Paul shook his head. “No, this should be it. I know that last turning was right. Unless—” We all waited. Fatigue and the strain made the king’s face hard and tight in the dim pre-dawn light. He did not curse, he did not shout at Cyrus, who should have at least as good an idea as he did where we were. Instead he said after a moment, “Wait for me. Let me retrace our steps just a little way—”
And abruptly the castle was back. We stood in a dark, enclosed passageway, without even a night sky above us. The solid rocks under our hands were no longer invisible.
Without even thinking I tried a spell of light. And it worked. The corridor lit up for a few seconds as bright as day.
“Ha!” cried Paul, the tension gone from his face. “I knew I was right! I’d just forgotten we had to turn left and walk twenty feet along this arcading first. Come on! We’re almost there.”
Spells of light were too hard to keep going constantly; a flare would glow for only a few seconds unless there was something to burn. In the dark again, our eyes too dazzled to see at all, we followed Paul as quickly as we dared.
Cyrus’s hand closed around my shoulder. “How did you do that? Vlad spelled this castle against the magic of light!”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. Vlad had also made it invisible just a short time before. Were he and the demon engaged in some gigantic clash that had diverted both their attentions?
“And down here to the chapel,” the king called back cheerily. “I think I may see some light at the end of the passage—perhaps the children have lit a bonfire?”
But Vlad, if he had truly overcome the demon, would have had plenty of time to reach the ruined chapel before us. I had no idea what might be happening, but that did not keep my mind from churning out terrifying possibilities.
We stumbled forward, almost running. Paul, in the lead, tripped and hit the floor hard. “Watch it,” he gasped, waiting to catch his breath before even trying to sit up, “there’s something big and damp in the middle of the passage.”
A pool of blood? I cast another spell of light to see for a moment. Sitting in the middle of the passageway, looking at us with mournful eyes, was an enormous green frog.
I lifted it slowly, staring in disbelief as my magical light faded. “Ugh!” cried Justinia. “How did it arrive here? Put it down, Wizard!”
But I did not put it down. I turned it slowly, probing with magic now. The frog was held by a transformation spell that trembled just over the line into success. The transmogrified creature was strangely misshapen, and something was wrong with its eyes. “Daimbert?” asked Theodora quietly.
“Sweet Jesus,” I said at last. “I think it’s Vlad.”
I stuffed the frog into my jacket pocket; I would have to strengthen the spell that held him, but it would do for the moment and even more urgent things demanded my attention. Squaring my shoulders I pushed ahead of Paul, down the passage toward the chapel. Whatever was there, I thought a wizard ought to see it first.
As I came cautiously nearer, I too saw the light that Paul had thought might come from a bonfire. But the chapel itself at the end of the passage appeared completely dark other than that ghastly orange glow. The light did not flicker. Vlad kicked in my pocket, but this wasn’t his magic; as a frog, he wouldn’t be able to shape the words of the Hidden Language. This was something far more powerful—and even worse—than anything of his.
Panting as from a long run, I reached the doorway and stopped, holding onto the doorframe with both hands. The chapel was very quiet except for the sound of one small person sobbing. My heart suddenly felt as though it had been crushed inside my chest, for that voice was Antonia’s.
In the center of the chapel were two pentagrams, drawn with colored chalk. One of the pentagrams was empty, though a little yellow brimstone floated in the air over it. Glowing bright red in the middle of the other was a being with curved horns, an enormous bloated belly, two writhing snakes for legs, and eyes that burned with real flames.
The demon smiled, revealing twice as many teeth even as Vlad, a smile suggesting that we were old friends and he was delighted to see me again.
When I stopped dead in the doorway Paul and Theodora, behind me, first tried to push forward, then froze themselves. “May God be merciful,” murmured Justinia in horror.
But the sobbing continued. The pentagram was closed, I saw, holding the demon trapped. Theodora, Paul, and I wrenched ourselves from the doorframe and sprang forward. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done.
