Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  Gilles swallowed, his face pale and slick with sweat. “Rome will do,” he said softly.

  The hollow voice, once so boisterous, sank into Elisha’s heart. He touched his friend’s shoulder sending comfort. “Forgive me my brusqueness, it’s only—I would have given anything to be able to save your life, and I can’t. I don’t know how.”

  “Then perhaps my death will show you. What about your patient?”

  “He’s coming, too. I can’t leave him behind, not here. Besides, he may know more than almost anyone about this plague. He was the first to suffer it.”

  “I’d no idea.” Gilles raised his eyebrows. “He told me that you both are demons, but I find nothing demonic in him. And of course, I have seen the truth about you.” He crossed himself. “Do you know, it had a different meaning before? An older term. Daemon,” he pronounced carefully. “In pagan times, such a being stood between the human and the divine, an instrument of God among His creations.”

  Elisha opened his mouth to protest, but Gilles waved it away as if he would suffer no more protestations of Elisha’s angelic nature. “We were speaking of the problem of his name before you returned. I think he has settled on Jude.”

  “The patron saint of hopeless causes. Your idea?”

  “It may have come up in conversation, or in my prayers.” Gilles took up the bundle of his relics. “Rome, you say.” He stared down at his hands where he clutched the sack. “Is that where you, too, would like to die?”

  “They can’t kill me, Gilles. It’s not that easy.”

  “No, I imagine not. But this Vertuollo . . . I have not seen you scared before, not like that. To think that someone like you could feel such terror. Is Rome where these villains will have their feast?”

  “I don’t think so, not anymore. But Count Vertuollo has taken the best source of knowledge away with him.”

  “You are not giving up.” The light in Gilles’s eyes was not merely from the fever. “Perhaps not so hopeless after all, then. I have faith in you, that you will find a way to conquer your enemy in spite of everything. Are we going to any church in particular?”

  Elisha considered the question. Several of the churches had been destroyed, in part or in whole, and most of them were controlled by one faction or another of the dueling families who controlled Rome, save one, where the archpriest held his own and maintained his allegiance to the Pope above all else, and to the Lord beyond. “San Giovanni.”

  Gilles rooted through his sack and came up with a silk-wrapped parcel. “San Giovanni.” He nodded, and started to rise, only to stagger, clamping his hand to his mouth. Elisha caught him around the waist and supported him, holding him close even as he retched into the bucket.

  Jude scrambled over and stared, his mouth twisted. Cautiously, he touched Elisha’s arm. “He has the gift. My father’s gift.”

  “He doesn’t deserve it, nor does anyone.”

  “Did you kill my father?”

  “Not yet.” Then Elisha cursed himself. In his anger, he failed to consider his words. He should have simply said “no.” Instead, he’d made a promise or a threat. “He still knows more about this disease than anyone else; I’d like to question him again before he dies.”

  “Does he deserve it?”

  “I am not one to judge for all I’ve done, but you haven’t seen the results of his work. What he’s done to you was only the beginning.” If the plague was Danek’s gift to mankind, then what was Elisha’s?

  Gilles shook against him, and Elisha pressed the relic between their hands. San Giovanni was the church overseen by Pierre Roger, an even-handed priest of Rome and, perhaps, the son of the man who had become the Pope himself. Even better, Elisha himself had visited the church a few months ago—creating both knowledge and contact to draw him there again, assuming the church had survived the earthquakes caused when Elisha stripped away the false relics the mancers had planted. Aside from sending Jude and Gilles his own compassion, he could do nothing to shield them from the horror of the Valley, the boy clinging to one side, the monk cowering at the other, but his knowledge of the church made the passage brief, like a nightmare they woke from in an instant.

  Jude wailed in echo of the Valley, but Gilles crumpled to the floor, and Elisha went with him, bearing him gently down, cradling his head.

  Elisha caught Jude’s hand, making contact and sending him comfort. “Jude, you’re safe now.” The boy shrieked all the louder, twisting against Elisha’s grip. “Please, Jude, he’s dying.” Torn between the anguish of the ailing friar and that of the living boy, Elisha felt himself more stretched than ever.

