Blood of Ambrose

CHAPTER SEVEN GENJANDRO'S WARE

One day Lorn returned to their room in the city with what the King had learned to think of as his "bad news" expression. The first time the King had seen it was almost half a year before, perhaps ten days after their escape from Gravesend Field. The city Water Wheel, where Lorn did the day-labor that paid for their food and lodgings, was closed for repairs. They lived from hand to mouth, with no savings, and that meant there was no supper that night, nor the next either. On the third day the wheel reopened, and they gorged that night on fresh wheat bread, slices of roast meat, and cheese. It had been wonderful, worth the fast. But that first day! Lorn had taken forever to break the news to his King, afraid the fragile boy would collapse in hysterics at the thought of hunger. But the King had often gone without meals for days at a time, for fear of poison, and as it happened he handled the fast better than Lorn (who was used to regular fare and plenty of it at his legion's refectory). And it would always be that way with Lorn's "bad news." The badness was mostly in Lorn's own mind.

So as soon as he saw the renegade Legionary, the King smiled and said, "Out with it Lorn. It can't be so bad."

Lorn smiled tentatively-as usual-and said, "Well, Your Majesty …no supper tonight, I'm afraid."

"We've still got salt beef and flatbread from last night," the King replied. He always laid a little by, now.

"Pretty dry, they were," Lorn said wryly. "They'll be drier tonight. I forgot to bring up water, too."

"Lorn," the King said patiently, "what is it? Was the wheel closed again?"

"No, Your Majesty. I worked and was paid." He paused, then blurted out, "I spent the wages."

"Oh?" The King was surprised and a little embarrassed. This seemed very unlike Lorn.

"Yes, Your Majesty. I …I bought something."

"Well, it's not important."

"But it is, Your Majesty. I think it might be very important."

He had it in his hand, now-a linen bag about twice as long as one of his thumbs. There was something inside it. He reached it and took it out: a beautifully detailed model of a crow.

"Lorn-it's dwarvish!" the King said, not meaning the adjective literally. (It was a general term of praise.) "It must be unique."

"Dwarvish it just might be," Lorn replied, "but-with respect, Your Majesty-unique it's not. Why, I've seen dozens of these things around the city in the last few calls.* Old Genjandro by the market has been selling them like loaves of bread. But I never heard one speak until today. When I did …I had to buy one. Got it from some peddler in an alleyway."

"Heard one?"

Lorn, by way of answer, carefully put the crow figure down on the table in the center of the room. After a moment, it flapped its wings twice and croaked a few syllables. The King started in surprise and said, "How does it do it? Is it alive?"

"I don't know, Your Majesty. But-your courtesy-please listen."

The bird flapped its wings and croaked. There was a pause of perhaps two heartbeats, and it did so again, but the croaked syllables were different.

"Your Majesty," said Lorn, "my mother's parents were Coranians. I've never told anyone that, but it's true. They kept to the old ways, and every day they spoke at least three hundred words in …in that language of theirs. The one from the Wardlands."

Lorn paused, and in the interval of silence the crow figure croaked again.

"Lorn!" the King cried. "You're right! It's the secret speech!"

The soldier winced at the King's bluntness, but nodded. "I only know a few words. But I know you've been taught more."

The King raised a hand for silence. In truth, the recent political upheavals had played havoc with his lessons. (His language tutor had been an early victim of the Protector's purge.) But the message was simple, clear, and apparently meaningless.

"It says, vengeret pel, and then, ostin shore," the King reported finally. "That should mean: there is light under the wings. Or maybe: there is hope among the feathers. I don't really-"

"But it's obvious, you'll forgive my saying so, Your Majesty," Lorn said. He picked up the crow and turned it upside down. Under the left wing there was a design etched into the metal of the figure. Instinctively he rubbed at it with his thumb. Now the etching blazed out gold against the ebony metal of the figure: a bright hawk in flight over a branch of shining thorns.

"The crest of Ambrosius!" exclaimed the King.

Suddenly the crow took flight. It spun one swift circle around the King's head and plunged toward the window. It burst through the slats of the closed shutter and was gone in the night.

For the next few moments they were both speechless. But neither needed speech to understand the signs: the symbol only Merlin or his children would dare to use, magic, a crow …

"Merlin's children," said the King finally. "My Grandmother. It's not just the Protector after me. They're trying to find me, too!"

"I'm afraid so, Your Majesty," said Lorn. He was wearing his "bad news" expression again.

That same evening a similar conversation took place in the palace called Ambrose.

"It's quite simple, Lord Urdhven," the Protector was told by his poisoner. "Turn the crow upside down. Spread its left wing. See the design? Rub off the enamel; yes. Now it comes clear."

"I recognize it," the Protector said with distaste. "It's the crest of those crook-backed bastards."

"More precisely: the crest of the Ambrosii."

The black crow figure shot out of the Protector's hand, flew a tight circle around the poisoner's head, and departed out the nearest window into the dark of early evening.

"Where is it going?" the Protector demanded, his voice level.

"They all go to the same place, Lord Urdhven, which is the same place they all come from: Genjandro's shop, adjoining the Great Market."

"Who is this Genjandro?"

"An Ambrosian sympathizer, apparently. He was one of the thousand invited to Ambrosia's trial."

The Protector's face darkened at the mention of that fiasco.

"Genjandro, since then, has been selling these toys for practically nothing, in lots of a dozen. There are hundreds in the city as we speak."

"How do they work?"

Steng actually laughed. "Death and Justice! I don't know. There aren't ten people alive who do, I expect. But their purpose is clear enough: the Ambrosii are trying to make contact with the King and his supporters in the city."

"That must not happen." The Protector pondered the problem briefly. "If the Ambrosii are not at the shop, they have an agent there. I'll send a troop of soldiers to the place. Anyone present will be taken and put to the question. You'll ask the questions, Steng."

"A wise plan, my lord," said Steng with satisfaction. He rather enjoyed questioning prisoners; he'd learned a good deal about people by watching them under torture.

"You've done well, Steng."

"Thank you, Lord Urdhven."

"But never mention that business at Gravesend Field again. I won't have it."

"Yes, Lord Protector," said the poisoner humbly. His interest in torture didn't extend to undergoing it himself.

"One of your crows has come back, Morlock."

"Give it some grain and ask what it's heard."

"Not a real crow. One of the little machines you and Wyrtheorn made."

Wyrtheorn and Morlock were making toys in the back of Genjandro's shop. But at this news they downed tools and went into the front.

Genjandro and Ambrosia were standing on opposite sides of the counter with the gleaming black crow figure between them.

"The wing?" Morlock asked.

"The paint's been rubbed off the crest," Ambrosia told him. "A single swipe by a thumb considerably larger than Lathmar's."

"Well observed," Morlock conceded, looking for himself.

"Canyon keep her observations," Wyrtheorn swore. "That just means another false trail. Or a trap."

"Probably," Morlock agreed. "Still: it might be Lorn. Find one, find the other."

Ambrosia was dismantling the crow with the swift skill of long practice. At the figure's heart was a flame in a crystal box. The flame, burning parallel to the ground, was pointed north and west toward the city's poorer quarter …or to Ambrose on the city's northwest edge, or perhaps the open country beyond that.

The flame had been kindled when someone voiced recognition of the Ambrosian crest on the underside of the crow's wing, and it would direct itself continually toward that spot where the recognition had been voiced. Of the hundreds of mechanical crows Morlock and his apprentice had tirelessly constructed at a feverish pace in the seven months after Ambrosia's trial and the King's disappearance, perhaps three dozen had returned to Genjandro's shop. All of these had been activated by unregenerate Coranians, or perhaps by accident. But their startling behavior had stimulated the most extraordinary rumors in the city, and had directed unwelcome attention toward their source, Genjandro. He had stopped selling the crows some time ago, but all four expected at any time a visit from the Protector's Men. It was this expectation that sparked Wyrth's next suggestion.

"Let's get the hell out of here."

"I can't get out," Genjandro observed mildly.

"You can. We can set you up in a new place with ten times the stock. Tell him, Morlock."

"We don't lack money," Morlock conceded. "But we must follow the trail, Wyrtheorn."

"The trail is following us, Morlock. I tell you I don't like it. Trust me; the Protector's Men come calling tonight."

"One of us must go," Ambrosia stated. "But at least one of us must stay."

Morlock nodded. "They may come here. The shop has become unpleasantly notorious."

"Let one go," Genjandro suggested. "The rest of us will wait here. All will share the risk. When the quester returns, we will consult our common interest."

"Well said," Ambrosia approved. Morlock nodded. Wyrtheorn issued a crackling Dwarvish polysyllable, but did not seem to disagree.

"Then," Genjandro said, bringing forth a worn brassy slug from an inner pocket, "will the Lady Ambrosia make the call? Face or shield?" And he spun the coin toward the rafters.

The King was alone. It had taken an unthinkably long time, but he had finally persuaded Lorn to go to Genjandro's shop.

"We're well enough off," Lorn had kept saying stubbornly. "We don't need those damned Ambrosii."

