"Wizards are used to strange experiences," I said encouragingly.
"It was late at night, and I'd been in bed, so at first I thought it must be a dream, except that my bathrobe was all damp from the rain, so I knew it couldn't be a dream."
"Go on," I urged her when she seemed to be stopping.
"As I say, I was lying in bed. And then I heard his voice, almost inside my brain. He was calling me. You reminded me of it, that time you spoke inside my brain with the telephones. He told me to come stand at the base of the north tower, and so I put on my bathrobe and I did."
"But the door was locked," I provided.
"That's when the second strange thing happened," she said. "I started rising into the air. At first I was terribly frightened, but then I decided it was only a dream and that I should enjoy it. When I got up to the top, I was able to look in the window and see my man in there. He'd been shrunk back down, and he was caught in the star."
"So what did you do?"
"I kicked out the glass in the window—I'd put on my riding boots when I left my room, because of the rain."
So much, I thought, for the magic locks on the casement latches.
"And I went inside and talked to him. There was one little flow of rain water that had cut across the chalk lines, but he said he needed me to rub it all out so he could help me again. So I did, and then, maybe he put me to sleep, but the next thing I remember it was morning and I was back in my own bed. That's why I thought it was a dream at first."
"You've only had the one magic man here in the castle, haven't you?" I said as casually as I could.
"Well, yes." There was something in the way she said it that made me break out all over in a cold sweat.
"You didn't send for any others who might be able to find some extra years for you?"
"Well, I tried, early this fall," she said, looking at me accusingly. "At first when I freed him from the star everything seemed fine, but then it seemed he couldn't make me young anymore. You'd promised to teach me magic spells, so I'd hoped I wouldn't have to rely on that man—and, frankly, sometimes he made me feel a little, well, funny. But then you just gave me all that grammar. That's why I decided I would have to call on a different magic man."
"And did you?" I managed to croak, even though my tongue felt paralyzed. If there were two—or even more—demons in Yurt, we were all moving to the City and never going back.
"No," she said, with the tears of frustration at the edge of her eyes. "I tried, but it's been three years since I said the spell, and I could only get part way through it."
I said the best prayer of thanksgiving that I knew.
But there was something else, even more important, that she probably did not know and which I myself had only just admitted. Sweet, silly, pretty Lady Maria, sitting comfortably in her chair by the fire, wearing the white silk shawl I had given her for Christmas, had sold her soul to the devil.
It felt like the middle of the night, though I knew it was much earlier, as I staggered from the Lady Maria's chambers toward my own. If she had died in her fall this afternoon, if we all had died in the dragon's attack, she would have gone straight to hell. If the dragon had destroyed Yurt, probably some of the rest of us would have joined her in hell, including me for all I knew, but for her there could be no doubt.
In my room, with the fire blazing, I pulled out the Diplomatica Diabolica with nerveless fingers. As I read, the duchess's castle grew silent around me. The only sounds were the crackling of the fire and my own heartbeat, which grew louder and louder in my ears as night wore on. As the first morning light came in the window, I closed the book and tried to stretch the knots from my shoulders. I knew what I had to do and just hoped I knew how to do it.
IV
I swung the door of the chaplains' room open with a bang. The duchess's chaplain, whose room this actually was, had been on the point of opening it from the inside, and he jumped back, startled.
"Excuse me," I said, as calmly as I could. He went past me with a concerned look and hurried down the corridor.
The royal chaplain, Joachim, reached down to pick up his Bible, which he had dropped at my abrupt entry. The remains of the priests' breakfasts were on the table, and he had been reading after service.
"There's a demon in the cellars of Yurt," I said.
"Dear God," he said without any expression at all.
"I'm going back to negotiate with it, to persuade it to return to hell. But in return it's going to demand a human life. Now you and I have to decide who we'd be happiest to sacrifice. The young count? One of the ladies? Would anyone ever miss Dominic?"
He rose, shaking his head. "You really frightened me there for a minute. I think you'd joke if your immortal soul was in danger."
"I think it is."
At this point reaction set in, and I collapsed on his bed, trembling so hard from fear and exhaustion that I was nearly blind.
Joachim kicked the door shut and knelt beside me. "You mean it, don't you," he said quietly. "There really is a demon in the cellars of Yurt."
"And it's got the Lady Maria's soul." I heard his sharply indrawn breath and with difficulty opened one eye to look up into his own blazing black eyes. I told him the story in a few halting sentences.
"I think I'll be able to negotiate for her soul, because she never intended to sell it. She has in fact done so, in return for a few years of youth and a chance to see a dragon, but because her intention was never evil I have a bargaining loophole. But somebody will have to die."
Joachim rose purposefully. "Don't go away!" I called weakly. "Hold my hands."
He returned at once. Though it would have been far better to have the queen holding my hands, I was very glad for the human contact.
"So when will this person have to die?" he asked quietly.
"Right away. Immediately. As soon as I've completed the negotiations."
"It should take me no more than a few minutes to prepare to go."
I managed to struggle to a sitting position. "Not you! It's going to have to be me. You can pray for my soul, but the saints would never listen if I tried to pray for yours."
