Blood of Ambrose Read online

  “My…she…I'm…my…my…my—”

  “Get your story straight,” advised the driver as the cart surged forward into the open; with dispassionate skill, he lifted his whip and cut the King across the face.

  Too shocked even to scream, the King felt, as from a great distance, his nerveless fingers let the cart go; he fell to the filthy cobbles of the open square. Dazedly he watched the lamplit cart roll away in the dark toward the other lights clustering at the thoroughfare entrance.

  Slowly the King rose to his feet. The whipcut was a red lightning-stroke of pain across his face, and other dark fires were burning on the side of his head, his right side and limbs where he had fallen. He did not fully understand why the driver had done what he did. But he guessed that the same thing would happen unless he did as the driver had advised, and got his story straight.

  He would not tell them about his Grandmother. (That would only frighten them away, because she was the Protector's enemy, and the Protector ruled everything now.) He would not tell them anything—except what she had told him to say. Say the name aloud…

  He climbed back up on the stepping-stones and bided his time. Presently a cart came through and, while it was fully engaged in passing through the line of the stepping-stones, he jumped into the tarp-covered back of the wagon, landing on his feet, and prepared to dodge whip-strokes.

  “Hey, thief!” shouted the driver, a heavyset elderly man raising his whip (as the King had feared).

  “No, Rusk!” the passenger, a woman of the same age, cried. “It's a little boy!”

  The King did not think of himself as “a little boy.” He had seen little boys from far off, playing in the streets below the walls of the palace Ambrose, and he was not much like them. He usually thought of himself as “a child,” since that was how others referred to him when they thought he was not listening, often quoting the ancient Vraidish proverb “the land runs red when a child is king.”

  “They're the worst thieves of all!” Rusk grumbled, but lowered the whip. “Hey, boy! You're spoiling our vegetables!”

  “I'm sorry,” the King said. “I need help.” He shifted to the side of the cart, to avoid treading on their goods. The cart jerked as it pulled free of the stepping-stones, and the King almost fell into the square again. “I need to find somebody!” he cried, clutching at the wagon's side.

  “Who?” the woman asked.

  The King paused. Now that he came to it, it was difficult to speak that awful name aloud. “The Crooked Man,” he said then; it was one of many euphemisms for Ambrosia's brother.

  Rusk, looking forward now to guide the cart horses, gnashed his teeth in irritation. “Boy, you should know that beggars don't come out at night. Besides, we're not city people; we don't know any beggars, crooked or straight.”

  “I don't understand what you mean,” the King said slowly. “I mean…I am looking for…Ambrosia's brother. The Dark Man.”

  The woman gave a sharp intake of breath, and Rusk shouted, “Lata, this is on your head. Throw that rat off our wagon before he says the name and brings a curse on us—”

  “Morlock!” shouted the King in despair, as the woman reached back in a vague swatting motion. “Morlock! Morlock! Morlock! Your sister is in danger! Morlock!”

  He had expected (well, half expected) the Crooked Man to appear in a gush of flame, as legends said he did when his name was spoken, to work dreadful wonders, or haul traitors off to hell. So he was half disappointed when nothing of the sort occurred. A cart with a lamp (Rusk and Lata's had none) passed them; a wash of golden light passed over the old woman's seamed face, catching a speculative wondering look on her features as she met the King's eye.

  Rusk had reined in and was turning around, shouting, whip in hand. As he raised his arm to strike, Lata snatched the whip away from him and said in a breathless voice, “Shut up, Rusk, you fool—and you, too, sir, if you please,” she added, glancing back at the King. “Sit down there, out of the passing lights, sir, and you'll be quite comfortable.”

  “Sir!” exploded Rusk.

  “Don't you understand?” Lata said insistently. “It's the little King!”

  Rusk drew himself up, then glanced back at the King, who had settled himself down obediently into the shadows. “It's impossible,” Rusk said, but his voice was quiet and lacked all conviction.