"Lorn," the King reminded him, "I'm an Ambrosius."

"You're likewise heir to Uthar the Great!" Lorn insisted. "Your father would have been ten times the Emperor he was if your honored ancestress had let him learn to wipe his own nose when the snot ran out."

"Lorn!"

"Your Majesty, it's truth and time someone spoke it. Your dad spent half his life being nursemaided by Lady Ambrosia and the rest of it being led around by his wife and his wife's brother. That's why the empire is in the hole it's in today. Urdhven's a traitor and a kinslayer; there's no forgiving that. But it's also true he was tempted too far. Your Majesty, no one but the Emperor should get that close to the throne."

"I'm not the Emperor!" the King shouted. "There is no Emperor!" I don't want to he Emperor! he longed to add. To hell with the empire!

"If Your Majesty would be a little more quiet-these walls are not made of marble, nor masonry either."

"Then any listener has already heard too much," the King said, but more calmly (and quietly). He wanted to throw himself at this stupid soldier and scream Bring me my Grandmother! But he owed this stupid soldier his life, over and over. Besides, hysteria would convince Lorn of nothing. And he was not stupid. He was not stupid. But he wasn't seeing things as they were, either.

"Lorn," said the King, "what can we do by ourselves? Nothing, which is exactly what we've been doing. We'll sit here in this room or another like it, eating salt beef and stale biscuits until someone recognizes one of us and betrays us both."

"Your Majesty, the soldiers-"

"What can they do?" the King interrupted. "You yourself told me my uncle is killing them whenever they say a word he doesn't like. Their officers are all with the Protector. As we sit here, I might as well be dead and buried to them."

"The people-"

"Lorn, in the name of-of Fate, don't you see what I've said for the soldiers goes double for the people?"

"If we have time we can work something out," Lorn said stubbornly.

The King suppressed an impulse to tear at his hair. "Lorn," he said finally, "I'll always welcome your advice. How could I not? Your wisdom and courage are all that's kept me alive these past seven months. But the choice is mine to make. Lorn, I order you to go."

The soldier glared mutinously at him for a long, tense moment. Then his glance dropped, and the King knew he had won. Lorn armed himself and left a few moments later without saying a word. The King heard him cursing incoherently as he descended the stairs outside.

Now the King had been alone for hours and it was long after dark. He was restless and bored and tense all at once. He had waited many days for nothing at all, in this same room, with nothing to do but exercise and stare at the wall. Somehow it was harder to do now, for a shorter time and with a greater expectation.

That was what led him to the windows. Lorn had told him never to open them at any time. But it was after dark, and soon they would be leaving here forever. And he was bored.

He opened the window shutters and peered out. Dull as it might seem to some, the city street at night was a world of adventure to him. He had been shut in every day since their escape from the Protector; in a sense he had been shut in his whole life.

The street was a channel of darkness below. There were no streetlamps and no traffic. The only light came from lit and open windows; there were few of these and none of them were on the ground level. He stared, fascinated, into the shadows, hoping to catch a glimpse of some passerby. But if there were any passersby, he couldn't see them.

There was someone down in the street, though, sitting at the front of a cart with its load covered by canvas. At least the King thought there was someone there: the figure was motionless and heavily cloaked; the street was dark…. He couldn't be sure.

Suddenly a window lit up just above the cart; light fell red upon the seated figure. The King saw, too, a dense uneven fringe of splayed stiff fingers lining the edge of the cart, thrusting out from under the canvas.

It was a death cart. The figure seated in front was a Companion of Mercy. The King goggled a bit at the red robes, mask, gloves-he had rarely seen these figures belonging to the city's night.

The Companion still hadn't moved. His (?) back was to the light, and shadow fell across the masked face. The King wondered if he had been struck dead by one of the hundred illnesses that killed without ceasing in the poorer quarters of the city. But alive or dead the Companion did not move.

Presently gentle hoofbeats approached from farther up the street; they could only be heard because all else was so quiet. Another death cart appeared, two red-clad Companions seated within it. The King wondered that the cart moved so stealthily, then realized that the wheels of the cart and the hooves of the horses must be padded. The new cart pulled alongside the stationary cart and halted. If the Companions spoke the King did not hear them. But the first Companion gestured with a red-gloved hand, moving for the first time, and the other Companions turned their masked faces away from the light. After a moment the King realized the Companions were not merely looking toward him, but at him.

That thought, in the chill blue air of evening, was menacing. He was alone. The most powerful man in the empire desired his death above all things. And, beyond all that …there was something strange about the redclad Companions as they watched him and did not move, as they waited and watched him while the night grew darker.

He wanted to back away from the window, but he was afraid to move. Suppose he left their sight, and they decided to seek him out? The thought of those red-clad figures at the door of his room was terrifying. He decided not to leave the window until Lorn returned.

Suddenly he wondered if Lorn would return. Perhaps they had him already. The King wanted to make sure the door was bolted-had he locked it after Lorn left? Would it be worth the risk to leave the window for a moment, just to check?

With dreadful gentleness, hoofbeats arising from the darkness of the street announced the arrival of another death cart. The King watched with fascination as it appeared in the vague circle of light below. The two Companions seated within it were already staring at him as they reined in beside the other two death carts.

A frightful thought occurred to him. The second and third death carts each had two Companions. But the first, the one that had been outside his window since before he had opened it (the crow! they had seen the crow crash through the shutter!)-the first cart had only one Companion. Where was the other? Where had it gone?

The conviction seized him that the missing Companion was coming for him, that the others were merely waiting for their missing peer to bring him down to them.

Now every shadow seemed tinged with red-a high hood above redgloved hands reaching for him. He felt he must go to the door-was something already moving stealthily in the room behind him? But he could not move a muscle. He could hardly breathe. He certainly could not speak. And if he called …who would come for him?

And so he watched, motionless, in speechless horror, as a gloved hand with long fingers reached over his shoulder, clamped itself across his mouth, and drew him, sobbing, back into the darkness.

CHAPTER EIGHT WAYS TO AMBROSE

Those birds were a bad idea," Wyrth was saying morosely. If I never have a worse I'll die a happy dwarf."

"Not inherently bad," his master disagreed. "We all underestimated the number of Coranians in the city."

"Of course no one boasts of it. Might as well boast of being a dragonworshipper back home under Thrymhaiam. But they remember, those crafty bastards. Hundreds of generations in exile, and they still understand the speech of the Wardlands! How many of them are Urdhven's liegemen, do you suppose?"

Morlock shrugged his twisted shoulders. One would be too many, and they both knew it.

One of the iron crows lay before them on the counter of Genjandro's shop. It had flown through the door less than a hundred heartbeats after Ambrosia's departure. They had immediately shut up shop and had been discussing what to do ever since.

"At any rate," Morlock decreed, "no one of us will go to investigate this crow." Its flame pointed in more or less the same direction as the last, toward Ambrose, and all of them felt the coincidence ominous. "It may be an attempt to separate us," the Crooked Man added. "We will wait for Ambrosia's return and look into this together."

"Ach, Master Morlock. Ambrosia may already be in the Protector's hands."

Shaking his head, Morlock replied. "I await her here. You and Genjandro may go, if you wish."

"Hursnze angaln khore?"* Wyrth quoted the Dwarvish proverb. "Blood has no price! I'll stay."

Genjandro's wistful expression suggested he was thinking of his own blood. But, "She would wait for us," he said. "I'll stay."

Morlock nodded matter-of-factly. It was then they heard the soldier (all three of them heard the clanking of his mail as he approached) step up to the door of the shop and pound on it with his fist.

"Genjandro," Morlock said calmly, "open the door." He loosened his sword in its sheath as he spoke. The dwarf reached out, and his fingers closed on a bar of lead that Genjandro used as a counterweight. Then the merchant threw open the door and stood back.

The light from the shop lamp fell on the face of the soldier outside.

"Good evening, Captain Lorn," Morlock said coolly. "I trust you received our message."

"The Strange Gods seize you all, Ambrosian filth," replied the Legionary. "I am here only at the King's command."

"Good for little Lathmar!" muttered Wyrth.

"Then you know where the King is?" Genjandro asked.

"I'll take you to him."

"No," Morlock said. "Ambrosia is with him now, I guess. We await her return."

Lorn, breathing heavily, stared at Morlock. "Then I wait, too," he said finally.

"That may be unwise," Morlock observed. "If-"

He paused. In the interval they all heard the rhythmical crash of booted feet marching in the lane outside.

"Please come in, Captain Lorn," Morlock said. "Shut the door behind you. We have a decision to make."

The King was relieved when his captor proved to be his Grandmother rather than one of the faceless red Companions-but not very. He anticipated a tongue-lashing for various stupidities, whereas a Companion would, he supposed, merely kilt or kidnap him.

In fact, he was pleasantly surprised. His Grandmother simply set him down out of sight, grunted as if in pain, and pulled at her black gloves.

