Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  Harald hooked a chair with his foot and slid it closer, sitting opposite Elisha, elbows on knees, leaning in. “How?”

  “By making contact with as many mancers as possible, and killing them all.”

  “They’d never allow it.”

  Elisha said, “They might—contact moves in both directions. If I have contact with them, they’ll have it with me. They’ll believe they can control me.”

  “Couldn’t they? Surely, if so many of them could reach you at once, they’d kill you.”

  “That’s the very temptation they can’t resist. I’ll have to fend them off until the last possible moment before I strike back. It’ll take a very powerful magic, and I’ll need them to be very close by, to get as many as I can.”

  His dark eyes narrowed. “How can you get that kind of power, Elisha? I know you’re strong, but to slay them all, wouldn’t you have to—” Harald’s fingertips pressed together. “You’d have to kill someone. Even then, it would have to be someone very close to you, am I right? The closer the better.”

  Elisha stared at his hands, imagining what might be running through Harald’s mind. Would he kill Jude? Harald himself? Was that why Elisha had sent Katherine away, so he wouldn’t be tempted to kill her? Was it better for Harald to know the full truth, or, like Katherine, to storm away in fury at Elisha’s cowardice? He wished there could be another way, that they could make another plan, but every hour he delayed only helped the mancers solidify their power and grind their victims yet further into misery. The plague would spread on its own, to be sure, but it would spread further and faster with the mancers’ gleeful deployment, and its impact would be far worse with the mancers there to take advantage of the chaos. There was only one possible solution, perhaps there had always been. Only one possible victim could give him the power he needed.

  The Jews believed he was holy; the English peasantry wanted him for a saint, while the Salernitans believed he was a demon. Gilles had called him an angel and a daemon: one who stood between the worldly and the divine. Soon enough, it would be up to God to sort that out. For a moment, he could feel the pressure of the Pope’s hand over his heart. Did God truly see all? Did He know what lay in Elisha’s heart, where fear coiled against his conviction? Only a handful of sinners were guaranteed to go to Hell, without the chance for redemption: traitors, heretics, suicides like his brother. Like himself.

  He did not want to be alone. He did not want them all to think the worst of him, until they learned the truth of what he would do, and yet he could not afford to have them close.

  “You wouldn’t do that. I can no more believe you a murderer than I believed that you would abandon the fight. What, then, Elisha?” But Harald’s voice sank to a whisper as he spoke. Elisha heard his breathing and sensed the beating of his heart. “Holy Mary. Have I ever been so blind.” Then the warmth of Harald’s hand penetrated Elisha’s numbness, Harald’s fingers gripping his shoulder, drawing him closer so that their heads rested together. “You don’t want me to stop you,” Harald breathed, his fingers tightening, as if he could hold Elisha right there.

  “If you stop me, they win. The most powerful magic comes from the death of the magus himself—there is no other way.”

  “By God, I wish I could find you one.”

  Their breath mingled, Harald’s hand steady, even in sorrow. He might well be the only person Elisha would wish to have beside him, the one person he could trust to understand what must be done.

  “Why aren’t you going to England, then? One last time.”

  “I’d never come back.” Elisha pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “If I had to face Thomas again, to look into his eyes, and make this choice, I couldn’t do it.” He almost laughed, a strained breath of nerves and regret. “As it is, I’ve given myself too much time to reconsider, or worse, to signal my intentions. I had to give Katherine enough time to get herself and her sons to safety as well as warning the others. But if the mancers figure out what I’m planning, they won’t let me get close.”

  “They won’t learn it from me.” Harald did laugh, then, a light chuckle. “And the Pope’s offered you a distraction: he’s invited you to take a chamber in the palace, to dine with him tomorrow and celebrate the mass. It’s an all-day affair for some saint or another. I offered to bring you the message.”

  “Mass with the Pope? Christ.”

  “Yes, exactly.” Then both men were laughing, tears stinging Elisha’s eyes, his shoulders shaking, until he had to sit back or risk knocking their heads together. Harald blinked back at him, shaking his head.

  Elisha wiped his eyes, gasping for breath. Then he finally said, “After everything else I’ve been through, I did not expect to be afraid.”

  “You may be closer to death than any man alive, but you are still human.” Harald steepled his fingers and regarded Elisha more coolly. “Are you certain you can carry this off?”

  “Dying? I need to choose it, to be prepared for it, in order to bend the magic to my will, but yes. Some days I haven’t been sure how to go on living, now all I need to do is to accept my own death.” Saying it out loud, meeting Harald’s level gaze, made the decision solid and clear, like stamping the king’s seal to a freshly inked writ.

  “What do you need of me?”

  “I need you to keep anyone else away. If Katherine returns, send her off, do something, anything to keep her away. I don’t want anyone else caught in this magic, understood?” At Harald’s nod, Elisha continued, “And I need you to take Jude, to bring him to safety. He may be able to use the Valley—he’s a sensitive, and he’s been with me when I opened it, but if this works, the Valley may be sealed, at least for a time. Like an avalanche in the mountains. Whatever purpose it has beyond what the mancers do, it will be reborn, but most of them will be gone. It’ll take them a long time to rebuild to their current strength, and they may never be so organized again.” He smiled briefly. “They are not a trusting lot, even of each other. It’s only the crimes they commit that bind them together.”

