Blood of Ambrose Read online

  Morlock gripped Tyrfing with both hands and met the blazing sword of his enemy in a glancing parry. The shock nearly sent him to his knees, but he managed to keep his feet. The next stroke did not come swiftly—his opponent had a deadlier weapon, but he was no swordsman—and he was set for it. He even managed a glancing riposte, and the adept shuffled back.

  Then the room was filled with flying black forms. The adept was laughing, swinging his bright sword, sending heaps of black feathers burning to the floor.

  Crows—more than a murder, a rampage, a slaughter of crows. They must have followed him from the grave lands. God Creator, they were trying to help him.

  “Get out!” he screamed. “This isn't in the treaty! You can't help me! Save yourselves!” He charged the adept, lashing out at him with Tyrfing in great double-handed blows, but the adept laughed as he saw the tears running down Morlock's face and kept shuffling away, striking clouds of black birds from the air, bright with fire, dark with departing tal.

  In the end, they did flee, but countless crows (bright with fire to his weeping eyes, dark and lifeless to his inner vision) lay dead about the adept's chamber. The adept laughed at Morlock as he wept, his eyes stinging from the stench of burning feathers.

  “You should never get too attached to your pets,” the adept remarked.

  Morlock dashed past the blazing sword, knocking it aside with a one-handed stroke of Tyrfing, and grabbed the adept's dangling nose, tearing it and a large portion of the attached flesh from the gray rubbery cheek. “For the crows!” he shouted in the adept's astonished partial face and, plunging back out of range, tossed the trophy off the balcony.

  As he stood there on the balcony, staring in at the laughing noseless adept, like a spider at the center of a web of whispering talic threads, he wondered that it was so dark, so confined in the adept's chamber. How had he not seen the crows coming? Their tal should have stood out like a signal fire against the dead city. The stones of the tower should have been transparent to it. They were only dead matter…

  But they weren't, Morlock realized. They couldn't be. Otherwise the adept would send his webwork of talic control through them. Instead, those lines of immaterial force must pass through the great window opening on the balcony.

  Everything is opaque to itself, Morlock knew. Matter blocks matter; even light blocks light, under certain conditions. Only tal could block tal. Morlock looked on the talic imprint of the adept, like a tower pierced by myriads of whispering thorns, and he knew at last. Somehow, through the adept's magic, the tower itself was an extension of himself. It was through the substance of the tower that life passed from his disembodied organs to the shell of his body. He had not seen the source of the adept's life because it was all around him.

  He dashed forward again, feinting left, then right, then high, finally striking low, slashing away part of the sorcerer's robe.

  The adept's legs were exposed. Each had five calflike stalks descending from the knee. Each ended not in a foot, but in a broad, gray-lipped mouth pressed hungrily against the gray stone breast of the chamber floor.

  “So that's how you do it,” he remarked calmly, and lunged, balestra, so that Tyrfing slashed the front of the sorcerer's robe and the gray flesh beneath it.

  The adept snickered, his breath whistling oddly through the bones of his torn cheek and nose. “That's how.”

  Morlock thought he could see scars of surgery on the exposed bones of the other's face. So what he had told Lathmar was untrue: this body had not naturally assumed this form, in response to the adept's talic imprint; it had been crafted as deliberately and as cunningly as the winged gargoyles themselves. But less vulnerably; Morlock doubted his enemy could feel pain in any usual sense of the word.

  “Where's the speech?” the adept sneered. “‘Now, alas, too late, I realize…’”

  Morlock dropped from the visionary state entirely. He wove a net of blades around his enemy, dancing aside from the deadly soul-blade, now the color of white-hot gold.

  “You're hoping to wear me down,” the adept said. “But you can't do that. You're working ten times as hard as I am, and I'm drawing new strength through the stones every moment.”

  Morlock feinted left and again thrust, slashing deep into the adept's belly. He did the same a moment later. A great flap of the robe and the dry skin underneath now hung open.

