Blood of Ambrose Read online

  This occupied a good deal of time; it was dark before his spider crawled out of the empty river course at what was once a riverside quay. The sky looked cloudy, too—as if it might rain for the first time in at least two thousand years over the Old City. Morlock hoped not, for various reasons, but the most he could do about it was hurry, which he had planned to do anyway.

  He scanned the streets on all sides with the spider's external eye, but he never glanced at the sky. So he didn't see the dark cloud that had formed behind him, following him from the grave lands.

  He approached the adept's tower from the east, the last direction he would be expected from, or so he hoped. But in the event it seemed not to matter. There were not, as he expected, companies of corpse-golems and Companions patrolling near the adept's tower.

  Morlock didn't like it. True, the adept, even after centuries, could only have a limited number of undead servants. (They could not remain usable forever for very long.) Also true, he had many uses for these relatively few soldiers: he had to secure a large city and assault a well-defended castle.

  But if Morlock's theory was correct, the adept's principal need was to protect his central mind-body nexus at all costs. If the tower was as unprotected as it seemed, either Morlock's theory was wrong or the adept was somewhere else—possibly hidden in the city.

  “Didn't think of that, did you?” Morlock said to himself, in the jeering tone he used to no one else. “Well,” he continued, more reasonably (you have to live with yourself), “I can always hope the defenses are better than they seem.”

  The hedge of dagger thorns was high, but the legs of Morlock's spider were longer when fully extended. He simply walked the spider-craft over the hedge.

  There were no corpse-golems on the far side, either. Morlock saw the work-wheel Lathmar had described; it was abandoned. The bare patch in the ivy-thorn covering the tower could be seen, as well: the iron stairs were drawn up and the stone door closed.

  Morlock considered. This, as a matter of fact, looked rather promising, as if the adept had drawn up his bridge, so to speak, and trusted to his moat and wall to defend him. If so, the wall would have defenders: the tower stair inside would be lined with the undead waiting to kill him. Morlock hoped so, as he had no intention of going that way.

  He walked his spider over to the wall of the tower, away from the shut entrance.

  There was a screeching sound; Morlock turned to see that a number of dagger thorns had pierced the steel hide of his spider.

  “Ugh,” he commented briefly, and went to the weapons locker. He was already wearing a mail shirt under his tunic; from the locker he took a helmet and put it on. He also took up Tyrfing, in a shoulder sheath that he duly strapped to his crooked shoulders. Then, of course, the jars. He strung them separately across his shoulders, as he would need his hands free for climbing.

  He released the hatch and crawled out on top of the spider's body.

  He found his hands were trembling as he stood there. In fact, he found to his surprise that he was frightened. It was not the height nor the fight he faced that frightened him. He had grown up in the Whitethorn Mountains and free-climbed many a rock face more treacherous than this. And he had fought and killed so many times that the prospect of doing so again, merely to protect his own life, rather sickened him.

  But that was just it. This wasn't for his life. It would be better, in some ways, if he didn't live through this. But if he didn't succeed in destroying the adept, far more would be ruined than his own life. He thought of Wyrth facing the second death, of his sisters facing the mind-torments the adept would inflict, little Lathmar.…The boy would never break, that Morlock knew, but what horrors he might have to face before he died!

  We should have fled. We should have waited for the wise ones from the Wardlands. Together, Illion, Noreê, and I could have killed this thing. I wish I had a drink.

  He put his trembling hands over his face and stood there until he grew still. Then, the voices in his head grown quiet, he took the first jar in his hands and stepped toward the thorns.

  The jar was made of aethrium; inside it was phlogiston. In the hours before the last council, Morlock had dephlogistonated everything he could lay his hands on, while Wyrth frantically worked every piece of aethrium Morlock had in his workshop into suitable containers. In the throat of each jar was a piece of flint that scraped against a metal wheel when the cap of the jar was flipped open. The resultant spark ignited the upward-rushing phlogiston, resulting in a sheet, a rising cloud of flame.

