Blood of Ambrose (3 page)

Rusk's feelings were less ambiguous, and he gave vent to them all the way back to their farm. He cursed everyone they had dealt with, from the Protector on down, not excluding the King (“that foul-mouthed fucking little brat”) or Ambrosia (“the evil venom-spewing bitch”). Frequently he exclaimed, “Morlock take them all!” because he considered himself to have been ill used, if not positively betrayed.

They sold most of their goods at Twelve Stones, for a fraction of what they would have gotten at the Great Market. Their ride home was another long litany of curses, this time including the day's buyers and competing sellers, but concentrating as before on the Protector, the guard captain, the ungrateful King, and that inhuman crook-back witch Ambrosia. Rusk invited Morlock to show himself and cart off each one in several directions.

Lata, whose shame had grown as her anger faded, finally told him to shut up. But the grievance became something of an obsession with Rusk, and for years afterward he was liable to mutter, “Morlock take them! Morlock take them all!” particularly when he was doing some dirty or disagreeable task.

The pattern for all this was set on that first day, when they returned home to find the young nephew they had hired to watch their farm missing, their scarecrow stolen, and a murder of crows feeding in their wheat field. Before anything else, Rusk had to rush hither and thither through the field, waving his arms like a madman to scare away the crows. This he did while screaming out such treasonable abuse of the imperial family that even the crows were shocked. The repeated references to Morlock caught their attention, too, for they had a treaty with Morlock. It was the treaty, rather than Rusk's ineffectual gesticulations, that caused the murder to rise up into the air, showering Rusk with seeds and croaks of abuse, and fly off into a neighboring wood for a parliament.

They settled between them how much they actually knew of the story—this took some time, since crows are quarrelsome and apt to suppose they know more than they do—and they agreed on who was to carry the message. They then determined Morlock's location by the secret means prescribed by the treaty and dispatched the messenger. Their duty discharged, the parliament adjourned and the murder flew back to pillage Rusk's wheat field again.

But the messenger-crow flew east and north till night fell and day followed night. He flew on, pausing only to steal a few bites of food now and then, and catch an hour's sleep in an abandoned nest. At last, after sunset on the second day, the messenger flew over a hillside where a dwarf and a man with crooked shoulders were sitting over the embers of a campfire; the man was juggling live coals with his bare fingers. The messenger-crow settled down on his left shoulder and spoke into his ear.

he judicial murder of a royal person is not something that can be done lightly, nor should it be done in secret. Rightly performed, it is a piece of theater, and the murderer—who is, as it were, the director and producer of the piece—must select the audience carefully. They must be numerous and they must be (collectively at least) powerful. But they must not be so numerous nor so individually powerful that they can intervene on behalf of the victim if they are so inclined. They must be forced to watch the murder without seeming to be forced; they must watch it without protest, so that they will forever after support the party of the murderer, having become his accomplices. The forms must be observed, so that they can accept their complicity with something like good conscience.

If both they and the murderer live to old age, they may actually become proud of their complicity. “It had to be done,” they'll say. “You can't know what it was like. Bad times need strong men.”

And if the murderer comes to grief, his onetime accomplices will be sadly conscious of their own innocence. “We ourselves did nothing; we did what we had to do, and waited. But bad men come to bad ends….”

Wyrtheorn, as a dwarf and a voluntary exile from the Wardlands, had a professional interest in such matters. At least that was how he put it in the rug shop of Genjandro, just off the Great Market in the Imperial city of Ontil. “At first it was just professional,” he confided to Genjandro himself, over a friendly mug of beer. “These men and women and their great thumping quarrels were affecting business. So I made it my business to know about them, but I ended up by becoming interested. They are a bloodthirsty lot, these Vraidish barbarians.”

Genjandro, a native Ontilian and no friend to the Second Empire, allowed himself a thin smile but no more. A smile might mean anything.

“Now, let me see,” Wyrtheorn continued, understanding fully Genjandro's reticence. “The last time I was in the city must have been a hundred round years ago. Uthar the Fifth was Emperor then. A strong ruler, so they said. I thought he had banned these trials by combat.”

Genjandro grunted. “That is so, though I had forgotten it. I was not born then, of course”—a dig at the dwarf for having thoughtlessly referred to his racial longevity—“but my father mentioned the matter to me once. Uthar the Fifth was a great man, but he did not live forever unlike—well, you know who I mean. His grandson had a long minority, and the Regency Council of the time restored the combats. The nobility will always prefer combat; they have the longer swords, as the expression is.”

