Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  “Did you know that Benedict wrote letters home?” Elisha cut in. Ariane displayed the parchment. “How often did he write?”

  “Weekly,” she said. “The ships are less regular. Sometimes I have two or three letters at once. I expect there are still a few to come.”

  Lucius’s long face went still and his jaw clenched.

  Elisha shifted a little closer to the door, and Lucius drew his chin back, stiff from head to toe. “Leon was charged yesterday with giving me a tour of the school,” Elisha told him. “Alas, the library was not open to us. Might it be open today?”

  Lucius gave a snort. “Are you even capable of reading much less comprehending the texts we hold?” He waved a negligent hand. “Go on then, Herve, take the wretch into our treasury—but keep a close eye lest he try to make off with something. He’s more likely to profit by the sale of the books than by reading them.”

  “Yes, Maestro.” Herve, the librarian, ruffled himself and brushed past Lucius into the hall.

  “Ariane, I should like to,” Lucius began, reaching out toward the letter, but Ariane slipped it away again, and walked after Herve, Leon following in her wake.

  That left Elisha in the hall by the door. Lucius, behind it, spoke through a narrow gap. “You will not win this,” Lucius said. “That Italian count, he’ll be back, and between the two of us, we shall make your life a misery—straight up until its well-deserved end.”

  Vertuollo hardly needed Lucius to aid him in that. “Nothing means so much to you as your reputation, does it, Lucius? Ariane already believes me. For the rest, it is only a matter of time. You are nothing more than a hollow sheaf of titles, and the slightest wind will blow you away.” Elisha put a hint of power in that breath, making Lucius’s hair and gown flutter. Childish, perhaps, but so satisfying.

  The physician jerked back and slammed the door in Elisha’s face. With a bounce to his step, Elisha set off to delve into Lucius’s own secret realm.

  Chapter 14

  They began with any works Master Guy had studied, Leon eager to help as long as Ariane stayed around. With Herve dogging his steps, Elisha chose a broad table with plenty of light. Conveniently, the students already there moved away when Elisha arrived, and he sighed but claimed the space for his own. It reminded him so much of the long trestle table in the manor on the Isle of Wight where Mordecai first taught him to read. The memory shook him. The ashes of that table, and all of the books it once held, mingled with Mordecai’s ashes. When the mancers came to seize Brigit from Mordecai’s care, he set the manor on fire, and his own wounded body with it, to ensure his flesh and bones could never be used against Elisha. Once he’d sent Leon and Ariane off with their instructions, Elisha stood a long moment, his hands braced on the surface of that table. He felt about to begin a difficult operation, as if conjuring Mordecai’s memory were an invocation to his own private saint of learning.

  Ariane, either sensing his mood, or sharing a bit of it in her own grief, placed a pile of books on the table and quietly departed back into the stacks. Herve perused the works, flipping back the covers, unrolling a scroll and letting it roll back up again.

  “Are you just planning to stand there?” Herve asked. “You can’t absorb knowledge through the skin, you know.”

  Elisha turned a hard gaze upon him. “You have no idea.”

  Herve stepped back, fiddling with his sash, then scouted one of the books for himself and settled on a stool not far away.

  Sinking onto a bench, Elisha opened the first volume. “A Treatise on The Causes of Mortality With Some Commentary upon the Misapprehensions of treating the Poor.” Mortality sounded like a promising start, but the work itself proved tedious, its convoluted Latin a match for the strained title. Elisha put it aside.

  In a translated work from someone called Avicenna, he found pages of detail about the theory of the humors, and how they might relate to disease, but surely the other masters, much more familiar with that theory, had already delved into it. Fools they might be, though none so bad as Lucius himself, but they did know the ideas of the ancients. He read a bit more, initially excited by a section on diseases afflicting more than one member of the body, but this, too, proved futile, and he began to wonder if Danek hadn’t been right about the library. His eyes ached, and he stretched his back, amused to find that Herve had fallen asleep with his feet on the table. Tempting to give it a thump and see Lucius’s pet tumble to the floor, but he refrained.

