Elisha Magus (31 page)

Elisha kept his awareness tighter. He had strength enough for this without taking on that terrible power. The crossroads was clear toward the city but had some clumps of brush toward the west. It should be safe to emerge there, and not so far that it would tax his strength completely. When he found the roots of those bushes, he would know to rise. In between, the ground would be hard, unturned, and he would need a greater extension of power. He crept forward, his knees and toes pushing against the wood of the coffin, then scraping the small stones, grinding in the dirt. Elisha gritted his teeth and went on, until his battered toes touched the soil, the coffin left behind him. The pressure increased, the weight of earth bearing down on him, and it was a continual process using the contact of every grain of dirt against any surface of his body to push the earth away and behind, allowing it to tumble into the coffin.

His right hand shivered. He inched it forward again, but the cold grew worse, creeping up his hand until his fingers felt numb and cramped. Now his wrist and arm trembled.

Cursing inwardly, Elisha released a bit of his focus, taking his attention from the tiny grains to the cold earth that stretched before him. Something mixed with the dirt here, making it lighter than it should be. Elisha snapped back his hand. His stomach roiled. He felt the earth reaching back toward him, felt the terrible sense of loss, like the fury of the crows, but close, so close. Chanterelle. Now that his focus wavered, he could feel her, all around him, mingled with the earth. Morag had slain her and ground her into the dirt she knew. Every bit of soil, every stone, stung with the taint of her death.

E
lisha’s lungs burned,
tears trapped behind the squeezed lids of his eyes. He kept his jaw clamped shut against the urge to gulp for air—there was none but the tiny pockets trapped between the grains of earth. Not enough. His chest couldn’t expand, his ribs groaned. All around him, the dirt grew dense, pressing in on him. He remembered the comfort Chanterelle used to take from this contact, but all he felt now were the echoes of her terror and the irretrievable union of her flesh with the dirt. Dirt-whore, Morag called her, when she came to answer Elisha’s need. And he had hunted her down.

Elisha could not move forward. Even from here, his skin recoiled, and his hand rebelled against thrusting through her. To continue would be a violation as cruel and sickening as that of the men who drove her to earth to begin with. He tried to retreat, inching backward by digging in his toes, but the way behind was already filled with the earth he had displaced. His body cramped into the smaller space, pulling back from the edge of what he now recognized as another grave. He guessed if he moved aside and tried again, he would find the shreds of her mingled in a circle all around. He might probe deeper and try to go beneath—surely, in only one night, Morag could not have dug too far down. But going down meant doubling his effort for he would have to rise again. His nostrils itched from the effort of breathing. In fact, he itched from the soles of his feet to his battered toes and legs, to his aching sides to the top of his scraped and shaven head. The longer he delayed, the harder it would be to ignore the mounting unpleasantness of the sensations that built up in his flesh. He had to go up, right now, or die in truth only a few feet short of the grave.

Morag wanted him to rise. Elisha squeezed his eyes shut so hard that he saw red now instead of black, a dancing red like the carpet page of a rich manuscript furling with poisonous vines.

How long had he been down here? It felt like ages. Thomas and the rest must be gone by now, the road abandoned to those who knew nothing of what had happened or else could not afford to avoid the place.

Even changing direction was an arduous process, digging his fingers upward and pushing at the earth, turning his body and wrenching his wounded shoulder. He sobbed with the effort, and with the knowledge that he was doing what his enemy wanted, and he had no choice.

But the thought of Morag presented a tantalizing option. Somehow, the mancers could appear and disappear, travelling a secret corridor of Death. Elisha might be able to use it, if he only knew how. It was something to do with using blood to seed the ground, as they had at the arch where Alaric met them, and at the stone where Morag had dragged him from the abbey. It needed preparation then, and what? Death? But Morag did not seem aware of the death already around him, in those mounds of ancient burials. Murder? Did it truly take them to another place, or straight to Hell like the demons that they were? Had Morag shown him Rome, or merely told him that? In spite of the horror they inspired, the mancers did not seem any more supernatural than he himself.

