Blood of Ambrose Read Free Page B

to the gate. He opened his eyes to meet those of the guard captain, who swore furiously, “Death and Justice! It's true. Thurn and Veck: take His Majesty back to his apartments and stay with him. Don't be drawn off by anyone or I'll feed the one ball you have between you to the goats. Carnon: notify the Protector's Man napping upstairs in the inner guardhouse that we have recovered the King. I know; I know! Then you go with him while he reports to the Protector, and just you mention it to everyone you meet. Nobody's falling down a stairway on my damn watch.”
    “Wait, now!” Rusk said hoarsely. “Little sir, won't you speak up for us? This soldier man is trying to cheat us of our reward! Didn't we help you get home safe, all right? Won't you mention us to your Protector?” And through this the King saw Lata tugging at Rusk's arm, begging him to be quiet and come away. Then the soldiers carried the King through the gate, onto the open bridge over the river Tilion, toward the yawning gate of Ambrose on the far side of the river, and the darkness, and the fear.
    The guard captain's voice, now lazily threatening, echoed back through the City Gate. “Hold on. This isn't some sack of beans you've brought to market. It's the royal person, His Majesty Lathmar the Seventh, the King of the Two Cities and (the Strange Gods willing) your future Emperor. As to the Protector hearing your names, there's little doubt of that. Now—what are your names? Where do you live? How did you become involved in the abduction of His Majesty? Which one of you slashed his face?” The gate of Ambrose shut behind the King.
    Grandmother was condemned to death the next evening, along with all the people the Protector's Men had killed the night before, in a special session of the Protector's Council. The King never remembered much about the ceremony, just that Grandmother (in the plain brown robe of the accused, her empty hands hanging loose from the wrist as if they had been broken), looked at his face once and turned away.
    They had given him a statement to read before the Council, but he burst into tears and couldn't say anything. They took him away and put him to bed. After a while he stopped crying or moving so that they would think he was asleep and go away. When they did, he lay there in the dark room, thinking.
    The last thing he thought, many hours later, when he really was falling asleep, was that the things they said about the Crooked Man were all lies. He would never believe a legend again, or his Grandmother either.
    As for Lata and Rusk, they had been released that morning, after a bitter night of questioning. It soon proved that no one really believed they were involved in a plot to abduct the King. The guard captain, Lorn—not a Protector's Man, one of the City Legion—who assumed charge of their interrogation, was simply furious at them. He referred several times to their attempt to “sell the King like a sack of beans.” But he kept the Protector's Men away, and finally dismissed them when it was too late to make it to the Great Market (which ceased to admit vendors at dawn), contemptuously declining to confiscate their goods. As they drove their wagon away from Ambrose, Lata felt obscurely ashamed, yet intensely angry—as if she had tried to cheat someone, only to find herself cheated instead.
    Rusk's feelings were less ambiguous, and he gave vent to them all the way back to their farm. He cursed everyone they had dealt with, from the Protector on down, not excluding the King (“that foul-mouthed fucking little brat”) or Ambrosia (“the evil venom-spewing bitch”). Frequently he exclaimed, “Morlock take them all!” because he considered himself to have been ill used, if not positively betrayed.
    They sold most of their goods at Twelve Stones, for a fraction of what they would have gotten at the Great Market. Their ride home was another long litany of curses, this time including the day's buyers and competing sellers, but