by James Enge
How had Steng and a squad of armed Protector's Men entered Ambrose? The King was at a loss, and he supposed Ambrosia and Wyrth were as well.
Lathmar had a sinking feeling that Steng's argument was perfectly tailored to his Grandmother's instincts, as a ruler and as a sister. He decided he wouldn't be surprised if he ended this day in the Protector's power once more—
Morlock stepped through the open door behind them.
His sister glared at him. “You took your time getting back.”
He shrugged his crooked shoulders. “I had some trouble at Lonegate.” His eyes narrowed as he saw the Morlock against the far wall with Steng's bloody knife at its throat. “What is that?” he asked. “A joke?”
“A poor one,” Ambrosia agreed.
Irritation twisted Steng's unlovely features as he took his knife from the Morlock-thing's throat. It looked at him suspiciously, then glanced at Ambrosia, but did not otherwise move.
“A joke that fooled you properly, Lady Ambrosia.”
“Only a fool would think so. The thing does not act like Morlock. It hasn't grunted once in my hearing, at any rate. Further, you have had its blood on your skin for some time now without any evidence of pain or harm. But the blood of Ambrose burns, Steng—as you have cause to remember. I let you live then, but I see no reason to do so now.”
The memory was clear on Steng's face. “Then we will take the King—”
“Try it!” shouted Ambrosia exultantly, and brandished her sword. “Wyrth—get Lathmar out of here. Find some royal troops.”
“My lady, with respect—”
“Wyrtheorn,” said Morlock flatly, “take the King and go.”
Wyrth turned to Lathmar, who said, “No, I want to stay.” He was fascinated by the change that had come over his Grandmother when Morlock entered. Wyrth did not bother to listen to the King's protests, but knocked the sword out of his hand, picked him up, slung him over his shoulder, and darted for the door behind Morlock.
Morlock moved forward to stand beside Ambrosia, and she clapped her right hand on his higher shoulder. “It will be like that day above the Kirach Kund—eh?”
“Yes,” Morlock said flatly. Clearly Ambrosia had referred to some specific tactic, and was not just engaging in nostalgic banter. The King caught a glimpse of the two crooked figures, dark against a bright thicket of advancing swords, and then Wyrth's foot kicked the door shut behind them, narrowly missing the King's nose.
The dwarf's short legs blurred as he dashed up the corridor. Lathmar knew he was headed for the guard station at the base of the next tower. “Wyrth!” he said. “Put me down! It will look better to the soldiers.”
The dwarf complied without comment, and they ran up the hallway side by side. When they reached the guard station its hall door was closed, against all usage. Grimly Wyrth kicked it, shouting, “Awake! Awake! Intruders in the castle!”
The door opened. They saw that no one inside was asleep. There were, perhaps, a dozen armed men within, three times the complement for this station. Word of the breach had spread, clearly, and the soldiers were debating their best course. In their midst was Karn, recently promoted to the rank of secutor.
“Secutor,” said Wyrth, addressing Karn as the senior soldier present, “a squad of Protector's Men—”
“We know,” said Karn, interrupting. “I'm glad to see the King is safe.”
Wyrth stared at the men in the room. “You know?” he demanded. “Did you know that this squad has the regent and Morlock pinned down in a chamber up the hall?”
The King was sorry to see the weakness he had suspected in Karn's character rise to the surface. The secutor licked his lips and said, “If—”
“Karn!” Lathmar interrupted. “Need is present. Bring your men at once!”
Karn's eyes shifted to avoid the King, and he said, “It may be better if—”
There was a clatter of armor and the thunder of booted feet in the hallway outside. Wyrth calmly knocked a soldier down, took his sword, and stood between the open door and the King.
These days Lathmar was considerably taller than Wyrth. Over the dwarf's head he saw the squad of Protector's Men stumbling down the hallway, Steng in the lead.
A moment later he saw their pursuers: two dark-cloaked, crooked figures, their eyes cold, their swords red with blood. One glimpse and they were gone, silently running down their quarry like wolves hunting deer.
