Blood of Ambrose (8 page)

“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.”

“We'll look again. Those things would be no use if they were easily found. Call a squad of soldiers,
my
soldiers, and have them begin breaking up the dais.”

“My lord.” Vost was instantly elsewhere.

The Protector stood and brushed off the knees of his breeches. “Excellent work, Steng,” he said briefly. “Turn it off, now.” He turned away into the night.

Steng felt a stab of jealous anger as the Protector walked away. He wanted to leap up, tug at the Protector's elbow, demanding recognition. He had worked so hard—done so much! He was furious for the space of a few breaths, and then it occurred to him that
this
was what Vost suffered continuously.

“Pitiable,” Steng muttered. “He'd be better off dead.” Absently he poured the contents of the oil jar into the central bulb of the Flagrator, extinguishing the flame guttering along the puckered strip of half-consumed metal. As the night's darkness swept in, like a tide covering an exposed shoal of light, the corpse gave a convulsive shudder and never moved again.

Urdhven heard the fighting before he came within sight of the dais. He drew his sword and ran through the enclosure arch. A single Legionary was counting up several of his own soldiers in the lists. Three lay among the shattered wood of the benches and another in the dust of the field. The King was nowhere in sight.

“Stand back, idiots!” he shouted. They parted ranks slightly, assuming (it seemed) that he only wished to be in on the kill. Furiously he leapt into the gap. Lorn was standing there, parrying the tentative sword flicks from the pack of soldiers. The Protector raised his sword and, lunging forward, caught Lorn's in a bind.

“Get back, you fools!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Search among the benches. Look for the King. Don't you see? He attacked you so that the King could escape. Find him. Capture him.
Now!
”

They stood back, somewhat startled, and slowly spread among the broken seats. Meanwhile Lorn made a furtive shift of stance, as if preparing to attack. Urdhven disengaged, leapt aside, and lunged, slashing a bloody line across Lorn's forehead as the Legionary belatedly parried. Lorn riposted, and again Urdhven caught his sword in a bind.

“Why did you betray me, Lorn?” the Protector wondered. “What could that witch give you that was worth your soldier's oath?”

Lorn spat with contempt. “The King has my oath. I never gave it to another.”

“I command the empire's legions, Lorn. Your oath to the King is a legal fiction. You've chosen it above your duty and—Death and Justice!—you'll pay for it.” Furiously he threw the Legionary back and lunged at his heart.

Lorn laughed a little breathlessly as he struck the Protector's blow aside. “I believe in the Strange Gods you only swear by, Lord Urdhven. They'll enforce the oath I kept and you broke.”

The Protector advanced behind a businesslike network of head-cuts, thrusts, and ripostes. He was done with talking. Lorn backed away slowly, defending himself with skill. But he was no match for the Protector, and both of them knew it. He had backed now out of the enclosure's shadow into the bloodless light of the minor moons, Horseman and Trumpeter. Sweat glittered on his forehead, and blood was dripping from the wound there into his eyes.

Urdhven leapt forward and again caught Lorn's hilt with his. The moment he felt Lorn begin to pull away he shifted his footing and lashed out with one foot, kicking the unsuspecting Lorn's out from under him. The Legionary fell down, startled, on his right knee, gaping up at Urdhven, who methodically punched him in the throat with his empty left hand. Lorn choked and clumsily slashed out with his sword. Urdhven deftly beat it aside and smashed his knee up against Lorn's jaw. The bloody-faced soldier fell back in the dust and lay still.

Urdhven nodded. Now Lorn could be publicly executed, perhaps after torture—a fine example for any City Legionary tempted to take his oath too literally.

Looking up, the Protector saw a division of cavalry depart from the Dead Hills in some disorder, form up, and ride off toward the Old City Road. A lone horseman raced toward the enclosure, undoubtedly a messenger. All this could only mean the Ambrosii had been taken and slain; the cavalry commander would never have called off the search so soon, otherwise. Excellent—Urdhven had been hoping to make that insolent dwarf suffer in some degree before his death, but that was a small matter, in every sense. Things were going well.