  “I know a thing or two about that.” Harald let his hands fall open. “Speaking of trust, are you certain it was not Jude who betrayed you?”

  “If he has, then I’m lost—they’ll know I had the plague and recovered. As it is, they’ll have to assume that Jude shared some of his experience with me. That’s why his father was so eager to get him away from me, so I couldn’t find out enough to understand the mechanisms of transmission. He was afraid that I would find a cure. He may not have realized what a perfect creation is his pestilence.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Harald said, then rose. “There is still that curfew to remember.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I have an escort from the papal guard.”

  Harald put out his hand and Elisha clasped it, pulling to his feet, and maintaining the contact a little longer, sending his gratitude. Harald said, “At least you’ll have a fine bed tonight and a busy day ahead.”

  By the time they reached the papal palace, Elisha had recovered his composure, casting his deflection dark and deep, accepting the comfort of a soft bed in a chamber painted with such richness that it shocked the eye with garish color, a pattern of vines concealing a multitude of animals. At least the curtains over the bed interrupted the intent black gaze of all those creatures. There would be enough eyes on him tomorrow as it was. But as he lay in the dark, it was Thomas’s eyes he remembered, sharp, blue, haunted. On Elisha’s brief visit to London before the birth of Brigit’s child, Thomas told him he feared Elisha would die overseas, and Thomas without even a grave to visit. Elisha apologized to the darkness, then he brought up the power of death, that oblivion he would soon embrace, and armored himself with cold, the expectant ice of an early winter.

  Chapter 34

  Elisha allowed that cold to carry him through the next day, admiring the Pope’s gilded palace and rich meals, kneeling when he was to kneel
and standing when he was to stand. And when he must pray, for the sake of the mancers all around him, he prayed for England. Cardinal Renart loomed near in his awareness, in his sumptuous robes of red, the image of stern piety. If his glance flicked to Elisha a tad too often, that might be blamed on Elisha’s unusual status in the palace, neither clergy nor nobility. Guy de Chauliac watched him in a similar way, trailed by the saintly presence of Brigit and her handmaid, Gretchen, the pale beauty and the dark, both remote as the painted angels on the chapel walls. At the morning meal, two other mancers lurked among the clergy, but by the evening Mass, the number swelled to nine: clergy, servants, that French lord Harald followed to Avignon, all performing their roles with no apparent interest in the others.

  When the Pope’s rolling Latin died away in the church of Saint John, Elisha lined up with the others—far back in the procession of cardinals and lords set to accept communion and the blessing of the Pope’s own hand. Cardinal Renart stood beside the Pope, holding the monstrance that had been elevated to the Lord. Clement’s gaze met Elisha’s as he offered a wafer. “Corpus Christi,” he intoned, with the slightest smile of encouragement.

  The wafer came from the same monstrance as all the others, and no other member of the congregation showed any ill effect, in spite of Renart’s presence. Elisha took it on his tongue, the wafer dry and slightly bitter, its taste familiar, but unlike the wafers of England. Even this ritual should make him long for home, on the eve of the moment he must lose it forever. He had taken communion at Easter in Saint Bartholomew’s the year before, behind his brother Nathaniel, and Nathaniel’s pregnant wife, not knowing the baby and its father would soon be dead. A year and a half, and he was a father himself, and he would have felt their deaths coming, and he would have felt the swelling strength of their dying, just as he did now, when plague stalked every nation and death hovered so close to his own heart.

  Elisha bowed his head to the Pope, rose and walked down the aisle, out into the street. For a moment, he resisted, thinking to walk away, to visit the bridge over the consecrated river, or the church of Saint Agricol, where a poet believed he had seen an angel. But there was no profit in delay, not tonight. Instead, he sought a place to attune himself, and prepare for what he must do. A church, a bridge, a plaza or a palace—all might serve for another man. Elisha followed the twisting, narrow channels of streets to a place where a half-built palace loomed in the growing darkness, its open courtyards filled with hovels, small houses built against the walls, half-halls carved into homes for a dozen families. A few voices rose here in prayer, in song, in weeping, and the bodies of the unburied dead lay along the outer wall, faces covered, given all the dignity these people could afford. There, in the most desperate place in all the city, Elisha knelt among the dead. His furred cloak could not defend him from the cold that rose within, the echoing Valley penetrating, permeating him.

  Stilling his fears, his pain already deadened, Elisha attuned himself to Death. He sorted every bit of knowledge he possessed: the quiet deaths of the old and the thrashing agony of a soldier slashed to the bone, the creeping understanding of death that grew in Friar Gilles and how it had grown in Elisha himself when he accepted the plague and learned what it had to offer. He thought of Martin’s sacrifice, dousing the flames that might have devoured London, and the final grief of Randall, living long enough to see his daughter avenged by the man he thought had killed her. He recalled the sharp defeat of every patient he had lost and the loss in the faces of mothers told that their children had gone. Last of all, he thought of Nathaniel’s quiet despair, believing all his family were dead, believing himself responsible. That memory nearly shattered Elisha’s careful work, his layering of death and dying, weaving his knowledge with his power as the Valley swelled with the plague victims. He must be inured to the certainty of death if he would claim its gift tonight. Even his brother’s death must hold only knowledge severed from emotion. Fitting, that the moment which had propelled him to this dark discovery of magic, should mirror the moment that ended it.