“Those two old fools will get themselves killed,” Wyrth remarked in a level tone, not as if he were discussing anything important. He turned to address the soldiers. “Secutor Karn, I trust you will have no qualms against intervening now? Excellent. A remarkable display of nerve.”
Wyrth, the King, and the Royal Legionaries charged down the hallway after the Ambrosii. The King soon fell behind, and Karn paced him.
“Get up with Morlock and Ambrosia, Secutor,” the King commanded irritably.
“Your Majesty, with respect—”
Lathmar glared at him. Karn turned away and trotted to the head of the Royal Legionaries, just behind Morlock and Ambrosia. They passed by a castle servant, fallen in the hallway. One of the soldiers stopped to attend to him.
“Don't bother,” Morlock called back. “He's dead.”
The soldier rejoined his troop. But Lathmar had already fallen behind, and anyway needed a rest. He knelt down by the servant, and found that he was still breathing.
Still, Lathmar knew almost instantly what Morlock had meant. The servant's eyes were open, but seemed to see nothing. There was a terrible sense of vacancy. The King wondered what he would see here if he were in the rapture of vision. He shut the servant's eyes, wishing he knew his name, and hurried on to keep up with the others.
They ran a twisting path right through the body of Ambrose, dead-but-breathing bodies of castle servants and Royal Legionaries littering the hallways.
The King began to see red. How had they done it? He demanded of himself over and over, but there was no answer. Had the intruders somehow killed everyone in Ambrose? Clearly not—they themselves were still alive. The King guessed that they had killed everyone in their path on the way in, and were taking the same path out.
That path, Lathmar realized, must lead to the Lonegate. They were headed away from the City Gate, and they were too far away from the Thorngate. Then, Morlock had said something…. It didn't matter. What did matter was: Lathmar knew of a secret passage that led almost straight there. If he took it, he might catch up with the Ambrosii (now out of sight in the corridor ahead).
On his next chance he swung left and found an entrance to the passage he wanted. Then he sprinted and walked as fast as he could until he reached the corridor outside the inner guardhouse on the Lonegate bridge.
He poked his head out, but there was no one in the hallway. He stepped out, breathing heavily, and went up the hall toward the inner guardhouse, wondering if he had missed everybody. Then he heard the tramp of many booted feet behind him in the corridor.
The King gulped. He wondered if, rather than missing everybody, he had beaten everybody to the goal. That was extremely inconvenient, since it meant that his enemies were between him and his defenders. He glanced up the hallway, but decided he was too far from the entrance to the secret passages, and ducked instead into the guardhouse. Royal soldiers lay scattered about the floor like dolls, dead but breathing. He ground his teeth, but there was nothing he could do for them. He ran up the stairway to the upper level, hoping the Protector's Men wouldn't trouble with it, but simply rush past toward the bridge and escape.
At first he thought his plan had worked. Steng and the Protector's Men burst into the guardhouse, and began to stream out toward the bridge. Then they began to shout and scream, and there were other noises the King couldn't understand. Drawn by an irresistible curiosity, he crept toward one of the bowslits in the chamber wall. Peering through, he saw a black charger was rearing up in the middle of the bridge, deftly kicking a Protector's Man with his right front hoof. The bod
ies of others were scattered around the bridge's wooden surface.
The remaining men of the squad and Steng stumbled back into the lower chamber of the guardhouse.
“What do we do now?” one screamed.
“We go upstairs and fill that damn horse with arrows,” said Steng's voice.
The King glanced around frantically, but the place wasn't designed with any convenient nooks for hiding. He sat down on a stool and breathed deeply and calmly. A shred of a tactic occurred to him. It was unlikely to work, but the thought pressed itself on him with peculiar urgency.
Steng and a few Protector's Men appeared at the head of the stairway and paused, gaping, as they recognized him sitting there.
“But we left you back there!” Steng gasped.