The demon turned avidly to follow our progress. I didn’t like the way he looked at me—meeting Vlad had already been one reunion too many with an old enemy—but I averted my eyes for something far more important. On the far side of the pentagram, chalk clutched desperately in one small hand, sat Antonia.
Theodora and I nearly ripped her in half as we both snatched her up. Somehow we managed on the second try. The chalk dropped from her fingers to roll away into darkness. The demon continued watching but had not spoken; maybe he couldn’t while trapped unless addressed by the person who had summoned him.
I saw then, all around, the still forms of the other children. Dead? I thought, my insides going to ice. But they were breathing, rapidly and shallowly, but breathing.
“Gwennie!” called Paul, his voice an octave too high. “We’ve got to get these kids out of here!”
She might not have entered a room with a staring demon in the center for anyone else, but she did for the king. She ran toward him, gasping for breath. Theodora and I, selfishly ignoring any child but our own, carried Antonia back up the passage as fast as we could go, but behind us I heard Paul say, “Just grab as many as you can. We’ve got to get them away from here. Justinia! Cyrus!” I didn’t wait to see if the others obeyed.
Antonia stopped sobbing as soon as we were out of the chapel, but she clung to me like a bur, her face in my beard. Now that we could see the castle again, we were quickly able to reach a window and collapse with real light, the light of an summer’s early dawn, breaking through. The heavy clouds that Vlad had summoned were now dissipating and rolling away.
Gently I pried Antonia’s hands out of my beard and turned her around. Her face was filthy and streaked with tears, but she managed half a smile for us. “I’m sorry if I scared you,” she said.
Theodora started crying herself, kissing her hard. “We were scared, dearest,” she murmured, “but it wasn’t your fault. We’re just so happy to find you alive and well. Could you tell us—tell us what happened back there in the chapel?”
“I didn’t think it would be so awful,” said Theodora, squirming around to get comfortable on her mother’s lap. “Your book should have explained it better, Wizard.” Suddenly she looked very pleased with herself. “But when everybody else fainted I didn’t. And I saved the Dog-Man.”
“What, exactly, did you do?” I asked, very quietly and afraid I already knew the answer.”
“The Dog-Man made us all follow him,” she said, enjoying having two adults follow her every word with rapt interest. “I didn’t like that. It was as though we were rats! And we got so tired and he hardly would let us rest. But then he said he had a demon for a friend, and I started thinking. You have that one big book that tells all about demons, though Elerius didn’t want me to read it. And my friend the bishop told me that demons make people do bad things. So I knew that the demon wasn’t really his friend at all and had made him whistle his magic pipes at us. That’s when I decided to get the demon away from him.”
“All right,” I said slowly and carefully. “I agree, the demon was responsible for bringing you here. But Antonia, could you explain to us how you managed to capture the demon? There are masters at the school who can’t do it as easily as you just did.”
“That wasn’t his demon you saw,” said Antonia complacently. “His demon is back in hell. That was mine.”
Theodora and I exchanged stunned glances. “Just— Just tell us,” I said, when I had my voice working again
, “tell us what happened, starting when all of you reached the castle.”
Antonia settled back, yawning and smiling at the same time. She was, I saw, totally exhausted, but she didn’t want to go to sleep while there was anything exciting going on. “We were very, very tired by the time we got here,” she said. “And the Dog-Man took us to the room where you found us. Then another man came and stared at us. Or do you think he might have been another demon?” she asked thoughtfully. “He looked like he wanted to hurt us, though he didn’t try anything then. But the Dog-Man kept trying to push him back out of the room, and his eyes didn’t look like real eyes.”
“He was human, all right,” I said. “Go on.” As I spoke, I felt in my pocket for Vlad. Not there. He must have fallen or hopped away while Theodora and I were getting Antonia out of the chapel. For that matter, I wasn’t entirely sure how he had become a frog in the first place. Could Antonia possibly have transformed him? But that was unlikely; it would be very hard to put a spell on a wizard that powerful.
