Elisha Magus

by E. C. Ambrose

  “No doubt the country shall improve with better leadership—even for those of lesser rank. Serfs. Barbers. Common folk.”

  Morag prowled behind Alaric and back again, emerging from the darkness by Alaric’s shoulder. He tipped up his scruffy chin. “Not a bad idea, yer Majesty, t’bring him in on your side.”

  They were a study in opposites: the prince tall, handsome, clad in riding clothes, but richly so, while his companion was stocky, lumpish, stinking. Elisha wondered if the man were leprous and had some putrefaction concealed beneath his sloppy clothes.

  “He’s already rejected that offer. Really, he leaves me no choice.” Alaric held up his sword, but his glance flicked from Elisha to Morag, as if he couldn’t decide which of them was more worrisome. And Thomas had thought Elisha bargained with the Devil.

  The hunched magus watched him beneath bushy brows, and Elisha felt the fleeting tingle of the man’s awareness extended to him, like the touch of fleas in bedstraw. The brows gave a minute twitch. Somehow, Elisha had reacted to the invisible touch. Morag knew and it surprised him. Morag turned the assassin’s knife in his hands, a trinket too small to deal death to princes.

  “You heard all we said, didn’t you?” Alaric smiled a little, the smile of a conspirator to his mates, resting back on one heel as he slipped his sword back into the scabbard. “I have nothing against you, really. Nothing that a marriage or two won’t settle. We don’t have to trust each other to work well together.” He tipped his head a bit toward Morag, offering an example.

  The invisible touch advanced again, this time so softly it was more of a change of atmosphere, like the opening of a distant door that disturbed the pattern of dust in the air. Elisha willed himself to stillness, to reveal nothing, clamping down on his emotions to be sure not a whisper of his heart could be read by another. His hand tingled, the fingers slightly numb, perhaps due to the binding that supported his sprained wrist.

  “I don’t think he’s listening, Majesty. He’s a bit distracted, eh?”

  “It’s this place,” Elisha said, gesturing toward the mounds that made the darkness more complete. “It’s not the best for conversation. Surely there’s a tavern at Beaulieu with a private room? We could meet on equal ground, without soldiers or hostages.”

  “A good wine would ease my palate,” the prince agreed, but Morag’s furrowed face twisted.

  “Not the best? This place? Why, I’da thought a man like you, a magus full-blown and besotted with the dead would love it!”

  Damn it. The prince might accept his misdirection, but Morag already suspected something. Elisha dropped his defensive skin and unfurled his awareness instead. With sickening clarity, the scene swelled inside his mind, the lurking presence of the dead in the mounds, the sprinkling of pain that echoed on the surface, the looming stones behind him with their terrible juncture: the heat of Thomas’s presence marked by his blood, and the cold weight of the talisman, so close together that their edges blurred, and Elisha might not have known the living man from the sucking distraction of the dead. Pray God that Morag felt the same. Before him, the prince’s cockiness returned. Untrained in the ways of witches, his emotions flickered out around him, eager now to go, hopeful that Elisha would go with him and give him some alternative to his unpleasant allies.

  But from Morag himself, Elisha felt nothing. He could stare straight at the man, could feel the breeze of his passing as he stalked another circuit past Elisha, leaning closer, and feel nothing at all, not even the sense of an object, the way he felt the standing stones at his back. Every muscle in his body tightened, and he forced his hands not to make fists. “You’re a gravedigger—I guess it means more to you than it does to me.”

  “Really.” Morag rocked back. “I heard you were close with Death, like a lover, eh? Didn’t notice it last we met.”

  “Maybe the indivisi should be talking to you.”

  Morag’s laughter echoed around him. “Babies! Their knowledge is shit. Desolati, like the rest. But maybe it takes a baby head for you to get a rise up, eh?”

  The words shot straight to his memory. Morag still had contact with him, despite his own defenses—but how? He tried to shake off the vision, but still he saw his own hands take up the sorry thing, the remains of his brother’s child, and pack the little head in a jar with some vain idea of healing it, bringing it back to life with the mystical Bone of Luz. But neither medicine nor magic could wake the dead. He swallowed, his chin dipping, but forced himself to watch Morag. Cold crept up his numbed fingers, insinuating itself into his flesh as if he held the copper jar, his skin sticking, the horror of its contents seeping into him. Elisha’s stomach clenched, and his ribs felt too tight.

