Blood of Ambrose (32 page)

“I can cure that,” Morlock Traitor's Bane said calmly, and stepping forward, he broke the old man's neck. He threw the body negligently on the floor.

Aloê was shocked, and shocked again that no one else was. Even Jordel and Baran seemed to approve the action.

“I suppose he knew nothing more that would be useful to us?” Ambrosia asked temperately.

“Almost certainly; there was little left of him. I suspected something of the sort last night. Kedlidor was behaving oddly, and the thing that dwelled within Urdhven's body knew of matters that had been discussed at the supper before he arrived.”

“What are we up against, Morlock? Surely it's time for you to speak.”

“I still think our enemy is an adept. I think, though, that he has bent his power to duplicate the abilities of a shathe. That is, he can seduce a will into destroying itself, and get sustenance from the event—and control the dying will.”

“God Creator,” Ambrosia said. “And he has Lathmar.” She turned toward the wall to hide her face.

When she spoke without moving, a few moments later, her voice was deadly calm. “If we know our enemy, we can take steps against him. Morlock, you must see to that first thing. It is unfortunate that he has taken the King, but not fatal to us: the Protector is no longer a political force in the city, whatever has become of his soul. Wyrth, perhaps you can make an illusory King to serve for ceremonial occasions. If we can recover Lathmar, we will. But we must confront the fact that he is probably lost to us.”

She turned her face back to the room again; they saw the tears streaking her face. “Morlock—Where is Morlock?”

“Eh, madam,” said Wyrth. “He has gone to find the little King. What did you expect?”

ast of the living city of Ontil is the Old City—the capital of the storied First Empire. A triple curse killed it, the empire it ruled slipped away, and its people fled. Millennia later, Ambrosia and Uthar diverted the river Tilion; on its new banks they built a new city and gave it the proud name of the old one.

But the Old City was always there, just beyond the gray curtain of the Dead Hills. They remembered it and honored it by making it the domain of the imperial heir, along with the New City.

A triple curse. A drought from the sky that had never ended, not even after millennia. A curse from the sea, the curse of the Old Gods. And a curse from the earth: a plague that drove men mad and then killed by rotting the bones and the flesh.

People still came here. To hide, because no writ ran in the Old City. To die or to await death: there was no more suitable place. To uncover the past: for here it lay open for the taking.

And now its king was coming to it, for the first time since the founding of the New Empire, Lathmar reflected.

“Carried like a sack of beans by someone else, as usual,” he complained aloud. “Someday someone will figure out a better way to transport a king. I just hope I'm there to see it.”

He didn't suppose that he would be, but he was speaking largely for his own entertainment anyway. His captors (two men he had known as Thurn and Veck, members of his Royal Legionaries) seemed to have only enough awareness to abduct him and carry him out of the castle and the city—literally in a sack, he believed, although he had been unconscious at the time. It was not even as if they were traitors, ashamed to make conversation with the king they had betrayed. Talking to them was like talking to rocks, to a wall, to oneself.

But now he said nothing as the skyline of his other city crept above the horizon. It was like a city in a dream, in a nightmare. A forest of stone towers rose up, but they were half-eaten by the wind, etched crookedly against the bitter blue sky. Nothing lived in the streets that they shadowed: the boulevards had been dead so long that even the dust of the dead trees had blown away. But as the King and his captors approached closer to the city, he did see one living thing lurking in the shadows: a vaguely human form, its head a hairless, shapeless mass, like a rotten gourd striped in fever-blue and pus-yellow. It fled, staggering and shrieking as they came near. A plague victim—man or woman, Lathmar couldn't tell.

Lathmar was obscurely ashamed. For centuries, this place had been here, and people like him had ruled it in name and not given it a thought in reality. He had not cursed it; his people had not cursed it, nor caused the curse. But perhaps their indifference was part of the curse—a fourth curse, adding the cruelty of man to the hatred of earth, air, and sea.

“It's not as if I can do anything about it,” he muttered to his peevish, unreasonable conscience.