  “Ow, that stung,” the adept said drily. “Maybe you're hoping to outlast the soul-sword? You won't. The lightning will burn bright enough to kill until dawn. By then you'll be dead.”

  An orange-black spider, its body the size of a human fist, crawled out of the hole in the adept's belly, clung to the shifting surface of the robe, and stared at Morlock with its eight eyes. A green, faintly luminescent cord went from its body back into the hole in the adept. A moment later, it was joined by another spider.

  “Pets?” Morlock asked.

  The adept laughed. “I said ‘Don't get attached to them.' I never said not to let them attach themselves to you.”

  Morlock's next two attacks slashed the green cords, killing the spiders. He guessed, from shadows he could see within the gap, that there were more where these came from. But he could afford to wait no longer: what the adept had said was true; he was wearing out.

  He closed with the adept and brought the lightning sword into a bind. Then he plunged his left hand into the open belly of the adept.

  The adept screamed and stabbed him in the face and neck with the dagger. He felt several lancing pains in his left hand: spider bites, laced with burning poison. He let none of this distract him. He closed his hand on the spine of the adept and, gripping it, lifted him from the floor.

  The ten mouth-feet resisted, each leaving the floor with a separate sucking plop. The adept stabbed him with the dagger again, yet again, but the strokes were weaker. Holding the body aloft, Morlock walked to the balcony of the chamber and held the adept's writhing body as far as he could from any surface of the tower.

  The dagger (dark with Morlock's blood) and the soul-bright sword both fell from the adept's nerveless fingers. Morlock thought he could hear screaming, the screaming of many voices (in triumph, in hate, in fear, in shame, in death), but the adept's gray mouth was slack and motionless. Perhaps the sound came from the tower. Maybe he was hearing some echo from the talic realm, as the souls of those the adept had consumed over the centuries tore loose from the dying hulk that had eaten them. Perhaps he was dreaming the sounds, for he was very close to unconsciousness as he stood there and stood there and stood there until the sounds receded like a tide of darkness and left him there, alone in the dark.

  “You're telling me you're dead,” he whispered to the dead face when the whispers died. “But why should I believe you? How would I know when a thing like you is dead?”

  But, in the end, he could stand there no longer. He clenched his fist till the spine within his grip shattered. He cast the lifeless body as far from the tower as he could. Falling back, he lay still and stared at the dry stormy sky.

  Lathmar's spirit leapt up like a silver candle; he felt Aloê's bronze glory singing beside him.

  He was far past the state where words are possible, but he shared his sense of personal triumph with the spirit who had fought so bravely and so hopelessly beside him.

  She responded with a gesture that unmistakably recalled a hawk in flight over a branch of flowering thorns.

  Lathmar looked down a dark corridor that was shutting like a mouth and saw through it Morlock killing the adept.

  The shock of the myriadic death drove Lathmar back from his vision. His soul flew home to his body, hungry for the knowledge that he was still alive.

  And he was. He opened his eyes to find Hope kneeling over him.

  “Something happened,” she was saying urgently. “What was it?”

  “The Protector's Shadow is dead,” the Emperor said. “Morlock killed him in the Old City.”

  “But these things, these corpse-golems, are still alive,”
said Jordel, who was standing nearby. “A half dozen of them just tried to charge up the stairway.”

  “No, they're not,” the Emperor said sleepily. “Wyrth. Tell him.”

  The dwarf looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. “I get it. If they're like golems, they're not alive. They're just carrying out the instructions on their life-scrolls.”

  Lathmar sat up. He was desperately tired. But the Emperor had work to do. “Right,” he said wearily. “There will be thousands of these things—here and in the Two Cities. They'll be dangerous to us, but they can't really think. We'll first need to regroup the Royal Legion. No.” He looked around the room. “Erl, congratulations. You're the new commander of the Imperial Legion.”

  “Um.”

  “The correct response is, ‘Thank you for this high honor, Your Imperial Majesty; I will endeavor to justify your trust in me.’”

  “He was speechless with delight, Your Imperial Highnitude,” Jordel suggested.