  The library contained several hundred volumes—a treasure indeed—and Elisha hadn’t the time to study them all. Would he really find something the others had overlooked? Unlikely. So, then, what had they not examined?

  Leon sat a little ways off, a book in his lap once more now that Ariane had gone to visit her patients. Elisha must visit his own patient before too long, but he knew his access to the library would last only as long as Guy’s visit—after that, his own visit would come under scrutiny. At least spending time in the library supported his claim to be here in search of knowledge.

  “Leon?”

  The young man stirred, and lay down his book.

  “I understand that some of the volumes contain forbidden texts. Magic, dark arts.” As Leon gaped, Elisha quickly added, “Some believe this pestilence may be a curse, so a deeper understanding of their workings might be of use.”

  Leon nodded. “Not books, just parts, a quire here or there, bound in with some other texts.”

  “Can you find them? I gather you’ve spent many hours here during your stay.”

  That brought a flicker of humor to the young man’s face, and he gave a nod, then set off. A moment later, the large doors opened, and Ariane stepped through, looking weary. Leon hesitated in his stride, then turned toward her, swallowing hard before he spoke. The two of them moved into the stacks together while Elisha stood up and went to a long shelf where chains kept the books from straying. Herbals, simples, compounds. He moved to the next row. Anatomies and wound healing. The books weighed down his hands, and some of them scattered dust and bits of pages as if they had not been disturbed for a hundred years.

  Movement caught his eye and he found Herve glowering down the aisle at him. Elisha returned to his table and spent the next while perusing a manuscript of charms. Some of them contained items of magical use—fingernails and hair trimmings of the beloved, or of someone sick or hated—then added lead or antimony, bindweed, sulfur, sweet basil, and any number of things with no healing use at all outside the body, and only moderate use inside of it. Another treatise might have been written by a magus about the doctrine of mystery, but in the same convoluted phrasing as the other scholarly texts. Elisha let it fall shut with a clunk, drawing another sharp look from Herve. He pointedly pushed back from the table and stalked away, letting the librarian follow him, albeit at a distance. Back to the chains, so much useless knowledge held prisoner here for the edification of the students and their masters. He couldn’t help but feel he was wasting time.

  To dispel his rising irritation, Elisha closed his eyes and reached for attunement. He’d done this before, when he first entered the library, tracking the students as they came and went. Hints of their work or their patients clung to them, if not with the thickening shadow of mancers. Some carried the deaths of their patients as faint wisps around their hands. Others carried nothing but hope or desperation. Surrounded by so many younger people, every one of them reading faster, writing with more assurance than he ever would, contributed to Elisha’s frustration. He walked further from the main study area. Two shades, impressions of the dead, moved in the library, one near the windows, one seated on an unoccupied bench, rising up and sitting once more—re-enacting the quiet death of a scholar. The stacks at the back held works little consulted and musty. Around to the front, individual works chained to separate desks made for easy copying, and a few students sat there, diligently working. Beyond the entrance desk, manned by a pair of youn
ger students, a few more comfortable chairs drew up at another table, with a few more books chained beyond it, inconveniently placed for browsing. Elisha swept his awareness through the floors and stacks and walls, wishing his magic senses extended to reading so many books in so little time. Already, the sky outside the windows shaded to twilight. Guy would be having his final dinner with the faculty, Lucius would be reminding them of their promise to investigate Elisha on the morrow. And Vertuollo? Was he marshalling his evidence or counting on his own lordly demeanor to carry weight with these people?

