Elisha Mancer

by E. C. Ambrose

  “I’ll need maps, and a horse,” Elisha told him.

  Rinaldo bowed briefly and departed.

  Elisha pushed himself to the edge of the bed and sat up, groaning. He needed to search, to find Brigit. He needed, too, to finish his mission here—he had marked the tainted relics, but he still needed to destroy them for good. Rubbing away the sleep from his face and drinking the last of the cold broth, he struggled for attunement. When he drew up his strength to assault the relics, he would need to act fast. Too many mancers held the flesh and bone of these victims. If he moved without precision, they would be on him. From his sleeve, he plucked out one of Margaret’s relics, the finger bone of a tortured man.

  Could he simply draw the relics to him? No, they must be destroyed. What then? Fire, perhaps.

  For a moment, Mordecai’s dozen wounds streaked Elisha’s memory, followed by heat. He gasped, dropping the bone as he turned aside the memory, and a breath of cold reached back. On his feet in an instant, Elisha spun, braced.

  The silvery shape of Count Vertuollo stood by the door. He gave the slightest nod. “Ah, my brother. I feared you would not be ready for visitors.” He paused, brows lifting. “After that exquisite outpouring of grief.”

  Elisha swallowed, banishing all emotion, all sense of himself back beneath his skin. “I appreciate your sympathy,” he replied, thankful that his voice didn’t tremble.

  “Ha!” Vertuollo gave a slender, sharp smile, his eyes crinkling. “Sympathy. Oh, that is rich. Your . . . friend? . . . made quite an impressive showing for one who’d never before entered my gate. I might like to have known him.”

  The wound of Mordecai’s death still stung, in spite of his defenses. “I’m not sure you would have gotten on.”

  Vertuollo’s face lost all hint of humor. “They seem to think that you are my problem now, since you have sojourned so long in my city. What has he been doing, they inquire? Looking for me, I assume, seeking to insinuate yourself into my good graces. Did you learn what you wanted?” The pale eyes widened. “No?”

  Elisha drew up a breath, and Death rose with it, tingling beneath his skin as if it frosted his veins.

  Vertuollo sighed lightly. “I like you, Brother. You have skills even my son cannot share. You know the traumas of our sensitivity in ways few others could understand. And what, exactly, do they think I can do about you? You expect me to kill you, yes? Is that even possible?”

  As ever in this man’s company, Elisha felt at a loss, the mancer’s civility at odds with his casual inquiry. Count Vertuollo liked him? Good God—that damned him more surely than any inquisition. “The Germans tried. Several times.”

  “You see?” He gave a turn of his hand, too cultivated to adopt the Roman shrug. “The French, well, one expects them to be ignorant, but the Germans have known you—they should cease to underestimate what you might do.”

  “When they slight me, Brother, they’re slighting you.”

  “Precisely.” His eyes crinkled. “You allowed the priest to hang, then stole his essence. You slew that fool who thought to betray you to me. You . . .” he shook his head slightly. “I can’t kill you—even if I tried. Even in your grief, just now, I could not surprise you.”

  “I doubt you came here to compliment me.”

  Vertuollo tipped his head, acknowledging the point. “I am content with Rome. It is a good country, rich, beautiful. It is enough, and it is mine.” Power crackled through him then, the tendrils of death wreathing his hands, draping his shoulders like a cloak of darkness. “Death is not the only unpleasant fate for such as you. You are a strong man, a good man—whatever that is worth—and you cannot possibly succeed. You cannot comprehend the forces arrayed against you.” For a moment, he regarded Elisha with a steady, almost pitying stare. “Go home to England, Brother. Go home and drink the wine of your own vineyard.”

  With an unfurling of the Valley, Vertuollo was gone.

  Elisha sank onto the bed, heart pounding, and tried to catch his breath. Before he’d even retrieved the bone from the floor, footfalls thundered down the hall, then Rinaldo’s agitated presence cut his awareness followed by a banging on the door. Elisha pushed himself up to draw back the bolt.

