Emaculum (The Scourge Book 3) (37 page)

Or burn them in.

I force the doubt from my mind and wade into the shallows of the river. The cold water seeps through my armor and trousers. Metal glints among the sedge. The gate. Closed, as I left it. Prior John’s tunnel burrows directly under the willow tree and runs several hundred paces underground. A ladder of iron rungs at the end leads into the prior’s chamber, inside the monastery itself.

I take hold of an iron bar and pull. Flakes of rusted metal grind beneath my gauntlet. The gate squeals loudly and falls with a thud against the tall grasses of the riverbank. A stench of wet, rotting bodies wafts from the tunnel.

“Get in,” I call to the others. “Hurry, before we’re seen.”

The Italians hold crossbows over their heads as they wade into the Lark. Frederico is the first to pass me. I hand him the lantern and speak to him in Italian: “
Lanterna
.”

He gives me a quick nod and climbs into the tunnel. “Lahntern.”

The other Italians follow, several groaning at the stench.

“I hope Brother Phillip is awake,” Tristan says as he passes me.

“I hope he has food.” Morgan clambers into the tunnel and I follow.

The stench reminds me of Richard’s dungeon at Framlingham. The tunnel is wide enough for two men to walk, side by side, shoulders brushing. I push my way past the others and take the lantern from Frederico. The flickering light does little to improve the visibility. There is a suffocating darkness here. My heart races with the memory of the first time Tristan and I entered. Plaguers had found the tunnel. Two dozen at least. We fought our way through them, killing with many blood and shouting hallelujah. We were fools

Dripping water echoes. Lantern light glitters among the flints and stones used to pave the passageway. I take a sloshing step forward, through calf-deep water, then another. A scraping sound rises from the depths of the tunnel. A rat, I imagine. I hope it is not plagued. Lantern light shines upon something pale and slick. A decaying face with no eyes stares sightlessly from the floor, submerged to the cheeks. The first of many bodies. I step past the corpse and walk farther into the tunnel, past skeletons that jut from the water like shipwrecks. I count twenty paces before one of the Italians closes the gate behind us. It shuts with a screech and a thunderous clang that echoes through the darkness.

“
Silenzio
!” I call. “Satan’s toe, can you be any louder?”

“Yes,” a voice calls out. “Oh, yes, I can.”

The voice does not belong to any of the Italians. Nor does it belong to Tristan or Morgan. It is a voice I’d hoped never to hear again. I look back toward the gate, shove Morgan’s head to one side so I can see. It was not an Italian that shut the gate.

A group of men stand outside, silhouetted by the moonlight. I cannot see them clearly, but I do not need to. I know Sir Gerald’s voice too well. We have been trapped like rats. How did he learn of the hidden entrance? My breath catches and a thought as horrible as plague seizes me. Brother Philip would not have opened the trap door to anyone but me. We agreed on a pattern of knocking. And if Gerald had entered the monastery, he would have ambushed me inside the prior’s chamber, where I could not possibly escape.

“Morgan?” Tristan says.

“What?” Morgan hisses.

“I don’t think it was God who gave you those words at the gate.”

“I regret that it won’t be my hand that kills you,” Gerald calls from the tunnel mouth. “But I do appreciate the irony of an evil man being torn to pieces by demons.”

Sloshing footsteps sound ahead of us. I turn and hold my lantern at arm’s length. Plaguers. Their eyes glinting in the lantern. An endless mass of them. Far more than Tristan and I encountered the last time. Far more than twelve of us can handle. Fear seizes my heart, colder than the water about me.

The afflicted snarl and reach for us with rotting limbs. Tristan draws his sword and sighs in his helmet.

“
Inculare tutto
.”

Chapter 45

“One hundred and thirty-two demons,” Gerald shouts. “We let them in, to welcome you. Do you feel welcomed?” His shrill laugh echoes through the tunnel. “Welcome, Edward.
Hell welcomes you
!”

