Elisha Magus (32 page)

E
lisha grabbed at
the smoke with all of his strength. He flung his awareness through the writhing space between them and felt the impact of the ball striking through. Contact. He struck back with a ferocious need, but smoke alone was not enough. The ball slipped just a little, streaking through his smoky grasp with a sizzle, burning a furrow down his side. Elisha winced. It saved him for a moment, but it wasn’t enough.

“You’re quick, I’ll grant ye that.” Morag propped the staff to begin his ritual of reloading.

Crouched on the ground, a bare ten yards from his enemy, his foot clamped down, Elisha didn’t feel quick. But Morag took his time, letting the smoke disperse, moving no nearer. He, too, needed contact, and the band of ruined earth gave it to him—enough to keep Elisha in his grip. Elisha groped through the contact, forcing himself to face the thousand piercing grains of Chanterelle’s suffering. Every grain diminished him, striking another tiny blow against his crumbling strength. He panted, pushing as hard as he had under ground, with barely greater results. He could feel the pressure of Morag’s feet upon the dirt, but he could not sense him at all. Just as before, Morag’s presence and absence were one: He had as little character as a stone, and he gave as little hint of what lay inside. Without that, Elisha’s awareness slipped around him, broken into useless eddies like a river pierced by bridges. Rage as he would, he could not strike a man he could not sense. He felt only the iron pressure of those boots that held him, too, upon the ruined ring.

Magic pinned Elisha down, but simple lead could kill him. He recoiled his senses, fleeing the dread of Chanterelle’s destruction. Every gasping breath brought a stinging pain from his latest wound. But if he would not die for Brigit’s use, he would be damned if he died for Morag’s. He reached out again and found the lead ball marked with his blood, burrowed into the earth not far away. He clung tighter to his talismans and borrowed the racing speed of his heart. Quick, Morag had called him. He would see about that.

Morag braced the weapon and brought up his flame. Elisha flung his shot. With every urgency of his being, he sent it home, back to the barrel that launched it.

Steadying the staff, Morag touched off the flame. Elisha’s shot slammed into the hollow core, and the thing exploded with a ferocious blast. Shards of smoking metal flew. One of them slashed Elisha’s face, leaving a burning trail, as he ducked for cover. Across the ring, Morag staggered with the impact, stumbling free of the ruined earth. For a moment, Elisha was free. He scrambled to his feet, limping a few steps beyond the ring, the smoke searing his nostrils and throat as he tried to catch his breath.

With a snarl Morag flung away the broken staff with its smoldering shape of bronze petalled like a flower from Hell. Blood streamed down his face and arm from a dozen rents in his clothing, and one ear dangled. “Oh, barber, ye’ll regret that shot.”

Elisha stumbled as he ran, trying to think of some way to defeat the mancer. He screamed as he unwillingly stopped again, his knees buckling at the terrible sucking at his soles that held him down. His right hand dragged backward, pulled everywhere the tainted earth touched him. Morag had regained his circle. He not only had contact with the dirt, but also intimate knowledge of Chanterelle’s death and desecration. He called out to the dirt with the force of that knowledge, and Elisha was held like a deer at a net, waiting for the hunter, and the hunter came, boots scuffing the ground.

Elisha reached back through that same contact, but he didn’t have the knowledge. For him, it was still too faint and fragmentary.

“I met a woman at your graveside, oh, barber mine. Weeping she was for love of you.” His breath rasped, then bubbled as he coughed. Elisha stilled his struggle, listening.

Morag grabbed his arm, fingers digging in and dragged him, Elisha’s back pressed to Morag’s thighs, the other thick hand clamping Elisha’s jaw. Morag pulled him up, smearing him with blood, squeezing Elisha’s head until his teeth ached, and the mancer stared down from his burned, battered face. “Pay for that, ye will. I had to leave my pretties home, ’cause I was that worried what you might do with ’em. Needn’t’ve worried, eh?” He chuckled in Elisha’s ear, his own dangling against Elisha’s forehead. “You haven’t learned shit since last we met.”

Elisha reached up with his left, flicked open the razor, and snapped it across Morag’s throat, but the mancer turned with the cut, spinning like a dancer, and seized Elisha’s hand, crushing it.

With a fierce lunge, Morag bit down on the razor’s back and tore it free of Elisha’s grip. He spat it aside and flung his captive down, slamming a knee into Elisha’s chest, holding him spread like Christ on the cross. “You can’t beat me,” he spat, and Elisha felt the mancer’s blood, mingled now with Nathaniel’s dried remains. His stomach clenched with nausea. The new wound gaped at the side of Morag’s throat, but too shallow to kill. Why couldn’t his brother have failed so dismally? Failed—and lived.

The mancer bore down on him, and his ribs cracked. He could no longer draw breath. “I tasted your brother’s death,” Morag murmured, his voice gone soft now with something like lust. “Ooh, it tasted good. Steeped in despair.” He licked his lips, lingering on a gash that cut the lower one. His gruesome glee was the first emotion Elisha had felt in him. Hoping to overwhelm Elisha with repulsion, Morag sent him this, making a breach in the utter lack of presence he affected. Morag’s shield had a flaw.

He tasted Nathaniel’s death, but he did not know it. And so, Elisha showed him. He ripped open his memories, his own and the awful vision captured by the razor. He could not vanquish this demon with horror; he didn’t even try. But there was more to dying than that. From the flickering memories of that moment, Elisha chose the thread of guilt, the layers of his own remorse from his doubt of Helena to his silent acceptance of his sentence. He sent Nathaniel’s mistrust, his late action, his realization at what must be done to save his wife, and the moment he was sure both wife and child had died and might have lived if not for him.