  “Dottore! Praise Mary, I’ve found you.” Rinaldo caught his arm. “There is an army gathered against us—we have to go.”

  “I need to take care of—”

  But Rinaldo shook his head fiercely. “It is Vertuollo’s son who leads them. He says they must expel the tribune and all of his council—especially the foreigners. Come, Dottore!”

  Shit. Vertuollo paired his curious warning with a terrible threat. Elisha should have expected this sort of subtlety—stirring innocents to move against him. He knew how to counter a direct attack, but to fight off the very citizens he had been working to save? He thrust his few possessions into a satchel and hurried after Rinaldo through the emptying palace. They met the tribune at the great lion stairs before the palace, where once he hung his enemies. Once more he wore banded armor of an ancient style that barely contained his growing belly. He stared down at the helmet in his hands. Ringing over the city in urgent waves, the bells of Sant’Angelo called the citizens to battle. Already their cries rose up after each stroke of the bells and torchlight glowed.

  “The mob is coming.” Cola held up the helmet, its crest shivering a little in his hands. “I shall depart as a warrior. One day, I shall return here, and they will once more adore me.” So saying, he placed the helmet on his head, his eyes gleaming in the narrowed view. Mounted among a small company of knights, Rinaldo once more at his side, Elisha rode out as the madman abandoned Rome.

  • • •

  For a few days, they wound through the mountains, until they finally fetched up at a small monastery where Cola and his men intended to rest and decide what to do.

  Elisha roamed the monks’ peaceful graveyard, considering his own path. When he was a child, his mother had wanted him to join a monastery—hoping the religious life would cure him of the impression the burning angel had left within him. If he took vows, he could tend the graves of the peaceful dead, and never again know the horrors of the mancers’ world. Except that the mancers’ world was growing. It would consume Rome and all of her pilgrims. It would consume the Pope and all of those who followed him, devouring both secular and spiritual realms at a single blow. And Elisha, at peace, would be powerless to stop it.

  At peace among the dead. “How could I fail to be at ease in such a place?” he asked of Vertuollo in the catacombs of Rome. The mancers who stole Brigit knew she had been important to the mancers of England if not to Elisha himself. They knew he’d gone to considerable trouble to conceal her from them—they would go to equal lengths to conceal her from him. How? Not the obvious way, by relying on the negation of death for life: Death was one area in which their enemy was their equal. In fact, he had shown all of them, time and again, his power drawn from that source. He’d been assuming they would want that strength as well, that they would need the dead to succor themselves and defend against him, but they also had Count Vertuollo’s advice in this. By now, they knew Elisha was more sensitive than almost any of them. No matter the care they took with that power, they must expect him to be yet more capable of discovering it. So they would avoid death completely. They would look for a place where none had died.

  Elisha sat on a bench near the little graveyard chapel, taking a deep breath. Good God. That could be anywhere. Couldn’t it? If they used all possible caution, they would travel by sea, knowing that the combination of salt and water would make it all but impossible to find her that way. Clearly, they avoided using the Valley or he would recognize her presence there. How was he ever to find her?

  A few flakes of snow drifted down to settle on the leaves and the cross before him. Elisha blew out a breath that ruffled the fur of his collar. A bloody scrap of this very cloak had enabled them to find her. He f
rowned, running his palm over the softness. Even then, it would have taken a sensitive, someone who knew about the cloak, who might be able to search as he could across such a distance. Count Vertuollo? He had only recently learned the truth of Elisha’s identity, but sensitives like them were hard to find.