They turned up a street where, to his surprise, Lathmar saw some dead plants. They stood in a wedge of darker earth…no, a sort of reddish dark streambed that ran along the broken gutter of an ancient street.

Then plants could grow here, if there was water. Or some other fluid: Lathmar wondered what sort of runoff had given brief life to those seedlings.

He was soon to know. They followed the dark stain in the ancient street around a corner. The screen of half-eaten towers parted, and Lathmar saw what he guessed was their destination. A tower unruined (or rebuilt, he guessed) standing apart from the others in a field of stumpy ruined buildings. Surrounding it was a hedge of thorns, and the thorns climbed like ivy up and all around the tower so that it bristled black against the blue dust-strewn sky.

How did the plants grow in this dead waterless place? The dark stain in the ground was deepest and darkest near the hedge. Nearby, tossed negligently among the bare foundations of the broken buildings, were bright bones grinning back at the sun. The bones of many men and women: hundreds of them, thousands, tens of thousands perhaps. Their blood had been shed to nourish the thorns. Some of the bodies were fresher: the King watched in horror as a crow landed on the head of one of these, plucked out one of its drying eyeballs, and gulped it down, neatly snipping the string of optic nerve with its bill. It looked right at him, rather quizzically, then bowed down to eat the other dead eyeball. Lathmar turned away shuddering.

The two soldiers who had been Thurn and Veck reined in by the hedge and dismounted. They cut the King's bonds and dragged him down to stand by them—rather unsteadily: the bindings had cut off the flow of blood, and his legs and hands were numb. Lathmar was fascinated by the hedge of thorns: the leaves were small and darkish green; the thorns were as long as Lathmar's hand, with points like daggers. They were dense and intertangled: no light passed through them.

Veck's hand raised a signal horn to Veck's mouth, which blew a single blast.

A creaking mechanical sound was heard, and then the hedge of thorn began to rise in the air. At least the section nearest them was rising. It lifted and the King saw this section of hedge was planted in huge vats; when they were clear he saw the vats were resting on a section of planking like the deck of a ship. It was being lifted from the ground by some vast screwlike mechanism. A team of corpse-golems—he knew them at a glance by their mismatched limbs and dead angelic faces—were working the wheel that drove the screw.

The soldiers dragged the King down the sloping blood-brown earth left clear by the lifted thorns. As they passed, the one that had been Veck lifted the horn and blew another blast. The corpse-golems stopped, turned, and began to push the wheel the other way. The section of thorn-hedge behind them slowly began to descend again.

They walked on to the tower bristling with thorns. There was no place to enter, but the soldiers stopped just below a bare patch, some fifteen feet up the wall. The soldier that had been Veck blew two blasts on the signal horn. The bare patch of wall opened on darkness, and presently a stairway began to unfold downwards to the accompaniment of unmusical clanks.

The King took special care to look at the sky as they ascended the stair; he guessed it would be the last time he would ever see it. There wasn't much to see: the dark blue bar of the sea to the south, some black birds hovering in the west over the Dead Hills. He paused at the top of the stairs, reluctant to surrender the light. But the empty-faced soldiers simply dragged him into the tower.

There were two teams of corpse-golems here, one team in each chamber on either side of the broad windowless corridor within. They were still straining mindlessly against their wheels, striving to lower a stairway that was already lowered. The one that had been Veck blew two blasts on the signal horn as they passed. (The sound was painfully loud in the echoing corridor, but only Lathmar seemed to be aware of it.) The corpse-golems stopped; they stood; they turned and began to push their wheels in the opposite direction, lifting the stairway. (The King wondered if they would continue to try and raise it after it was all the way up, straining at the wheels until someone told them to reverse directions again.)

The blank-faced soldiers took him up a long series of stairways to the top of the tower. He was out of breath by the time they reached there—if he ever fell behind they simply seized him by the arms and dragged him till he took to his feet again.

At the top of the last stairway the King found himself standing in what was obviously an antechamber. There was a monumental door flanked by two enormous particolored winged beings Lathmar took at first for remarkably ill-made gargoyles. Then one looked at him with mismatched eyes (one red and round, another narrow and slitlike, with a black iris peering through). Lathmar looked away, shuddering from fear and exhaustion.

