Blood of Ambrose (38 page)

“This is the iron crown of Vraid,” she said. “With it I crowned your ancestor, my beloved husband, Uthar the First, Emperor of Ontil on the field of battle. In that dark hour without hope we won through to victory. Will you accept now the heritage of your ancestors and be our sign of hope in this dark hour?”

Lathmar squawked, “You want to crown me Emperor, now, before breakfast?”

“Certainly. Unless you would rather someone else do it.” She didn't look at Morlock.

“No!” the King said instantly, to Morlock's relief. “No, Grandmother: you do it.” He stood, kicking his chair to the floor, and kneeled before her.

She placed the iron circlet among his disordered brown locks, saying, “I crown you Lathmar the Seventh, Emperor of Ontil.”

Then he rose and she kneeled, taking off her chain of office and handing it to him. “Your commands, my liege?” she said softly.

He gripped the chain like a lifeline, but his voice was steady as he spoke. “I affirm the acts of my late regent, my well-beloved ancestress Lady Ambrosia Viviana. Let's leave the rest of the ceremonies for another time; we have a war to fight. And, frankly, I want breakfast.”

“Hail Lathmar the Seventh, called the Wise!” cried Jordel enthusiastically. “Breakfast in droves, by all means. Maybe we should get an emperor in the Wardlands.”

Baran pushed his chair over for this blasphemy, and thus ended the imperial coronation of Lathmar VII.

“Morlock,” Aloê said in the Crooked Man's ear as the others were standing around the table talking. “You've other good-byes to say, so I won't keep you. But come back to me, Morlock: I say it to you like some stupid fisherman's stupid wife. Come back to me.”

Morlock stood, took her by the elbow, and walked her out in the hall. “The time is come for an understanding between us,” he said firmly.

She looked at him with her golden eyes and waited.

“I am no longer your husband,” he said harshly. “You are not my wife. I am an exile, and you are a member of the Graith of Guardians. You could be exiled simply for saying what you have said to me. Don't throw away everything you are because of something which is nothing to you.”

“Do you really believe you are nothing to me?” she said, surprised.

“You would wander with me, from place to place, without a home, because I can never come to the place that is my home?”

She laughed, dismissing this fantasy with a wave of her hand. “I can see the future better than that, Morlock.”

“Prophesy for me.”

“You will be in the future what Ambrosia has been in the past: the true ruler of this empire. It took a long time, but
now
you have a place to call your own. You cast a long shadow—”

“An ill-chosen metaphor indeed,” he hissed.

“Choose your own metaphor, beloved. The job is yours to do. I've never known you to shirk a job that was yours. I think I understand you now, at last, and I am willing to be a partner in your destiny, wherever it leads.”

He bowed his head, clenching his teeth. He thought he understood her, and rather better than she knew him. It was strange to love someone, to look into her eyes, and to see oneself mirrored there as a nothingness cloaked with power. It was the cloak of power she loved, not the man who wore it. He could not say these things; they blocked his throat, too great, too terrible to be spoken.
It is Morlock who loves her
, he said to himself.
But the man she loves is Merlin's son.
She had never realized that they were not the same man, that they would never be, that he could not let them be.

He heard a sound behind him and turned to see Lathmar standing behind them, the boy's eyes twin pools of grief and shame. The young Emperor fled up the hallway, his bodyguards following at a practiced run. Ambrosia came out of the council chamber, looked up the hall, looked at Morlock, and shrugged.

He turned back to his ex-wife. “You've hurt him,” he said fiercely. “I won't forget this.”

“Save your anger for our enemy,” she said, smiling. “I'll be here when you get back.” Then she kissed him, and he found he could not resist her. She turned away and walked up the hall after Lathmar, her red cloak swirling behind her. Perhaps he would not be able to resist her, either, Morlock reflected gloomily.

“Did you know Merlin sent me off to school one year?” Ambrosia said as he turned back to her.

“No,” said Morlock, genuinely surprised.

“It was such a disaster. I'll tell you about it, sometime. Anyway, this is a little like the end of the school year—fast farewells, so much to say that nothing gets said.”

So he held her hand, kissed her forehead, and said nothing at all.

She kissed him on the lips, hesitated, then kissed him again. “From Hope,” she whispered, and walked away almost as quickly as Lathmar had done.

“Nothing disgusts me as much as schmaltz,” said Jordel disagreeably, stepping forward, “so I won't say good-bye. No point to it! You'll be a pest and a botheration to the Wardlands until the mountains wear away and the Guard fails.”

“A pest, maybe,” Morlock conceded. “But a botheration?”

“Don't try to bandy wits with me at this late date; you're not equipped for it. You don't even know what a bandy is—deny it if you can! See you, Baran.”

“Good-bye. Good-bye to you, Morlock,” the big man added. “Thanks for the horse. Think he'll carry me?”

“He carried Ambrosia, Wyrth, and me,” Morlock said. “I'm fairly sure it was him. Let him run free in Westhold when he's carried you there, eh?”

Baran said he would, clapped Morlock on the shoulder, and was gone.

