Elisha Magus (21 page)

T
he 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 allowed. “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.

The cloak flicked out, a thing long at the middle with two dangling straps and a fringe of—Elisha’s stomach burned and twisted. Toes. They were not tatters of cloth but shreds of skin, flattened and strangely shaped, whorled as they had been in life, leathery as they reached out toward Elisha. It was no cloak that had been rolled in imitation of a hump, but a human skin.

The Frenchman. It must be. Elisha had seen his flayed corpse.

Elisha wrapped himself in knowledge, dodging Morag as he remembered all he could of the messenger—how he spoke and acted, how he looked in life, how he felt in death, bleeding out in Elisha’s arms. Elisha forced himself to remember, girding himself with the memories, knowing what to expect. Within his armor, Elisha gathered his power and felt a breath of triumph. Morag thought to use the murdered man against him. This time, he would fail. Elisha almost welcomed the contact, a hint of his old arrogance returning.

Retreating to give himself time, Elisha felt the slap of one long strap—not a strap, a leg, outflung by Morag’s mad capers. Elisha gasped, the armor of his knowledge ripped aside. He staggered as if struck a body blow.

Morag clapped for himself now, a little jig like a drunken man. But the brush of the human skin swept away the last of Elisha’s power, like a river drawing down a stream. Elisha struggled for breath, one hand pressed to his chest. Still pierced. By God, so the hide was not the Frenchman. Who? Not another stranger; the death, the sob of pain that struck him had an echo he should know, one that broke his own strength precisely because his strength had failed him before, when this victim had need of him. Guilt assailed him from within.

The skin was long and pale and pierced with holes that let the moonlight through. Its blond scalp fluttered at the back of Morag’s head, doubling his own hair, its sorry arms pinned at his throat with a spike of bone.

“ ’s better to have ’em fresh and killed by me, but this fellow’s got a whiff of betrayal—” Morag paused, letting one flayed leg dangle over his arm, and sniffed. “—mmm, jus’ ’bout makes up for anyffin’ else!”

Elisha gulped a breath, expecting to scent betrayal in the air. Morag’s hand shot out toward him, the leg still wrapped over it. He seized Elisha’s shirt and dragged him close. They grappled and the skin flapped around them. The touch shivered Elisha’s skin, then struck him. His mouth filled with water. He was plunging under, tossed by a current, then trapped beneath branches. Every flailing attempt to escape brought streaks of pain. One, two, three bolts pierced him, back and lung. He gasped, struggling to free himself from branches, fighting the water, fighting the vision that gripped him. He knew this death! It was not his—then why could he not break free? Instead, it sank him deeper with each gulp of water. It burrowed into him with every touch of the dead man’s skin. May sunshine gleamed overhead through the water that filled him, branches from a broken tree clawing at his face and chest.

As he sank, terror washed over him. His burning lungs strained, cut with the agony of the crossbow shots, the sense of his failing strength, the distant pang of longing for a girl he’d never see again, the astonishment at what he knew, that his trusted master would frame him with treason. His master who stood at his back and shot him, calmly re-loading to shoot again.

Benedict, the physician’s assistant who suspected his master’s treachery. The confrontation left Benedict shot in the river, a note in his belt to incriminate him. Elisha had pulled him free, fighting his death even as he felt it approaching. Helplessness rushed in once more. Elisha could not save him then—any more than he could save himself now.

He sputtered and gasped. In some distant shred of his awareness, Elisha felt the dirt at his back, the stones that scraped him, the weight of the man who pressed upon his chest, forcing contact with the dead man’s hide. Morag the gravedigger must have been responsible for Benedict’s sad remains and stripped the skin before burial. How many more victims did he carry, slung about his body like a peddler’s pack? Who else’s murder would Morag exploit? Elisha tried to cling to these real things, only to be sucked back into the vision, the dying repeated again and again.

Someone shouted. The weight upon him shifted. For a moment, Elisha could see the night sky, no longer overlaid with the river’s run. Even as Elisha tried to push away the contact, his own bandage, leaping to the call of magic not his own, wound free of his wrist just long enough to bind it to the other. Morag rose, leaving him bound. “Son of a whore, Your Majesty—can’t you see I’m busy?”