When he touched his old razor, he had triggered the memory of his brother’s last moments. It had been that effortless for Morag the night they met. He had seized Elisha, draped him over a shoulder, and opened a door that didn’t exist. Tentatively, Elisha reached out again toward Chanterelle. He had known her, surely better than the mancer who slew her; if there were a door she could open, would she not open it for him?

His fingers sifted through the soil and the remnants of her. Ash struck like a thorny vine, tearing along his skin with a prickling pain. It surrounded him, scraping at him, entwining about his trembling arm. He aimed his awareness to this end: to bring all the focus he could spare, from the process of keeping back the dirt, into those outstretched fingertips. The cold insinuated itself through contact, but he had little sense of Chanterelle. She was fragmented, her body and self so broken he could not find her center. She surrounded him, pulsing with pain and terror so that his skin crawled, but the sensation was so pervasive he could not bring his awareness to bear upon it. Unlike that connection he briefly shared with his dead brother, this was as thin and dreadful as mist, binding, clinging—not a thing he could push away or avoid without shedding his awareness completely. And if he did that, he was doomed to die beneath the ground. Up, then. Up to face whatever monsters lay in wait.

Elisha steeled himself to thrust in a new direction, and his muscles protested. Already, he weakened from the efforts expended. Dear God. He might come bursting from the earth to collapse at Morag’s feet, ripe for the skinning. And whoever else witnessed his emergence would acknowledge Morag the hero of the scene, killing the fiend that dodged his own death.

His left hand gripped his talismans a little tighter. Thomas’s compassion, Nathaniel’s sacrifice. His tutors among the magi always chided him for failing to build more strength with his talisman, rather than allowing it to resonate with the focus of his power. He practiced now, recreating the braid of strength he had earlier drawn on, but damping the full intensity of the razor. His situation was too precarious for that. The grief alone would overwhelm him.

Armed as best he could be, Elisha moved upward, wriggling and pushing through the earth like a mandrake root being harvested. He wished he could spring forth from the ground with a shriek. Pressure built up within as well as around him. As he moved despite the protest of his twitching muscles and burning lungs, the urgency transformed his progress from escape to confrontation. The sooner he rose, the sooner he would know what threat awaited him; to meet it with his strength or fall before it into nothing.
We are each of us soldiers, fighting our own enemy until we fall and do not rise again.
Mordecai’s words, before Elisha knew who and what he was. At the time, in his arrogance and excitement, Elisha’s reply had been to suggest that he might rise again in a way that none expected. Today, he would be lucky to rise at all.

The earth above grew lighter, the pressure slowly releasing, and Elisha moved more carefully, until his fingertip touched air and he froze, praying it had not been noticed. He mustered his scattered thoughts first on searching the ground around him, reaching for attunement. He could feel no one, but he was not fooled. Morag would be here, whether he waited so well concealed that Elisha could not sense him, or whether he would appear from nothing in a howl of the ravening dead.

Deflection would not alone suffice against an enemy magus who expected him, but it might buy a few minutes for Elisha to understand the situation and find some advantage. He sucked back his senses, projecting his own absence as he wriggled the last few feet and pushed his right arm, then his head free of the earth. Dirt scattered down over his shoulders, and he fought the urge to shake himself—any further sound or disturbance would make the deflection that much more difficult.

The dull light of an overcast afternoon showed him little but the nearby mound that covered his grave. He heaved and shoved against the surface, kicking and finally had his knees on the broken ground. He gulped a breath, reeling in the sudden release.

A familiar acrid odor reached his nose, but it was out of place here, so much so that he did not immediately place it. He started to get his feet under him, and the edges of his tunnel trickled away with a soft rumble.

