Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  Elisha wrenched him from the barrel and tossed him across the floor, blood splashing the room. Danek struck the wall hard and pulled himself up, whirling to face Elisha, wiping some of the blood from his face. Elisha stalked across and caught him again, this time from the front, staring into his blood-streaked face. Never in his life had he been so enraged. Everything he had ever struggled for and fought against was refuted by this one man. “Tell me how to stop it.”

  “You can’t. Nobody can.” Danek grinned through the streaks of blood, already recovering. “Not even me.”

  Elisha rapped his prisoner’s head against the wall. “Bullshit—you made this, you know it better than any man. By Christ, you sired children just so you could torture them with sickness after sickness until you made this one—how did my patient even survive it if you can’t cure it?”

  The grin slipped a little, the presence pulsing with a shot of concern. “I am ashamed to say I do not know. A few people do survive—what would be the point otherwise? The runt appears to be one of them. Leon is another, but he will not consent to my examination. How can I further my understanding without their cooperation?”

  “And the boy screams his head off at the sound of your name, never mind at your presence if you should enter the room.”

  “I gave him to the church with a sum of money that should have ensured that they kept him.”

  “Because you couldn’t get what you want from him.”

  “You understand nothing. Disease maintains a sliver of mystery, even for me. No matter how much you know about anything, knowledge can take you only so far, after that, the mystery remains. You are a magus, at least, surely you have learned about mystery and knowledge? We who focus on knowledge tend to neglect our understanding of mystery.”

  Lucius’s blood froze upon his fingers and flaked away as Elisha’s power, his knowledge, swirled through his grip. “How could you do this? How could you forge a pestilence to kill everyone?”

  “Not everyone.” Danek’s teeth chattered. “Nothing is learned when the patient dies.”

  The patient? As if all of humanity were his patient, and he the doctor developing his cure. “What are you learning, then? How to kill better? How to serve the necromancers—how to serve them up the rest of mankind on a platter for their lunch?”

  “What am I learning? Rather ask what they are learning, all of those the pestilence assails.” Danek’s skin flared with a sudden fever that cracked at Elisha’s cold, and Elisha snatched back his hand, bracing for the fight, but Danek did not attack, his hand rubbing at the marks of Elisha’s fingers against his throat. “Humility, doctor. They learn to tremble. They learn that their lives are not safe, secure, or worthy. They learn that God doesn’t care about any of them, not the churchmen, not the kings, not the children. The Pope himself is powerless as are his priests and his physician. They are subject, every single one of them, not to some great and powerful God, but to the power of the powerless. They’re subject to me, Elisha, to me.” His finger tapped at his breast, leaving a mark of blood on his pale nightshirt.

  “Are you so in love with power that you would let so many people die?”

  “Not in the least. I am a doctor, and a teacher.” Danek, still shaking from the assault, took two steps to his table and perched upon its edge, for all the world as if he and Elisha were in a lecture hall, his face streaked with another man’s blood, regarding his pupil. “What I told you before is true. I want everyone to learn what I have learned, to know what I have been forced to understand.” He laced his fingers together.

  “To know the plague?”

  “To know what it is to be sick unto death and yet to find no rest, to be turned away from church and hospital and home, to be outcast even from charity. There is no love in this world and no compassion. They seek it from God, and they are deluded. They demand compassion from each other and then lie to each other about offering it.” He flicked his fingers as if to cast away every man, woman and child of the earth.

  “Because you are a cynic, you want everyone else to be, is that it? You sired a child without love and tortured him without remorse to teach the world to suffer?”

  “I am no cynic! No close-minded philosopher, not merely an abstract physician devoted to the great masters of an ancient time. Elisha, I am like you—a man of the world, a man who has suffered himself, and hoped to learn and to teach by his experience.”

  “You’re nothing like me.” Elisha took a step back, shaking his head, utterly mystified. “You’re a madman, a monster.”

  Danek surged out of his chair and jabbed his finger in Elisha’s face. “There it comes! You claim compassion, you even sought to be my friend, but you’re just like all the rest, a hypocrite who dares call me a monster, who would smother me in my sleep rather than to look me in the eye.”

