I put my hand over my eyes, visualizing the page in the book. "First and most importantly, her intention was never evil. A soul is judged on intent, and if you took her soul you took it on the flimsiest grounds. Secondly!" as the demon seemed about to interrupt. "She may have gained some advantages for herself, but she brought no evil to anyone else."
"She nearly killed the king," said the demon with another leer.
"No, you nearly killed the king. She has never wished any harm to anyone."
The demon did not answer. Taking his silence for agreement, I pushed desperately on. "Her soul may be yours, but only on the slimmest technicality. Therefore!" I paused to make sure I had the words absolutely right before I spoke. "I have come to offer you the following bargain. You shall release the Lady Maria's soul and return at once without it to hell. Before you go, you can take my life, but my soul must be judged on its own merits."
"But I like it here in Yurt," said the demon with what would have been petulance in a smaller being.
The last of my strength gathered itself into fury. If the demon was able to delay for only a few more moments, I would throw myself at his feet and promise anything in return for my life, and he knew it. "Binding negotiations!" I cried. "You have to answer!"
"All right," he said with a slow smile. "I would be delighted to take your life. I agree."
"Formally!" I shouted as the enormous mouth opened, revealing more teeth than ever. "You must agree formally!"
The mouth closed slowly, and long flames darted from the demon's eyes. "By Satan, by Beelzebub, by Lucifer and Mephistopheles," he said finally.
This at last was the beginning of the correct terms of a binding engagement. I concentrated as hard as I could through the roaring in my ears, watching for the slightest deviant word.
"In the space of what you in the natural world call one minute, I shall return to hell, not to return to this world unless deliberately summoned by woman or man."
Joachim had told me, I reminded myself, that he thought that someone who gave his life for another would save his own soul. But I also remembered that he would have to ask the bishop to be sure in a case like this.
"I release, give up, and free the soul of the Lady Maria."
So far, so good.
"But before I go, you shall die." The demon's last semblance of a human form was going fast, but he still had a face that grinned at me. "Agreed and accepted?"
I started to speak, could not, swallowed twice, and tried again. "Agreed and accepted."
My eyes went black as the enormous mouth full of razor-sharp teeth bent toward my neck. The last thing I heard was the demon's booming voice. "See you in the afterlife, Daimbert!" The last thing I felt, even before the jaws reached me, was his iron forefinger burning against my chest. It passed effortlessly through skin, muscle, and bone, until it touched my heart, which leaped once more and was still.
III
The afterlife was wet and extremely cold. For a long time, which could have been hours and could have been months—although I expected they reckoned time differently here—there had been nothing but confusion, of colors, black, white, and red, of giant wings, of spaces in which I knew nothing and spaces in which I could hear myself screaming. But now everything was calm and completely dark.
I wondered with mild curiosity where I was. Purgatory, probably, which meant that they hadn't yet decided what to do with me. At least hell would have to be warmer than lying in purgatory in half an inch of icy water.
Very far away, I heard a door creaking. Maybe they had made up their minds. Steps were coming toward me, deliberate and slow. I turned my head stiffly, interested enough to want to know if it was an angel coming for me or the devil. To my surprise, it was carrying a candle. Somehow I had not expected them to need candles in the afterlife.
I couldn't see the angel's or devil's face behind the candle, although the fact that I couldn't keep my eyes open properly may have had much to do with it. I lay back and awaited my fate.
The candle was put down by my head. I could see its light, pink through my closed eyelids. There was a slight creak of joints as the angel or the devil knelt beside me.
He put his hand lightly over my heart, and then I could feel his hair tickle my nose as he put his ear to my mouth. He was so gentle that I decided he had to be an angel.
"Thank God," said the angel in Joachim's voice. "He is alive."
I tried to speak but managed only a faint croak. I moved one of my arms experimentally and was able slowly to reach up to feel a pair of clasped hands and a cheek wet with tears.
Joachim put his arms around me, under my shoulders, and drew me partly up and out of the water. "Can you hear me?" he asked quietly. "I've got to get you out of here."
I tried again to speak. This time I was more successful. "I thought I was dead."
"I think you were. But it's no good your coming back from the dead if you then die of pneumonia."
"Did you ever contact the bishop?" I croaked. It had been my final thought.
"Yes; I asked him to send me an answer here in Yurt, and it was here when I arrived." He tried to ease me into a sitting position. "He said that if someone lets himself be killed, even killed by a demon, for completely pure reasons, his soul will go straight to heaven."
Just my luck. Probably the only time in my entire adult life my soul would ever be completely pure, and I'd wasted my chance by coming back to life.
"But how did you get here?" I asked, realizing I had last seen him thirty miles away, in the duchess's castle.
"When you flew away, I knew at once I had to follow you. As soon as I'd sent the message to the bishop, I went to the stable and took the queen's stallion—I didn't give the stable boys a chance to argue. I was here by mid afternoon." There was a sound that would have been a chuckle from anyone else. "I've never been on a horse that went that fast. I found the drawbridge down when I arrived."
"I'd lowered it."