A slithering rattle followed by the tap of metal. Then he realized that he had smelled smoke, but not from the wood fires that would heat any local houses, and he froze, eyes wide. The air was so dry it hurt his eyes and nose and throat. This unnatural dry felt like Sundrop’s doing, taking the rain from the site of Elisha’s grave. Mud would have made Elisha’s escape all the more difficult. But if Sundrop meant to help him, he must not know about the offended crows, or what had happened to Chanterelle. Sundrop had urged her to flee out of fear she would be discovered by the mancers. Did he now search for her with the touch of his soft rains upon her earth?

When he heard the blast, Elisha first thought of thunder. But the percussive force of something shot past him from the left in a rolling wave of smoke. Instinctively, Elisha threw himself to the ground. A bombardelle. Someone had shot at him. Why not arrows or the sword, something sure to strike, at the very least?

It came from behind, and he scrambled to his hands and knees, peering into the smoke that swirled around him.

Why not an arrow? Because he couldn’t be seen. Until now.

Another rattle of metal on metal, the hiss of flame. Elisha flattened himself, only to draw down a wraith of smoke like a pointing finger over his head. Deflection might fool the eye but not the air. Instead, he sprang up and dodged right. A second shot cracked the air, and Elisha dove away as the lead ball slammed into the dirt where he had emerged. Smoke roiled out, spilling down in the wake of the thunder.

Elisha projected his breath, pushing the smoke briefly away, and caught a glimpse of the bombardier, standing in the open on the ring of earth despoiled by Chanterelle’s ashes, leaning slightly back on one foot as he braced the bottom of the staff where his weapon was mounted. Unhurriedly, he drew something small from a pouch at his side, stuffed it into the mouth of the tube with that rattle of metal as he drew out the slender shaft he used to pack it. A bit of flame flickered at his hand, obscured by smoke into a pale light.

“So, this’s how a death-mage dies: shot full o’ lead on the dirt-whore’s grave.” Morag’s head swung like a hunting hound, scenting his prey. His form shifted slightly, the flame crackled.

Elisha dove as the shot thundered by. He struck hard, his injured shoulder grinding into the dirt, and he bit back a cry. The smoke allowed him to be tracked, but it also made the aiming that much more difficult. A few running steps and he’d be free, beyond the range of the wicked instrument. He floundered up again, panting, then used his breath to make contact, gathering the smoke rather than letting it disperse. He thickened it around him, between himself and Morag, then leapt first left, then right, improvising a dance to confuse the eddies and the ears.

“Hah!” Morag laughed. A rattle, and another shot that punched a brief hole in Elisha’s smoky defense.

No matter, Elisha ran, easily avoiding the direction of the shot. One, two, three, four, steps—and then stuck fast, his sole rooted to the spot so that he wrenched his ankle and fell to his knees, crumpling sideways with a cry. The earth sucked at his foot, wrapping it like a gripping hand that dug in its fingers as he tried to move. It seized him like ice, a burning agony that pulled at every inch of exposed skin. Chanterelle’s ashes awakened to her killer. Morag used his own trick against him, but instead of moving the tainted earth, the ashes marked Elisha heel and hand and dragged him down. He twisted, looking back.

Beyond the turbulence of Elisha’s passage, Morag laughed again. The smoke began to clear from the last shot. Elisha tried to gather it once more, but Morag’s presence shone through like a beacon in a fog. He braced his weapon, stuffed in the shot and slowly drew out the tamping rod, then lifted his head to stare directly at Elisha. He slipped the rod into his belt and raised a wick that sputtered flame.

“You think someone might hear? Somebody might come a’runnin’ to find out what’s on? Not to a witch’s grave at a crossroads. Not to the sight of smoke and the smell of brimstone.” Morag drew a deep sniff, like a lady with a nosegay. “ ’ave no fears about the common folk. They think I’m the Devil come to take you home.”

He chuckled. “Come to think of it, mebbe they’re right.” He touched off the flame with a sound like thunder.