Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  The dead child swept forward with the unnatural wind, brushing by Elisha with a streak of terror and grief. Elisha seized that contact and stole it for his own, using his knowledge of the way that Gilles died. The corpse collapsed as the wind cracked around it, but Jude was gone, shrieking into the darkness, stumbling and crying out. Elisha fell with the dead child, pushing it aside with a breath of sympathy.

  Jude’s screams echoed all around him, beating at his ears and at his heart. He pushed himself to his knees, searching. Shreds of old cloth and withered skin slapped his shoulders and stroked his head. Lovers slain together in her husband’s bed; a young man who threw himself from a tower, another who drowned in the river, weighted down by armor. Already exhausted from the last few days, Elisha tried to ward himself against the assault, to find Jude. He had entered the count’s domain of his own accord, bringing the child with him, pretending he could protect him. Every bone and scrap and lashing hair struck him with the crippling pity of the dying. If he drew down Death and made himself go cold, he could stop feeling them all, Jude along with them. “Jude! Where are you?”

  Vertuollo spoke again, a commanding voice using a language Elisha did not understand. The scream broke into a series of panting cries, then Jude’s voice, answering. The first time Jude had spoken in Elisha’s presence was to call his name, summoning his aid against Danek. Now, he spoke in words Elisha did not know, halting and soft. The wind died back, bones thumping to the floor, as if their master were distracted. Vertuollo spoke again, silky and soothing, and Jude answered, his voice shaking with tears. They were ahead of him—both of them. Elisha crept forward, reaching, opening himself to search through the shadows.

  Someone shifted in the darkness, with a scent of dust and decay. Passages lay to the left and right, lined with the dead.

  Elisha reached for his power, letting it swell through his flesh and spread to his fingertips. “Do not touch him, Brother. He is not for you.”

  “I thought of seeking out your baby, Brother.” Vertuollo’s voice, from the left, much nearer.

  “Why? Because you think I don’t know loss? It was my brother’s death that started me down this road. It was my mad wish to bring back his dead son that taught me anything of this power.” Elisha listened for movement in the darkness. “Why do you think it’s so hard for me to kill? Every life is joined to so many others. Every time someone is killed, there is another who feels a pain like yours.”

  “No!” the count roared, his denial echoing in the caverns. “No one can feel pain like this, Brother.”

  “For any other two men, Brother, that would be true,” said Elisha softly, “But not for us—your pain lies all around you.”

  Vertuollo’s presence felt chill and brittle as new ice. “No,” said the count a second time, and Elisha could feel his power gathering.

  He’d gone too far, and for what—Vertuollo was a sensitive, yes, but a mancer still. Another’s pain meant nothing to him, and the idea that someone might share his pain only made him angry. The count’s voice resumed its cold, conversational tone. “The baby is not yours alone. This child is different. Not your son, but very like you. Perhaps your younger brother.”

  Elisha lunged toward the voice, hands outstretched, surging with power. Light blinded him, searing to life in the darkness with Vertuollo’s power. It blazoned the count’s sharp features in Elisha’s shocked vision.

  “You went to Gilles to trap me, to lure me here. But not for Jude, his father was meant to take him.” Elisha focused his vision, away from the world of the living, to the shadows of the dead. The light went soft, Vertuollo’s living form flickering before him, outlined in the shades of those he had killed, Lucius now prominent among them. “What will you do with me, Brother, now that you’ve got me?” Elisha concentrated the crackling cold into his palms, as if he could wield hammers of ice.

  “As if you were at bay in the caverns of the dead. I said it to you once, Brother, and now I say again: Go home. England is not yet fallen to the plague, and you could save it. Go home and leave the ruins of Europe to the men who have cultivated these fields and will reap their harvest.”

