Elisha Mancer

by E. C. Ambrose

  Squatting, Elisha found marble columns at each corner, enabling a petitioner to crawl beneath and thus be closer to the saint whose relic made the altar holy. He tipped his head beneath it and looked up. A small panel was built into the lower surface of the slab near the front, embellished with carved acanthus leaves like those on a manuscript page, and emanating the sense of violent death too recent for any saint. He was right about the relics, bits of the murdered, planted as talismans to allow their murderers easy transit. He rose again to stand before the altar and reached his hand beneath, his fingers going numb with the chill of death when he slid back the door. Inside it, wires held a finger bone in place. He recoiled: the finger had been severed from a living hand.

  Bardolph passed this way, going to some pre-arranged destination, the relic providing the connection he needed to open the Valley. If Elisha would stop the mancers he must know what they did, who they were, what they planned, how they moved. Pressing his hand over the bone, Elisha opened himself to the stirring of the dead. He caught the memory of an old man, bound and frightened; hot, living hands holding him; his own son wielding the knife.

  Seven mancers slew this man—seven who could use his death to travel the Valley. Would they all be waiting, gathered in some distant place with Bardolph now among them? Elisha’s pulse thundered, his breathing too sharp. Part of him urged patience, rest, find an inn and report to the emperor. Or was it fear that urged his retreat? If he lost this trail, when would he get another chance?

  Elisha breathed in dust and summoned power. His sensitivity and his affinity with death allowed him to do what the mancers could not: travel the Valley through a death he had not committed. Knowledge flowed up his arm, as if his own veins drew it onward to his heart. He must be Death. He must be unknowable, invisible, silent. He let himself go cold. When he opened the Valley, it would be not a tearing, but the whisper of a familiar path; the howling wind of this man’s death must become a soft voice that beckoned him to find the murderers. None must feel his coming. Elisha wooed death with sorcery. He remembered his own near-dying and the holes pierced through his skull resonated with the memory of pain. He claimed the old man’s death, tamed it, and made it the blade that cut through the dim light of the church into darkness. The Valley opened with a soundless, frozen mist, like a painting of Hell.

  As he opened the Valley, he felt again that strange tension, as if it were reaching back. He did not think it was only his near-death that made it so, but he had not the time to investigate.

  In the blink of an eye, a dozen points of black, stained by this one death, stood out from the maelstrom of the Valley, but, as if the old man truly guided him, one felt more distinct than the rest. Elisha’s skin burned with cold fire as he called upon the power there and reached toward that deepest night. Pinpricks of heat shimmered within. Elisha strained to hold himself in the Valley, caught between one place and another in the terrible nowhere of death that underlay both worlds. The effort made him tremble. Heat: the living. He reached more carefully to the edge of the ripple, further from the heat.

  With a last wrenching of his heart, Elisha slid out again on the other side, soundless, sucking the cold into himself, his jaw so tightly clenched that his teeth ached. The Valley stroked across his skin, familiar, then gone.

  For a moment, the silence throbbed against his ears.

  Holding his breath, he stood in a dark forest rich with death—and made himself as nothing, his presence deflected.

  Living voices broke into his numbness.

  “—Vespers!” Bardolph had his back to Elisha, so close that a simple misstep would bring them both down.

  “Look, Bardolph, when you were late, we assumed you were courting and didn’t wish to be disturbed. And anyhow, it doesn’t matter—we’ve made the harvest.”

  “For God’s sake, you might have waited!” Bardolph snapped.

  Someone else laughed. “You can barely hold the knife since you went over.”

  Elisha made himself breathe, if shallowly. God’s sake? A necromancer dared call upon the name of God?

  Elisha’s left eye saw it first: the shade of a fresh death, swirling toward him, drawn by his affinity. He sealed himself against it, refusing to draw up that power. His ruined vision might be unique in all the magical curses of the world, but he could not risk another tracing the shades of death back to him. Four mancers formed a loose circle in a clearing of the woods, Bardolph on the outside with another confronting him—a thickset man with a huge ginger-colored beard, a man Elisha had last seen in the company of the Emperor Charles. Though he looked like any courtier, his form flickered with the shades of the dead, concentrated around the sword he wore, an elegant blade dense with the stain of murder. His hands, too, emitted that swirling darkness, the shades of those he had killed still marking to their killer.