  “No,” he protested, but too quietly, trying to focus long enough to work out what Morag was doing to him, and how.

  Morag watched him, a spectator at a bear pit, eyes alight, thick lips caught in a fascinated smile. Then he held out the little knife toward Alaric. “Hold this for us, Majesty. Your brother’ll wait.” He emphasized the word “brother,” and Elisha shivered, his effort to focus shredding into nothing. In his mind, he opened the door to his brother’s shop, searching, and found blood, pooled in his basin, spattered on the floor, oozing from the dead man’s throat.

  “Nathan,” Elisha whispered, and his knees buckled. Morag caught his arm in a powerful grip, sinking down with him.

  His brother lay dead, a suicide, blond hair tossed over his face, revealing the awful wound. Elisha held him, the body already growing cold, his guilt grown colder still. He steadied himself on the offered arm. The blood, his brother’s life severed, as the child’s had been. If only Elisha hadn’t been so arrogant. If he hadn’t been such a fool as to doubt his brother’s love, if he—Christ, what a waste. His brother’s life, his brother’s blood allowed to drain away. For a moment, the talisman’s power echoed in his chest with the horror of a life cut short. How much more powerful would his brother’s head have been? Elisha gagged, turning away, trying to put off the image. It was not his thought! It never had been. He hated that power, hated the strength it gave him and the injury it made him capable of. And he hated most of all the way it made him feel: that sense as he moved to kill the king that he, Elisha, conquered all. “No,” he whispered, or tried to, but his dry lips did not move.

  Was it not enough that he hated it? That he renounced it at every step? But he could use it, too. Brigit’s face drifted before him, Brigit’s suggestion that this power might be harnessed against evil. What he might do in the name of justice. No witches need burn. No soldiers need die. No princes need hide. Elisha gasped, jerking out of the memory he was forced to imagine—and not a moment too soon. Morag’s face thrust inches from his own, the man’s breath clouding before him, the man’s grip holding him steady. The face broke into silent laughter. “Go on, then, Barber. What else could you do with a dead man’s blood?”

  Morag was leading him, like a dog herding a sheep, merely by suggesting which way to go. The miasma of grief and despair echoed in Elisha’s memories, and all Morag need do was push him a step too far. The cold on Elisha’s arm, where he caught himself as he stumbled in the grass. The cold of Death, and the slick, creeping sensation of another man’s blood damp upon his hand. If he’d been less worried, he would have understood right away: the mancers had spattered the blood of a dead man all over the ground. It marked Elisha now and left him open. Morag kept his insidious contact, the insect-tingle of his awareness smothering Elisha’s skin.

  Elisha summoned up the cold of this stranger’s death and struck back. The blood stung his arm, frost swirling out in tendrils, and he lashed them forward toward the other man’s skin. Their misty breath between them turned to crystals that tinkled to the earth like rain. Morag twitched, but he didn’t let go. His fingers dug in, welcoming the cold, and the frost evaporated back into mist. But the blood showed Elisha more, it shimmered around in his secret senses, marking the ground around the barrow, the area carefully prepared to enable the manc
ers to work their magic and insulate themselves from outsiders. If the stranger’s blood gave him just a hint of death, it also gave him contact.

  Elisha reached out through the earth to the next patch of blood and snatched at it, splashing the dirt away like water beneath Morag’s feet, and he lurched, at first dragging Elisha toward him, then letting go as the earth rocked. Elisha sprang away from him, but Morag scrambled up again, growling. “A pretty trick for a sensitive child.”

  “Look,” Alaric began, but Morag cut him off with a gesture. “Stay back, Majesty.”

  He reached toward his belt, and Elisha tensed, expecting a dagger, not the bottle that Morag pulled free. Again, he found the blood, the resonance around him of this one dead man. It came more easily now that he knew its touch, but it did not respond. No matter how he tried to twist it to his use. Instead, it cried out, as if his reaching awareness were a brand against the body that once contained it. He shied away, the wails of remembered death piercing his hearing from all around him. He wiped his hand against his trousers, trying to free himself from the dizzying shrieks that grew louder with every moment.

