by James Enge
The King approached him presently and whispered, “You wouldn't have drunk, I suppose? I suppose it was all for nothing?”
“I'm not sure,” he replied honestly. The boy deserved the truth. “I'm never sure when I'm offered a drink whether I'll drink or not. Anyway, it wasn't for nothing: I thank you, Lathmar. You were right about the others, too; their behavior was curious. I think I'll talk with Thoke before I go to bed, and perhaps Kedlidor as well.”
“What is it?” the King whispered urgently. “That thing that pretends to be Urdhven?”
Morlock was surprised by this, but not very much. The boy's insight was becoming very sure indeed.
“He wants me to think he is a shathe,” Morlock said thoughtfully. “So I naturally assume he is not. Apart from that, I'm not sure.”
“If—” the King began. Then he saw Aloê approaching and he fled, throwing her a wounded look. His bodyguards followed hastily, their dress armor clanking as they ran.
Aloê was smiling indulgently as she reached Morlock. “He's very young to be a player in this sort of game,” she said, nodding her head toward the departing King.
“Or perhaps you're too old,” Morlock replied. “You hurt him badly tonight.”
“You're soft, Morlock. But that won't do him any good.”
“That's what Ambrosia says about me.”
“That bitch.”
“And that's what she says about you.”
“Well, perhaps I am, in a good cause.” She put her right hand on his chest, and he grew absolutely still. They stood that way for a few moments, oblivious of the others in the room. Then she dropped her hand to take his elbow. “And you've been very uncivil to me,” she said, as if continuing a conversation they'd been having. “You haven't offered to show me your workshop.”
“Would you like to see my workshop, Aloê?”
“The magical workshop of the master of all makers? I suppose it might have a certain tame interest. Since you insist, I'll accompany you there.”
She did, and, in the event, he did not speak to Thoke or Kedlidor that night, as he had intended.
“You are lovely in the morning light,” Morlock remarked to Aloê as she stood in the western window of his workshop, silhouetted by the dawn.
Aloê, who was aware of it, said, “I wish you were. Why is it I'm never done with you, I wonder?”
Morlock paused, then answered seriously, “You are never really done with anyone.”
Aloê was touched for a moment that Morlock saw her as so loyal. She knew it was a quality he prized highly. Then she realized he was thinking about Naevros.
“You're right,” she said flatly. “I can never finish things with someone and walk away—even when they're dead, or in exile. What should I do about it?”
“Nothing,” said Morlock the exile, with a crooked smile. “I can offer you tea and hotcakes for breakfast. It's a long way down to the nearest kitchen.”
“I suppose you cook them with the same spatula you use to measure out darkleaf and dogbane.”
“No, these are strictly cooking utensils. I gave up alchemy after I invented the still—”
“The still what?”
“The still is a mechanism which purifies, concentrates, and refines certain essences. That of wine, for instance.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“Hm. Well, it seemed a good idea at the time. Of course, I was drunk more or less continuously back then.”
She laughed as if this were a joke, although she suspected it was not. “Hotcakes are fine,” she said. “Anything to put on them?”
“Wyrth's own fireberry jam.”
“Hm. You're sure there's no dogbane around here? Because—”
“It's pretty good jam. Try it.”
She licked it off his finger, and tasted it again on his lips, and they said nothing more for a while.
“Morlock, your hotcakes are burning.”
“Eh. Oh, you mean literally. Er. Breakfast will be a few minutes late.”
“Indeed it will.”
The sun was well up before they finally had their hotcakes and jam. As they ate, they talked about the matter at hand. Aloê was amazed at how easy it was to talk to him and to listen to him. There was a soul-deep comfort in it, the easing of a long-felt icy pain.
“I've missed you, Morlock,” she said impulsively.
“And I you.”
“Once I thought—it seemed to me that you threw away everything for nothing. But now that I see you the master of this great state—”
“Wait. This state is not mine. You see me as a servant of the crown.”
