All the Plagues of Hell

by Eric Flint

  Von Stebbens knew the story. And the names associated with it. “That Valdosta?”

  “By blood, the last man of that line, married to the last woman of the Montescue line. According to my friend Eneko Lopez—who married them, by the way—he’s one of the bastions of light in the West. Eneko was both awed and comforted by the power and goodness of that young man. He said to me that young Marco was possessed of natural gifts of magic of a high order. With those and because of his relationship with the Lion, he was able to withstand Chernobog. We know, privately, that Marco is a man who shares his being with the city’s guardian, and that it is a mutual relationship of love, both for the people and the place. So I doubt somehow, that a mere mortal magician like this Mindaug could contaminate Marco and the Lion of St. Mark. I know he is aware of the use of any dark magic within his demesnes. I don’t think you have anything to fear.”

  Von Stebbens, who had met and been awed by Eneko Lopez himself—who was also a humble fellow, now that he thought about it—swallowed. “He simply seemed a nice young man.”

  “He is. It is possible to be both, you know. You may trust him completely, and if you can enlist him, he would be an ally against which your cunning magician might fail.”

  * * *

  That evening Marco sat talking with Kat, Maria, and Lodovico. He might have had a glass too many. Not far too many, but enough to loosen his tongue a little. “Francisco says it looks like the snake on the old Visconti coat of arms. I am convinced there was something magical involved. But as Petro says, if the Visconti had such a magical viper, they’d have used it.”

  “Unless the price was too high,” said Maria. “There is always a price on using such things.”

  “Or they have only just found out how to do it again. As if it was a part of their magical armory back when the house acquired the coat of arms. But they lost the skill…”

  Marco snapped his fingers. “I think you may have it. Sforza just got a new magician, who may know how to use an old Visconti magic.”

  “But, Sforza…he’s not a Visconti. And the sick girl you have at the palace is,” said Lodovico.

  “That’s true. But I will go and see that archimandrite first thing in the morning, and take him to Violetta, and see if he can detect any sign of this magician of theirs.”

  “It still makes no sense to me,” said Lodovico stubbornly. “It’s more likely to be one of Sforza’s enemies, or a claimant to the ducal throne that would kill all his rivals. I wouldn’t put anything past Andrea Malatesta, for all that he is only a second cousin.”

  “It might also be that this magician is using Sforza, either for his own or someone else’s ends. It’s worth investigating.”

  The next morning, Marco had a message sent to Archimandrite von Stebbens, asking if he could come to the Doge’s palace, to the rooms where Violetta de’ Medici was being cared for, and meet Marco there. The Knight arrived shortly after Marco had done his morning examination of the patient. She continued her depressing course—physically healing, but slowly creeping toward death.

  After greetings had been exchanged, and while the Knight had not been disrespectful in any way the day before, Marco got the feeling that his status had been elevated hugely since. There was almost deference in the Knight’s speech now as he explained: “Further examination of your parchment showed no evil communications. It appears to be exactly what it looks like, a copy of an old prayer, possibly from one of the Gnostic heresies, but at least it is calling on the one true God. It was surprising that Mindaug dared to use such a thing.”

  “Well, I asked you to come here on a separate but possibly related matter. Would it be possible for you to detect traces of magic having been used on a person? You see, I have this young woman here…apparently bitten by a very strange serpent, and I begin to suspect that some form of magic was involved.”

  “It would be possible, yes,” said Von Stebbens. “Powerful magework leaves traces. It is why whatever Mindaug is up to is so worrying. He appears to have barely used any of his vast power. At first we thought that was merely a desire to hide, but we realized that he had outsmarted us with the snowstorm that he used to give us the slip.”

  Marco nodded. “So he may have a way of not leaving a trace. These levels of magic are still far beyond me. I’ve been so occupied in my medical studies that I have not really given it much concentration.”

