Blood of Ambrose (13 page)

Into the emptiness of his mind came the slow persistent sound of dripping. He listened for a moment, absorbed, utterly unaware of what he was hearing. Then he knew: it was the sound of Morlock's blood, still dripping from his open wounds. Finally the smoke and fire lost their mystery.

It must be true what people said—that the secret of the Ambrosian immunity to fire lay in their blood, which drew the fire from their flesh, and which could itself start fires, when spilled. It was said to be a poison as well.

Steng was tempted to keep Morlock alive a while longer to do some experiments. It would be dangerous, of course, and there was always the possibility of using Ambrosia to the same end. When he came to the question, though, he found he feared Ambrosia more than this Morlock fellow.

In any case, the thing to do now was to clean up the mess. He turned to fetch his guard and noticed with some gratification that the man was already approaching him: finally something was going well on this dreadful night. Something of nightmare remained in the scene, or in Steng's own mind. Some trick of the light or the smoke made it seem the man approaching was headless, his slow uncertain steps the movements of a body about to collapse.…

Steng stared open-mouthed as the body of his deaf-mute guard fell in a heap on the floor. Beyond it, the doorway filled with a figure in the surcoat and armor of a Protector's Man. But it was no man. The little room was already echoing with the fierce, pitiless laughter of the royal ancestress, Ambrosia Viviana.

Although perfectly capable of fear, Steng did not then feel it. It was something beyond fear: a stark blank realization of his powerlessness. That, along with the smoke fumes, the poison of Morlock's blood, and simple shock overthrew his last vestiges of strength, and he fell unconscious on the dead body of his dead protector, like a stone or a broken toy or any lifeless thing.

When Ambrosia saw Steng fall she wasted no more thought on him. Glancing around, she saw the contents of Morlock's pack spread out over a nearby table. She went over to gather tools, then returned, drawing a three-legged chair with her. Standing on the chair she used the tools to shatter the hinges on the manacles imprisoning Morlock's ankles. At the last blow of the chisel the manacles flew open and Morlock began to fall. Ambrosia dropped the tools and seized her brother by the shins, but the weight caused her to overbalance and she fell with him to the floor.

Half dazed, she saw Morlock lying beside her on the floor. He also stood above her, a glittering pillar of black-and-white fire. He offered her a hand (?) and, hesitantly, she accepted it, rising from her half-conscious self to walk beside her brother's tal-shadow.

He led her to the window of the small chamber and gestured. She saw immediately what he meant her to see: through the dark translucence of Ambrose's mossy stones she saw a river of light approaching through the narrow streets of the city below: living souls, living tal. As she watched, the flood broke upon the City Gate, then after a pause began to filter in through the shadowy opening, its light dimmed by veils of stone.

The Protector's forces
, she thought. Nothing was so alien to the rapture of vision as ordinary rational speech, so she consciously formed the words, firing them at her vision-lost brother like arrows.
The Protector is coming back. We must hurry, or he'll trap us in these towers. I know where Wyrth is being held. Morlock, return.…

She saw the brightness of his flames dimmed by conscious forethought. She sensed his presence recede toward the physical plane. With a poignant sense of loss and relief, she opened her eyes to find herself twelve feet from the chamber window, her head aching. Lathmar knelt over her with tears on his face.

“—ndmother,
wake
up!” he was saying.

“I'm with you,” she said, sitting up. “See to Morlock, if you can.”

But she saw that he had. There was a clumsy smoldering bandage about Morlock's tortured hand (very clumsy, but this was no time for a lesson in leechcraft), the burning rugs on the far side of the room had been put out…and the pool of blood was mostly dry. The air of the chamber was clear, too. Ambrosia suppressed a curse. Time, as well as volition, is distorted in rapture. How long had they been unconscious? The Protector's Men might be killing Wyrth as she sat there.

“Morlock!” she shouted in her brother's ear.

He responded with a rasping cough that might have had a syllable of Dwarvish in it.

“Don't revert to type, you useless bag of knuckles,” she stormed at him. “Talk to me in my own language. And don't say anything noble and self-sacrificing: we've already been to too much trouble on your account.”

