Blood of Ambrose (36 page)

“What is it?”

“It's a day's work-credit,” the dead baby said. “The new currency of the city. Nothing else will be accepted for any commercial exchange, under pain of my extreme displeasure (which can be pretty extreme). It's what these men are working for, here.” Its tiny gray hand (several fingers were bare bone) gestured vaguely at the Water Wheel.

Genjandro opened his fingers and let the thing fall to the ground. “I'd rather steal,” he said.

“Oh, don't do that! All property rights will be respected, because ultimately, you know, it all belongs to me. You really won't take it?” Insofar as the sagging little face could express emotion, it seemed to be surprised. “Why, these are valuable indeed.”

“I can see that. That's why I refused it. I take nothing from you: that's how it starts.”

“You're taking life from me,” the dead baby argued. “I could have these Companions kill you right now, but I refrain.”

“Then do it,” Genjandro said with genuine indifference. “I owe you nothing.”

“You could owe me gratitude for eternal life!” the dead baby said earnestly. “Consider, Genjandro! You're an old man; you haven't many years of life before you. But there's no reason for me, or anyone who becomes part of me, to ever die. You could live forever! And there's nothing that people won't do for more life, even if it's only a single day. Consider this line of men!”

“And children,” Genjandro observed.

“The children are tangential. It's the men I ask you to consider. I have sent out word that only those who bring one of their children to me and kill it in front of me will be allowed to work today at the wheel. Men say they love their children; they say that their children are their future, their hope of life after death in this world, but look how many have obeyed—for a single day's wages, for a day's worth of food and lodging, of life in the present, they sell their future!”

“How do you know they're bringing their own children?”

“Well, I don't, really, but do you doubt it?”

Genjandro looked gloomily up the line of hard-faced men and weeping, pleading children. “No,” he said finally.

“They've picked the younger ones, the feeble or sickly ones, the crippled ones, the ones they never really cared for,” the dead baby continued. “Tomorrow or the next day they will work their way up to the ones they really care about. That's when it will become really amusing; you should stop back.”

“Why do you hate children so much?” Genjandro wondered.

“I don't. I don't hate anyone. I can hardly afford to, since someday I will become everyone. But the souls of children, I've found, are a little like unripe fruit: they take a great deal of effort to eat, and the result isn't worth it. Meanwhile they eat, and that's a problem, as the city's food supply is not what it was. The fewer children there are, the less strain on the food supply. Also, the dead bodies can be taken to the butcher's shops and used for food by those whom I allow to survive. It's a temporary solution until I begin to expand in the countryside, but I think it will work quite well.”

“Not in the long run. If you keep on killing children—” Genjandro paused.

“I'll have to keep on expanding,” the dead baby said eagerly. “Yes, of course, you're right about that. But why not? Genjandro, did you know that at one time I longed to be the Emperor?”

“No,” Genjandro admitted.

“Silly, isn't it? But it's true. My father was Lathmar the Second—the son of Uthar the Great and the Lady Ambrosia. It seemed to me that I deserved the imperial throne after my father died—instead they let some little girl have it.”

“Were you—was your mother—”

“Oh, she was no one important. Just an Ontilian girl my father met while traveling. That little accident cut me off from imperial power, and I was very bitter about it, even after I poisoned her. I studied magic; I laid my plans for seizing power; I worked and waited. Then, one day, it happened.”

Genjandro waited.

“You don't mind getting information from me, I see,” the dead baby commented archly. “Well, why not? What happened was, one of my shathes got loose in my workroom. I had a number of them prisoner, trying to domesticate them. It seemed to me that they would be fearsome weapons if they could be controlled somehow.”

Genjandro nodded unwillingly. He understood that he was accepting something from the enemy, but it was too important to refuse.

“It was trying to seduce my will—to eat me. The vistas it opened up were so remarkable I almost fell. Then I realized something—something extraordinary. If it could eat me, if it could be nourished and sustained by my tal, then I could eat it. So I seduced it with the prospect of devouring me, and in the end I consumed it.”