  Elisha pictured London, a soft rain parting, the sun gleaming on the grand White Tower, Princess Alfleda’s joy and his baby’s fresh, wrinkled face as he tried to make sense of the world. He thought of Martin, dying that his city could live, and Allyson, mourning her husband Count Randall, defending her land; Sundrop, Madoc, Pernel, and all the rest. Just for a moment, he once again met Thomas’s keen blue gaze, always seeing the truth, seeing the things Elisha wished he could hide. Go home to England, to save his country—let the rest of the world burn, and let the mancers win. Even if Thomas survived, Elisha could never again meet those eyes.

  He stared into the darkness, staring down the enemy, and said, “No.”

  Chapter 22

  The next blow of the count’s power knocked Elisha against the wall, fighting for breath, the bones clattering all around him, and he could not even reach Vertuollo. What had the count said to Jude? Could the boy be won over by the count’s grace and command of Jude’s language? Elisha came here to confront the count, to learn the truth, and by God he would try. But how to reach a man who hid in the darkness, among his own familiar dead?

  Elisha focused instead on his old enemy, Lucius Physician, the sneering charlatan who had dragged him into this war to begin with. Elisha pictured Lucius’s haughty features, his arched brows, his over-long sleeves indicating that the physician planned to do no work whatsoever. Then he imagined Lucius’s body stripped bare, down to the muscles, leaving his face intact, a great gash nearly parting his head from his neck, and he imagined the hand that had flayed the corpse.

  That death linked him to Vertuollo, a single, shifting tendril in the chaos that surrounded him. Elisha opened the Valley and sprang through. Rather, he sprang in, readying himself for the attack, and met a wall, a sheer, cold surface forged of the suffering of thousands. In the spiraling madness of the Valley itself, lit by the flicker of passing souls, Vertuollo stared back at him and shot out his hand straight for Elisha’s chest.

  With a stretch of his presence, Vertuollo conjured the Valley, that private passage of Elisha’s own death, the death that he refused when he returned to this world. But no matter that he had refused it, it had never left him, lighting his left eye with the vision of shadows, binding him to the Valley and all the shadows it contained.

  The count vanished, and Elisha felt the impact against his chest. His breath shocked out of him, his limbs jerked taut, as if he stood bound against the mouth of a bombard that fired through him. Agony shot from the center of his being, searing up into his skull, as if streaks of flame would burst from the scars of his surgery. Elisha’s mouth gaped but he made no sound, all breath stolen in an instant. His fingers and toes went numb, his throat working without purpose.

  All strength left him, yet he could not fall. Death poured through him, scouring him from the inside out. Vertuollo’s power was tearing him wide open.

  Vertuollo’s voice, smooth and cultured, echoed through him. “Perhaps you cannot die, Brother, but I can make you, every moment, wish that you had.”

  Elisha’s flesh shuddered with cold, his skin slick as if it were stripped from him again and again.

  “Choose, Brother. Choose death now and be at peace.”

  Choose. The choice remained to him, just as he had told Jude who cowered alone in the dark. Alone, but for the thousands across the world who cowered just like him.

  “Lie down among the martyrs and let them build a shrine to you,” Vertuollo whispered.

  Elisha let go of the Valley, rejecting it, with his last ounce of wit flinging himself out of the passage between the worlds and staggering into darkness. It made no difference: the hollow, horrible rush continued, pinning him against the wall, as if half his being tumbled back to the Valley with the shades that swirled within.
Choose. To die. What a blessed relief it would be to simply let himself go. Elisha’s heart hesitated.

  A sharp and singular pain pierced his left side, like a consuming mouth that sucked back the Valley into a hard pearl buried in his flesh. Elisha gasped a single breath, tumbling as if he’d been shot. His awareness fled, his every secret, magic sense bound up with that pain. His fumbling fingers touched a hilt, a blade thrust between his ribs at a low angle, stopping his blood even as it stung his flesh with salt. “Jude,” he breathed.

  A trembling hand touched his face, his hand, his chest. “I killed you, like him. Dead demons.” The words came and went, broken with Elisha’s senses.

  “Get out, leave,” he panted, not knowing what language he spoke, knowing it didn’t matter.

