Blood of Ambrose (11 page)

They marched up the broad gleaming street to the City Gate of Ambrose.

“Hey, watchman!” the same harsh voice behind him called out. “Open this gate or I'll have your balls for breakfast!”

The road to captivity and Ambrose had begun on the way back to Genjandro's shop. Ironically, the King had been delighted. They took back alleys and deserted streets to avoid notice, and soon after they reached the ground the heavy clouds had begun a steady drenching storm that promised to last all night. The King had never been so cold, nor so physically uncomfortable. Nor, indeed, so happy. The danger, it seemed, was past; he was free and abroad in his city; he was with his Grandmother again. He could not imagine what was before him (fortunately, as it proved), so he didn't try. He simply reveled in the wild air, the bright blackness of the wet streets in the storm.

The first intrusive doubt that all was not well came when they had to dodge a column of armed soldiers marching up a lane leading away from the Great Market. Grandmother heard their boots long before he did and pulled him along with her into a stairwell that led to a door below street level. They watched from the shadows as the soldiers marched past, the red lion of the Protector on their black banner and their shields.

“Protector's Men!” his Grandmother muttered when they had passed. “Something's stirring, and I don't like it, Lathmar. Maybe they're just patrolling the city. But that's more normally left to your City Legion, from all I hear.”

“They're not mine,” the King said, but he thought of Lorn.

“Hmph. If Urdhven agreed you'd be a good deal safer. So would they. Be quiet a moment, boy.” Hardly a moment had passed when she spoke again. “We won't risk the market,” she decided. “If something's afoot and it's nothing to do with us, we still might be caught in the open. And if they're looking for us, we mustn't give them the chance they're wanting.”

So she led him around the Great Market by side streets, a long weary way in the rain. His exaltation had cooled by then, but he said nothing in complaint. The way was made longer (and filthier) because at every untoward sound, Ambrosia hid them somewhere along the street. But the King did not complain of this either, even though they once burrowed into a pile of street-side trash and once climbed straight up the crumbling brick wall of a half-ruined building. Too often her suspicions were correct: they were passed many times by troops of soldiers, never less than a dozen together, and once by as many as a half thousand marching, rank on rank. They bore no torches in the rain, but above them all flew the Protector's standard, the red lion black as a wound in the blue bursts of lightning.

“They must have had a whole quarter of the city isolated,” Ambrosia whispered to Lathmar after the hundreds passed. “I suppose it started after I left Genjandro's—you can't move this many troops in a city without causing an uproar, and I'd heard nothing.”

“Why are they moving again?” the King asked.

“They found what they were looking for. Or they've given up.” In the shadows Ambrosia's mouth was a grim dark line.

“But would they give up so soon?” the King wondered.

“No!” Ambrosia shouted, and the King kept quiet after that.

Finally they arrived at Genjandro's shop. It was not hard for the King, who had never seen the place, to pick it out of the shops lining the street. Peering out alongside his Grandmother in the issue of a narrow alley, he guessed it was the shop whose shutters had been torn from the windows, whose door lay shattered in the street.

“This looks like grim business,” Ambrosia observed coolly. “Come along, Lathmar.”

“Grandmother, wait!” the King hissed, seizing her arm.

She looked at him impassively.

“Won't there be someone watching the shop…waiting for us?” the King asked.

“That's very good thinking, Lathmar,” his Grandmother said, her tone cold and distant. “You're probably correct. I'm going in anyway, though. You may stay here, if you like.”

Tongue-tied, he stared at her and then followed as she walked away. Her behavior was strange to him, but familiar, too, in a way he could not name.

She drew her sword as she approached the empty doorway and entered with casual wariness. He followed almost as quickly, more afraid of the open street than the hidden but doubtful menace of the ransacked shop.

In truth, there was nothing inside more dangerous than darkness and broken furniture. Lathmar stayed at the windows and watched the empty street while Ambrosia rummaged about and searched the place. She disappeared for an alarmingly long time into the back of the place, but presently returned to report, “They didn't even loot the place. Pretty businesslike for Protector's scum. Over here, Your Majesty, if you please.”