The dead baby smacked its lips appreciatively. “A hard-won meal, but a very satisfying one. In the end, I ate most of the rest of the shathes in my workshop. The others became tame, since the alternative was to be eaten. From the shathes I learned how to eat people, how to assume control of their bodies, how to use the traits and abilities of devoured entities to inhabit a legion of bodies. That was when my ambitions changed, you see. Why become the King of the Two Cities when I could become the cities themselves? Why be the Emperor when I could be the empire? To see through many eyes, to be a multitude of beings simultaneously while remaining myself, to remake the world into my own image! Would you rather rule the world or eat it?”

“Neither,” Genjandro said.

“You'll find out,” the baby said simply, and turned away. A hard-faced man stepped toward it, almost shyly, dragging a weeping girl with a crooked leg.

Genjandro walked off, but he did not truly walk away. As he left the wheel behind him, he heard the dead baby's voice in his head, whispering,
Was it worth it, Genjandro? I offered you the chance to go to Ambrose with what you knew, but then you knew nothing worth telling. Now you know something worth telling, but I won't let you go. I've got you now.

Genjandro knew it was true, but he walked on. There might be a way, in spite of the voice eating him from within, to make his sacrifice worthwhile.

He went home and had breakfast (although it was more like lunch by the time he got there). Vora's body was still there, and had opened the shop for business. He said to it, “Get out, or I'll kill myself before you can eat me.” His sincerity must have been sufficiently clear to the whispering presence within him; Vora's body walked out the door and he never saw it again.

He wrote what he knew and guessed in a letter to Morlock, then burned it. It was too long. He wrote three more versions, each one shorter than the one before. The last was less than half a page, summarizing what he knew (without adding how he knew it or his guesses about what it implied). He trimmed off any part of the paper that didn't have writing on it, then, on the reverse, wrote Morlock's name and sketched the heraldic crest of the Ambrosii, the hawk and thorns. It looked more like a seagull over some rocks—Genjandro didn't claim to be a great artist—but it was the best he could do. Then he put a fistful of unground grain in one of his pockets, stuffed the letter in after it, and went out to find a crow.

He saw a number of them, all dead, their heads removed. Then, on a street corner, he saw a crowd of men and women in ragged clothes, like beggars, surrounding a Companion of Mercy. One of the beggars gave it a double handful of dark bloody objects—crow heads. The Companion dropped them one by one into a bag: ten in all. He handed the beggar a work credit.

Useful employment for the city idlers
, whispered the voice in Genjandro's head.

Despair crashed down on Genjandro then: the thing within him had won. It was eating him; it would eat the city; it would eat the world. If someone could stand in its way, harm it somehow, Genjandro was not that person. If it would ever be defeated, it would be too late for Genjandro and his city.

His city. It
was
his city. Not some Vraidish king's; not some Ambrosian witch's. His. Not because he ruled here, but because he had lived here and would die here. Because he belonged to the place, the place belonged to him, by some mystic law that transcended any human rules of property or ownership.

Had he bought and sold, lied and cheated on occasion, lived and grown rich, amassed what power he could, solely for himself, all for his own benefit? He had thought so. But that man, if he'd ever lived, was already dead. He had thrown away fortunes, destroyed his own property and that of others, spent magic gold that came from nowhere. As the King's spymaster in the occupied city he had killed and ordered others to kill to protect his organization. He had lived in danger every day. For himself? So that he could settle down in the peace after the civil war and sell rugs and die—old, childless, and rich, regretted by none?

It had all been for the city, of which he was a part and which, he had thought, would survive him after his death. Now he knew it would not, or at least not for long, that it was already dying of the same insinuating voice, the same withering Shadow that was destroying him. His death was meaningless if his life had been meaningless; he grieved for neither but rather for the city that, till now, had given a meaning to both.

He walked vaguely toward the river Tilion. To the extent that he was thinking of anything, he was hoping that he would be able to drown himself in the river. But he never got there.