  Fetching up against the table by the alcove, Elisha grabbed the candleholder and urged the flame higher. Light swelled between them, flickering and fair, and he saw Danek’s face plainly for the first time. Pits marked his uneven features, swellings hid beneath his hair, and dry patches of skin marred his cheeks. His fingers looked fat and blotchy, one fingertip missing and badly healed.

  “Go on, Doctor, what’s your diagnosis? What would you say of a man in my condition?” He brought his hand over his face and down his body, indicating every sign of his disease, putting himself on display.

  Elisha’s instincts, his years of training urged him away, but he forced himself to be still. “Leprosy,” he whispered.

  “Leprosy,” Danek repeated. “A leper, a lazar.” He stepped back from the light, calling out, “Leper! Unclean!” His hands balled into fists. “Throw me from the hospital, cast me from your sight. Send me out in the streets to beg for my life. To beg for my death. Give me a bell to warn them of my coming.” He swung his hand to and fro as if ringing the absent bell, and Elisha could almost hear its chime. “Leper. Unclean. You claim compassion, you claim knowledge.” His head swung back and forth in rhythm with the missing bell. “You know nothing, and neither did they. Until now.”

  Danek stopped dead still, hands clenched, eyes locked to Elisha’s. Then Danek’s voice came low and insistent. “Are they learning their lesson, Doctor? They do not learn from books, not when they cannot even read. They do not learn from listening, not to homilies on Sundays nor to the beggars in the streets. They do not learn from the Bible, not even to turn the other cheek. Oh, no, but they are learning now. Humility and hopelessness. That there is nothing on this earth as precious as life—not gold, not faith, not friendship, not fatherhood. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And they learn that lesson only when everything they have is gone. Men are despicable, deceitful, disgusting creatures. They did not honor the word of their Lord. Perhaps they will honor the word of their new masters. They will finally have the saints that they deserve.”

  Folding his arms, Danek breathed out in a satisfied sigh. “Thank you for attending my lecture today. Have you any questions?”

  “How do I stop it?” Elisha repeated.

  Danek groaned and shook his head. “Dear Lord, don’t be so thick. Ask me one I’ve not already answered.”

  “How did you make the plague?”

  “I told you, I did not: I found and improved upon it. I made it more virulent, easier to transmit. The boy was the warmth upon which the yeast of death was grown. His own magic potential made it easier to maintain contact.” Danek spread his hands. “Ask me another.”

  Danek could not be spreading the disease on his own, not with the variety of people who had already contracted it. Even if a hundred mancers followed the map in the flesh-bound book, they could not spread it so far and so fast. Elisha demanded, “How is it spread?”

  “In small ways. Ask me another.” Danek lounged on his desk, casual in his nightshirt and bloodstains, as if he cared for nothing and no one, giving Elisha answers that were none at all.

&nb
sp; “You think I know nothing,” Elisha said, pushing off from the wall and stalking forward once more, “but I know this.” Danek dodged to one side, but Elisha had contact through Lucius’s blood, and he pulled the magus back again. Danek flailed his arms, his feet skidding across the floor and his face twisting with helpless rage until they came once more face to face.

  Elisha seized his arm and launched them into the Valley. Even in the few days since Elisha travelled to Salerno, the Valley had grown deeper, stronger, a torrent of death and power that rushed through him. He plunged through to his destination, dragging Danek with him. They stumbled in the candlelit basement of the church of San Matteo. Elisha pulled him up the aisle between the victims, dead and dying, their deaths gathering in shadowed rivers around him. “I know Death, Maestro. I know how it comes and when. I feel it stalking, like a shadow that clings at the heels of the dying. My friend Gilles volunteered here among the sick, and now he’ll die because of them.”

  “Ah, is that what this is about? Your friend is dying, so now you care?”

