Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  “Silvio never returned from the riot,” said Teodor. “I’ll have to find someone among the students to do it.” He gave a heavy sigh, that pained look returning to his face.

  One of the other men reached out to take the chain, and Teodor stepped aside as the man asked, “Where should we take him? The dark chamber? It’s got only one door.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the boy.

  Then Teodor’s beard broke in a smile. “And so has this. Chain him to this empty bed, would you? And two of you can keep watch at the far end. That should be sufficient. We’ve all the facilities here to maintain a prisoner, after all.”

  The man shrugged and rounded the spare bed, looping the chain around a post and sliding a lock into the links to hold it there. Elisha had about four feet of liberty, plus the length of chain between his hands. He could reach to the boy’s bedside. He met Teodor’s smile and bowed his head as he had never done for Lucius. “Thank you, Maestro.”

  “It is no favor to you, but to the other patients who deserve a better rest. Come.” Teodor turned on his heel and led his party back along the aisle toward the stairs.

  Elisha sat on the bed and raised his right hand to the wall. “Did you start up just for me? That’s hardly a sign of madness.”

  The boy shuddered with each breath as he shrieked and did not open his eyes.

  Very softly, Elisha started to sing. After a long moment, the wailing slowed and fell away to a whisper. The nun shuffled up the aisle with the basin Elisha had used the day before. “Brought you some water. He’s sure to be thirsty after all of that.” She looked Elisha up and down. “Not sure how I feel about using a murderer to soothe a demon, but there you are. As the Maestro said, ’tis better for the other patients not to put up with his caterwauling.” She set down the basin on a little stool between them. “There you go. Also a visitor on the way for you.”

  “Maestro Danek? But it’s still light out.”

  The boy gave a sharp howl, and the nun raised her hand as if to strike. Elisha thrust his own chained hands between them, her hand striking the metal. “Don’t, Sister, please don’t.”

  She drew back her hand. “Then you see to it he stops with all of that racket. It’s why you’re here, and if they see it’s no help, then I’ve no need to have a murderer on my ward, you see?”

  An icy wind preceded his visitor, and Elisha pulled back, his hands clenching into fists, his back to the wall.

  “I hardly expected to find you in such circumstances,” Count Vertuollo said, staring down at him. “A good bed? Fresh water? Thanks to you, my son has no bed except the grave.”

  Vertuollo’s presence soared with a sinister majesty, the nun and door guards shrinking back, bowing as Elisha searched for his lost composure.

  The count’s voice sank very low. “Nobility is so hard to defeat, even in such dark days as these. They will grow darker, Brother, mark my words.” He made a slow pushing gesture with his palm, as if leaning upon a door.

  The frigid power of the Valley exploded in Elisha’s chest, and he screamed.

  “Oh, don’t you start,” groaned the nun, but Elisha barely heard her.

  Pain shot through him, a wrenching sensation as if he were being torn apart from the inside out. Vertuollo twisted his hand.

  Elisha snatched for strength, pushing back, driving the count from his heart, chasing him from the Valley that they shared. The searing cold raced through his limbs and mind and spirit, and he fought it with his will alone. He would not die, not today, not like this, shackled and condemned. He couldn’t breathe. His teeth chattered together, his hands shaking. Then a slender heat wrapped his fist, a grasping hand that clung to his.

  “Demons!” cried the boy’s voice against his skin.

  Shaking off his panic, Elisha lifted his chin and stared at Vertuollo. “No.” With an effort, Elisha forced back the Valley, not sealing it—these days, it never wholly vanished, but he narrowed its touch to a slender gap like the mouth of a cave, opening into the endless darkness.

  Vertuollo finished his gesture, drawing back his hand to cross himself, his gaze resting on the boy, then lifting to Elisha. “Not today, Brother? Soon, you will meet your justice.” Vertuollo inclined his head and swept away out the door. Moments later Elisha felt the Valley shiver as the count took his leave.

  Trembling, Elisha huddled on his bed, the boy’s hand wrapped in both of his.

