Blood of Ambrose (14 page)

When the binding was done the King turned sluggishly toward the door they had entered, but Morlock said, “We can't go that way. There must be a door yonder; the other torturer headed for it.”

Straining with each step the King followed Morlock to the far wall and waited through the endless dragging seconds it took for Morlock to find the secret door hidden behind a woven stone panel. Morlock cast the panel aside, kicked the door open, and stepped through, holding Tyrfing in a high, close guard as he glanced up and down the hall. He motioned the King to follow him.

Dragging his feet along the slimy floor of the corridor outside, the King followed Morlock as he passed onward. There was the sound of booted feet behind them; the King hurried as best he could.

Then he froze, along with Morlock, as a Protector's Man stepped into the corridor in front of them.

“I just don't believe it,” the soldier was saying.

“Madam,” said a clear-voiced but unseen speaker, “you have a tin ear. No one but my master would make so much noise when trying to be sneaky. No matter how many soldiers are behind us we ought to—”

The speaker, now emerging into the corridor, stopped dead in his tracks and fell silent. A monstrous weedy green figure half a man's height, he raised his arm and pointed with a hand that dripped blood and water from the palm. The Protector's Man turned and froze, catching sight of Morlock and the King. Another moment of silence passed, and then the Ambrosii met with a roar of laughter as their enemies closed in from either side.

It was a brief, achingly long time they stood in the open corridor, laughing at each other as the King stood apart, his burden and their danger growing heavier with every heartbeat. Then, abruptly (the King couldn't follow what they were saying) they moved together, back along the corridor the way Morlock and the King had come, with Ambrosia in the lead.

Wyrth stepped next to the King and helped him shoulder Lorn, snapping the knotted makeshift cords around his waist like rotten string. The King was hoping that the dwarf would take the entire burden, but for some reason he did not.

“—were an idiot,” Ambrosia was saying to her brother. “You should have guessed they would hold the two close together.”

Morlock muttered something.

“I
said
I was an idiot,” Ambrosia replied. “Or did I?”

“No, madam,” the dwarf called. “That was us.”

“Morlock, if you can't teach your froggy apprentice a lesson or two about silence, I'll—Trouble.”

They were passing through the torture chamber again, and a company of soldiers was passing by outside. As the others got out of sight, Ambrosia stepped forward and engaged in gravel-voiced repartee with the patrol leader. The King couldn't understand a single one of their words—the world seemed to be expanding and contracting before his eyes; his face felt hot—but presently he found they were moving again.

The scrape of stone on stone shortly thereafter announced their entry into a hidden passage. They climbed an endless series of narrow dusty stairways, lightless airless holes where they must always go single file and he bore the lion's share of Lorn's weight, blood running into his eyes and hair.

Finally they reached a more open airy place, dimly and indirectly lit by openings near the ceiling. It must be day outside, the King realized. The dreadful endless night had ended at last.

Wyrth gently lifted Lorn from the King's shoulders and laid him in the corner, tearing cloth from his soggy shirt to cover the stumps where Lorn's hands had been.

The King collapsed nearby, drinking in the fact that he did not need to move, to flee, to hide, to fight, to pretend he was stronger than he was. Gasping he listened to the three others, chattering like veteran soldiers after a battle.

“I never thought we would make it. Never.” (This was Ambrosia, his iron Grandmother.)

“Your ready wit saved us, twice and three times,” Morlock remarked.

“My ready womb. We were all as stupid as mad pigs, blundering about inside a farmhouse. Let me see that hand. I should have slit Steng's throat.”

“It's better not. They spent more time than they could afford trying to read the scene in Steng's room. Or so I guess.”

“Especially after I left my sword in Steng's hand.”

Morlock chuckled, an unpleasant sound. “Good. Good. A flight above the mad pig level, I'd say.”

“Save your breath for screaming. This is going to hurt. Wyrth, there's a water bottle somewhere in this uniform—damn, it's nearly empty.”

