Blood of Ambrose Read online

“I hate this,” the dwarf complained. “When he speaks in a vision he hardly sounds like himself. I could almost believe another spirit has possession of him.”

  “Don't be superstitious, Wyrth. Morlock, I can't wait. Speak to me what you see.”

  Voice rasping, eyes closed, Morlock said, “The death in the Protector's Shadow sleeps and, sleeping, dreams.

  “The death the Protector fears wears our faces like masks.

  “The death to ease the Protector's pain wears our name, like gravestones.

  “The wing rides over the plain.”

  “Shake him out of it,” the dwarf said impatiently. “What does that mean, ‘the wing rides over the plain'?”

  “The wing enters the hills—”

  “Canyon keep the wing. Wake up, Morlock!”

  “He is waking,” Ambrosia said. “Be quiet, Wyrth, you can't hurry him. ‘The flight must take its course,' as seers say.”

  “No,” said Morlock, in a voice almost his own. “Wrong.”

  “What's wrong?” Ambrosia asked.

  “Wing. Not flight. Shoes.”

  “A wing with feet?” Wyrth demanded.

  Morlock looked puzzled, like a sleeper with a perplexing dream. “No feet. Shoes.”

  “Oh, that's plain. A wing with shoes, but no feet.”

  “Not plain,” Morlock insisted. “Hills.”

  Ambrosia looked speculatively at her brother, then said to Wyrth, “I'll be back in a moment.” She climbed a nearby hill and looked westward. After a moment she turned and came down again. She called to the horse and then said to Wyrtheorn, “Pick up my brother and carry him. We must be going.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Wyrtheorn, what sort of wing rides rather than flies and has shoes but not feet?”

  The dwarf glared at her. It was Morlock who answered, ascending (or descending) finally to full wakefulness.

  “A cavalry wing,” said the Crooked Man, “and almost upon us.” He sat up. “Wyrtheorn, where are my clothes?”

  Thousands of heartbeats later Wyrtheorn still had not gotten over it. “Wyrtheorn,” he intoned to himself, “where are my slippers, where are my buttered biscuits, where my evening tea?”

  Morlock, who was wearing the dirty, rusty, torn, bloody black rags that Wyrth had been prepared to discard, did not respond.

  “Wyrtheorn,” Wyrtheorn intoned, “bring me my rags.”

  “Shut up, Wyrth,” Ambrosia said irritably. “They'll track us down by your whining alone.”

  “They won't track us at all,” Wyrth rejoined. “They'll quarter the area and search. They're cavalry, not hunters. They'll find us, all right, but in their own good time.”

  “Can't you make your prentice be quiet?” Ambrosia asked her brother.

  Morlock smiled. “No.”

  “Hmph,” Wyrth said, to keep the conversation going. “Listen to this: I say we let the horse go.”

  The Ambrosii said nothing. The expression of pain sternly repressed was stamped on both their faces, bringing out the most fugitive likenesses. If it were possible Wyrth would have made them both be still and take some healing. Since it was not, he was determined to distract them.

  “No, really,” he said, as if they had answered him. “It—”

  “We need the horse, Wyrtheorn,” Morlock cut him off.

  They proceeded through a silence punctuated by Wyrth's wisecracks. The sun was gone behind the dusty gray hills to the east, but its light was still in the sky and its heat was still in the dead valleys.

  “Here,” said Morlock.

  Wyrtheorn looked around.

  “There.” Morlock scuffed a mark in the crumbling gray earth.

  “Get away; I'll do it,” the dwarf said irritably.

  Morlock did not argue, but sat on a slope a few feet away. “Dig a square perhaps as long as my arm.”

  “Which arm?” the dwarf retorted, digging rapidly in the dry earth with his hard blunt fingers. It was not long before he laid bare a crystalline blade, blazing with white light. There were darker thornlike shapes within the light. Beneath the sword was a large pack made of dark canvas. Between pack and sword two small boxes made of translucent shining metal.

  “What is that?” the dwarf said, pointing at the boxes.

  “Aethrium,” Morlock replied.

  “And inside them?”