  Elisha shoved him to his knees at a bedside where the darkness lay most thickly, a young woman round with child, her face glossy with sweat, her eyes shot through with red streaks as they searched the heavens. Elisha caught her hand and opened them both to her dying, the child within her already dead. Pain wracked her limbs and fever torched her throat. The swellings at her neck, arms and legs ached and distorted her flesh, a wrongness palpable in their contact. Her parched mouth worked, cracked lips praying, “Not for me, Lord, for the baby, please Lord, for the baby . . .” Her frail chest hitched up and sank down, expelling a breath of heat, the dark chill of her dying swirling into Elisha’s touch, the slender shade of the baby lingering at her side.

  “This is what the world becomes, because of you.”

  Danek met his gaze. “Did you draw down that woman’s death, into yourself? I did not know a mancer could do that.”

  “I am no mancer.”

  The other man blinked at him and said nothing.

  Elisha hauled him up again and tore open the Valley, stepping into the maelstrom. Danek’s doubt still stung his hand, Danek’s utter disregard for the suffering all around them stoked the fires of Elisha’s fury. Ever since he slew Vertuollo’s son, the Valley turned against him, the shades of his friends and those he had honored vanished into the howling madness of all the rest: Those he had killed, those he had failed to save, and those who died now all around him, while he stumbled helplessly from place to place, desperate to stop the dying, and utterly unable to do so. The dead mobbed him now, a thousand shades that flickered and shrieked with all the hurt, the fear and the despair of living. Elisha let them come. He let them slash through him and shared every sensation through the contact he forced on Danek. The maestro’s eyes flared, and he twisted in Elisha’s grip, then he struck back with his own dread knowledge.

  The heat of fever, the rash of disease spread along his arm, but Elisha refused them, rejecting Danek’s assault with his own cold callousness. “This serves no purpose, Doctor—give up and let me go,” Danek insisted.

  For a moment, their eyes met in the queer wavering light of the Valley, then Elisha did as Danek asked. He flung Danek into the Valley and let go, sealing the void with the Maestro on the inside.

  Chapter 19

  Gasping for breath, Elisha stood once more in Danek’s basement study, staring at the blood-spattered walls. What would happen to a living man left in the Valley? He had no idea. It was not a place like other places, but rather a between, a portal through which the dead must pass, leaving behind their earthly cares. He sank into Danek’s abandoned chair. The indivisi of plague himself suffered from leprosy, a disease that had spoiled his body, but also left him bitter and closed. At any other time, Elisha would have sympathized with the man, suffering first from his sickness, then from the disdain showed to him by other men. It was that suffering and the medical skill that grew from it which had drawn him to Danek—to a man who might be so much like himself. His chest tightened. He reached back, re-opening the Valley through Lucius’s blood, using it to search for the man he had left behind. The swirls among the shadows showed the signs of other travelers, trails of absence in the same way that death left marks upon the earth, but Danek was gone. Elisha returned, once more empty-handed.

  Then he remembered his patient’s hair, torn from his scalp to be used—for what? A talisman? Danek hardly needed a talisman of disease, he carried it within him. A charm, then—not a blessing, but a curse. Elisha pictured the night of Guy’s departure, Danek’s parting gesture to present him with a sachet to ward off the pestilence. To be given to the Pope. Good God: he had sent his gift to the heart of the Church itself.

  Back in the Maestro’s study, Elisha searched Danek’s few belongings, looking for any clues: writing perhaps, a journal of his accomplishments, or a treatise on his methods; any hint at all of how the plague might be fought, but he found nothing. True to his fears, he found no trace of the boy’s hair either. Facing his ignorance, Elisha considered what to do next—what could possibly be done next. Had Danek given him any lead to pursue? Any course at all to lead him to his next steps? Danek claimed the plague could not be stopped, not by him nor by Elisha. Could it be true? The idea chilled Elisha more than any single death had ever done. The thickening of the Valley and the way it remained so near the surface made passing through it easier than ever, and could be an end unto itself for the mancers who commanded Danek’s terrible design. Thousands were dying, all around Elisha, all the time, his distorted sight barely discerning any more between the living and the dying, and mancers like Silvio became drunk on the power, no longer able to control their dark desires, or no longer caring to conceal them. Danek drained Lucius of his blood to be sure, but he had not the skill to skin him so well.