  Lata, her voice equally quiet, drove the point home. “Who counts the coins on market day, Rusk? I do. If I've seen his face once I've seen it a hundred times. And you remember what the gate guard said, about the disturbance at Ambrose. If the Protector and old Ambrosia are finally having it out, she might call on her brother (the Strange Gods save us from him; I name him not). What'd be more natural?”

  “'Natural!’ Those ones…” Rusk's voice was sardonic, but held no disbelief. Hope beat suddenly in the King's heart.

  “Then you'll help me?” the King said. “You'll help me find Morlock?”

  “Shut that filthy-mouthed brat up.”

  “Shut up yourself, Rusk. It's different for him; the Crooked Man (I name him not!) is his kin, in a manner of speaking. Yes, little sir, we'll help you as best we can. Bless you, it's our duty now, isn't it? Just pull some of these blankets over you and lie down on the side of the cart, there. There now. There now. That's fine.”

  Lata and Rusk did a good deal of low-voiced talking, but the King didn't bother to listen to it. He had done his part; he had succeeded; it was up to the others, now. He hoped they would be in time to save Grandmother—how proud she'd be of him, for once! He wondered at the power of the Crooked Man's name, which frightened others even more than it did him. Lata had said, it's different for him, and he saw how true that was.

  “Morlock,” the King muttered, and felt the ancient blood of Ambrosius glow in his veins. “Come help us, Morlock. Help Grandmother. Hurt the Protector. He killed my parents, Morlock, I'm almost sure of it….” The King whispered to Morlock in the dark what he had never dared to say aloud to anyone, even Grandmother. But he didn't have to be afraid anymore; it was a wonderful feeling.

  He peered through the boards of the wagon side. Would Morlock appear magically out of the darkness, as he was supposed to do when someone said his name? Would he be hunched over and crooked, as the legends said? Would his fiery servants appear alongside him? Was his hand really bloodred, from all the killing it had done? But Morlock never appeared.

  That was all right, though. The King knew it was because they were going to meet him. Lata and Rusk seemed to know more or less where to go. Rusk was expressing delight at how empty the streets were; the King guessed that people avoided the streets, because that was where Morlock lived.

  After a while the King grew tired of muttering Morlock's name in the dark. He risked peering out of the wagon past Lata and Rusk. He saw the high twisting towers of a palace, the windows glittering with light. He wondered dimly if Morlock had his own palace, his own court, a kind of secret Emperor.…But that was impossible. He knew those towers. He had seen them, looking up from the palace walls, as he walked with the sentries…. It was Ambrose. They were taking him back to Ambrose.

  “You're taking me back!” he shouted, throwing off the blankets. “You lied! You said you'd help!”

  Rusk said nothing, flicking the reins to make his horses go faster. But Lata turned toward him, her etched face expressionless in the shadows, her voice troubled and concerned. “Now, now, young sir. We are helping. It's best you not be mixed up in that nasty old witch's plots. And you can't be wandering the streets at night, no, no. Why, who knows what might happen? You'll be safer at home in…in the palace, there. Let the grown-ups settle things between themselves. Now, don't be afraid. Don't cry. No matter what happens, they won't hurt a boy like you.”

  The King was crying, in fear and frustration. If the Protector had murdered the Empress, his own sister, why would he stop at killing anybody? They had killed Master Jaric and drained him like a pig, and who did Jaric ever hurt? The King wanted to call out Morloc
k's name again—Morlock who was death to traitors—but the power to do so had left him.

  He wondered, briefly, fearfully, what would happen if he jumped away from the wagon and ran away into the dark streets. He didn't know. He didn't know. He didn't do anything. There was no point in doing anything. He had done something and it hadn't worked. The King sat, weeping as the wagon pulled up in front of Ambrose's City Gate. He did not even listen as Rusk and Lata began their marketplace chaffering with the guards on duty.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” the guard captain said finally. “You two—go over there and claim that person these two are talking about. You see him there, in the back?” The King heard booted feet approaching, and felt himself lifted gently out of the wagon by his shoulders, then carried bodily to the gate. He opened his eyes to meet those of the guard captain, who swore furiously, “Death and Justice! It's true. Thurn and Veck: take His Majesty back to his apartments and stay with him. Don't be drawn off by anyone or I'll feed the one ball you have between you to the goats. Carnon: notify the Protector's Man napping upstairs in the inner guardhouse that we have recovered the King. I know; I know! Then you go with him while he reports to the Protector, and just you mention it to everyone you meet. Nobody's falling down a stairway on my damn watch.”