The King went where she directed, his face burning in the darkness because of the scorn and fury in her voice. He was surprised: Grandmother, though often brutal, was never, never unfair. But he was not very surprised. Her anger made sense to him somehow. It was not right, but it was wrong in a way he felt he understood.…

Grandmother's silhouette in the dark casually hurled aside a heavy stone-topped counter, and the crash startled the King out of his thoughts. As he approached she was pulling stones from the floor where the counter had stood. He stood gaping, guessing at his Grandmother's actions (for she was a shadow among shadows, bent down to the floor) by the sounds they made. Presently he heard her brushing loose earth away. Then she stood up and pressed something in his hands: the handle of a dagger. (He saw the blade's edge gleaming in the faint light from the broken windows.)

“There,” she said. “If anyone comes out you don't like, stick that in him.”

“Out?” he said stupidly, and then he understood. There was a chamber hidden beneath the shop floor.

“Out!” she affirmed. Then she bent down and seized something on the floor. He heard her grunt of exertion and the rasp of stone against stone.

Lines of blazing light appeared on the ground, forming three sides of a square. His Grandmother stood before the widest of the three, grimacing as she heaved at a large ringbolt. Placing one hand under the lip of the stone she was lifting, she hurled it back with a negligent crash.

In the wake of this noise the King heard a gentle coughing; it seemed to rise with the light blazing from the incandescent hole in the floor.

“You shouldn't have lit your lamp, Genjandro,” the King heard his Grandmother say. “Don't blame me if your lungs are purple with smoke.”

“On the contrary, madam,” said a polite-voiced shadow rising from the light. “I had no intention of waiting, perhaps for days, only to die in the dark. I knew you would come tonight before the sixth hour, or you would not come at all. If the smoke killed me after that, why so much the better: so much less of a cruel wait.”

“Now, now, Genjandro, will you defy the proverb and talk of death to the King? Because standing beside me is your lawful sovereign, Lathmar the Seventh.”

“Truly? Ah, Your Majesty, I am most signally honored—”

The King could sense no irony in the merchant's tone. (He had nothing else to go by, as Genjandro was still almost invisible in the intolerable brightness of the dim oil lamp he carried in his hand.) But he could sense the corrosive amusement bubbling up in Ambrosia without even glancing at her, and when Genjandro's form looked to make some courtly gesture, perhaps to kneel, the King cried out, “Oh, please don't bother yourself. I'll be glad to accept your homage at any more fitting time.”

“As Your Majesty wishes. Perhaps it would be best if we departed as soon as possible—”

“But that won't
be
possible,” Ambrosia cut in, “until we decide where we are going. Where are Morlock and Wyrtheorn, Genjandro?”

“I assumed you had guessed, my lady. The Legionary captain, Lorn, arrived just after sunset, with an army of Protector's Men at his heels.”

“So quickly, eh? You think—”

“I think it was a coincidence. Otherwise I would not be here. It was after Lorn arrived that the others hid me in the floor. The Protector's Men broke in and, I assume, took the others prisoner. Certainly they would not have left me here, if—”

“Lorn is no traitor!” Lathmar protested. “He might have turned me over to Urdhven at any time—”

“You're both off the mark,” Ambrosia said harshly. “Genjandro, they would have left you as bait for us. And Lathmar, Lorn would not have been betraying you by informing on us. You haven't understood your soldier yet, that's obvious.”

“How—”

“Shut up. We'll leave the question of Lorn unsettled. The main thing is: Morlock and Wyrtheorn are in Ambrose. That determines our course of action.”

The King was relieved when Genjandro said, “I don't see how,” because he thought he did and hoped he was wrong.

“Eh? Oh, it's nothing to do with you, Genjandro. We'll gladly accept any help you might offer, but if I were you I wouldn't offer any. You've obviously got your own problems. The King and I have to go to Ambrose this night.”

This was much as the King had suspected, but he couldn't refrain from yelping when his guess proved correct.

His Grandmother turned on him fiercely, her white face stark with shadows in the lamplight. “You don't like that, do you? It doesn't matter if you like it or not. You're my key to the gates of Ambrose, and I'm going to turn you till the gates open or you break.”

Genjandro, obviously concerned by this, began to utter a protest, and the King himself wanted to say something, he hardly knew what. Ambrosia listened abstractedly for a moment and then said distinctly, “Be quiet.”

In the offended silence that ensued, Genjandro and the King noticed what Ambrosia had already heard: the stealthy fall of booted feet outside the shop door.