  Jude beat at his back and shoulders, shouting, his presence so infused with fear, he could not even hear Elisha’s words of comfort. Elisha let him go, and Jude stumbled back, his cacophony briefly interrupted, then he fled into the darkness.

  “Come back! Jude!”

  “Go after him,” Gilles breathed. “I’ll be all right.” His body heaved, and he rolled on his side, retching and gasping.

  They knelt in the darkened church of San Giovanni, a few small windows supplying the only light, just enough to gleam upon the gilt and silver canopy at the heart of the church. When Gilles collapsed again into panting, Elisha gathered him up and carried him to lie beneath the canopy, the monk’s flesh lying loose and quivering. Elisha wiped his friend’s face and laid a cool hand upon his forehead. “Go after him,” said Gilles again. “The living need you more.”

  Elisha blinked back tears. “Gilles, I hardly know who is living any more. We seem, every one of us, to be bound in the shadow of death.” Already, the friar’s features carried a shadowy echo. He faded faster than any plague victim Elisha had yet encountered, and Elisha could not help but feel that travelling through the Valley explained the difference. It was wrong, unnatural, for any living man to enter into that passage of the dead. It had to leave its mark. Just as the pilgrimage left the pilgrim more holy on his return, travelling the Valley stripped a little of a man’s life or his humanity. Gilles had no strength for such things, and Elisha could see the change in his glassy eyes.

  “Who’s there? Who calls like the enemy in the night?” A clear, strong voice echoed in the empty church, counterpoint to Jude’s piteous wails. The speaker approached, carrying a lantern. “If you’ve come to steal from the church, I say to you that the Lord who sees the sparrow’s fall sees your perfidy. San Giovanni survived the earthquake, and it shall survive this as well.” Father Pierre Roger walked closer, his handsome young face revealed in the lantern’s glow. Elisha remembered him well, first from the compassion he showed during Father Uccello’s so-called trial, then when Elisha came to visit San Giovanni before departing Rome. Father Pierre’s face revealed his own recognition. “It’s you. I little expected to see you returned to Rome, much less to find you here. I take it there was no pass through the mountains?”

  “Forgive me, Father, but my friend dearly wished to see Rome before he is called back to the Lord.” The phrase felt empty on his lips. He knew too much of death to feel it as any kind of homecoming. But then, he had not gone beyond the Valley, not even when it opened for him with the soft warmth of springtime and beckoned with the voices of his friends who had gone before. Some of them entered the void with joyous hearts, and he recognized that he did not know everything, even about this. There were some mysteries only open to the dead, the sliver of mystery that a man with knowledge so often forgot.

  Danek’s words. Elisha’s teeth tasted sour, his stomach aching.

  Father Pierre stood over them, lantern held high. “We have many hospitals in the city, Doctor, to which your friend might be admitted, and many monasteries where they tend their brethren.”

  “I wanted to find a place where I knew we would be welcomed.” With the city’s former leader, Cola di Rienzi, gone and the barons resuming control—or resuming their own battles—Elisha had no idea who could be truste
d any more, with the exception of Father Pierre.

  “You are fortunate to find me here, on the last night of my vigil before I sail to the Holy Father at Avignon, to consult with him and to seek his intercession for . . . for those who are not his children.” Father Pierre’s brow furrowed, and he flicked a gaze over Elisha’s face as if uncertain whether the trust might be mutual.

  “The Jews,” Elisha guessed.

  The dark eyes blinked, and Father Pierre gave a short nod. “The Jews of Rome live in fear and in hiding.”

  “Would that I could aid in your mission, Father. God bless you for undertaking it.”

  The priest’s face softened. “And what of he who wails in the night? Is he, too, your friend?”

  “Indeed he is, and more in need of one than any.”

  “Well, perhaps you can coax him to worship more silently in the house of the Lord. And I shall bring blankets and water.” Father Pierre made the sign of blessing over Gilles’s chest. “Do not fear, my son. You will be well-cared for.”