  Against a tree nearby, a slender young man lounged, richly dressed, with pale hair and eyes, his lips set in a prim line. His glance flickered with disdain from Bardolph’s confrontation to the mancers who formed the circle. Each of the mancers carried the echoes of murder, shadows that draped their hands. Inside the circle, a table of stone ran with blood, a crimson corpse upon it, still glistening as, with a wet, tearing sound, the others peeled its skin. Her skin.

  Elisha’s stomach churned, but he knew it was too late.

  “We voted,” offered one of the knife men in a guttural accent.

  “Do not take that tack with me,” Bardolph replied. “Someone had to track the damned barber, that is why I’m late.”

  “You should’ve done the job in England and had him off our back once and for all,” said a thin man, yanking the skin so hard that it tore. For a moment, they all stared at the dangling strip of hide. “Shit.” He laid it carefully on the far side of the slab and worked more carefully over the dead girl’s shoulder.

  “I am sorry about your brother—I’ve said it over and over,” Bardolph went on. “There was really nothing I could have done—”

  “Nothing? You could’ve stayed in England to sort the barber there, couldn’t you? Or gone back to Bruges to wait for him? You’re the one who thought he’d cross the Channel to begin with!”

  “There is no earthly way your brother’s death was my fault. You are only angry you lost the chance to harvest him.” Bardolph smacked the air with his good hand.

  The mancer at the table straightened slowly, towering, his fleshing knife dripping blood. “Don’t you dare say that. He was my brother.”

  “He was a fool,” said the big bearded man amiably. “Don’t complain, we all knew it. We thought he could manage the crucifixion—it was his own mistake tracking blood around that let the barber find his workshop.”

  “No,” said the tall one. “The barber is a Judaizer; he must have known something about the Jew already, or he’d never have been able to get to the vintner’s workshop by contact alone. Even by blood, it isn’t enough.”

  “You have not been listening to me,” said Bardolph, and some of his anger shifted away, his control returning. “The barber has a level of awareness most of you can’t imagine. He can travel the dark road with deaths he hasn’t caused or even shared. Can even your father do that, Conrad?”

  The pale young man, Conrad, stiffened and aimed that fine glare at Bardolph. “There is no one like my father. Even I cannot yet master the way he can manipulate the paths of the dead.” He spoke with a thick, unfamiliar accent.

  A few rays of low sun struck beneath the table, casting long shadows back toward the denser forest, shielding Elisha, shimmering on the trickle of blood that crept across the barren ground between him and the table. A man who could manipulate the paths of the dead: the Valley. He breathed carefully, listening.

  “That is precisely my point,” said Bardolph. “You all persist in the belief that the barber is one of us, that he is simply working on a plan of his own, independent of Rome or Kaffa, and
I tell you he is not. In his position would any one of you have let me live? No. If he’s one of the Chosen, then something is terribly wrong. Look at what happened in London.”

  Rome, Elisha recognized, but what, or where, was Kaffa?

  “Aside from the fact that the queen’s gambit failed, leaving the crown in the hands of the blood heir, we don’t really know what happened in London, do we? That Frenchman Renart was there, but he left too early to tell us much.” The bearded man folded his arms. “We can only guess at how it turned out.”

  “Based upon the fact that Wolfram and Federica never came home, it turned out very badly. Is that not enough for you, Eben?” Bardolph regarded the bearded man.

  “You should have been there to find out!” snarled the tall man, thrusting his knife in Bardolph’s direction.

  “I would’ve been dead, too, and you would never have known about the threat.”

  “One barber,” scoffed the bearded man, Eben. “How much of a threat could he be? I saw him at Trier where Henry got him to run for his life.” He toyed with the hilt of his sword, cold steel gleaming from colder shadows.