Deliberately and with great presence of mind, Genjandro smashed his oil lamp against the wall. In an instant the burning oil set ablaze the wreckage on the floor below, lighting the whole room. Thus the soldiers who presently entered had to do so as individuals, rather than as the aggregate armed shadow they would have been in the dark room.

When the first soldier appeared in the doorway (of course: a Protector's Man, the red lion splashed like blood across his dark surcoat), Ambrosia threw back her head and screamed; the memory of it lived in Lathmar's nightmares till the day he died. Then, brandishing the blade she had never sheathed, Ambrosia leapt into battle, hatred and happiness twisting the lines of her face. And then, just when it would do no good to anyone, the King recognized his Grandmother's oddly familiar mood. It was grief, in its maddest middle phase—the reckless destructive mood when you don't care if you live or die.

The King had been that way, after the first shock of his parents' death. No one had noticed, of course. The recklessness of which he was capable was invisible to anyone else. But for a long time he would eat his meals before others tasted them, he would leave his doors unlocked at night. He could not sleep much, but he lay in bed—shutting his ears with his eyes—and let the assassin's blade come when it would.

It didn't come, not then, and one by one he resumed his pitiful precautions. Grief is strong, but life is stronger. He would not have told this to his Grandmother because he knew that the griever hates life. Grief is love itself, wounded by loss, and life is just the emptiness that goes on afterward. It is terrible that such an emptiness can overcome the fullness of grief, and the King would never have inflicted this knowledge on anyone he loved. (It occurred to him, as she leapt eagerly toward death, that he loved his Grandmother.) But he would have delayed her or decoyed her, lied to her until she inflicted that knowledge on herself.

Now it was too late for such gentle trickery. Ambrosia had gone to find her death on a bright thicket of blades and would no doubt find it. The King crouched down in the shadows of the high leaping flames and waited for death to find him.

From there to Ambrose was just a journey of so many steps.

*
“What does blood cost?” The enclitic
-me
implies a negative answer to the question.

he keeper of Ambrose's City Gate grunted, his oily face gleaming between the dark iron bars of the portcullis. “Whatcha want?” he snapped. “Gate's close'. Go ‘round ta Lonegate. Command's in Markethall Barracks. I guess it is. Anyway, no one here but the poisoners.”

The raspy voice from behind the King responded irritably, “Damn you, you wobbly old winebag. Can't you see? I've got the King of the Two Cities by the scruff of the neck. High Command wants him locked up before the Ambrosians in the city have a chance to grab him back.”

“Go ’round!” shouted the gatekeeper. “Go ‘round! No so'jers here. Ha'n't stood a watch in five years, wi' my leg. Not s'posed to open the gate till Pr'tect'r rides back. Now—”

“You've got the key, haven't you?”

“Yes, but—”

“It's ten miles on foot to the Lonegate. I've got to go to the nearest bridge, through a city that's half in revolt, cross the bridge, then walk through open country until I get to the other side of Ambrose. And they've probably got some damn fool on duty who'll tell me to go back to the City Gate.”

“They
tol'
me—”

“Did you say the poisoners were here?”

The gatekeeper reluctantly admitted this.

“Send for a poisoner—Steng, if he's here. Tell him Hundred-Leader Medric is at the gates with the royal prisoner.”

“Steng's questioning…mmm…Steng's questioning…some…er…”

“He's questioning the prisoners who were brought in earlier—through
this
gate. Isn't that so?”

“Hmph. Hm. Yes.”

“I've got the answer to his questions in my mitt. When I see him, I'll remember to tell him who sent me around to the back door with the royal prisoner. Then maybe he'll have some questions for
you.
”

The gatekeeper puffed air through his lips and twisted his face. Then he disappeared into the shadows. Presently a clanking sound was heard, and the small door set into the portcullis swung open.

“Come in, you foul-minded Protector's brat,” the gatekeeper's voice came out of the darkness.

The King dragged his feet, but his captor fairly lifted him across the iron threshold. In the darkness within the gate, the keeper's voice came from behind them.

“Know how I know you're the real thing, Protector-pup?”

“I've got the King.”

