Kedlidor screamed, "I have not been eaten!"
A brief silence followed, punctuated by the Rite-Master"s sobs.
Ambrosia sighed. "I knew he was a traitor, but I thought he was one of the ordinary sort. That"s why I kept him in charge of the Royal Legion-as long as the news was always good for us, always bad for Urdhven, it served to overawe him. And it worked: Urdhven signed the treaty on our terms."
"The Protector is gone, too, devoured by his Shadow." Morlock turned to Kedlidor. "You say you have not been eaten."
"I"m not. I"m not. I am still myself."
"But his voice is always in your head. When it speaks you must obey."
Kedlidor simply sobbed and shook his head.
"He told you what to do at the supper last night-to support the Protector when he offered me a drink," Morlock continued. "Answer or die."
"Yes."
"And later?"
"I ... He told me to go to the King as if I were suing for pardon. So I did. He told me to bribe the guards to let me in. So I did. He told me to push the King down the escape shaft. So I did."
"And there were two eaten guards at the other end of the shaft? How were they to get him out of Ambrose?"
"I don"t know. I don"t know. Do you think he tells me things? I tell him things; I tell him all I know, but he doesn"t tell me. He doesn"t tell. Doesn"t tell."
"That wasn"t part of your deal, I suppose?" Morlock asked.
"You don"t understand!" Kedlidor screamed. "You"ll never die! I"m getting old; I"ve been so afraid. I didn"t want much. I didn"t want to live forever. I just didn"t want to be afraid anymore, afraid of dying...."
"I can cure that," Morlock Traitor"s Bane said calmly, and stepping forward, he broke the old man"s neck. He threw the body negligently on the floor.
Aloe was shocked, and shocked again that no one else was. Even Jordel and Baran seemed to approve the action.
"I suppose he knew nothing more that would be useful to us?" Ambrosia asked temperately.
"Almost certainly; there was little left of him. I suspected something of the sort last night. Kedlidor was behaving oddly, and the thing that dwelled within Urdhven"s body knew of matters that had been discussed at the supper before he arrived."
"What are we up against, Morlock? Surely it"s time for you to speak."
"I still think our enemy is an adept. I think, though, that he has bent his power to duplicate the abilities of a shathe. That is, he can seduce a will into destroying itself, and get sustenance from the event-and control the dying will."
"G.o.d Creator," Ambrosia said. "And he has Lathmar." She turned toward the wall to hide her face.
When she spoke without moving, a few moments later, her voice was deadly calm. "If we know our enemy, we can take steps against him. Morlock, you must see to that first thing. It is unfortunate that he has taken the King, but not fatal to us: the Protector is no longer a political force in the city, whatever has become of his soul. Wyrth, perhaps you can make an illusory King to serve for ceremonial occasions. If we can recover Lathmar, we will. But we must confront the fact that he is probably lost to us."
She turned her face back to the room again; they saw the tears streaking her face. "Morlock-Where is Morlock?"
"Eh, madam," said Wyrth. "He has gone to find the little King. What did you expect?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.
THE DEAD CITY.
ast of the living city of Ontil is the Old City-the capital of the storied First Empire. A triple curse killed it, the empire it ruled slipped away, and its people fled. Millennia later, Ambrosia and Uthar diverted the river Tilion; on its new banks they built a new city and gave it the proud name of the old one.
But the Old City was always there, just beyond the gray curtain of the Dead Hills. They remembered it and honored it by making it the domain of the imperial heir, along with the New City.
A triple curse. A drought from the sky that had never ended, not even after millennia. A curse from the sea, the curse of the Old G.o.ds. And a curse from the earth: a plague that drove men mad and then killed by rotting the bones and the flesh.
People still came here. To hide, because no writ ran in the Old City. To die or to await death: there was no more suitable place. To uncover the past: for here it lay open for the taking.
And now its king was coming to it, for the first time since the founding of the New Empire, Lathmar reflected.
"Carried like a sack of beans by someone else, as usual," he complained aloud. "Someday someone will figure out a better way to transport a king. I just hope I"m there to see it."
He didn"t suppose that he would be, but he was speaking largely for his own entertainment anyway. His captors (two men he had known as Thurn and Veck, members of his Royal Legionaries) seemed to have only enough awareness to abduct him and carry him out of the castle and the cityliterally in a sack, he believed, although he had been unconscious at the time. It was not even as if they were traitors, ashamed to make conversation with the king they had betrayed. Talking to them was like talking to rocks, to a wall, to oneself.