I try to calm my breathing. Gerald and his men could not have entered the monastery. If they had, Elizabeth would be with them. Sir Gerald would not forgo the opportunity to kill her in front of me. They have not been inside. Philip did not let them in, so Gerald let the plaguers into the tunnel out of spite.

The lurching mass of plaguers splash toward us. Their feet churn the water, sounding like a broken water mill. Their groans and shrieks echo madly, like the sounds of a child’s nightmare. Lantern light glitters from the shining bone of a man’s skull, visible through shredded skin. He hisses, a terrible sound in this tunnel, and lunges at me.

They are not to be slaughtered, Edward
.

I kick him backward and he falls against two of his afflicted brethren. All three crash into the water, at the feet of the plaguers behind them.

“Tristan, Morgan, keep them at bay for a moment.” I back away. My hands shake so much that it takes three tries to hang the lantern on a flint stub in the wall. I shove my hand cannon at Morgan.

“Keep them at bay?” Morgan holds the gun crosswise and shoves at the plaguers as they advance again. But there are scores and scores of the afflicted. We will be overrun. Knocked down or pushed back to the entrance, pinned against the gate. We will be crushed, our armor ripped away, our flesh torn from us in strips. I try to calm my breathing.

Someone screams behind us. It is Tarviccio. Again.

“Someone shut that Italian’s bloody—”

The words die on my lips. An arrow juts from the crossbowman’s shoulder blade.

“Death from the front, death from behind!” Gerald shouts. “When I am an old man, I will sit in the sun and smile at the memory of this moment!”

“Tell me that story again, Edward,” Tristan says, grunting. “You had . . . a cannon pointed at him . . .”

The Italians, all save Tarviccio, turn toward the gate and fire, shouting as one: “Death to de harless carrot farmars!”

The Genoese know their work.

Their sudden attack is so swift that only Gerald and the archer next to him sees it coming. The two men leap to the side, and the eight crossbow quarrels rip into the soldiers behind them. The shrieks of Gerald’s men echo in the tunnel.

“Die, Edward!” Gerald’s voice is pitched high and warbling with madness. “
Die, miserable wretch
!”

“Keep holding the plaguers at bay!” I fumble through my shoulder sack.

Morgan groans against the weight of the advancing horde, skids backward a foot. A woman clamps her teeth around his gauntlet and he uses his knee to break her jaw. “
How can we hold a hundred plaguers at bay
?”

“One hundred and thirty-two!” Gerald is beyond madness. He is in a state of rhapsodic fury. His cackling fills the tunnel.

“When we get out of here,” Tristan says, “I’m going to tie him up and laugh at him for hours. I won’t hurt him. Not at first. I’ll just laugh.”

“
If
we get out of here.” Morgan aims his cross at a woman in a filthy dress and she recoils from it. Tristan uses his hand bombard to shove at a plagued soldier whose livery is so muddy I cannot make out the sigil.

“We will get out of here,” I shout, still fumbling in my shoulder sack.

“How?” Morgan screams. “
How
?”

“We’re going to walk forward, into that horde, and the plaguers will protect us from Gerald’s arrows.” I cannot find what I am looking for. Did I lose it? Have I condemned us all?

Tristan and Morgan look back at me, then at each other.

In these times of madness . . .

“And what,” Tristan replies, “will protect us from Gerald’s archers?”

I find a ceramic jar in the shoulder sack and draw it out. “This.”

. . . only magic will save us
.

The Italians work their windlasses, but archers are much faster than crossbowmen. Another arrow slashes into the tunnel. Another Italian cries out.

Tristan and Morgan are shoved back again, and I am forced to retreat. We are less than fifteen paces from Gerald.

“I hope you have a dozen knights in that jar,” Tristan shouts.

“Better than that.” I throw off my gauntlet and strip the wax seal from the jar, glance at the pink ointment inside. “The old magic.”

“What?” Tristan and Morgan say it together, one with hope, the other revulsion. Both of them stumble back as the plaguers press forward.