"I had intended to rush down into the cellars after you. But great choking clouds of yellow brimstone were billowing out, and vipers and scorpions were crawling up the stairs. It was clear that no one could walk a dozen yards into the cellars and live. I got as far as the door and couldn't go any further. I knew then the only way I could help you was through prayer.
"So I rubbed down the stallion, went to the dovecot in the south tower for the bishop's answer, and then to the chapel, and I've been there ever since."
He tried to pull me further out of the water. "Do you think you could walk if I supported you? I could probably carry you, but I'm afraid of dropping you with the floor so slippery."
"Help me up." Although all my joints ached excruciatingly, I could actually stand. I checked my throat for fang marks and my chest for a hole and found nothing. But my red velvet jacket streamed with water, now as thoroughly ruined as my new suit.
"But why did you come down now?"
"Just now, fifteen minutes ago, I felt a sudden certainty that whatever was going to happen was over. Whether the demon would go or stay, or you would live or die—and when I reached the cellars, most of the brimstone was gone."
We proceeded slowly up a long slope, out of the standing water, me half collapsed against Joachim and both his arms around me. Abruptly I stopped, and he stopped with me. "Oh, no," I said. "I've broken the agreement by coming back to life. The demon must still be here."
"Is he?" asked Joachim, very low in my ear.
I took a breath and managed to find enough words of the Hidden Language to probe for evil. There was none. When I had walked down this corridor into the cellars, the air had been so permeated with evil I had barely been able to move. Now there was nothing but abandoned store rooms whose floors flowed with icy water. I probed further. There was no evil mind in the castle, not even the oblique touch of the demon when he had been hiding from me. He was indeed gone.
"It's all right," I said, fairly complacently considering that I was now shivering so hard I had trouble speaking
through chattering teeth. "I thought I'd done the negotiations right. The demon killed me and went back to hell without either the Lady Maria's soul or mine."
"Let's keep moving, then," said Joachim gently.
We staggered on to the foot of the stairs. A big silver crucifix leaned against the open cellar door. Here Joachim did have to carry me, lifting me with a grunt over his shoulder. "Thank you for bringing me back to life," I gasped.
"I had nothing to do with it. The saints had mercy on you and interceded with God for a miracle."
I had my own ideas about who had enough influence with the saints to bring that about, but it was too hard to argue. Joachim carried me up the cellar stairs to the courtyard.
The sky was dark, except for some faint streaks of light in the east. Swung across Joachim's shoulder, I took as deep a breath as I could of the cold winter air.
As we came into the courtyard, I saw a swirl of faces, of people I had believed thirty miles away, and heard a sudden incoherent murmur of voices. This was all too confusing to me in my present state, so I let my eyes fall shut again. Joachim paused, and the voices were all around us.
"He's alive!" he said in a tone of command that carried over all the rest. "Now, in the name of God, step back and let us pass!"
They fell silent, and Joachim strode on, while I wondered without much curiosity what had happened.
But when we reached my chambers, he had to turn and bend down so that I could reach out and touch the magic lock with my palm to free the spell. With the demon gone, my locks should be safe after this, and I would be able to write letters without the paper being permeated with the supernatural influence of a demon who had been rummaging through my possessions.
Inside, Joachim pulled my drenched clothes off and wrapped me in blankets while he found me some pajamas. He pulled my bed close to the fire and knelt to rekindle the blaze. As I fell among the pillows, I saw that his clothes too were filthy and soaking.
"I'm afraid you've ruined your new vestments coming for me," I said. At the moment it seemed inexpressibly sad that he had done so.
But he shook his head and smiled. "I'll go change and come right back to sit with you. I want to make sure you don't develop pneumonia."
"What day is it?"
"It's dawn of New Year's day, the morning after you went to meet the demon."
"I think I'll go to sleep now," I said indistinctly, feeling warm waves of sleep breaking over me as I slowly stopped shivering. "But I think when I wake up I'm going to be very hungry."
IV
I had of course done everything wrong. I thought about this with pleasant detachment some twenty-four hours later, from what seemed a great distance, lying comfortably propped up in a warm bed with the sun pouring through my windows, eating cinnamon crullers and drinking scalding tea. My breakfast tray was decorated with holly.
Joachim had gone to celebrate morning service in the chapel, but I had managed to wake up enough to speak briefly to him before he left and to order my breakfast. Everyone, it turned out, was home again.
The first place I had gone wrong was in being too frightened for months to admit the obvious to myself, that a demon was loose in Yurt. Nothing else, not even a master wizard, could have repeatedly broken my magic locks as though they were cobwebs, or filled the cellars with such a powerful sense of evil that even a first-year wizardry student would have felt it. I should have realized at once what was happening, rather than waiting until it brought a dragon down on us.
My second mistake was going down alone to face the demon, when I could no longer ignore its presence. With the duchess's assistance, I doubtless could have persuaded the Lady Maria to stay safely inside, at least for a few days, and the knights to delay their attack. That should have given me enough time to send a message to the City, to ask for help from one of the experts in demonology. Someone else might have been able to persuade the demon to leave in return for far less than a human life. In retrospect, this had probably not been one of the "little problems" that Zahlfast had said I would have to solve on my own.
