Elisha Magus (17 page)

Then Chanterelle focused on Elisha, her gaze as well as her anger. “But he’s just come from the mancer—and the mancer let him live.”

“Shit,” said Parsley, his presence colder than ever. Elisha glanced back, his memory stirred as the man spoke again. “You said he wasn’t one of them.”

“She said he wasn’t. That doesn’t mean he isn’t,” observed the misty form, the man gray as rain, who moved nearer. “Now that you’ve brought us together, Chanterelle,” he murmured, “you need to go. They have already tried once to kill you. Now that they know you’ve been tracking them, they won’t stop until they have you.”

She gave the misty man a glance almost of pity. “I will not go until you have seen the truth about him.” Returning her focus to Elisha, she said, “You have met the mancer.”

“The necromancer asked me to join him. He—” but what could Elisha say? That he had been tempted? “He plans to kill me later, when he thinks I’m ready. Next time we meet won’t be so easy.”

“A coward, then, if not a mancer.” Parsley shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now he’s failed your test.”

Chanterelle continued to regard him from behind her curtain of hair, and finally spoke again. “He’s not turned mancer,” Chanterelle murmured. “I know their touch.”

“He looked here,” said the voice among the crows. They were clustered on the steps of the church, and a woman moved among them, hunched, old and ugly, clad in black. If ever a witch lived to give rise to the image of sorcery itself, it was she. Crows perched upon her shoulders and hopped along at her feet. “And we saw what he did on the road. Even you, Sundrop.”

The misty figure—Sundrop?— gave a nod, but the cold man rejoined, “He hasn’t got the knowledge, or the sensitivity. He is not one of us.”

“If you haven’t the time, Parsley, you shouldn’t’ve come.”

Elisha bristled to be left out of the conversation. For the moment, listening served him better than questioning. Let their private conflicts reveal them.
Indivisi
. Testing him, to try Chanterelle’s claim. Knowledge and sensitivity.

“He hasn’t been a magus very long,” Chanterelle offered. “He hasn’t learned much.”

He knelt among them, ignorant as a child, despite the fact that she was half his age. Time to grow up—and fast. Parsley was not the only one who had other friends to look out for. Elisha rose to his feet. “The body in the church,” he said. “Who is it?”

They fell silent, aside from the caw of a crow.

“You see?” Parsley, the cold man, folded his arms with a soft clang. “Any mancer’s boy would know that much.”

More, then. There was more for him to know. Elisha forced himself to relax and stretch his awareness. He found the body by the chill he’d felt when he reached out his awareness. Now, he reached up through the earth that gave him contact, however distant. The woman with crows cocked her head at him. Chanterelle slipped aside a fistful of her bedraggled hair to watch. The chill reached back, fitting him like his old, familiar boots. Elisha focused on the corpse they had brought to the church and recognized it. He swallowed past the ache of his throat. “I killed the man. Is that what you wanted?”

Shoving off from his doorframe, Parsley stalked nearer, his eyes glinting in the light. “Is it what you wanted?”

“He was a bandit, attacking an innocent woman. He had to be stopped.” Elisha thought to say more but held back. These people had no claim on him, no need to know his regrets.

“You had a talisman. An evil thing—”

“No,” Elisha said, circling with him, meeting his eyes. “Terrible, yes. Not evil.”

“A baby you killed—not evil?”

The crow woman hissed.

“The baby was dead.” Tension knotted Elisha’s shoulders.

“You did it,” the man insisted.

“I knew it, I didn’t
do
it,” Elisha shot back. Then he straightened. “I
knew
it,” he said again. The signs had been there, yes. Medically speaking, an experienced practitioner would have guessed the child would be stillborn. But Elisha did not need to guess. For a moment, he met Chanterelle’s obscured gaze, and she smiled. Elisha turned from her. Nausea cramped his stomach. That same practitioner might guess it had been too long since he’d eaten, but Elisha’s sickness went deeper than hunger. Could it be true? Could all of his training, all of his trying, have led up to this: that he made himself servant not to a necromancer, but to Death itself?

