Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  Before blood claimed his vision, Elisha saw an arrow fly, streaking through the shadows and thrusting into a mancer’s side, the arrow tipped with glittering salt. Katherine’s guidance, Thomas’s shot. She stood beside the king, holding him, keeping them both in the Valley, though her presence flickered with exhaustion. Thomas stood braced beside her, a longbow in his hands, launching arrow after arrow as the mancers plunged toward them, and more rose up behind. Pale strands connected them, Elisha and Thomas, Elisha and Katherine, the strands of their shared lives and united memories. Elisha whispered of danger, warning them of a mancer’s approach. Katherine heard, sweeping out a long blade of her own, slashing behind them to the mancers who thought to attack from behind. Even then, she did not free her other hand from Thomas’s waist.

  The mancers surged toward them, and Jude howled, his presence flaring with a fury that seemed too great for his slight form. Gretchen moved grimly beside him as he flung himself into the mancers, flailing as wildly as ever, and every one he touched crumpled, vomiting, their faces slick with sudden fever. Jude’s little friends might not bite a mancer, marked with death, but Jude himself had no such distraction. His affinity with the disease he had so long harbored gave it potency. Jude struck and Gretchen amplified his power, but every blow caused a flicker in their presence, weakened by the struggle of merely remaining in the Valley, of intruding there in Life rather than in Death.

  Katherine’s presence faltered and she gave a moan. A distraction—their assault could never have been anything more. And if she fell, then Thomas remained, trapped and lost forever. Elisha almost cursed Harald’s name—Harald who had sworn to keep his friends away—but the assassin was no magus, never mind a mancer. He would not have felt Renart’s call to all the mancers as Katherine would, nor could he act to stop them. He was, in the end, as powerless as Elisha.

  Thomas swung about, Katherine following, and nocked a salt-tipped arrow, drawing down on the knot of mancers surrounding Elisha. Their eyes met across that misty space, Thomas’s hard and determined, only the pressure of his lips revealing all the fears he stifled. Brigit had her back to him. Without the anatomical drawing, her cutting slowed in spite of Renart’s urging. The tip of that salt arrow aimed at her spine.

  “No, Your Majesty—she anchors his life,” Katherine breathed into the contact she shared with Thomas, the contact that touched Elisha even at that distance. Anchored in life, indeed.

  Renart shoved at Elisha, shifting their little party, but too late. Thomas’s arrow streaked through the seething Valley and slammed into Renart’s skull. He dropped from Elisha’s back, his magic snuffed into nothing, even his death diffused like smoke at a breath of wind.

  Falling with him, Elisha briefly slipped Brigit’s grasp, his blood smoothing his passage. No matter, two dozen hands reached for him already, ringing him with their power, reinforcing the strength of Brigit’s binding as she dropped beside him, grinding her fingers between the bones of his arm, pinning him.

  Katherine’s presence, so deliberate for so long, tremored against his awareness like a captured sparrow, too weak to survive.

  Elisha dredged up the shreds of his power and focused on the channels that linked him with his friends, all of those who thought to save him, who did not know they had already failed. Through the tenuous links between them, he rejected them, pushing hard, his body flaring with the pain, then shuddering as he pushed them away. Katherine cried out, and Thomas jerked as she pulled him back, the Valley snapping open to a distant night.

  “No!” Thomas shouted, then they were gone.

  Chapter 38

  Vertuollo slipped into the circle of mancers, their cheers blending with the madness of the Valley. Some of the mancers vanished, retreating as their power failed, others replaced them, rising and falling in waves.

  “What for you, my lord? An ear? An arm?” Brigit asked.

  “If you will not have it,” said Vertuollo calmly, “then I shall have his heart. It seems to me a worthy prize.”

  “Act fast, my lord—not all of our people have the strength to stay here long.”

