's ankles. At the last blow of the chisel the manacles flew open and Morlock began to fall. Ambrosia dropped the tools and seized her brother by the shins, but the weight caused her to overbalance and she fell with him to the floor.

  Half dazed, she saw Morlock lying beside her on the floor. He also stood above her, a glittering pillar of black-and-white fire. He offered her a hand (?) and, hesitantly, she accepted it, rising from her half-conscious self to walk beside her brother's tal-shadow.

  He led her to the window of the small chamber and gestured. She saw immediately what he meant her to see: through the dark translucence of Ambrose's mossy stones she saw a river of light approaching through the narrow streets of the city below: living souls, living tal. As she watched, the flood broke upon the City Gate, then after a pause began to filter in through the shadowy opening, its light dimmed by veils of stone.

  The Protector's forces, she thought. Nothing was so alien to the rapture of vision as ordinary rational speech, so she consciously formed the words, firing them at her vision-lost brother like arrows. The Protector is coming back. We must hurry, or he'll trap us in these towers. I know where Wyrth is being held. Morlock, return.…

  She saw the brightness of his flames dimmed by conscious forethought. She sensed his presence recede toward the physical plane. With a poignant sense of loss and relief, she opened her eyes to find herself twelve feet from the chamber window, her head aching. Lathmar knelt over her with tears on his face.

  “—ndmother, wake up!” he was saying.

  “I'm with you,” she said, sitting up. “See to Morlock, if you can.”

  But she saw that he had. There was a clumsy smoldering bandage about Morlock's tortured hand (very clumsy, but this was no time for a lesson in leechcraft), the burning rugs on the far side of the room had been put out…and the pool of blood was mostly dry. The air of the chamber was clear, too. Ambrosia suppressed a curse. Time, as well as volition, is distorted in rapture. How long had they been unconscious? The Protector's Men might be killing Wyrth as she sat there.