He was wandering down a street running westward when he looked up and realized where he was. There was a burned-out building not far off, its blackened brick walls supported by wooden struts. It was his warehouse, the one he had burned as part of the dragon ploy. He stared up at it, trying to recover the feelings of reckless amusement and triumph he had felt on that day. As he was standing there, a young boy ran into him from behind and they both fell.

“Don't let them catch me!” the boy cried.

“Them?” Genjandro said stupidly.

“They're not my parents!”

“No,” Genjandro said dully. “I suppose not.”

The boy looked him in the face and said, “Death and Justice! You've been eaten! You're one of them!” He desperately kicked at the old man until they were disentangled from each other, scrambled to his feet, and ran off. Genjandro croaked, “Don't go in there!”

Behind him on the street came a pair of figures, a man and a woman. Genjandro did not know them at first, but then some mark on their face, perhaps the same one the boy had seen on his, gave them away.

“Oh. It's you.”

“Genjandro,” said the man, in a voice reminiscent of Vora's, the dead baby's, the whisper in Genjandro's own mind.

“You're going fast,” the woman said, in a voice which was different, but somehow the same. “A little too ripe, perhaps—but all the better for quick eating.”

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“It's most amusing,” said the man's mouth.

“Isn't everything?”

“Not like this,” said the woman's mouth, acknowledging Genjandro's feeble gibe with a smirk. “I've eaten the child's parents, and now I'm hunting him through the streets in their persons. The parents' awarenesses live within me and try to resist, but there's nothing they can do about it. It sets up the most delicious pattern of emotional contrasts; I wish you could experience it. But you will, soon, of course. I shall do this sort of thing citywide once I get really organized.”

“Genjandro,” said the man's mouth, almost excited, “there's no way out of that building, is there? The windows were all on the upper floors, and the flooring and stairs are all burned away, so there's no way the child can reach them.”

“As far as I know,” Genjandro agreed heavily. He supposed the enemy had read it from his own mind—if he could even call it
his
mind anymore. “There may be damage…holes in the walls,” he continued. “The boy may be gone already.”

“Just walk around and see, won't you?” the woman's mouth said.

Genjandro did as he was told, simply because he had nothing else to do, because nothing mattered anyway. There was a good deal of damage to the west side—there were more support beams on that side. The ground sloped downward there, toward the river.

“Etkondel,” cried the woman's voice through the open door. “Don't go to your father. He killed your puppy. I saw him do it. Then he made me say it ran away.”

“I did it for your own good,” barked the man's voice. “Don't let your mother have you, boy. She'll cut your balls off, if she can. You may hate me, but at least I'll let you be a man.”

Genjandro leaned wearily on one of the supports, remembering what the builder had said—the one he had consulted after the fire.

“Etkondel, Etkondel,” the woman's voice sobbed. “Help! He's going to hurt me again, I know he will! If you don't help me, I just don't know what I'll do.”

“She's lying. She's always tried to poison you against me, and me against you. She's good at that. If you come out now, why, I'll let you help me with her.”

Master Alkhendron
, the builder had told him,
we can't rebuild. At most we can keep the thing from falling down, and that's hard enough. The solution is to level it and build again.

“Etkondel, I'm afraid! Please help me!”

“Enough of this nonsense! Come out here now, boy. Don't make me come in there!”

I understand
, Alkhendron/Genjandro had said to his builder. But he felt that only now did he really understand. The city was dead, ruined, a shell propped up with great and useless effort. But if he leveled it, then the boy would be able to build again. The city was dead, but need not die.

“Etkondel!” the woman's dead voice wailed. “I know you want to do what's right, what's in your heart! You won't leave me out here to be hurt by this horrible man!”

The dead father's voice shouted, “I say what's right and what's wrong—the Strange Gods damn your heart and whatever's in it!”

“Lathmar!” Genjandro screamed abruptly. “Level it, and I'll build again! The city isn't dead, it's just dead!” That was wrong, somehow, but there was no time to change it—he could feel the will of the other trying to work within him. He pushed the support beam in front of him and it fell. He pushed the next one, and it fell. He went down the line of supports, crashing into them, falling from one to the next, struggling to keep his feet so that he could knock them all down, level it all.