  “You were the one who supported the new English candidate to begin with, a queen without royal blood,” said the tall man. “When their prince died, they should have gone for the daughter. Jonathan should have governed his followers better.”

  “You think the English could be ready for Rome if they had to work with a child?” Conrad made a dismissive sound. “Rome will be the culmination of a decade’s planning. Better to leave the English out of it entirely if they haven’t a firm hold on their throne.”

  So the mancers planned something important for Rome, and a Frenchman named Renart was involved. Elisha clung to every scrap of information they spilled.

  “Jonathan intended a regency on her behalf.” Eben sighed and shook his head. “We’re going to miss him the next couple of years. He was a great mind.”

  “He would’ve been a hide worth taking,” Conrad agreed. “My father still speaks of him.”

  “See? The barber didn’t even harvest him,” Bardolph pointed out. “He is not like us. Besides, the new queen was a magus, a powerful one, and one willing to partner with us. We will be stronger if we maintain our connection with the other magi.”

  Back in England, before Brigit’s arrival, Bardolph had spoken this way, of bonds with the magi. Perhaps those at the Unicorn were, indeed, working with the mancers, just as Brigit had been.

  “There’s only one of them you want to connect with,” said the tall man, giving a thrust of his hips that made his meaning clear.

  Eben opened his hands, a crackle of darkness stretching between them that cut short the other’s irritation. “A magi queen, who is already with child? Bardolph is right about that much at least: For our purposes, she’s perfect—we just need to get her back.”

  “Agreed, but you’re not going to find her by standing around here bickering.” A man at the feet of the corpse straightened his spine, groaning. “I’d like to get this done and get on home, right? You’ll argue ’til Rome at this rate. I’m sick of hearing it, and my wife’s waiting for me.”

  “Your man makes a good point. I have an important meeting in the morning.” Conrad inclined his head with the grace of one who expects others to bow to him.

  Eben met his nod evenly, not bowing a single inch more. “You’re sure you do not wish to join in?”

  “I wish I could, but my father would know it. He finds this sort of thing unbearably vulgar.” Conrad made an elegant turn, the Valley sliding open like a lady’s bed curtain, to welcome him inside.

  “Are all the Italians so insufferable?” said the tall man. “Maybe I’m glad they don’t join.”

  “They hardly need to work toward Rome—Conrad’s father already owns it,” said Eben. “Pity he lacks his father’s sensitivity, though. We could use a few more like that.”

  “Help me roll her,” said a woman who stood on the other side. She and the tall man took hold of the body, then the woman hesitated, frowning, shifting her grip. “None of you has got a new talisman, have you?”

  Elisha’s hand, steadying him against the ground, shivered with a touch of Death. Blood seeped around his fingers. Blood that had run in slow rivulets from the altar and now linked him with every mancer at the table. He glanced up and the woman met his gaze with a cry of surprise.

  Chapter 10

  Elisha sprang up, bowling over Bardolph so that the mancer’s head thunked against a tree. Elisha seized the cold power that flowed around him, his left eye clearly seeing the shadow that dripped from the murderers’ hands and clung about their arms. With the strength of the Valley still bound against his living flesh, Elisha forced the contact. The mancers screamed, the woman spinning, wiping her arms where the dead girl’s blood withered her skin. Her fingers writhed, rotted and tumbled away, the pallor of her fear swiftly overtaken by the gray of ancient skin. The three knifemen with her likewise howled their agony, two twisting and dancing, desperate to strip the stain from their arms before it carried their deaths too deep. The third man lunged away from the table and spun, launching his bloodied knife.

  The blade arced through the air, following the paths of blood, diverting Elisha’s focus to the weapon itself. He reached through the blood to contact the blade, slowing it enough to dodge and knock it from the air. Before they could recover, Elisha stamped on the knife, pinning it down. From the Valley, Elisha conjured Death, his fell hound, to rend the mancers soul from body. For a moment, their lives held out—long enough for one to seize a wineskin and sluice the blood away, but the others, perhaps not recognizing the threat, reacted too slowly, and Death raced through them, stopping their hearts.