H
is wrist throbbed with every heartbeat,
and he loosened his grip on the knife. No wonder Morag greeted him as friend, almost as a brother. “I am not with Death.”

“You may not have chosen it,” said Sundrop, the mist-man, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Chanterelle did not choose her other self.” Sundrop gestured toward her, and a spattering of rain fell. She sank down to her knees, hugging herself. In a soft, solemn voice he continued, “There are only so many times a girl can be forced to the floor before she sinks right through.” The dirt that still clung to her body shifted and shivered on her flesh, forming a second skin from her shoulders to her knees.

Crows hopped down around her, tipping their heads, studying her, their mistress following. “Most don’t choose, not at first, my pretties.” She caressed one of the dark birds, and it bobbed up at her.

“Or they wouldn’t choose such stupid things,” Parsley, the cold man, snapped.

Elisha bristled at his harsh tone. The man must have a heart of—“Iron,” Elisha said aloud, leveling his knife at Parsley. “I’m surprised to find you in such company. Aren’t you afraid of rust?”

Sundrop laughed as if storm clouds had broken. “Ignorant, but not a fool. Knowledge, I’ll grant you. Sensitivity, yes—he’s even spoken through raindrops. But I don’t see how a man can be with Death. Even the ’mancers don’t claim that.” A speculative expression made the misty features suddenly acute—a young face, sharp and long-jawed. “Though the ’mancers might well wish to claim you.”

“Why do you?”

“We don’t.” The iron-magus flicked Elisha’s blade with a finger, bending it as if it were straw.

Sundrop splashed Parsley’s hand and he cursed, snaking back his arm. Tiny pits of red showed against his skin as he wiped away the water, glaring. “If the magi are a race apart, we are apart from even them,” Sundrop explained. “When Chanterelle suggested you might be one of us … well, some of us were curious.” His gestures, graceful and gray, took in his companions. “Some of us were furious. Mancers are no man’s friend. But a magus who walked with Death could be friend or foe—who could know?”

“How would I tell?” Elisha pressed. “How, if this were true?”

“How could it be?” Parsley the iron-man grated. “How can a man know death who hasn’t died and lived again?”

Elisha’s hand rose to the scar at his throat.

Sundrop’s eyelids fluttered shut, and he stretched out his hands. “There’s a drought in the chalk—they could use me now, but I’d have to go closer. Drought,” he repeated softly, with a subtle shift in posture. Elisha’s eyes grew suddenly dry, and he coughed, the moisture drawn away, the mist sucked down toward Sundrop until Elisha couldn’t swallow for the dryness of his mouth.

“Squalls along the channel,” Sundrop continued. “Bad for shipping. And here,”—the fingers of his left-hand stirred—“in London, now, it’s raining so gentle. Ah. Harder now. I can’t quite reach that far … The storm will move this way. Already, it’s raining harder, yes. Oh, yes.” His fist clenched, and his body tremored as he panted, reaching for that distant rain. “Can you feel it, too, Chantie?”

Awareness could not spread so far, or could it? Could he feel the rain approaching from London? Elisha was starting to see why the magi claimed the
indivisi
were mad. The man before him writhed in ecstasy at the touch of a distant rain. The gathered moisture clouded over his head, then clothed him in a tiny, private storm, releasing the damp into the air around them as its master drank it in and groaned with pleasure, swaying his arms to let it sprinkle to the earth all around him, like a dance without music.

The iron-mage gave a snort of disgust, closing his fist with an audible clang. “The earth of this square contains fifty-eight links of mail, the fittings of a harness, including the horse’s bit, a sword-hilt, broken, and seventeen nails.” He did not close his eyes. “I feel strong steel and shod horses. We don’t have much time.”

“Twenty-one,” whispered Chanterelle, staring at him. “Nails,” she clarified.

Parsley glowered. “Don’t make me summon them up for counting.”