A brief chorus of shouts sprang up outside the enclosure and as suddenly died down. The sound of marching feet rang out, and a tight formation of soldiers entered through the enclosure arch. At their center was Steng; his ropy boneless fingers clutched the shoulders of a young boy with a filthy face and frightened darting eyes: the King.

The Protector stayed where he was, assessing the situation. Steng's expression was all gleeful pride, while the soldiers wore masks of stern fury. Steng had made the capture, then, and had fought with the soldiers over who would bring the Protector his prize. That was good. Urdhven had made a life study of the art of breaking a man's spirit, and he guessed that Steng was two-thirds his property now.

As for the King…yes, the story could be that he had been kidnapped by Lorn's cabal of rebellious soldiers. When set upon by the Protector's Men, they had slain their captive in panic. The Protector's Men had overcome the Legionaries, and these would be executed for treason and regicide. (Urdhven knew of a company of soldiers he could easily sacrifice for this piece of political theater: Lorn's.) It would be an excellent pretext for a loyalty inquisition among the City Legion. Or perhaps abolishing them altogether—it was awkward to have so large a body of troops in the capital not under his personal control.

“My Lord Urdhven!” came a cry behind him. In his reverie he had forgotten the cavalry messenger. He turned and crossed to the bar where the messenger, still in the saddle, was waiting.

“Sir!” the messenger said. “War-Leader Kyric reports that he has fallen back and is re-forming his troops along the Old City Road. He has sent to the city for a company of bowmen.”

Urdhven looked sharply at the messenger's face, streaming with sweat in the chill moonslit air. His voice had been tolerably steady, but there was no mistaking his fear.

“Lancer,” said the Lord Protector harshly, “I sent your wing to capture or kill three refugees, only one of whom was armed and mounted, and one of whom was crippled. The third was a dwarf. Are you saying you met
armed
resistance?”

The Protector's Men and Steng had come up, with the King in tow. Urdhven could hear them muttering behind him. Had he foreseen the nature of this interview he would have sent them to wait some distance away. Now it was too late: he judged that it would be worse to send them away than let them hear the rest of the bad news. Foot soldier morale would not be too heavily affected by a cavalry blunder, Urdhven judged—he took care to encourage rivalries among his own troops. (And Steng, of course, viewed all soldiers with contempt.)

“My lord,” said the messenger, a note of pleading in his voice, “they used magic. The…the attack came when we were scattered. There was nothing we could do!”

“From which I deduce that you did nothing. I'll have Kyric twisted for this—”

“My lord—”

“None of that. In what form did this ‘attack’ come?”

The messenger did not answer immediately. In the silence they heard a faint but definite sound. It was something like a fierce inhuman scream, heard from afar. Urdhven automatically took a step back toward his men. He glanced about, trying to locate the source of the scream. His concentration was broken by the sound of hoofbeats: he looked up to see the back of the messenger as he rode off.

Urdhven paused to promise himself that Kyric and his messenger would twist side by side, then turned to his soldiers.

Their faces were expressionless; their hands were steady. No doubt their voices would be, if he required them to speak. But he knew these men: they were terrified. Moments before they had moved and stood with easy arrogance; now they were stiff, their shoulders set.

He knew the stories they were remembering, legends accumulated over the centuries, in which the sorcerous powers of the Ambrosii were constantly invoked to protect or avenge their kinsmen of the imperial line. Urdhven was convinced that most of them were lies, fomented by the Imperial House for its own protection. He knew that many of them were slander, spread by people like himself, who had tried to undermine the popularity of some emperor by associating him with monstrously distorted rumors of Ambrosia, Morlock, or even Merlin. Now Urdhven understood why all those attempts (including his own) had been failures. The more the dangers of the Ambrosii were exaggerated, the more fearful a weapon the Imperial House had in them. Urdhven promised himself he would not forget that lesson, if he lived.

If he lived?
It was only when that phrase came into Urdhven's mind that he knew how deeply fear had infected him. And in that instant he heard the scream again.

It was nearer now, and louder. It raised horrible indistinct pictures in Urdhven's mind. It sounded fierce, pitiless, triumphant, inhuman. Urdhven could not keep from his mind the knowledge that Morlock had first appeared from the direction of the Old City, and that the three had retreated the same way. Urdhven had special reason to fear that place. Was the scream coming from some monster of the Old City that Morlock had befriended or controlled? Was it a demon summoned from yet farther away? Why had they waited until nightfall? Was their dreadful ally some ghoulish creature that could walk only by night?

