James Enge: Blood of Ambrose

They struck out as fiercely as they could, to distract the adept, to disrupt his spell. But it was no use. As they fought on, the lightning fell, dazzling the adept's delighted eyes.

Morlock, as he ran, raised Tyrfing against the gigantic war hammer of the gargoyle. With his left hand he grabbed the last jar of phlogiston, snapping with his thumb and forefinger the string that held it across his shoulder.

"Leave and I won't hurt you," he said to the gargoyle.

The gargoyle stared at him with lightless black eyes and said nothing. Morlock sensed that it feared the adept more than it feared him. But it held the hammer at guard and thrust with it: clearly the gargoyle didn't want to leave itself open to attack by swinging the hammer over its shoulder for a killing blow.

Morlock parried the shaft of the hammer as if it were a blade and dodged within arm-reach of the gargoyle. It was risky, but he had no choice. The thing was reaching for him with its empty right hand. Morlock didn't doubt it could kill him with that alone. He cracked open the jar of phlogiston and held the sheet of flame under the gargoyle's left wing.

The gargoyle shrieked and struck him down. He hit the floor rolling and sprang to his feet. The adept, who had shuffled nearer, lifting the dagger hopefully, shuffled away, a cheated expression on his gray rotting features.

The burning gargoyle was dancing and shrieking with pain on the balcony. Morlock dropped the empty jar and picked up a nearby table, throwing it at the gargoyle. It saw the table coming and raised its hands quickly to protect its unlovely face. It overbalanced and fell over the edge, its fading shriek stopping short with the meaty thump of impact.

"Any more gargoyles?" Morlock said coolly.

"No-that was the last," the adept said. "It was useless to me anywayit takes two of them to open the door, here, so we're both trapped. Isn't that amusing? I didn't anticipate you would or could climb the outer wall, and I was sure my first gargoyle would take care of you when I saw you creeping along out there."

Morlock reflected that the halls and stairwell of the tower must be packed with the adept's undead soldiery, and that enough hands and a few levers would move a stone far heavier than the one blocking the door of the chamber. But he saw no reason to tutor the adept in the principles of mechanics.

"The things were well made," he conceded. "But you should have made them impervious to pain."

"I would have, too," the adept agreed ruefully, "if I had anticipated today's events. But it made them so terribly amenable. Demons, you know, quite enjoy inflicting pain, but they never have to experience it themselves, and the effect was most amusing. They were broken to harness in record time-it was almost easier than eating them."

Morlock grunted.

"And there I thought we were going to have a civil conversation," the adept complained, tossing his head in irritation so that his dangling nose waggled back and forth. "I am a kind of maker, you know, using the substances of life. You can call it necromancy, but it's life, not death, which interests me."

Morlock glanced toward the window. His eyes told him that the play of lightning was becoming more frequent. His inner vision told him that a lightning stroke was imminent …and that an intention was drawing it toward this room.

He looked back toward the adept, who was smiling.

"Yes," he said quietly, "I was wondering when you'd catch on. Aether, the substance of lightning, is semi-intelligent in its ultraheated statesemi-alive. So it comes within my sphere of manipulations."

Morlock knew something about lightning, too. He knew that spicules of lightning-stuff were woven though the fabric of the universe. In deep vision he could weave a cloak of lightning particles to ward off the fire from the sky. He could assemble cells of antilightning particles as well, drawing down thunderbolts.

But he could not do so without surrendering volitional action in the world of the senses. The adept would simply step forward and kill him with its dagger.

"Unbelievably difficult to create a lightning storm over the Old City," the adept was saying cheerfully. "And it's always a dry storm-never rain."

Morlock ran across the room, standing so that the adept was between him and the window. Startled, the adept moved away; Morlock moved so that the adept was always between the window and himself.

"Oh!" said the adept, laughing. "Oh! You think-"

The lightning fell. Both Morlock and the adept were thrown to the floor. But the bolt did not hit either one. It struck the glowing strip on the worktable near the window.

The worktable itself burst into flying red ash, but the strip was not destroyed. As Morlock scrambled to his feet, the adept shuffled toward the strip of glowing faces, now shrieking silently, dark tormented lines dissolving slowly in a lightning-bright surface.

The adept picked it up and turned toward Morlock, his gray face agleam with new confidence.

"Bound souls!" he bragged. (Morlock was, after all, the master of all makers; the adept seemed to be childishly intent on impressing him.) "They hold an aetheric charge wonderfully."

"But not for long," Morlock guessed. His vision sensed the screaming of the dying souls, the agony of their bright brief damnation. "They must disorganize fairly rapidly."

"Right," the adept acknowledged, and whirled forward to strike Morlock with the sword of burning souls.

Morlock gripped Tyrfing with both hands and met the blazing sword of his enemy in a glancing parry. The shock nearly sent him to his knees, but he managed to keep his feet. The next stroke did not come swiftly-his opponent had a deadlier weapon, but he was no swordsman-and he was set for it. He even managed a glancing riposte, and the adept shuffled back.

Then the room was filled with flying black forms. The adept was laughing, swinging his bright sword, sending heaps of black feathers burning to the floor.

Crows-more than a murder, a rampage, a slaughter of crows. They must have followed him from the grave lands. God Creator, they were trying to help him.

"Get out!" he screamed. "This isn't in the treaty! You can't help me! Save yourselves!" He charged the adept, lashing out at him with Tyrfing in great double-handed blows, but the adept laughed as he saw the tears running down Morlock's face and kept shuffling away, striking clouds of black birds from the air, bright with fire, dark with departing tat.

In the end, they did flee, but countless crows (bright with fire to his weeping eyes, dark and lifeless to his inner vision) lay dead about the adept's chamber. The adept laughed at Morlock as he wept, his eyes stinging from the stench of burning feathers.

"You should never get too attached to your pets," the adept remarked.

Morlock dashed past the blazing sword, knocking it aside with a onehanded stroke of Tyrfing, and grabbed the adept's dangling nose, tearing it and a large portion of the attached flesh from the gray rubbery cheek. "For the crows!" he shouted in the adept's astonished partial face and, plunging back out of range, tossed the trophy off the balcony.

As he stood there on the balcony, staring in at the laughing noseless adept, like a spider at the center of a web of whispering talic threads, he wondered that it was so dark, so confined in the adept's chamber. How had he not seen the crows coming? Their tal should have stood out like a signal fire against the dead city. The stones of the tower should have been transparent to it. They were only dead matter …

But they weren't, Morlock realized. They couldn't be. Otherwise the adept would send his webwork of talic control through them. Instead, those lines of immaterial force must pass through the great window opening on the balcony.