  “Even grown-ups get scared,” the boy said.

  “Especially grown-ups.” He swallowed over and over, wet his lips, brought the boy’s hand up to his forehead, letting it warm him. Vertuollo had stretched out through the Valley to clutch at his heart, but that had not been his full strength, just a test, a thrust against his armor.

  The tremor of someone else approaching rippled through Elisha’s awareness, and he reflexively seized at his own power, but the voice allayed his fear.

  “Elisha, I came when I heard! My goodness, what has been happening? And was that the Roman count I saw upon the stairs? He gave me such a smile that I thought I might well be struck dead by it.” Friar Gilles hustled up the aisle. The friar’s fleshy face streamed with sweat as if he had been running all day, not merely from the church to the hospital. “Oh, thoughtless of me, you hardly wish to be reminded of untimely death.” He finished at Elisha’s bedside and dropped onto the foot of the bed, panting for breath and patting his freshly shaven tonsure with a folded bit of cloth. “My goodness,” he said again, blinking at Elisha’s chains. “You do look in a bad way.”

  Elisha stared back at his companion; he wasn’t the only one who looked in a bad way. Gilles’s face was red and blotchy as he patted his tonsure and forehead. Then he tugged at the collar of his habit, tipping back his head to blot the sweat beneath his chin. A patch of darkness marked his jaw, a small, dark swelling. The unmistakable sign of the plague.

  Gilles smoothed the cloth back into place, glancing at Elisha, his eyebrows edging up, then glancing away as both of their eyes clouded with tears.

  Chapter 17

  Elisha should have known. By God, he should have known! How could he have so much power, so much strength and knowledge and be unable to stop this pestilence from claiming his friends? Because he did not know enough but to bring them into danger. Elisha squeezed away the tears, rubbing his eyes with one thumb.

  “Your friend is sick.” The boy’s presence, withdrawn and frightened at Gilles’s entry, strengthened and he let his hand remain.

  “I shouldn’t have come. You do not need my burdens atop your own.” Gilles rose heavily, but Elisha stopped him with a gesture that made his chains clank ominously.

  He found his breath and tried to control his emotions. Self-recrimination did no good. Gilles willingly came with him into danger; Elisha could not let him suffer the consequences alone. “No. Please stay. You couldn’t have known all the rest of this. It’s not your fault.”

  “Is that so?” Gilles stared at the kerchief in his hands. “Is it not the will of God, the punishment for my sins?”

  “What sins can you possibly have that deserve this?”

  Gilles flinched at his tone, and the boy’s tension rose. Elisha took a deep breath, and tried to calm himself, but Gilles spoke again, very softly, “The relics I carry have not defended me. The saints are angry about their translation. We have always maintained that relics would not allow their translation if the saints did not condone it, and perhaps they do not. Is my mission over? Is it time for God to call me home? I have prayed it was not so. I have never even seen Rome, but I don’t want to defy the will of the Lord.” His shoulders trembled, then he sank down to the bed, elbows on knees, his head in his hands. Sweat beaded on his tonsure and the exposed back of his neck. “But I don’t want to die.” He broke into gut-wrenching sobs.

  Elisha glanced back at his patient, then gently extricated his hand from that desperate grip. He slid toward
Gilles, lifted the chain over his friend’s shoulders and wrapped the friar in his arms, Gilles’s fevered head nestled against his chest. He allowed his flesh to go cold, radiating such cold comfort as only he could offer. Waves of sorrow crossed the friar’s body, accompanied by the guilt of denying his fate, and the fear of death itself. Had he been worthy enough to pass into Heaven? Or was this growing corruption of the body merely the sign of the corruption of his soul?

  The boy on the other bed made a little sound of inquiry, the most gentle and speech-like sound Elisha had yet heard from him. His patient uncoiled himself from the top of the bed and crept closer, then stretched out his skinny, scarred legs until his toes touched Elisha’s knee. “Don’t leave me.”