“Draw your swords,” Urdhven said aloud, coolly. “Form a ring around the King and Steng.”

The soldiers performed the maneuver instantly, seemingly relieved to be taking any positive action. Urdhven was racking his brains to think of something more for them to do when he saw a furtive shape flit across the pockmarked face of the second moon, Horseman. Instantly he realized why the scream had been so difficult to locate: it was coming from the sky! Urdhven thought he could trace the progress of the flying figure as it briefly occulted stars. He could not discern its shape, but it was certainly getting closer. From the sound of the repeated horrifying scream he guessed that the creature was flying straight at them.

“Ready, men!” he called out. “It's coming from the east, and in the air. When it appears,
strike:
for your lives and for the empire!”

A dreadful silence swallowed this remark, for the screaming had halted again. Then three voices rang out from the dark sky, singing an awful cacophony of nonsense syllables.

“The Ambrosii!” The Protector heard one of his men whispering. “They come for their own!”

Then the enemy was upon them.

round sunset Wyrtheorn had been saying, “But won't the horseshoes catch fire? We've imbued them with many times their natural quantity of phlogiston.”

Morlock, hanging upside down from Velox's saddle, finished imbuing the front left horseshoe with phlogiston. Then he observed, “The shoes may catch on fire, I suppose, if we ride across a field of stones, or a paved road. But I put an aethrium plate under each shoe; Velox should feel no pain.”

“What about the nails? Wait a minute—they're not—”

“Aethrium spikes. Yes.”

“
Hurs krakna.
Your Velox is the most expensive horse alive.”

“It's worth it if it saves our lives,” Ambrosia, sitting in the saddle, pointed out. “Morlock, we are maybe twenty feet in the air.”

“Are we headed up or down?”

“A moment. Down, I think. Slowly.”

“Just as well,” Morlock muttered.

“Don't mutter,” his sister directed. “What are you saying?”

“Morlock not mutter?” muttered Wyrtheorn. “Shall the dew not glisten? Shall the sun not rise in the west? And a diamond not be harder than a duck-sapphire?”

“What are you saying, Wyrtheorn?”

“I am muttering,” the dwarf said distinctly.

“We're done,” Morlock said matter-of-factly. “Watch your seat, Ambrosia. I'm coming up.”

Morlock shook out the aethrium box in his hand; the phlogiston rushed out in a vaporous glowing cloud that dispersed even as it flooded upward. Then he let the box fall to the ground. Behind and below her Ambrosia heard Wyrtheorn give a sigh of exasperation. “The waste!” he exclaimed.

“You're too thrifty, Wyrth,” Morlock said. “The stuff's as precious as it is useful, no more. We can gather more if we need it.”

A hiss, a glowing cloud over her shoulder, and a thump on the ground below told Ambrosia that Wyrtheorn too had emptied his aethrium box and dropped it. By then Morlock was carefully clambering up the side of the floating horse. It was a ticklish business (for Ambrosia, with her broken hands, could not help) and they had descended almost halfway to the ground before he was upright on Velox's back in front of Ambrosia. Then he threw down a knotted cord and pulled Wyrtheorn up more swiftly. This was as well, because by that time they were beginning to fall more rapidly.

“Morlock,” Ambrosia began, hardly knowing what she would say.

“Don't worry,” he replied instantly. “Our weight just barely overrides the unweight of the phlogiston. We fall swiftly, perhaps, but will not strike heavily. However…”

“Yes?” said Wyrtheorn. “Don't keep us waiting, Master Morlock.”

“We are somewhat top-heavy, I expect. We should be careful not to overbalance while in the air.”

“Hear that, Wyrtheorn?” Ambrosia said lightly. “None of your riding tricks, then.” He was already gripping her arms from behind with painful intentness.

Wyrth laughed, and his grip eased somewhat. “Lady Ambrosia, I promise to behave.”

They struck the ground. The impact was less than if they had leapt a fence. And they immediately found themselves flying upward and forward at a sharp angle.