  “Phlogiston.”

  “From…”

  “I dephlogistonated the armor I fashioned, and most of the metal in the smith's shop.”

  The dwarf laughed in pure delight. “That was generous of you!”

  “It was a partial payment for the trouble we put him to. A dephlogistonated implement is harder, denser, more durable.”

  “And you, of course, brought this dangerous matter away with you?”

  “I saw a use for it.”

  “You will kill me with wonder, someday, Master Morlock.”

  “What's phlogiston?” Ambrosia asked.

  Her brother replied didactically, “Phlogiston is the element in matter which is responsible for combustion. Burning, in fact, is simply the release of phlogiston resident in a given object.”

  “Does metal burn?”

  “Everything burns,” said Morlock, “unless it has been dephlogistonated. Metal burns in a peculiar manner, though. When a log burns and you weigh the residue, it weighs less than the original log. If you burn a piece of metal, the residue weighs more than the original piece.”

  “Then metallic phlogiston,” remarked Ambrosia composedly, “weighs less than nothing.”

  “Considerably less. This has certain obvious uses…”

  he King of the Two Cities was coughing quietly in the darkness underneath the enclosure seats.

  “Be quiet, please, Your Majesty,” the Legionary captain, Lorn, whispered.

  “It's the dust,” the King explained, whispering back. “I'm sorry.” He added impulsively, “I'm sorry for everything.”

  “You? Sorry?” the Legionary said incredulously. “No, Your Majesty. My fate was sealed when I set your Grandmother, as you call her, free. And yours was sealed when you declared her free. But free she was, and the Strange Gods can seize anyone who says otherwise, Protector's Man or no.”

  “I thought you were a Protector's Man, when you came to get me,” the King confessed.

  “I wasn't but three steps ahead of them, and that's the truth. Traitorous bastards. We're not all like them in the City Legion, Your Majesty—you mustn't believe that. If we get you back into Ontil, you'll be safe enough.”

  “But how will we get there?”

  “We'll wait until it gets a little darker; then we'll make our way out of the enclosure. My squad will be waiting out there, as if on perimeter guard. Then we'll go to a city gate manned by loyal soldiers. From there on, we'll just guess and hope.”

  The King nodded, and they waited in silence for nightfall.

  Steng was waiting on the stone steps of the anchor building when the Lord Protector and his chief henchman, Vost, stepped out.

  “And where have you been?” Lord Urdhven demanded. He was furiously intolerant of any hint of disloyalty—which, Steng often thought, was rather ironic, given his own career.

  “Hunting a king, Lord Urdhven,” the poisoner replied.

  The Protector's green-gold gaze, prepared to shift away scornfully from a properly obsequious reply, snapped back and focused on Steng. “You've found him?”

  “I have found…an indication. A squad of soldiers outside the enclosure.”

  “My soldiers?”

  “The City Legion, my Lord Protector. They pretended to be on patrol, but I knew better than that.”

  “You alerted my men? They are on the lookout? Where are—?”

  “I have them here, my Lord Protector.”

  “A squad of City Legionaries?” shouted Urdhven, reaching for his sword.

  “I took them prisoner,” Steng said modestly, and gestured at some bound forms lying at the foot of the stairs.


  “Excellent, Steng,” cried the Protector, and clapped his poisoner on the shoulder. He leapt down the steps and knelt at the side of one of the bound figures.

  Vost followed, after mouthing some congratulatory noises, while his eyes burned with hatred in the darkness. His love for Urdhven was a jealous love, and he hated Steng because of the poisoner's influence over the Protector. Steng reflected on how truly dangerous Vost was. He forced himself to remember this, occasionally, because Vost was such a flat-faced capering dung-beetle of a man that it was easy to forget.

  “Steng!” Urdhven shouted. “This man is dead!”

  “Yes, my Lord Protector,” Steng said. “I killed them all.”

  “Didn't you realize I would want to question them?”

  Steng smiled. He had not moved from his place on the topmost stair. “That was precisely why I killed them, Lord Urdhven.”