  For a moment, Elisha sat stunned by the recognition that he could distinguish between expert and amateur flensing, and Elisha’s denial that he was a mancer felt hollow indeed. Vertuollo must have conspired with Danek, on the murder, another trap for Elisha. Vertuollo could no longer keep Elisha out of the Valley, now that the dead swelled it nearly beyond all recognition, but the count would be sensitive enough to know when Danek, likewise stained by Lucius’s death, might have need of him. Vertuollo came for Danek in the Valley, and took him where? Back to Rome. Where the devout Friar Gilles longed to go before he died.

  Cleaning the blood off as best he could, Elisha left the chamber, letting the door stand open just a bit. In moments, he’d be gone. His absence would make him look guilty for Lucius’s slaying, but anyone visiting Danek’s room would have to wonder what had happened there, and perhaps Danek’s own absence would suggest the real culprit, even if they never understood why. Casting a deflection of death and of darkness, Elisha returned to his own chamber. His things were gone, removed by his accusers no doubt, but Gilles’s carefully labelled and lovingly displayed relics remained; no need to confiscate the possessions of Elisha’s apparently innocent, if misguided, companion. Good. Elisha gathered them up and returned to the hospital, treading carefully, watchful for the ward sisters. The nun on his own ward lay where she had been, snoring softly. Given the boy’s restlessness and wailing, this might be the first good sleep she’d had in weeks. Let her rest.

  At the far end of the ward, Friar Gilles sat on the bed facing Elisha’s patient, speaking softly, the boy sitting before him, silent. Elisha shed his deflection when he drew close, and Gilles managed a smile. “I’m feeling much better, and I do wonder if I might have overreacted earlier.” He searched Elisha’s face, but the black pall of his dying had not departed, and Elisha’s face must have shown it, too, for Gilles lost his smile and looked away, smothering a cough.

  Feeling better. The boy rested his bound hands on the friar’s knee, his young face solemn, his presence radiating need. When Elisha opened his medical kit, the boy jerked back, but Elisha settled on the floor beside him, loo
king up into his eyes, and offered his hand to make contact. “I’d like to cut you free, so you can come with me.”

  “To Hell, with the other demons?”

  “Through Hell, in any case. There will be demons, and not all of them will be our friends.”

  The boy held out his hands, and Elisha drew his short knife, cutting through the leather bonds, though the child flinched at the nearness of the knife, as much because of its medical nature as because of the blade, Elisha guessed. Replacing the knife in his medical kit, he drew out another blade, a short, sharp knife with an inlay of salt, and offered it to the boy. “This blade is proof against demons, if you are fast enough to use it. It has to plunge into soft flesh, but if it does, it can cut through magic.”

  The boy accepted it solemnly, running his finger down the flat of the shimmering crystal.

  From the sack, Elisha drew a spare tunic, too large by half, but better than the rags the boy currently wore. His patient accepted this as well, drawing it on over his own torn garment. Elisha took up the leather straps that had bound the child to the bed and made a belt of them—blood and terror stained the bonds. They would serve him as a talisman when he knew how to use it. The boy tucked his blade through the belt, pressing it close.

  “What shall we do? You stand accused of murder and sorcery,” Gilles pointed out.

  “There’s nothing more we can learn here.” Elisha stood up. “We’re going to Rome.”

  “That is the home of your enemy, Elisha, which I have not forgotten even if you have. What about England?”

  “Gretchen stole the talisman that could have brought us there, unless you have a relic that can forge such a connection.” Elisha tried not to let the bitterness seep into his voice but could not hold it back. He should have been searching for a way home aside from the talisman of earth tainted with his brother’s blood, and now it was too late—they must move on. “Besides, I have a duty to try to stop this plague and the men who are spreading it—I cannot simply run away. If there is another destination that will serve us both, then tell me, Brother Gilles, where would you like to die?”