  “Um. What does Your Majesty direct me to do?” Erl said, ignoring the opportunity to banter. (Something told Lathmar he always would.)

  “Take Karn—where's Karn?”

  “Dead, Your Majesty. He died bravely.”

  So? his Majesty nearly replied. Dead is dead. But it did matter. When he had looked around for Karn and missed him, he had been afraid the man had run away. Karn had chosen his job, or allowed it to choose him, and died at it. Lathmar hoped he himself would have an epitaph that good.

  “Take Wyrth, then,” the Emperor said aloud. “The stairway is still blocked by corpse-golems? Go down the escape chute. Collect a body—I mean, collect a group of soldiers and put them under discipline. Draft anyone you come across, now that I think of it: this is everyone's fight. Come back here, clearing the corridors as you go and suiting your tactics to the occasion. That's your short-term goal. When that's done, we'll clear the castle of these things. By then we should have enough troops to enter the city. That's the long-term goal: to cleanse the living city.”

  Wyrth solemnly saluted the Emperor, and Lathmar suddenly realized that Wyrth was not his subject anymore. His oath had been to the King of the Two Cities; he was not a citizen of the Ontilian Empire. But if he would go along with the gag as long as was necessary, Lathmar reflected, it wouldn't matter.

  “As long as everyone else does likewise,” he muttered to himself.

  “A true Ambrose,” Hope observed to Aloê, who was smiling sadly. “Always muttering!”

  The dry storm receded, and the dark sky grew silent. In a moment, Morlock thought, he would get up. He would go back to the city. He would retake Aloê to be his wife and replace Ambrosia as the power behind the imperial throne. He would again be the defender of a realm that needed him; his life would have a meaning and a purpose once more. He had succeeded, and the rest would be easy. He could now have back everything he'd thought he'd lost forever. All he had to do was betray the trust of someone who loved him.

  In the dead tower of the dead Protector's dead Shadow, Morlock lay among the silent black bodies of the crows—and among silent thoughts that were blacker than crows.

  erlin Ambrosius walked into a cave deep in the Blackthorn Mountains. His tall body was bowed with weariness, not age. He'd had a long trip. He'd had a disappointment or two. He would be right as rain with a little rest. (He loathed rain.)

  He sat down next to part of an elderly woman who was lying inside what appeared to be a block of ice. But when you put your hand upon it, as Merlin did, you found it warm as human blood. Nonetheless, it was ice, of a rather special type; it was slowly melting. There were a few drops on the ground underneath its shelf in the wall of the cave; if Merlin stayed for several days, as he planned, he guessed he might see another drop added to the tiny pool.

  Merlin, the woman spoke directly into his mind, where have you been?

  “Oh,” said Merlin airily, “going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.”

  Very funny, the woman responded. I suppose that means you have been trying to destroy our children again.

  “Nimue, my dear, I have merely engaged in a little experiment. I set a rock spinning down a slope, a couple of centuries ago, and it has turned into a great landslide, engulfing kingdoms.”

  That means you failed, I suppose.

  “It was just a ranging shot,” Merlin replied. “I'll do better next time. At least I know where they all are, now.”

  Why do you hate them so?

  Merlin took a while answering. But he told her the truth, since she knew it anyhow. “You should not have loved them better than me. When you betrayed me and I lost everything, I forgave you. I will always forgive you, I suppose. I can even forgive you for loving them. But I don't have to forgive them. I earned your love and they stole it. That's all.”

  Merlin, the old woman said, we short-lived people are not like you, who live half as long as forever. We give our children life, and love, and then we die. It's the way of things. You should have let me die long ago.

  “Not until this is done.”

  It will never be done. Don't you see that if you destroy them I'll hate you, rather than love you? Even now you disgust me with your selfish greed, as if love were a treat you could hide from the other children and hoard, wolfing it down in secret until it makes you sick.

  Merlin didn't answer this. For one so young (she had been hardly more than a hundred when Merlin had put her in the block of ice and took other even more extreme measures to keep her alive) she was very wise, but she didn't know about the deadly wasting power of time, or the things the mind can do to itself. Her body was frozen, but her mind was awake and unsleeping, one long single day through the centuries.