  “Wait, now!” Rusk said hoarsely. “Little sir, won't you speak up for us? This soldier man is trying to cheat us of our reward! Didn't we help you get home safe, all right? Won't you mention us to your Protector?” And through this the King saw Lata tugging at Rusk's arm, begging him to be quiet and come away. Then the soldiers carried the King through the gate, onto the open bridge over the river Tilion, toward the yawning gate of Ambrose on the far side of the river, and the darkness, and the fear.

  The guard captain's voice, now lazily threatening, echoed back through the City Gate. “Hold on. This isn't some sack of beans you've brought to market. It's the royal person, His Majesty Lathmar the Seventh, the King of the Two Cities and (the Strange Gods willing) your future Emperor. As to the Protector hearing your names, there's little doubt of that. Now—what are your names? Where do you live? How did you become involved in the abduction of His Majesty? Which one of you slashed his face?” The gate of Ambrose shut behind the King.

  Grandmother was condemned to death the next evening, along with all the people the Protector's Men had killed the night before, in a special session of the Protector's Council. The King never remembered much about the ceremony, just that Grandmother (in the plain brown robe of the accused, her empty hands hanging loose from the wrist as if they had been broken), looked at his face once and turned away.

  They had given him a statement to read before the Council, but he burst into tears and couldn't say anything. They took him away and put him to bed. After a while he stopped crying or moving so that they would think he was asleep and go away. When they did, he lay there in the dark room, thinking.

  The last thing he thought, many hours later, when he really was falling asleep, was that the things they said about the Crooked Man were all lies. He would never believe a legend again, or his Grandmother either.

  As for Lata and Rusk, they had been released that morning, after a bitter night of questioning. It soon proved that no one really believed they were involved in a plot to abduct the King. The guard captain, Lorn—not a Protector's Man, one of the City Legion—who assumed charge of their interrogation, was simply furious at them. He referred several times to their attempt to “sell the King like a sack of beans.” But he kept the Protector's Men away, and finally dismissed them when it was too late to make it to the Great Market (which ceased to admit vendors at dawn), contemptuously declining to confiscate their goods. As they drove their wagon away from Ambrose, Lata felt obscurely ashamed, yet intensely angry—as if she had tried to cheat someone, only to find herself cheated instead.

  Rusk's feelings were less ambiguous, and he gave vent to them all the way back to their farm. He cursed everyone they had dealt with, from the Protector on down, not excluding the King (“that foul-mouthed fucking little brat”) or Ambrosia (“the evil venom-spewing bitch”). Frequently he exclaimed, “Morlock take them all!” because he considered himself to have been ill used, if not positively betrayed.

  They sold most of their goods at Twelve Stones, for a fraction of what they would have gotten at the Great Market. Their ride home was another long litany of curses, this time including the day's buyers and competing sellers, but concentrating as before on the Protector, the guard captain, the ungrateful King, and that inhuman crook-back witch Ambrosia. Rusk invited Morlock to show himself and cart off each one in several directions.

  Lata, whose shame had grown as her anger faded, finally told him to shut up. But the grievance became something of an obsession with Rusk, and for years afterward he was liable to mutter, “Morlock take them! Morlock take them all!” particularly when he was doing some dirty or disagreeable task.

  The pattern for all this was set on that first day, when they returned home to find the young nephew they had hired to watch their farm missing, their scarecrow stolen, and a murder of crows feeding in their wheat field. Before anything else, Rusk had to rush hither and thither through the field, waving his arms like a madman to scare away the crows. This he did while screaming out such treasonable abuse of the imperial family that even the crows were shocked. The repeated references to Morlock caught their attention, too, for they had a treaty with Morlock. It was the treaty, rather than Rusk's ineffectual gesticulations, that caused the murder to rise up into the air, showering Rusk with seeds and croaks of abuse, and fly off into a neighboring wood for a parliament.