“There are many of us,” the King said carelessly. “Didn't you know?”
There was no way he could have known it, since it was what Wyrth would have delicately called “a damn lie,” but the bit of misinformation seemed to impress Steng very deeply. His eyes grew round and he took a step backwards.
The King turned his head to one side and said, “Ah! There come Ambrosia and Morlock now—I assess their talic halos,” he said, lying wildly but (he hoped) plausibly.
The Protector's Men vanished from the stairwell. Steng paused for a moment and met the King's eye. His face looked puzzled.
“You could try to take me by yourself,” the King offered. “It would be easy—if I were who I seem to be, and if I were truly alone.”
That was enough. Steng fled also down the stairs. Peering through the bowslits, the King saw him follow the Protector's Men over the side of the bridge into the green water of the Tilion.
He dashed down the stairs and out toward the bridge. He paused where the stone gave way to wood. The Protector's Men and Steng were floundering downstream, nearly around the bend.
The black horse looked at him with a silvery eye. He felt no threat, but then he hadn't tried to cross the bridge yet, either.
He felt a presence behind him, then, and turned. There was no one there.…
But there was someone there; he felt sure of it. He took a step toward the wall of the guardhouse and glanced around.
There was nothing except a pair of oval shields bound together with twine, their convex sides outward, as if to contain something in the cavity inside. As odd as it seemed, this was what gave Lathmar the sense that someone else was there.
He stepped closer and saw that the shields were not bound with twine, exactly. It was just long blades of green grass, twisted together into a kind of makeshift rope. He couldn't believe that anything could be restrained by so feeble a restraint, but that was what his intuition told him.
His sense of the other was so strong that he found himself speaking to it.
“Who are you?”
He was not even surprised when it answered.
Many.
“That's no answer,” the King complained.
You will know what I mean—soon enough, the mysterious (yet familiar) voice replied.
“How did you come here?”
I was sent, and then set. I would go if I could.
“What are you?”
Many.
“What does that mean?”
You will know—very soon now.
The King found that he had taken a step nearer the thing.
“How do you speak?” he wondered.
The same way that you do—with your mouth.
Lathmar realized that this was true—that the thing had been answering all the time through his own mouth, through his own voice.
Except that it wasn't his anymore. He found that out when he saw that he was taking another step toward the bound shields. He tried to stop, but couldn't.
He tried to scream, but the other one of him, the one that was many, laughed. It came out as a laughing scream, and the world began to fade before Lathmar's eyes. Through the mist masking the world he saw his hands reaching out toward the grass that bound the shields.
Then someone else was beside him, a pillar of black-and-white flames: Morlock.
Get out! Morlock shouted, and one of him wailed and another sobbed with relief, and abruptly there was only one of him again, and he fell to his knees beside the bound shields.
Groggily, he rose to his feet. Morlock (the plain Morlock of the nonvisionary world, his dark faced creased with urgency) seized him by the shoulders and said, “What is your name?”
“The King,” he said sleepily.
Morlock grabbed Lathmar by the hair; his gray eyes stabbed at the King like spear points. “What's your name?” he shouted.
The King understood, hazily, that Morlock was afraid, and he thought this was interesting, as he could not remember another occasion where Morlock had so obviously shown fear. He thought about the other self, the one that had almost mastered him, and he understood what Morlock was afraid of. “Lathmar,” he said, as clearly as he could, desperately hoping he would be believed.
Morlock, his dark face a mask of relief, released him. He patted him awkwardly on the shoulders and said, “Good. I'm glad you're well. You're not ready to face things like that, yet.”
“What is it?”
“A shathe,” Morlock said flatly.
Behind him, Ambrosia said, “Of course! There were shathe-wards on the old bridges, but we didn't think to put them on the new bridges. When was the last time a shathe was seen in Ontil?”
“This morning. That was why I sent Wyrth off to the City Gate and Thorngate. He can set wards that will hold until you and I come to put in place more permanent protections.”