“There's a water stone in Morlock's pack. It ought to serve us all for a few days.”

“Is that why he wanted that albatross along? Morlock, if you had left that damn thing with Genjandro—”

Morlock grunted, dissenting. “Delaying tactic.”

“Scut.”

“Not at all, Lady Ambrosia,” the dwarf chipped in. “You should have seen him, before the Protector's Men broke in at Genjandro's, frantically repacking so that the book on gold making was on the top.”

“To distract Steng, or whoever opened the pack? So. Did it work?”

Morlock grunted. “Yes. Steng's not a dangerous man. Wyrtheorn, don't bind those wounds yet.”

“I was just going to sponge off the little King. Creator knows he's had enough blood dripped on him tonight.”

“Let him rest,” Morlock directed. “He pushed himself as far as he could. He has nerve, that one.”

Ambrosia laughed, a short sharp sound like metal breaking. “You've misread that book, brother. The old fire has gone out in House Ambrose.”

“We'll see.”

“We've
seen.
If—” She broke off as the King sat up. There was silence as he struggled to his feet. They were all three looking solemnly at him, and he glared back.

“I don't care what you say about me,” he said thickly. “But none of you has said
one word
about Lorn, or made
one move
to help him. So don't. I don't care! He wouldn't want your help! Give me some of that water and I'll clean his wounds myself.”

That had got them! He exulted fiercely as he watched their frozen faces. The silence lasted for five heartbeats, and then Morlock said evenly, “King Lathmar, you cannot help Lorn. No one can. He is dead.”

Lathmar turned and looked stupidly down on Lorn, lying not far away. It was true. It was obviously true.

“He died almost as he spoke to you,” Morlock's voice went relentlessly on.

“Why didn't you tell me?” the King cried. He was horrified that he had carried that bag of broken bones a single step. It wasn't Lorn. Lorn was far from here. Lorn was dead. Lorn was dead.

“I'm sorry,” said Morlock's voice from near at hand. The King looked up and saw those bright enigmatic eyes on him. “I misunderstood. I thought you were acting as his kin.”

Ambrosia laughed harshly. “Dwarvish scut! Dead is dead.”

“It is a dwarvish custom,” Wyrth admitted. He, too, was suddenly at the King's side. “A slain, er, man has certain things owed to him. Revenge and burial, chiefly. Morlock provided the revenge; he thought you were bringing away the body for burial. I thought the same thing, but then I
am
a dwarf, and prone to believe in dwarvish scut.”

“You killed him,” the King said thickly.

Silence.

“You all killed him!” the King shouted. His face wrinkled as he spoke, stained with dried blood, Lorn's blood. “You killed him. You and your
empire!
” He screamed the last word as if it were the filthiest word in any language—which it was. It had killed Lorn.

“It is not our empire,” Ambrosia responded calmly. She had taken her helmet off; he had almost forgotten what her face looked like during the endless night.

“It is,” the King said wildly. “You created it. You built it into something men kill other men for. It's yours…and the…the Strange Gods can have it, and
you
!”

“Men will kill other men for a goat's knucklebone or a piece of dirt,” Ambrosia said calmly. “They'll kill each other for the fun of killing. More to the point, do you think men like Steng and Urdhven would be wielding power if any of us three had a claim to the imperial throne?”

“If—”

“That was a rhetorical question, Lathmar, because the answer is, ‘No.' Steng would be a street-corner hawker of drugs; Urdhven would be knocking up ex-maidens in his little barony; and Lorn would be a living, itching, complaining foot soldier instead of a dead hero if this were
my
empire. The trouble with it is that it's not mine. It's yours or no one's. That is why men are killing each other in these evil days, Lathmar. Because what is no one's might be anyone's, if only he can get it.”

“Enough,” Morlock said. “Ambrosia, he is grieving for his friend.”

