Elisha Mancer

by E. C. Ambrose

  “Oh.” She smiled, swallowed. “Yes.” Crossing her hands, she reached down to pluck the fabric and pulled it up, up, over her head, silk swishing down her back. Beneath, she wore a chemise tied a bit lower than her throat, and a bodice, defining her shape, lifting her breasts to press against the light fabric above. Concealing the talisman that shaded his vision. Elisha shut his left eye, repressing the shade: it would not be the first time she murdered a lover.

  From the passage below, a subtle shifting of the heavy air. From the tunnel they had used, a whisper of sound. The mancers came.

  Again, she reached for the ties at his waist, sliding her hands beneath his tunic, and this time, he let her tug the knots even as he opened the ribbon at her throat and spread the fabric down about her shoulders. Surely, a lover now would unbind her bodice and free her breasts to share the pleasure—but to do so would leave her truly naked, her talisman cast aside with her clothing, and she would need it in the moments to come. Katherine’s right hand found his manhood. “Come,” she sighed, her breasts swelling at the edge of their confinement. She lay back before him, onto the pile of their cloaks and clothing.

  Kneeling between her thighs, Elisha pushed back her skirt. Their eyes met. Salt and more parched his throat. His hand—dark and rough against her pale skin—lingered on her knee. “We don’t need to—”

  “I want to,” she answered, her right hand gripping the back of his neck, urging him down, propping on her elbow, she kissed him, sending him confusion, lust and need, heightened by terror.

  She risked her sons, her heirs, her position with the empress, her estates, and her legacy along with her life. What did he risk but some mad sense of honor, of devotion to what he could not have—who he could not have? And yes, in that deep place where he buried his secrets, he felt the gnawing of a new guilt: he wanted it, too.

  She opened herself to him, a gulf of desire, strength, courage, and he sank between her legs, grateful for the strength of his arms to support him, for the softness of the cloaks beneath as her legs embraced his. Katherine kissed with frantic need, not the practiced passion of the whores, nor the calculated sympathy that Brigit projected. Her kiss recalled him to his old friend Martin and the two kisses they had shared: the first on the eve of Elisha’s burial, Martin claiming the kiss he’d wanted for so long; the last on the day of Martin’s sacrifice, Elisha’s gift before Martin’s spirit soared, and he worked his final spell.

  Then thought was gone. His body shuddered and she moaned, her hand pulling him closer, her back arching as she clung to him. For a moment, her presence hovered, as if on a wave, caught between the swirling chaos of the death she carried against her heart and this flash of light. She glowed against that darkness, vivid as his angel, and gave a cry. Then her nails raked his spine.

  Elisha trembled, gasped, threw his head back and screamed. His body rocked, his heart stuttered, and he died.

  Chapter 24

  Breaking open the secrets he had sealed, Elisha spilled forth Death. He drew it out from every talisman, from the memory of dying, from the scar upon his scalp that marked his broken skull and the Valley of the Shadow that ever lingered. He allowed his heart to falter, calling up the memory of every patient beneath his hands whose operation had gone wrong, and he plunged his life into the frigid void of death. His scream broke off as if his startled flesh forgot he still commanded it.

  Katherine’s voice rose up to take its place. She jerked and struggled under him, then rolled them both and rose to her knees, wailing, tears streaking her face.

  “Come on, hurry!” snarled a deep voice.

  The familiar voice of the flagellant priest called out, “Repent, you temptress! Repent and leave your weeping, for God has done His will through your weak flesh and the enemy lies dead.”

  “Stop shouting,” replied another, coolly. “Wolfsbane won’t kill him right off. He’s just paralyzed. We’ve got a few minutes to reap him right.”

  Elisha’s staring eyes dried in the salty air, and he cursed the urge to blink them—though the idea of blocking out Katherine’s horrified face was temptation in itself. Why were her horror and guilt so strong? She had known what to expect, but perhaps his execution of the scheme surprised her with its thoroughness. Even now, she seized and chafed his hand, magic entwining from her talisman in dark bands that flowed along her arm as she tried to reach him. Elisha did not respond.