Not far away, Alaric yelped in pain.

Shadows flitted over Elisha’s head, shadows with flickering blades. His breath burned, his lungs still fighting the battle he’d lost. A tall man with wild hair fought his wobbly opponent backward. A few more steps, and he’d be down.

“Here,” said Morag. “This is the one.” His hand went to his belt and pulled free a hank of hair. It fell in golden waves across his arm, as he held it up to the princes’ gaze.

“Anna!” blurted Alaric, and Thomas froze. His sword arm wavered, he glanced away. For a moment, Elisha saw the blue of his eyes, edged with awful white. He gasped a single breath as if he, too, were drowning.

Thomas dodged in a daze, not near fast enough. Alaric, stumbling, bleeding, still clung to his sword. It slashed from behind, cutting deep at his brother’s thigh.

In an arc of blood, Thomas twisted from the blade, for a moment still arrested by his dead wife’s name.

J
ust too far out of reach,
enemies between them, and Elisha’s breath once more froze upon the air. The wind of dying rippled through the king’s hair. Elisha reached out his bound and trembling hands.

For a moment, Alaric stood over, breathing hard, watching blood stream from his brother’s thigh. “Fitting,” Alaric murmured. Elisha’s medical mind supplied the veins and arteries, the lateral slice.

A spasm passed Thomas’s face, and he dropped to his knees, rocking in pain, groping for the wound. Pressure to the wound, Elisha thought, his voice too weak to speak. He tried to push himself up, but collapsed instead, gulping for breath.

Alaric reached out convulsively and cupped his brother’s cheek. “I didn’t do that, Thomas—you’ve got to understand.” Thomas cried out at the touch, but Alaric did not let him go. “Anna—Alfleda—I didn’t do that. They’d already done it, don’t you see? Before they, before I—” His teeth flashed. “Before our alliance. I wanted you to know, before you—” He swallowed. “I don’t kill women.” A sound fled his lips that might have been laughter, and Alaric gave a little bob of his head. “This was a fair fight—you know that.” His arm trembled as he made Thomas face him, but his brother’s eyes and teeth clenched shut.

“Thomas.” Alaric gave him a little shake, and his brother’s eyes flared open.

Thomas winced in pain, wet his lips, and whispered, “God have mercy on your soul.”

Alaric released him, jerking back, his face gone pale as he hurriedly crossed himself. He stumbled once more to his feet as his brother’s head lolled to one side. “Mercy,” Alaric panted. “I can give you that,” and he raised his sword.

“Naw,” said Morag, and he reached out to stay the blade. “Let him bleed out.” Alaric gave a twitch, a movement of defiance despite the white gleam at his eyes, but Morag snorted. “When you’re done showing the body, I’ll be wanting the skin. The longer the death, the sweeter the skin.” With the chuckle of a friend, Morag slapped Alaric’s back, then he bent to collect the arrows that had struck him and slide them into the back of his belt: taking any trace of his own blood.

Elisha pushed hard and found his feet. Three staggering strides to Alaric’s side. With a casual arm Morag swept him down. The blow stung with a river’s cold and a dizzying pain. Elisha shook it off and tried again, hooking his numb fingers into Alaric’s belt.

With a wince half of pity and half disgust, Alaric gripped Elisha’s hair and bent back his chin. “This one, too?” he asked.

“Thought he’d best me at my own game.” Morag shrugged. “I’ll deal with what’s left of him.” He resumed watching Thomas’s death, greedy eyes watching the short, uneven breaths.

Elisha stared up at Alaric’s face, the sword raised above him, Thomas’s cold blood dripping on Elisha’s lips. He could taste Death rising, his stunned awareness open to the dying prince’s desperate, silent prayers, to the darkness seeping in through the gaping wound, to the dull, slender sense of an earlier pain. With a creeping of his fingers, Elisha’s hands gripped the hilt tucked at Alaric’s side. The assassin’s dagger still wore Thomas’s blood. Blood it had no right to.