“You can’t,” she said. “The other ones are copper.” She spread her fingers into the earth, the packed dirt accepting her as he stared her down.

“It’s a blessing,” the old woman cackled. “A blessing to know! A blessing to see with so many eyes, to hear, to ride the winds of near and far!” She thrust up her arms, and the flock of crows exploded upwards, flapping around her.

“All these years,” the iron-magus sighed, “and you still can’t fly.”

The woman croaked and drew back her head, shoulders humped.

A blessing that held its own curse. The iron-magus must hide from the rain. The earth’s lover could be trapped by a fire set in her other flesh.

And Elisha? Did he truly know more of death than any other man? He had found the body, true enough, but it was fresh and personal. He called on Death only when he held the talisman—and that jar was a universal, a talisman so strong that any fool could use it to amplify magic, if not to such terrible ends. As Morag observed, he hadn’t even created it a talisman on purpose. Could he sense a death approaching, the way that Sundrop knew a storm, or feel the deaths already present, like the iron-magus counting nails? Could it be his servant like the woman and her crows? Or would it, like the earth, devour him?

“You try too hard,” Chanterelle said, coming nearer, moving as easily through the earth as he through the air. “You doubt and you deny and so you struggle.”

Elisha glanced at the others and back to her. He needed to find Thomas, but he needed this, too, to be sure what he was and to know what he must do. Once more, he knelt before her, listening to her small voice. “Show me,” he breathed.

She took his hand, a cool, gritty touch, and turned it, placing his palm upon the ground. “
You didn’t kill the baby,
” she sighed into him, “
You knew its death. Knew it. What else do you know?
”

During his first lesson, under Brigit’s care, she had asked him something similar: to catalog what he knew about the things he would transform, seeds and eggs. Now, he attuned himself to the young woman before him, growing aware of her stillness, her investment in the earth around them, the peculiar glinting quality of her eyes. Never again would he fail to recognize her presence or need to bring up corpses because he could not find her among them. She shared no emotion, he asked for none. They were together in a most intimate way, fully present, utterly without passion.

Then she sank into the earth, letting it flow up around her, inviting it closer, luxuriating in its touch as another woman might love furs. Her hand remained above the ground, still capturing his, her hair spread upon the earth like the fine roots of mushrooms. He felt the earth as never before, the layers of it, the richness of dead leaves mixed in and the questing strength of roots. Worms devoured the grains, making tiny spaces where air filtered in. Chanterelle tugged at his awareness through their contact, like a child pointing out fishes beneath a quiet pond, she showed him the chainmail, the scraps, the nails—both iron and copper—and shared the tang of them upon the skin, as if he touched them with his tongue. She found a squirrel’s den with the warm little creature startled, then soothed by her touch. And there, a forgotten crop of turnips. Withdrawing to her center for a moment, Chanterelle murmured, “
It’s everything I need.
”

He thought of the burning peat that trapped her with the pain and the dead, but she pushed back the image. “
The mancers changed my skill when they tried to trap me, they perverted it, made it wicked. Like yours, when you kill.
”

“How can Death be anything but wicked?”

A spasm of sadness and worry flickered through her, and was gone. “
I thought you’d know.”

He sensed the presences above them—no, around them—but any magus could sense a living presence: it proved nothing. He looked further. What did he know? He knew the strength of his hands and the medical skill that resided in him. He knew how to set bone and when to cut it off instead. He knew his brother’s baby was already dead. The talisman must be here, somewhere close. He knew Brigit and how she had marked it with her blood. Death, and blood that hinted at the death inherent in every life. A body lay in the broken church, and the crow-woman let her friends pluck out its eyes. Elisha’s hand clenched with the memory of killing, gripping the handle of the now-useless knife he’d used to murder. Chanterelle’s presence unfurled through the earth around him, kept him steady and warm, like an incubating seed. When he had sought her in the burning bog, she was not all he found. He had sensed the presence of the ancient dead, and in his panic, he could not discern between those corpses and the living woman. And she had seen them. No wonder she believed.