  “Given that which you have to help you, and quite possibly your natural aptitude, you would not need it to do things which are beyond our power,” said the Knight, confirming what Marco had suspected. Someone had been talking about him. “If I might call on three of my companions, we will attempt to discover this for you.”

  “I’d be grateful.”

  The Knight nodded. “I will send a message, and then begin to prepare the room. It is not without danger, M’lord Valdosta. If you could remain…and grant us your protection, too.”

  “I am quite unschooled in this kind of magic. I can scry within the lagoon, and defend it. But these subtleties—I don’t know much about them.”

  “Defense would be our need. I suspect demons.”

  Something within Marco said, “I would rend such creatures into gobbets if they dared,” and there was something of a roar in his voice.

  The Knight nodded, slowly. “The danger, of course, is also to the poor young lady. We may summon back what injured her in the first place.”

  Marco sighed and said aloud what he had known for some time. “She’s dying anyway. Day by day, hour by hour, something draws her life away.” He knew this as the Lion, not as Marco Valdosta, the physician.

  A little later the room was prepared, the girl was lying in the center of a cross drawn onto the floor in the elemental colors, and inscribed with symbols traced out and framed in sulfur, mercury (in a curved wooden platter) and salt. The ward candles were lit, the chants of invocative prayer sung.

  A soft halo of light formed above Violetta, and in it something like a watercolor scene appeared, washes of color resolving into forms, tall sycamores and a scythed lawn, and laurel bushes fringing the rose garden…and two figures, patterns of movement, rather than distinct…and the blue wash of the sky was suddenly flushed with something dark rising from the earth, a blueish-purple apparition that crawled with sickly yellow lightnings.

  It was, of course, just a recreation, an illusion, a picture taken from the mind of the woman. Marco knew that.

  The warding candles flared and burned like torches, but the purple serpentine darkness rose and swayed, no mere illusion now, scattering the symbols and brushing the Knights aside.

  The morning air was suddenly darkened, dank and full of the stench of putrefaction.

  Violetta made the first large movement that Marco had seen, and made the first real sound he’d heard out of her since she’d arrived in his care. Her back arched and she clutched at her now healed leg and screamed. A scream of both pain and fear, but especially pain.

  Marco stepped forward and swiped his arm through the air and he reached to take her hand, to stop her clawing at the newly healed flesh. Golden light slashed through the purple darkness, scattering it.

  “Begone!” he roared.

  The walls shook and windows rattled across Venice, but the dark force was strong with pain and fear. Marco knew that that was its food, what it sought endlessly, relentlessly. But in the realms of the spirit, here within the bounds of the ancient marsh where the belief and trust of generations was vested in him, it could not prevail. He knew it now. He’d fought it before, when men fleeing from its purple buboes had fled into the marshes. Some had carried the killer disease. He had not been able to save them as individuals, but he had kept them apart, and had kept the serpent out.

  He could stop the creature drawing them down into the dark, and could still their pain. And some of them had recovered. So too, now, he stilled her pain, and banished the thing that had been drawing her down into screaming death.

  The candles, mere wicks in pudd
les of wax, still burned. The morning light streamed in through the broken window and the wind brought them the fresh clean smell of the sea across the lagoon bar.

  A little later, with the room warded as well as the Knights could—not that it mattered anyway, Marco knew—Von Stebbens turned respectfully to Marco. “M’lord Valdosta…well, I am afraid we know now that there was magic involved in that ‘snake bite’ and it was very evil and dark. This, I think, is without a doubt the power that Mindaug wields. I don’t know quite what it is…”

  “I do. It is a serpent, and its power lies in suffering and death. It is also, somehow, the plague.”

  “So—this Mindaug has come to Milan and somehow awakened this ancient monster.”

  “It is not ancient,” said Marco, with the certainty that was the Lion speaking through him. “I know it now. It is, as magical beings go, barely adolescent, and merely beginning to gather its power. It lurked in caverns near Arona digesting its last meals and waiting to be called out. But it not old. It is new, by the standards of the powers, and all fear it. Even Chernobog. It kills all it can reach, and gathers power from each death. Enough deaths and it will be unstoppable, until it runs out of lives. It will eventually devour the person who tries to control it, too.”