Ambrosia spat out a clot of dark phlegm before replying. “Don't coddle him, Morlock. He's seen
one
soldier die in this civil war. Lorn wasn't the first and won't be the last.”

“You sound like Merlin,” Morlock remarked.

Ambrosia became very still. Then she said quietly, “That's a woman's argument.”

Morlock grunted. “Then it ought to be effective. Wyrth, tend to the King.”

Lathmar struck out desperately at the hard blunt hands that offered to take his arm. But his strength, such as it was, had gone. The last thing he remembered was sitting with his head on his knees weeping uncontrollably. He had begun to cry when Morlock called Lorn his friend, and now he could not stop. In all his life he had had one friend, and now that friend was dead. What was an empire compared to that?

hrough the nine or so months they hid within the stony womb of Ambrose's hidden passages, “sitting on each other's damn elbows,” as Ambrosia herself impatiently put it, the King only saw the dwarf Wyrtheorn embarrassed once. He only saw him angry once. This cheerful unflappability was one of the things that made him a good companion, but it was one of the things that set him apart from the others, made him a little strange to Lathmar.

For Merlin's children were anything but unflappable. Ambrosia was frequently and furiously angry. For Lathmar she clearly felt equal amounts of affection and contempt, and would spill from one to the other in midconversation.

That didn't bother him. He always knew she had felt that way, and it was almost a relief to hear her say as much. Her anger didn't frighten him, but her weakness did. He watched one night, covertly and with mounting horror, as she sat talking with Morlock and Wyrth, talking and talking in her hard clear voice, one arm thrown carelessly about her brother's shoulders (as crooked as her own), her other hand holding tightly to one of his. Talking and talking as her head drooped and jerked with weariness, talking in her hard clear voice. Afraid to sleep, afraid to let go, afraid. Afraid.

Though he was rarely angry, and never at Lathmar, Morlock was worse. As the days passed into months, his hand healed, he grew less pale. But while he was still bleeding he directed Wyrth in burying Lorn within the castle walls, carving the epitaph with his own hands:
LORN: soldier and friend of Lathmar VII.
And from the first day he took charge of the King's education—he was grammarian, fencing master, and court sorcerer all in one.

“Ten thousand things you need to know I cannot teach you,” he said to Lathmar. “The law of your empire is nothing I understand, for instance. But the language of the land where I was born, the secret speech as you miscall it, I can teach you that. There is much knowledge in that language, and many of your subjects are exiles from the Wardlands, as I am. I can teach you to defend yourself with a sword. And I can teach you the uses of the Sight within you—the skills of vision.”

He was patient; he never lashed out at Lathmar as Ambrosia did. But he was terrifyingly unpredictable. Once, when Ambrosia cuffed Lathmar for some slight error (he never remembered what it was for, but the blow was nothing—the kitchen servants used to hit him harder to amuse themselves), Morlock stepped forward and threw his sister, his beloved sister, whom he rocked nightly to sleep in his arms (as she talked and talked and talked), against the wall and kicked her feet out from under her. Lathmar cowered, waiting for the Dark Man to turn on him, but it never happened. Ambrosia picked herself off the ground, laughed shortly, and said, “You'll soften him up, Morlock. His trouble is, he hasn't been beaten enough.”

Morlock stared at her with his pale eyes until she turned away. She never hit Lathmar again.

Lathmar was not allowed to grow soft. Morlock, as fencing master, worked him until he literally fell over with exhaustion. Fencing, yes, endless mock combat, but always with a deadly point. The court fencing teacher had never been especially concerned with the King's proficiency, but Morlock and his apprentice casually assumed that Lathmar would, soon and often, be fighting for his life. Along with the necessary formality of thrust and parry they discussed the location of probably mortal wounds, weak spots in body armor, tactics when fighting more than one opponent. Lathmar balanced for hours on the ball of one foot while Morlock and Wyrth walked around him, tossing him a ball that he had to toss back without delay.

