Blood of Ambrose (25 page)

He felt a presence behind him, then, and turned. There was no one there.…

But there
was
someone there; he felt sure of it. He took a step toward the wall of the guardhouse and glanced around.

There was nothing except a pair of oval shields bound together with twine, their convex sides outward, as if to contain something in the cavity inside. As odd as it seemed, this was what gave Lathmar the sense that someone else was there.

He stepped closer and saw that the shields were not bound with twine, exactly. It was just long blades of green grass, twisted together into a kind of makeshift rope. He couldn't believe that anything could be restrained by so feeble a restraint, but that was what his intuition told him.

His sense of the other was so strong that he found himself speaking to it.

“Who are you?”

He was not even surprised when it answered.

Many.

“That's no answer,” the King complained.

You will know what I mean—soon enough
, the mysterious (yet familiar) voice replied.

“How did you come here?”

I was sent, and then set. I would go if I could.

“What are you?”

Many.

“What does that mean?”

You will know—very soon now.

The King found that he had taken a step nearer the thing.

“How do you speak?” he wondered.

The same way that you do—with your mouth.

Lathmar realized that this was true—that the thing had been answering all the time through his own mouth, through his own voice.

Except that it wasn't his anymore. He found that out when he saw that he was taking another step toward the bound shields. He tried to stop, but couldn't.

He tried to scream, but the other one of him, the one that was many, laughed. It came out as a laughing scream, and the world began to fade before Lathmar's eyes. Through the mist masking the world he saw his hands reaching out toward the grass that bound the shields.

Then someone else was beside him, a pillar of black-and-white flames: Morlock.

Get out!
Morlock shouted, and one of him wailed and another sobbed with relief, and abruptly there was only one of him again, and he fell to his knees beside the bound shields.

Groggily, he rose to his feet. Morlock (the plain Morlock of the nonvisionary world, his dark faced creased with urgency) seized him by the shoulders and said, “What is your name?”

“The King,” he said sleepily.

Morlock grabbed Lathmar by the hair; his gray eyes stabbed at the King like spear points. “What's your
name?
” he shouted.

The King understood, hazily, that Morlock was afraid, and he thought this was interesting, as he could not remember another occasion where Morlock had so obviously shown fear. He thought about the other self, the one that had almost mastered him, and he understood what Morlock was afraid of. “Lathmar,” he said, as clearly as he could, desperately hoping he would be believed.

Morlock, his dark face a mask of relief, released him. He patted him awkwardly on the shoulders and said, “Good. I'm glad you're well. You're not ready to face things like that, yet.”

“What is it?”

“A shathe,” Morlock said flatly.

Behind him, Ambrosia said, “Of course! There were shathe-wards on the old bridges, but we didn't think to put them on the new bridges. When was the last time a shathe was seen in Ontil?”

“This morning. That was why I sent Wyrth off to the City Gate and Thorngate. He can set wards that will hold until you and I come to put in place more permanent protections.”

“You should have consulted me,” Ambrosia said. “We each could have gone to a gate.”

“I thought I might need you here,” Morlock said.

The King drew a deep breath. The mist was gone from his sight; the living world pressed against his senses. Beyond Morlock was Ambrosia, and beyond her were the twelve Royal Legionaries, foremost among them Karn the secutor. His eyes pleaded silently with the King. Lathmar turned away deliberately to glance at the black horse, still standing guard on the bridge over the river Tilion.

“You were too cautious, Councillor Morlock,” he said aloud.

“Was I so?” Morlock replied, smiling wryly.

“Yes, indeed. We didn't need Ambrosia, and we needed you only as an exorcist. Your charger and I were enough to hold the bridge against our enemies. He is worth at least a dozen of the Royal Legionaries, if I could pick the dozen.”

“He will be flattered to know you rate him so highly,” Morlock said, clearly noting the King's underlying anger but puzzled by it.