  He walked down the stairs, watching through the dusk as the suspicion, darker than the shadows, settled down on the Protector's face. Is Steng, too, about to betray me? That was what Urdhven was thinking. Whereas Vost was looking at him almost affectionately. Poor Vost—who would surely hate him dearly in a very short while.

  “The silence of dead men,” Steng remarked as he descended the stairs, “is proverbial—but overrated. Consider: the dead man has all the knowledge the living man had, but he has no personality. Because he has no personality, he has no loyalty, no greed, no self-interest, no ideals. He has no reason not to talk, if he were only able to. If asked, he will simply answer—if he is able to.”

  Now he was standing at the bottom of the stairs beside Urdhven and Vost. Urdhven trusted him again and Vost hated him again: that was the way of things.

  “Do what you have to do,” Urdhven commanded.

  Steng knelt down by the nearest body and drew apart its slit tunic. He heard Vost, seeing the Flagrator planted in the riven chest, gasp behind him. Steng smiled. A trickle of blood, thick and dark as molasses in the dim light, was meandering down the white skin stretched over the corpse's ribs. Steng wiped it away with a hiss of fastidious distaste. The device was in order; in fact, the blood of the recently dispatched corpse had warmed it almost to operation point.

  “What is it, Steng?” the Protector asked calmly. Steng suspected it was a formal question—not an expression of curiosity so much as a statement that the Lord Protector had no strong feelings about mutilated corpses. Therefore Steng chose not to respond directly.

  “We may look upon any body,” he said, “as a mechanism, like the hinges of a door, or the Water Wheel. The mechanism will work properly if it is in good repair and has a proper stimulus, a source of energy. These mechanisms”—he waved his hand at the assembled corpses—“are in good repair; their deaths were effected without harming the bodies. What they lack to function is the proper stimulus, the source of energy we call life.”

  His pale ropy fingers moved as he spoke, drawing the necessary implements from the pockets sewn into his wide flowing sleeves: a firebox, a strip of yellow metal submerged in a jar of oil, a candle, and a fistful of pale narrow wedges of maijarra wood.

  “With the Flagrator”—and he gestured at the bristling instrument of metal and glass driven into the dead man's chest—"we will provide an artificial stimulus, a pseudo-life, if you will. The mechanism will then function to the best of its ability and—because it has none of the volitive propensities associated with genuine life—it will do more or less as we tell it.”

  “A human golem,” Urdhven remarked.

  Steng paused before replying. “It is not as useful as a golem,” he said. “The capacities of the corpse are limited to some subset of the abilities of the man. The connections of the Flagrator are tenuous and would be disturbed by physical movement. Also, it was necessary to destroy the left lung and most of its associated musculature to implant the Flagrator.”

  “Interesting,” the Protector remarked distantly, and Steng knew his evasive tactics had been successful. “He will speak?”

  “It will speak,” Steng replied.

  “Then he has intelligence. Why, then, not will?”

  Steng reflected that the Protector, in spite of his appetites and angers, was not a wholly stupid man. “Intelligence,” he said aloud, “like beauty and strength, is largely a physical attribute. Because it is resident in the structure of the brain, this is not obvious; it is nonetheless true. Will, however, is an expression of personality, of identity.”

  “Of spirit?”

  “If you prefer. You must not expect to find it as intelligent as it was when it was alive, however. The brain, as has often been observed, is something like a parasite feeding off the blood of the body. This brain has had no fresh blood to eat for some time and has consequently deteriorated. It will continue to do so, by the way—the Flagrator warms and circulates the blood of the body, as part of its function. But it does not generate fresh pure blood as a living heart does.”

  “You've cut out the heart?” asked Vost, who was clearly attracted and repelled by the notion.

  “Yes,” said Steng indifferently. “It is around here somewhere. Excuse me for a moment; I must perform some delicate manipulations.”