  Vertuollo tore back Elisha’s shirt, exposing his scarred chest as if preparing him for an operation. He placed a hand over Elisha’s heart, and a hand upon his own chest. “I swore my own heart had been torn out when my son died. The power of death came easily to me, yet I was not prepared for that, to feel the loss of his life.” His touch was so cold, Elisha’s heart slowed, their two frigid hearts beating a slow and terrible unison, their sensitivities focused in that instant upon each other as Vertuollo’s power spread between them. Before, Vertuollo used the Valley within, thrusting a shaft of sorcery that nearly slew Elisha. Now, he crafted something much more precise. With this intimate contact, Vertuollo forged an affinity between Elisha’s flesh and his own, between Elisha’s life, and his own.

  “I called you ‘brother.’ And you showed me what death meant to the living.” His pale eyes lingered on Elisha’s face. “You showed me what life meant. No man should live forever by the death of his brother.”

  A shot of cold, like a lance of ice, drove into Vertuollo’s chest, centered just beneath his own palm, his touch still joining them, the entire force of his magic directed within. His sorcery united them in that affinity, heart to heart, as he made the choice that Elisha could not and gave him the death of a magus.

  The count’s eyes rolled back, his head pitching as he collapsed in a pool of silk and silence.

  His gift of power rushed Elisha’s veins, his healing instincts activated in an instant. His nerves and vessels clasped, his muscles twitching as that dark gift turned from death to life. With an effort, Elisha forced the healing to slow, but the power defied him, that overwhelming strength of the magus in his final moment.

  The black storm of Vertuollo’s death swirled over him, and the mancers summoned up the shadows. They wreathed themselves in those they murdered, armoring themselves against Death, their webs grown strong in expectation of attack.

  Elisha lashed out, Vertuollo’s strength doubling his own, and cold lightning streaked the Valley, illuminating the mancers, their faces for a moment glowing pale, then once again flickering with shadow. For that instant, they seemed frozen, convinced that his assault would defeat them, but Elisha’s own flesh, the blood talismans they carried blazed with sudden heat.

  “Thomas’s face, Elisha. White bread and fresh cheese. Our child’s first steps.” Brigit whispered into him, snaring him in the magic of Life, reminding him of every reason to live in a succession of images so sharp he could taste them, see them, smell them. Even if he had the focus to force the point, Brigit’s conjuring, her working of life and death together, anchored Elisha to the life he so longed for. He could not spend Vertuollo’s death-magic as if it were his own.

  And Vertuollo gave him not only death but his accursed sensitivity. Elisha’s awareness stretched among the hundred mancers who carried his mark, showing him the murders they called up, his own tortured body echoing the pain of every one of those: Katherine’s daughter, skinned in a forest; an old man slain by his son; a woman torn in an orgy of slaughter. When he called upon his affinity with death, all of these deaths taunted him, his sensitivity so acute he could no longer bind them to his will—each stood alone, a singular tragedy, like the death of Vertuollo’s son, showing the master of Rome that the pain was not only for the dead, but for those who must go on living.

  Elisha sobbed. His right hand felt loose, and he rocked, twisting himself around the pain, kicking away Brigit’s knife and tearing himself free of her grip. He crept, rose, staggered on damaged feet, his arms held tight, his chest still aching with the terrible cold. He swallowed over and over, tasting only blood. For a moment, Brigit herself was gone, fleeing the Valley to find her strength, leaving him to her followers. The greedy dead reached toward him, shadows rising and falling, moaning with the breath of their thousands as the mancers closed in
. He lay across Vertuollo’s body, already grown thin and disintegrating, the flesh unnatural in this place of shades and nightmares. A slender well of darkness marked the crumpling corpse: the salt blade Harald had given him so very far from here. Elisha reached for it, his fingers barely responding.

  “And what would you do then?” Brigit demanded as the Valley roiled around her, her entry framing her for a moment with the living world, the temple, the torches. “You cannot die—and I have claimed your life.”

  Life. A bitter claim indeed. When they first met, when she first recognized him and showed him what he was, Brigit told him, “You defend the border of life and death, and your choice at any moment might tip the balance.” And yet he now had no choice at all. She had forced him to live. Vertuollo’s sensitivity, added to his own, only made it all the harder to fight back, and even then, he could not strike at them with that core of Death he had created, they had armored themselves against it. Brigit would resume her cutting, making of him the greatest weapon the mancers ever held.