  Something splashed across his face and throat. Elisha spun, wiping at his face. He had to find his balance, but the ground now tipped against him, sloshing at every step where it was marked with blood. His hand struck ground, scrabbling among the stones.

  “I don’t need the knife, yer Majesty,” Morag said, his tone as ordinary as ever, “yer brother’s—”

  Before Morag could finish, Elisha launched his assault. Knowledge, Mystery, Affinity—and a handful of stones that flew like arrows.

  Morag howled and danced, slapping down the missiles Elisha flung at him. One arrow streaked across his brow, spattering his face with blood. Another pierced his leg, another stuck into the hump at his back, quivering there like a feathered banner. They had little force without the bow to fire them, but the tips could still draw blood and strengthen Elisha’s magic. Morag whirled, jerking free the shaft in his leg with a roar. “Stupid barber!” He flung up his hand.

  Elisha’s face and throat scorched with pain as the dead stranger’s spattered blood sizzled with power. He screamed, staggering. Horror blazed to life through his skin, through the potency of the blood that marked him. It was not merely cold, but frigid. He could feel the work of Death.

  It started with a lash of fear that built into a frenzy. He was attacked, beset, seized by a stranger in the dark. Strong hands tore his clothes and flung him down. Knives hacked into his arms and legs. He fought back with all his strength, bucking against the knees that bore him down, screaming against the knife that cut out his tongue, then choking on his own blood as he heard an awful ripping. Every inch of his body burned with pain.

  Dimly, Elisha realized this death did not belong to him, but to another. Elisha fought it, but the force of the murder cascaded through him, carried by the victim’s blood, reaching down from his face, covering the mark of the angel’s wing.

  He felt the rough stones of a path that scraped his body. “Help me!” he screamed aloud and gagged on the phantom blood that filled his mouth. He thrashed against the unseen, brutal hands. A blade carved into his belly and something burst. “Please,” he sobbed through ruined lips. “Please,” he begged, and he begged for death.

  Chapter 23

  The horror vanished, like a smothering hand stripped away, and Elisha gasped for breath, coming back to himself with a vengeance. He felt a wave of gratitude, as if his prayer was answered—then realized that, if Morag had released him, it was not kindness but something else that drove him to it. Something had distracted him and forced his attention elsewhere.

  Elisha rolled and scrambled to his knees, but he did not stand before he captured the dark vision that had gripped him. He knew Death, he knew injury inside and out, and he turned the cold upon itself, numbing his own sensitivity, insulating himself from the images the blood had conjured. He knew now how the man had died, and that knowledge was his shield. He worked quickly, plaiting that power with his memory of the icy, awful strength Death brought him. His ears still rang with the screams, and his raw throat recalled their terror.

  Morag lay in a heap, his coat slashed, the arrow Elisha made from a stone fallen back to the earth, and Thomas crouched over him, sword in hand.

  Even as Elisha spotted them in the gloom, Morag snarled, pushing against the earth and shaking himself. Thomas, still tensed from his attack, hefted his sword for a second blow, but it rang as Alaric struck his own against it, forcing him back. Their blades flashed silver in a flurry of blows, then they separated, wary, both in fighting stance.

  Anger and worry over Thomas’s presence warred with gratitude in Elisha’s heart. If the king hadn’t disobeyed when he did, answering Elisha’s desperate call for help, Elisha had no doubt his own body would be left in ribbons, his blood drained for a talisman.

  Morag heaved himself up, and whirled to where Thomas waited the next attack.

  “Here, you bastard,” Elisha whispered, and he sent his touch through the earth, to every patch of blood his art could reach. He sent them leaping from the dead man’s pain. Fountains of earth. The mancer turned back to him with the slow, dread pace of the wolf to its prey.

  Both princes recoiled from the spewing earth, then Thomas lunged forward. He thrust at Morag’s chest. The magus brought up a hand, but Alaric’s blade sang again, barely deflecting his brother’s.

  “Thank you, Morag—I’ll take him.” Alaric’s boyish face twisted into a snarl as he whipped off his cloak and let it flutter to the ground.