Aloê laughed. “That's just a legalism. Why, that boy would do anything you told him to. Anyway, we all know that it's Ambrosia who has really ruled the empire all these centuries, and now she's growing too old to do it. I was shocked when I saw her. Who can she leave the job to except you?”
Morlock looked as if this had really never occurred to him, and Aloê laughed again. “Anyway. If—”
Morlock held up a hand and looked at the window. Aloê followed his gaze and saw a crow standing there on the sill. Morlock got up and stood over it as it gasped out some croaking syllables. Morlock answered briefly in the same language, and the crow's response was briefer yet. He took a fistful of grain from a closed jar nearby and scattered it on the sill with a final croaking word. Turning away he headed for the stairway door.
“Morlock! What is it?” she called.
“The King is gone.” Then so was he. She ran to follow him.
When they arrived at the Great Hall, the regent was already sitting at the head of her council. Kedlidor and Wyrth were there, along with Jordel and Baran and the King's bodyguards, Erl and Karn. Ambrosia lifted her haggard face to sneer at Morlock and Aloê as they entered.
“Now we know the night's events have passed their climax,” she began, “since these lovebirds—”
“Shut up,” Morlock said briefly. “A crow told me that the King was taken into the dead lands by two soldiers in royal surcoats early this morning, before dawn. The guards at the King's chamber say that no one entered there since Kedlidor, late last night.”
Kedlidor nodded in confirmation. “And he was well, and alone, when I left him,” the Rite-Master said. “And so—”
“Wait a minute, Morlock,” Ambrosia said. “Are you suggesting that two Protector's Men stayed behind from the conference, disguised themselves as royal guards, and kidnapped the King? Because I saw them out myself.”
“No, I think they really were Royal Legionaries. Or had been, before their insides were eaten. Like Kedlidor here.”
Kedlidor screamed, “I have not been eaten!”
A brief silence followed, punctuated by the Rite-Master's sobs.
Ambrosia sighed. “I knew he was a traitor, but I thought he was one of the ordinary sort. That's why I kept him in charge of the Royal Legion—as long as the news was always good for us, always bad for Urdhven, it served to overawe him. And it worked: Urdhven signed the treaty on our terms.”
“The Protector is gone, too, devoured by his Shadow.” Morlock turned to Kedlidor. “You say you have not been eaten.”
“I'm not. I'm not. I am still myself.”
“But his voice is always in your head. When it speaks you must obey.”
Kedlidor simply sobbed and shook his head.
“He told you what to do at the supper last night—to support the Protector when he offered me a drink,” Morlock continued. “Answer or die.”
“Yes.”
“And later?”
“I…He told me to go to the King as if I were suing for pardon. So I did. He told me to bribe the guards to let me in. So I did. He told me to push the King down the escape shaft. So I did.”
“And there were two eaten guards at the other end of the shaft? How were they to get him out of Ambrose?”
“I don't know. I don't know. Do you think he tells me things? I tell him things; I tell him all I know, but he doesn't tell me.
He doesn't tell. Doesn't tell.”
“That wasn't part of your deal, I suppose?” Morlock asked.
“You don't understand!” Kedlidor screamed. “You'll never die! I'm getting old; I've been so afraid. I didn't want much. I didn't want to live forever. I just didn't want to be afraid anymore, afraid of dying.…”
“I can cure that,” Morlock Traitor's Bane said calmly, and stepping forward, he broke the old man's neck. He threw the body negligently on the floor.
Aloê was shocked, and shocked again that no one else was. Even Jordel and Baran seemed to approve the action.
“I suppose he knew nothing more that would be useful to us?” Ambrosia asked temperately.
“Almost certainly; there was little left of him. I suspected something of the sort last night. Kedlidor was behaving oddly, and the thing that dwelled within Urdhven's body knew of matters that had been discussed at the supper before he arrived.”
“What are we up against, Morlock? Surely it's time for you to speak.”