  Elisha turned from the sitting area, thinking to resume his table. Then he was stung with cold, a single barb, as if a thorn had gotten under his skin. Elisha flinched and turned in the direction of the sensation, drawing up his defenses and expecting to find Silvio, the barber, or perhaps a reliquary of ill-gotten bones. Nothing but books and scrolls and diagrams and yet more books. One of the books, a slender, leather-bound volume with a tarnished chain, tingled in his awareness. Elisha skirted the table and chairs and plucked the book from its place. Pain shot through his fingers and the book dropped to smack the shelf below.

  “Please be careful,” Herve snapped. “I could have you expelled for that.”

  Ignoring him, Elisha lay the book more gently on the examination shelf, his hand lingering on the cover. Leather, indeed, but of a pale, smooth variety, undyed. Human, stripped from a living victim years before. Tanning the hide could not remove the taint of barbarity that had brought it here. The victim’s pain still lingered; a scholar himself, a man seeking consultation for a certain affliction of the nerves, and not expecting his nerves to be assaulted so thoroughly. “On the Movement of Bodily Fluids and their Passage through the Organs, with Recourse to the Flows of Certain Streams,” read the cover in a spidery hand. Elisha’s own hands trembled a little, just handling this.

  “Doctor?” Ariane’s voice. “Maestro Danek’s lecture will be starting soon. And I’ll need to eat before then.”

  “Thanks for all of your help.” He looked up from the book as she turned to leave. “Ariane? Tomorrow the council will sit in judgement on me, of Lucius’s accusations, and the others.”

  She nodded, sliding her hair back behind her ear. “I will give testimony, of course, and read out Benedict’s letter—I can look over them again tonight, to see if he might have said anything in detail.”

  “Thank you. If you would, can you introduce me to the other maestros, perhaps in the morning? I should have been getting to know them.” He sighed and gave a shake of his head. “I don’t know if it will matter.”

  “In the morning, then. I’ll take you to the classrooms as they are preparing.” She curtsied, as if he were due such honor, then departed, Leon’s gaze tracking her until the doors closed behind her.

  “Go on, Leon,” Elisha said. “You must be hungry, too. I appreciate your help.”

  Leon scampered for the door with surprising vigor, leaving Elisha with his discovery.

  Elisha bent over the book. The author’s name meant nothing to him, nor the obligatory remarks about God’s aid in both writing and healing. This introduction ended with the exhortation, “Let he who is in search of knowledge come before the Lord, and give praise to Saint Stephen.” Most of the other texts invoked Saint Luke, patron of physicians, or one of the various saints said to look out for particular conditions—a litany of the portraits he had seen on Leon’s tour. Saint Stephen stood watch over what? Stone masons? In point of fact, the book merely elaborated the same information he’d already read. It centered on a large diagram at the center which unfolded twice the size of the book itself. This purported to be an anatomy of blood flows in and out of the heart and other organs, except that the organs themselves were just as distorted and misplaced as in any of the other works he’d seen, and the heart itself was strangely shaped, badly drawn and more pointed than it should be, embellished with curious anatomical details. Elisha felt disappointed. If he had anything in common with the mancers, it was a stronger understanding of the human form than many university physicians. This mancer, presuming the same person ripped the hide for the cover as penned the text itself, made so much of his metaphor between rivers and veins that he turned the organs into islands with little boats passing between. The whole thing was ridiculous, but it still took him more than an hour to read, constantly referring to the diagram from the little numbers in the text.

  Nonsense, yet bound in human skin. How many of the people who came to the library would ever know that? Only the mancers. Elisha drummed his fingers lightly on the closed cover. The chain carried no special weight or influence that he could tell, nor did anything else about the binding seem strange. The parchment inside looked relatively new compared with many of the works he had seen today, but he had no idea what that implied.

  Herve cleared his throat. “Are you through? We now must shelve all the works you and your assistants have left lying about, and some of us would like to have dinner some time tonight.”

