Blood of Ambrose (39 page)

Morlock thought of ascending to the visionary state: if he was to defeat the gargoyle he needed to know what it was. But he would need all his physical ability to ward off the gargoyle's next attack; he could not risk ascending to rapture now.

It was coming; he could hear it. He glanced over his shoulders and saw it stall in the air. Why would it do that, unless…

He let his left hand open and swung to the right; unburnt thorns scraped against his mail shirt, and one pierced it and him. But the hammer struck the wall where he had been. Stone shattered, and mortar-dust clung to a patch of blood on the hammer's grip. The gargoyle's blood. It occurred to Morlock there had been blood on Tyrfing when he had sheathed it.

The hammer fell and was caught in the thorns below. It left a hole in the wall, through which dead gray arms reached for Morlock. He drew Tyrfing with his left hand, snarling as it caught for a moment in its sheath (the blood had made it sticky). Then he lopped off the arms reaching for him through the gap in the tower wall.

The gargoyle was returning below for its hammer.

Morlock took a moment for cold calculation. The gargoyle had a method of attack that could hardly fail, which he could not counter. But it bled; it could be wounded; it could feel pain. There was only one thing to do.

He did it, opening his right hand and falling, like the hammer, down the wall. He landed on the gargoyle's gray winged back.

“No!” it screamed. “He'll eat me if you—”

Morlock severed the screaming head from its neck, and then abandoned the gargoyle body as it suddenly relaxed in death. He was pierced by several unburnt thorns in the patch he leapt into, but not seriously. His blood caused them to flicker with sluggish flames that soon guttered out. He clung to the dark branches, listening to the dead body hit the earth below them, recovering his breath. “All hands, abandon gargoyle,” he muttered when he could, then breathed some more.

Finally he took a jar of phlogiston and opened it, burning a new pathway upward. He ascended the bright ladder of burning branches, remembering that there was another, at least one other gargoyle; wondering about the enemy who awaited him above; hoping that those he loved back in Ambrose were still safe.

They weren't. The second siege of Ambrose had been shorter than the first, and more disastrous. Before Morlock reached the tower, the sack of Ambrose had begun.

The Royal Legion had fought bravely against their eerie attackers. Wyrth had set up a smaller version of the Siegebreaker on the inner Thorngate, and it seemed as if things were going well.

Then half of the defenders began attacking the others. There were eaten soldiers among the royal ranks. No one could be sure that the soldier beside him would not turn. Some fought and died; others fled; the battle was lost. Wyrth barely had time to tumble the Siegebreaker into the river before he fled with the others.

Ambrosia led the vocates from the Wardlands, Wyrth, the Emperor, and his two bodyguards through the screaming chaos of the sack to the High Hall of the North.

“It's as good a place for a last stand as any,” she explained grimly. They had ascended the narrow stairway and stood around it; the doorway at the other end of the hall was shut, bolted, and barricaded. “I can keep us safe from the whispering of the Shadow in this relatively small space—”

“But Grandmother,” Lathmar broke in urgently. (He supposed he could call her Grandmother again, now that he was Emperor.) “Won't you have to ascend into the visionary state to guard us? Shouldn't you stand away from the stairwell so that we can guard your body?”

She reached under her armor and pulled out a pendant. It was luminous with power. Lathmar gaped at it for a moment, then lifted his eyes to meet Ambrosia's amused gaze.

“I am in the visionary state, Your Imperial Majesty,” she replied calmly. “I have been since the enemy stormed Ambrose.”

“But—” But she was walking and talking normally. But the pendant, clearly her focus of power, parallel to Morlock's Tyrfing, attested that she was acting powerfully in the talic realm. “But Morlock can't do that!” he blurted foolishly.

“Morlock, despite your touching faith in his abilities, cannot do everything,” Ambrosia replied.

“Shut your mouth, Your Imperial Majesty,” Wyrth muttered. “What Morlock is to makers, Ambrosia is to seers.”

