Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  “What—”

  The door crashed open and a trio of men staggered inside. “Are there any here?” The leader shouted. “You!” he brandished a bloody sword at Elisha. “Recite the Lord’s prayer.”

  Elisha’s left eye traced the spirals of death that coiled around the man’s blade. “Pater Noster qui et in caelis—” It came out in Latin, Thomas’s voice echoing in Elisha’s memory. Thomas, the king who prayed over him.

  The man blinked, then gave a sharp nod. “Good—you’re one of us. Come on, then, the Jews are getting away!”

  Chapter 2

  Elisha marched forward and gripped the man’s shoulder. His presence was hot with anger, his arm stiff with tension, but he was no mancer. “I’ve been in seclusion,” Elisha told him. “What’s the fighting about?”

  “It’s the wells. The Jews’ve been poisoning wells to the south, that’s why this pestilence is spreading. If we can stop them now, it won’t spread to us.”

  “You know this for certain?”

  One of the man’s companions ducked back out the door into a street thronged with fighters. The other growled, “We’ve no time to explain, just get a weapon.”

  Projecting calm, Elisha let his hands take on a slight glow, highlighting the scars at his palms. “The righteous do not need weapons.”

  The man he held glanced down and startled. “Who are you?”

  “The Jews’re the ones who call themselves righteous,” said the other man, swinging about with two hands on his axe haft.

  “Our Lord Jesus Christ was born a Jew,” Katherine said. “Queen Margaret said—”

  “Doesn’t matter what she says now that we’ve got a new emperor.” The second man blocked the door. “Judaizers, that’s what they are. That’s why they’re hiding here while we’re out there taking care of things.”

  “But his hands,” said the first man.

  The second man turned toward the open doors. “Here!” he called to someone outside. “Drive ’em in! We’ve found some of their friends.”

  The shouting on the streets grew louder, and all of them tumbled back into the chapel as a group of people shoved inside, stumbling, still running. They burst between Elisha and Katherine, running for the back of the little chapel, two dozen men and women with children in their arms, some of them bleeding, carrying canes and cudgels.

  “Fire it!” shouted someone outside, and the armed pursuit stumbled to a halt, ringing the steps of the chapel. A few of the men held torches, lighting their eyes with fire.

  “Neighbors, do not take this madness on yourselves.” A man separated himself from the group of refugees, a tall man with a thick white beard. The rabbi of Heidelberg. He raised his hands in a calming gesture. “Let these people shelter and listen to the words of your leaders and priests.”

  “Shut up!” A ceramic jug flew through the air and struck the floor just past the rabbi, but he did not move.

  “We share the commandments of ha-shem, and the first of these—”

  A second missile slammed into his chest and staggered him. Elisha caught his elbow, then the man with the ax stepped up, already swinging, his face twisted with hatred. The axe swung downward, and Elisha channeled that mad power of the dying. As the ax slid past him on the way to claim the rabbi’s head, he put out his hand, still glowing, and brushed the weapon with his fingertips. It flew apart into puffs of old wood and ancient rust. Elisha put the thunder of death into his voice as he said, “Thou shalt not kill.”

  The ax-man drew back, and his hand began the automatic gesture of crossing himself. He glanced at the Jews, then back to Elisha, and his ax rose, pointing. “They’re stealing the Bible, the holy words! Using their black arts against us!”

  The man who had tried to recruit Elisha grabbed his companion’s arm and tugged him out, the two of them stumbling down the steps as the doors swung shut. The wooden doors rattled and groaned, and one of the narrow windows showed murky figures barricading it from the outside.

  “They’re going to burn it, to burn all of these people.” Katherine fought through the crowd. Their eyes met. They had a way out through the Valley, but how many others could be brought that way, and to where?

  At his side, the rabbi straightened with a groan. A streak of blood marked his scalp, his head bare of its usual cap. His presence warmed when his dark eyes lifted to Elisha’s face. “A surprise to see you, and yet, it is not. For what other reason are you among us, but this, to be here at our time of need.” The rabbi raised his eyebrows, glancing at Katherine, then giving a little bow. “Margravine,” he acknowledged her, using her title.