"Grandmother," he said haltingly, "your, your hands …"

"Morlock and Wyrth patched me up," she replied. "These gloves are Wyrth's making; with them I can do just about anything I need to-except scratch my palms, damn it!" She paused and asked, "Where is Lorn?"

"I sent him to Genjandro's to find you."

"Good. Excellent. Then he's met up with Morlock by now. I was worried he might have gone down to deal with those creatures in the street."

"Why are they here? What do they want?"

Ambrosia-a shadow in the sparse light from the window-shrugged crooked shoulders. "Something to do with you, of course. You're the man of the hour, Lathmar, if it delights you to think so."

It didn't. Lathmar stood in silence, trying to think of a reply that was both true and properly respectful, until his Grandmother spoke again.

"We'd best get out of here, Lathmar. Come along. I've-"

Her voice broke off. A sudden poignant intuition caused Lathmar to turn. In the open doorway stood the shape of a Companion. Its red robes were gray in the dim light, but there were faint red gleams in the gaping eyeholes of its mask.

Ambrosia stepped in front of Lathmar, drawing as she did so the short curved blade strapped over her shoulders.

"Gravedigger," she said, "get out of my way. I am Ambrosia Viviana; I will not tell you twice."

The Companion did not retreat, but it did not move into the room either. Ambrosia advanced three paces cautiously, then-instead of cutting or thrusting with the blade, as Lathmar expected-she leapt forward with a chest-high kick.

The Companion disappeared from the doorway, and they heard him strike the corridor wall outside. Ambrosia rushed out the door, Lathmar at her heels. They saw the robes of the Companion settling down in the dust of the hall floor. Apart from dust there was nothing beneath them.

"A sending of some kind," Ambrosia said. "God Creator! What a stench!"

Lathmar, his throat clenching like a fist, could not reply.

"We've no time to sort this out," she continued. "Come along."

He followed her down the hallway to the stairwell. Glancing back, he saw a shadow standing in the doorway of the room he had shared with Lorn.

"Grandmother," he whispered.

"Shut up."

They entered the stairwell. In the absolute darkness therein Ambrosia seized Lathmar's hand and led him upward. Beneath them, beneath the sound of their footsteps and their harsh breathing, Lathmar thought he heard something moving on the steps below.

They reached the tenement's highest floor. The hallway there was narrower than on floors below, the ceiling lower. Ambrosia led the way to the end of the hall, where it was narrowest and lowest.

"There doesn't seem to be anyone home," Lathmar whispered as they went.

Ambrosia laughed. "No? I'd bet there's someone standing behind every door we've passed. But don't trust in that. We could be killed as we stood here and no one would even holler for the night-watch."

"That's bad!" Lathmar replied. He was wondering how many of his people lived this way.

Is it? I suppose it is. But they've got their own lives to think about. They've learned how to survive among the water gangs, the muggers, the corrupt watchmen, the thugs who prey on others for the pleasure of doing so. These people are tough, Lathmar, and they know what matters to them. They take no unnecessary risks because they meet and survive a hundred dangers in a day. Your best soldiers come from here, Lathmar-but they've got one flaw, from your point of view. They're realists, not loyalists like Lorn. They'll follow the strongest leader always."

"And I'm not the strongest."

"Not today. Look here, Lathmar, do you think you can lift me?" They had reached the hall's end.

He had spent the long days exercising-there was little else to do-but he looked up at his towering Grandmother fearfully. "I-I-don't think so, Grandmother."

"We'll see. Turn around."

He did so, and she put her back against his, linking both their arms at the elbow. "Bend over," she commanded, and he did so. Then she swung her legs off the floor and, lying with her black flat upon his, kicked at the low cracked ceiling. He staggered under the weight, the force of the blow. Plaster dust rained down on them.

"Grandmother!" he shouted. "There's something there!" By "there" he meant the dark door of the unlit stairwell.

"Save your breath!" she said, and kicked again. Chunks of plaster fell with the dust this time. Light was flickering within the King's eyes, and the world was changing shape. Ambrosia kicked again and the world came apart in a chaos of shattered plaster and broken wood. His legs gave way, and they both fell to the floor. He was not conscious of this, though, until she lifted him up. The hallway window was blocked with debris.

"Grandmother," he said groggily, "the window-"

"Get up!" she commanded. "No-not on my hands. On my forearms. Up you go!" She fairly threw him toward the ragged ring of dark blue that was the sky, the hole she had kicked in the ceiling. Choking from the dust, he found his head in the open air. He scrabbled at the flat filthy roof of the tenement, but there was nothing to grab onto.

"Lift yourself up!" she shouted.

"Can't!" he screamed back.

She placed her hand against his rump and pushed. The King of the Two Cities sprawled on the tenement roof. From the hole he heard a rush of footsteps in the hallway and sudden harsh laughter-his Grandmother's. Then came a burst of fire-bright light that left red afterimages in his eyes. When he could see again, his Grandmother was lifting herself through onto the roof.

"Phlogiston!" she said, laughing, to his complete bewilderment. "Never leave home without a pocketful, Lathmar! Brothers are useful creatures, sometimes," she added, even more mysteriously. As she rose to her feet he saw that she had drawn her sword again, and that the grip, broken in two, was trailing smoke in the night air.

"What?"

"Never mind. I left him burning on the floor, with the tenants stamping out the fire-"

"The tenants?"

"Certainly. They fear fire more than a thousand gangsters, or the Strange Gods they swear by. Rightly, too, I'd say." She sheathed her sword. "That was well done down there, Lathmar."

He felt ashamed and surprised all at once. He didn't remember her ever praising him before. "I did nothing," he protested.

"You did what you had to do. No one ever does more-many not so much."

"I could have done nothing else."

She responded with a cheerfully hair-raising obscenity. "You could have run, or simply panicked, even if there was no use in it. You did well. Let's go."

The King followed her across the roof. The prospect of his city dizzied him as he approached the edge. The dim smoky light from myriads of lamps and torches faintly sketched in the successive ridges of skyline-crooked, angular, domed. It was breathtaking, vast, yet somehow constricting. It was as if he were seeing an entire universe at once-but a very small universe, which was closing in on him. He looked up at the low-hanging clouds and saw red light reflected there.

"Is the city burning?" he asked.

"No more than every night. Look here, Lathmar, can you jump across that?"

"That" was the chasm between the roof they stood on and that of the next building. It was only a couple arm lengths across, but lit windows on both walls descending displayed its depth. Fear stopped his throat-he could feel the impact of the street on his flesh-but he knew he could make it. He nodded.

"Good. We'll cross a few of these to break our trail, then tear through another roof and walk down to street level. Understand?"

The King nodded.

"Jump!" Ambrosia said.

The King jumped.

Before the night was over the King found himself wishing he had missed the jump and gone down in a red smash beside the tenement. "It would have been better than this!" he muttered to himself. He thought his words would be lost in the tramp of soldier's boots behind him, but the mailed fist gripping his neck tightened painfully. "None o' that!" a harsh voice said in his ear.

They marched up the broad gleaming street to the City Gate of Ambrose.

"Hey, watchman!" the same harsh voice behind him called out. "Open this gate or I'll have your balls for breakfast!"

The road to captivity and Ambrose had begun on the way back to Genjandro's shop. Ironically, the King had been delighted. They took back alleys and deserted streets to avoid notice, and soon after they reached the ground the heavy clouds had begun a steady drenching storm that promised to last all night. The King had never been so cold, nor so physically uncomfortable. Nor, indeed, so happy. The danger, it seemed, was past; he was free and abroad in his city; he was with his Grandmother again. He could not imagine what was before him (fortunately, as it proved), so he didn't try. He simply reveled in the wild air, the bright blackness of the wet streets in the storm.

The first intrusive doubt that all was not well came when they had to dodge a column of armed soldiers marching up a lane leading away from the Great Market. Grandmother heard their boots long before he did and pulled him along with her into a stairwell that led to a door below street level. They watched from the shadows as the soldiers marched past, the red lion of the Protector on their black banner and their shields.

"Protector's Men!" his Grandmother muttered when they had passed. "Something's stirring, and I don't like it, Lathmar. Maybe they're just patrolling the city. But that's more normally left to your City Legion, from all I hear."

"They're not mine," the King said, but he thought of Lorn.

"Hmph. If Urdhven agreed you'd be a good deal safer. So would they. Be quiet a moment, boy." Hardly a moment had passed when she spoke again. "We won't risk the market," she decided. "If something's afoot and it's nothing to do with us, we still might be caught in the open. And if they're looking for us, we mustn't give them the chance they're wanting."

So she led him around the Great Market by side streets, a long weary way in the rain. His exaltation had cooled by then, but he said nothing in complaint. The way was made longer (and filthier) because at every untoward sound, Ambrosia hid them somewhere along the street. But the King did not complain of this either, even though they once burrowed into a pile of streetside trash and once climbed straight up the crumbling brick wall of a halfruined building. Too often her suspicions were correct: they were passed many times by troops of soldiers, never less than a dozen together, and once by as many as a half thousand marching, rank on rank. They bore no torches in the rain, but above them all flew the Protector's standard, the red lion black as a wound in the blue bursts of lightning.

