Elisha Magus

by E. C. Ambrose

  “Should we go after Lady Rosalynn now, Your Majesty?”

  Sucking on his teeth, Alaric considered, then shook his head. “Her behavior’s been so wild of late. The lady I knew would never allow herself to be handled by a commoner, never mind two in one day. After this, I can’t imagine anyone short of her father will listen to her—seems she’d do anything to get a little barbering.”

  Brigit gave an exasperated sigh. “I can’t explain where that attraction came from—he didn’t strike me as so eager for the duke’s favor.”

  Mortimer loomed up then, blood matting the right side of his hair, his nostrils flaring. He nudged Elisha with a boot, pushed him to his back and pinned him firmly beneath his foot, sword extended. “So, Your Majesty, now may I do the deed?”

  “Kill him,” said Alaric, and Brigit began to speak, but he overrode her, “He’ll never trust us again—never.”

  The sword shifted, pressing harder, but another voice interrupted.

  “Now, you don’t want to be doin’ that here, Majesty, begging your pardon and all.” A thick hand patted Mortimer’s sword hilt, then clasped over it, giving it a friendly wiggle that nicked Elisha’s chest.

  “Where did you come from—and who the Devil are you?”

  “Humble gravedigger, Majesty, at your service, all that. But I do know my work.” The lumpish face of the hunchback from Dunbury loomed into view with something like a smile. “Didn’t expect all this to-do. Jest looking for work myself, y’know.” He smacked his lips together. “Plenty of criminals hereabouts. Plenty to keep busy.”

  Mortimer gave a little shake of his head, then glanced at his king, looking for guidance. Alaric, too, started at the man’s approach, but his eyes went round as if the gravedigger frightened him.

  “Now, don’t say nuffin’, Majesty, jest you let old Morag take care of this, eh?”

  Alaric’s brows leapt, his lips parted as if to speak, then he scowled instead, drawing back from the intruder, masking his brief concern in his royal air.

  Elisha felt a whiff of fear. His chest shivered with pain, each gasp pressing the sword into his skin, but this fear was not his own. Was this what Alaric had somehow sensed to startle him like that? It drifted around Elisha, up from the earth perhaps, a sudden sense of watchfulness, of his own insignificance. He wanted someone else to take charge, to make the hard choices and do the dirty things. Elisha, too, shrank from this queer blend of desires, but the chill, at least, felt familiar, and he focused on Morag. Was he real, truly the gravedigger from Dunbury? Or had Elisha’s addled mind imposed Morag’s face upon a stranger?

  Elisha squeezed his eyes shut and popped them open to the same sight.

  “Back ’ere’s a better spot, where they do the sheep for table. Nobody’s like to notice more blood, eh?” The gravedigger leaned down and grabbed Elisha’s upper arm, causing the startled Mortimer to pull back his sword and his foot rather than fall over as Morag lurched into motion, dragging Elisha with him across the grass. “Come on, Majesty.”

  “My lord king, you can’t do this,” Brigit insisted softly. “Some of our friends will be furious.”

  “Then don’t tell them,” Alaric snapped. He hung his hand on his sword, following the gravedigger.

  “As if I would—but they will know. They will find out. If we are to bring our peoples together, we can’t simply flout their wishes like this.”

  “How will they? These are my most loyal men.” He stared at the gravedigger moving ahead of them, Elisha’s view bouncing as he thumped over the grass. “Even that one, it seems.” Alaric nodded at Morag, who gave a sickly grin in reply.

  “Too true, Majesty.” He gave Elisha another yank, and the chill of death seeped up from the dirt through Elisha’s back, the smell of slaughtered sheep filling his skull.

  “Please, Alaric, listen to me. I only wanted to stop him running before you’d finished, don’t you see? We can control him. We can find another way.” Brigit clung to his arm, but he gently set her aside, with a shake of his head.

  “I am sorry, Brigit, truly. When you’re thinking more clearly you’ll understand. If you knew all that I know—” he broke off with a sharp breath. “Go back, find the talisman, whatever you need, darling. You don’t need to watch this.” He rubbed her arms, smiled fondly, kissed her forehead.