  Three voices cut short, one mancer flung across the dead girl’s body as if, at the last moment, he begged for her forgiveness.

  The fourth man backed away from the table, shaking the dregs from the wineskin over his arms. He stared at Elisha, his thin lips parting to a triumphant grin.

  Bardolph shifted, scrambling up—but Elisha had already gone, snatching himself through the Valley as Morag used to do. For that moment of his absence, he imagined their relief and confusion—just as he had felt the first night he knew this was possible—and the howls of the dead voices became chants of excitement, urging him on. Brigit, he thought. That touch in the Valley reminded him of her, and now it was as if her voice encouraged him.

  Elisha stepped through the Valley to the far side of the table, caught the man by the shoulder as if to steady him, and sank the ice of death into his heart. The man’s back arched, his breath broken as he collapsed to Elisha’s feet.

  Across the way, Bardolph, a dagger in hand, turned from the place where Elisha had been, darting his glance around. He arrived too late to participate in the kill, and Eben the nobleman abstained, both of them unmarked by blood. Eben gave a single nod, his dark eyes on Elisha’s face.

  Bardolph straightened, dagger extended, his injured arm held close. “Now, Eben—now! Between the two of us, surely,” but his voice quavered.

  “Do you think so,” Eben murmured. “Do you really?” His own hand slipped to his belt, the other snatching Bardolph’s wrist. With a shriek, the Valley tore open, and Eben yanked Bardolph through, but his dark eyes remained steady, calculating, then they were gone.

  Elisha swayed, panting. He stumbled, then reached through the girl’s death to the Valley, searching the howling chaos. For an instant, he sensed the heat of their two lives, then it faded, and he let go, standing alone in the forest, the earth bathed in blood, with the four dead mancers sprawled about the girl they had murdered, the posthumous weapon of her own vengeance. So fast, so many dead.

  Elisha’s heart thundered and his legs shook. He longed to step back to the church, to sink to his knees and ask for absolution—not for killing those who died, but for that thrill he felt when he had done it.

&nbs
p; Spreading his awareness, he knelt by the first mancer. Like the mancers of England, this man carried the skin of his first victim, a tattered thing, aged with use. He also carried a knuckle of the old man whose death had brought Elisha here from the church, and a half-dozen relics of other victims. Elisha did not take the time to know their deaths. Instead, he carefully searched the other three mancers gathering their brutal talismans. He lay them out at the dead girl’s feet, averting his gaze as if she had any modesty remaining. Sorting the relics, he found they shared several victims, an unholy communion that allowed the mancers to gather here through their knowledge of the murders.

  One of the dead mancers claimed Elisha must have had prior knowledge of Simeon, the Jew they crucified, in order to follow the man’s blood to the vintner’s. The only reason to share in such a harvest was to share the power it conferred. The mancers needed to understand the death in order to exploit it. Elisha’s sensitivity combined with his compassion gave him the advantage: He could track these remnants to their matches, even through the lives and deaths of strangers.

  At last, he raised his eyes to the girl’s face. Sometimes, the dead appeared at peace, composed by those who prepared them for burial. Some, like Martin or Biddy, even carried the gleam of hope, their willing sacrifice serving a greater cause. This girl lay on her side, half-flayed, blood dripping from her long, wavy hair. He could touch her, or simply allow her blood to communicate the terror and pain of her last moments, but he could not read enough of her that way to know her name, where she lived or who might search the streets to find their daughter. Would it be better for them to find her, like this, or for her simply to have vanished?

  Eben and Bardolph knew his power, and would guess how he came to be here. If they still carried their talismans of the old man who brought him, they were greater fools than they seemed. Seven pairs of hands took part in that slaying, and three of them were dead—the female mancer must have been linked to the table through some other talisman. Bardolph and Eben would soon warn their compatriots and gather strength against Elisha. Unless he moved against them first.