It didn’t matter, I tried to reassure myself, who had transformed him and where he was now. A quick magical probe didn’t find him, but my probes weren’t set up to find amphibians. He shouldn’t be able to break a transformations spell himself, even a somewhat weak one, while he was a frog, and Cyrus was unlikely to break it for him. I’d catch him later.
“After we were left alone almost everybody went to sleep. Maybe I did myself for a while,” Antonia added reluctantly. “But when I woke up I started thinking. I wanted to save the Dog-Man because I knew he was in big trouble, and I thought if there wasn’t a demon around pretending to be his friend, maybe he would take us all home. But I didn’t know how to catch a demon—that part of your book is hard. So I imp—imperv—”
“Improvised?”
She shot me a smile. Her sapphire eyes were still bright but her lids were drifting shut. “I remembered the way the book told to draw things in chalk and say magic words to call a demon from hell. I thought maybe because there was already one so close they’d just send him, the Dog-Man’s demon, into my pentagram.” She managed the word on the first try and looked pleased. “But they didn’t. That was the part where everybody fainted except me.”
When the masters had summoned a very small demon, just to show how it was done, in demonology class at the school, several wizardry students twenty years older than Antonia had fainted.
“They sent this different demon,” she said around a long yawn. “And he’s really scary. I didn’t want to cry because I’m a big girl, but I couldn’t help it. He asked me what he could do for me, and I told him to catch the other demon and make him go back to hell. He tried to argue with me but I told him he had to obey because I was ‘Mistress of the Pentagrams.’ Doesn’t that sound good?”
And with that she fell asleep in Theodora’s lap, her eyes shut tight and mouth slightly open. We sat still for several minutes, hardly breathing. Theodora spoke at last.
“God in Heaven, Daimbert. Our daughter has just sold her soul to the devil.”
PART EIGHT - DEMONS
I
I scrambled to my feet. This all had to be a mistake. A mistake! I stopped myself just in time from driving my fist against the stone wall. Of course she had summoned a demon, and asked it for favors, a process that both wizardry and religion agreed led to eternal damnation. But she was only five years old!
Unlike Cyrus, she’d had the sense to keep it imprisoned in a pentagram rather than letting it run around loose. But that reminded me. There must still be unconscious children in the room with it, awash in the terror beyond terror of death which flowed from a demon, even an imprisoned one.
I hurried back to find that Paul and Gwennie so far had been able to shift about two dozen of the children. I needed to do something, anything, even worse than the king did. A demon, even an enormous horned demon who kept giving me a knowing smile, was not the most terrifying thing I could imagine. Lifting limp boys and girls with magic—I could manage five or six at once—and carrying them away from the chapel was an excellent alternative to dissecting Cyrus bone by bone and nerve by nerve.
He sat huddled in a corner by the arcading, his hands over his head, and Justinia, sitting a dozen yards from him, seemed to have given up trying, but Gwennie and the king kept grimly running up and down the passageway. She was strong and could easily carry two children at a time. Theodora settled Antonia in a corner and came to help.
The others made wide detours around the demon, but I, running with my head down, didn’t care—until my foot skidded and almost slid across the chalk line, which would by breaking the pentagram have let the demon out.
I wiped cold sweat from my forehead with a damp sleeve. All the things they had taught us in demonology class came rushing back. Someone who had sold his soul is even more dangerous to those around him than someone who has damned himself through ordinary sins. Cyrus had barely begun. First the demon fills a person with anger and bitterness, then offers spectacular ways to harm those with whom he imagines he is angry. And why worry about a few murders? His soul is already long gone.
And, if the demon is loose and able to work his own tricks, the situation only grows worse.
The children started to revive once they were away from the chapel. One little boy opened his eyes to find himself in Paul’s arms and asked with delighted surprise, “Are you the brave knight?”
“I guess I’d better be,” he said with a grin, ruffling the boy’s hair for a minute before putting him down and starting back for more.