“I rate him more highly than that,” the King continued. “If my Lady Regent is guided by my advice, she will appoint this horse to the rank of secutor at least.” Then he turned and met Karn's eye at last.

“Oh,” said Ambrosia coldly, “is that how it is?”

“Yes.”

“I wondered when I glanced in and saw you all loitering in the guard station.”

“Some of us were loitering more intensely than others, Grandmother.”

“All right, you men: put aside your weapons,” Ambrosia directed.

They were a dozen and she was one, but they clearly didn't even think of disobeying. They disarmed themselves and trooped up the stairs to the upper chamber of the inner guardhouse at Ambrosia's direction. She bolted the door shut behind them and shouted out to the King and Morlock, “I'm going to find some live soldiers. You two wait here for me.”

Morlock nodded casually and guided the King over to the bridge. The black, silver-eyed stallion cantered over, and Morlock introduced him.

“Lathmar, Velox. Velox, this is Lathmar.”

“Is this the horse you flew out of the Dead Hills?” the King asked eagerly.

“I think so. He is not quite as I last saw him, years ago, but he has had some remarkable experiences since then, perhaps enough to account for the changes.”

“Does he still fly?”

“Not literally. But I've never seen a faster horse. It's thanks to him I was back in time.”

“And when you arrived you found the shathe,” Lathmar said flatly.

“Yes.”

When it was evident that this was all Morlock was going to say, Lathmar asked, “What's a shathe?”

“A shathe,” Morlock said didactically, “is a being that has no corporeal presence. It exists entirely in the tal-realm. It can exert its will on the physical universe, and manifest itself in various ways, but it can't be killed by any material weapon or force.”

“How can they be killed?”

“By nonmaterial force. They can be starved to death also.”

“Have you ever killed a shathe?”

“Twice that I know of. I kill them when I can, bind them when I must.”

“Why?” the King asked. “Is it a religious…?”

“Because they are evil?” Morlock twisted his face wryly. “They may be. But it doesn't matter: I kill them anyway.”

“Why?”

“You have not considered, Lathmar. These things can be starved to death. They live on the tal-plane, and matter does not affect them. What do you suppose they eat?”

Lathmar shook his head.

“Souls. The psyches of living beings able to take volitional action.”

“Oh.” Lathmar thought about how close he had been to releasing the thing trapped in the shields. “Oh. How?”

“They gain entry to the will by persuading their prey to do certain things. It doesn't matter what, as long as it is at the prompting of the shathe. The moment of greatest danger is when the prey accepts a favor from the shathe. Then the prey may find that his will is no longer his own. It is then an easy thing for the shathe to compel the prey to destroy himself.”

“Was I in that state?”

“I think so.”

“But I never—”

“Tell me what happened,” Morlock directed.

The King obliged, telling the tale from when he took to the passages. Morlock heard him through and said, “That was a good thought, to take the secret ways. I guess it was the shathe who gave you the idea to pose as a simulacrum of yourself.”

“Why?” Lathmar demanded, annoyed. “Too clever for me?”

“No. But you said, ‘There are many of us.' That was what the shathe told you his name was.”

“Oh.” Lathmar's anger deflated. “That's true.”

“And it appalled Steng, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

Lathmar waited a few moments, then observed, “Whether you are my magical tutor or merely my councillor here, ‘Hm' seems insufficient.”

Morlock smiled a crooked smile. “I was wondering if the shathe knew that it would affect Steng the way it did.”

“I can't say.”

“Perhaps we'll look into that.”

“How…how did you bind it?”

“You're not ready for that knowledge yet, Lathmar.”

“I'm not asking for a page from your spellbook. I just wonder how it was done—how grass can bind the thing.”

“Plants have a kind of
tal
,” Morlock replied. “But it is impenetrable by shathes, because plants have no volition. It is by seducing the will that shathes obtain control over the
tal
of living beings.”

“Then how could it reach me?”

“I think you reached it,” Morlock admitted grudgingly. “Your Sight reached out intuitively, as you were grasping for solutions to your dilemma.”