  What else did he have? How else could he tip the balance? He had Vertuollo’s sensitivity. He had the salted blade, and his attachment to life—if he could only see how to sever it.

  “Roll him over,” Brigit commanded, and the mancers obeyed, the queer, shifting nature of the Valley pressing up into his pierced throat and creeping into the wounds that gaped in his chest and stomach.

  Brigit’s fingers pressed along his neck, then, “Just below the skull,” she muttered. “Any pressure to the spine may result in paralysis.”

  It would take only a single cut, short, sharp, and accurate. And in that moment, Elisha knew what to do.

  In spite of his agony, in spite of his war, Elisha let go of Death. He surrendered himself to Life, letting her words and images wash over him as she prepared to make that cut. His awareness, heightened by Vertuollo’s sensitivity, flowed in the Valley, avoiding the dark webs of murder, streaking instead along the those thin, bright strands of life that tethered the mancers to the world beyond. They who delighted in Death still counted among the living. Brigit’s magic made him the center of this binding, death and life in a terrible balance. The mancers held him here in the Valley. It flowed around him, but also through him, its pathways of death and its webbing of life like the veins of a body and he lay now at its heart. Contact he had, and affinity he named.

  The next time Brigit’s blade pierced his skin, Elisha used the law of affinity to reflect that severing thrust. He turned it from his own weak flesh to the vessels of the Valley itself, and sent it out through every channel of life, every trace of those who dealt in death and ignored its opposite. In an instant, cut from the bonds of worldly life, they crumpled. Each cold presence flared into nothing. The Valley shivered and briefly stilled, its every shade suspended, silence resounding in the misty space. The mancers tumbled and dropped, like so many dolls cast out, like so many corpses died of plague with too few gravediggers to care for the bodies.

  Vertuollo’s form collapsed into nothing, his fine features dissolving as the skin shredded, the skull beneath fracturing into tiny shards that shivered into dust. All around them, the wind sighed and swelled once more, ruffling the clothing of the dead mancers, its sharp current rising by the moment, sloughing off their skin and swirling them away to nothing. All of the mancers, all of those who willfully spread the plague and reveled in its brutality, who stood to gain by its slaughter, every single one of them—gone.

  The Valley bent once more, cracked and spilled him into the temple, its torches still flickering, the fall knocking free the scalpel that probed his spine and allowing the rush of pain that overflowed his senses, until her touch brought him back. “What have you done?”

  The brief thrill of victory fled him and tears stung Elisha’s aching eyes. Brigit had bound them so closely together that the strands of life and death for her, as for himself, became too tangled to separate. Elisha sprawled on the tomb he had left, atop his ruined cape, and Brigit still loomed over him. She gripped his severed left hand in hers, and in the other, that scrap of skin she had stolen from his cheek, taking back the touch Rowena had given him all those years ago, when she used the power of her own death-magic to transform into an angel as she burned.

  “Elisha? Dear God, can it be?” Harald’s voice echoed in the empty chamber.

  Brigit’s confusion turned to wonder. “I live,” she said through the scrap of his flesh she carried, then she did what she had for so long desired: she conjured death from Elisha’s severed hand.

  The chill power flowed through him and Elisha felt its rush as it leapt to her command. “Don’t touch her,” he cried without a voice, without even the echo of the dead to carry his words.

  In one hand, she carried Death, in the captive form of Elisha’s own power. In the other, she carried the scrap of him that held the angel’s touch, the memory that linked her with her mother. Demon and angel, so very alike, and so very different. Affinity. Knowledge. Contact. She held it all.

  Elisha marshalled the last of the sensitivity Vertuollo had forced upon him, both vulnerability and strength, and he conjured the memory of her mother’s death, sending it sharp and clear as she sucked down the black river of death she craved.

  With the last strand of power he yet held, Elisha conjured one thing for himself. From the salt blade pressed in his tortured hand, he conjured the affinity to cut magic itself, to sever the connection she had forged between them as he touched off the vision of her mother’s death, like the spark that lit a bombard’s explosion. With the salt blade, Elisha cut himself free of her binding and left her to die.

