William gave a thoughtful nod, then turned to the emperor and repeated all of this, almost in Elisha’s own words but in German. He concluded, “It is possible that the man is lying. Perhaps you shall know more by the king’s letters.”
“Harald, get our letters,” the emperor said, gesturing to the steward, who approached. Elisha brought out his packet, sorting through the parchments for the king’s documents, and handed them over.
Raising the larger parchment to capture the light of the tall window, the steward examined its wax seal and ribbons. “It appears genuine.”
“Very well. We shall read it after dinner.” The emperor stared down at Elisha. “There are several hostels in town if you wish to linger. I shall find you if I require you further.” He swallowed, his eyes shifting toward his wife and back, an edge of worry underlying his hard words. “If not, that is the message you may bring to your master.” He put out his arm for her, and the woman heaved herself back up to seize it as she groaned her weariness.
“Your Majesty.” Elisha pushed himself up to one knee. “I have information about some of your rival’s allies. Information you must have in order to fight them.”
“What do you know of battle?” the emperor asked. “You are a doctor, are you not? My rival’s most important ally is the pope himself—Charles is not called the cleric’s king for no reason, Doctor. Do you know how to defeat the Holy Father?”
A few people in the chamber flinched at this, their hands twitching as if they would cross themselves but feared their master’s wrath at any expression of their faith. No wonder the man was excommunicate.
“We kings, we emperors, we rulers of men—we pretend to hold the power, when it is the priest at Avignon who holds the ear of God and the hearts of every nation. Bring me an army who can conquer that, Doctor, and I shall shower you with honors. I thought once I could defeat the power of the Church. Now I merely hope to bargain for my share of my own sovereignty. I should like to ride to Rome in the Jubilee and be welcome there as one day I hope to be welcome in Heaven.”
The woman beside him gripped his arm and gave a little smile. “You shall, my dear,” she murmured, and the emperor’s face softened just a bit. “And your granddaughter lives. Surely this is a blessing.”
“I will read the letters,” Ludwig told her. “Harald will see you out.” The party swept away again with all ceremony.
As they departed, Elisha bowed his head, using it to stifle a cough. His throat ached. A bitter old man, already defeated, and Elisha must rally him against an enemy that could not be met upon the battlefield—if he could even gain another audience. Brother Gilles with his relics might serve better here—and likely he would be here soon, to bring the gifts the emperor required in order to curry favor with the Pope.
“Sir,” came a hoarse whisper, and Elisha glanced up to find the young serving woman standing nearby offering a cup.
“Thank you.” He reached for the water and their fingers brushed, a tingle of awareness passing through him. Elisha lifted his eyes to her face, his breath stopped. A magus, but her touch came so tentatively that he couldn’t tell if it were unintentional or merely cautious. The water cooled his throat and wet his lips. He drained it in a few swallows and held it up for refilling. “The emperor mentioned hostels. Do you know of one to recommend?”
Long, dark hair framed her face, pretty but not overly so, her brown gaze focused on him, then quickly lowered. “There is the Unicorn, sir. Just by the Church of the Holy Spirit—the one without a spire. It is my mother’s inn,” she told him, with a flash of a smile as if in apology for recommending a family establishment. “Food is good—except for dumplings.”
At that, Elisha smiled, but his humor quickly faded. He hadn’t actually any money—it all remained with his things in Jacob’s house.
“Sir?” she said, and her brow furrowed. Not only a magus, but a sensitive one, based on the subtle reaching of her attention and her instant awareness of his emotions.
“I was caught by surprise in Trier, finding the wrong emperor.” Elisha settled on the floor, rubbing his knees, letting the focus of his magical senses move between them so gently even she might not notice. “I left in a hurry, and had to leave my purse behind. I do have some . . . talents . . . I might exchange, if anyone in the family needs medical care.”
At the word “talents,” she flushed briefly with interest, but said only, “I’m sure an arrangement can be reached. My mother would not turn you away.” Her glance darted toward the steward who lingered at the door.
“Then I am in your debt.” He pushed himself to his feet and returned the cup. “I should be going.”
“Go with God, and the river,” she answered, giving a little curtsy.
Elisha glanced back at her, arrested by that curious phrase, and her presence warmed, her smile hidden by the sweep of her hair as she cradled the pitcher. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Gretchen,” she told him.
“Well met, Gretchen. Thanks again.”
His first acquaintance with the local magi gave him both hope and direction in the face of his failure with the emperor.
“Come, sir,” Harald said, all brusque business again as he led Elisha through the passages into the late afternoon and watched him exit past the pikemen at the gate. A man apparently loyal to his emperor in spite of anything else, Harald’s presence rang with worry and regret, but he said nothing at all, even when Elisha said his farewells and suggested he might call again on the morrow. With Harald’s dark eyes at his back, Elisha began the long descent, now one among many heading down, while only a handful climbed the slope, their long shadows forming tangled thickets of darkness. The shades of the dead lingered silently among them, moving through recreations of their deaths until Elisha blinked them away.