“Oh.” Lathmar paused, then remarked, “Grandmother wants you to stop teaching me about the Sight.”

“That's not possible. You must obtain control over your gift.”

Earlier today the King would have been delighted to hear this. Now, thinking about the thing that had nearly devoured him, that had reached him through his own power of Sight, he wasn't so sure. Then, abruptly, he was sure. True, he would have preferred to live in a world where such dangers didn't exist. But since they did exist, he decided he wanted to know about them, and what he could do about them. Maybe someday he could save someone as Morlock had saved him.

He looked up to find Morlock's gray eyes on him.

“Do you know what I am thinking?” he asked, feeling himself blush.

Morlock shrugged. “Some I know. More I guess. Most is closed to me. Here's Ambrosia.”

The regent had returned with a troop of soldiers; the King turned to her almost in relief. She disposed some of the Royal Legionaries at the gate, charged others with escorting the imprisoned guards down to the dungeon level, and assigned one to feed and water and otherwise tend to “that damn horse—I hope Morlock doesn't start filling up the entire castle with his pets.”

The King looked around to see how Morlock would react to this, but saw that Morlock and the shathe he had bound were gone.

he trial of the eleven Royal Legionaries (before the regent in the presence of her council, only Morlock being absent) didn't take a great deal of time. The evidence showed that they had all obeyed their superior, Secutor Karn, in taking to the guard station and concealing themselves. But they had also failed to obey a royal councillor and the King himself when they had been given contrary orders.

“Respect for a superior officer is a fine thing,” the regent remarked, in delivering her summary judgement. “But secutors don't rank members of the Regency Council, much less the King. These soldiers chose to obey the dictates of their cowardice. Given that they were following an illegal order of a superior officer, I'll incline to the lesser penalty. Commander Erl,” she said, addressing the Legionary officer in charge of the dungeons, “have your men strip these prisoners of their uniforms, beat them each with twenty strokes, and expel them into the city. They are never to hold any position of trust or profit under his Majesty Lathmar the Seventh. So say I, Ambrosia Viviana, regent for the aforesaid Lathmar VII, King of the Two Cities. Let it be done.”

The dungeon keepers, grim in their black surcoats with no device, marched the dumbfounded ex-soldiers out of the council chamber. Karn was left alone in the plain brown robe of the accused, facing the Regent's Council who would judge his fate.

“Your Majesty,” Karn said hoarsely to the King, who sat with the council as usual. “Don't let her kill me. I admit it: I was afraid. I've been in battle before, but this was different. Your enemies have powers I don't understand, and I let that get the better of me. But I won't fail you again; I swear it.”

“Shut up,” Ambrosia said coldly. “Secutor Karn, this court finds you guilty of treason. The penalty, as you know, is death. Reflect on this overnight; we will summon you for sentencing in the morning.”

Karn was visibly aghast. Officers were normally given a night's grace before a death sentence; they were supposed to use the time to commit honorable suicide, rather than face public execution. Commander Erl detailed several dungeon keepers to march Karn from the room; Lathmar gloomily watched him go. Would he have intervened with Ambrosia, if she had given him the opportunity? Possibly. He was glad she hadn't, though.

Ambrosia was speaking again; he had missed a few words. “…as we have more important matters at hand, specifically the question of reprisals against the Protector for today's raid. I'll confer with you and your aides separately, Kedlidor. Wyrth, see what you can come up with—I understand that Morlock is at this moment laboring on something particularly nasty in his workshop; perhaps you can assist him. We will meet tomorrow, an hour after dawn. I adjourn the council until then. But Wyrth and Commander Erl, wait here a moment; you, too, Your Majesty, if you please.”

The scribes and attendants departed; Kedlidor also left, his face marked with dread at the thought of leading soldiers in combat again.