“I wouldn't know the King from a ripe melon. No, if you were trying to break in, you'd have tried to grab my throat while I was waggling my face at you through the bars, thinking I had the key on my person.” The door slammed shut behind them and locked. “
You
didn't even make a move at it. So you knew the key was hanging in the gatehouse, not around my tempting neck. Move on, straight ahead. You've been here before.”

It was the King who went first; he had passed through this gate often, the last time as much a captive as he was now. But he did not really know the way—usually he was being led—and he often stumbled in the dark. He no longer even had his captor's guidance; the mailed glove had released its grip on his neck once they had stepped through the gate. Once they were through, the King reflected, rubbing his neck, it didn't matter anymore. Before him was a small guardroom with two tables and a number of chairs. Most of the flat surfaces were covered with wine jars and wide-mouthed drinking cans; there was a barrel of beer in the corner of the room, stale stinking foam drying on the floor underneath its tap.

Soldierly voices echoed in the stone corridor behind him. The two entered the room in single file behind him, the gatekeeper bringing up the rear.

“…might have been wrong about that,” the King's captor was saying. “Treason's our biggest worry in this business.”

“Treason!” the old Legionary sneered. “You Protector-snots throw that word around like it still means something. You're lucky it doesn't. If it did you'd all be traitors, and your All-Leader with kin-blood on his hands the biggest of all—”

“You're pretty free, there, old-timer.”

“Not free enough!” said the gatekeeper, turning about to hang the gate keys on an iron hook protruding from the wall. “When the snow falls, that's my
sashvetra
^*
—I'm a twenty-winter man. I don't give a damn what happens after that, and not much what happens before.”

“I hope you make it, old soldier,” the King's captor said.

A change in the other's voice brought the Legionary wheeling about in suspicion. By that time the King's captor had seized the larger of the room's two tables by one leg and raised it to the ceiling, dumping the bottles and drinking cans to the floor; the King was sprayed by a beery reek. The Legionary stared open-mouthed as the table swung down and clipped him on the forehead. The King's captor dropped the table and grabbed the unconscious gatekeeper as he slumped toward the stone floor.

“Did you kill him?” the King asked.

“No,” Grandmother replied.

“Won't he talk when he awakes?”

“You've become rather bloodthirsty tonight, Lathmar.”

The King thought of the seven Protector's Men his Grandmother had slaughtered in his presence earlier, one of whose armor she presently wore. He had smelled the dead man's blood all through the long walk from Genjandro's shop. “No,” he said dimly. “Not that.”

“Your point's a good one,” Ambrosia continued, “but you lack experience. A man who's been struck unconscious takes a long time to remember what's happened to him, if he ever does. He almost never does if he's been drinking. Besides, we'll fix it so that no one believes him if he does remember. Drag that table back where it was.”

The King obeyed. When he had set it up, Ambrosia deftly kicked it over on its side with one foot. It looked as if the table had simply fallen over, spilling its contents. Then Ambrosia dragged the Legionary over, carefully draping his body so that the mark on his forehead aligned with the edge of the table; then she let the body sag to the ground.

“I see,” the King said. “If he tells his story, people will just think he tripped, being drunk, and struck his head on the table. And his story…”

“Will be thought a lie or a dream. Right.”

“That's why you kept him from falling,” the King observed. “You didn't want any unexplained bruises on the back or side of his head.”

“Right again.”

The King had thought she was being humane. He'd gotten to like the old soldier in the few moments he'd known him. He wished he could look forward to a
sashvetra
that would free him from the eternal intrigues and treacheries of imperial succession. He disliked his Grandmother's ruthlessness, and something of this must have shown in his face, for she took him by the shoulder.

“Look here, Lathmar,” she said, “let's see where we stand. I'm here to rescue my brother Morlock and my friend Wyrtheorn, and I don't much care how I do it. I've obliged you to accompany me because I needed you to get in, and because you owe them more than you may be aware of. But if you want to stay here, or take your chances alone inside Ambrose, or out in the city—that's up to you.”

The King was furious. He turned his face away from the battered visor of the Protector's Man Ambrosia had slain. “And now,” he said finally, “you
don't
need me. I'll be in the way. Your guise as a Protector's Man will take you unnoticed anywhere in Ambrose. But if anyone sees you with the King, you
will
be noticed; questions will be asked. I make your task harder, and so you generously offer…” His voice trailed off.