“I said,” Morlock croaked, “'Pack my pack.'”

Her head ringing with pain and the loss of rapture, she cursed him for a nine-tenths dwarvish deviant crookback bastard.

He shrugged.

Ambrosia snarled and jumped to her feet. She packed his pack, not omitting the chisel-grip and hammer she had used to break his bonds. She understood Morlock's demand: it would have been an act of madness to leave the pack behind. The books alone would have made a half-wizard like Steng a power among those-who-know.

The sounds attendant on her brother rising to his feet sickened her; she kept her face averted. They needed to know
now
if Morlock could move about on his own. When it proved that he could she finished knotting the straps and turned around to shoulder the pack.

He moved toward her, his face bloodless as a ghost's. “I'll—”

“You'll shut up. Now's not the time to let loose the mordant wit and conversationalist we all know rages within you. I can handle your damn pack.” She grunted, though, as she took the weight of it on her shoulders. (No wonder he grunted so much.)

“—take Tyrfing,” he finished, as if she had not spoken.

Glumly she passed him the dark ornamentless sheath that lay upon the table. She saw Lathmar goggling at the dark crystalline pommel, and almost smiled. She sensed an incipient hero-worship there. Ah well: it could only prove dangerous if both of them lived through the night, which seemed somewhat unlikely.

“Now!” she said. “We'll go break out Wyrth—”

“What about Lorn?” the King demanded (speaking to Morlock, Ambrosia noted wryly).

“I know where he is,” Morlock said impassively. “But I don't know where Wyrth is.”

“But I do,” Ambrosia said.

Morlock nodded.

In the tense silence they all heard, faint and far off, the echoing reports of booted feet on stone.

Ambrosia swore. It was a waste of time, but it was the only alternative to
You poor dear, I can't have you wandering around this nasty castle all by yourself.

“You never learned the hidden passages, did you?” she said accusingly.

“No.”

“You'd better take Lathmar, then. He knows some.”

“Good. We'll meet when we can.”

She moved forward and embraced him briefly. “Go, now. I'll sow confusion in their ranks.” She kept her tone neutral. He hugged her back, a hard shell inside a hard shell, she thought, behind the mask of her visor. Then he was gone, and Lathmar, with a woeful look backward, followed him through the doorway.

This night would be wasted time if they managed to get themselves killed, she reflected. (She took no thought for Lorn.) She hated to waste time, so she set straight on sowing confusion, taking the still-bloody sword she had slain Steng's guard with and putting the grip in Steng's right hand, which clenched upon it reflexively.

“Ah, Steng!” she said. “If you didn't exist we'd have to design and build you.” She allowed herself a single fiercely satisfied thought about what the Protector's Men would likely do to the poisoner-turned-torturer if they had the chance, then passed from the bloody chamber to the rising din of the corridor outside.

The King knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about healing. He didn't know how much blood a person could lose and still live. Morlock's grave sallow face, though impassive, was somehow imprinted with sick weariness, and Lathmar noticed he limped as he walked.

“Is your leg hurt?”

“An old wound,” Ambrosia's brother said flatly. “Be quiet now.”

The King of the Two Cities shut his half-open mouth, and they moved as quickly as they could down the dark narrow stairway that led to the pedestal floor. They were on that floor, well lit and well aired, when a door opened in the corridor behind them and a group of chattering soldiers came out—hiding from their troop leader, not taking their search seriously. Until it succeeded: their voices fell silent as Morlock turned against them and drew the accursed sword Tyrfing in a single movement.

The King thought it was all over with them then. The only thing between him and captivity was a sick, limping man older than Time. If the soldiers had seen Morlock as the King recently had (hung by the heels like a slaughtered pig) no doubt he would have been right.

But (he realized this later) what they saw was this: the dark glittering edge of the accursed sword, and beyond it the smoldering hand and the sallow impassive face of the man who had killed Hlosian Bekh.

They ran. But as they fled, they called out, shouting for their troop-leader, reinforcements,
help.
The King thought of Lorn's desperate stand against the Protector and his men at Gravesend Field and was ashamed for them. But Morlock wheeled about, seized him by the collar, and dragged him down the corridor.