  Elisha strode into the blackness, searching by the scrap of bloody cloth he still carried in his medical kit. Jude’s howling sent eerie echoes through the church, making it hard to know where to look for him. “Jude,” he called, “remember control. I know you can do it. You have every right to be afraid, but now you need to be brave. Can you do that?”

  Jude’s cry sank low, and Elisha heard his breathing. “Yes, yes, that’s it.”

  “What if I cannot learn it?” Jude’s touch whispered back.

  “You can; you already are.”

  Elisha walked toward the door, his senses mapping out the dim interior where Jude waited for him. Then a chill wind cut through the church and silence devoured all sound. Into the darkness, a high, childish voice cried out his name, and Elisha ran.

  Chapter 20

  The voice cut short, but the heat of a new presence flared in Elisha’s awareness, and he was already preparing his armor, drawing up the strength of death within himself, drawing it down from the Valley. He ran down the aisle of the church toward a widening gap of evening light, a pinkish hue interrupted by a hurrying figure, its silhouette distorted by the thrashing form it carried: someone had seized Jude and hauled him out the door. Elisha ran even faster and plunged into the day, blinking at the sudden light.

  Jude’s terror touched him from the left, and he swung about, glimpsing the running figure as it rounded the corner of the church’s colonnade and gained the freedom of the street. The shades of the dead massed in Rome, the shades of ancient soldiers joined by a throng of new victims, not fighting in ghostly battles or succumbing to ghostly crimes, but merely gliding from doorways, standing in windows, lying in the streets, their freshly dead corpses lying there still. The reek of death suffused the air, a combination of vomit and rotting flesh. The corners of the piazzas held low mounds of the dead and those barely living lined the wider streets. It was easier to discern the living from the dead here—the living held cloths over their faces and ran, furtive as rats as they dodged among bodies. A handbill on the wall opposite the church offered a rich price for anyone willing to haul the dead or dig their graves. A line drawn through the price raised it twice already since the notice had been posted. Elisha thought of the mancer-gravedigger of Rome, who had died in a distant valley trying to conceal Brigit from Elisha. The gravediggers had never been so vital to a city’s health. If there had been no miasma of sickness before, there surely was now.

  Fending off the odor, dulling the senses of his mouth and nose, Elisha turned, tracking his quarry. There!

  Elisha leapt a broad crack that cut the street and split a nearby house. All around him, the crumbling structure of Rome frayed even more, the piles of rubble larger than he remembered, the buildings more tilted and roofs leaning at precarious angles as a result of the earthquake. A few buildings collapsed completely, lying in heaps among their fragile neighbors. Cracks and fissures marred the streets and the standing houses, with slabs of stone thrusting up here and there. Paving stones scattered the ground. Beneath the facades of the numerous churches, patches of colored plaster and bright bits of mosaics twinkled in the growing day. And among them all, the dead.

  A girl with bright hair and pale, vacant eyes lay beneath the Virgin’s statue near a shattered chapel. Two men side by side, faces distorted by black swellings and reddened eyes. Others lay wrapped in anonymous cloth, their lingering shades rising up and lying down in endless repetition of their final moment. The rhythm of these shadows, slow and dreadful, gave the impression that the city breathed in death and breathed it out again. Before, Elisha had felt the jittery surges of death as the plague advanced. Now, it seeped through him in a constant rain, sending strength to his limbs and turning his breath to a misty shroud of ice crystals. Never before, even in the act of killing, had he felt so powerful or so helpless.

  Sealing in his emotions, Elisha allowed himself to grow cold, his divided sight showing him the gray tracks of death, his extended senses reaching for the child. If he could do nothing else, save no one else, surely he could at least do this.

  He flung himself around a corner and found the vast, ruined bowl of the Colosseum towering before him, his quarry vanishing into its shadow. “Jude!” He cried out.

