Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) (34 page)

Someone shouts “No!” from inside the church. The alchemist steps outside and blinks against the sun. “No. Take them to the cellar of my tower. There is only one door and no windows. No chance for them to escape.”

“You filthy bastard!” I lunge toward him but soldiers pull me back and drag me away from the church doors.

“Who are you?” Sir Gerald asks.

“I am Dominic of Norwich, granted this monastery by the earl of Warwick.”

“And why do you wish these men harm?”

“Because you do, your highness. And in these dark times we must bow to the new order of things. I wish to keep the monastery and to be allowed a continuation of my studies. In return, I will serve you however I can.”

“We should have let you burn!” Tristan shouts.

“The monastery belongs to King Brian now,” Gerald says. “You may appeal to him. But in the meantime.” He claps his hands together. “Guards, bind Sir Edward and Sir Tristan and take them into the cellar of the tower.”

We are pushed toward the church. Belisencia tries to follow but two soldiers bar her path. “Tristan!” she shrieks. “
Tristan!
”

King Brian stands in his stirrups and points to Belisencia. “Wait!” The guards stop. “I know that woman.”

All eyes fall upon Belisencia, who wipes at her tears roughly and spits toward King Brian. “You know who I am, but you do not know me. You never have.”

“She’s comely,” says Gerald. “Who is she?”

“She’s—”

“Elizabeth of Lancaster,” Belisencia spits. “Countess of Pembroke. Cousin to King Richard, and sister to Henry of Bolingbroke.”

“Elizabeth of Lancaster?” The thoughts jumble in my head too quickly to make sense of things. “You’re…you’re…”

She looks at me, and more tears fall from her eyes. “Daughter to John of Gaunt. Though I hold little love for him.”

“You’re John of Gaunt’s daughter?” Tristan asks.

“And wife to my cousin, John Hastings,” King Brian adds. “She escaped from his household and has been missing for months. We shall be rewarded for her return.”

“Wife?” Tristan’s voice is sharp as a razor. “You have a husband?”

Belisencia, or Elizabeth, or whoever she is, reaches past the guards and runs a hand along Tristan’s face. “I can explain it. I can explain all of it.”

Sir Gerald laughs. A loud, uninterrupted stream of madness. “This is…this is the best day of my life. I could not have planned it any better. Take them away.”

We are shoved through the church doors. Belisencia shouts after us. “It’s not as it seems! Tristan!
Tristan!
” The boom of the closing church doors cut off her scream. The guards bind our wrists with iron manacles and we are dragged through the dark nave toward the octagonal tower. The alchemist walks ahead of us, holding a set of keys, the jingle of them echoing in the church.

“The peasants were right!” Tristan shouts. “You
are
Satan’s dog! Burning is too good for you!”

“Why?” I shout. “Why betray us?”

The alchemist stops at the beveled archway leading to the tower stairs and looks back at me. “You are fighting men,” he says sadly. “It is beyond your understanding.” He takes a candle from a sconce on the wall and walks down the stairs.

The cellar is a low-ceilinged room. So low-ceilinged that I have to duck as they shove me inside. Tristan does the same. It smells of feces and urine in the room.The alchemist reaches in and lights a torch on the wall beside the doorway. It is a large room despite the low ceiling. The torchlight does not illuminate much of it, so the alchemist steps inside and extends his arm. The candlelight shines on something cylindrical to our left. The smell seems to emanate from there.

“Do you see it?” The alchemist whispers. He slips a dagger into my hands. “Do what you must. Then get to the top.”

An instant later the two guards enter the room. I fumble to hide the dagger beneath my wrists.

One of the guards, a fat man with a tangled beard, covers his nose. “Oi, but that’s a horrid smell!”

“A hermit lived here,” the alchemist replies. “I’m afraid we never cleaned this chamber when we took over the monastery.”

The two guards flip a penny to see which one will stay in the room. The portly one loses and groans; the other laughs and takes position outside the door. As the alchemist departs, he glances to my left one last time. The door creaks shut and the lock clanks true. The portly guard pounds on the door. “It ain’t right leaving me here with this smell!”

The lock clanks again and the door groans open. “What are you thumping about?” the other guard asks.