A little graveyard stood behind the tithing barn. Eight, ten, twenty-seven dead. Chanterelle’s encouragement sprang through her touch. Others were buried here and there beyond the houses. As Chanterelle had shown him, he spread his awareness in all directions, moving from each discovery to the next. He ignored the presence of all the animals living and dead, their slight chills easy to pass over. Shod horses and fine steel, the iron-mage claimed, and Elisha found them now, riding through the dark with a familiar presence at their head. It took a moment to sense the tension, the excitement, the strength and fickleness in that peculiar combination that was Prince Alaric. How far were they? Elisha started to track the distance between, but a sense of cold whispered through his senses. Alaric rode with a small guard, and Death rode with them. Elisha caught his breath, but he felt Chanterelle’s triumph.
“You know it comes,”
she said.

“But I don’t know who or how or when!”
This half-knowledge galled him. He reached again, this time feeling the strain. Instead of growing stronger, the chill evaporated into nothing, as if he knew nothing. Angry, he snapped back his awareness, sending it scurrying behind, only to be jolted by a new presence, one he knew right away: Brigit. Was she coming out to meet her love? No, she came alone, on foot. She came for the talisman he had not found, probably sneaking out of the abbey now that Alaric had gone. Damn it!

Elisha shook himself, nearly breaking contact with Chanterelle. She shouldered upward, the earth moving aside until she sat upon the ground before him. Crows scattered from the fresh corpse in the church as their mistress flung wide her arms.

“Soldiers, aye,” the crow-mage muttered. “Battle for us, my sweets, hmm?” Her body swayed, her arms lifting, straining for flight, then she swiveled her head and caught Elisha’s gaze. “We like you, my flock and I. Where you go, Death is never far behind.” She grinned, the gaps between her teeth as dark as crow’s eyes.

“He can feel Death’s approach,” Chanterelle murmured aloud, and the iron-mage snorted again.

“You can’t claim that,” he said, “not until somebody dies. Not until he fingers the dead man before he’s even bleeding.” He held up his own hand, steady as a rod. “I can feel Death, too, when it’s dripping down my hands.”

From where he knelt, Elisha suddenly placed the voice, the single curse repeated twice as an assassin slew the Frenchman—with a weapon like a glove of knives. The cold man stared back, snicking his fingers together and folding his hands beneath his arms.

A crow swept suddenly back from the path with a sharp cry and dropped to the mage’s shoulder. “Somebody’s coming,” she said and hustled away, snatching up handfuls of the black rags that flailed around her legs as she scurried into the woods.

Sundrop seemed to fade, his outline misty once again. “Welcome,” he said, then, “We’ll meet again.” He gave a little bow and strolled away leaving the scent of rain.

The iron-mage stayed a moment longer, turning his stance to aim the hardness of his hands down the path. “Shall I, Barber? Do you feel it now?” He was laughing as he retreated, leaving Elisha and Chanterelle alone, crouched on the ground in the flickering light.

“Thank you,” Elisha breathed, although his knowledge felt a bitter gift.

“Power’s never bad. If you’ve got it, and they don’t.” She smiled, but her eyes were hard. She tipped her head toward the silent church and the silent corpse within. With a gritty hand, she gripped his arm.

Images shot into him and he gasped. An inn and a barn with a hard dirt floor, a father too cruel, men who paid their money and thrust her down. “
Thank me, yes, oh master of Death. I wanted you to go to my father’s home, to kill for me as you killed for Rosalynn. I can see now you never will.
”

Her touch throbbed as if her heart were broken all over again. She sank into the ground before him and rippled away through the earth and his awareness until she dove deep and was gone. Elisha sat back on his heels, stunned. For a moment, he wished she had stayed to talk—but he had no idea what he might have said. She had seemed the only reasonable one among the
indivisi
, but even she had her own motives. Each of them had come to their power through pain, and he had barely begun to imagine what his might mean.