  Even as he spoke he was carefully turning valves on the Flagrator with his long ropy fingers. The valves hummed slightly, in tones that varied with their setting, and he set them so that they sang a long monotonous harmony. Then he took a long piece of maijarra wood and wedged it into the corpse's mouth, so that it looked as if the corpse were thoughtfully gnawing at it. Finally he opened the jar of oil and removed the strip of metal with a small pair of tongs. The metal burst into multicolored flame as the air touched it, eerily lighting up the poisoner's face. With a hasty exclamation that might have been a curse or the fixative word of a spell, Steng dropped the burning metal into the central glass bulb of the gleaming turreted Flagrator.

  Instantly the corpse began to convulse. Steng had carefully bound the body so that it could not move much, nor damage the delicate mechanisms of the Flagrator. But it was startling to see the dead body twitch and shudder, its teeth clamping tight on the strip of maijarra wood, arcing its back as if it were in agony.

  “Is he in pain?” Vost asked.

  “There is no ‘he,'” Steng replied irritably. “It does not matter if the nerves register pain. There is no one to feel it.”

  The convulsions subsided. The eyes were open and staring, the jaw slack. Steng removed the stick of wood from its mouth. Its chest rose and fell in a slow irregular rhythm.

  “Is he ready?” the Protector asked.

  “I believe it is ready.”

  “What is your name?” the Protector said to the body (as if it were a captured prisoner, Steng thought).

  The body did not speak.

  “Steng!”

  “My Lord Protector,” Steng said, “it has no name. It is not a person and will not respond as one. If I may—”

  “No.” The Protector tugged at his chin, then addressed the corpse. “What was your name?”

  “This was Jence, of the City Legion,” the corpse replied. Its voice was unmodulated and carried no emphasis. A whiff of its breath apparently reached Vost, who turned away gasping.

  “Who was Jence's captain?” the Protector continued.

  “Lorn.”

  “Death and Justice! I should have known that. Vost, do you hear?”

  “Yes, Lord,” Vost replied, still gasping.

  “I was going to have the city commander break him tomorrow,” the Protector said reflectively. “He must have guessed that and decided he had nothing to lose.”

  “We'll prove him wrong there, my lord.”

  “Only if Steng finds him for you. Did Lorn,” the Protector continued, addressing the corpse, “order Jence to patrol outside the enclosure?”

  “No.”

  “Ha. What did Lorn order you—what did Lorn order Jence to do?”

  “‘Pretend to patrol, while waiting to make rendezvous with the King and me,’” s
aid the corpse, in a passable imitation of Lorn.

  “How long was Jence to wait?”

  “Until they came.”

  “Where would they come from?”

  “The enclosure.”

  “Where were they hiding in the enclosure?”

  “Jence did not know.”

  “Did anyone in the squad know?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lorn refused to discuss his plans. He said the soldiers might be questioned.”

  “A good precaution,” Steng observed. “We may have learned all that we can.”

  The Protector shook his head impatiently. “How long did Jence wait for Lorn? Was it a long time?”

  “It seemed a long time. Then the red fog came, and Jence died.”

  “Did the squad speculate on where the King and Lorn might be hiding?”

  “No.”

  “Did Jence speculate?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lorn ordered us not to. He said—”

  “Never mind that. Speculate now.”

  “Now?” whispered the corpse.

  “Where did the King and Lorn hide?” the Protector demanded.

  There was a pause, then the corpse said, “In the drop chamber.”

  “There is no drop chamber,” the Protector said sharply.

  Steng nodded his head slowly, then did so more pointedly when he saw Vost's look of mystification. The drop chamber was a device of the assassin-minded Ambrosii—built into a royal enclosure to provide escape in times of need.

  “There is no drop chamber,” said the Protector more urgently, when the corpse did not reply. After another long pause in which the metal in the Flagrator's central bulb burned and spluttered thoughtfully, he continued, “I ordered the Guild of Carpenters not to build a drop chamber into the enclosure.”

  “They would have ignored such an order,” the corpse observed. “Guild law. Imperial charter. No public structure or conveyance for a royal person to be without a drop chamber or a slide chute. Jence's father-in-law was a carpenter. He knew the law.”

  “Enough!” the Protector said. “Vost, what of this? Have your men searched for a drop chamber?”

  “No, my lord,” Vost said, pulling at his chin. “There would hardly have been room among the supports for the royal dais.”