In ten minutes we had them all spread out in the arcade, well away from the passage that led to the chapel. The king flopped to the floor and leaned back against the wall. He reached up with one hand to pull Gwennie down beside him. Her face was running with sweat and looked exhausted, terrified, and grimly satisfied. “You’ve always been the best friend I’ve ever had,” Paul said, meaning it. He gave her a hard hug as she settled herself on the floor, with no more romantic passion in it than the dozens of hugs he had just been giving children. “Once we’re home I’m changing your title from acting castle constable to permanent constable. When you told me you thought you could handle the duties, did you ever expect them to include facing a demon?”
We caught our breaths for a minute. All a big mistake, I told myself again. Baptized children went straight to heaven, as long as they had not yet reached the age of reason and therefore could not commit intentional sin. Didn’t they? What was the age of reason? Seven for sure. Yes, that was right. Seven. Antonia was only five.
Did demons recognize how old a person was in human years, or did they ask only if they had functioning reasoning abilities—if, for example, they could read and work magic?
“When I was little,” said Paul, “I always thought it would be exciting to meet a demon. Now that I have met one, I can’t say I particularly care to repeat the experience. Did you see that belly? Those eyes? But I do remember learning about pentagrams. Looks like your daughter, Wizard, must have drawn a pentagram to imprison it—she’s an amazing little girl, and you have no reason at all to hide her. One of her chalk lines, I couldn’t help noticing, looked scuffed, but it was redrawn carefully. And the demon appears pretty well trapped now.”
“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “It can’t move away or hide, and it can’t make itself invisible. As long as no one lets it out, it shouldn’t be able to do anything to terrify us, such as bringing more vipers and apparitions.”
“Oh, I’m terrified quite enough already, if it asks,” said Paul cheerfully. “But it looks like we’ve won, then! Cyrus seems to have broken down completely without his demon to help him,” with a glance in his direction, “and Vlad’s a frog, so once it’s a little lighter outside one of us can fly the carpet back to Caelrhon and tell the parents all their children are safe.”
That reminded me. I had better try to find Vlad again.
“And I guess sending the demon back to hell is something you wizards know how to do,” Paul co
ntinued lightly. He looked around at children starting to sit up groggily, many of them apparently deciding the whole episode had been a nightmare and lying down to sleep again. The Princess Margareta was awake but lay silently, as though trying to make it all make sense in her own mind.
“Maybe Mother has a point,” the king went on. “If I got married I could have children. Maybe not a hundred. Say, a dozen or so. Wouldn’t that be great, to have a dozen little princes and princesses running around the castle?”
“You’d better consult your queen on that.” Gwennie managed to say it as a joke. Margareta, looking startled, rose on her elbows.
Paul laughed without seeming to notice either’s reaction. For him, all our troubles were over rather than just beginning. “All right. Maybe I’ll settle for three or four. Too bad I don’t have any brothers or sisters of my own, or I could have nieces and nephews. And if the duchess’s daughters aren’t going to marry—” He stopped. “That reminds me, Wizard. Is Celia a novice nun now?”
I had completely forgotten about the twins since leaving them at the nunnery. “I suppose so. They would have had to finish the ceremony without a spiritual sponsor.”
“I’ll ride down there in a few days,” said Paul lazily. “They probably won’t let me see her, but at least I can find out if everything is going smoothly. I was looking through some old ledgers—thanks again, Gwennie, by the way, for helping me find them—and it looks as though previous kings of Yurt sometimes made gifts to the nunnery, so maybe I should too.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, a voice floated through the window. “Hello!” It sounded magically amplified. “Is anyone there?”
I knew that voice. I jumped up so fast I almost slipped and leaped to the window. Outside, hovering somewhat tentatively in mid-air, were two wizards, one black-bearded and one with a red bandit’s beard: Elerius and Evrard.
Paul joined me at the window and waved enthusiastically. “What’s that older wizard’s name, Elerius, is that right?” he asked me with a low chuckle. “It seems like he’s always showing up just a few minutes too late, just after you’ve finished disposing of the enemy. You’re going to make him jealous at this rate, Wizard!”
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