Morag shivered, his tongue protruding. He blinked a few times and Elisha felt the rush of unaccustomed emotion, a feeling so foreign to Morag that he had prepared no defense against it. Tears streamed down his captor’s face. Impatiently, Morag shook them away. He shifted his grip, blood flying as he shook his head again, trying to shake off the emotions. His loose ear flapped, but his lips curled now with sorrow rather than hate. Morag stared at Elisha with tear-stained eyes, a mixture of guilt and wonder on his face.

Elisha called Death. He called it quick and sharp from the flecks of his brother’s blood and slipped it like a razor through this fracture in Morag’s defenses. The mancer thought he knew death, but he was wrong. His knowledge was inflicting it, torture, murder, shock, and horror. Pain, to him, was power, but this … he struggled to understand, and Elisha undermined his struggle. Elisha summoned up the howling blast, the cold, the cracked abyss. There was no control as there had been with King Hugh, there was only desperation. Morag’s labored lungs seized, his torn face split as he realized his danger. He thrashed and kicked, but Elisha held on. The two of them rolled, the cold of dying lashing between them until it lanced home through the blackened shard of bronze from the bombardelle that lodged behind the ruined ear. Elisha sought for Morag’s death and found it there. A nudge and the shard drove inward, eager.

Morag’s body convulsed, his eyes flaring, tears drying, then he finally stilled, sagging onto Elisha, pinning him and dribbling brains.

Elisha shoved him away, and vomited. He rested his forehead on his trembling arm. King Hugh’s death seemed so easy now, so distant, thanks to the numbness he had cultivated. Then, he had called on the body’s natural decay, turning the flesh against itself, using his talisman to bring out what was already there—the death inherent in the idea of birth. Alaric’s death was different, true, but it had come in battle, as a king should wish to die. Morag’s death was murder. Personal and ugly.

He gagged, wiped his mouth, and crawled a little further away to the fringe of brush around the milestone where he had planned his emergence as overhead, something cawed.

Slumped against the stone, Elisha groaned, pulling his legs closer, curled into himself. “Take him,” he croaked in answer as another bird circled by. “At least, you can’t tell your mistress I left you with nothing.”

“Sundrop knows she was killed for you.”

Elisha bolted upright and grabbed the stone to steady himself as he turned.

“He couldn’t bear to touch her grave.” The crows’ mistress shuffled toward him. With a bob of her head, she sent on her friends, and he could hear the suck and splat of fresh meat being torn by beaks and talons.

“I’m sorry, Mistress,” he tried again, swaying, but she flapped her hands.

“We’re watching,” she said. “Don’t forget us.” She shut her mouth with a click.

“Never,” he sighed.

She shuffled past, crooning to her black darlings.

Elisha straightened slowly in her wake. The cold still lingered, and he drew it upward, taking it in, reluctantly, as a hunter accepts an ugly whelp: it was not wanted, but it was his. The strength of Morag’s death tangled inside him from every tingling patch of blood and every salted, starry tear. Elisha drew a deeper breath and showed his ribs how to heal. He closed the wound at his shoulder, sealed the furrow of the bombardelle’s shot, and eased the ache of his twisted ankle. With halting steps, he approached the scene. His razor lay on the ground, still open, one patch of the old blade clean where Morag’s lips had pressed. Numbing his hand to the memories, both new and old, Elisha reached out for it and shut the blade. He cast about in the gathering gloom, and finally spread his senses, leery of feeling either Chanterelle’s agony or the gory victory of crows. But he found what he was looking for and pinched it close: the lock of Thomas’s hair.

Now that the battle was done, the smoke clearing, someone would come, and he must be gone. How they would explain the fresh corpse at the crossroads—and how much of it would remain—he did not know.

Enough strength lingered from Morag’s death to sustain his walk, and he cast a deflection to keep him safe, though he was so tired that it hardly seemed worth it to try. Thomas was enthroned, with the support of bishops and barons, and soon he would be wed. Rosalynn would have the prince she deserved, faithful and strong. Elisha lived, in spite of his enemies. Truly, it had been a victory. He wondered how long it would take before he felt it so.

His leaden feet kept moving, his aching lungs yet breathed, and so he found the inn as Mordecai said, and the bundle tucked in the rafters there. The clothes were fine but not too rich; plain linen, new and clean. Elisha breathed in Thomas’s concern. He found the packet of food, but could not consider eating just yet, not with the taste of death still there upon his tongue. A belt curled underneath, with a softly clinking purse and Elisha’s medical pouch. Tucked at its back, he found a new knife, short, sharp, its blade with the swirl of metal that showed the smith had layered it over and again. A Damascene blade worth all the rest, and then some. At the bottom lay a pair of boots more supple than any he had ever owned. When Elisha first met Thomas, they had been nearly equals: two men apart from others and barefoot. For a long moment, Elisha gathered his gifts to him and breathed in his gratitude.

After scrubbing away the last of the dirt at a trough by the back, Elisha dressed carefully in the privacy of the stable and stepped out again, refreshed. Before him stretched the road back to London, past the crossroads that should have been his grave. Beyond the clusters of houses and shops, the highest steeples, towers, and walls of the city stood rosy in the last of the sun’s light. And over the gate, snapping proudly in the wind, waved the pennants of the king.