He would have to try again, hoping that Thomas’s letters had softened the emperor’s anger. The stiff-necked old man even refused aid against his obvious enemy. Having met them both, Elisha no longer wondered at the support from the other nobles that resulted in Charles’s election despite a sitting emperor already upon the throne. Elisha shook himself. Any emperor influenced by necromancers, even one so pleasant as Charles, could not help but create evil. Somehow, he must make Ludwig understand the true threat, not merely against his position, but against the lives and souls of his people.
Elisha’s awareness stirred with an echo of his own presence, and he stopped, stepping aside from the flow of traffic, searching the crowd. Below, a young man pushed against that flow, a bundle clutched in his hand and his brow furrowed. Elisha focused his senses, finding the fear that hid beneath the prickly heat of anger. Unlikely to be a mancer, then, though he carried something of Elisha’s with him. Elisha’s left eye caught glimpses of shades that hung about him, but faintly, as if death were a stain that faded but could not be removed. The man glanced up toward the castle, catching Elisha’s gaze as he pushed himself onward. His steps slowed as he studied Elisha more closely. “Are you the English doctor?”
“I am,” Elisha answered.
“Good.” The stranger dodged a woman with a handcart to join Elisha in the browning grass at the edge of the path, though he kept a wide space between them. “These are yours.” He thrust out the bundle. “A mutual acquaintance asked me to bring them, if I could find you.”
Elisha took the bundle and peered inside to see his belt wrapped about his medical pouch and purse. “Thank you—and give Jacob my thanks.”
“I shall not,” the other replied, his shoulders too square. “I have dealings with him as rarely as possible.”
In point of fact, the man resembled Jacob, though his hair and beard were closely trimmed. An estranged cousin or some other relation? “I’m sorry to hear it. He seems a worthy man.”
The stranger wet his lips and lied. “We may have had some business together, but otherwise, I know nothing of him, and I’ll th
ank you to remember it.”
His acid words stung, but Elisha swallowed his annoyance. “As you wish.” He gave a nod and started down again.
“If he gave you any messages,” the man called after him, “you should burn them.”
At that, Elisha turned. “I beg your pardon?”
“He’s a foolish old man and worry for his son has enfeebled him. If he wrote you anything, it’s only the raving of a father overcome with joy.” He stared down the slope at Elisha, hands clutched behind him. “It means nothing.”
On top of his failure with Ludwig, this was one insult too many. “It’s nothing to do with you if he has,” Elisha snapped back. “And how is Simeon?”
“Recovering.” For an instant, a hint of relief broke the man’s fierce presence, though his expression only hardened. “But I don’t—”
“You don’t associate with him, either, of course. Good luck with the emperor. Your humors are nicely aligned today: both choleric. Good day to you.”
“God be with you!” the stranger shouted defiantly, as if it were a curse. Then he turned sharply away.
Elisha stalked down the hill, the bile returning to his own humor. His feet ached as he returned to the streets of the city, weaving between citizens on his way toward the Church of the Holy Spirit, to find the Unicorn. The huge church, cut of the same red stone as the castle, rose up from a cobbled square with the awnings of market stalls forming a skirt around its base. Scaffolds covered the apse of the church, and workmen moved about with trowels and stones. The towerless church enveloped an earlier structure, aging stone replaced with new, even as commerce bustled in its shadow.
Elisha paused in the shadow of the broad church steps, scanning the wooden signs that hung above the doorways all around him, and taking the moment to slip his belt back on beneath his outer tunic. Down an alley to the left, he spotted a swinging golden unicorn, carved rampant as if it would charge the chandler’s sign across the way. A good meal and a rest would rouse his spirits, and he could hope the night would do the same for Ludwig. He started to emerge from the shadows, then froze and shifted back again.
A hooded man, one of many, to be sure, walked toward the door beneath the swinging unicorn, his arm in a sling of fabric across his chest. He exuded friendliness, but so strongly that it seemed as a spice laid upon rotten meat: clearly a projection.
Yanking open the door with his good arm, the man ducked beneath the swinging unicorn and shut the door behind him, not before Elisha recognized the cool, strong presence: Bardolph, the mancer who had escaped him back in England. While Elisha fought the other mancers to rescue Thomas, Bardolph left to fetch Brigit to claim the rescue for herself—and he never returned to the fight. Bardolph was one of the mancers who seized Thomas and Rosalynn, who slew the queen and readied the king to be skinned alive.
Chapter 9
Elisha leaned back against the tall church steps, his heart racing, draping himself in a deep deflection. He had known Bardolph was German, had even expected to find him lurking somewhere, probably in the service of the upstart emperor, Charles. But seeing him enter the very inn that had been recommended by another magus left Elisha shaken and worried. Had the mancer spoken with Gretchen, or had he merely guessed where to look, anticipating that Elisha would seek out the company of magi? If Gretchen’s family were not involved with the mancers, Elisha risked their lives to go there and confront Bardolph, bringing them into a conflict they had no part of. On the other hand, if they were colluding with his enemies, then he risked his own—and before he completed even the first part of his mission by telling Ludwig what he needed to know.