“
Shoot again
!” I have never heard Gerald shout so loudly. His cries are deafening in the echoing tunnel. “
Keep shooting
!”

I glimpse more archers outside. Moonlight paints the curve of at least three bows bending back. One of the archers makes a choking sound and falls backward. Tarviccio screams again, this time with fury. He lets his crossbow drop to the waters and slumps sideways against the wall.

“Edward!” Tristan bellows. “We can’t hold them back!”

I reach two trembling fingers toward the open jar, but Morgan and Tristan stumble into me and I nearly drop it.

Another Italian shrieks as an arrow finds flesh.

“There are too many!” Morgan calls. “We need more light!”

“I hate this tunnel!” Tristan howls.

I scoop two fingers of paste from the ceramic jar.

“This was worth waiting for!” Gerald screams. “The Lord says good things come to those who wait, and this is surely the greatest thing I have ever witnessed! Are you dying yet, Edward?
Are you dying
?”

The plaguers push against the two hand cannons. Tristan stumbles on a rotting body and falls back on his arse. Plaguers reach for him. He jabs with his sword but one of them, a man with a filthy beard, falls onto him, grabs the bottom edge of his helmet. The plaguer’s beard is so grimy it looks like pudding. I reach forward with my bare fingers, thrust the pink paste at him.

And he recoils, tumbles backward and kicks away from me, into the other plaguers. I thrust the paste closer and he shrieks, lunges again and again against the legs of those behind him. There is a madness of colliding plaguers. Bodies fall. I pull Tristan to his feet. Rub the paste along the flat of his sword blade.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Enchanting your sword,” I reply.

He jabs his blade forward and the plaguers back away from it in a ripple.

“It’s a miracle,” Morgan whispers.

“It’s magic,” Tristan says, grinning. He advances, waving the sword. The afflicted in the first few ranks try to back away farther but there are too many behind them. They are shoved toward Tristan and Morgan, howling and hissing at the sword and cross.

Frederico howls at me. “
Ci stanno uccidendo
!”

Morgan glances at his cross, then at Tristan’s sword. I know what he is thinking. The same thoughts came to me in Rougham, when Alison-with-one-L helped me prepare the paste of fish oil, flour, and some red lichen from the stone circle outside her home.

Morgan thrusts the cross forward. The plaguers thrash and tremble and hurl themselves backward against the wall of their afflicted brothers and sisters.

I reach into the jar and draw out another dollop. One of the plaguers stumbles forward, shoved by someone behind, and knocks into Tristan. He knocks into me and the glob of ointment flies from my finger onto the wall. I growl. There is not enough of the cream for it to be wasted.

I scoop out more of the balm and smear it onto Tristan’s great helm.

“We’re going to push into them,” I shout. “One at a time. Go, Tristan!”

Tristan looks in my direction and manages to express shock and incredulity with a tilt of his helmet.

“Go!” I roar.

He stares at the afflicted mass for a moment, then lunges into them. The plaguers roar and fall to the sides of the tunnel. He takes another step into the crowd.

I smear the paste onto Morgan’s helm and clap his shoulder. He shoves at the plaguers with the staff of my cannon again and they recoil from him.

The crossbowmen unleash another volley at Sir Gerald’s men. One of the Italians lies in the water, face down. Arrows jut from several others.

“Frederico!”

He glances at me, his hands fumbling with his windlass.

I do not have time to explain. I smear the ointment on his face. He slaps at my hands. “
Che cazzo stai facendo
?”

I point a shaking finger toward Tristan, then realize that I cannot see him anymore. He is lost in the crowd of plaguers. Only Morgan remains, shoving at the plaguers with the cannon.“You have to go in there!”

Frederico shrugs violently and attaches the windlass to his crossbow.

“We have to run,” I shout. “Through there.”

He shrugs again and steps into the stirrup of his weapon.

I push him and point deeper into the tunnel. He looks at the plaguers, then at me. I smear paste onto my vambraces and step beside Morgan, thrust my arms forward at the afflicted. They howl and fall away from me.