They all breathed deeply in relief. Wyrth's grip relaxed entirely. He said, “If—”

The horse screamed.

The sound was blood-freezing. Ambrosia felt Velox beneath her laboring with the effort of the scream. It was desperate and prolonged, expressing the last extremity of some dreadfully intense feeling—fear, or physical agony, she guessed. Behind her, through the last whistling rasp of the horse's scream, the harsh clear syllables of Dwarvish: Wyrth's expression of surprise and alarm, perhaps pity.

“I never thought!” Morlock said bitterly. “He's an old warhorse that had been through many a battle and single combat. I bought him from a castellan of the northern marches. I was only concerned about the trial at arms. I didn't think he'd be afraid of flying.…”

Wyrth, after his first shocked exclamation, fell silent. Ambrosia decided that she, too, would be silent. She understood the pain and horror her brother and his apprentice must be feeling. To an extent she shared it. But Ambrosia was not a softhearted woman; she had never had that luxury. To preserve her own life, for the chance of helping her descendant Lathmar, for the sake of the empire she had fostered, she would ride a thousand suffering beasts like Velox to their deaths. What was necessary she would do. But she realized that Morlock and Wyrth felt differently, and she would say nothing that might lead them to act on that feeling.

They were descending again to the ground. The horse, still shuddering, drew up all his legs at once in a very unequine manner.

“Terrified it is,
rokh tashna
,” Wyrtheorn guessed. “It may tumble us this time, Ambrosii. Get ready to jump.”

But there was no need. At the last moment Velox swung down all four legs in a driving motion that sent them plunging forward in a long flat arc.

“He can't be in pain,” Morlock said in a troubled voice. “And—” His voice was drowned out as Velox gave another heart-shaking scream.

Suddenly it occurred to Ambrosia that it was not a scream of terror at all.

She laughed. “This is all your fault, Morlock.”

He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder—a swift luminously gray glance that said everything. Yes, he too understood.

“What are you saying, Lady Ambrosia?” the dwarf asked.

“We've misunderstood, you see,” she said, over her own shoulder (as crooked as Morlock's). “Velox is not frightened, or in pain. Consider that he grew up and passed his prime in stables and paddocks, trotting in companies, living for the mad rush of a tournament day or a cavalry charge…”

“I begin to see.”

“Yes, I think we all do. Velox is not afraid. He is in heaven. At something past middle age for a warhorse, Morlock has taught him to fly.”

They came down to the ground again, and Velox brought all his hooves down in a stamping movement that plunged them straight into the dim blue evening air. Ambrosia's toes curled painfully inside her shoes, and her heart raced with apprehension and delight as the dark earth sank away.

Wyrtheorn laughed. Velox screamed. Morlock muttered.

“Don't mutter!” Ambrosia shouted.

Morlock held out his left hand and pointed. Glancing in that direction, Ambrosia saw light glinting off the dark forms of armed riders gathering below the crest of a nearby hill.

“They've found us, then,” Wyrth said. “Ah, well. We should have no trouble escaping them on a flying horse.”

“Escape?” Morlock said, his voice doubtful. His crooked shoulders twisted in a shrug. “Maybe.”

Ambrosia was about to laugh at his pessimism when a certain thought occurred to her. She decided to hold her tongue. Morlock knew the horse better than she did.

One of the armed riders below sounded a horn call. Velox's head snapped in that direction, and Ambrosia saw the charger's nostrils flare with anger and delight. With a serpentine movement the warhorse swung himself about in midair so that his head faced the imperial horse soldiers.

This maneuver nearly unseated Ambrosia. Because she could not grip with her shattered hands, she reached forward and hooked her forearms around her brother's midriff.

“With your permission, brother,” she said, resting her chin on his left and lower shoulder.

Morlock grunted.

“We're not going to make it, are we?” she said into his ear. “Velox won't retreat.”

“Do they have bowmen?” was his unexpected reply.

“I don't think so,” she said. “Bowmen are infantry.”

“Bad tactics,” he observed.

“Shut up.”

“We'll make it.”

“We won't!”

“You'll see.”