“You're not even going to say good-bye to Velox?” Wyrth said querulously.

“No,” said Morlock, who badly wanted to. “He might cry, and I couldn't bear that.”

“Ach, you're a cold and pitiless man. I suppose you're only waiting for me because you want help with your spider.”

“That, and one other thing.”

Wyrth became solemn, even grim. “I know. We never talked about how I failed you in the gravelands.”

“That's nothing.”

“Not to me,” Wyrth replied, stung.

“Then it's your business,” Morlock said coldly, if not pitilessly. “I should have warned you what was in the offing or forbidden you to come. Your suffering falls to my blame. Frankly, I have worse things on my conscience.”

“And I'm the one who knows,” Wyrth replied. He hesitated and asked, “What's the other thing, then?”

“I call you master, Wyrth.”

“What?” the dwarf said irritably. “You can't do that. I'm just an apprentice.”

“I can, and you know it. I should have done it a half century ago. You know that, too.”

“You're doing this as a going-away present,” said Wyrth angrily. “But when you come back, we won't be able to travel together anymore. Or maybe you're thinking of giving up traveling.”

“Master Wyrth, you need to sit at your own bench, work in your own shop, dream your own dreams, and do your own deeds. If you do, you may become the greatest of all the masters of Making. I say so.”

Wyrth bowed his head and raised it again. “All right, ex-boss. I guess I'll see you at the craft meetings. Let's get this spider of yours on the road.”

He was weeping as he walked, but he took no notice of this so neither did Morlock.

yrth was glumly sorting through the accumulations of stuff in Morlock's workshop. In truth there was not so very much—no more than forty or fifty donkeys might have carried. Since, in the event, it would have to be carried by one old man with crooked shoulders and one dwarf (headed in different directions, he kept reminding himself incredulously), some sorting needed to be done.

He was tempted to carry nothing. To walk back to Thrymhaiam with nothing in his hands, stand on the Rokhfell Hill, and shout, “I am a master of Making! The greatest maker in the worlds has said so!” On reflection, this didn't seem practical—he would need food and water on the way; there were some notebooks with useful things in them; he didn't like to go anywhere without a few tools.…The items mounted up.

There was a folded slip of paper not far from the choir of flames. Wyrth opened it and read it to see if it was worth preserving or if, as he thought, it had been put here to become fuel for the ever-hungry choir.

The note read:

Morlock—

I am alive.

Hope.

“Odd,” he said. Was the last word a signature or an injunction? He had heard of someone who might have addressed Morlock in this way—Morlock's other sister, Hope. But she was supposed to have died before he (Wyrth) had been born. Of course, that might have been the purpose of the note…to let him know it wasn't the case. Wyrth tapped the note against his nose reflectively three or four times, refolded it, and put it back where he had found it.

The Emperor entered the room quietly, as if he didn't want to be heard. The clash of his bodyguards' boots and armor outside the door made that more or less impossible, so Wyrth looked up and said, “Yes, Your Majesty?”

“Is Morlock away?” Lathmar asked.

“He has been away some hours,” Wyrth said.

“Oh,” said the Emperor emptily. “I thought…I thought he might need this.” He held up the signal horn with which he had escaped the adept's tower.

Morlock and Wyrth had discussed the horn and agreed it would be useless to him—the corpse-golems would be instructed to disregard it. But, Wyrth thought, as a pretext to say good-bye, the horn would have been pretty useful. Too bad Lathmar hadn't thought of it sooner, that's all. In lieu of saying all this, he grunted.

“You're getting as bad as Morlock,” Lathmar said, laughing. He grew more solemn. “When do you suppose we'll know…one way or the other?”

“If he succeeds or dies, you mean?” the dwarf said querulously. “I don't suppose it's occurred to you that he could succeed
and
die—or that you might be better off if he didn't come back?”

“No,” said the young Emperor so defiantly that Wyrth knew he was lying. Normally he disapproved of untruths, especially unsuccessful ones, but he had to give the boy credit for trying. If Morlock fell on his sword for this young twerp, the young twerp had better prove to be worth the sacrifice.

“Well,” he said, in lieu of saying all that, “what news from the walls? I guess you've come from there.”

“We are besieged again,” Lathmar said solemnly. “There are bands of corpse-golems led by Companions of Mercy at every outer gate.”

“Where's Ambrosia? I take it she's still leading the troops.”

“Yes, she's at Thorngate. She was wondering if you have something that might—might—”

“Put a bug down their hoods?” Wyrth thought it over. “We can try a few things. Give me a hand, won't you?”

The current of the river carried Morlock down to the sea. He dozed a bit, barely troubling to guide his spider craft. There would be work to tire him soon enough.

When he reached the sea, he took up the controls and directed the spider eastward along the shore. Once he was past the city he took his craft to land and began a long, oblique walk toward his goal. He went north through the grave lands, then finally turned east again when he was north of Gravesend Field. He sped across the plain between the grave lands and the old riverbed on the Tilion. Then he took the dry riverbed into the heart of the Old City.

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.