“Is this how Naevros taught you?” Lathmar demanded in a rare pause from exercises.

Morlock fixed him with a gray luminous glance, saying nothing.

“I…I had heard you were taught by Naevros syr Tol in…in the old time,” Lathmar said.

“Naevros taught me the way of the sword,” Morlock acknowledged finally. “There were some who said it was a waste of time—that a crookback would never learn. But he taught me so well that when the time came, I was able to kill him.”

Lathmar was aghast, even more so when he saw the grief on Morlock's dark face. He had loved Naevros, it was clear, yet “when the time came,” he had killed him. He loved his sister, had risked his life to save her, but he had thrown her about like a rag doll for no good reason. No one this man loved was safe, obviously; someday “the time” would come and Morlock would destroy them in turn. Maybe it was part of the curse that went with Tyrfing.

As a teacher in sorcery Morlock was even more demanding. The difficulty lay in the fact that seer-training did not consist of learning things. “We must strengthen your intuition, your inner voice,” Morlock said. “Your perception, too, is coarsely material; we must liberate it. Push-ups won't help, nor noun-declensions.”

What did help, it seemed, was an almost endless series of pranks. Lathmar would be told to go to a room and practice with a sword there for an hour; he would do so, then when it came to resheathe the blade he found it was not in his hands. It had never been: it was an illusion. Morlock's hand would leap off his arm and run like a rat into a hole in the wall. But on second glance Morlock's hand was as it had been, and there was no hole in the wall. Illusion. Or Lathmar would walk around a bend in the corridor and there stood the Lord Protector in full armor.

“Morlock!” he cried impatiently. “I don't have time for this now! I have to go steal some food.”

“Who told you to?” the Protector inquired, in Morlock's voice.

“Wyrth. He said…” The King's voice trailed off. “It wasn't Wyrth.”

The Lord Protector dissolved into Morlock. “How do you know?”

The King shrugged. It was partly a guess. But, as he thought back, there was something odd and…insubstantial about that Wyrth. “Wyrth never calls it stealing,” Lathmar said finally.

Morlock's pale glance betrayed impatience. “Of course not. I used the word to suggest doubt in your mind. But you only just thought of it. There was something else, but you do not speak of it.”

“I don't know how!” the King cried out.

Morlock was not displeased. He motioned for Lathmar to follow him.

Presently Lathmar found himself in an empty square chamber he had never entered before. Wyrth was there, sitting with his back against the wall opposite the door. He was also sitting next to the door. Lathmar glanced around the room: there were four Wyrths, each sitting with his back to a wall. Each one, as he met his eye, smiled and waved agreeably.

“Here is my apprentice,” said the Dark Man, “and three simulacra we have crafted. You may get as close as you like to them, but do not actually touch them. Also, do not engage them in conversation. Go about the room and tell me what you perceive.”

The King walked about the room. In a few moments he returned. “They are all different,” he said, feeling helpless.

“But?” Morlock had a knack for spotting his unspoken reservations.

“But that one isn't alive,” Lathmar said, pointing at the Wyrth sitting next to the door. “I don't know what it is.”

Morlock reached down and tugged at the Wyrth's boot. He fell into a heap of shining cord, and Morlock deftly wrapped it up and stowed it in a bag in his belt.

“A physical shell,” he explained. “The most difficult simulacrum to spot,
if
there is someone inside it. Tell me of the others.”

“I think the real Wyrth is sitting opposite the door.”

“I didn't ask you to find the real Wyrth,” Morlock replied coldly, “though of course I expected you to try. Tell me of the others.”

“That one”—Lathmar pointed at a Wyrth—“isn't there.”

“What do you mean? Don't you see him?”

“Yes and no. I'm sure he's there. But I know he isn't. He…I feel him in my mind. But my eyes can't feel him.”

Morlock nodded encouragingly, and the false Wyrth vanished. “A tal-construct, projected directly into your mind. For the adept, the easiest of simulacra to spot: the talic halo is unmistakable, nothing like a real person or thing.”