  “Hurry up, then, the priest’s beaters will grow anxious if they’re without him for long.”

  Five. Five mancers against himself and Katherine—but his own performance left her stunned, in more ways than one. Let them get their hands upon him, they would know death. In his cold, Elisha readied himself.

  The soldier leaned over them, grabbed Katherine and pulled her away. “Come on, woman. You’ve had yours—now he’s all for us.”

  To the east, a rustle, a crack, then a cry that ended in a sickening thud. The Valley tore open, chaos howling from the gloom to suck down a soul. The ambush had begun.

  “Holy Rood!” Shouts and screams and the tremor of feet in the salt beneath him.

  A spatter of blood struck Elisha’s face. The instant chill carried the sharp tang of death, and Elisha rolled, pushing himself up.

  Katherine shrieked again in a rush of confusion.

  The mancer soldier scrambled away, reaching for his weapon. “He’s meant to be paralyzed, woman, scratch him again!”

  “Who are these people?” cried one of the other mancers.

  The flagellant priest reared back from Elisha, bringing up a whistle that hung at his collar, and the blast echoed through Elisha’s skull.

  “Idiot!” cursed the soldier. “Why’d you call your acolytes?”

  “We’ll need them,” the priest spat back, and already, his presence brightened with the clamorous approach of his followers, eager to give him their pain.

  “Margravine! Watch yourself.”

  Katherine flung herself close to the wall, isolated both from him and from any weapon.

  Elisha leapt back as Daniel Stoyan stumbled through, swinging a bloody pickaxe. The soldier seized its handle. With a burst of power, the pick fell to rust and the handle shattered. The soldier lunged toward the miner, but Elisha sprang between them, conjuring Death. At the end of the chamber, one of the mancers lay dead, and one of the miners beside him. Four other miners wielded picks and shovels, beating at the pair of mancers only to have their weapons struck through. A mancer with a thick brow shot out his hand, clawing death into a miner who twisted and screamed as his flesh withered.

  “Don’t touch them,” Elisha cried. The soldier sneered, and his dark shades rose up around him—twenty deaths at least, a cold army—but weakened and without a source of contact to carry his power into the miners. Even the floor they shared, carved of salt, would carry no magic.

  The soldier lashed out, Elisha danced back, leading him away from Daniel and Katherine. Then he stumbled over their abandoned bed of cloaks and dropped to one knee. The soldier drew a knife that gleamed with an edge of darkness and swirled with shadow. Elisha grabbed the cloak that had tripped him and yanked it, tumbling the soldier. Elisha caught the fresh deaths around him, snatching the soldier by the throat as if he could shove the dead straight down it. The mancer’s eyes frosted, his mouth gaping.

  Snatching the knife from the dead man’s grasp, Elisha searched the chamber. Armed now with the dead who lay about him, he felt his power constrained by salt, but not suppressed. One of the deaths the knife remembered echoed to the east; a faint, but certain, sign that another mancer here shared that crime. Elisha blew a breath and conjured it to wind, then flung the knife and let the echo of shared murder carry it home into the mancer’s side.

  The fellow wailed and clawed at it as the cursed blade poured forth its cold. The man’s flesh peeled back, crumbling, from the wound. He conjured blackness to his grasp, only to be bashed
down by a miner with a block of salt clenched in both hands. The cursed blade finished its work, the mancer’s blood freezing into a stream of red crystals, his peeling skin turning black until his flesh was as twisted as any slab of salted meat. The remaining miners—Daniel along with them—grabbed stones, knives, anything that could be thrown. The mancer caught in the corner conjured terror from the talismans he carried, but the salted stones battered him until a miner stabbed him in the throat.

  “Lo! And do you see the depravity!” howled the mancer-priest, his half-naked, bloodied followers forming ranks about him. “Do you see what the flesh has wrought?” He shouted, and they echoed with “amen” and “save us,” their spirits given to his will. Already dripping blood from lashing themselves in the chapel, they reached for each other, linking hands, blood spiraling their limbs as the mancer at the center drew power from them. If they felt this unnatural flow, they showed no sign of it, their eyes turned in ecstasy or weeping from the sting of salt upon their wounds.