  Then two small hands wrapped his arm above his elbow and dragged him forward on unsteady feet. Bones clattered around him, grinding into him, blessedly silent of their history. Elisha shoved against the wall and fell forward, managing his feet, any progress simply a matter of falling in the right direction but failing to hit the ground. Jude hauled him along the corridor, silent. The pearl of death throbbed at his chest, but could not devour him, not so long as the salted blade skewered his side. God, but it hurt. Elisha wept without tears.

  Jude hesitated with a whimper, and Elisha crashed into him, the two of them scraping the wall. “Gilles,” he said. “Can you, find his body. The exit.” They swayed around a corner and stumbled onward, the tunnels clammy against his skin, the boy’s hands burrowing into his muscle. Elisha pressed his other palm around the blade, keeping it in place as they fled through the darkness.

  Jude cried out, with that particular wail he used when a mancer came near. Hunched around the salted blade that kept Vertuollo from reaching into him, Elisha was blind to the Valley as Jude was not.

  They ran on, then the boy suddenly rose, his hands hauling upward, and Elisha shouted, thinking Jude had been grabbed. Instead, Elisha’s toes struck stone and he was falling again, up the steps, floundering into the overwhelming day. Sunlight spilled into the chapel at the top of the stairs. Once again, the pearl pulsed with Vertuollo’s strength, then they tumbled out past the threshold, beyond the count’s dark domain.

  Elisha rolled onto his back, arched and sobbing. Blood streamed around the shifting blade. “Wine, water, something.”

  Jude’s hands slid along his arm, down to his spasming fingers and finally released him. Shadows passed his vision—clouds, crows, dying children. Then the mouth of a bottle pressed into his palm, Jude’s hands clenching his own around it. With a convulsive grip, Elisha pulled free the salted blade, opening himself to magic, but his flesh remained too thoroughly salted to heal the wound. He kicked onto his side and poured the contents of the bottle, stifling his scream. The ancient wine stung with vinegar, but it swept away the salt, letting it spill forth with his blood. Clenching his shaking fist around the ring he wore, the single talisman he still had that was not linked to death, Elisha forced himself to heal. He had to focus on every nerve and vessel, working slow and clumsy as a barber’s poor apprentice, finally sealing the skin and tossing the ancient wine bottle away.

  Blinking up at the sky, Elisha found Jude’s face, the boy kneeling at his head, staring down at him with wide eyes. “Have to run,” Elisha told him. “The river. The boat. Help me.”

  They clasped hands again, and Elisha struggled to calm his mind enough to send the images: the dock at the river outside of town, the water that would give them some protection, the salt water that would offer more, all in a rush. Then a question, quiet, almost pleading. “Lend me your strength.”

  Jude gave a high-pitched bark of laughter. “Too weak, too worthless.”

  “You have strength enough, and more.” But even before he found the way to convince him, Jude’s barricades fell before him, the boy’s fear and power infusing him with the vital strength of life itself. Elisha could not accept the power of death, not now, so he chose its opposite. Between them, they were enough. He let Jude pull him up and they ran on, as fast as they could. Vertuollo knew the Valley through his murders—he was powerful, but even he would feel the strain of such a spell as he had attempted, forcing himself through Elisha’s armor. Elisha noticed his own right hand pressed against his heart, as if to reassure himself it still beat. Choose death, the mancer urged, and Elisha had been a heartbeat away from obedience.

  They took a dirt track between tilted wooden buildings and the broken columns of pagan temples to fetch up at the riverside. A few boats lay on the shore, and they turned over one of these, dragging it down to the water. Elisha remembered all too acutely Thomas rescuing him from the Thames, hauling him into a boat, Thomas’s strong, lean arms stroking the oars to speed them away. His own work was clumsy at best, but the current was with them, pushing them along down the broad river marked with docks of wood and stone, broken houses, and floating corpses, their arms waving with the lapping wake as the boat passed by. Elisha felt raw and vulnerable as he had not for years, perhaps not since he was Jude’s age, watching an angel die. The boy huddled before him, watching with haunted eyes.