  Her troubled, green-eyed glance fell briefly on Elisha, then she stepped away, Ian and Patric falling in with her. If he had voice enough to speak, would he thank her for trying? The gravedigger, Morag, bowed politely as the lady withdrew.

  Then Morag tightened his grip on Elisha and jerked him into Hell.

  The smell of brimstone reminded him of the bombards’ smoke on the battlefield. The world snapped apart, filled with shrieks and terrors, a thousand icy winds tore at Elisha’s clothes and hair, wrapped his throat, and stung the brands of his punishment. For a moment, he felt suspended in a tempest, mad wails whirling about him, streaks of light like shooting stars. His head pulsed with the crazed rhythm. He tried to open his eyes, and found they were already open, garish colors writhing in his sight. His ears throbbed with every sound of human misery, and his throat burned with foul mists. Faceless tormentors trailed pain and pleading across his skin.

  The world blinked back. Elisha reeled as the gravedigger turned about with him. Elisha lay once more on a marble floor, staring up at a church ceiling, but one with enormously high painted arches, red stone and three ranks of galleries. He gaped at it. Hell to Heaven in the space of a breath.

  “Naw, bad idea,” Morag muttered.

  Hell snapped them up and spat them out once more, under trees and a twilight sky. Tall, pollarded oaks that smelled like home, and a bed of acorns that nubbed into his back. The New Forest? Elisha blinked up at the branches.

  Finally, he wet his lips and swallowed past the pain. “What was that?” he breathed.

  “Tossed ’em a smoke bomb and ran like the devil. You’ve been out a little while, friend.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Elisha managed, but he had smelled smoke, hadn’t he? He pushed himself up on his elbows until he could sit, wavering slightly. Then he grabbed the knotted cloth in his teeth and tugged until it came free. He rubbed his aching wrist and re-wrapped it slowly, this time without help.

  “Prob’ly thought you’d gone to Hell for a moment, eh? All in your head.” Morag reached out and gave Elisha’s skull a rap. “When you think you’re dead.”

  He recoiled from the touch. Had he been close to death? He hadn’t had any visions at the hanging tree. Absently, he rubbed his neck. The memory had receded far enough that Elisha felt himself returned fully to the present. Certainly, he had not been quite lucid since Brigit nearly strangled him with a scrap of the same rope. How could she choke the life from him with her magic, then claim they shouldn’t kill him? But then, she had not yet gotten what she wanted, and she would give up no advantage until she had—even the symbol she had made of him to rally the other magi. It wasn’t as if she wanted him free. “Thanks.”

  “Pffff.” The gravedigger tossed off his gratitude with a careless flap of his hand. “We’re not far from where we were—close enough that you’ll have a deal of running afore you leave him behind. And he’s the king and all, so that makes it tricky.”

  Elisha nodded vaguely.

  Morag scratched the stubble under his chin and eyed him sidelong. “Might be, a man had some friends, some with … similar interests, he might get out all right.”

  Recalling the wave of anxiety that came over him when Morag appeared and how, by force of his presence alone, he had pushed away the prince’s men, Elisha said, “You’re a magus.”

  Again, Morag gave a dismissive flop of his hand. “Y’ could say.” He moved surprisingly well for a hunchback, and Elisha wondered if his deformity were some kind of skin condition or growth rather than a problem with the skeleton itself. “Y’did something in that church, eh?”

  “Something,” Elisha agreed. Now that he had returned to his faculties,
he began the process of attunement, letting his awareness creep out into the duff on the forest floor and up to the trees, and over to the strange man who saved him; a man who felt like nothing at all. Elisha glanced at him, to find the sunken eyes staring back.

  “Without no talisman.”

  “A minor one.” He held up his sore wrist with its purple binding. Elisha could see Morag, feel the moisture of his breath, smell the slightly putrid presence, and knew the strength of the arm that had dragged him here—through what means, he could not quite be sure. But with his other senses? Nothing. He felt tempted to touch him again, to see if closer contact might reveal more.

  Morag reached out and flicked the purple cloth at his wrist. “That? Pffff. How d’you get a spell from a thing like that?”

  “Same as any other talisman.” Elisha shrugged. “As I said, a minor one.”