“It ain’t right, this smell!”

“You lost square. Shut your mouth and do your job.” The door slams shut again and the lock slides into place.

The fat guard waves us away from the door. “You two stand over there, right? Don’t come near me.” He puts the back of his hand to his nose and grimaces. “God’s Thumb, this smell is awful. This is the worst post I’ve ever had.”

It’s about to get worse for him. I flip the dagger so the blade is out and find the man’s throat with my eyes. I have to be quick and cut deep or he will cry out.

An instant before I raise the dagger, something in the room growls deeply. A long, winding, animal growl that echoes in the circular chamber.

Chapter 53

I hide the dagger again and stare into the darkness.

“What the bloody hell was that?” the portly guard asks.

Whatever made the noise is on the opposite end of the room. The three of us huddle against the door and stare into the darkness. Something laughs. A woman’s laugh. Musical. It continues for a long time, growing higher and higher pitched until it becomes a shriek. And when the shriek ends, the echoes throb in the low chamber. Something pants in the darkness.

“Oh Jesus,” the guard says. He bangs on the door behind him. “Oh bloody Christ.”

A woman’s whisper slips from the darkness: “I love you.”

I hear Elizabeth in that voice. It is a knife thrust through my heart. The woman giggles, and there is malevolence in the sound. Evil.

“Who’s there?” the guard calls out. He continues to pound on the door as he speaks.

Another long growl rolls out from the other end of the room. “I will care for you always,” says the woman. More laughter.

The words batter at my conscience. I think of Elizabeth waiting for me in the monastery. Wondering if I would come to save her. And I never did.

I’m sorry, Elizabeth. I’m so sorry
. Mea maxima culpa.

“Eat my fingers. Please. Won’t you eat my fingers?” A thunderous roar nearly knocks us over. The voices and sounds blend into one another. It seems impossible, but the same creature is making all of those sounds. More laughter echoes across the chamber. Scraping footsteps approach us.

“Christ in heaven, it’s coming for us!” shouts the guard.

I have known abject terror many times in my life. But never has the sweat risen on my body so swiftly. Never has the fire of terror burned through my limbs quite so fiercely. I want to pound at the door and scream. But all I do is suck in deep breaths of the damp, dusty air.

The portly guard pounds on the door. “William, open the door! Open the bloody door!”

William calls back from outside, but the door is so thick that I cannot understand what he says; I can only hear his laughter.

“The torch,” Tristan whispers. “Take the torch, you baboon.”

The guard pulls the torch from the sconce and aims it toward the sounds. Something scuttles on all fours through the light and disappears in shadows. Something pale and filthy and skeletal. The three of us jump back at the sight.

The guard swings the torch to one side then the other, creating long, swirling shadows. The light flashes from withered and bleeding eye sockets. No eyes. Just black, scabrous holes like open graves. A face that has lost much of its skin. Wisps of hair like windblown scraps of hay. A shriveled mouth opens and hisses, then the creature is gone.

“It’s a demon,” the guard says. “They got a demon locked up in here.”

But it is not a demon. The torchlight glitters off a chain on the floor. Someone has bound the creature to the wall, and I suddenly understand who this poor soul was.

The guard sconces the torch and draws his dagger. He aims the pommel of the dagger at the door and lifts his fist to pound on the oak. “I ain’t gonna be killed by no demon.”

“No,” I say. I raise the dagger in my bound hands, fight through a twinge of guilt, and plunge it through the back of his neck. “You ain’t.”

He tries to turn but I hold the dagger tightly as he gurgles and spasms.

The woman’s voice rings out from the dark. “I will care for you always.”

More mad laughter.

I lower the dead guard to the floor of the room. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so terribly sorry.”

“What is that thing?” Tristan gestures toward the darkness with his bound hands.

“It’s the alchemist’s failure.” I nod toward the darkness and borrow the alchemist’s words. “The other was not successful.”

I wipe the blade on the guard’s trousers and tuck the dagger into my boot. “Gerald will want his horse seen to,” I say. “Hopefully, he’ll drink something. Maybe eat before he deals with us.” It is wishful thinking. Gerald’s hatred of us will keep us foremost in his mind. While we live, we are an itch in his mind. And I do not think he will wait long to scratch.