  The Knight shook his head. “He has been there barely a month. To free such evil on the world…”

  “She was poisoned six weeks ago, near Florence.”

  “But Mindaug was in Tyrol then. We saw no signs of spellworking…”

  “Yet…Tyrol is important. I feel this. And it is not as a place of evil,” said the Lion-Marco.

  “He must have been up to something. Perhaps thwarting something good there. There must be a reason, and I am very afraid of what it could be.”

  Marco—and the Lion—were troubled, not really wanting to talk to the archimandrite, or anyone, but needing to digest this situation. Marco the healer, faced with the news of an outbreak of the plague, had not made the connection with the wyrm and the disease that had gone with it. There had been five recorded outbreaks. And then it had stopped. Or had it been stopped?

  One thing he knew: he would make this Count Mindaug tell him everything.

  He wondered about Francisco, if anything could be done to save him. Probably not, he realized, with a heavy heart.

  * * *

  Violetta, from her sleep of tangled and terrified dreams, had suddenly found herself rushing to her mother’s rescue, in between the bay trees and laurel bushes, with the snake rearing and striking at her. The pruning scissors in her hand had not been enough; she needed a sword: a sword to save a maiden from the great wyrm that would devour her slowly otherwise. A somewhat divorced part of her mind said she was the maiden and it couldn’t possibly swallow her. But then she saw the bruise-purple and pus-yellow enormity of it. The terror was nearly as bad as the pain. And then, roaring his challenge and blazing golden, there was the Lion. And behind him, the rose garden. Soon she would enter the rose garden.

  Why a rose garden? part of her mind wanted to know. She had never been particularly fond of that flower.

  Chapter 32

  Milan and environs

  Count Kazimierz Mindaug had been thinking for some days now. He had begun to wonder if he should essay at least some scrying. He had prepared a few careful traps that required no magic at all in laying out—but at a word, they would no longer be inert and harmless. That was his only step towards defense. He knew—none better—how vast the world was to try to search, magically, for something that gave no sign of its presence.

  But the plague, and the great wyrm—those were worrying enough to make him begin to consider the problem. It was, he admitted wryly, a strange thing to discover about yourself, that you were like other humans. And, when faced with the most horrible danger, you could still bury your head and try to pretend it wasn’t there.

  The problem was that the count had discovered, late in life—probably too late, he admitted—some degree of pleasure and contentment. Yes, there had been satisfaction, deeply hidden, at his cunning plot to destroy Chernobog and Jagiellon. There had also been some pleasure in setting the trap that he had foreseen would probably end the evil power of Elizabeth Bartholdy. But he had never sat with a group of men who, rather than pull him down for their own advancement, seemed to revel in his ideas and delight in his leadership.

  It was strange and…heady.

  He did not wish to give it up. But he had come to realize that with their loyalty he had also acquired responsibility. Most inconvenient that was!

  So, he had been looking for a way that would allow him to continue to avoid magic, and also to continue his present life, when it presented itself to him in the form of Francisco Turner, and his friendship and contact with Marco Valdosta. Let the Lion of Etruria deal with the great wyrm. Mindaug would help it along, with a little information.

  * * *

  “Ah, Caviliero,” he said, smiling, once Turner had dismounted and tethered his horse to a hitching post. To his inner surprise, that was a smile of genuine pleasure. He found enjoyment in the visits of the man. He was well-read and acerbic from time to time, which provided a counterpoint to Tamas, Emma, and Klaus and their hero worship. They had their forms of intellect, too, but this was different. The question now was how to feed the information to him, and to be sure he would pass it on to Valdosta.