“I can walk!” the King protested.

“Don't. Run!”

The King ran, his short legs moving double-time to keep up with Morlock's long, irregular stride. The darkness of a stairwell closed about them and the King paused, sighing with relief.

“Don't stop.” Morlock's flat implacable voice came out of the dark. “Once they pass the word there's no escape for us. Run.”

They ran: down endless unlit stairwells, through wide corridors dangerous with light. The King remembered little of it later except his growing desire for sleep, a thirst for rest so intense it made all exterior sensations dim and dreamlike.

He returned to himself at that blessed moment when Morlock drew to a halt, putting a hand on his shoulder. They were in a hallway he didn't recognize, but he knew they were deep under Ambrose: the weight of the stone above their heads was almost palpable.

“Be quiet,” Morlock said gently. The King, about to protest that he had said nothing, realized he was gasping and gulping like a lungfish in a net. He tried to make his breathing less raspy and more regular, finally succeeding.

“Now,” said Morlock, “we will enter the chamber together. There will be one or two attendants within. I will kill them—”

“Why?” the King demanded.

Morlock's strangely pale gray eyes peered at him though the shadows of the dark corridor. The King could not read his expressions (if he had any!), but he thought Morlock was surprised.

“You'll understand,” he said finally. “Don't interfere. Tend to Lorn.”

“What if he's not here? Suppose they've moved him?”

“Then he is lost to us. Come now.”

It was a clean, well-lighted place they entered, like a surgeon's chamber he had been taken to once when he fell sick, before his parents died. Like the surgeon, the attendants themselves were not clean. They looked up, sweat-stained faces twisting in surprise, from the bright bloody filth on the table at the center of the room.

Morlock spoke, but the King never heard what he said, for at that moment he realized the squirming thing on the table was wearing Lorn's face. For a long stupid second he wondered why they had put Lorn's face on that thing. It was very like a mask: bloodlessly pale, fixed wooden expression, dark holes where the eyes should be. Then he understood; he understood everything.

He walked straight to Lorn, ignoring the attendants. One brushed by him, plunging forward to Morlock and death; the other fled away to the far wall of the chamber.

The King stopped at the table; spiked metallic forms gleamed dully with Lorn's drying blood. Lorn couldn't see him: charred wet meat was all that remained in his eye sockets. The King could think of nothing to say (did even Kedlidor the Rite-Master know a formula for this?) and simply reached to unfasten the manacles binding Lorn's stumps. This was a mistake; Lorn flinched at his touch, and the animal whine that escaped his torn lips broke the King's heart.

“No! No!” the King whispered urgently, frightened and obscurely angry. “I've come to release you!”

“What is your name, friend?” Lorn whispered, breath whistling through the hole in his throat.

There was only one answer for that. “I am your King.” He tried to say it firmly, but his voice quavered.

“Majesty!” the tortured soldier gasped. He added loyally, “I knew you'd come.”

He was lying. He must be lying, thought Lathmar, as his eyes filled with tears and his soft fingers strove to turn the bolts of the manacles. How could anyone think such a thing? How could anyone be so stupid as to expect it? He hadn't come, anyway. He'd been brought.

When he finally unfastened Lorn's bonds he looked up to see Morlock standing at the door, evidently listening. The two torturers lay like broken dolls on the floor; Morlock had killed them without drawing blood.

“Help me,” he said to his Grandmother's brother.

“How?”

“I…I want to bring Lorn away from here.”

Again Morlock turned his bright colorless eyes on the King for a long moment. Whether the glance expressed surprise, disdain, or some other emotion the King could not tell and did not care.

“You'll have to carry him,” Morlock said. “Our enemies are at our heels and I'll be fighting soon. I'll tie him to your back, though.”

When the dreadful weight of Lorn's ruined body came down on his shoulders, Lathmar nearly quailed. But there was no alternative. He would die himself before he left Lorn here.

Morlock bound the flaccid body to his shoulders with twisted strips of cloth torn from the dead torturers' smocks. The King tried to gasp out an apology to Lorn for confining him after so brief a freedom. But Lorn did not answer; it probably hurt to speak, or perhaps he was unconscious.