  “Bring him! Bring the sinner here to me!” the priest shrieked, pointing at Elisha.

  Elisha mustered his power, but to wield it, he must slay them all—he could not reach the mancer except through those he had deluded to his service, the people he had forged into both weapon and armor.

  “I’ll bring him!” Katherine cried, rushing forward.

  “No, woman—he knows you bear him sorrow in your heart!” the priest thundered at her.

  “Then take my strength, father! And let me join with you!” She reached out her hand, and the followers on that side wavered, the circle bending as she strained toward their leader. If she could reach him, she could loose the blast of death against him, but he reared back from her.

  “Strip off your bodice! Shed that symbol of vanity that offers up your breasts like a whore.”

  He was asking her to give up her talisman, to be vulnerable to him. After the briefest hesitation, Katherine struggled with the bodice laces and let it fall, her talisman falling with it, leaving her bare of magic. “I’m ready for the whip, father,” she said.

  The acolytes moved toward Elisha, a dozen of them, joined in a union of pain and aimed at Elisha like a blade. Elisha edged backward.

  “What do we do?” Daniel Stoyan demanded. He’d found the handle of a broken shovel, but held it uncertainly, faced with his margravine’s crazed behavior and the ring of innocents that shielded the enemy.

  “Don’t touch them,” Elisha said again, retreating another step.

  “Run,” said Daniel, gesturing with the handle, urging him away. But if Elisha ran, he left Katherine’s fate to the mancers. Her change of heart seemed calculated to convince them she had tried her best to kill him, and been thwarted, but the priest’s wild glare and the black power he sent in her direction suggested he already guessed the truth: that her fingernails were never poisoned to begin with.

  Katherine straightened as if she saw it, too, and she glanced to Daniel. “Yes, let’s go!” but when she tried to retreat, the priest cried, “Seize her! Let her flesh be punished and her soul revealed!”

  “No!” Elisha reached for her, but it was too late. Two bloodied acolytes caught her arms and dragged her inward, the circle closing around them already.

  Katherine kicked and struggled. Daniel smacked the arms of the acolytes with his shaft of wood, but they cried with evident delight and madness, welcoming the pain.

  “Father!” Katherine wailed, dumped at the feet of the mancer-priest. She collapsed as if to kiss his feet, then dragged her nails down his bare calf, leaving four trails of blood. The priest’s glower flickered and his hand flew to his chest. He gulped, swayed, and dropped to the ground, his body jerking and flailing, arms and legs scraping the salt, then dreadfully still, eyes staring and mouth gaping. For a moment, the frisson of power surged through the small chamber as the dying mancer strained to conjure some final blow, but the salt ground into him and his magic shredded to nothing.

  The sharp web of his power collapsed with him, draining away as his acolytes’ ecstatic cries turned to woe. A few of them dropped beside him. “Saint Raphael!” someone shouted, and they stumbled, shoved, and fell in their eagerness to take up his body. Some made as if to come for Elisha, then followed their master instead, leaving him with muttered urges to repent of his fleshly sins. Without the mancer’s magic to hold them, their unity withered. Perhaps they no longer knew why they bore the stripes of lashing or why they honored the madman whose corpse they carried away, its rigid limbs battering the walls as they went.

  Wolfsbane. Administered directly to the blood from Katherine’s hand, just as she had said she would do to him.

  Elisha’s chest echoed with his heartbeat. Katherine knelt there still in an attitude of penance. Her bowed head twitched a little, as if to glance his way, but she did not.

  The corridor back to the church echoed with shouts as the acolytes pushed their way inside. Where she knelt on the blood-stained ground, Katherine tremored, a sob escaping her.

  “Margravine? My lady?” Daniel glanced around uncertainly, wiped his face, motioned for the two remaining miners to come closer. “Would you, that is . . . are you hurt?”

  “My sons!” She staggered to her feet, spinning wildly, her hands spread, her nails dripping blood. “All the mancers are dead, Elisha, and where are my sons? How will they ever be found?”