  Then Elisha’s breath caught in his throat. Gretchen, Queen Margaret’s maidservant, beloved of the mancer Bardolph. She bore him a grudge both for the damage he had done to her lover, and for his and Katherine’s collusion in having her expelled from the Queen’s service. Elisha squeezed shut his eyes and searched his memory, the visions that Mordecai had left him. The one who appeared at the lodge on the Isle of Wight, the first to arrive, was no mancer, it was a magus, a woman. Damnation. Likely, until she arrived there, she didn’t even know what the mancers were looking for. Instead, she performed a scouting mission, possibly looking for Elisha himself, and discovered the sleeping queen, the woman supported by the mancers of England. Likely, they assumed the child she carried was Thomas’s, the unborn heir to the throne. It wasn’t Elisha they were attacking, not yet, but the throne of England. They knew him to be its defender, and hoped to distract him with the battle of San Lorenzo: making a mess in the city of Rome, a mess that Count Vertuollo would have to clean up. No wonder he grew so angry with them. But where did these revelations leave Elisha? Gretchen had been the messenger that drew the enemy to Mordecai’s refuge. A sensitive magus married to a mancer, with the blessing of her family. She had one of the arrows that nearly killed Elisha, and Sabetha had kept that scrap of fur from his cloak. A mancer, even a sensitive, could not have traveled through living blood like that—they needed a magus who still cared for the living.

  Elisha lifted the latch at the chapel door to let himself inside and shut it behind him. Drawing on the moisture of the drifting snow, Elisha conjured the door to swell into its frame, ensuring he would not be disturbed. He lit a pair of candles, leaving them beneath the altar-table to shield their light. For this, he did not even need the maps, but sorted through his talismans until he found the one he sought: the knuckle bone of Bardolph’s father. With a few breaths, Elisha sought attunement, spreading his awareness.

  Finally, he opened the most slender inlet to the Valley, hardly an opening at all, but merely an acknowledgement that it was there, always with him. By the time Vertuollo’s interest quivered inside the Valley, Elisha had emerged in the silence of the unfinished church at the heart of Heidelberg.

  Chapter 42

  Straightening his cloak, Elisha cast a deflection and moved swift and silent through the wintery market to the sign of the Unicorn. Thick snow draped the rooftops and piled in the corners, and he gave thanks for the warmth of Margaret’s gift. What must the Empire be like now that Ludwig was dead and Charles ruled at last? That mancer victory weighed heavy on his mind. At least he and Ludwig had made them fight for it. Margaret would be in Bavaria, her husband’s stronghold, while the surprisingly capable Harald learned how to hunt mancers with Katherine’s aid.

  The unicorn sign swung above him, and Elisha redoubled his deflection. Seven people in the common room, two moving among them and away; three more above, two sleeping, and the last one was Gretchen. He withdrew his senses before she could become aware of his interest. The door popped open, and a thick man muttered apologies as he stepped around Elisha.

  Elisha moved inside, letting the door swing shut again in the breeze with a little flutter of snow. With deliberate speed, he walked the common room, raised a hand to the serving man as if bidding him goodnight, and mounted the creaking stairs. All the way to the back, beyond a door that marked the family’s home, and inside it without a cry of alarm.

  Gretchen spun at the click of the door, a hand flying to her throat where a string of glass beads glinted. She cast a deflection, smothering her thoughts and emotions, any sense of her that might help him, though her face simmered hot with anger. “You monster—what are you doing here?”

  This greeting left him briefly speechless.

  She drew a deep breath, and Elisha pounced, snatching her hand and snapping her into the Valley where her scream joined a thousand others, unheeded by mortal ears. The sound hitched upward, terror flooding the contact as she stared around them.

  “Will you do to me what you did to her?” Gretchen’s eyes welled with tears, but her arm tensed to steel as if ready to strike. “Will you steal my soul and leave me a living casket to carry a child?”

  Elisha reeled with horror, almost releasing her, but she could not get home without him, not unless Bardolph had been much more open with her than Elisha believed. “No, Fraulein, no more did I intend that for her.”

  “So it was an accident that Britain’s queen collapsed at the moment she came into her power? That sorcery sustains her at the king’s need? When the child is born, what then? Will he kill her and marry again, or simply rape her to get another?”