Elisha’s head thumped back against the old stone, a drift of stone dust from the mason’s work tickling his throat, reminding him of the water Gretchen offered. He so wanted to trust her. He needed that small kindness she gave him, but the need turned sour in his stomach. Of course the mancers would have spies in the stronghold of the emperor. Elisha refused to walk into their trap by going to the inn. But what was the alternative? He could hide in the church all night; already, the workmen packed their tools and draped cloth over the unfinished windows. Mass would not likely be held in the half-made building, but in one of the older churches, so he would have time and space. In the morning, he would crawl back up the hill to prostrate himself before the castle guards and try to convince them to let him in.
Around him, shopkeepers packed up their things and closed their shutters while the crowds dispersed, many heading to his right, toward the other steeples, until the square stood nearly empty, the golden light of early evening shimmering on the red stone buildings, the chatter of conversation ebbing to nothing. A few people emerged from the Unicorn, a few more went in.
Elisha wrapped his fingers through his hair, binding his useless hands. In England, men had feared him and wooed him for his power, and here he must cower in a church and wait upon an old man’s whim. By God, he was not made for this.
For what, then? For what did he have this dread affinity, this too-intimate knowledge of death, if it availed him nothing? He felt like a shepherd in the moors, watching a storm approach and helpless to do anything about it but suffer the lashing rain. Luck or fate or divine providence had brought him to Simeon at the moment of his need. How many others wept or died in their dark prisons while Elisha was powerless to save them? At any moment, the necromancers might leap through the Valley to their forged relics to steal another victim, and Elisha still had little sense of the true nature of their plans.
Across town, a church bell rang for Vespers, and every church took up the tolling, save the vacant one in the center of the plaza. The people still trickling through the streets hurried their steps, and a fellow with a few woolen cowls slung upon a pole rested it on the ground, then heaved it up again with a grunt. Elisha stepped out of the shadows. “Here! Are those for sale?”
“Aye, sir,” the man replied. “Only gray left, though.”
“It’s fine.”
He slid one off the pole and handed it over while Elisha fished out a coin. The cowl draped his neck and he pulled it up to cover his head, sending his face into shadows. The door at the Unicorn banged open and Bardolph popped out, waving off a woman in an apron. “Come, Bardolph, you’ve not even—”
“It’s Vespers. I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder as he hurried away from her.
Wiping her hands, she called after him, “Say a few for me, would you?” The mancer laughed, giving a slight wave with his good hand. The door banged shut again as she went inside, and Bardolph instantly changed direction, cutting across the square and bounding up the steps into the unused church so fast that he slipped and banged the elbow of his damaged arm on the entry. A ripple of anger broke his cool projection, then he pushed inside.
Casting a deflection to conceal his presence, Elisha ran after. He couldn’t enter via the church door without drawing the attention of those inside, but the scaffold beckoned. Finding a mason’s ramp, Elisha moved upward as quietly as he might, dodging the lashed uprights to make his way to the church wall. Tall frames of stone marked where stained glass would someday light the nave, but for now they stood open in the thick walls, draped over with lengths of cloth to keep out the weather. Elisha carefully slid between the wall and the cloth, moving it as little as possible to avoid letting in a telltale shaft of light. After a moment his eyes adjusted to the vast, dim space beyond. The aching presence of the dead filled the void, some whole and buried, their shades lingering, others fragmented, captive in the altars, bits of saints waiting to serve the prayers of sinners, and a few shades reenacting their deaths. Only one moved among them, his presence too sharp to be dead. Bardolph cut across the floor below, still fuming, until he entered a side aisle and Elisha could no longer see him.
Elisha dared to reach through the stone, extending his senses in a narrow path in search of those living feet, a tenuous contact at best. He felt the vibration of
Bardolph’s long stride, then the mancer halted. The hairs on Elisha’s arms tingled as the Valley opened somewhere below; the brief howl of pain, grief, and fear, then it snapped shut and the sense of Bardolph was gone.
With a silent oath Elisha slapped the wall, stinging his palm.
Bardolph was in a hurry—the bells had been a signal for him, but not a call to prayer. This might be his best chance to learn more about the mancers’ schemes. No longer concerned with silence now that his quarry had vanished, Elisha scrambled down the ramp and up the steps. A heavy lock hung upon the latch, but a careful glance showed the latch itself disconnected. Pushing inside, Elisha shut the door carefully behind him and ran down the aisle toward the chapel where Bardolph had opened the Valley. The church held little—only things too heavy to be moved to safer quarters for the duration of the work, like the baptismal font and main altar. A few side altars remained, bare of their altarpieces and cloths. Elisha slowed, glancing up to count windows and find where he had been standing, then he moved more cautiously toward the chapel at that end. Now that he was aware, fully present, the air chilled his skin when he came to the altar, and tension tightened his shoulders. He forced himself to relax. A step to either side, and the sensation vanished. Even here, immediately before the slab of marble, it faded as he reached to capture the feeling, to remember it. The altar looked like any other, without even the images of saints to identify its patron. Elisha ran his hands over the surface, disturbing the dust of the construction work and making it clear that Bardolph had not touched it so. He might have opened the Valley with a talisman he already had, but then he could have done it right inside the door—why cross the entire church to this very place?
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