  “You’ve met before?” Katherine asked, then she brushed this away. “Never mind—what are we going to do?”

  Fire crackled outside and already the door at his back grew warm. The crowd outside roared along with the soaring flames. Inside, the Jewish families huddled together toward the center of the chapel.

  “We can get you to freedom by folding the way,” Elisha said. “Katherine, where can we go?”

  “There is no place we are safe from madness and ignorance,” said the rabbi. “We are not afraid to die for our faith.” Then the corner of his mouth lifted. “Though we might wish it were not so soon for some of us.” He gestured toward the gathering.

  Katherine touched Elisha’s arm. “I have a few relics—the Church of the Holy Ghost, the royal chapel at Aachen, but he’s right, the attacks are spreading faster than the pestilence.”

  Elisha’s fur-lined cloak grew uncomfortably hot against his back as the flames licked up the building. “It has to be stopped, all of this. You said Queen Margaret spoke against the violence—will she help?”

  “She might. She is resting at my house in Bad Stollhein, but I can’t bring so many people.”

  The restless power of death still pounded in Elisha’s veins. Would it be enough? The alternative was to stay there and burn. “I think I can get us to her.”

  “All of these people? I’ve never brought more than two, and that was exhausting.”

  “What choice do we have?” To the rabbi he said, “We’ll need everyone close together, holding on to each other.”

  “Should we pray?”

  “If it comforts you, rabbi. You’ve taken this path before, you know what it’s like.”

  The rabbi combed his fingers through his beard, betraying the slightest tremor, then he raised his arms and stepped in close to his small flock and spoke to them in a different tongue, that language that sounded like German, but wasn’t.

  “What about the rest of the Jews in town?” Elisha asked Katherine in a whisper. “This can’t be all of them.”

  She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. “Yes, Elisha, it very well could be.”

  The rabbi held out his hand, his face grown still and serious. Last time they met, Elisha had taken him to Jerusalem to show him the truth of his own power and win his aid in the fight against the mancers. Had that very alliance been the event that caused all of this? No—suspicion of the Jews lingered in the hearts and churches of every Christian, waiting for some terrible event to flare up into hatred but rarely into such open violence. Elisha took the rabbi’s strong and aged hand in his own while Katherine circled the crowd and took a place opposite, holding hands with a young boy, her other arm circling the shoulders of a mother who carried a baby close against her breast. Did Katherine think of her own children, the daughter the mancers had tortured to death and the sons they had bled to punish Katherine’s disobedience?

  No matter, her eyes met his. “To the queen?”

  Elisha nodded. Twenty-seven lives, to be drawn through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He focused on Queen Margaret, the weight of the cloak she had given him draping his shoulders, the death of the child she had hoped for and wept for, the one he had arrived just too late to save. The baby’s death was a slender thread, a life to
o young to leave an impact, except upon the heart of its mother. He marshalled his power, the near overwhelming whorls of death and dying that had spread through him these last few terrible days, and opened the Valley. Katherine’s own power, small but clear, echoed his, sent to support him, surrounding these people with what comfort she could. For a long moment, they hovered between living and dying, between the chapel that roared with a sudden, ferocious light, and the snarling darkness of the Valley, then he found the thread of the child’s death, like a silver gleam, a pin fixed in the fabric of Margaret’s life.

  The shades of the dead gathered round them, stronger and more numerous than ever before, stroking through his awareness. The rabbi’s hand felt slick with sweat and frigid tendrils slid between, trying to drive them apart. The strain of holding the passage for so long shook through Elisha’s muscles and throbbed in his skull. He focused on Queen Margaret, but the forces around him built into a frenzy. The rabbi’s hand slipped, then the deep tenor of his voice stirred the madness, drawing them together again in the unmistakable rhythm of prayer. “Baruch aso Adonoi, Eloheinu melech ha’olum, go’er baSatan umoshel beAshmodoi . . .”