They struck the ground and rebounded, leaping over the crown of the hill where the imperial riders were gathering. Velox's scream broke through a storm of horn calls. Ambrosia felt Wyrth's hands tighten reflexively on her arms. Morlock suddenly shouted, a refrain of nonsense syllables carried on a deep-throated roar. When they struck the ground in the center of where the cavalry group had been, there was nothing there but dead hillside and some clouds of dust. Ambrosia could hear the hoofbeats of the imperial riders departing in various directions through the dusk.

“What was that spell?” Ambrosia demanded as they sprang up toward the first stars of evening.

Morlock cleared his throat, seemingly embarrassed.

“An Anhikh cattle call, I believe,” Wyrtheorn observed.

“We'll have Wyrth shout next time—,” Morlock began.

“Cattle call? Next time?” Ambrosia felt the conversation was getting away from her.

“It might be anything,” Morlock explained. “So long as they believe dire Ambrosian magic is being worked on them.”

“It won't keep working, Morlock,” Ambrosia said. “These are imperial soldiers.”

“Oh, I think you underrate your reputations, Lady Ambrosia,” the dwarf disagreed cheerfully. “Some of the stories I heard about you in the Great Market were enough to make one swear off sausages.”

“Sausages?”

“You haven't heard that one? Well, never mind. The point is, these soldiers are quite prepared to see Ambrosii exact a dreadful revenge by means of dreadful magic. They have their heads crammed full of such stories from the time they're born. And here we have a flying horse screaming horribly as it hurls through the darkness while on its back a three-headed silhouette chants ominous but unintelligible words—oh, yes, they'll run like rabbits.”

“But a whole cavalry wing…”

“The more do run, the more will run,” Morlock said flatly. “Our chief danger is that Velox will break a leg, or overturn in his enthusiasm. I think as it gets darker we will even be safe from bowmen.”

“They won't have bowmen.”

Morlock shrugged.

“Shut up!” Ambrosia insisted.

Velox spotted another group of horsemen deeper in the hills. Snorting, he lowered his head and—as they fell toward the ground—struck off with all four hooves, bounding toward the hapless enemy.

After dispersing the greater part of the cavalry wing, Velox seemed to grow restless, and even a little bored. At that time, well after full night had risen into the sky, Morlock managed to persuade the charger to direct his bounds toward the smudge of light on the western horizon that was the imperial city.

“That was rather easy,” said Wyrtheorn suspiciously.

“New horizons,” Ambrosia speculated. “Think of all the traffic he can disrupt in the city. What do you say, Morlock?”

Morlock grunted. From Ambrosia's viewpoint his expression looked even more saturnine than usual.

“I see what you mean,” said Wyrtheorn reflectively. “I hadn't thought of that.”

Ambrosia held her silence through two more long leaps. Not even Velox screamed. The lifeless hills below issued no noises into the night air; the only sound was the chill persistent sea breeze, whispering over the dead lands toward the south.

Eyeing the western horizon she said finally, “We're not headed directly for the city, are we?”

“Gravesend Field, I think,” said her brother, in a burst of volubility.

Ambrosia grunted.

It became obvious as they left the Dead Hills behind them (a ragged shadow on the moonslit eastern horizon) that Morlock's guess was correct. Velox's leaps over the plain separating them from Gravesend were the long low ones that covered the most ground in the least time, and he had resumed his enthusiastic screaming.

“You know what it is,” the dwarf said, in a speculative tone of voice.

“Say it,” Ambrosia replied.

“He's not satisfied with the outcome of the joust. You saw how Morlock got knocked right off his back. Maybe that's a point of pride with warhorses.”

“My fault,” Morlock said matter-of-factly. “I never was a great spearman. You may be right, though.”

“Is your warhorse wounded by self-doubt? Your palfrey pained with an inexplicable distress? Your charger changeable in his moods? Consult Brother Wyrth, ministering to the emotional needs of the equine even now in yonder booth!”

Morlock grunted.

“Well, it might pay better than being your apprentice.”

“Anything would. I suppose Urdhven and his soldiers will have left Gravesend by now.”

Ambrosia resisted the temptation to grunt enigmatically. “Think again, brother. Note yon trail of dust the sea breeze is carrying south.”