Ambrosia removed the helmet. Her face held no hostility. In fact, she seemed to smile in approval. “You have a gift for balancing the books, Lathmar. What you say is true: what I have to do will be easier if you're not around. Nonetheless (put this in your books, boy) I will bring you along, if you wish to come. Because it is your right to act with me in this.”

“I'll come,” said the King. “Because of Lorn. You don't say anything about him. But you're wrong about him. He tried to warn me about you!” He spoke desperately, aware of his own incoherence.

“I've no doubt his warning was a good one,” Ambrosia conceded, “for himself. For you, Lathmar, things are different. You are one of us.”

“I'm not,” the King whispered, frightened by his defiance. “I'll never be like you.”

Ambrosia shrugged her twisted shoulders. “So much the worse for you then, my friend,” she said, and covered her face with the stolen helmet.

Poisoning is a science, but torture is an art. The goal of the poisoner is simply to attain a physical goal, the death of the patient. The goal of the torturer is to destroy the personality of the patient without achieving the patient's death. Hence the torturer, unlike the poisoner, has to attend to the individual identity of the patient. This was the theory under which Steng, a poisoner turned torturer, operated, and he had attained some success.

That was why he had started on this patient's hands. The patient had been raised by dwarves, Steng knew, and the dwarves have a peculiar reverence for the hands. The maker of things, the Master of Making, is the person whom all dwarves revere. And hands are the organs of physical creation. After death, a dwarf's face is left bare, but his hands are covered.

It was with this in mind, then, that once the patient had been hung from the ceiling by his ankles, Steng had patiently and carefully flayed half of the patient's left hand, in full view of the patient. He had made a good job of it, stopping at the wrist so the manacle wouldn't get in his way, clipping a poisonous
zarm-beetle
every now and then to an exposed bundle of nerves, leaving the skin hanging from the bloody meat of the living hand. He had been careful not to let the blood of the patient get on his hands or clothes, for he hated a mess.

Really, it had been a very workmanlike job, and Steng was annoyed to find that it was not appreciated. Looking up to make some jovial comment, he saw that his patient's eyes were closed. Lifting one of the eyelids, he saw that the patient's pupil had constricted almost to invisibility, and that the pale gray iris was glowing faintly in the dim light. The patient was no longer respirating, but was clearly not dead either.

Steng could not tell whether this was the rapture of vision or mere withdrawal. (He was not a master of Seeing, and he hesitated to consult the one he knew.) But the patient's tal-self was not present to engage with the suffering Steng was inflicting on him.

“But it doesn't matter!” he told his patient. “You've gone far away into the tal-realms. But your source is still here in this body. If I damage it enough you will have to return. You won't have the strength to remain where you are.”

There was no answer, of course.

“You're a coward, you know! A coward!” Steng found himself shaking with—with anger, of course. That would never do. He went to the door of his tower chamber and sent the attendant off to fetch a hot drink. Then he sat and drank and calmed himself by watching Morlock's blood gather along his flayed fingertips and spatter on the stone floor.

The light of Ambrosia's torch fell, red and gold, on the squalor of an abandoned guard post. “The palace is a shell,” she remarked. “Practically every soldier in the city must be pounding a beat in or near the Great Market.”

“They think—” the King began.

“They think they can catch water in a sieve. Bad tactics, as my esteemed brother would say.”

“They caught your brother with those tactics,” the King observed, greatly daring.

Ambrosia turned toward him, masked by the helmet visor but still clearly angry. Then she shrugged and laughed. “Well said, Lathmar. But it wasn't Morlock they wanted, nor can he give them what they want, which is you, so it's still bad tactics. Besides, what if the Khroi attacked? Ambrose is the key to the city, and your Protector has left it almost unguarded—just the poisoners and their thugs, it seems. Stupid of him—and worth remembering. Well, let's go.” She kicked aside a pornographic book and the remains of an unfinished meal and passed through the post to the corridor it guarded.

The rooms along the corridor had been storage space, but a few decades ago river water had begun to seep into them. Rather than fix the problem, the late Emperor, Lathmar's father, had seen fit to convert the rooms to prison cells, which were increasingly in demand in those days. (It was the beginning of Lord Urdhven's influence over his brother-in-law, some said.)