  Across the circle, Elisha felt Katherine’s cry of elation, then he pitched into a tumble of limbs and a sudden quiet broken by a woman’s startled cry.

  Chapter 3

  Elisha pushed to his knees in a velvety darkness, a single candle burning, the queen’s pale, round face staring back at him from a gap between the bed curtains. He knew the room at once, the fine chamber in Katherine’s manor house that she prepared for her queen when they came to the salt baths of Bad Stollhein in the late autumn. Likely, the queen’s entourage had been caught there by winter after the emperor’s death. The broad bedchamber between them held the little crowd of Jews, many of them, like Elisha himself, fallen to their knees with the jolt of their arrival.

  The children started crying then, their mothers soothing, their fathers bewildered as the rabbi found his feet and regained his voice, calm and commanding.

  The queen shook her head as if to clear it of sleep. “What on earth is all of this commotion? Can that possibly be you, the English doctor?” Margaret pushed back the curtains and rose up, snatching a robe from a hook at the bedside.

  “Your Majesty?” Another woman emerged from beyond the larger bed: Lady Agnes, the queen’s companion. “My goodness! Who are all of these people?”

  “Please forgive us, Your Majesty.” Katherine struggled to extricate herself from the group, gently peeling away from the grip of the boy beside her. “These people are in need of refuge. We hoped you would help them.”

  Agnes and Margaret both lit lanterns, then Agnes took over the lighting as the queen arrayed herself better for company. In spite of her sleeping clothes, within a moment she assumed the regal air and stern intelligence Elisha had come to associate with her. “They are Jews? From where?”

  “From a village outside Heidelberg, Your Majesty.” The rabbi gave a bow. “I heard there might be trouble, and I travelled there to see what might be done about the danger.”

  “What indeed? I abhor violence, of course, but I cannot be seen to be harboring Jews, not when my own position is far from secure. At any moment, the emperor”—she gave a little sniff—“the new emperor might withdraw my every rank and privilege.”

  “There is no need for us to stay, Your Majesty. We are merely in transit to a destination where we might breathe a little while in peace. Again, forgive us for this intrusion.” The rabbi bowed again and raised his hands to his people, encouraging them to rise, to move toward the door as Agnes hurried to open it.

  Katherine curtsied and darted a glance to Elisha, but he found himself watching the queen, arrayed in the remnants of her royalty, so diminished after her husband’s death. Margaret, in her capacity as Queen Consort, had once told him she would look after the Germans—he need not trouble himself. After all, he was not royalty and had no duty to defend his realm. But he had been. If only for a little while, he had held the power of a nation. He knew the strain of balancing the factions, the needs of the peasantry against the demands of the barons, the fear of war against the scarcity of the resources needed to fight it. Would he have turned away two dozen supplicants with no place else to go? Would Thomas? If they would win this war against the mancers and confront the spreading evil of the pestilence, how could those with power deny it to those who had none?

  She stared back at him, her face as lovely and impervious as marble, still pale with the grief of her losses. Elisha gave a bow and stalked from the room, yanking the door shut behind him. In the torchlit corridor, tapestries gleamed with golden threads, and the little crowd bunched together, sooty and bleeding.

  “Some of you are injured.” Agnes waved them along. “Come to the hall—I’ll fetch Klaus and find you some provisions before you go.”

  Who was Klaus? The name brought a brief smile to Katherine’s lips as she moved ahead with Agnes, heads close as they whispered, then Agnes hurried on and they entered a broad hall with a fire banked in its great hearth. A pair of servants roused to stir the fire back to life, but the new flames lit their narrowed eyes and down-turned lips as they examined the Jews. The rabbi moved among his people, settling them on benches. Now that their fear and confusion ebbed, spikes of pain infused their disordered presence, and Elisha became aware of the individuals: the mother and baby, exhausted and worried as she searched among those rescued for someone she could not find; a youth with a torn shirt, a bloody arm clasped to his chest; two men who gripped their weapons, glancing around them, still vigilant.