  They settled between them how much they actually knew of the story—this took some time, since crows are quarrelsome and apt to suppose they know more than they do—and they agreed on who was to carry the message. They then determined Morlock's location by the secret means prescribed by the treaty and dispatched the messenger. Their duty discharged, the parliament adjourned and the murder flew back to pillage Rusk's wheat field again.

  But the messenger-crow flew east and north till night fell and day followed night. He flew on, pausing only to steal a few bites of food now and then, and catch an hour's sleep in an abandoned nest. At last, after sunset on the second day, the messenger flew over a hillside where a dwarf and a man with crooked shoulders were sitting over the embers of a campfire; the man was juggling live coals with his bare fingers. The messenger-crow settled down on his left shoulder and spoke into his ear.

  he judicial murder of a royal person is not something that can be done lightly, nor should it be done in secret. Rightly performed, it is a piece of theater, and the murderer—who is, as it were, the director and producer of the piece—must select the audience carefully. They must be numerous and they must be (collectively at least) powerful. But they must not be so numerous nor so individually powerful that they can intervene on behalf of the victim if they are so inclined. They must be forced to watch the murder without seeming to be forced; they must watch it without protest, so that they will forever after support the party of the murderer, having become his accomplices. The forms must be observed, so that they can accept their complicity with something like good conscience.

  If both they and the murderer live to old age, they may actually become proud of their complicity. “It had to be done,” they'll say. “You can't know what it was like. Bad times need strong men.”

  And if the murderer comes to grief, his onetime accomplices will be sadly conscious of their own innocence. “We ourselves did nothing; we did what we had to do, and waited. But bad men come to bad ends….”

  Wyrtheorn, as a dwarf and a voluntary exile from the Wardlands, had a professional interest in such matters. At least that was how he put it in the rug shop of Genjandro, just off the Great Market in the Imperial city of Ontil. “At first it was just professional,” he confided to Genjandro himself, over a friendly mug of beer. “These men and women and their great thumping quarrels were affecting business
. So I made it my business to know about them, but I ended up by becoming interested. They are a bloodthirsty lot, these Vraidish barbarians.”

  Genjandro, a native Ontilian and no friend to the Second Empire, allowed himself a thin smile but no more. A smile might mean anything.

  “Now, let me see,” Wyrtheorn continued, understanding fully Genjandro's reticence. “The last time I was in the city must have been a hundred round years ago. Uthar the Fifth was Emperor then. A strong ruler, so they said. I thought he had banned these trials by combat.”

  Genjandro grunted. “That is so, though I had forgotten it. I was not born then, of course”—a dig at the dwarf for having thoughtlessly referred to his racial longevity—“but my father mentioned the matter to me once. Uthar the Fifth was a great man, but he did not live forever unlike—well, you know who I mean. His grandson had a long minority, and the Regency Council of the time restored the combats. The nobility will always prefer combat; they have the longer swords, as the expression is.”

  “I suppose Ambrosia sat on the council.”

  “At its head. But when the nobles clamored, she let them have their combats. Some say her powers were slipping, even then, but I don't see it. She's a noble herself, of a sort.”

  “Ye-es—she would have had a kind of inheritance in the Wardlands, but that she was born after old Merlin's exile.”

  “I meant because of her association with the Imperial family.”

  “Eh? Oh, yes—them.”

  Genjandro, heir to a culture nearly as old as that of the Wardlands, favored this remark with another thin smile. “Now if she is to live, it's the combat that will save her,” he added.

  “Will she live, then?”

  “No. The young King's Protector, Lord Urdhven, leaves nothing to chance. Sir Hlosian Bekh is the champion of the Crown.”

  “A good fighter?”

  “No. Not particularly. But he always wins.”

  “I don't understand,” the dwarf said patiently.