But now he said nothing as the skyline of his other city crept above the horizon. It was like a city in a dream, in a nightmare. A forest of stone towers rose up, but they were half-eaten by the wind, etched crookedly against the bitter blue sky. Nothing lived in the streets that they shadowed: the boulevards had been dead so long that even the dust of the dead trees had blown away. But as the King and his captors approached closer to the city, he did see one living thing lurking in the shadows: a vaguely human form, its head a hairless, shapeless ma.s.s, like a rotten gourd striped in fever-blue and pusyellow. It fled, staggering and shrieking as they came near. A plague victim-man or woman, Lathmar couldn"t tell.
Lathmar was obscurely ashamed. For centuries, this place had been here, and people like him had ruled it in name and not given it a thought in reality. He had not cursed it; his people had not cursed it, nor caused the curse. But perhaps their indifference was part of the curse-a fourth curse, adding the cruelty of man to the hatred of earth, air, and sea.
"It"s not as if I can do anything about it," he muttered to his peevish, unreasonable conscience.
They turned up a street where, to his surprise, Lathmar saw some dead plants. They stood in a wedge of darker earth ... no, a sort of reddish dark streambed that ran along the broken gutter of an ancient street.
Then plants could grow here, if there was water. Or some other fluid: Lathmar wondered what sort of runoff had given brief life to those seedlings.
He was soon to know. They followed the dark stain in the ancient street around a corner. The screen of half-eaten towers parted, and Lathmar saw what he guessed was their destination. A tower unruined (or rebuilt, he guessed) standing apart from the others in a field of stumpy ruined buildings. Surrounding it was a hedge of thorns, and the thorns climbed like ivy up and all around the tower so that it bristled black against the blue dust-strewn sky.
How did the plants grow in this dead waterless place? The dark stain in the ground was deepest and darkest near the hedge. Nearby, tossed negligently among the bare foundations of the broken buildings, were bright bones grinning back at the sun. The bones of many men and women: hundreds of them, thousands, tens of thousands perhaps. Their blood had been shed to nourish the thorns. Some of the bodies were fresher: the King watched in horror as a crow landed on the head of one of these, plucked out one of its drying eyeb.a.l.l.s, and gulped it down, neatly snipping the string of optic nerve with its bill. It looked right at him, rather quizzically, then bowed down to eat the other dead eyeball. Lathmar turned away shuddering.
The two soldiers who had been Thurn and Veck reined in by the hedge and dismounted. They cut the King"s bonds and dragged him down to stand by them-rather unsteadily: the bindings had cut off the flow of blood, and his legs and hands were numb. Lathmar was fascinated by the hedge of thorns: the leaves were small and darkish green; the thorns were as long as Lathmar"s hand, with points like daggers. They were dense and intertangled: no light pa.s.sed through them.
Veck"s hand raised a signal horn to Veck"s mouth, which blew a single blast.
A creaking mechanical sound was heard, and then the hedge of thorn began to rise in the air. At least the section nearest them was rising. It lifted and the King saw this section of hedge was planted in huge vats; when they were clear he saw the vats were resting on a section of planking like the deck of a ship. It was being lifted from the ground by some vast screwlike mechanism. A team of corpse-golems-he knew them at a glance by their mismatched limbs and dead angelic faces-were working the wheel that drove the screw.
The soldiers dragged the King down the sloping blood-brown earth left clear by the lifted thorns. As they pa.s.sed, the one that had been Veck lifted the horn and blew another blast. The corpse-golems stopped, turned, and began to push the wheel the other way. The section of thorn-hedge behind them slowly began to descend again.
They walked on to the tower bristling with thorns. There was no place to enter, but the soldiers stopped just below a bare patch, some fifteen feet up the wall. The soldier that had been Veck blew two blasts on the signal horn. The bare patch of wall opened on darkness, and presently a stairway began to unfold downwards to the accompaniment of unmusical clanks.
The King took special care to look at the sky as they ascended the stair; he guessed it would be the last time he would ever see it. There wasn"t much to see: the dark blue bar of the sea to the south, some black birds hovering in the west over the Dead Hills. He paused at the top of the stairs, reluctant to surrender the light. But the empty-faced soldiers simply dragged him into the tower.
There were two teams of corpse-golems here, one team in each chamber on either side of the broad windowless corridor within. They were still straining mindlessly against their wheels, striving to lower a stairway that was already lowered. The one that had been Veck blew two blasts on the signal horn as they pa.s.sed. (The sound was painfully loud in the echoing corridor, but only Lathmar seemed to be aware of it.) The corpse-golems stopped; they stood; they turned and began to push their wheels in the opposite direction, lifting the stairway. (The King wondered if they would continue to try and raise it after it was all the way up, straining at the wheels until someone told them to reverse directions again.) The blank-faced soldiers took him up a long series of stairways to the top of the tower. He was out of breath by the time they reached there-if he ever fell behind they simply seized him by the arms and dragged him till he took to his feet again.