Lathmar slowly approached the Wyrth opposite. “This is the strangest of all,” he whispered.

“Put your hand out,” Morlock directed. “Touch it.”

“Wait!” The Wyrth who had been sitting opposite the door got up and walked over. “Let me look at the thing for a few moments longer. God Creator! Master Morlock, it's wonderful.”

Morlock grunted. “
You
would think so.”

“That's not what I mean and you know it. Do you see what it is, Lathmar?”

“No.”

“Keep on looking at it, then.” Wyrth went over and doused the lamp in the middle of the room. Everything went dark—except the last simulacrum of Wyrth. It remained as bright as it had been, and lit the room like a candle.

“He
built
it,” Wyrth said, coming over. “Took light from a window and carved this image in it.”

“The process is more like weaving,” Morlock corrected him. “Each mote of light must have a stable path, linked to others, or the image will dissolve.”

Lathmar hesitantly put his hand out to touch the luminous image. There was no surface; his hand passed into it, and light splashed and foamed about his wrist. The image dimmed markedly as captive light motes left their paths. Within the simulacrum a small mechanism sat on the floor, with an upright armature that moved at intervals.

Wyrth lit the lamp again, and Morlock dispersed the simulacrum with a wave of his hands. He picked up the small machine and handed it to Wyrth. “This shifted the paths from time to time,” he explained, “so that the figure could move.”

Lathmar was struck by Wyrth's evident wonder. “Is the craft of Making difficult?” he asked. “Could I learn it?”

“No,” said Morlock flatly. “You have no gift that way. Yet you may become a master seer, far greater than I am. If you were not king and emperor-to-be I would send you to New Moorhope in the Wardlands. But I can teach you much that you need to know, and in the end, the master trains himself. Enough for today. Perhaps you and Wyrth should go and ‘gather' some food after all. Don't forget grain for the crows.” He walked off without a farewell to either of the others.

“He thinks more of those crows than he does of you or me!” Lathmar, stung, complained to Wyrth.

The dwarf grinned and shook his head. “But if you could carry messages to the city, like the crows do, that would impress him, certainly. We'll work on it, in your copious free time.”

“Wyrth,” the King whispered, as they descended the narrow hidden stairs that led toward the kitchens. “Why don't you call it ‘stealing' when we go to get food?”

“Because it's not,” Wyrth said flatly. “This castle and all its contents are yours in law. Your ‘Protector' is the thief.”

“I know,” the King said patiently. “But…”

Wyrth looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “But you think there's something more?”

“Yes.”

“You're right. I'm a dwarf. Stealing and lying are the two most serious offenses a dwarf can commit; they're even the same word in Dwarvish. I've done my share of both, I suppose, but I'm not as lighthearted about it as the Lady Ambrosia is.”

“Morlock seems to feel about it almost as you do.”

“He doesn't. He's just being civil—he was raised among dwarves, himself, so he knows how I feel.”

“What was he like, back then?” the King wondered. He found it hard to believe Morlock had ever been young.

“
Rosh takna.
I don't know. Morlock was exiled from the Wardlands about the time Ambrosia married your ancestor, Uthar the Great. What is that, three hundred years ago? I'm not even a hundred fifty years old. A bit aged for an apprentice, but not old enough to remember Morlock's youth.”

“Why do you stay an apprentice? I thought all dwarves wanted the title of Master Maker.”

“I do,” Wyrth acknowledged. “I suppose I should have demanded Morlock release me and gone off as a journey-smith some time ago. That's the usual way: apprentice, journey-smith, master. But he wanders a lot, you know, so I'm effectively a journey-smith as long as I stay with him. It's when I leave him that I'll be ready to settle down somewhere as master of my own shop. Also, Morlock is the master of all makers. I could spend another century, or the rest of my life, in his service and still learn new things every day.”