  Mindaug just needed an opening, and after talking military matters for a while in the comfortable chairs in the green salon, Francisco Turner gave it to him. “I’ve a question, seeing as I gather your reading has taken you far from just the sciences. Magical creatures…a water-nyx to be precise. Is it possible that she was once human?”

  “The origin of such creatures is not simple or monophyletic,” replied Mindaug, shaking his head. “Some could once have been human. There are elemental creatures and those created by the divine. We do not begin to understand the nature of magic, or of ritual and the innate. But circumstances, place, power and belief all come into it.” He shrugged. “I don’t pretend to understand half of it, but some things have power from being conferred on them by belief. A stream may once have been a mere flow of water, but if enough people possessed of enough belief think it to be an aspect of a naiad…there may indeed be a naiad there. And once she is there, or thought to be there, belief will be strengthened. It becomes its own fulfilment.”

  “So…a drowned pregnant girl could somehow become a nyx, desperate to have that child?”

  Mindaug waggled his hand back and forth, indicating a range of possibilities. “Or some part of that girl’s spirit could shape the nyx, which was once merely a drift of waterweed that recalled her face.”

  Turner made a face. “That’s quite terrifying. I think I will stick to medicine.”

  “Well, it, and medicine, bring up something I have been wanting to pass on to your friend Marco Valdosta,” said Mindaug. “I am a mere scholar, not a man of medicine or magecraft, but I have been thinking about your snake. You recall I said that I thought I had read something about it. Well, I had and I have found it. And it is worrying me, especially in the light of your questions about a magical protection against the plague. I think I now know what your snake was, or was a sendling of. I believe the plague your friend seeks to prevent and the snake may be one and same, raised by the same means as the nyx was.”

  Francisco’s eyes widened with surprise. “What?”

  “When the plague swept Europe for the first time, the people facing it did not know what it was, or how to deal with it. So they did the same as they did with lightning or a stream. They personified it, gave it form, and made it into a being: a being with a nature like the disease. They had seen and smelled the death from the kind of snake venom that rots the flesh. And somewhere in northern Italy that took the form they believed it had. The wyrm came to be, came into existence. They tried to appease it, made sacrifices to it, to make it spare them and theirs. And, because they were human, they tried to turn it on their foes. But the thin
g they’d given life to was not the spirit of a woman. It was a disease, which they themselves had made into a magical creature. They had given it form and they had given it life, and they tried to control it. It has those attributes they gave to it, now. But it remains a disease. It is a new god, and with time and belief they become more like the humans who believe in them.”

  Now Francisco’s expression was skeptical. “Quite honestly, it sounds like a myth to me.”

  “We humans are bad at inventing completely new things. It is a myth, but like most myths has its origin in the truth. And the myth has grown stronger because people believe in it. It has grown other aspects and other abilities, like the snake sendling to this person. They die, because although you harness the disease and give it a name, death is really all it can do in the end.”

  “She’s still alive.”

  It was Kazimierz Mindaug’s turn to look surprised. “As far as I knew only one man had ever resisted it, freed the sacrifice from the devourer, and banished it. And he was a legendary knight of his age and had the fruits of his previous adventures.”

  “Quite a few people survived the plague. Around one in ten, I recall. Justinian himself did.”

  “They survive the plague, but not the wyrm. But that is irrelevant. I have here a book for your friend Valdosta.” He reached down to a shelf below the top of the side table he was sitting beside and withdrew a slim volume. Then, leaning forward, he handed it to Turner.

  “It’s a compilation of the tales of Diderich—or Theoderic, as the Goths called him,” Mindaug explained. “They’re popular still in song and story. You would both have heard some of them, but this is an old book, not changed by storytellers and bards. This copy comes from a bare hundred years after his death and is nearly nine hundred years old. There is a marker at the page describing Theoderic’s rescue of a maiden from the wyrm. Later versions made the wyrm into a dragon. The description is precise, and I think you will recognize it. It also speaks of the treatment he administered, which will be beyond your friend.”