“The King needs a personal guard,” Ambrosia said flatly. “We thought it was a formality in the castle, but today has proven how wrong we were. Erl, take this, you son of a bitch.” Her sword was in her hand; in the next moment it was at Erl's throat. Somehow—the King wasn't sure how—Erl unsheathed his own sword and brought it up to parry Ambrosia's. His face didn't change expression, but as he watched her withdraw and sheathe her sword, he did the same.

“Erl,” said Ambrosia, “you're the best swordsman this century (barring Morlock) and the bravest man.”

Erl nodded coolly in acknowledgement of these facts.

“You're the King's new personal guard. I'm not demoting you: your lieutenant can run the dungeons without you for a while. If you do this job right, there's a promotion in it for you; if you don't, we're all screwed.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Wyrth, you'll have to help him. He's a tough pitiless bastard, but he doesn't know a damn thing about magic. That's the only thing that can touch the King inside Ambrose, but obviously we can't rule it out—not after today.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Lathmar,” Ambrosia said grudgingly, “it looks as if you're going to have to continue those lessons in the Sight.”

“I've already seen to that,” Lathmar said with a touch of sharpness. If she wanted him to act like a monarch in front of his subjects, she would have to start acting like a subject toward him. He prepared himself for a counterblast.

Ambrosia merely smiled. “That's all, then. I'll see you in the morning, if not sooner.”

The King found it impossible to sleep that night. It was not because of his encounter with the shathe “Many.” It was not even because he kept envisioning Karn, sweating through his last night of life (or, perhaps, already dangling from a beam in his prison chamber). These might have kept him from sleep, or given him nightmares once he reached it. But the fact was he never got near enough to rest for these to distress him. His blood was on fire; he paced endlessly about his rooms. The King was in love with one of his kitchen maids.

Her name was Guntlorta, which seemed to Lathmar a very beautiful name. Her hair was the color of dark honey (brown). Her cheerful laugh could be heard from one end of the Great Courtyard to the other. (Less biased observers remarked that it “sounded like a brass kettle falling down a flight of stone stairs.”) Her complexion was like an unequal mixture of roses and cream, and as she had brought in one of the courses of his evening meal, he found himself longing to shower kisses all over the taut ripe curves of her body.

He would not have been the first to do so, but this was the first time the impulse had come to him, and he was struck with surprise. He tried several times to speak to her, but found he could not. Nor could he get her image (nor her scent, which was not at all of roses or cream) out of his mind.

Now he threw himself out of bed and paced frantically around the room. How could he see her again (without a bodyguard in tow, that is)? What should he do if he could manage it? Did he even want to manage it? He groaned, splashed cold water from the basin on his face, and paced about his room some more.

The truth was, he reflected ruefully, he needed advice—advice from a grown-up man he could trust. If Lorn had been alive, Lathmar would have asked him. If Karn were not in prison he would have been Lathmar's second choice—a poor second, though. True, he would have listened to Lathmar's problem patiently, and maybe advised him helpfully. But Lathmar had sometimes wondered uneasily if Karn mocked him before others as he mocked others before him. He didn't like to think of the other soldiers chuckling over their king's romantic dilemma. In any case, Karn was facing a dilemma far more dreadful than his. It would be cruel beyond words to pester him at this hour.

Who did that leave? Wyrth had been present at dinner. No doubt he saw what had come over Lathmar; he saw everything, it seemed. But somehow the King didn't want to talk to Wyrth about this. He didn't know how dwarves arranged these matters, and he didn't want advice that wouldn't apply to his case.

He wondered idly if Hope could help him, somehow—it would be pleasant to talk to her, at any rate. But he remembered suddenly that he couldn't simply knock on her door: she was hidden inside his Grandmother. He did
not
want to talk to Grandmother about this, he thought, shuddering.

It was Morlock or nothing, he decided, finally. He threw on some clothes and crept out into the hallway. The guards at his door were sleeping, and he crept past them up the hallway, and soon was climbing the stairs to Morlock's tower.