"They must have had a whole quarter of the city isolated," Ambrosia whispered to Lathmar after the hundreds passed. "I suppose it started after I left Genjandro's-you can't move this many troops in a city without causing an uproar, and I'd heard nothing."

"Why are they moving again?" the King asked.

"They found what they were looking for. Or they've given up." In the shadows Ambrosia's mouth was a grim dark line.

"But would they give up so soon?" the King wondered.

"No!" Ambrosia shouted, and the King kept quiet after that.

Finally they arrived at Genjandro's shop. It was not hard for the King, who had never seen the place, to pick it out of the shops lining the street. Peering out alongside his Grandmother in the issue of a narrow alley, he guessed it was the shop whose shutters had been torn from the windows, whose door lay shattered in the street.

"This looks like grim business," Ambrosia observed coolly. "Come along, Lathmar."

"Grandmother, wait!" the King hissed, seizing her arm.

She looked at him impassively.

"Won't there be someone watching the shop …waiting for us?" the King asked.

"That's very good thinking, Lathmar," his Grandmother said, her tone cold and distant. "You're probably correct. I'm going in anyway, though. You may stay here, if you like."

Tongue-tied, he stared at her and then followed as she walked away. Her behavior was strange to him, but familiar, too, in a way he could not name.

She drew her sword as she approached the empty doorway and entered with casual wariness. He followed almost as quickly, more afraid of the open street than the hidden but doubtful menace of the ransacked shop.

In truth, there was nothing inside more dangerous than darkness and broken furniture. Lathmar stayed at the windows and watched the empty street while Ambrosia rummaged about and searched the place. She disappeared for an alarmingly long time into the back of the place, but presently returned to report, "They didn't even loot the place. Pretty businesslike for Protector's scum. Over here, Your Majesty, if you please."

The King went where she directed, his face burning in the darkness because of the scorn and fury in her voice. He was surprised: Grandmother, though often brutal, was never, never unfair. But he was not very surprised. Her anger made sense to him somehow. It was not right, but it was wrong in a way he felt he understood….

Grandmother's silhouette in the dark casually hurled aside a heavy stonetopped counter, and the crash startled the King out of his thoughts. As he approached she was pulling stones from the floor where the counter had stood. He stood gaping, guessing at his Grandmother's actions (for she was a shadow among shadows, bent down to the floor) by the sounds they made. Presently he heard her brushing loose earth away. Then she stood up and pressed something in his hands: the handle of a dagger. (He saw the blade's edge gleaming in the faint light from the broken windows.)

"There," she said. "If anyone comes out you don't like, stick that in him."

"Out?" he said stupidly, and then he understood. There was a chamber hidden beneath the shop floor.

"Out!" she affirmed. Then she bent down and seized something on the floor. He heard her grunt of exertion and the rasp of stone against stone.

Lines of blazing light appeared on the ground, forming three sides of a square. His Grandmother stood before the widest of the three, grimacing as she heaved at a large ringbolt. Placing one hand under the lip of the stone she was lifting, she hurled it back with a negligent crash.

In the wake of this noise the King heard a gentle coughing; it seemed to rise with the light blazing from the incandescent hole in the floor.

"You shouldn't have lit your lamp, Genjandro," the King heard his Grandmother say. "Don't blame me if your lungs are purple with smoke."

"On the contrary, madam," said a polite-voiced shadow rising from the light. "I had no intention of waiting, perhaps for days, only to die in the dark. I knew you would come tonight before the sixth hour, or you would not come at all. If the smoke killed me after that, why so much the better: so much less of a cruel wait."

"Now, now, Genjandro, will you defy the proverb and talk of death to the King? Because standing beside me is your lawful sovereign, Lathmar the Seventh."

"Truly? Ah, Your Majesty, I am most signally honored-"

The King could sense no irony in the merchant's tone. (He had nothing else to go by, as Genjandro was still almost invisible in the intolerable brightness of the dim oil lamp he carried in his hand.) But he could sense the corrosive amusement bubbling up in Ambrosia without even glancing at her, and when Genjandro's form looked to make some courtly gesture, perhaps to kneel, the King cried out, "Oh, please don't bother yourself. I'll be glad to accept your homage at any more fitting time."

"As Your Majesty wishes. Perhaps it would be best if we departed as soon as possible-"

"But that won't be possible," Ambrosia cut in, "until we decide where we are going. Where are Morlock and Wyrtheorn, Genjandro?"

"I assumed you had guessed, my lady. The Legionary captain, Lorn, arrived just after sunset, with an army of Protector's Men at his heels."

"So quickly, eh? You think-"

"I think it was a coincidence. Otherwise I would not be here. It was after Lorn arrived that the others hid me in the floor. The Protector's Men broke in and, I assume, took the others prisoner. Certainly they would not have left me here, if-"

"Lorn is no traitor!" Lathmar protested. "He might have turned me over to Urdhven at any time-"

"You're both off the mark," Ambrosia said harshly. "Genjandro, they would have left you as bait for us. And Lathmar, Lorn would not have been betraying you by informing on us. You haven't understood your soldier yet, that's obvious."

"How-"

"Shut up. We'll leave the question of Lorn unsettled. The main thing is: Morlock and Wyrtheorn are in Ambrose. That determines our course of action."

The King was relieved when Genjandro said, "I don't see how," because he thought he did and hoped he was wrong.

"Eh? Oh, it's nothing to do with you, Genjandro. We'll gladly accept any help you might offer, but if I were you I wouldn't offer any. You've obviously got your own problems. The King and I have to go to Ambrose this night."

This was much as the King had suspected, but he couldn't refrain from yelping when his guess proved correct.

His Grandmother turned on him fiercely, her white face stark with shadows in the lamplight. "You don't like that, do you? It doesn't matter if you like it or not. You're my key to the gates of Ambrose, and I'm going to turn you till the gates open or you break."

Genjandro, obviously concerned by this, began to utter a protest, and the King himself wanted to say something, he hardly knew what. Ambrosia listened abstractedly for a moment and then said distinctly, "Be quiet."

In the offended silence that ensued, Genjandro and the King noticed what Ambrosia had already heard: the stealthy fall of booted feet outside the shop door.

Deliberately and with great presence of mind, Genjandro smashed his oil lamp against the wall. In an instant the burning oil set ablaze the wreckage on the floor below, lighting the whole room. Thus the soldiers who presently entered had to do so as individuals, rather than as the aggregate armed shadow they would have been in the dark room.

When the first soldier appeared in the doorway (of course: a Protector's Man, the red lion splashed like blood across his dark surcoat), Ambrosia threw back her head and screamed; the memory of it lived in Lathmar's nightmares till the day he died. Then, brandishing the blade she had never sheathed, Ambrosia leapt into battle, hatred and happiness twisting the lines of her face. And then, just when it would do no good to anyone, the King recognized his Grandmother's oddly familiar mood. It was grief, in its maddest middle phase-the reckless destructive mood when you don't care if you live or die.

The King had been that way, after the first shock of his parents' death. No one had noticed, of course. The recklessness of which he was capable was invisible to anyone else. But for a long time he would eat his meals before others tasted them, he would leave his doors unlocked at night. He could not sleep much, but he lay in bed-shutting his ears with his eyes-and let the assassin's blade come when it would.

It didn't come, not then, and one by one he resumed his pitiful precautions. Grief is strong, but life is stronger. He would not have told this to his Grandmother because he knew that the griever hates life. Grief is love itself, wounded by loss, and life is just the emptiness that goes on afterward. It is terrible that such an emptiness can overcome the fullness of grief, and the King would never have inflicted this knowledge on anyone he loved. (It occurred to him, as she leapt eagerly toward death, that he loved his Grandmother.) But he would have delayed her or decoyed her, lied to her until she inflicted that knowledge on herself.

Now it was too late for such gentle trickery. Ambrosia had gone to find her death on a bright thicket of blades and would no doubt find it. The King crouched down in the shadows of the high leaping flames and waited for death to find him.

From there to Ambrose was just a journey of so many steps.

CHAPTER NINE AMBROSE AND ELSEWHERE

The keeper of Ambrose's City Gate grunted, his oily face gleaming between the dark iron bars of the portcullis. ' Whatcha want?" he snapped. "Gate's close'. Go 'round to Lonegate. Command's in Markethall Barracks. I guess it is. Anyway, no one here but the poisoners."

The raspy voice from behind the King responded irritably, "Damn you, you wobbly old winebag. Can't you see? I've got the King of the Two Cities by the scruff of the neck. High Command wants him locked up before the Ambrosians in the city have a chance to grab him back."

"Go 'round!" shouted the gatekeeper. "Go 'round! No so'jers here. Ha'n't stood a watch in five years, wi' my leg. Not s'posed to open the gate till Pr'- tect'r rides back. Now-"

"You've got the key, haven't you?"