  Morlock flipped open the first jar, holding it among the dagger thorns. A river of flame crept uphill through the dark ivy-thorn, spreading out in many branches across the face of the adept's tower.

  Morlock tested the tip of a burning thorn with his bare thumb. The point was gone. The point of a thorn is its most flammable part, and a thorn without a point is just a branch. And the flame, of course, could not harm him, by virtue of the blood of Ambrose the Old. Morlock nodded grimly and climbed into the rising river of flame.

  His greatest danger was that a burning branch would fail to support his weight, so he moved as quickly as he could up the side of the tower. When the fire began to give out (the thorns were green with the blood they had drunk) he uncapped another jar and the way of flame opened upward again.

  He was intent on climbing when he heard the whisper of wings on the air, a hiss audible even above the crackle of burning thorns. He kept climbing with his feet and left hand, but with his right he reached back and drew Tyrfing.

  As the hiss grew nearer he let his feet swing free and, hanging from his left hand, spun around so that his back was to the wall.

  Silhouetted against the night sky, lit by the major moons, a winged but vaguely manlike figure was approaching, a great hammer in its hand. It must be one of the door gargoyles whom the King had seen outside the adept's chamber, Morlock guessed.

  Once, when he was a young man, only just made vocate in the Graith of Guardians, his tutor in the arts of swordsmanship had made him dangle from a rope. Then Naevros had swung at him on another rope and battered him with a wooden sword as he passed. After several days of this, Morlock had gotten a wooden sword of his own to defend himself with.

  I needed these skills once, fighting pirates in the Sea of Worlds, Naevros had told him, when he objected to the uselessness of the exercise. You'll learn them because I've sworn you can learn whatever I know, despite your crooked shoulders and your damned stubbornness.

  The memory of Naevros's cool, tense, angry voice calmed him, as it had in many another fight, including the duel in which he killed Naevros himself. He braced his feet against the tower and lashed out with his sword, stretching out as far as his protesting left arm would permit. Tyrfing's edge crossed the gargoyle's hammer-bearing arm at the wrist and it screamed. Tumbling in the air, it recovered and flew away eastward. Morlock caught a glimpse of the thing's back in the moons' light as it flew off.

  In a single motion, he sheathed Tyrfing and swung around to face the tower again. The thorns were burning in his hand; he had to move or fall. The gargoyle would be back in a few moments, but he had to make progress while he could. So he did, shouldering burning branches aside as he struggled upward.

  The gargoyle. What was it, anyway? Morlock could swear he had seen scars like seams crisscrossing the thing's back. Its body was made of many pieces, but what sort of soul inhabited it? Perhaps the thing was a harthrang, a demon possessing a dead body—one specially made for it by the adept. But harthrangs were not so closely bound to the bodies they inhabited that they could feel pain.

  So the adept himself must be controlling the gargoyle body. But that hardly made sense either. The adept's consciousness had expanded to occupy many bodies. Even if he could feel anything like pain any longer it would only be one sensation in a forest of others—nothing to make him scream.

  Morlock thought of ascending to the visionary state: if he was to defeat the gargoyle he needed to know what it was. B
ut he would need all his physical ability to ward off the gargoyle's next attack; he could not risk ascending to rapture now.

  It was coming; he could hear it. He glanced over his shoulders and saw it stall in the air. Why would it do that, unless…

  He let his left hand open and swung to the right; unburnt thorns scraped against his mail shirt, and one pierced it and him. But the hammer struck the wall where he had been. Stone shattered, and mortar-dust clung to a patch of blood on the hammer's grip. The gargoyle's blood. It occurred to Morlock there had been blood on Tyrfing when he had sheathed it.

  The hammer fell and was caught in the thorns below. It left a hole in the wall, through which dead gray arms reached for Morlock. He drew Tyrfing with his left hand, snarling as it caught for a moment in its sheath (the blood had made it sticky). Then he lopped off the arms reaching for him through the gap in the tower wall.

  The gargoyle was returning below for its hammer.