At the top of the last stairway the King found himself standing in what was obviously an antechamber. There was a monumental door flanked by two enormous particolored winged beings Lathmar took at first for remarkably ill-made gargoyles. Then one looked at him with mismatched eyes (one red and round, another narrow and slitlike, with a black iris peering through). Lathmar looked away, shuddering from fear and exhaustion.
The soldiers halted and stared at nothingness. They waited there without words. Then the huge winged beings stood, and together they lifted the huge stone slab (which the King had taken for a door) away from the doorway.
Within the empty place was a shadowy form. It gestured at the King with long, ropy fingers.
The soldiers pushed him and he staggered, almost falling. Then he pulled himself up and strode forward into the emptiness. He heard the soldiers march after him into the chamber beyond.
"Steng, I believe?" the King said to the shadowy form. He tried to keep his voice cool, but the tone wavered; he was tired and he was frightened. But he didn"t let that stop him. As a king, as a ruler in the proud tradition of Vraidish conquerors, he might be a complete failure. But he"d die like a king, at least, never giving in. "I believe I had the pleasure of your company once or twice at Ambrose, though of course we were never formally introduced."
The form laughed, in a voice that was very much like Steng"s ... or was it? It was phlegmier, somehow-creakier.
"So you have, Lathmar," the other replied, "in a way, although I"m not Steng. I"m the original on which Steng was modeled. He was made in my own image. Don"t you find that amusing? But perhaps you haven"t heard that one. I forget which religions are current in these parts."
There was a crash as the stone slab was set back into place, sealing the room.
It was a broad open chamber, with a work desk and chair, and other furniture harder to name scattered about. There was a hole in the middle of the floor with spiral stairs leading down to a lower level. The room was well lit by a line of floor-length windows opening onto a balcony. But the other was standing with his back to these. The King stepped around him to inspect him more closely.
This certainly was not Steng. His right shoulder was hiked even higher than Morlock"s; his hair was stringy and gray; the tip of his nose and the ends of his fingers seemed to have rotted away. But, in spite of that, the resemblance was striking.
The other, meanwhile, was inspecting the King equally closely, wagging his head as in disbelief.
"No, no," he said. "Incredible. Anyway, I can hardly believe it."
After several minutes of this, the King said, as sharply as his shaky voice allowed, "Well?"
"Well?" the other echoed.
"Aren"t you going to tell me why you brought me here?" the King demanded, striving (and failing) to get something like the authentic Ambrosian rasp.
The other seemed surprised. "Tell you ... ? Oh, no. I don"t think so. I mean, what"s in it for me? And what good would it do you, really?"
"I"d like to know."
"People make that mistake all the time. "Better to know the worst!" they say, and then, you know, they blame you simply because they get what they think they wanted. No, I"ve done with that. I don"t give people what they think they want, and I don"t give them what they want. I give them what I want. It"s easier and there"s less fuss and screaming and things."
"What would you do if I started screaming?" asked the King, wondering if he could reach this oddly sensitive semicorpse through his finer feelings.
"Kill you," the other said briefly. "I"ll tell you why I didn"t bring you here. Some of me said, "Oh, transfer into a young body this time-the little King, wouldn"t that be amusing? Why, we could be Emperor after all, after everything." But others of me, and I"m with them, they said, "No, take someone like Morlock, or the dwarf or Ambrosia. Even if they"re slightly killed they"ll last better than the little King." And these of me are clearly right. You"re practically ordinary: an Ontilian man in the street, junior size."
Somewhat confused by this, the King said, "Transfer to Gr-I mean, to Ambrosia"s body-"
"Don"t call her Grandmother," the other said, with every appearance of jealousy. "I hate it when you do that. You"ve no right, you know. She"s not your grandmother; she"s nay grandmother. Anyway," he said, cooling off slightly, "she was the grandmother of my first body. I suppose the matter is somewhat more complicated now."
"You"re not ... not in your original body, then?"
"Well, I am and I"m not. That"s the interesting thing. Even if I transferred into your body, I"d soon look like this again. The mind is subject to the body in many mundane ways, but the body yields to the mind, too. My talic imprint compels any body I wear to a.s.sume this form. Why, take this very body-it was female when I took it up, very recently dead, quite fresh and comfortable. Now it"s quite male. It even has a p.e.n.i.s. Would you like to see it?"
"No."
"Hm. No, I suppose you"re right. My circulation is failing rather badly in the extremities, and I don"t think I could bear to look at it myself."
The adept shrugged his crooked shoulders and turned away.
"The thorns could use some fresh blood," he said thoughtfully, looking at the two soldiers.