"Yes, but-"

"It's ten miles on foot to the Lonegate. I've got to go to the nearest bridge, through a city that's half in revolt, cross the bridge, then walk through open country until I get to the other side of Ambrose. And they've probably got some damn fool on duty who'll tell me to go back to the City Gate."

"They tol' me-"

"Did you say the poisoners were here?"

The gatekeeper reluctantly admitted this.

"Send for a poisoner-Steng, if he's here. Tell him Hundred-Leader Medric is at the gates with the royal prisoner."

"Steng's questioning …mmm …Steng's questioning …some …er…

"He's questioning the prisoners who were brought in earlier-through this gate. Isn't that so?"

"Hmph. Hm. Yes."

"I've got the answer to his questions in my mitt. When I see him, I'll remember to tell him who sent me around to the back door with the royal prisoner. Then maybe he'll have some questions for you."

The gatekeeper puffed air through his lips and twisted his face. Then he disappeared into the shadows. Presently a clanking sound was heard, and the small door set into the portcullis swung open.

"Come in, you foul-minded Protector's brat," the gatekeeper's voice came out of the darkness.

The King dragged his feet, but his captor fairly lifted him across the iron threshold. In the darkness within the gate, the keeper's voice came from behind them.

"Know how I know you're the real thing, Protector-pup?"

"I've got the King."

"I wouldn't know the King from a ripe melon. No, if you were trying to break in, you'd have tried to grab my throat while I was waggling my face at you through the bars, thinking I had the key on my person." The door slammed shut behind them and locked. "You didn't even make a move at it. So you knew the key was hanging in the gatehouse, not around my tempting neck. Move on, straight ahead. You've been here before."

It was the King who went first; he had passed through this gate often, the last time as much a captive as he was now. But he did not really know the way-usually he was being led-and he often stumbled in the dark. He no longer even had his captor's guidance; the mailed glove had released its grip on his neck once they had stepped through the gate. Once they were through, the King reflected, rubbing his neck, it didn't matter anymore. Before him was a small guardroom with two tables and a number of chairs. Most of the flat surfaces were covered with wine jars and wide-mouthed drinking cans; there was a barrel of beer in the corner of the room, stale stinking foam drying on the floor underneath its tap.

Soldierly voices echoed in the stone corridor behind him. The two entered the room in single file behind him, the gatekeeper bringing up the rear.

"…might have been wrong about that," the King's captor was saying. "Treason's our biggest worry in this business."

"Treason!" the old Legionary sneered. "You Protector-snots throw that word around like it still means something. You're lucky it doesn't. If it did you'd all be traitors, and your All-Leader with kin-blood on his hands the biggest of all-"

"You're pretty free, there, old-timer."

"Not free enough!" said the gatekeeper, turning about to hang the gate keys on an iron hook protruding from the wall. "When the snow falls, that's my sashvetra*-I'm a twenty-winter man. I don't give a damn what happens after that, and not much what happens before."

"I hope you make it, old soldier," the King's captor said.

A change in the other's voice brought the Legionary wheeling about in suspicion. By that time the King's captor had seized the larger of the room's two tables by one leg and raised it to the ceiling, dumping the bottles and drinking cans to the floor; the King was sprayed by a beery reek. The Legionary stared open-mouthed as the table swung down and clipped him on the forehead. The King's captor dropped the table and grabbed the unconscious gatekeeper as he slumped toward the stone floor.

"Did you kill him?" the King asked.

"No," Grandmother replied.

"Won't he talk when he awakes?"

"You've become rather bloodthirsty tonight, Lathmar."

The King thought of the seven Protector's Men his Grandmother had slaughtered in his presence earlier, one of whose armor she presently wore. He had smelled the dead man's blood all through the long walk from Genjandro's shop. "No," he said dimly. "Not that."

"Your point's a good one," Ambrosia continued, "but you lack experience. A man who's been struck unconscious takes a long time to remember what's happened to him, if he ever does. He almost never does if he's been drinking. Besides, we'll fix it so that no one believes him if he does remember. Drag that table back where it was."

The King obeyed. When he had set it up, Ambrosia deftly kicked it over on its side with one foot. It looked as if the table had simply fallen over, spilling its contents. Then Ambrosia dragged the Legionary over, carefully draping his body so that the mark on his forehead aligned with the edge of the table; then she let the body sag to the ground.

"I see," the King said. "If he tells his story, people will just think he tripped, being drunk, and struck his head on the table. And his story …

"Will be thought a lie or a dream. Right."

"That's why you kept him from falling," the King observed. "You didn't want any unexplained bruises on the back or side of his head."

"Right again."

The King had thought she was being humane. He'd gotten to like the old soldier in the few moments he'd known him. He wished he could look forward to a sashvetra that would free him from the eternal intrigues and treacheries of imperial succession. He disliked his Grandmother's ruthlessness, and something of this must have shown in his face, for she took him by the shoulder.

"Look here, Lathmar," she said, "let's see where we stand. I'm here to rescue my brother Morlock and my friend Wyrtheorn, and I don't much care how I do it. I've obliged you to accompany me because I needed you to get in, and because you owe them more than you may be aware of. But if you want to stay here, or take your chances alone inside Ambrose, or out in the city-that's up to you."

The King was furious. He turned his face away from the battered visor of the Protector's Man Ambrosia had slain. "And now," he said finally, "you don't need me. I'll be in the way. Your guise as a Protector's Man will take you unnoticed anywhere in Ambrose. But if anyone sees you with the King, you will be noticed; questions will be asked. I make your task harder, and so you generously offer …" His voice trailed off.

Ambrosia removed the helmet. Her face held no hostility. In fact, she seemed to smile in approval. "You have a gift for balancing the books, Lathmar. What you say is true: what I have to do will be easier if you're not around. Nonetheless (put this in your books, boy) I will bring you along, if you wish to come. Because it is your right to act with me in this."

"I'll come," said the King. "Because of Lorn. You don't say anything about him. But you're wrong about him. He tried to warn me about you!" He spoke desperately, aware of his own incoherence.

"I've no doubt his warning was a good one," Ambrosia conceded, "for himself. For you, Lathmar, things are different. You are one of us."

"I'm not," the King whispered, frightened by his defiance. "I'll never be like you."

Ambrosia shrugged her twisted shoulders. "So much the worse for you then, my friend," she said, and covered her face with the stolen helmet.

Poisoning is a science, but torture is an art. The goal of the poisoner is simply to attain a physical goal, the death of the patient. The goal of the torturer is to destroy the personality of the patient without achieving the patient's death. Hence the torturer, unlike the poisoner, has to attend to the individual identity of the patient. This was the theory under which Steng, a poisoner turned torturer, operated, and he had attained some success.

That was why he had started on this patient's hands. The patient had been raised by dwarves, Steng knew, and the dwarves have a peculiar reverence for the hands. The maker of things, the Master of Making, is the person whom all dwarves revere. And hands are the organs of physical creation. After death, a dwarf's face is left bare, but his hands are covered.

It was with this in mind, then, that once the patient had been hung from the ceiling by his ankles, Steng had patiently and carefully flayed half of the patient's left hand, in full view of the patient. He had made a good job of it, stopping at the wrist so the manacle wouldn't get in his way, clipping a poisonous zarin-beetle every now and then to an exposed bundle of nerves, leaving the skin hanging from the bloody meat of the living hand. He had been careful not to let the blood of the patient get on his hands or clothes, for he hated a mess.

Really, it had been a very workmanlike job, and Steng was annoyed to find that it was not appreciated. Looking up to make some jovial comment, he saw that his patient's eyes were closed. Lifting one of the eyelids, he saw that the patient's pupil had constricted almost to invisibility, and that the pale gray iris was glowing faintly in the dim light. The patient was no longer respirating, but was clearly not dead either.

Steng could not tell whether this was the rapture of vision or mere withdrawal. (He was not a master of Seeing, and he hesitated to consult the one he knew.) But the patient's tal-self was not present to engage with the suffering Steng was inflicting on him.

"But it doesn't matter!" he told his patient. "You've gone far away into the tal-realms. But your source is still here in this body. If I damage it enough you will have to return. You won't have the strength to remain where you are."

There was no answer, of course.

"You're a coward, you know! A coward!" Steng found himself shaking with-with anger, of course. That would never do. He went to the door of his tower chamber and sent the attendant off to fetch a hot drink. Then he sat and drank and calmed himself by watching Morlock's blood gather along his flayed fingertips and spatter on the stone floor.

The light of Ambrosia's torch fell, red and gold, on the squalor of an abandoned guard post. "The palace is a shell," she remarked. "Practically every soldier in the city must be pounding a beat in or near the Great Market."

"They think-" the King began.

"They think they can catch water in a sieve. Bad tactics, as my esteemed brother would say."

"They caught your brother with those tactics," the King observed, greatly daring.

Ambrosia turned toward him, masked by the helmet visor but still clearly angry. Then she shrugged and laughed. "Well said, Lathmar. But it wasn't Morlock they wanted, nor can he give them what they want, which is you, so it's still bad tactics. Besides, what if the Khroi attacked? Ambrose is the key to the city, and your Protector has left it almost unguarded-just the poisoners and their thugs, it seems. Stupid of him-and worth remembering. Well, let's go." She kicked aside a pornographic book and the remains of an unfinished meal and passed through the post to the corridor it guarded.