  Thomas wasted neither time nor breath. His unkempt hair lashed about him as he dodged the parry and sent a wicked thrust to his brother’s off-side. His grim silence underscored the skill of his attack, but Morag’s turning set loose the torn cloak to foul his blade, and Alaric slipped away left, seeing an opening.

  The duel shifted from the shadow of the stones, leaving Morag revealed in moonlight, suddenly straighter. Elisha faced him, throbbing with the memory of pain. If he could reach his own talisman, he could touch Morag with a blast of death to wither him skin from bone. Instead, he searched the earth around them. The anonymous victim Morag carried in a bottle at his waist had no more power over Elisha, now that Elisha had such intimate knowledge of the man’s murder, but neither could he summon the strength he needed past that particular defense. The first blood, which had marked the ground and touched his hand, lay scattered by the earth, degraded to fragments too small to use.

  The ancient mounds sheltered their own dead, like the bodies he had called up out of the bog. Elisha thought of the shades that had marked his path from the village to this place, separating them now into slivers of cold, the residues of the dead. A fresh death was different, a piercing cold, a thick blackness almost palpable in his hands. These wisps, however, slipped through his awareness like vapor. He breathed them in, the scent of decay, and gathered them strand by strand, erasing the pain.

  “I can feel it, Barber. I can feel you pulling—but there’s nothing you can steal that I haven’t already got.” Morag rolled his shoulders. His hump rippled down, unrolling along his back in a wave of tattered shadow. “Better.” He tipped his head toward the standing stones. “Mebbe I should let you fetch your baby head. That’d make this last a little longer. Little more fun, mebbe. I’ve got some friends, after all. Why not let you?” He pursed his lips as if considering, then shrugged. “Naw.”

  A shock of cold assaulted the stranger’s blood, but Elisha ignored it. He heard the clash of steel and a cry from his left, but forced himself to ignore that, too. Thomas was a swordsman. It was in his hands and those of his distant God.

  Elisha reached back through the contact, reflecting the cold until the blood in Morag’s bottle froze. It slapped against Morag’s leg when he moved, giving a thunk like a bludgeon, then the thong twisted hoary with ice and snapped, dropping the bottle to roll away.

  “If ye had a proper master, ye could be something,” Morag all
owed. “As it is …” He took another step. The night ripped and sealed and he was gone. Elisha spun about, disbelieving.

  “How long have you been in league?” Alaric shouted, dancing out of reach between the stones. “Did he kill the king for you indeed? What a victory if my little lies were true.”

  Thomas panted mist into the night. “Elisha! Where’s Morag?” He stalked forward, but Alaric showed no sign of leaving the protection of the stones, holding his blade before him.

  Gone, Elisha wished, but Morag wouldn’t leave his chosen king unprotected. He did not speak, but searched the dale with all his senses. He could feel Alaric’s men lurking in their perimeter, still too far away, still with no sign of tension. Whatever spell contained the battle, it was—

  Something slammed into Elisha’s back. He fell face first, skidding in the dirt, rolling fast to get up again. A bloody boot kicked hard into his ribs, knocking him flat once more.

  “Sensitive,” Morag sneered. “With Death, they say.” He reached out and the frozen bottle leapt to his hand. He smacked Elisha’s jaw with it, and a ringing rose inside Elisha’s skull.

  Thomas lunged, but Alaric burst from his refuge, slicing his brother’s back as he spun to meet the assault.

  Elisha raised his bloodied hand and shoved Morag, pushing his strength into the contact. The blood scattered on the ground marked Morag as well, and he tumbled as the earth protested and his boots flew from under him. Elisha pounced, reaching, the strands of Death he had been gathering now spread to every fingertip, crackling for company.

  At his feet, Morag bent and wriggled, the movement so bizarre that it caught Elisha off guard. Morag’s fist emerged, not with a weapon, but with a handful of his tattered cloak. He flung it up to snap before Elisha. The echo of Death throbbed, Elisha’s power snatched from his very hand. Morag rose with a twirl that sent eddies of fear into his wake, Elisha’s hoarded strength growing slippery once more.