“I suppose Ambrosia sat on the council.”

“At its head. But when the nobles clamored, she let them have their combats. Some say her powers were slipping, even then, but I don't see it. She's a noble herself, of a sort.”

“Ye-es—she would have had a kind of inheritance in the Wardlands, but that she was born after old Merlin's exile.”

“I meant because of her association with the Imperial family.”

“Eh? Oh, yes—them.”

Genjandro, heir to a culture nearly as old as that of the Wardlands, favored this remark with another thin smile. “Now if she is to live, it's the combat that will save her,” he added.

“Will she live, then?”

“No. The young King's Protector, Lord Urdhven, leaves nothing to chance. Sir Hlosian Bekh is the champion of the Crown.”

“A good fighter?”

“No. Not particularly. But he always wins.”

“I don't understand,” the dwarf said patiently.

“I watched him win the Tournament of Zaakharien three years ago. He stood aside until all the members of his side had been struck down. Then he killed the members of the other side, one by one. The wounds he took that day! His surcoat was red all through, and his armor looked as if it were enameled; it was after that he came to be called the Red Knight. It was horrible and wonderful and a little boring, to tell the truth. You found yourself yawning as he struck off another knight's helmet. Then you saw the blood seeping into the dust and you remembered: that was a man, that was a man's head in there. But enough of that….”

“Do you really think someone has arisen who will challenge the Red Knight?”

Genjandro ran his fingers through his beard and looked thoughtful. “Nobody believes it,” he admitted. “Although a token of challenge was given: they found a lance with black pennons thrust into the Lonegate of Ambrose.”

Wyrth expressed some surprise at this, though he felt none. (He had, in fact, placed the lance there himself.) “Then you think…”

“Witchcraft!” Genjandro said, nodding. “They say there's no limit to what Ambrosia can do. Somehow she worked it, to put a snake in the Protector's chamber pot.”

“And did it?”

“They say he pulled the lance from the gate with his own hands and broke it. Then he took the pieces to her and threw them at her feet. And they say the old bitch just sat there with her hands folded. And smiled, you know. She's brave and bad, that one.”

“An age will end if she dies, sure.”

“It's because it is ending that she will die,” Genjandro disputed.

“But if she's as powerful as you say…”

“Her charms aren't powerful enough to stop Hlosian. She can't whistle up a champion from nowhere. I'm not saying she has no supporters, but none will dare to challenge the Red Knight.”

“Then why the trial at all?”

“She claimed the right; the token appeared. In law, he cannot deny her. And, frankly, I doubt he wishes to. It is a great show, as you say. And if no champion appears, it will hardly be less. They will burn her at the stake.”

“Hmph,” said the dwarf. “Yet they used to say, in my youth, that the Ambrosii could not be slain by fire. It was supposed to go with the unnaturally long life and the, er, uneven shoulders.”

The rug merchant smiled and stroked his beard. “Of course! The clearest proof of witchcraft. Then Urdhven will boldly have someone lop her head off, and the audience will go home with a sound moral lesson.”

“Ah. What is that, exactly?”

“No doubt we will be required to learn it by rote before we depart,” said Genjandro, no longer troubling to conceal his distaste.

“Well, it sounds most interesting to me. Politics in action, as it were. And you say your attendance has been, er, requested.”

“Required. I would gladly send you in my place.”

Wyrtheorn laughed and said, “If only it were possible! But let's talk of other things.”

Genjandro the rug merchant duly made his appearance the next day at the tournament enclosure of Gravesend Field, three miles east of the city walls. He was greeted by a captain of the soldiers whom he happened to know, one Lorn, who was glumly marking an attendance roll.

“Genjandro, good day! I am glad I can strike you off the list of our Protector's enemies.”

“That list will be much shorter after today,” Genjandro said, stroking his beard.

“It will be at least one name shorter, Genjandro—like the imperial family tree.”

Genjandro scented a political conversation in the offing, something he particularly wanted to avoid at the moment. He nodded vacantly and would have led his horse through into the enclosure.

Lorn stopped him. “Genjandro! Have you heard the prophecy that Ambrosia and the last descendant of Uthar the Great will die in the same year?”