The rooms along the corridor had been storage space, but a few decades ago river water had begun to seep into them. Rather than fix the problem, the late Emperor, Lathmar's father, had seen fit to convert the rooms to prison cells, which were increasingly in demand in those days. (It was the beginning of Lord Urdhven's influence over his brother-in-law, some said.)

The air in the hallway was dank and foul; grayish darkness grew upon the walls and floor. As she entered the corridor Ambrosia raised her torch high and gazed fixedly at the moss on the floor.

"Someone has passed this way, recently," she said quietly. "Not a soldier, I think. Still, they must patrol the corridor at intervals."

"So there's something to guard."

"Probably Urdhven's wine cellar. Watch behind us, Lathmar, and keep quiet."

A faint sardonic chuckle echoed in the corridor before them. "The suggestion comes a bit late, madam, if you don't mind my saying so," a bodiless voice remarked.

Lord Urdhven watched moodily as Companions of Mercy hauled corpses out of the smoking ruin that had once been Genjandro's shop. The walls of the building still stood, but the roof had collapsed and fumes still poured from the hole upward into the dark humid air.

"It's lucky there was so much rain," Vost remarked. "We might have lost the whole quarter to fire."

Idiot, Urdhven thought with weary impatience. What a blessing such a fire would have been! How easy it would have been to lose the body of the little King in the general destruction! How the city would have rallied behind him, the Protector, as he and his men fought the blaze! What a pogrom of the Protector's enemies could have followed, accused and condemned as pro-Ambrosian arsonists! It was a lost opportunity, but Vost would never see it. If only Vost were more like Steng, or Steng a little like Vost…. But each tool had its purpose, he reminded himself wryly.

Urdhven noticed that the Companions were preparing to depart. "Wait!" he barked at them, and crossed over to the death cart. He reached it before he noticed that Vost, open-mouthed, had not followed. He motioned impatiently for his henchman to come over, but even as he did so his mind was alive to the situation's possibilities.

Vost, peasantish town man that he was, looked on the Company of Mercy with awe and terror. He never would have dared to interfere with them, nor would they have paid him the least attention if he did dare. It was different with Urdhven, of course, and perhaps he could make some use of that sometime. Not on Vost, of course: his mastery of Vost was complete. But on others whom it would be useful to impress with a casual gesture of power….

All this in the moments it took Vost to follow in his master's footsteps, braving the gauntlet of the hulking red-shrouded Companions.

"What do you see?" Urdhven demanded.

Vost's face twisted with revulsion as he faced the charred crumbling meat in the death wagon. "Seven bodies-urrr. It was so many soldiers we set to watch on the shop."

"What do you make of that?" Urdhven demanded, pointing at one of the seven. Unlike the others it was armorless.

"I'll tell you," Urdhven continued, tired of waiting for the wheels to turn in Vost's skull. "It was Ambrosia who went to fetch the King; we know that much. She was either successful or not. In any case, she returned here. The soldiers attacked her and she killed them. Then she stripped that one there and put on his armor and surcoat. What did she do then?"

"Headed for a gate," Vost guessed. "In one of the regional garrisons- Sarkunden, maybe-she-"

"Shut up. She did nothing of the kind." Vost wilted visibly in the heat of Urdhven's fury, not understanding that the Protector was in fact angry with himself. He should have predicted this! "She headed straight for Ambrose. She's there now, possibly with the King in tow. She's trying to rescue her brother, just as he rescued her at Gravesend Field.

"This is our chance, Vost. Ambrose is nearly empty, but they are thereall there in the same box. We must close the lid on them."

"Yes, my lord."

"I'll go ahead with the mounted troops mustered in the Great Market. You follow as soon as possible with reinforcements on foot. They must all be my sworn men-none from the City Legion; we don't want this to turn into a damn civil war. And, yes, send a company of my men to each of the city gates; have them watch for the Ambrosii. It was folly to concentrate our forces like this. But if we catch the game we've flushed, it'll be worth it."

They turned together toward the Great Market. Behind them the redmasked Companions of Mercy unconcernedly climbed aboard the death cart and drove away.

CHAPTER TEN BLOOD'S PRICE

Within the iron-barred cell, the monster that had been Wyrtheorn opened its weedy beard and laughed. The sound of the dwarf's voice rang overloud and echo-laden in the narrow corridor. The waist-deep water in which the dark-green figure crouched sent back mottled reflections from the red light of Ambrosia's torch. The King could not tell if the movements he could see in the marshy water were ripples, from Wyrth's motions, or illusions from the torch's flickering light, or whether there were creatures of some kind in the water. He was tempted to ask, then realized he didn't want to know.

"No, madam," Wyrth was saying. "My appearance is due to my captors, who `scrubbed the floor' with me, as they put it, before they secured my hands to the floor."

"So your hands are chained down there?"

"Pinned. They have an apparatus something like a double-headed barbed spear; they drove one end through each hand and bolted it to the floor."

The helmet that caged Ambrosia's head nodded slowly. "I wonder if they have done likewise with Morlock."

Wyrth shook his shaggy head. "I couldn't say. They separated the three of us even before we reached Ambrose, as I've mentioned. But I won't slow your search down, if that's what you're thinking. I've had worse wounds in the field."

The dwarf's voice had grown not quite querulous, but curious. The King, too, was astonished to see his Grandmother so slow, so seemingly indecisive.

"Wyrth ……Ambrosia began, then fell silent.

"Yes?"

"Never mind. Face away, if you can. I'll pry-"

"Stop!"

Ambrosia stopped. She said nothing, but waited for the dwarf to speak again.

Finally he did. "Very well, Lady Ambrosia. I can follow your reasoning, if I can't lead the way. You may not free me at this time."

"The risk is small. If-"

"I beg your pardon, madam, for saying so, but that's horse-scut and you don't believe it. If you free me now we risk, at any moment, that the alarm will be raised against us. Since we do not know where Morlock is in this venerable pile, we can't know how long the search will be. Any delay may be too much. The risk, however small, is too great. I will stay."

Shocking the King, his Grandmother sheathed her sword. "We'll return for you, Wyrth."

"If possible, please do. If not, avenge my death, as my kin will be unable."

The stolen helmet nodded curtly, and the King's Grandmother turned away to walk back as they had come. The King stole a last glance at the dwarf (a stone figure in an abandoned fountain, hip-deep in stagnant water, covered with greenish moss) and hurried after her.

When they were well away she observed to the King, "It was a bit of an insult, that last remark. His father and I swore kith in the far north, before he was born. And Morlock was raised in his clan; dwarves consider that an even closer tie than blood-kinship."

"Then aren't you breaking kith by leaving him?" Lathmar asked. Formal issues of kinship etiquette interested him.

Ambrosia clenched her fist, unclenched it, and let her hand fall to her side. It was only then that the King realized she had been about to strike him, and he flinched, belatedly, uselessly. But when she spoke her voice was unshaken by anger.

"Yes," she said flatly. "But I'm not a dwarf. Nor was I raised among them, as Morlock was. My own people come first with me. I'd risk my own life to save Wyrth, but I won't risk Morlock's."

"You're risking mine," the King observed.

"You chose to come," Ambrosia replied. "Because of Lorn."

The King could not tell if the harshness in her voice came from scorn or pain. But he let the matter drop, even though what she had said was half true at best.

Or had he chosen? Truly chosen? It was something to think about.

Properly speaking, there are not three worlds but one: flesh and spirit, fused in action. But if that fusion is broken the world separates, not into two parts but three. There is spirit, there is matter, and there is the medium (called tal by those-who-know), which knits them together into mind.

Separate the three realms, if you have the skill. Remember: three points in space may form a triangle, or a line. Do not form a triangle. Preserve the tal as a barrier between the greater realms. Remember: mind is the union of flesh and spirit. If you part the talic union between them your awareness will dissipate upward into spirit or downward into matter; either condition may be considered death. (There are deaths and deaths: beware the second death.) It isn't death you seek. Separate the realms: preserve their tension.

The third realm, the realm of tal, then becomes a corridor down which you drift. You are neither conscious nor unconscious. You are dreaming, freed from the limits of flesh, not subject to the freedom of spirit, constrained by the freedom of the dream, the rapture of vision.

From the corridor of dream you watched as the poisoner flayed your hand. It had the kind of gruesome interest a revenge tale used to have, told after supper in the High Hall back home under Thrymhaiam. But it did not concern you personally: the power to move that sodden flesh was within you: interwoven black-and-white fire flaring bright against the dim insubstantial backdrop of the world of matter.

Presently you turn away, led by a secret intention to mark this place. It had some other purpose in your conscious mind, but the dream understands it in its own way. To mark the place of your own death. (The intention to kill you flares bright as a torch in the poisoner's dim patchwork skull.)