  The images she conjured sickened him, but his fury fought the bile down again. “You know nothing of the king, and nothing of her but the lies they told you. She would have slain half England to take that throne. Her power burned every lord, lady, and noble child, Fraulein. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Then why save her? Why not kill her, if she were the evil you claim? Let the king get himself a new baby on a new bride.”

  The words beat at him like the howling madness of the Valley itself. He clenched his jaw and sought the strength of death to hide his heart even as Gretchen’s whoosh of breath showed he was too late—her sensitivity had revealed him. She gripped the beads at her throat. “It’s not a royal babe at all—it’s yours. Holy merciful Virgin, what depths does your wickedness not know?”

  Elisha mastered himself, forcing back the guilt along with the swirling chaos, forging them a place of stillness from the heart of pain. “Where have they taken her?”

  “As if I would tell you. They shall bring her back from where you left her.” She thrust up her chin. “Go on, then, kill me. What else do monsters do?”

  What, indeed? If he released her, how quickly would she go to Bardolph and tell him the truth about the child? And yet, too many innocents had died already. “Where’s your husband? I presume you’ve married him by now.”

  “I would never betray him.”

  He focused his senses on her as she writhed in his grasp, her enchantments stinging at his skin, then submerging as she sought a way to defeat him, but an edge of white showed at her eyes, and her awareness fractured. A part of her struggled against him, while the rest trembled in terror at the place he’d brought her. What if he left her? If he let her go, right now, and conjured himself away, she would not be able to reveal him. Cold threads seeped in through his skull and the warden’s interest stretched in his direction. Elisha was running out of time.

  Her breath shuddered in her chest, a cloud of white against the flickering dread around them. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered, and she seized his wrist in her hand.

  Elisha hardened his heart against her, forcing himself to feel nothing. “Tell me where to find them.”

  Gretchen’s throat worked, and she brought her eyes back up to meet his. “No.”

  Will battled fear within her flesh. Gripping the vial he wore at his throat, Elisha pulled her through the Valley and stumbled into the darkness of his brother’s workshop. He thrust her away as she stumbled, spun and faced him. “What—”

  But he must move fast if he would return to Heidelberg before the paths faded. Elisha fled her astonished gaze, stranding her in England for his friends to handle. She had walked the Valley before, at least once on her own when she entered the manor on the Isle of Wight and brought the mancers who slew Mordecai. She might do it again, when she realized what had happened, but it would take her time and trouble to get back without a powerful contact. Hopefully, it would take her long enough to return that he’d be gone on his quest.

  Elisha r
epeated his journey from the Church of the Holy Spirit back to the Unicorn, surprising the same server he’d waved to before. “Forgot something,” he called to the man’s frown, as if that explained everything.

  Unfortunately, a search of the chamber where he’d found Gretchen revealed a few items of her clothing, but no talismans at all—certainly no bits of bone or scraps of flesh to link her to her lover. For a moment, he perched on the bed, so angry he could shred the mattress down to its straw. He risked himself, revealed the one secret he could not afford his enemy to know, for what? To terrify a magus and abandon her thousands of miles away? Nothing personal remained here. Likely, she didn’t even live here anymore, but only returned home for a visit. It must be close to Yuletide, or even beyond. What did mancers give at Yule? Relics of their victims? Holy bones and holy blood, wrapped in the glory of gold to honor the Magi’s gift. Elisha pushed himself up and, before exhaustion overtook him once more, slipped back through the Valley for the tiny chapel he’d left behind.

  • • •

  He awoke to someone banging on the door and calling, “Dottore! Is it you in there?”

  Elisha scrubbed his face and realized he must have been snoring. Outside, Rinaldo tried the door with a rattle of the latch and a groan of wood and stone. “Just a minute,” Elisha called out.

  “Are you well? We have missed you at dinner.”