  Morlock took a moment for cold calculation. The gargoyle had a method of attack that could hardly fail, which he could not counter. But it bled; it could be wounded; it could feel pain. There was only one thing to do.

  He did it, opening his right hand and falling, like the hammer, down the wall. He landed on the gargoyle's gray winged back.

  “No!” it screamed. “He'll eat me if you—”

  Morlock severed the screaming head from its neck, and then abandoned the gargoyle body as it suddenly relaxed in death. He was pierced by several unburnt thorns in the patch he leapt into, but not seriously. His blood caused them to flicker with sluggish flames that soon guttered out. He clung to the dark branches, listening to the dead body hit the earth below them, recovering his breath. “All hands, abandon gargoyle,” he muttered when he could, then breathed some more.

  Finally he took a jar of phlogiston and opened it, burning a new pathway upward. He ascended the bright ladder of burning branches, remembering that there was another, at least one other gargoyle; wondering about the enemy who awaited him above; hoping that those he loved back in Ambrose were still safe.

  They weren't. The second siege of Ambrose had been shorter than the first, and more disastrous. Before Morlock reached the tower, the sack of Ambrose had begun.

  The Royal Legion had fought bravely against their eerie attackers. Wyrth had set up a smaller version of the Siegebreaker on the inner Thorngate, and it seemed as if things were going well.

  Then half of the defenders began attacking the others. There were eaten soldiers among the royal ranks. No one could be sure that the soldier beside him would not turn. Some fought and died; others fled; the battle was lost. Wyrth barely had time to tumble the Siegebreaker into the river before he fled with the others.

  Ambrosia led the vocates from the Wardlands, Wyrth, the Emperor, and his two bodyguards through the screaming chaos of the sack to the High Hall of the North.

  “It's as good a place for a last stand as any,” she explained grimly. They had ascended the narrow stairway and stood around it; the doorway at the other end of the hall was shut, bolted, and barricaded. “I can keep us safe from the whispering of the Shadow in this relatively small space—”

  “But Grandmother,” Lathmar broke in urgently. (He supposed he could call her Grandmother again, now that he was Emperor.) “Won't you have to ascend into the visionary state to guard us? Shouldn't you stand away from the stairwell so that we can guard your body?”

  She reached under her armor and pulled out a pendant. It was luminous with power. Lathmar gaped at it for a moment, then lifted his eyes to meet Ambrosia's amused gaze.

  “I am in the visionary state, Your Imperial Majesty,” she replied calmly. “I have been since the enemy stormed Ambrose.”

  “But—” But she was walking and talking normally. But the pendant, clearly her focus of power, parallel to Morlock's Tyrfing, attested that she was acting powerfully in the talic realm. “But Morlock can't do that!” he blurted foolishly.

  “Morlock, despite your touching faith in his abilities, cannot do everything,” Ambrosia replied.

  “Shut your mouth, Your Imperial Majesty,” Wyrth muttered. “What Morlock is to makers, Ambrosia is to seers.”

  “Unquestionably I am,” Ambrosia conceded. “Unfortunately, I'm getting a little old for this sort of thing. Still, I can shield you from the Shadow's whispering, here. If he detects me and sends his minions, and he will, they'll have to come at us one by one up the stairs. Also, there's an escape chute in the hall beyond. Erl and Karn: if the enemy's forces break in, I expect you to put the Emperor down that chute and follow him. Get him safely away.”

  “No!” said Lathmar, loudly if not firmly. “I'm staying here!”

  “Erl, Karn: you heard me.”

  Karn looked gloomy, but Erl said firmly, if not loudly, “Lady Ambrosia, with respect, we serve the Emperor.”

  “That's what I'm counting on, Erl. If the Emperor gets away, the empire is still alive. If he doesn't, then it's just food waiting around for the Protector's Shadow to eat it.”

  Erl didn't answer this one way or the other, and Lathmar saw he was in doubt. Now wasn't the time to press the man, but Lathmar was damned if he was going to go along with Ambrosia's plan. His days of being carried around like a sack of beans were over.