  Brigit screamed as the spells she carried became one, the death she longed to deliver and the memory of her own mother’s death captured in Elisha’s flesh. The affinity of Brigit’s own presence bound the two spells into one, and, just as her mother had done, she burst into flames. Somewhere beyond her, Harald cried an oath.

  The fire billowed up, bursting free of the roof overhead in a shower of ash and timbers that scattered all around. Her death lit up the sky above, the light so intense it felt blinding, but Elisha could not shut the wounded lids of his eyes and so he watched, as he had watched her mother’s final agony and dread release.

  Elisha lay in silence on the tomb, the air transformed in a moment from terrible heat and thunder to this stillness, the peace of the dead below him. Above him, the peace of Heaven, the brightness of stars.

  Chapter 39

  Elisha waited for days to rise from the grave. He considered rising at three, but the Biblical significance, if, by chance, he were seen would be far too great to ignore. As it was, he lay still for a long time, his senses turned inward to understand the damage done to his body. He began the painstaking labor of knitting himself back together again, remembering how to be whole, or nearly so: Brigit had taken his left hand with her beyond the grave.

  Where before he felt open to the Valley, the tug of it somewhere near his heart, now he touched it, the contact subtle and constant, any shift in its movement, as a ripple in a stream, as if in forging the affinity between his tortured body and the Valley’s flows, Elisha remained forever at its heart, its pulses as familiar as his own.

  Allowing his awareness to spread from his tortured flesh, Elisha found another corpse laid out not far off, still intact. It showed him the way, serving as a model to guide his healing. Sometime later, Elisha opened his eyes to the darkness. Carefully, he moved his toes, then the fingers of his right hand. Stiff they were, and numb, but they obeyed well enough. The stump of his left wrist healed, the skin smooth over the abrupt knobs of bone. With much prodding and wriggling, he managed to unwrap the top of his winding sheet, tearing it away from his face and shoulders.

  Reaching out, Elisha explored his surroundings in all ways, finding the smooth surface of wood a few inches over his face. His awareness roved around him: bodies, old and new, many touched with the particular vi
bration of holy relics. He lay in a crypt. Had he been buried at Avignon?

  Elisha pushed hard against the wood, testing its strength, and it sprang open. The coffin lid clattered to the floor and he flinched at the sound. Lamplight gave a soft glow to the air above although it reeked of death and incense.

  Slowly Elisha sat up, dislodging something that lay upon his chest, and looked down. The wooden lid of his coffin lay askew against the wall. It had not been nailed shut.

  Another, more subtle fragrance reached him then, and Elisha frowned. He glanced down to find a sprinkling of dried roses on the marble floor below, along with oranges and lemons, cloves and cinnamon, and a hundred tokens—some of metal and some of wood—bearing the sign of Saint Barber. London. Harald had brought him home.

  This in itself brought an ache to his throat, his eyes tracing the familiar pale stone of England which he had never expected to see again. Then Elisha turned his attention to the thing he found in his coffin, a folded parchment, unsealed. He bent his sore back and groaned. Every part of him ached, from the tips of his new-healed fingers to the soles of his feet. The flesh of his chest and throat and arms still twitched with the slashes of the mancers’ knives. He sat still for a time, then held up the page to let some light fall upon the words.

  “My dear Elisha,

  “It is only a fool’s hope that leads me to imagine you reading these words, and I further hope that you will forgive me if the ink occasionally runs with tears. I came there to save you, Elisha, and yet I came too late, and I shall repent of it for the rest of my days. I hoped as well that my love, or the promise of it, would be enough to keep you here, even as reason tells me that you had to go.

  “Your son is well; your brother’s widow treats him as her own. And Alfleda is home with me, but you must know how she grieves, even as she is some solace to my own. The priests would have me believe that you are in a better place. To be true, not a few of them think you are in a place much worse, but neither voice can sway me. They speak more often of Hell now, for so many of them witnessed it body and soul. But none of them, I wager, know it so intimately as you. On the night you fell, a pillar of fire rose over the palace of the Pope himself, and many have taken it for a sign of evil. And yet, this foul pestilence that roams among us is lessened since that day, and I dare pray again that we shall be free of it, as it runs its course without the influence of demons.