  When he had gathered what strength he could, Elisha bound his knowledge deep and forged his projection, hope and fear in equal measure, his desire to save England, his willingness to do whatever must be done, to sacrifice the world if only his homeland might be safe.

  Elisha armored himself with these layers, the projection of hope and fear that his enemies would sense wrapping the knowledge of his own intentions that he would conceal until it was much too late. He rose again to face the night. He walked steadily across the broad plaza before the palace, and down the street toward the block of buildings where death lay thick and dark against his vision. For all of the allies he had gathered, this walk he must take alone. The Valley rippled with mancers shifting, moving, approaching. They need not reveal themselves on the street; clearly their temple held enough relics to serve as the crossroads for a hundred highways of death. And he came there as a highwayman, to steal the tainted fortune they hoped to reap from the downtrodden world they had created.

  In the narrow way between two tall houses, a door of old wood bore the chipped image of two knights mounted on a single horse, sign of the Knights Templar, the order destroyed by another Pope forty years ago. The mark of a great betrayal, and of a perfect place for the mancers to carry out their killings. The other mancer lairs he entered stood far from people, in forests, barrows, coal mines, and vineyards, places where the victims might scream to the unhearing night, where blood and flies and the inevitable reek of death were readily concealed or ignored. The mancers of Avignon were reckless or arrogant, to do their killing in the heart of the Pope’s own city. Their victims must be gagged, or drugged. It gave Elisha a moment’s pause. Here he stood, about to make himself an offering. Could they indeed defeat him, all of them at once?

  He drew a deep breath, and sucked down death. They could not. What defeat could he face but death itself, and death was what he’d come here for. If they slew him early, they would only trigger the power he held in store for them. A wolf indeed. Beyond the door, a hundred other wolves lay waiting, imagining they might ambush him, not knowing he had marked them out as sheep.

  The familiar warmth of Harald drew near, and Elisha acknowledged him with a tip of his head.

  “It got late enough, I hoped you’d found another way.”

  The darkness picked out the gleam of his eyes, and Elisha shook his head, briefly touching the assassin’s shoulder. “Jude, and the vial.”

  “I’ll get them,” Harald answered. “God be with you, whatever comes next.”

  Elisha rapped on the door, a hollow sound that resonated like the belly of a harp, its strings humming in expectation. The door swung open and Gretchen stared back at him. “I am only here as escort to my lady,” she said. “I am not—with them.” She retreated, drawing the door open and ushering them in. She dodged Elisha’s glance as he passed her into the octagonal space. A series of peaked arches elevated on columns marked the perimeter of the temple, with flickering torches in sconces all around, lighting the place like a pit of Hell. This image framed the crowd of mancers dense with the shades they carried, a shifting mass almost as thick as the flickering chaos of the Valley itself. If he focused his vision, he could see the connections among them, the webbing of deaths they shared, linking the French lord to a German merchant to a Roman peasant. A chainmail conspiracy, gathered here before him. The crackle of power rose on all sides, the focus of awareness on him, against him, wary defenses conjured.

  The door closed behind him, Harald following to one side, Gretchen further back.

  At the center of the temple a pair of stone sarcophagi dominated the space in a slight clearing where Cardinal Renart and Count Vertuollo stood waiting, framing one of the waist-high tombs where Jude sat between them, his hands pressed between his knees. He alone gave no acknowledgment of Elisha’s entrance, his head bowed and shoulders trembling.

  “We began to think you would not come
,” Renart said as Elisha approached. The other mancers shifted back from him, some of them wearing hoods and long robes as if concealing their faces might preserve them from his notice. “Your henchman can stay outside, or I cannot guarantee his safety.” He aimed his stare at Harald.

  “He is here to ensure you live by your side of the bargain. When he goes, the boy and the vial go with him.”

  “The count said you demanded surety. The surety we use among ourselves is to be joined to our purpose through relics, like any other order.” He stepped back to reveal a pair of knives on the tomb at his side, a curved flensing blade for stripping the skin, and another, a butcher’s knife, for severing joints and cutting through meat.

  “By killing someone,” Elisha supplied. He stood near enough now that he could see the stains of old blood on the carved stone of the tombs and catch the flicker of Jude’s lashes as the boy glanced up.

  Renart sighed. “I thought you said he had some manners, Vertuollo.”

  “Some,” the count agreed mildly. “The boy is the clear candidate, and for this purpose, he is willing. It would be his choice.” He held the last word, meeting Elisha gaze.

  “You told us Jude would go free, that the ceremony was only to seal the bargain,” Gretchen said suddenly. “You called the boy your brother.”

  Just as he had called Elisha, his brother in the bond of sensitivity. Was Gretchen then his sister as well?