“You should have consulted me,” Ambrosia said. “We each could have gone to a gate.”
“I thought I might need you here,” Morlock said.
The King drew a deep breath. The mist was gone from his sight; the living world pressed against his senses. Beyond Morlock was Ambrosia, and beyond her were the twelve Royal Legionaries, foremost among them Karn the secutor. His eyes pleaded silently with the King. Lathmar turned away deliberately to glance at the black horse, still standing guard on the bridge over the river Tilion.
“You were too cautious, Councillor Morlock,” he said aloud.
“Was I so?” Morlock replied, smiling wryly.
“Yes, indeed. We didn't need Ambrosia, and we needed you only as an exorcist. Your charger and I were enough to hold the bridge against our enemies. He is worth at least a dozen of the Royal Legionaries, if I could pick the dozen.”
“He will be flattered to know you rate him so highly,” Morlock said, clearly noting the King's underlying anger but puzzled by it.
“I rate him more highly than that,” the King continued. “If my Lady Regent is guided by my advice, she will appoint this horse to the rank of secutor at least.” Then he turned and met Karn's eye at last.
“Oh,” said Ambrosia coldly, “is that how it is?”
“Yes.”
“I wondered when I glanced in and saw you all loitering in the guard station.”
“Some of us were loitering more intensely than others, Grandmother.”
“All right, you men: put aside your weapons,” Ambrosia directed.
They were a dozen and she was one, but they clearly didn't even think of disobeying. They disarmed themselves and trooped up the stairs to the upper chamber of the inner guardhouse at Ambrosia's direction. She bolted the door shut behind them and shouted out to the King and Morlock, “I'm going to find some live soldiers. You two wait here for me.”
Morlock nodded casually and guided the King over to the bridge. The black, silver-eyed stallion cantered over, and Morlock introduced him.
“Lathmar, Velox. Velox, this is Lathmar.”
“Is this the horse you flew out of the Dead Hills?” the King asked eagerly.
“I think so. He is not quite as I last saw him, years ago, but he has had some remarkable experiences since then, perhaps enough to account for the changes.”
“Does he still fly
?”
“Not literally. But I've never seen a faster horse. It's thanks to him I was back in time.”
“And when you arrived you found the shathe,” Lathmar said flatly.
“Yes.”
When it was evident that this was all Morlock was going to say, Lathmar asked, “What's a shathe?”
“A shathe,” Morlock said didactically, “is a being that has no corporeal presence. It exists entirely in the tal-realm. It can exert its will on the physical universe, and manifest itself in various ways, but it can't be killed by any material weapon or force.”
“How can they be killed?”
“By nonmaterial force. They can be starved to death also.”
“Have you ever killed a shathe?”
“Twice that I know of. I kill them when I can, bind them when I must.”
“Why?” the King asked. “Is it a religious…?”
“Because they are evil?” Morlock twisted his face wryly. “They may be. But it doesn't matter: I kill them anyway.”
“Why?”
“You have not considered, Lathmar. These things can be starved to death. They live on the tal-plane, and matter does not affect them. What do you suppose they eat?”
Lathmar shook his head.
“Souls. The psyches of living beings able to take volitional action.”
“Oh.” Lathmar thought about how close he had been to releasing the thing trapped in the shields. “Oh. How?”
“They gain entry to the will by persuading their prey to do certain things. It doesn't matter what, as long as it is at the prompting of the shathe. The moment of greatest danger is when the prey accepts a favor from the shathe. Then the prey may find that his will is no longer his own. It is then an easy thing for the shathe to compel the prey to destroy himself.”
“Was I in that state?”
“I think so.”
“But I never—”
“Tell me what happened,” Morlock directed.
The King obliged, telling the tale from when he took to the passages. Morlock heard him through and said, “That was a good thought, to take the secret ways. I guess it was the shathe who gave you the idea to pose as a simulacrum of yourself.”
“Why?” Lathmar demanded, annoyed. “Too clever for me?”