“Unquestionably I am,” Ambrosia conceded. “Unfortunately, I'm getting a little old for this sort of thing. Still, I can shield you from the Shadow's whispering, here. If he detects me and sends his minions, and he will, they'll have to come at us one by one up the stairs. Also, there's an escape chute in the hall beyond. Erl and Karn: if the enemy's forces break in, I expect you to put the Emperor down that chute and follow him. Get him safely away.”

“No!” said Lathmar, loudly if not firmly. “I'm staying here!”

“Erl, Karn: you heard me.”

Karn looked gloomy, but Erl said firmly, if not loudly, “Lady Ambrosia, with respect, we serve the Emperor.”

“That's what I'm counting on, Erl. If the Emperor gets away, the empire is still alive. If he doesn't, then it's just food waiting around for the Protector's Shadow to eat it.”

Erl didn't answer this one way or the other, and Lathmar saw he was in doubt. Now wasn't the time to press the man, but Lathmar was damned if he was going to go along with Ambrosia's plan. His days of being carried around like a sack of beans were over.

“Maybe we should all go down the chute,” Jordel said calmly, “without waiting.”

“You're at liberty to do so, vocate,” Ambrosia said evenly, “if you can find it. But there's some chance that Morlock may succeed in what he is about. If so, we should be together, not running about like chickens with their heads chopped off.”

“Because that's what the adept's former bodies may be doing?” Aloê guessed.

Ambrosia shrugged. “It's not like anyone knows what's going to happen.”

It didn't take long for the enemy's forces to find them. Lathmar anxiously wondered if that meant one of them was being eaten, or had been eaten, by the enemy. Looking around the room, he thought he saw the same doubt on other faces and decided not to voice it.

They heard the enemy's forces breaking down the door in the chamber below. They all drew their weapons and stood around the stairwell.

“Truce!” called an oddly familiar voice, coming up the stairwell. “I don't want to kill you, you know.”

Ambrosia glanced at Lathmar and rolled her left hand repeatedly in a circle. She was indicating, he guessed, there was no reason not to spend time talking. He nodded his agreement.

“You can come up,” she said. “But only one of you.”

“There is only one of me down here.”

“I mean one body, Inglonor,” Ambrosia said flatly.

“It's been a long time since I've heard that name,” said the familiar voice, growing nearer. “I didn't even know that you ever knew it—isn't that amusing?” The speaker appeared at the head of the stairwell.

“Genjandro,” whispered Ambrosia, sagging slightly. “I…I hoped you had escaped, my friend. That was what the crow told us: that you were dead.”

“A little bird told you?” remarked Genjandro's mouth. “You can't even trust birds these days, I guess. No, I found it possible to eat Genjandro in the end, just as I shall eat each one of you. Isn't that an amusing thought?”

Lathmar could see from Ambrosia's face that she didn't find it amusing—but that she feared it might be true.

Morlock clambered as rapidly as possible over the railing onto the balcony of the adept's tower chamber. If he had been the adept, he would have been waiting there with a blunt object to solve his Morlock problem once and for all. But there was no one present that he could see.

Near the window entrance was a sorcerer's worktable, and standing upright atop it was a strip of some translucent, irregularly glowing substance. As Morlock glanced at it he saw faces rising from the base of the strip, twisting and changing color as they passed up its length, then contracting and darkening at the top and sinking to the bottom again. Perhaps it was meant to be a lamp—there was no other light source than the window in the dim room—but it was very dim and irregular. On the other hand, it radiated power; most likely it was some sort of experiment or spell left here by the adept to run its course.

His fear that the adept was not present at all recurred to him. But, Morlock reminded himself, the adept didn't have to be here for Morlock to kill him. He saw the stairway leading to the lower chamber and leapt down it.

The lower chamber was darker; there was no window to light it. The air was thick down there, too; the whole place was redolent of rotting flesh. But the vats the King had described were there, glowing faintly by their own light.