The lock on the doorpost of Morlock's workroom recognized Lathmar, winking a glass eye at him. It released the door from its long iron fingers and allowed the King to enter.

As soon as he stepped across the threshold he heard Morlock and Ambrosia talking on the far side of the workroom. He especially did not want to talk to Ambrosia just now, so he crept behind a table and waited for her to leave.

It took a while. Ambrosia, as usual, was angry.

“I don't understand you, Morlock,” she was saying. “First you say this is the most serious attack we've had from the Protector's forces, and then you say we should
not
retaliate. I don't give a rat's ass what you say; that's bad strategy.”

“What would I do with a rat's ass?” Morlock replied, sounding amused. After Ambrosia made a suggestion, he continued, sounding less amused, “Nonetheless, you misheard me. We don't know that this attack was from the Protector. I don't think it was.”

“Then I think you're mistaken. His poisoner Steng led the attack, and you yourself said it must have been his magical patron who supplied the shathe.”

“‘Magical patron,’” Morlock repeated. “We call him that because Urdhven did. It was a mistake. Suppose he is not?”

“Suppose
who
is not
what?
”

“Suppose that the magical adept is not, in fact, Urdhven's patron. Suppose that Urdhven is merely the dupe or pawn of this adept, who uses him to distract us from some undertaking of the adept's own.”

“Ur. I don't like that much, Morlock.”

“It makes perfect sense, though. The adept never granted Urdhven a weapon like the shathe before. Why did he do so now? What imminent development did the adept, not Urdhven but
the adept
, find threatening?”

“You're talking about the treaty negotiations I'd begun with Urdhven.”

“Yes. If we make peace with Urdhven, his usefulness as a distraction becomes slight. The best result, from the adept's point of view, is for negotiations to fail and the civil war between the Protector and the royal forces to resume. So the adept arranges for this feint upon the castle.”

“Suppose you're wrong, and Urdhven is really behind this? He'll take it as a sign of weakness.”

Silence.

“Don't shrug at me!” Ambrosia snapped.

“The attack failed,” Morlock said. “Urdhven knows we are not weak. I leave it at that.”

“You leave it to me, as usual, you mean,” Ambrosia complained. “Suppose you're right, then: I continue negotiations as if nothing happened. Not quite nothing maybe—I'll start the next session by presenting Urdhven with the bodies of the Protector's Men we killed today—”

“A nice touch.”

“Quiet, you. Meanwhile, you'll be off looking into this adept, this Protector's Shadow.”

“Yes. I think I know where to begin—I had a dream the other night.”

“You and your damn dreams.
I
had a dream the other night. I dreamed that for once you had decided to be something other than a pain in the ass.”

“I think my dream is likelier to be true.”

“Very amusing. Is this where you want this thing?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to stay?”

“Not unless you want to.”

“I don't. It was bad enough being there when you bound Andhrakar. You're sure you'll be all right? Shall I call Wyrth?”

“No. I'll be fine. Good night, Ambrosia.”

“Good night, sweetheart.”

The words went through Lathmar like a spear—and more than the words, the tone of voice. He had never, ever heard Grandmother speak to
anyone
like that. He thought of his mother, then Guntlorta, and writhed uncomfortably in his hiding place.

He heard their footsteps walking toward the door, the door open, shut, and lock, and Morlock's halting footsteps return alone from the door.

They walked directly from there to the King's hiding place.

“Come out from there,” Morlock's voice said.

The King crawled shamefacedly out from under the table.

“You should not skulk,” Morlock said. “It isn't kingly.”

“How would you know?” the King shouted, furious from embarrassment and something else.

“I've known many kings,” Morlock replied calmly. “What did you want of me, Lathmar?”

Lathmar growled, unable to speak. He didn't want to talk to Morlock about it.
She
had called
him
…
sweetheart.
It boggled the mind. He was furious. He was jealous, he realized suddenly. And why not? Ambrosia was
his
Grandmother—she had been long before she was Morlock's sister. Wait—that didn't make sense….