Blood contact linked the assassin’s wicked blade to the sword Alaric still bore. Elisha yanked free the dagger, Alaric moved to knock it away. Contact made, affinity stretched Elisha’s blade to match Alaric’s. It shivered in his grip and sprang upward into a princely sword, thrusting up beneath Alaric’s ribcage, growing longer and sharper. Elisha’s numb hands registered the soft severing of intestines, the piercing of the peritoneum, the final muscular thrust as it spiked into his heart.

Alaric’s sword tumbled from his fist as his knees collapsed beneath him, his eyes gone vague. For a moment, Elisha felt the sharp, cold slash as if it cut him as well: Alaric’s death, that shadow that hovered near as he rode, had come upon him. Elisha recoiled, and Alaric’s dead hand slid free from Elisha’s hair, settled briefly on his shoulder, and fluttered to the ground. The trapped sword scraped bone as it slipped from Elisha’s hands.

“Damn you, Barber, you’ve killed our king!” Morag thrust between them, and unstoppered another bottle. Elisha braced himself for another onslaught of blood, but water drenched his face and hands. Washing away Elisha’s latest crime—so he could not use the blood to turn this death to his advantage—if he had been strong enough. Morag hauled him up, his feet dangling, but his fury mingled with a wicked glint. “Those’ll be some fine, fine skins.” He gave a little snort of laughter. “Bleedin’ shame I can’t carry you all and do it proper. They may well ’ave my hide I tell ’em you killed their man. Mebbe let you live long ’nough to tell ’em yourself.”

He tossed Elisha to the ground and kicked his back, forcing him to face the princes. Pulling a short, utilitarian knife from his belt, he lined up Elisha’s hands, pinning his wrists. Then with a strong, efficient plunge, he rammed the knife home through both hands and into the earth below.

Elisha screamed, a raw, broken sound that trailed off to sobs.

Across the gap between them, Thomas’s eyes slid open, unfocused, then shut.

“Not dead yet? Good.” Morag knelt to snap the chain from Alaric’s throat, the dead prince’s head dropping back with a thump. “Can’t take you, lad—not yet. Folks’ll come looking.” He patted Alaric’s shoulder and gave a little sigh. “But him,”—he tipped his head toward Thomas—“nobody knows he’s even close. Nobody but us.”

Elisha stared, for a moment not understanding, as Morag wrapped the chain around Thomas’s thigh, cinching it, stopping the blood. Saving him?

Then Morag reached to the back of his belt for the answer: the half-moon blade already stained with filth except at its gleaming edge. Thomas lay before him, his hands unmoving, his chest giving the slightest shiver of breath. Morag turned and squatted, holding the blade before Elisha’s blurred vision, superimposed over the mancer’s reeking grin. “You killed mine, Barber. Bit a turnabout, eh?” He moved the blade ever so gently down Elisha’s cheek. “Oh, you’ll be sweet. Sweeter than a virgin’s blood, after this.”

The edge drew a frigid line, and Elisha twitched his face away, only to draw a thrust of pain from his impaled hands.

Morag ripped Thomas’s shirt, revealing his chest, barely moving. He straddled the prince’s crotch, crooning to himself as he sketched the carving strokes. Alaric lay nearby, crumpled, his knees bent and eyes staring at the sky. Where were his soldiers? Why didn’t they come? The ground lay stained by strangers’ blood—the mancers must have used it to cast a deflection around the space they claimed, containing the conflict within. How far out did the blood circle extend?

Elisha dragged at his power. He curled around his agony and pushed it aside, his fingers trembling. Could he strike again at Morag with the power they both knew? It evaded him. The mancer set one point of his blade at Thomas’s navel and gave it a careful nudge. The prince twitched. Morag’s rough tourniquet would keep him alive long enough to know what fate he suffered. In the memory of the stranger’s blood, Elisha felt again the terrible ripping as skin was stripped from flesh.

It was not Elisha’s battle, Thomas had said, and he could not fight it alone. Even Mortimer would be welcome. Elisha flung out his awareness into the earth, searching for the circle, the limit of Morag’s magic beyond which Alaric’s soldiers waited for their king.