Morlock heard a snuffling sound in the far end of the chamber. He drew Tyrfing and stepped toward it. He had not gone far when he saw its source. It was like an unfinished sketch for a body—no head, no hands or feet. From the way it flopped when it moved it seemed to have no bones. It snuffled and crept in a mindless circle around a vat containing human innards that breathed and pulsed and twitched with life.

Staring at it (the striations on its dark red surface were oddly like muscle tissue), Morlock thought suddenly of Urdhven. Was this formless form some fraction of his body, not superficial enough to be included in his walking self, not vital enough to be placed in the vat? And here it was, whuffling about in the hopeless hunger of being restored to its organs?

Morlock summoned the rapture of vision. It partly confirmed his guess: there were dim tal-lines connecting the misshapen shape with the organs within the vat. Other tal-lines stretched across the floor and up the stairs, out of sight. Going to carry life and sustenance from the vitals to Urdhven's walking shell?

He turned away. There were only two vats with organs in them; he guessed the other contained the organs of the adept's central body nexus.

These, too, were rippling with life. But no tal-lines extended from them that Morlock could see. Were they mere illusions? Morlock's insight said they weren't. He gazed at them, with his inner and outer vision, as they pulsed flaccidly on a surface that looked like the bare rock of the tower. He felt he was missing something.

He lifted his sword to strike. Like Lathmar, he felt that he would not have been allowed to come here if there was any chance of his breaking through the vat. But unlike Lathmar, he was armed with Tyrfing: it was worth attempting. The accursed blade, blazing with the black-and-white pattern of his tal, fell upon the unreflective transparent surface covering the vat…and bounced. He struck another time, and a third, with even greater force and less hope. The effect was the same.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. No tree falls at the first chop. Perhaps, he thought, the inner surface of the vat was what it appeared to be—the bare rock of the tower. He decided he would try to turn the thing over when he heard a soft, shuffling footstep behind him.

He turned to find Steng stabbing at him with a dagger in his long, ropy fingers. No—not Steng: the adept. He avoided the dagger and punched the other in the face with his hand that held Tyrfing; the quarters were too close to use the blade itself. The adept's rotten nose squelched and tore under the impact of his fist.

Morlock contained his reflexive utterance of disgust, but when he saw the other stagger back to the stairway and stand there, he switched the sword to his left hand and wiped the fluid and fragments from his right hand onto his cloak.

“Well, I thought I'd try,” the adept said apologetically, what was left of his nose dangling from his gray face. “Your vital organs are still conveniently located in your body, you know.”

Morlock didn't answer this, but focused his inner and his outer vision on the adept. A dense cloud of spider-thin talic strands extended from the adept's body up the stairwell, as if the body were a marionette controlled by thousands of invisible strings. But the strings were woven into the talic imprint that rested on the body, and every time the adept spoke they sang in dissonant harmony, a soft cacophony of other voices calling out in pain. These were the strings controlling puppets, perhaps, but here was the puppeteer.

Why did the talic emanations of control go up the stairwell? The stones of the tower, as mere matter, should have been transparent to them.

“You're very rude,” the adept said coldly. “Speak when you're spoken to—that's what my dear damned mother always used to say.”

Morlock shrugged. He had come here with a single purpose, to commit the ultimate incivility. Besides, he didn't believe the adept was making civil conversation.

One of the talic emanations of control did not go up the stairwell, but toward the far vat.

The adept, who must have been in something like the visionary state continuously, noticed that Morlock noticed it. His gray mouth smiled, and the talic thread twitched, whispering in Urdhven's voice.

“Yes, you must have guessed—those are the living remains of the late Protector, the fellow whose shadow you so unflatteringly called me. He was so grateful to me when I cored him! It burned bright within him. He never understood, even at the end as I consumed him, that
that
was when I first began to devour his soul. Now he knows, of course. I keep that shred of him nearby as a sort of pet: I look at it sometimes, and think of what I did to him, and he reacts, and it's terribly amusing. Terrible for him, amusing for me. And that thing, the shred of him, it wants nothing but to be reunited with its innards, and of course it can't be—they're forever inaccessible. But it would take others, if it could get them. If there were other, unprotected organs in the room…”