  The figure ahead of him stumbled, the thrashing of his captive gone wild, and Elisha gained a few steps, enough to see the flash of the other man’s eyes. Danek held Jude’s wrists clamped in one hand, a band of leather in the other, wrapped through the boy’s mouth to stop his voice, though he still moaned.

  “He is my son, Doctor. By right and law, he belongs to me.”

  “No man who would treat him so deserves a son.” Elisha stalked closer.

  Jude flailed and twisted, his legs dangling, so that Danek carried him at arm’s length, like a cat about to be drowned.

  “You are a doctor, you understand the need for greater knowledge. It is vital that I study him. The similarity of his flesh to my own makes it clear that I am the only one who can do so effectively. What if, by doing so, I discover the reason he survived? Surely, that would be a discovery that you would support.”

  “If you would learn from him, then earn his trust and make him your ally, not your victim.” Elisha took another step, hands spread as if in conciliation, the power of death lurking just beneath his skin, his muscles trembling with the urge to use it.

  “Stay back.” Pulling Jude against his chest, Danek shifted his grip on the leather, giving it a pull that turned the boy’s head. “A broken neck is not an injury to trifle with.”

  “Kill him and you die.”

  Danek claimed he wanted to learn from the boy, but he was just as willing to kill him. In both body and mind, Jude contained so much knowledge about the plague he had survived, knowledge Danek had not intended to share. In bringing Jude to Rome, Elisha gave Danek the chance to steal back that knowledge. Elisha could not afford to lose both father and son, but Jude’s trust was hard won, and his life was worth fighting for.

  The shadows at Danek’s side resolved into a blanket-draped mound with a few limbs poking out, the lingering shades of the dead rising and falling from beneath. The Valley whispered all around and through him, and Elisha reached out along it, stretching his senses, drawing up the insubstantial shadows of a family, father, mother, three children, cold and frightened. Elisha drew upon their terror and their grief and pulled them forth in a frigid blast.

  Danek yelped at the touch and spun away, stumbling into a column. His elbow hit hard, and he lost his grip on Jude’s hands.

  Elisha snapped himself through the Valley to Danek’s side as Jude grappled with his father. Then Jude’s hand came up with something that shimmered pink. The salt blade plunged into his father’s stomach, jerked free and stabbed again, blood streaming from the wounds.

  Cursing in a language Elisha did not know, Danek slammed Jude’s face into the column, then f
lung him aside as Elisha caught Danek’s arm, blasting him with cold. Through the contact, Danek’s confusion swirled, his knowledge disintegrating, the diseases that had always defended him now slipping away from him, blocked by the stabbing pain that cut his belly, and by the sharper slice of the salt through his awareness. Screaming, Danek dropped to his knees, trying to reach the blade. Elisha grabbed his wrists and shoved him to his back, looming over him.

  “I can heal you—tell me how to stop the plague.”

  “Told you, you can’t.”

  “But you’re still alive, so’s Vertuollo, so am I. You must have a way, even just to save a single life.”

  Danek’s mouth gaped, blood seeping between his teeth. “One at a time, Doctor. Not enough for you. You’re greedy for life.”

  “Why did you help them?”

  “They helped me.” He worked his mouth into a bloody grin. “We travelled the world to get this far, to share the gift of humility.”

  To get this far—not yet so far as England. The black pall of death coalesced around the pinned man. “Immunity, for one, how do you cast it?”

  “Fuck off.” Danek’s rough skin twitched, pain spreading from the wound, his presence still flaring with the attempt to reach his magic, his panic spreading as he could not.

  “You sent a gift with Guy to the Pope, it was tainted with the plague, wasn’t it?”

  Danek had lost the will or power to reply. Digging in his fingers, Elisha pushed himself deeper, his awareness invading Danek’s wounds, tracing his knowledge, grasping for every fleeting thought. Immunity, a charm, a talisman. Survival rates at half or less, charts of calculations in an orderly script. An image of Jude lying bound upon a cot, flea-bitten and weeping. Mice, rats, larger furred creatures and smaller ones. The boy’s little friends. A startling, tender moment of Danek combing his son’s hair.