I aim the torch toward the left side of the room. The cylindrical object I saw before looks like a well. I step forward and realize with dread what it is.

“God’s Boils,” I say.

“What?” Tristan asks.

“What’s the second most common way for an army to breach a fortification?”

He steps forward and looks. “No, no, no, no, no.” He shakes his head. “I think I’ll let Sir Gerald have me.”

It is a cesspit. The place where all the garderobes in the tower empty into. We must wade through the cesspit and climb a shit-covered, piss-soaked shaft to freedom.

I lower myself down into the cesspit. It is like climbing into a giant intestine. The filth reaches my stomach. A deep swamp of human excrement. I take two steps and gag, then vomit.

“Lovely,” Tristan says. “Shit, piss, and your vomit.”

The creature behind us cackles.

I wipe at my mouth with a sleeve. “Someone finally finds you funny,” I say.

Chains rattle and clink as they go taut again and again. The creature is struggling against its bonds.

I hear Tristan gagging behind me, but I do not have the will to look back and gloat. I reach the stone shaft that leads up to the various floors of the tower and pull myself into it. The shaft is wide enough for me to brace my knees against one wall and my back against the other. Square niches pierce the shaft at intervals, putlock holes used by the builders to support scaffolds. To climb, I simply have to shove with my knees so that my shoulders slide upward along the wall. I then place my bound hands in a putlock hole and pull my knees upward until they are bent again. I am a human inchworm. My shoulders push through the feces as I glide upward, like a plough through a muddy field.

I vomit again as I climb. My eyes water, but still I climb. I hear Tristan pull himself into the shaft.

“I’m…sorry about Belisencia,” I say, trying to think of something other than what we are doing. “I had no idea.”

He does not respond immediately. Only the sounds of our shuffling climb interrupt the silence, the moist scrape of bodies through feces-caked walls. I know now what a turd’s journey through the body feels like. And smells like.

“I’m glad she’s married,” he says. “It’ll be easier to get rid of her.”

Something drips onto my cheek just below my eye. I am not certain if it is liquid or solid, and I do not want to know.

“You don’t mean that,” I say.

The shaft splits at an angle away from me. The alchemist said to get to the top. Of course he did. It is not him climbing through four stories of shit. I continue inching my way up through the main shaft.

“No,” Tristan says. “I don’t mean it.” His sigh echoes in the tunnel. “How could I have gotten involved with her? She’s been nothing but trouble since the start.”

Down below the chain rings over and over, faster and faster, as the creature yanks against it. I brace a foot against the angled shaft and push as hard as I can, until my back begins to rise along the lubricated wall. A thought rises in my head and I chuckle.

“What?” Tristan calls.

“Belisencia,” I say. “She’s John of Gaunt’s fault.”

Tristan chuckles, then laughs, and I laugh with him. Our laughter rings loudly in the tunnel, so we stifle it as best we can. Tristan’s snorts echo.

“I’m sure there’s more to her marriage than we imagine,” I say. I fought for John of Gaunt once, but he became my enemy years later, when his avarice and hunger for power turned him into a monster. He has many children. I have heard of Elizabeth of Lancaster but I know little about her. And even less about John Hastings, who apparently is her husband.

My foot slips in the branching shaft and I have to brace myself with my hands to keep from becoming wedged in the tunnel. “God’s Teeth!”

“If you fall on me with your shit-stained bum and send me into that cesspit below, Edward, I swear our friendship will be over.”

I take hold of a putlock hole and pull with all my strength. “Your loss,” I say. “‘Woe to him that is alone when he falls into the cesspit and has not another to lift him out of the shit.’”

We laugh again, quietly, and for the next two floors our giggles intersperse our groans.

A jingling crack sounds from far below. Then the sound of a dragging chain.

“Edward?”

“Just keep climbing.”

My nose stings with the stench of this place. I wipe at it and manage only to smear feces across my face. Tristan vomits again.

“At least…at least if we are caught again,” Tristan says, “I won’t mind so much being pissed on by Sir Gerald and his new friend.”

We pass a second branching. Two more floors to go. I lean forward and brush at my back, dislodging the mound of tepid shit that has accumulated across my shoulders.