Death and life are both marked by blood. Surveying the pool of fading blood forming beneath your vacant body, you sense the almost talic vibrance of the innumerable spicules of fire-to-be drenching the dark dying fluid.

Put forth your hand: not the half-dead wounded hunk of meat that fascinates the poisoner: the black-and-white woven fire of the third realm, the strength and wisdom that move the hand of flesh to move. Put it forth; draw a dripping fistful of the sparkling fire-to-be. Depart, dreaming, through the open door like a ghost in an old story, dripping blood and fire.

Ambrosia and the King had come at last to a level of the palace seven flights of stairs above the ground. Corridors were narrow, rooms were few, and the walls were palpably thick and heavy. It served as the base of a rank of highaspiring towers; Steng's poisoners had their quarters there-or so Ambrosia said that rumor had it.

"But which tower holds Steng's chambers?" asked Ambrosia. "It's a fair guess that Steng himself is torturing Morlock, and in his own place. But if we pick the wrong tower we're lost; we won't have time to search them all."

The King said nothing. A strange somber mood was growing with him. Perhaps it was just weariness: it had been a horribly long night; he hardly had strength to shuffle along, and all his limbs seemed numb. Even his Grandmother's voice was just a buzzing in his ears, a voice in a dream, heard without understanding.

It was as Ambrosia's voice sank to an empty murmur that the King became distracted by Morlock, peering at them through a pane of glass on the wall of the stairway at the far end of the corridor. Their eyes met, and Morlock turned away as Ambrosia's voice came through suddenly, clear as a thunderclap.

11 -think that the night will last forever? We've got to find Morlock!"

The King's throat gurgled, like someone trying to speak in his sleep. Finally his mind and muscles responded to his will and he coughed out words: "I saw him. Just now."

"Did you?" said Ambrosia with polite interest. "Where?"

"In the stairway-just now. He looked through the window in the wall, and he …he went away."

"Your vision is remarkable," Ambrosia observed, "since I can't even see the wall, much less any pane of glass."

"But-" the King began, and stopped. He'd been about to explain that Morlock had been clearly visible, irradiated with motile tongues of blackand-white fire. Yet this did not seem as sensible when he tried to put it into words as it had when he had seen it.

"In any case," Ambrosia was continuing, "there are certainly no windows in those stairwells. I drew the plans of this palace myself, Lathmar, and laid many a stone with my own hands."

The King said nothing.

Ambrosia eyed him narrowly through the mask of her visor, then seized him by the arm. "Come along. Just move your feet; we'll have a look."

Grimly unhappy, the King let himself be dragged along to the stairwell. As he had feared, there was no glass of any sort in the walls, and in addition the stairwell was thick with the stench of blood and smoke. The torture chambers, he thought, must be nearby. But he swore to himself he would say nothing about it; Ambrosia herself pretended not to notice the reek, he saw.

"Lathmar," she said finally, after searching the wall, "tell me again what you saw. Tell me exactly what you saw."

The King's eyes gaped in the dimness, struggling to see something that could account for his delusion. "That, I think," he said, pointing.

"What?"

"It must have been light reflecting off that."

"Don't tell me what you think you saw, tell me-Wait. What are you pointing at?"

"The smear of blood on the wall. It-" But looking again, he saw no blood. The reek of it was fading, gone, had never been there. "I don't see it now," he concluded lamely.

"Well, where was it?" Ambrosia's voice was matter-of-fact.

The King pointed again, feeling foolish. His Grandmother put out a mailed glove and traced her finger on the wall. It left a thin guttering stroke of flame behind it that soon expired. But as it did so the reek of blood and fire was back in the King's nostrils.

"Ah!" Ambrosia exclaimed, sounding pleased. She put her palm flat against the stone and swept it back and forth. A pale shower of reddish sparks leapt out from the wall; the King again saw a patch of blood, outlined in fire that instantly faded.

"What is it? Is it real?" the King demanded.

"Yes. Quite real: it is the blood of an Ambrosius. Only ours sheds fire in quite this way. Which way was Morlock going, up or down?"

"Down. That is-"

"Don't think. Just answer. He was going down?"

"Y Yes."

"We go up, then. I don't know if the rapture will take you again, Lathmar, but if you notice anything that seems strange to you, tug on my sleeve. Don't be surprised if you can't speak: reason and rapture are always at odds."

"What-?"

"This is a bad time for a lesson in magic, Lathmar, and the Sight is a bad gift to give a ruler, in any case. We see too much and feel too much as it is. Go on: lead the way, little King."

Silent, empty of rapture or reason, the little King wearily led the way upward.

After some conversation with his assistant poisoner, Steng returned to his chamber. His mouth was sticky with warm sherbet, and his mind was more purposeful, more resolute. This would be the end of the game, one way or the other. Morlock would or would not tell him what he wanted to know; he would or would not rise in the Protector's estimation for this. But either way: at the day's end he would have tortured, degraded, and killed a master of Making, famous even among those-who-know, a dark legend among those who did not. He wondered what it would feel like to have done that; he looked forward to the sensation.

Lost in his reverie of blood he did not notice the faint traces of smoke in the air as he approached the chamber door. They were, indeed, slight, but a normally alert Steng would have caught them. He waved aside the deaf-mute guard, ignoring the urgent gestures the guard made at him. He threw open his chamber door, a derisively pleasant remark at his lips.

The room was an image of chaos: filled with clouds of dark smoke, lit within by dim flames clinging to the floor. Morlock's form-a dark constant in the flickering red gloom-hung as before from the chamber ceiling. Steng plunged forward with a curse, snatching the woven rug from inside the doorway as he ran and hurling it down on the patch of guttering flames on the floor.

Steng screamed as a spray of corrosive liquid leapt up from the floor, searing his right arm and setting his capacious sleeve on fire. He batted out the flames in his clothing, staggering back in confusion. He was totally at a loss, fearfully expecting at any moment his death-stroke from some strange Ambrosian magic.

Into the emptiness of his mind came the slow persistent sound of dripping. He listened for a moment, absorbed, utterly unaware of what he was hearing. Then he knew: it was the sound of Morlock's blood, still dripping from his open wounds. Finally the smoke and fire lost their mystery.

It must be true what people said-that the secret of the Ambrosian immunity to fire lay in their blood, which drew the fire from their flesh, and which could itself start fires, when spilled. It was said to be a poison as well.

Steng was tempted to keep Morlock alive a while longer to do some experiments. It would be dangerous, of course, and there was always the possibility of using Ambrosia to the same end. When he came to the question, though, he found he feared Ambrosia more than this Morlock fellow.

In any case, the thing to do now was to clean up the mess. He turned to fetch his guard and noticed with some gratification that the man was already approaching him: finally something was going well on this dreadful night. Something of nightmare remained in the scene, or in Steng's own mind. Some trick of the light or the smoke made it seem the man approaching was headless, his slow uncertain steps the movements of a body about to collapse….

Steng stared open-mouthed as the body of his deaf-mute guard fell in a heap on the floor. Beyond it, the doorway filled with a figure in the surcoat and armor of a Protector's Man. But it was no man. The little room was already echoing with the fierce, pitiless laughter of the royal ancestress, Ambrosia Viviana.

Although perfectly capable of fear, Steng did not then feel it. It was something beyond fear: a stark blank realization of his powerlessness. That, along with the smoke fumes, the poison of Morlock's blood, and simple shock overthrew his last vestiges of strength, and he fell unconscious on the dead body of his dead protector, like a stone or a broken toy or any lifeless thing.

When Ambrosia saw Steng fall she wasted no more thought on him. Glancing around, she saw the contents of Morlock's pack spread out over a nearby table. She went over to gather tools, then returned, drawing a threelegged chair with her. Standing on the chair she used the tools to shatter the hinges on the manacles imprisoning Morlock's ankles. At the last blow of the chisel the manacles flew open and Morlock began to fall. Ambrosia dropped the tools and seized her brother by the shins, but the weight caused her to overbalance and she fell with him to the floor.

Half dazed, she saw Morlock lying beside her on the floor. He also stood above her, a glittering pillar of black-and-white fire. He offered her a hand (?) and, hesitantly, she accepted it, rising from her half-conscious self to walk beside her brother's tal-shadow.

He led her to the window of the small chamber and gestured. She saw immediately what he meant her to see: through the dark translucence of Ambrose's mossy stones she saw a river of light approaching through the narrow streets of the city below: living souls, living tal. As she watched, the flood broke upon the City Gate, then after a pause began to filter in through the shadowy opening, its light dimmed by veils of stone.

The Protector's forces, she thought. Nothing was so alien to the rapture of vision as ordinary rational speech, so she consciously formed the words, firing them at her vision-lost brother like arrows. The Protector is coming hack. We must hurry, or he'll trap us in these towers. I know where Wyrth is being held. Morlock, return….

She saw the brightness of his flames dimmed by conscious forethought. She sensed his presence recede toward the physical plane. With a poignant sense of loss and relief, she opened her eyes to find herself twelve feet from the chamber window, her head aching. Lathmar knelt over her with tears on his face.