“I had not heard that prophecy.”

“It is a very recent one.”

“Lorn, I am here from necessity, no other reason.”

“And I likewise. Nor do I really care what happens to an old witch who has already lived too long.”

“Of course not.”

“But Ambrosia was always the merchant's friend. We…One would have hoped they would show more loyalty.”

“Ambrosia had her supporters among the army, did she not? She led them to victory many a time. Yet there is a prophecy, a very
recent
prophecy, that she is destined to die without a single armed champion.” The rug merchant glanced pointedly at the sword swinging from the other's belt. “Had you heard that saying, Lorn?”

The soldier looked straight at him. “Yes. Now is not the time or the place. But the King, Genjandro. If the King were—”

The rug merchant turned on him in fury. “Your ‘times' and your ‘places'! Go back to your lists, Lorn. The Protector's Man will be along for them, presently.”

The soldier stood back, obscure emotions twisting his face. The rug merchant limped past, leading his horse off to the stables. He paid three silver coins for a separate stall without comment, though several occurred to him. He insisted on tending to his mount himself, saving himself a silver coin or two more, and the stable boy left him alone in the stall.

“Three fingers of silver to keep a horse for half a day!” he complained to the animal.

“Someone has to pay for this kind of circus, Genjandro,” the horse replied. “Be glad it wasn't three fingers off your hand. Money can be lost and gotten again.”

Genjandro grunted. He watched with horrified interest as the horse yawned wide, the jaws split, the whole front opened up, and the dwarf Wyrtheorn stepped out. Afterward the simulacrum of a horse re-formed itself and casually lumbered off to the far end of the stall, where there was a pile of hay.

“That's not a very dwarvish philosophy,” Genjandro observed, to cover up his dread.

“How would you know?” the dwarf countered. He tossed Genjandro a leather bag that sang with coins. “For your trouble, my friend. We had better leave separately—and I advise you not to recognize me if we meet outside. However, I'll remember your help. Good fortune.”

“What are you planning to do?” Genjandro asked, pausing at the door of the stall.

The dwarf grinned deep in his gray-flecked brown beard. “Something very like treason, if I were you, my friend.”

The Ontilian took the hint and left with a curt nod. The dwarf spent a few moments unweaving the “horse” and stowing it in his pockets, and then strolled out himself. The day's light was already strong and hot, and the carnival air of the enclosure was thick with dust and the anticipation of death.

Hlosian Bekh, the Red Knight, lay on a table, his gray flesh cold and lifeless, as the Lord Protector and Steng, his chief poisoner, argued over him.

“Still: make the golem stronger,” the Protector was saying. “If
he
does appear—”

“It hardly matters, my lord,” the poisoner replied with deferential soothing contempt. “If the Crooked Man (assuming there is such a person) turns up, he will be subject to the same limitations as any other challenger. The law is clear. Magic is forbidden at the trial by combat; its use compels the user's side to forfeit.”

“But
we
are using it,” the Protector pointed out.

The chief poisoner smiled as he wondered whether stupidity was an inevitable consequence of hereditary power. After all, had any of the descendants of Uthar the Great and Ambrosia really matched the ferocious supple intelligence of their forbears? And, though Urdhven was Protector merely by virtue of his late sister's marriage with the late Emperor, his ancestors had been warlords on the northern plains before the Vraidish tribes broke through the Kirach Kund to conquer the lands of the south and found the Second Ontilian Empire on the ruins of the First. “We may safely break the law,” the poisoner explained, “since we enforce it. The Crooked Man must come, if he does, with ordinary sword and shield to kill our champion. And that he cannot do, since Hlosian cannot die.”

“Nevertheless,” said the Protector, returning to the point at issue, “make him stronger.”

Steng stood motionless for a moment or two. He realized that the question was no longer Hlosian's strength, but the Protector's. And the poisoner was forced to admit to himself that the Protector would have his way, no matter what the cost. Perhaps that was what made his power more than merely hereditary.

The poisoner turned away to his worktable, where the golem's life-scroll lay. Taking up his pen, he dipped it in a jar of human blood and added a number of flourishes to the already-dried dark brown script.

“These are intensifiers,” he explained over his shoulder to Urdhven. “They focus the pseudo-talic impulses—”

The nobleman waved him silent with imperious distaste. “I don't wish to know about it. Just do it properly.”