  “I need you to tell me about your father and his gift,” Elisha said.

  Jude inched a little closer, not understanding the words without contact, and set his hand on Elisha’s knee. His presence clouded with worry and confusion as Elisha repeated his need, as gently as he could.

  “My gift,” Jude said within his flesh. “My pets, my pestilence.” He trembled on the verge of madness, and Elisha held his gaze, holding himself open.

  Then Jude remembered. His father combing his hair, the fleas hopping onto small, furred creatures, the mancers visiting, following the directions in the flesh-bound books, and taking the vermin away in a steady stream. Fleas would not bite Elisha as they did Gilles. They would not bite Vertuollo, either, he’d bet on that—nor any other mancer, so Danek used them to send his gift into the world, spreading it, as he had said, in small ways, and his son was the breeding ground, once he, too, learned to fend off the sickness they carried. Knowledge, but fleas and the animals that carried them, spread faster than even Elisha could stop them. Could there be another way? Charms, Danek implied, a way to protect people one by one. What else? What more could be learned? Jude showed him the suffering, the panic of his closing throat, the pain of the swellings and the taste of vomit that seared the throat with bile and blood. All things Elisha knew from tending his other patients and from watching Gilles die. It was not enough.

  “I need to know the plague, Jude.”

  Jude snatched back his hand and scooted away, shaking violently, his hair flying around him as he denied what Elisha was asking.

  Elisha shipped the oars and shifted forward, kneeling in the bottom of the boat even as Jude pulled up his knees, curling into a ball, still shaking his head. Elisha touched his shoulder, sending comfort, confidence and desperation. “Jude, I have to know all there is to know. You’ve told me what you can, and you can show me how to survive. You’ll be there on the ship with me, to protect me, to help me as your father never helped you. Please, Jude. Your father made you a demon—he made you the carrier to kill the world, you know that. It’s not your fault, and I hope to God you know that, too. Please, help me heal it.”

  Only now that he had buried his connection with death, with his skin warm and his heart too frail, only now could he hope to have what so many rushed to escape. Elisha opened himself to the plague. Jude knelt before him, the boy’s presence alive with fear, with hope, with an unaccustomed duty and an unspoken promise. Elisha embraced him, feeling the prickle of the boy’s tears, and the tiny pinch of a flea’s small bite.

  Chapter 23

  When they reached the port, Elisha briefly worried that they might have trouble locating the ship they were to sail on, but they found none of the usual bustle of a port town. At a small market manned by wary stall keepers, they paid inflated prices for the f
ood and herbs they would need on board. The docks were nearly deserted, marked by a proclamation that no boat was to land by order of the barons, co-signed, Elisha noted, by both Orsini and Colonna representatives. Apparently the plague had done some good if it could bring together the warring factions that fought for Rome. A single two-masted vessel at the far jetty showed signs of activity, loading a few dozen passengers while a restless mob lurked at the shoreline.

  A woman with a scarf over her head gathered two children close to her as she hurried past the group of citizens.

  “Good riddance!” someone shouted. “Let the Holy Father see to your wickedness.”

  Someone else threw a bottle that struck her on the back. She fell, one of the children tumbling with her. Up ahead, a man in a black cap turned back, but his arms were loaded with bundles. His eyes flared, and he started toward the woman. The mob gave an ominous rumble, pushing up as if to close the gap and make good on their promise of violence.

  Projecting peace and confidence, Elisha strode into their midst. They hesitated, glancing from him to the boy at his side. “Come now, they’re leaving already—no need for all of this.” Elisha smiled at the man who had thrown the bottle. “I’ll see to it that they get aboard.” He shifted his own sacks to his other shoulder and kept walking, stooping to take the woman’s elbow as she tried to rise.

  He sensed the throbbing of the bruise at her spine. She darted him a glance and snatched back her arm, stumbling in her long skirts to put some distance between them. Elisha and Jude followed more slowly. “Scared people,” Jude observed.

  “Jews,” Elisha replied. “Many people hate them and fear them almost as much as lepers.”