  “You got a fuckin’ earthquake from that?” Morag gave a hoot of disbelief, then he glanced around Elisha, as if expecting to see something else. “No jest?”

  For a moment, Elisha sensed interest, the same kind of questing he had felt when he called upon the power of that other talisman. “I appreciate your help back there, but I really must go.”

  “So the king can lop your head off, and I don’t get nuffing?”

  Elisha rose, a little lopsided with one foot bare and one booted. The ground felt warm. “Can you point me back toward the abbey?”

  The gravedigger shoved himself up, dusting off his sloppy tunic. He grabbed Elisha’s shoulder before he could dodge the reaching hand, and pushed him about. A river gurgled at the edge of the trees. Beyond that, a high stone wall with a steeple poking out. Morag leaned into him and rumbled, “What if I told you it was Rome you saw, not Heaven?”

  Rome was where the Pope should be, far to the east. Weeks away at best. “If Rome is Heaven, then what was Hell?” Elisha twisted away from the hand, not wanting this fellow behind him, especially on a riverbank.

  “Hell’s what you make it—you just ain’t thinkin’ right.” He hooked his thumbs into a belt. “But you’re thinkin’ now, eh?”

  “You took me to Rome and back in an instant? It’s not possible.”

  “Not for most.” That grin returned, smelling of rotten teeth and gapped by those already gone. “You strangle your own strength, playing w’ scraps like that.” Morag pointed to the talisman cloth. “You’ve had more. The kind a power gets a man up in the morning.”

  “I made the earth move with this.”

  The gravedigger bobbed his head side to side. “Gonna tell me you’re happy with that? Bullshit.” Elisha scowled, and Morag let out a guttural chuckle. “I coulda ripped the place down. Like that.” He snapped his fingers, and the gesture flashed in Elisha’s awareness with a sudden leap of cold. “Coulda smashed them soldiers like lice between my nails.” The blunt fingers pinched and the cold snuffed into nothing. “Part of your trouble is just you ain’t workin’ at it. Hardly done any magic, nuffin’ big. Well—one thing big, eh?” Morag reached out and gave his shoulder a friendly slap.

  A different riverside sprang before his eyes, King Hugh trapped there, his face shriveling to dust and his crown rolling away, Death leaping from the shrunken man to Elisha’s hand. And the thrill of power afterward. He tasted again the visceral joy, a rush of strength that flamed through him, when he could have done anything, been anything, and no man had the power to hurt him, ever again. Elisha recoiled from the memory, shaking himself.

  Morag licked his lips and sighed. “Can’t believe you let that one get away.”

  “Get away? I killed him,” Elisha blurted.

  “Wasted. Y’could’ve had so much more. Any idiot can kill somebody.” He hitched his thumb toward the great oak at his back, a stocky stone at its base. “Y’see that? William Rufus took an arrow to the lung right here.” He thudded his fist into his chest and made a grotesque face while his other hand imitated blood squirting from a wound. “You ain’t the only one as killed a king.” Morag leaned his shoulders against the rock, his hump compressing awkwardly. “Wisht I coulda been here then. Wisht I coulda brought yon prince out here. We’d show him what happens to kings, and mebbe he’d show us a little more respect, eh?” Morag settled into the stone like a cat on a hearth, but the hearth was cold with the sense of the dead, stained with blood, probably from the butchering pit in the yard where Morag had snatched him.

  Now, the other magus watched him from slitted eyes. “Saw Hell, did you? Lemme show you again.” He waved his hand in the air, beckoning.

  “I don’t want you to show me anything,” Elisha murmured, but some part of him did, the part that could suck down a man’s death and spin it into power, into armor, into weapons, into whatever his need required.

  When finally he allowed Morag to grip his hand, he focused, intent on what was happening. Again, it happened too quickly, as if without thought, and they passed from the world. This time, Morag held the passage. It howled around them with the thousand voices of the dead—cries of torture, tears of despair, unheard prayers to distant saints. They were not souls, exactly—at least, they had not the sense of presence that a living person embodied. Rather, they were shadows, cast by the dead and captured in their pain.