“I still think our enemy is an adept. I think, though, that he has bent his power to duplicate the abilities of a shathe. That is, he can seduce a will into destroying itself, and get sustenance from the event—and control the dying will.”
“God Creator,” Ambrosia said. “And he has Lathmar.” She turned toward the wall to hide her face.
When she spoke without moving, a few moments later, her voice was deadly calm. “If we know our enemy, we can take steps against him. Morlock, you must see to that first thing. It is unfortunate that he has taken the King, but not fatal to us: the Protector is no longer a political force in the city, whatever has become of his soul. Wyrth, perhaps you can make an illusory King to serve for ceremonial occasions. If we can recover Lathmar, we will. But we must confront the fact that he is probably lost to us.”
She turned her face back to the room again; they saw the tears streaking her face. “Morlock—Where is Morlock?”
“Eh, madam,” said Wyrth. “He has gone to find the little King. What did you expect?”
ast of the living city of Ontil is the Old City—the capital of the storied First Empire. A triple curse killed it, the empire it ruled slipped away, and its people fled. Millennia later, Ambrosia and Uthar diverted the river Tilion; on its new banks they built a new city and gave it the proud name of the old one.
But the Old City was always there, just beyond the gray curtain of the Dead Hills. They remembered it and honored it by making it the domain of the imperial heir, along with the New City.
A triple curse. A drought from the sky that had never ended, not even after millennia. A curse from the sea, the curse of the Old Gods. And a curse from the earth: a plague that drove men mad and then killed by rotting the bones and the flesh.
People still came here. To hide, because no writ ran in the Old City. To die or to await death: there was no more suitable place. To uncover the past: for here it lay open for the taking.
And now its king was coming to it, for the first time since the founding of the New Empire, Lathmar reflected.
“Carried like a sack of beans by someone else, as usual,” he complained aloud. “Someday someone will figure out a better way to transport a king. I just hope I'm there to see it.”
He didn't suppose that he would be, but he was speaking largely for his own entertainment anyway. His captors (two men he had known as Thurn and Veck, members of his Royal Legionaries) seemed to have only enough awareness to abduct him and carry him out of the castle and the city—literally in a sack, he believed, although he had been unconscious at the time. It was not even as if they were traitors, ashamed to make conversation with the king they had betrayed. Talking to them was like talking to rocks, to a wall, to oneself.
But now he said nothing as the skyline of his other city crept above the horizon. It was like a city in a dream, in a nightmare. A forest of stone towers rose up, but they were half-eaten by the wind, etched crookedly against the bitter blue sky. Nothing lived in the streets that they shadowed: the boulevards had been dead so long that even the dust of the dead trees had blown away. But as the King and his captors approached closer to the city, he did see one living thing lurking in the shadows: a vaguely human form, its head a hairless, shapeless mass, like a rotten gourd striped in fever-blue and pus-yellow. It fled, staggering and shrieking as they came near. A plague victim—man or woman, Lathmar couldn't tell.
Lathmar was obscurely ashamed. For centuries, this place had been here, and people like him had ruled it in name and not given it a thought in reality. He had not cursed it; his people had not cursed it, nor caused the curse. But perhaps their indifference was part of the curse—a fourth curse, adding the cruelty of man to the hatred of earth, air, and sea.
“It's not as if I can do anything about it,” he muttered to his peevish, unreasonable conscience.
They turned up a street where, to his surprise, Lathmar saw some dead plants. They stood in a wedge of darker earth…no, a sort of reddish dark streambed that ran along the broken gutter of an ancient street.
Then plants could grow here, if there was water. Or some other fluid: Lathmar wondered what sort of runoff had given brief life to those seedlings.
He was soon to know. They followed the dark stain in the ancient street around a corner. The screen of half-eaten towers parted, and Lathmar saw what he guessed was their destination. A tower unruined (or rebuilt, he guessed) standing apart from the others in a field of stumpy ruined buildings. Surrounding it was a hedge of thorns, and the thorns climbed like ivy up and all around the tower so that it bristled black against the blue dust-strewn sky.