  “Sorry,” Elisha muttered. Reluctantly, he replaced the book on its shelf, the chain rattling, and let himself be herded out of the library. No doubt, physicians across many lands now worked on their own ideas of the pestilence, its causes and its spread, but their work did him little good. Up slope toward the church and the mountains beyond, the sky glowed with flickering light and shouts echoed from the walls. Elisha crossed into the main courtyard of the school, drawn by the commotion, and nearly collided with a hurrying student.

  “Where’s Maestro Teodor?” The student cried, searching his face.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Riot at the church! Maestro Guy had best leave right away, or they’re like to lynch him as the Pope’s man.” So saying, the student ran off into the night.

  Elisha continued on toward the gate where two students and a handful of servants clustered around, listening, one of them up on a ladder, peering over the gate into the street beyond. “I told you, we’re closed up tonight—you’ll have to wait ’til morning,” the man explained.

  “You’re as bad as they are. People are dying out here!”

  Projecting authority, from experience if nothing else, Elisha moved through the gathering toward the gate. “Is it not our duty to help those in need of medical care?”

  The student on the ladder, a senior fellow by his age and bearing, glanced down. “There’s a dozen people with the pestilence out there who won’t go to the church—we can’t take them on all at once—and there’s rioters down by the church already, threatening to burn it down.”

  “Won’t they do the same to us if we don’t let them in?” asked one of the others.

  “We can’t afford to be overrun with this pestilence. There are other illnesses and injuries to be seen to.”

  Elisha’s extended senses felt the fear outside the gate and the tension building by the churchyard. Then a bolt of pain shot through his awareness and someone cried out. The shouting erupted into orders of attack and defense as the riot turned violent.

  “I knew it would come to this,” said Maestro Danek, his face and figure shadowed. “We can’t help them, and they’ve low expectations of us in any case. When the church turns them away, well, what are they to do?”

  “Surely there’s something we can do.” Elisha held back from reaching for contact, tempted as he was to communicate with the other doctor, magus to magus. Danek felt familiar, his presence rich with intelligence, yet mysterious at the same time.

  “We can treat only the symptoms, and likely become infected ourselves as it is passed from man to man. I heard you spent the afternoon at the library. Did you learn anything different?”

  A servant nearby crossed her arms tightly, hugging herself. “Maestro Fidelis has the right of it, hiding out ’til God’s punishment is passed.”

  “Maestro Lucius says it is the influence of a malign conjunction of the stars,” said the senior student, waving
a hand toward the heavens from his lofty perch on the ladder. “When the season turns, the alignment will no longer cause such effects.”

  “Maestro Antonio says it is a miasma caused by air that lingers over the swampland—the only way to escape it is to go higher in the mountains, and block any windows that face the water,” said another student.

  In moments, this, too, rose into an argument. Outside the walls, a chill shaft pierced Elisha’s awareness as someone died. He caught his breath and heard many footfalls pounding across the yard, accompanied by a glow of torches as a party of men approached, Guy de Chauliac among them, clutching a satchel. “Stand aside,” Maestro Teodor commanded, his face weirdly lit by the torch he carried. “We need to get Guy to his ship.”

  “If any of you go out there, you’re liable to be attacked,” said the gatekeeper.

  “I have no illusions the situation will improve by daylight. In fact, no matter whose theory prevails, none of them project an immediate end to this pestilence.” Teodor beckoned the student down from the ladder and handed off his torch to a servant.

  Outside, someone screamed, a voice that fell into a death rattle, and a group of others cheered. Teodor hesitated. At his back, Guy clutched his satchel, his professional demeanor faltering in the night. “The Holy Father needs me. This was to be a brief visit only. If this rioting should spread, I need to be at my post by his side.”

  Danek stepped up. “I’ve made this for the Holy Father—it’s a sachet with some healing herbs and minerals that may have a preventive effect.” He held out a small packet, and Guy accepted it with a nod.

  “I’ll see that he gets it. Thank you for your aid.”

  “I wish I had greater faith in its utility.” Danek withdrew as the pounding outside increased.