They walked together past the table and chair by the windows out onto the balcony. Once there, the one who had been Thurn killed the one who had been Veck. Then he slit the dead body"s throat and upended it, so that the blood ran down the side of the thorn-covered tower.
There was a heavy sc.r.a.ping sound, and the King turned to see the other walking through the open doorway.
"What am I supposed to do?" he asked, ashamed of the piteous tone in his voice.
"It doesn"t matter," said the other dismissively, and the gargoyles replaced the huge stone slab.
"It doesn"t matter," the King said fiercely. "Doesn"t matter." Of course, it didn"t-it was what Morlock and Ambrosia did that would matter. That was why he had been kidnapped-as a distraction.
Ambrosia would not be distracted, he was sure. With the removal of the Protector, there was no other center for power than the one she chose to create. He, the King, had already proved to her that he might be more of a nuisance than an a.s.set.
But Morlock would leave everything and come to get him-would come here, now. He could hear Wyrth saying, Blood has no price! as he stood there. Whereas Morlock never said it, anymore than he said blood was red, or the sea was deep, or the sky was up there in that sort of direction. Loyalty was his life. He would come, and the Protector"s Shadow would have him. (Lathmar suddenly remembered the crow he had seen eating eyeb.a.l.l.s outside this tower.) Morlock might be on his way here at this moment.
So the King would have to escape. He stepped over to the balcony, but he saw without surprise that the way was blocked. Even if he could contrive a rope, the thorns would cut him to shreds. The empty-faced body of Thurn was still holding the corpse of Veck over the thorns, watering them with the drizzle of his blood; the live soldier showed no more awareness of the King"s presence than the dead one. He only knew he felt easier the farther he was from them.
There was no chance he could move the stone slab blocking the entrance. It took both the gargoyles together to do that. It occurred to the King that the Protector"s Shadow was afraid of something-that this whole chamber was designed to protect something important. Whatever that might be, it wasn"t obviously present on the upper level, so he went down to the lower one.
There were no windows on the lower level-apparently no doorway, either, although it was too dark to be sure. There were a few tables-almost like vats on metal stands-which shone by their own faint light. Lathmar stepped toward the nearest one.
Woozy with disgust, he saw in the vat a brain, a heart, a pair of lungsother organs he could not identify. They were not dead: the heart beat, the veins in the brain pulsed, the lungs breathed in and out. They were aliveplaced here beyond the reach of danger. The Protector"s own? Or ... those of the adept, yes. That made a good deal of sense. With these kept safe he could not be killed, any more than Morlock had been able to kill the Protector on the bridge.
The King raised his fist to break the crystal covering the vat, paused, then lowered his hand without striking. The adept would not have left him here if there were any real danger that he could do harm.
There was a snuffling, whuffling sound in the shadows across the room, near another gently glowing vat. The King was suddenly frightened, and he fled back up the stairs.
He was nowhere nearer escape, he reflected, at the top of the stairs. He looked at the two soldiers. Then he thought ...
"Stupidest idea anyone has ever had," the King muttered to himself. "Mad pigs aren"t in the running." It was the only idea he could come up with, though.
Lathmar crept toward the soldier that had been Thurn, picking up the chair from the worktable as he went. The soldier that had been Thurn did not react when the King struck him on the back of the head with it; it took several more blows before he dropped Veck"s dead body and began to stagger. The King went on hitting him till he fell, until the chair was in fragments.
He stripped Thurn"s body. With a curtain rope he bound Thurn"s legs, with the knees drawn up to the chest. Then he took off his flowing nightshirt and put it on the soldier"s body; he heaved the dead or unconscious form up on a couch and turned it so that the blank face was against the wall.
"G.o.d Sustainer, what a fool I am to think anyone would be deceived by this!" he muttered, but of course he didn"t think they would be. Eventually, someone would come for Veck"s body. It all depended on what came through that doorway when the gargoyles opened it. If it was the Protector"s Shadow or one of his minions, the Companions of Mercy, then he was doomed. If it was one of these things like Veck or Thurn had become-empty, but capable of action at some obscure prompting-then he was unsure what would happen, what they could notice. But if corpse-golems came through the door, he might have a chance.
Getting into the mad-pig spirit of the thing, he took the other curtain rope and the fragments of the chair he had broken and made a pair of stilts, binding them to his legs. Getting up on them, he found he could walk reasonably well. Not with perfect naturalness, but who did, in this city of the dead?
He quickly put on Thurn"s tunic and armor and spent some time walking around in them. The boots and iron greaves, both carefully laced to the wood, covered the stilts, and the soldier"s tunic didn"t leave much of his legs bare. They weren"t quite a man"s legs yet, but ... they might pa.s.s a quick inspection, even if the eyes had a living awareness behind it.