  For the second time the boy had reached out to him, quite possibly the only times he had ever reached out to anyone. Elisha’s throat, already aching from Gilles’s grief, threatened to close up completely. “I won’t.” Then he drew a deeper breath. Gilles’s appearance, both the fact of his presence, and the clear signs of his sickness, had cut through Elisha’s fear, but it had not been Vertuollo’s appearance that set off his patient’s terror, as it had his own. As Elisha mastered himself again, he traced back the moment to the name he had spoken, twice in the boy’s presence, the man who knew everything about sickness, whose presence felt so familiar—because it felt like the boy’s. “There’s another man here, a doctor and a master of the school. I’ve spoken of him twice, and both times—”

  Before he even finished forming the thought, he felt the rush of panic that welled up in the boy, and he sent comfort, calm.

  “It’s all right—I won’t bring him here, I won’t make you face him.” He took a moment to consider how to approach what he must do, what he must know. “He’s your father, isn’t he? This isn’t your home because he moved you to Salerno. He left you at the church, but they turned you away to the hospital.”

  The boy’s sending throbbed with pain, and a burst of images: cuttings, bleedings, piercings, needles, and welts, cupping and herbs, emetics, his skin scraped raw or coming up in boils. Strong hands gripped and turned him, held him down, cut him and cured him, prodded and pinched him, fed him and forced open his mouth to check for symptoms.

  “Oh, dear God,” Elisha sighed, and Gilles stifled his tears to raise his head. Elisha kept his skin cool even as he felt his blood must boil. “He did all that to you. And you weren’t the first one.” The runt, the smallest of a litter, and not worthy of feeding.

  “My father had sons before me.” The boy shrank back from his knowledge, bound up in confusion, as if he did not know what the words meant.

  Elisha thought of his own father, a farmer, strong and capable, rough when he had to be, loving when he could be, and he thought of his own son cradled in Thomas’s powerful arms, defended with all the love of the man and the strength of the crown. “That’s not what a father should be. You deserve so much more, so much better.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because you’re a child—because you’re alive. Because you depended on him on this earth, and he made you live in Hell. If you’re a demon, he made you so.” At the boy’s fear, Elisha drew back his anger, binding it deep within, forging it into a blade. “This is no lie.”

  Tears sparked in the boy’s eyes as he shook his head in mute denial.

  “What’s happening, Elisha? It is as if the two of you speak, but I hear nothing.” Gilles lifted Elisha’s arms away, slipping back a little, his eyes red and weary.

  “Gilles, you know a number of languages from your travels. Do you speak Hungarian?”

  Gilles blinked at this apparent change of subject, then said, “A little. Jo nap. Hogy vargy?” He shrugged, but the child froze, staring.

  “Bocsass meg,” the boy whispered, the first words Elisha had ever heard him speak. Forgive me.

  One of the men called Saint Stephen had been the king of Hungary: invoked in a skin-bound volume of false medicine—in truth, a map to the heart of Kaffa, the source of the pestilence itself. “I know where the plague came from—it’s not from God, not for a moment. There’s a man I have to see.”

  “A mancer?”

  “A magus.” Indivisi, unless Elisha missed his guess. A magus who devoted his life and his talent to a single course of knowledge, a single understanding from which he derived all of his power, making himself indivisible from it. The Salernitan: the indivisi of plague.

  “Don’t leave me! Don’t go to him, please.” The boy shook so hard his tears scattered, and his toes barely kept contact.

  Elisha sank to his knees before his patient, tugging his chain as far as it would go to close the distance between them, and took the child’s hand. “I need to stop him, to stop them all, so that there need be no more demons, do you understand?”

  “He will kill you.”

  “He doesn’t have that power.” Not unless Elisha chose to give it to him. Would he die for this, if his death-magic could make it stop? Their eyes met over their bound and clasped hands. Gilles stumbled to his feet, shuffled a few steps to find a bucket, and vomited into it, the stench quickly suffusing the room, turning Elisha’s own stomach, but he chilled it with the echoes of death, even as his chest burned with anger.