  If need be, he would walk away and not come back until her mind had torn itself to shreds and re-formed anew. She would have forgotten the children; she would have forgotten everything. Then he would return to her. And then she would love him, because she loved life and he would be the only living thing in her world.

  Then, and only then, he would thaw the ice and allow her to briefly live and forever die.

  On a day, the Emperor Lathmar VII rode through his capital city and saw that things were well, but not well enough. He was glad to hear that the streets were completely free of the songs that claimed the young Emperor had personally defeated the villainous Protector (who was naturally, if somewhat unfairly, blamed for all the undead horror his Shadow had wrought) in single combat on the ramparts of Ambrose. In obedience with Lathmar's decree, no one sang these songs in public anymore. (Ten times as many sang them in secret, and more around the empire would do so every year, but he would never know that.)

  The cleansing of the city was almost complete. Whole quarters, overrun by the corpse-golems, had been burned to the ground and would have to be rebuilt. Now they lay under a heavy layer of winter snow, strangely empty and unmarked by all the horror that had passed there—like pages waiting to be written on. It would be Lathmar's job to make something of them, at least write the first few words on those blank sheets, and he was hastily boning up on the principles of architecture and city planning. Fortunately he had (in Morlock and Ambrosia) two of the greatest authorities in the world as his tutors. Unfortunately, he didn't think he would have them much longer.

  The weather was cold; times, in many ways, were hard. But the city, freed from the shadows of tyranny and living death, still carried something of a festival air. And the citizens loved it when their ruler rode or walked among them; any conversation he had with anyone was likely to be interrupted with loyal shouts of salute…but just as likely to be broken by cries of, “Get rid of them crooky-backs, Majesty!” The crowd would fall silent whenever he turned toward them after someone cried this; no one would say it to his face.

  But it was obvious that most of them felt this way. The Protector was hated above all, but it was widely believed that things had gone worse because he had used the weapons of the Ambrosii against them. The world would be better off without the Ambros
ii and their damn magic, people were muttering.

  Lathmar rode moodily back to the City Gate of Ambrose. Erl met him there, and they discussed the appointment of the new viceroy of Kaen.…That is, Lathmar discussed it, and when he had given certain orders, Erl said, “Yes, Your Majesty,” and carried them out.

  Lathmar, feeling lonely, went up to Morlock's workshop. It was empty: most of the stuff had been packed up. Wyrth had been making noises about leaving almost since they had brought Morlock back on a shingle and it became clear he was not going to die.

  There had been moments, while Morlock was convalescing, that Lathmar had almost hoped he would die. He was afraid that Morlock would carry out Ambrosia's plan to become the new power behind the throne. And Lathmar wasn't going to allow that. There would be no more powers behind the throne, no more damn Protectors. It was Ambrosia who had cast him in this farce, and he was going to play his part to the hilt; if she didn't like it, she…

  Lathmar choked these thoughts off. Morlock, in sentences of one syllable or less, had made it more or less clear to all interested parties that the job of ruling a world-empire was more or less beneath him. He had spoken more frankly in private to Lathmar. “I am a master of the Two Arts—Seeing and Making,” he had rasped. “It's enough. It's all that I am.” Then, as if that settled the matter, he turned back to his latest feat of making, a magical book in the palindromic script of ancient Ontil.

  Lathmar had called him a liar, kissed his terribly scarred face, and run from the room.

  Now he heard from a hallway attendant (Thoke, in fact) that Morlock had gone down to the stables.

  He found all of them there: the two vocates, Jordel and Aloê; Masters Wyrth and Morlock; and Ambrosia. They were crowded around a horse—Velox, it looked like, and Morlock was laughing his raspy crowlike laugh.

  “What's the joke?” he asked as he and his bodyguards joined the group. Anything that made Morlock laugh had to be pretty funny.

  Morlock, still smiling, handed him a scrap of paper. “This was on Velox's saddle when he wandered back this morning.”