"But I can't let you do it."
"Please don't argue," I said, blinking and feeling ashamed of my fear when he was so calm. "If you give up your life, who will minister to the people of Yurt? Since you've taken responsibility for my soul, you have to be alive to pray for it."
He said nothing, which I hoped meant he agreed. "I read the whole Diplomatica Diabolica," I said, "and I think I know how to do all the negotiations. But just in case I can't, and the demon kills me but refuses to go back to hell, you'll have to be here to stop it. The demon's already afraid of you. Beg the old wizard for his help. He caught the demon once, even though it was much weaker then. Send a message to the wizards' school in the City. They might be willing to assist you, since with me dead you'd have no qualified wizard here trained in the modern methods."
"This all sounds as though it would be better to have a live wizard and a dead priest."
"Please, don't think I'm insulting your abilities. Call for the bishop instead of the Master of the wizards' school if you want. But my life will be the life it will want."
Neither of us said anything for several minutes. "It seems so silly, in a way," I said. "When I was young, back before I became a wizard, I always thought it would be romantic to die for the woman I loved. Now I'm going to have to die for the Lady Maria."
"Christ died for all of us, most of whom have much worse sins than folly and vanity."
"Yes, but I'm not Christ."
"I'd already noticed that." Maybe, I thought, my dying would at last give the chaplain a sense of humor.
"There's something I have to ask you. I must go soon, very soon, because the Lady Maria has insisted she's going to go riding again, and the young count is going to lead the knights back to Yurt, and all of them will be in horrible danger. But you have to tell me. I shall offer the demon a life for Maria's soul, not another soul. But when i
t kills me, will it take my soul as well?"
"I don't think so," said Joachim slowly, and much more hesitantly than I would have wished. "Usually, if a person disinterestedly gives his life to save another, his soul is saved. But in this particular case, I would have to ask the bishop. I could send him a message by the pigeons."
"There's not enough time. I'll just have to risk it."
We sat in silence for several minutes more. I kept hoping that if I waited I would either start feeling brave or think of an alternate plan. "It's probably too late for proper spiritual instruction now," I said with an attempt at a smile. "I just wish I wasn't so scared."
"Courage is doing what you have to do, no matter how frightened you are."
"Even I know that. But I still wish I wasn't so scared."
Outside the chaplains' window, we could hear voices and clattering as the castle began to go about the day's business. I waited for but did not yet hear the sound of a mounted party preparing to head out.
"I suspected you of evil once," I said. "Will you forgive me?"
"Yes, of course. I suspected you of evil more than once. Please forgive me as well."
I stood up at last. "I have to go now. I'll leave it to your judgment what to tell the others. Just please don't let the Lady Maria know I had to die because of her; it would upset her too much. But do try to warn her against future experiments with pentagrams. Let Zahlfast, he's the teacher at the wizards' school I told you about, hear the whole story, whatever happens. And tell the queen I love her."
"I'm going with you," said Joachim, suddenly and intensely.
"You can't. It's thirty miles, and it would take you most of the day on horseback. I can make it flying in half an hour."
"But I could—"
There was a sharp rap on the door, causing us both to jump. It swung open, and Gwen came in for the chaplains' breakfast tray.
"I'm so sorry," she said, "but with everything so different in this castle, I lost track. I should have gotten it an hour ago."
"It's all right," Joachim said gently. She hurried away, closing the door behind her.
The interruption made me realize that the precious moments were draining away. I tried taking deep breaths. "Goodbye," I said. "I have no right to imperil anyone except myself. Pray for me."
Joachim was about to say something else, but he did not have a chance. I leaped out the window and was gone, flying back home.
I dropped from a grey sky in front of the castle. A cold rain was starting to fall. After leaving the duchess's castle with burning determination half an hour earlier, I now felt reluctant to go inside. The cracked parapets where the dragon had writhed in death looked like a row of broken teeth.
I wandered toward the king's rose garden, arguing unsuccessfully with myself that I needed to go inside at once. The individual rose bushes were all mulched and carefully covered, but the lawn was dead and sodden. I donned a protective spell against the rain.
My eye caught a glimpse of something just beyond the garden. I went around to investigate and found a pile of white stones, rounded pieces of chalk, emerging from the last of the snow. The stones were positioned half under a shrub, where they would never be noticed in the summer.
I continued on around the castle. There were four more of the piles of white stones. This, then, was the giant pentagram the old wizard had erected around the castle. The demon had escaped from the tower room, but it had been unable to escape from the castle.
The thought passed wildly through my mind for the second time in twelve hours that perhaps I could leave the demon in the castle and find some reason to persuade the king and queen never to return home again, but to start a new life with their household somewhere else.
I shook my head hard to dismiss this thought. Besides the unlikelihood that I could persuade them of any such thing, I knew that the piles of stones could be disturbed some day, whether anyone was living here or not, releasing the demon from its temporary prison. And the Lady Maria's soul was in jeopardy no matter where she was. I shivered, set my jaw, and rose to fly over the castle walls.