  “While I am gone, you must keep silent, no matter what. I can send the guards to sleep, I don’t want them to wake and find me gone.” He regarded the child seriously, the child whose welfare he had made so important to his own. “You must learn control if I am ever to teach you magic.”

  For a long moment, the boy sat and trembled, ideas forming and breaking apart before Elisha could even grasp them. Finally he said, “How will you get free?” The boy looked down at their hands, both bound.

  Elisha breathed in the death of metal. He pinched each lock in the fingers of the opposite hand and let the rust disintegrate their hasps, then slid his wrists from the shackles and left them on the bed, in case he might need the illusion of captivity.

  The boy’s eyes grew wide. “Is that a demon power?”

  “Aye, and one that you will learn, then no man shall ever keep you prisoner.” He was already working his deflection as Gilles returned. The friar walked along the other side of the bed and lay down, his breathing ragged with pain and exhaustion.

  “Gilles, there’s something I need to do—I’ll be back as soon as may be.”

  The friar gave a weary wave of his hand in acknowledgement. After a moment, Gilles rolled over to look at the other bed. “The boy, what is his name?”

  “His father called him ‘runt.’”

  Gilles’s soft face crumpled into a frown. “I will pray that the wickedness leave that man’s soul. And we will find a better name, a true name.”

  “You’d better pray fast, friar, he’s going to need it.” Elisha burned, just looking at Gilles, his flesh already sallow with sickness. “Watch over my friend?”

  The boy squared his narrow shoulders and gave a solemn nod.

  Elisha silenced his steps, his breathing, his very heartbeat, as he extended his senses. He rose and stalked down the ward. The two guards sat with their backs toward the beds, talking softly. Elisha prepared his suggestion, and let his hand sink to the fringe of the man’s hair, a contact he would not even feel. The guard started yawning, and when his friend reached out to cuff his shoulder, he, too, blinked his eyes sleepily. In a moment, the men leaned against each other, snoring softly. Elisha passed by like a ghost, silencing the door at the top of the stairs stepping over the ward sister where she lay on her pallet. Last night, he had forced her to stay away, keeping watch, and now that inducement had caught up with her. Very well, she had earned her rest.

  Where would he find Danek now? Daylight would not defend the Salernitan from Elisha’s discovery or his wrath. But even a nocturnal magus needed sleep sometime. At this hour, most students were in class, the yard abandoned. The door to the basement prepar
ation room stood locked until Elisha got there, then it opened to his command, the metal latch withering at his touch, the bar inside tumbling to the floor with a dull thud.

  Whispers of death twined from the dead animals on the benches and tables, but the smell no longer bothered him. At the far end of the hall stood another door that would not remain sealed against him. He pushed through into a round chamber at the base of the school’s bell tower. Lit by a guttering night candle, it contained a single chair and table, basin stand and a chest pushed against the walls. In the center, a barrel stood beneath the high ceiling where a bare hook held a chain that should have supported the chandelier resting near another chest. The barrel reeked of blood. Lucius’s blood. A magus to suggest he should sleep, a doctor to send him deeper with a few herbs, a strong man to chain his ankles and haul him up, a preparator to bleed him out, making it easy for someone to skin him, someone who liked things tidy. What would Danek say if the other maestri inspected his chambers? Or would he simply place the barrel outside with the other results of his preparations, another resource to be studied in the quest for healing, or roll it away to be discarded with the results of other bleedings. No hospital could ever be free of blood.

  At the opposite side of the chamber, curtains concealed an alcove where a single presence lay sleeping. Elisha shut the door behind him and crossed the room, cloaked in his deflection. He thrust his hand beyond the curtain and seized the throat of the sleeping man. He hauled Danek from his bed with the strength of his fury and of the Valley that throbbed all around him. As the magus jolted awake, grappling with his hand, Elisha dragged him across the chamber and thrust him to his knees, shoving his head into the barrel of blood. “You made the plague, you fucking arrogant unbelievable shit.”

  Chapter 18

  “I didn’t make it—I made it better.” Danek flailed and struggled against him, kicking and scratching. “Let me up—let me up or you learn nothing.”