The soldiers halted and stared at nothingness. They waited there without words. Then the huge winged beings stood, and together they lifted the huge stone slab (which the King had taken for a door) away from the doorway.

Within the empty place was a shadowy form. It gestured at the King with long, ropy fingers.

The soldiers pushed him and he staggered, almost falling. Then he pulled himself up and strode forward into the emptiness. He heard the soldiers march after him into the chamber beyond.

“Steng, I believe?” the King said to the shadowy form. He tried to keep his voice cool, but the tone wavered; he was tired and he was frightened. But he didn't let that stop him. As a king, as a ruler in the proud tradition of Vraidish conquerors, he might be a complete failure. But he'd die like a king, at least, never giving in. “I believe I had the pleasure of your company once or twice at Ambrose, though of course we were never formally introduced.”

The form laughed, in a voice that was very much like Steng's…or was it? It was phlegmier, somehow—creakier.

“So you have, Lathmar,” the other replied, “in a way, although I'm not Steng. I'm the original on which Steng was modeled. He was made in my own image. Don't you find that amusing? But perhaps you haven't heard that one. I forget which religions are current in these parts.”

There was a crash as the stone slab was set back into place, sealing the room.

It was a broad open chamber, with a work desk and chair, and other furniture harder to name scattered about. There was a hole in the middle of the floor with spiral stairs leading down to a lower level. The room was well lit by a line of floor-length windows opening onto a balcony. But the other was standing with his back to these. The King stepped around him to inspect him more closely.

This certainly was not Steng. His right shoulder was hiked even higher than Morlock's; his hair was stringy and gray; the tip of his nose and the ends of his fingers seemed to have rotted away. But, in spite of that, the resemblance was striking.

The other, meanwhile, was inspecting the King equally closely, wagging his head as in disbelief.

“No, no,” he said. “Incredible. Anyway, I can hardly believe it.”

After several minutes of this, the King said, as sharply as his shaky voice allowed, “Well?”

“Well?” the other echoed.

“Aren't you going to tell me why you brought me here?” the King demanded, striving (and failing) to get something like the authentic Ambrosian rasp.

The other seemed surprised. “Tell you…? Oh, no. I don't think so. I mean, what's in it for me? And what good would it do you, really?”

“I'd like to know.”

“People make that mistake all the time. ‘Better to know the worst!’ they say, and then, you know, they blame you simply because they get what they think they wanted. No, I've done with that. I don't give people what they think they want, and I don't give them what they want. I give them what I want. It's easier and there's less fuss and screaming and things.”

“What would you do if I started screaming?” asked the King, wondering if he could reach this oddly sensitive semicorpse through his finer feelings.

“Kill you,” the other said briefly. “I'll tell you why I
didn't
bring you here. Some of me said, ‘Oh, transfer into a young body this time—the little King, wouldn't that be amusing? Why, we could be Emperor after all, after everything.’ But others of me, and I'm with them, they said, ‘No, take someone like Morlock, or the dwarf or Ambrosia. Even if they're slightly killed they'll last better than the little King.’ And these of me are clearly right. You're practically ordinary: an Ontilian man in the street, junior size.”

Somewhat confused by this, the King said, “Transfer to Gr—I mean, to Ambrosia's body—”

“Don't call her Grandmother,” the other said, with every appearance of jealousy. “I hate it when you do that. You've no right, you know. She's not
your
grandmother; she's
my
grandmother. Anyway,” he said, cooling off slightly, “she was the grandmother of my first body. I suppose the matter is somewhat more complicated now.”

“You're not…not in your original body, then?”

“Well, I am and I'm not. That's the interesting thing. Even if I transferred into your body, I'd soon look like this again. The mind is subject to the body in many mundane ways, but the body yields to the mind, too. My talic imprint compels any body I wear to assume this form. Why, take this very body—it was female when I took it up, very recently dead, quite fresh and comfortable. Now it's quite male. It even has a penis. Would you like to see it?”