-ndmother, wake up!" he was saying.

"I'm with you," she said, sitting up. "See to Morlock, if you can."

But she saw that he had. There was a clumsy smoldering bandage about Morlock's tortured hand (very clumsy, but this was no time for a lesson in leechcraft), the burning rugs on the far side of the room had been put out …and the pool of blood was mostly dry. The air of the chamber was clear, too. Ambrosia suppressed a curse. Time, as well as volition, is distorted in rapture. How long had they been unconscious? The Protector's Men might be killing Wyrth as she sat there.

"Morlock!" she shouted in her brother's ear.

He responded with a rasping cough that might have had a syllable of Dwarvish in it.

"Don't revert to type, you useless bag of knuckles," she stormed at him. "Talk to me in my own language. And don't say anything noble and selfsacrificing: we've already been to too much trouble on your account."

"I said," Morlock croaked, "`Pack my pack."'

Her head ringing with pain and the loss of rapture, she cursed him for a nine-tenths dwarvish deviant crookback bastard.

He shrugged.

Ambrosia snarled and jumped to her feet. She packed his pack, not omitting the chisel-grip and hammer she had used to break his bonds. She understood Morlock's demand: it would have been an act of madness to leave the pack behind. The books alone would have made a half-wizard like Steng a power among those-who-know.

The sounds attendant on her brother rising to his feet sickened her; she kept her face averted. They needed to know now if Morlock could move about on his own. When it proved that he could she finished knotting the straps and turned around to shoulder the pack.

He moved toward her, his face bloodless as a ghost's. "I'll-"

"You'll shut up. Now's not the time to let loose the mordant wit and conversationalist we all know rages within you. I can handle your damn pack." She grunted, though, as she took the weight of it on her shoulders. (No wonder he grunted so much.)

11 -take Tyrfing," he finished, as if she had not spoken.

Glumly she passed him the dark ornamentless sheath that lay upon the table. She saw Lathmar goggling at the dark crystalline pommel, and almost smiled. She sensed an incipient hero-worship there. Ah well: it could only prove dangerous if both of them lived through the night, which seemed somewhat unlikely.

"Now!" she said. "We'll go break out Wyrth-"

"What about Lorn?" the King demanded (speaking to Morlock, Ambrosia noted wryly).

"I know where he is," Morlock said impassively. "But I don't know where Wyrth is."

"But I do," Ambrosia said.

Morlock nodded.

In the tense silence they all heard, faint and far off, the echoing reports of booted feet on stone.

Ambrosia swore. It was a waste of time, but it was the only alternative to You poor dear, I can't have you wandering around this nasty castle all by yourself.

"You never learned the hidden passages, did you?" she said accusingly.

"No."

"You'd better take Lathmar, then. He knows some."

"Good. We'll meet when we can."

She moved forward and embraced him briefly. "Go, now. I'll sow confusion in their ranks." She kept her tone neutral. He hugged her back, a hard shell inside a hard shell, she thought, behind the mask of her visor. Then he was gone, and Lathmar, with a woeful look backward, followed him through the doorway.

This night would be wasted time if they managed to get themselves killed, she reflected. (She took no thought for Lorn.) She hated to waste time, so she set straight on sowing confusion, taking the still-bloody sword she had slain Steng's guard with and putting the grip in Steng's right hand, which clenched upon it reflexively.

"Ah, Steng!" she said. "If you didn't exist we'd have to design and build you." She allowed herself a single fiercely satisfied thought about what the Protector's Men would likely do to the poisoner-turned-torturer if they had the chance, then passed from the bloody chamber to the rising din of the corridor outside.

The King knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about healing. He didn't know how much blood a person could lose and still live. Morlock's grave sallow face, though impassive, was somehow imprinted with sick weariness, and Lathmar noticed he limped as he walked.

"Is your leg hurt?"

"An old wound," Ambrosia's brother said flatly. "Be quiet now."

The King of the Two Cities shut his half-open mouth, and they moved as quickly as they could down the dark narrow stairway that led to the pedestal floor. They were on that floor, well lit and well aired, when a door opened in the corridor behind them and a group of chattering soldiers came out-hiding from their troop leader, not taking their search seriously. Until it succeeded: their voices fell silent as Morlock turned against them and drew the accursed sword Tyrfing in a single movement.

The King thought it was all over with them then. The only thing between him and captivity was a sick, limping man older than Time. If the soldiers had seen Morlock as the King recently had (hung by the heels like a slaughtered pig) no doubt he would have been right.

But (he realized this later) what they saw was this: the dark glittering edge of the accursed sword, and beyond it the smoldering hand and the sallow impassive face of the man who had killed Hlosian Bekh.

They ran. But as they fled, they called out, shouting for their troopleader, reinforcements, help. The King thought of Lorn's desperate stand against the Protector and his men at Gravesend Field and was ashamed for them. But Morlock wheeled about, seized him by the collar, and dragged him down the corridor.

"I can walk!" the King protested.

"Don't. Run!"

The King ran, his short legs moving double-time to keep up with Morlock's long, irregular stride. The darkness of a stairwell closed about them and the King paused, sighing with relief.

"Don't stop." Morlock's flat implacable voice came out of the dark. "Once they pass the word there's no escape for us. Run."

They ran: down endless unlit stairwells, through wide corridors dangerous with light. The King remembered little of it later except his growing desire for sleep, a thirst for rest so intense it made all exterior sensations dim and dreamlike.

He returned to himself at that blessed moment when Morlock drew to a halt, putting a hand on his shoulder. They were in a hallway he didn't recognize, but he knew they were deep under Ambrose: the weight of the stone above their heads was almost palpable.

"Be quiet," Morlock said gently. The King, about to protest that he had said nothing, realized he was gasping and gulping like a lungfish in a net. He tried to make his breathing less raspy and more regular, finally succeeding.

"Now," said Morlock, "we will enter the chamber together. There will be one or two attendants within. I will kill them-"

"Why?" the King demanded.

Morlock's strangely pale gray eyes peered at him though the shadows of the dark corridor. The King could not read his expressions (if he had any!), but he thought Morlock was surprised.

"You'll understand," he said finally. "Don't interfere. Tend to Lorn."

"What if he's not here? Suppose they've moved him?"

"Then he is lost to us. Come now."

It was a clean, well-lighted place they entered, like a surgeon's chamber he had been taken to once when he fell sick, before his parents died. Like the surgeon, the attendants themselves were not clean. They looked up, sweatstained faces twisting in surprise, from the bright bloody filth on the table at the center of the room.

Morlock spoke, but the King never heard what he said, for at that moment he realized the squirming thing on the table was wearing Lorn's face. For a long stupid second he wondered why they had put Lorn's face on that thing. It was very like a mask: bloodlessly pale, fixed wooden expression, dark holes where the eyes should be. Then he understood; he understood everything.

He walked straight to Lorn, ignoring the attendants. One brushed by him, plunging forward to Morlock and death; the other fled away to the far wall of the chamber.

The King stopped at the table; spiked metallic forms gleamed dully with Lorn's drying blood. Lorn couldn't see him: charred wet meat was all that remained in his eye sockets. The King could think of nothing to say (did even Kedlidor the Rite-Master know a formula for this?) and simply reached to unfasten the manacles binding Lorn's stumps. This was a mistake; Lorn flinched at his touch, and the animal whine that escaped his torn lips broke the King's heart.

"No! No!" the King whispered urgently, frightened and obscurely angry. "I've come to release you!"

"What is your name, friend?" Lorn whispered, breath whistling through the hole in his throat.

There was only one answer for that. "I am your King." He tried to say it firmly, but his voice quavered.

"Majesty!" the tortured soldier gasped. He added loyally, "I knew you'd come."

He was lying. He must be lying, thought Lathmar, as his eyes filled with tears and his soft fingers strove to turn the bolts of the manacles. How could anyone think such a thing? How could anyone be so stupid as to expect it? He hadn't come, anyway. He'd been brought.

When he finally unfastened Lorn's bonds he looked up to see Morlock standing at the door, evidently listening. The two torturers lay like broken dolls on the floor; Morlock had killed them without drawing blood.

"Help me," he said to his Grandmother's brother.

"How?"

"I …I want to bring Lorn away from here."

Again Morlock turned his bright colorless eyes on the King for a long moment. Whether the glance expressed surprise, disdain, or some other emotion the King could not tell and did not care.

"You'll have to carry him," Morlock said. "Our enemies are at our heels and I'll be fighting soon. I'll tie him to your back, though."

When the dreadful weight of Lorn's ruined body came down on his shoulders, Lathmar nearly quailed. But there was no alternative. He would die himself before he left Lorn here.

Morlock bound the flaccid body to his shoulders with twisted strips of cloth torn from the dead torturers' smocks. The King tried to gasp out an apology to Lorn for confining him after so brief a freedom. But Lorn did not answer; it probably hurt to speak, or perhaps he was unconscious.

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 l?"

"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-11

"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 nay 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?