  “Maybe we should all go down the chute,” Jordel said calmly, “without waiting.”

  “You're at liberty to do so, vocate,” Ambrosia said evenly, “if you can find it. But there's some chance that Morlock may succeed in what he is about. If so, we should be together, not running about like chickens with their heads chopped off.”

  “Because that's what the adept's former bodies may be doing?” Aloê guessed.

  Ambrosia shrugged. “It's not like anyone knows what's going to happen.”

  It didn't take long for the enemy's forces to find them. Lathmar anxiously wondered if that meant one of them was being eaten, or had been eaten, by the enemy. Looking around the room, he thought he saw the same doubt on other faces and decided not to voice it.

  They heard the enemy's forces breaking down the door in the chamber below. They all drew their weapons and stood around the stairwell.

  “Truce!” called an oddly familiar voice, coming up the stairwell. “I don't want to kill you, you know.”

  Ambrosia glanced at Lathmar and rolled her left hand repeatedly in a circle. She was indicating, he guessed, there was no reason not to spend time talking. He nodded his agreement.

  “You can come up,” she said. “But only one of you.”

  “There is only one of me down here.”

  “I mean one body, Inglonor,” Ambrosia said flatly.

  “It's been a long time since I've heard that name,” said the familiar voice, growing nearer. “I didn't even know that you ever knew it—isn't that amusing?” The speaker appeared at the head of the stairwell.

  “Genjandro,” whispered Ambrosia, sagging slightly. “I…I hoped you had escaped, my friend. That was what the crow told us: that you were dead.”

  “A little bird told you?” remarked Genjandro's mouth. “You can't even trust birds these days, I guess. No, I found it possible to eat Genjandro in the end, just as I shall eat each one of you. Isn't that an amusing thought?”

  Lathmar could see from Ambrosia's face that she didn't find it amusing—but that she feared it might be true.

  Morlock clambered as rapidly as possible over the railing onto the balcony of the adept's tower chamber. If he had been the adept, he would have been waiting there with a blunt object to solve his Morlock problem once and for all. But there was no one present that he could see.

  Near the window entrance was a sorcerer's worktable, and standing upright atop it was a strip of some translucent, irregularly glowing substance. As Morlock glanced at it he saw faces rising from the base of the strip, twisting and changing color as they passed up its length, then contracting and darkening at the top and sinking to the bottom again. Perhaps it was meant to be a lamp—there was no othe
r light source than the window in the dim room—but it was very dim and irregular. On the other hand, it radiated power; most likely it was some sort of experiment or spell left here by the adept to run its course.

  His fear that the adept was not present at all recurred to him. But, Morlock reminded himself, the adept didn't have to be here for Morlock to kill him. He saw the stairway leading to the lower chamber and leapt down it.

  The lower chamber was darker; there was no window to light it. The air was thick down there, too; the whole place was redolent of rotting flesh. But the vats the King had described were there, glowing faintly by their own light.

  Morlock heard a snuffling sound in the far end of the chamber. He drew Tyrfing and stepped toward it. He had not gone far when he saw its source. It was like an unfinished sketch for a body—no head, no hands or feet. From the way it flopped when it moved it seemed to have no bones. It snuffled and crept in a mindless circle around a vat containing human innards that breathed and pulsed and twitched with life.

  Staring at it (the striations on its dark red surface were oddly like muscle tissue), Morlock thought suddenly of Urdhven. Was this formless form some fraction of his body, not superficial enough to be included in his walking self, not vital enough to be placed in the vat? And here it was, whuffling about in the hopeless hunger of being restored to its organs?

  Morlock summoned the rapture of vision. It partly confirmed his guess: there were dim tal-lines connecting the misshapen shape with the organs within the vat. Other tal-lines stretched across the floor and up the stairs, out of sight. Going to carry life and sustenance from the vitals to Urdhven's walking shell?

  He turned away. There were only two vats with organs in them; he guessed the other contained the organs of the adept's central body nexus.