  Elisha trembled, the power of the Valley departing him. He possessed the power to aid, to heal—but if he spent it now, on these injuries, would he be ready for the next battle, and the next? Agnes returned, a tall man following after with the hesitant tread of one newly wakened. The man lifted his head, then his hand, waving a little greeting, and Elisha recognized Doctor Emerick, the queen’s physician.

  “If you need to tend them, Elisha, then tell me how to help,” Katherine said, coming up beside him. She rested her hand on his back, casual and warm, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and so it might be, for those who had been lovers.

  “Emerick can handle the injuries I’ve noticed.” Elisha wet his lips as he glanced at Katherine, the heat of her presence drawing him, her relief and comfort in his own presence just as attractive, perhaps even more so. “I need to know what’s been happening here.”

  She nodded, then called out, “Klaus, we’re going to the armory, if you should need us.”

  Across the hall, where he leaned over the young man’s injury, Doctor Emerick gave a nod.

  “Klaus?” Elisha asked softly.

  “He and Agnes are quite smitten with each other.” Again, that slender smile, then her hand encouraged him onward, down a corridor at the back of the hall. “Why were you seeking me, Elisha?”

  He briefly sketched for her the scene in the mancers’ vale, with its forlorn and dying pilgrims. “I did all I could for them, but it’s not enough. I haven’t the knowledge to fight this pestilence victim by victim—and I shouldn’t be. For all that I am a doctor, I am wasted trying to treat any single patient.” It cut against his instincts, but he knew it for the truth. “I must look deeper, toward the root causes. The mancers intend to profit by this, no doubt. Someone needs to stop them.”

  Katherine nodded and started walking again, drawing him with her. “When you left, you sent Harald to me for aid against the mancers.” He felt regret ripple through her presence, perhaps, for her own prior involvement with the enemy. “Even I hadn’t known all of Harald’s talents before—even now, I am not sure that I do. For a man who seems so open, he keeps a wide variety of secrets.”

  “It’s what makes him so good at his job,” Elisha said.

  “Daniel Stoyan, the Jewish salt mine foreman, is our weapons-master. Knowing that the sal
t inhibits magic, he’s started making all sorts of things that even desolati can wield against them. We have continued what you began, stalking the mancers themselves.” She produced a key and unlocked a narrow door, locking it again behind them when they had passed through. The stairs beyond led down into a musty, salty chamber carved from the salt deposits on which Katherine’s fortune rested. The candles she lit, in their recesses of salt, glowed pink against the vaulted ceiling of what had once been a cellar. Even with the deadening effect of the salt that reduced his magical senses, the cold of an unnatural death seeped into Elisha’s skin, stinging his face and hands. Katherine busied herself with more candles, her movements jerky. She shook back her hair, then tugged it impatiently into a queue that revealed the curve of her cheek and the span of her throat.

  Elisha’s raised hand stilled her even before they touched. “Who died here?”

  “My husband.” She walked to a high table littered with rusty tools. “It is deep, it is salty, it is secure. None have been allowed to come here for many years.” With a broad gesture, she displayed an array of knives with slender, crystalline inlays along their blades, then stroked a finger along the crystal in one of the blades. “Rock salt. Steel carries the salt into the mancer’s flesh, stopping the flow of magic like a cork in a bottle. If the blade is well-placed, it can kill on its own. The salt inlays degrade the steel faster than we’d like, so they rarely last more than a single use. Only someone willing and able to get very close, like Harald, can use these, but we have arrows as well, with salt embedded in the tips, and even brining our clothing makes us harder to catch.”

  “Very clever.”

  “You have given me very capable allies.” She flashed a smile in the direction of the table. “But we have slain most of our targets, the mancers I knew, and those we have since discovered, and of course Harald and Daniel and the others cannot act without me to recognize the enemy.” Her fingers stroked the length of a salt-enhanced blade. “But now that you are here, you can aid us.”