Blood of Ambrose Read Online Free PDF Page A

remember your help. Good fortune.”
    “What are you planning to do?” Genjandro asked, pausing at the door of the stall.
    The dwarf grinned deep in his gray-flecked brown beard. “Something very like treason, if I were you, my friend.”
    The Ontilian took the hint and left with a curt nod. The dwarf spent a few moments unweaving the “horse” and stowing it in his pockets, and then strolled out himself. The day's light was already strong and hot, and the carnival air of the enclosure was thick with dust and the anticipation of death.
    Hlosian Bekh, the Red Knight, lay on a table, his gray flesh cold and lifeless, as the Lord Protector and Steng, his chief poisoner, argued over him.
    “Still: make the golem stronger,” the Protector was saying. “If he does appear—”
    “It hardly matters, my lord,” the poisoner replied with deferential soothing contempt. “If the Crooked Man (assuming there is such a person) turns up, he will be subject to the same limitations as any other challenger. The law is clear. Magic is forbidden at the trial by combat; its use compels the user's side to forfeit.”
    “But we are using it,” the Protector pointed out.
    The chief poisoner smiled as he wondered whether stupidity was an inevitable consequence of hereditary power. After all, had any of the descendants of Uthar the Great and Ambrosia really matched the ferocious supple intelligence of their forbears? And, though Urdhven was Protector merely by virtue of his late sister's marriage with the late Emperor, his ancestors had been warlords on the northern plains before the Vraidish tribes broke through the Kirach Kund to conquer the lands of the south and found the Second Ontilian Empire on the ruins of the First. “We may safely break the law,” the poisoner explained, “since we enforce it. The Crooked Man must come, if he does, with ordinary sword and shield to kill our champion. And that he cannot do, since Hlosian cannot die.”
    “Nevertheless,” said the Protector, returning to the point at issue, “make him stronger.”
    Steng stood motionless for a moment or two. He realized that the question was no longer Hlosian's strength, but the Protector's. And the poisoner was forced to admit to himself that the Protector would have his way, no matter what the cost. Perhaps that was what made his power more than merely hereditary.
    The poisoner turned away to his worktable, where the golem's life-scroll lay. Taking up his pen, he dipped it in a jar of human blood and added a number of flourishes to the already-dried dark brown script.
    “These are intensifiers,” he explained over his shoulder to Urdhven. “They focus the pseudo-talic impulses—”
    The nobleman waved him silent with imperious distaste. “I don't wish to know about it. Just do it properly.”
    The poisoner finished his task in silence. When the new figures had dried, he rolled up the scroll and sealed it with wax (tinted with blood). He turned back to the prone form of Hlosian and placed the scroll in the gaping hole in its back. He drew to him several bowls of red mud and clay and began to trowel it into the breach between the Red Knight's shoulders. He worked steadily, pausing only to inscribe certain secret signs in the drying clay with a peculiar pointed stylus. Finally he was done. He spoke a secret word, and the stench of cold blood grew hot and dense in the workroom.
    “Hlosian arise!” Steng cried.
    The golem rose from the table and stood before them.
    “Hlosian Bekh,” the poisoner said, “seize yonder stone—yes, the one I have marked—seize it from the wall and crush it.”
    The golem roared and swept the table out of its way. In ten breaths the stone was smoking rubble at the Protector's feet.
    “Hlosian,” the poisoner asked, “what is your purpose?”‘
    “I will kill the witch's champion.”
    “Why?”
    “The witch Ambrosia must die.”
    The poisoner glanced at the Protector, who had hardly moved as his monster performed