  Moments before, those hands stroked heat into his loins. And now? Elisha met her gaze, and her expression twisted with pain.

  “I’m sorry.” She raised her shaking hands, first one, then the other. “My left hand was poisoned—in case, in case—” She gulped for breath, then sobbed again. “I’m sorry.”

  Elisha turned away, confronted at every glance by the dead. The other two miners, pale and frightened, took their fellows, while the mancers lay where they fell, oozing blood or, in the case of the soldier, simply dead without sign of injury but for the frozen blackness at his throat. Her left hand was poisoned in case she decided to kill him after all, but she had decided to let him live. Numbly, Elisha surveyed the dead. “Thank you,” he said to the miners, but they glanced at Daniel and avoided his gaze. All the mancers dead, five of them.

  “There were no others you knew in Bad Stollhein, my lady? No others you expected would come?” Elisha asked.

  “None,” said Katherine.

  The upper corridor reverberated as if there’d been a scuffle up above. If the watcher who had spotted Elisha remained, he might know another mancer, or there might be desolati involved, paid to keep the boys from their mother. There might be anyone—how was Elisha ever to know? They had fought to free her and her sons from the mancers, sacrificed the lives of the miners, and won nothing.

  Blood oozed along veins of salt tingling his bare feet with echoes of pain. Blood, and salt. “The man who makes the blood salt, do you see him here? Or the owner of the hostel that buys it?”

  “What?” Katherine’s bleak voice rang with confusion and despair.

  “This man’s a hostler,” grunted one of the miners, pointing to the thick-browed mancer.

  Daniel broke from his indecision, wiping his face, and shaking his head as he looked around. “That’ll be Heinrich von Deussel who makes the blood salt.”

  “Do you know where to find him?”

  The Jew’s brows lifted. “Of course—to avoid him. His work is against—” But he did not finish the sentence, with a glance at the margravine.

  One of the miners, carrying the body of a comrade toward the upper corridor, halted abruptly and dropped into a bow. The sound of marching feet echoed down toward them and a pair of soldiers clad in tabards bearing the imperial eagle tramped in, swords at the ready.

  “Go!” Elisha pointed toward the lower exit, the one that would lead them to the mines. “Hurry—you need to get to him.” Elisha scooped up her cape and flung it over her.

  “But how
can you be sure?” she pleaded.

  “I’ve tasted his salt—he’s bleeding someone to make it, and you said your son looked pale. Show him your nails—it should convince him I’m dead, and he can release the hostages. Run, before he hears the truth from someone else. Daniel—”

  “I’ll take her.” Daniel snatched the lantern with his off-hand. “Margravine. This way. If you please.” They ran into the darkness.

  “Halt! In the name of his majesty, Ludwig, king of the Romans!” barked the voice of the steward, Harald, as he swept in, his own imperial garb swaying with his rush. More soldiers followed, carrying torches and hurrying to block the other passages. A few crossed themselves at the sight of the bodies.

  Elisha bent to a bow of his own, glance darting toward his pile of clothes. He reached for his hose, but Harald shouted, “Be still!” The point of a pike appeared in the corner of his vision, spearing his undergarments, and Elisha froze, briefly squeezing his eyes shut.

  “My wife has been telling me about you and your adventures,” the emperor intoned. “But I hardly expected this. By God, Man, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Elisha’s cheeks flamed. There might be a worse moment to meet the emperor, but Elisha, half-naked and surrounded by corpses, could not imagine what that might be.

  “Eight dead,” the emperor observed. “And you without a scratch.”

  Not entirely true: Elisha’s back stung with the marks of Katherine’s nails now ground in salt. “I assume her majesty told you all that I said—that you know the nature of the enemies we face, Your Majesty. Five of these are necromancers.”

  “Sorcery!” cried the nearest miner. “It was awful.” Then he dropped his gaze, hands knotting together in fear at having spoken out of turn.

  “You were here—surely you are witness to his words.” Ludwig tapped the man’s bent back. “Come. Straighten up and say so.”