  But Morag twisted what he heard, and the maelstrom blasted into a sudden wind, the sort that sailors and millers admired. The gravedigger threw back his head and laughed. “Yes!” he shouted. “Yes!” Power flooded through them. Through his grip, all the strength of this vast and dreadful world flowed to Elisha’s hand, strength to break steel. His presence expanded, an awareness so full he could not drink it all, so rich, he could not take in all that he could know. It suffused him from toes to tingling scalp, such medicine that a man might never know sickness. By God, if he could channel that—

  His knees trembled with the rush, and he would have collapsed if not for the grip of Morag’s hand. Unlike the heat of Mordecai’s healing, this grip was solid and void at once, like a physical deflection—the strength of the lashing wind of Death outweighing the slender life of man.

  Outside was rage, horror, pain; inside, Morag kept it at bay. It swirled and eddied through him. Elisha stared at him, brought his every sense to bear upon him, the heightened, extraordinary awareness Morag’s very touch allowed him. The crowds of the dead, flickering like Hell’s inferno, resolved around the misshapen man, casting him in shadows. Four shadows or more stretched and shrank and clung in tatters about him, springing from his hands and shoulders. He touched the howling throng through these, the shades that never left him. They filtered the powerful wind, fluttering. Enslaved, they fed Morag on the pain that shrieked around him.

  Elisha reached back and some of the shades stirred toward him, twin shadows, thinner than the others, that stilled at his presence.

  Morag’s head snapped up, his body tremoring and he let go the door with a reluctant twinge. It slammed in an instant to a thunderous silence, an afterimage dancing in blue against the trees until Elisha could blink it away.

  Elisha sank to his knees, gasping. His heartbeat filled the silence. He wanted to vomit, to purge his stomach until he had forgotten all he saw and heard and felt, forgot the way the shadows reached for him. He wanted to know how it was done—how Morag stepped through this place of horrors all the way to Rome, how to gather the strength of a world, how to spread his awareness through a shifting sea of knowledge.

  Slowly, the chatter of crows, the distant neigh of horses, the calling of a shepherd emerged from the stunning quiet. Elisha quivered and worked to calm his breathing. Slowly, he raised his head.

  “Hell, may be, but I’m the master.” Morag grinned, his grip tightening. “Hell’s all mine. Who needs Heaven?”

  But the strip of cloth cradled his wrist with the pledge of the friend who had given it, and Elisha let that slender strength seep back into his bones. It felt the more slender now that he had felt what Morag possessed, what he offered to share. The gravedigger summoned and dispelled his passage with so lit
tle effort, even Elisha had not sensed it. He might be weakened by Brigit’s spell, but still, Morag’s agility struck him with a terrible awe. Morag’s mysterious talismans drew down a power almost unimaginable, a power that strained his senses to contain it. Elisha thought of all his teachers, of Brigit, Mordecai, Allyson—nothing they ever said or speculated had suggested this.

  Elisha’s little scrap gave him the skill to tame his racing thoughts and seal his emotions back in his own skin. It gave him strength to lift his head and look up into the eyes of the man who would be his master, the man who claimed to master Hell. The necromancer.

  Chapter 18

  Morag stared back at him, his eyes dark and cold beneath his furrowed brow. The hairs on Elisha’s arm tingled as if spiders crept from Morag’s sleeve, but he had sealed his emotions—or thought he had.

  After a long moment, the mancer growled. “Never shoulda got me for this, he shouldn’t. Don’t ye feel it?”

  Elisha bit back the obvious question. Morag searched him, looking for a reflection of his own fascination with the power of the dead. Elisha felt that power. He knew what it might do, and he even longed for the world that might lie open to him if he seized it. But Elisha’s work, his heart, was with the living.

  “Bloody sensitive, my arse.” He jerked Elisha’s arm so that Elisha had to scramble up to alleviate the pain. Then Morag swung him against the stone, leaning over him, reeking breath blowing out in Elisha’s face. “Anybody’s got a baby head in a bottle for a talisman’s got to be one of us, he says. Somebody got to go see, and seeing’s you awready know the fella—” Morag snarled. “Ye didn’t even make that talisman a’purpose, did you?”

  “On purpose? Are you mad?” Then Elisha caught his breath. The necromancer thought Elisha was already one of them. Or he had believed it, until now.