Finally, even if it was going to take a human life to return the demon to hell, I should have demanded at least a short period of grace. If I had had a day or two before what had almost been my death, I might have been able to use my own natural charms to win many more kisses from the queen.
Gwen came in at this point in my deliberations. She did not meet my eyes. "I'd like about that much again," I said, handing her the empty breakfast tray.
She took it with a little duck of the head, not with a saucy look, not even with the smile an elderly uncle might deserve. I realized she had not said anything or even looked at me directly when she brought me my food originally. She was treating me with the same reserve she showed the king.
"You can talk to me, Gwen," I said, holding onto my end of the tray until she had to look up. "I'm not so weak that I must have absolute silence."
Her eyes were very wide when they finally met mine. "Excuse me, sir, I don't want to seem rude," she said hesitantly. "But— I never knew anyone who miraculously returned from the dead before."
I hadn't either, of course, but I saw no reason that she should treat me with awe on that account. "That has nothing to do with me personally," I said hurriedly. "It was the chaplain's prayers that worked the miracle." I realized I was as anxious as Joachim to disavow any personal merit—with the important distinction that he was wrong to do so and I was right.
"But how did you know I was dead?" I asked when she remained silent. "Were you out there in the courtyard last night—or I guess it was night before last?" She stared at me without speaking, so I smiled and said, "All right, Gwen, I'll ask you something simpler. Sit down—you can bring the chair closer than that! How about if you tell me why all of you left the duchess's castle to come back here?"
She examined one of her thumb nails with apparent fascination but spoke clearly. "We realized something was wrong when our chaplain took the queen's stallion from the duchess's stables. The stable boys couldn't stop him. They ran to tell the constable, and he told the king. Nobody could imagine why he'd done it. They asked me if I knew anything, since I had just been up for the chaplains' trays a few minutes' earlier, and when I said that you'd been with him, they realized that you were gone too."
"But how did you know we'd come back to the royal castle?" I prompted when she fell silent.
"Sir Dominic and the young count guessed it," she continued with a quick glance at me. "They said there was an ‘evil wizard’ here in the castle, who had summoned the dragon. And they said that you must have gone back to fight him all by yourself, even though they'd offered to help you. And the count said— I really would just as soon not repeat it, sir."
"It's all right, Gwen. Go on."
"—he said," she paused, then went on defiantly, "he said that you would make matters with the evil wizard even worse through your ‘incompetence’! I knew you weren't incompetent, sir. But they wouldn't listen to me. The count started to gather the knights at once."
"But they listened to the duchess?"
"That's right," she said in surprise. "How did you know? She told them it wasn't another wizard at all, but a demon in the cellars! She said that you and the chaplain must have gone without telling anyone because you were afraid that the knights would imperil their souls by trying to fight it without realizing what it was."
I considered this for a moment. "Did she say where the demon had come from?" I asked casually.
"Well, from hell, I assume," Gwen said in confusion and fell silent.
So the duchess had not revealed everything I had told her. With luck, no one else had guessed that demons were unlikely to appear without reason in one of the smallest of the western kingdoms. I thought very affectionately of the duchess. Someone would have to have a long and private conversation with the Lady Maria; I would ask Joachim to do so. Maria might guess her own role in bringing both the demon and the dragon to Yurt, I thought, but I did not want to s
ay anything to her myself. Besides, matters of the soul's salvation were the chaplain's responsibility.
"It's back in hell now," I said to Gwen, who was giving me a wide-eyed stare again, "and I'm alive and still own my soul. But you haven't told me yet why you're all here."
"It was the king and queen. They said that if the two of you were fighting a demon to save their kingdom, it was their responsibility to be here with you. In the end, everyone came, though we had to leave the boar and the Christmas tree in the duchess's castle. It was late evening when we got here."
"And what happened then?" I asked when she fell silent.
She shook her head as though to shake off a strong emotion. "The castle was dark and empty, and strange—the stones were all oddly warm, and there were rats and bats and roaches all over the place—"
She gave a shiver of disgust. I nodded; I knew exactly what it had been like.
"I think the count would have gone straight into the cellars after the demon if he could have, but he couldn't even get down the stairs. There were big yellow clouds pouring out of the cellar door; the duchess's chaplain told us it was brimstone, from the demon."
I didn't know whether to admire the young count's courage or wonder at his foolhardiness—he had prudently stayed inside during the dragon's attack.
"Jon and I found our royal chaplain. He was lying in front of the altar in the chapel, and for a minute we were afraid he'd been killed! But when Jon touched him on the shoulder, he sat up suddenly—I'll never forget the way his eyes looked."
It sounded as though the castle had been an exciting place while I was dead. I was sorry to have missed it.
"He said—" Her voice dropped so low I could hardly hear it. "He said that you were dead, sir. And then he said that, in the name of Christ, we had to leave him alone to pray for you, and not to go into the cellars if we valued our immortal souls!
"Jon and I told the king and queen at once. The duchess's chaplain wanted us all to leave the castle immediately, but they said they wouldn't run away, and besides it was too dark and too cold to go anywhere else. We didn't even know if the demon was still in the cellars, or if you had been able to defeat it before it killed you, but there wasn't much we could do but wait.
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