I dropped into the courtyard and stood still for a moment, listening. There was no sound but the dripping of water. But the cobblestones in the courtyard seemed unnaturally warm, like the surface of a stove. Something whizzed silently by my face. I jumped back, throwing up my arms, and realized it was a bat. More bats wheeled around the castle towers. What were bats doing out in the middle of the day?
For several minutes I walked through the empty castle. Giant grey toads squatted in several of the rooms, and heavy flies buzzed against the windows. Small dark shapes that I recognized as rats scattered as I opened doors. The door to my own chambers was closed, but the magic lock was gone.
I opened the door and stepped inside. Nothing looked disturbed, although the supernatural influence was very strong. I had worried about a stranger reading my books of magic, but a demon, whose own power could cut right through the natural powers of magic, would have no need to do so.
It occurred to me that perhaps what I needed to do was to light a fire in my fireplace, sit down and get warm for an hour or two, and make sure I actually knew what I was going to say to the demon. Almost by force I dragged myself from the fireplace, where I was already reaching for the kindling.
I knew perfectly well what I was going to say to the demon. The negotiations were straightforward. If what the world's demonology experts had to say in the Diplomatica Diabolica was correct, at the end the demon would agree to release the Lady Maria's soul, would agree to return to hell, and would look around for the life it had been promised. And the life would be there.
I went back out into the courtyard, closing my door and putting on a magic lock. They would remember me in future years by the rooms that no one could enter.
I started walking toward the great hall, thinking vaguely that I might meet the demon there, but stopped myself. I knew perfectly well where I would find it.
But I wanted to do one final thing. I went to the little room by the main gate and worked the winch to lower the drawbridge. Even if the royal party did not return until the end of the twelve days of Christmas, someone from the village would see the bridge down and come in to investigate. The constable might be worried about the store rooms, in spite of the heavy locks on the doors, but I was more worried about my body. I hoped someone would find it before it was too badly nibbled by the rats.
The bridge went down with a clang that vibrated through the whole castle. I opened the main gate wide enough to admit a man and forced my feet to cross the courtyard.
Thin swirls of foul smoke were wafting up the cellar stairs. More bats flew up as I reached the top of the stairs and flew back and forth, blind and disoriented. I took a final breath of clean air and went slowly down.
The key I had taken from Dominic a month ago, when we had been chasing the stranger, turned with a rusty screech in the lock. I propped the door open and started down the long, black corridor.
PART EIGHT - THE CELLARS
I
The faint daylight faded away behind me, and I paused to turn on the magic light on my belt buckle. It cast just enough light for me to see a few yards ahead. Motes in the coils of foul smoke danced in the light of the moon and stars. I pushed aside the thought that I should go back for a lantern or a magic globe and walked determinedly onward.
But my determination lasted only for a few steps. The cellars were absolutely silent except for the sound of my feet. Instead of being half a dozen yards underground, I could have been half a dozen miles. I did not even hear the dripping and scurrying sounds I had heard when last here. All I could hear was the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.
"Maybe the demon's gone," the thought popped into my head. "In that case it's silly for me to be down here." But I dismissed the thought and continued slowly on. I might not be able to hear him, but I was pushing against a wave of evil like pushing against a headwind.
The hall turned, and I put
my hand on the wall while trying to peer around the corner. The stone was wet under my hand, and the wet was stickier than water. I held my hand at the level of my waist to look at it in the faint light of the moon and stars. It was dripping red.
I gritted my teeth and forced myself onward against a terror that threatened to overwhelm me. Soon I had proceeded further than I had gone before, past the spot where the floor had been flooded. Now it was dry and ominously warm.
My knees began to tremble so hard that each step became an effort of will. My steps came slower and slower until I found I had stopped completely. The smoke made me cough, as my lungs desperately sought purer air, and the sound of my coughing seemed to echo throughout the cellars. "Where are you?" I almost shouted but bit my lip just in time.
"You know that's not the way to open a conversation with a demon," I told myself firmly. This was not a time for improvisation, for using good ideas and flashes of inspiration to cover up for a lack of preparation. If I was going to save my kingdom, I would have to be the wizard I never had been and proceed absolutely according to the rules.
But I wished I would find the demon before I lost my nerve. I made my feet start moving again. "Merciful saints," I breathed, then shook my head. The Lady Maria's soul was beyond the prayers of even the saints. Her only hope of any kind, and the only hope for the life and happiness of all the people living in the castle of Yurt, was for a negotiated compromise with the demon. And as I had reminded myself once before, the saints do not negotiate.
The corridor turned again and continued downwards. I glanced sideways at some of the rooms I was passing, afraid of what I might see in them. They no longer looked like store rooms. They looked like prison cells.
Once again, I had to keep myself from shouting, "Come out! Let's get this over with!" If the demon wanted to drive me back out of the cellars with terror, he was close to succeeding.
I stopped, trying to steady my ragged breathing. I had no idea how much further the cellars went. The absolute stillness seemed to bear me down as though under a physical weight. But barely had I thought that any noise would be better than this silence when I discovered just how wrong I was.
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