How did the plants grow in this dead waterless place? The dark stain in the ground was deepest and darkest near the hedge. Nearby, tossed negligently among the bare foundations of the broken buildings, were bright bones grinning back at the sun. The bones of many men and women: hundreds of them, thousands, tens of thousands perhaps. Their blood had been shed to nourish the thorns. Some of the bodies were fresher: the King watched in horror as a crow landed on the head of one of these, plucked out one of its drying eyeballs, and gulped it down, neatly snipping the string of optic nerve with its bill. It looked right at him, rather quizzically, then bowed down to eat the other dead eyeball. Lathmar turned away shuddering.
The two soldiers who had been Thurn and Veck reined in by the hedge and dismounted. They cut the King's bonds and dragged him down to stand by them—rather unsteadily: the bindings had cut off the flow of blood, and his legs and hands were numb. Lathmar was fascinated by the hedge of thorns: the leaves were small and darkish green; the thorns were as long as Lathmar's hand, with points like daggers. They were dense and intertangled: no light passed through them.
Veck's hand raised a signal horn to Veck's mouth, which blew a single blast.
A creaking mechanical sound was heard, and then the hedge of thorn began to rise in the air. At least the section nearest them was rising. It lifted and the King saw this section of hedge was planted in huge vats; when they were clear he saw the vats were resting on a section of planking like the deck of a ship. It was being lifted from the ground by some vast screwlike mechanism. A team of corpse-golems—he knew them at a glance by their mismatched limbs and dead angelic faces—were working the wheel that drove the screw.
The soldiers dragged the King down the sloping blood-brown earth left clear by the lifted thorns. As they passed, the one that had been Veck lifted the horn and blew another blast. The corpse-golems stopped, turned, and began to push the wheel the other way. The section of thorn-hedge behind them slowly began to descend again.
They walked on to the tower bristling with thorns. There was no place to enter, but the soldiers stopped just below a bare patch, some fifteen feet up the wall. The soldier that had been Veck blew two blasts on the signal horn. The bare patch of wall opened on darkness, and presently a stairway began to unfold downwards to the accompaniment of unmusical clanks.
The King took special care to look at the sk
y as they ascended the stair; he guessed it would be the last time he would ever see it. There wasn't much to see: the dark blue bar of the sea to the south, some black birds hovering in the west over the Dead Hills. He paused at the top of the stairs, reluctant to surrender the light. But the empty-faced soldiers simply dragged him into the tower.
There were two teams of corpse-golems here, one team in each chamber on either side of the broad windowless corridor within. They were still straining mindlessly against their wheels, striving to lower a stairway that was already lowered. The one that had been Veck blew two blasts on the signal horn as they passed. (The sound was painfully loud in the echoing corridor, but only Lathmar seemed to be aware of it.) The corpse-golems stopped; they stood; they turned and began to push their wheels in the opposite direction, lifting the stairway. (The King wondered if they would continue to try and raise it after it was all the way up, straining at the wheels until someone told them to reverse directions again.)
The blank-faced soldiers took him up a long series of stairways to the top of the tower. He was out of breath by the time they reached there—if he ever fell behind they simply seized him by the arms and dragged him till he took to his feet again.
At the top of the last stairway the King found himself standing in what was obviously an antechamber. There was a monumental door flanked by two enormous particolored winged beings Lathmar took at first for remarkably ill-made gargoyles. Then one looked at him with mismatched eyes (one red and round, another narrow and slitlike, with a black iris peering through). Lathmar looked away, shuddering from fear and exhaustion.
The soldiers halted and stared at nothingness. They waited there without words. Then the huge winged beings stood, and together they lifted the huge stone slab (which the King had taken for a door) away from the doorway.
Within the empty place was a shadowy form. It gestured at the King with long, ropy fingers.
The soldiers pushed him and he staggered, almost falling. Then he pulled himself up and strode forward into the emptiness. He heard the soldiers march after him into the chamber beyond.