He gasped in astonishment to find someone reaching back. “
Chanterelle
,” he whispered to the bloodied earth.

“
It hurts
,” she answered, soft and distant. “
Too much
.”

“
Break the circle
,” he sighed. “
Let them in
.”

Thomas gave a whimper as Morag drew the blade up beneath his skin.

Elisha jerked against the knife that held him, clamping his teeth against the pain. But he could not stop the spatter of blood that sent his horror down below.

Chanterelle’s touch, always shy, slipped away, and Elisha cried out in her absence.

Then the earth rumbled. Morag jerked upright, his knife dripping. Elisha dared not look away. He clutched his fingers together and jerked upward with all his strength, trapping his scream. The earth shuddered and roared behind him as Elisha tore the blade from the ground and tried to get his knees under him.

“Fuckin’ dirt whore!” Morag shrieked.

From beyond, a voice called, “Your Majesty?”

With a growl, Morag flung himself away from Thomas and spun on Elisha just as he shook the knife free from the wounds that gaped in his hands. Morag kicked him hard in the gut, seized his arms and dragged him up. Shoving Elisha onto his shoulder, Morag locked him in place with one thick arm. Elisha shook his head, and let the throbbing in his dangling hands revive him. Morag cast about the ground. He took a step toward the standing stones where Thomas and Elisha first lay hidden and planted his feet.

For the first time, Elisha had a sense of the man who held him, a burst of awareness, as Morag ripped open the night. The gap rushed into being around them. This time, with his acute knowledge, his intimate kinship to the dead, the howl separated into voices, the shadows into faces. It screamed with a thousand voices: the tortured and the maimed, the soldiers and the seamen, the women torn by childbirth and their sad, wailing babes.

Unlike his sharp, efficient master, Morag hesitated, pausing to drink it all in. The shades of Benedict and the Frenchman clung to his shoulders, reaching toward Elisha, the man who once tried to help them. The man murdered in the alley held closer to his murderer, and the woman … Anna was faint and yet precise, an artist’s drawing without the paint to bring it color. She was beautiful and terrible, trapped in her final pain.

It took Morag strength to stay there, filling the unnatural door that pushed to be closed. His arm trembled with the effort of holding the opening, as his body quaked with pleasure. He allowed the power of the place to rush through him. He was invigorated, reveling in the presence of so much pain, and just for that moment, his presence laid plain for Elisha’s sight.

Elisha dangled at his back, turning his face from Benedict’s hide. He failed to save the young surgeon, it was true—but not because he didn’t try. With his teeth he pulled free the binding at his wrists. His trembling fingers groped then grabbed the skin and it rose to his call, its arms around the villain’s throat, its death an awful, willing tool. Elisha seized. The skin replied.

Morag cried out, scrabbling for his throat as the dead arms convulsed beneath his chin.

Elisha kicked, and the grip let free. He fell as Morag ripped the hide from his neck, bellowed, turned—and lost the focus that allowed him to open that terrible place. With a slam that resounded in Elisha’s mind, the unnatural passage was gone into darkness and stars. Morag went with it, in spite of his rage.

Elisha rolled away, scraped and battered, and shook himself alert again. Across the dell, a fire roared in the heath where the twin mounds should have stood. Instead, they formed two pits, sucked down into the earth with a fierce strength. But the torches they supported had fallen as well and struck a blaze. Mortimer shouted for the men to rally to him, only to be answered by prayers and terror.

On elbows and knees, his hands clutched together and shaking, the bloody scrap of his cloth talisman trailing, Elisha scrambled back to where Thomas lay, his breath coming in tremors, shaking the line of blood that seeped from Morag’s careful cutting, but he sobbed no more. Gritting his teeth, Elisha pressed his hands over the wound. Waves of dizziness assailed him, the sky wheeling now in darkness, now in stars. He once healed a man of worse than this, setting his hand back to his wrist, calling him home from the edge of death. But then he had the aid of the magi, channeling him their power through the river that they shared. He had to find a way to force the king to heal—and he had nothing, no strength, no spell, no hope. “God help me,” he cried out.

And the wheeling darkness answered with a caw.