I turned away in despair and disgust as Cyrus began kissing the bishop’s ring in abject gratitude. “Elerius,” I said. “We’ve got a new problem. The demon’s loose. I don’t think I could fly a hundred yards, so we’ve got to wait for the carpet. But when we get everybody out of here and back to Caelrhon, you’re going to call the demonology experts at the school. You’re the one who plans to be in charge over them, so you can just find a way to persuade them that after they catch the demon again, they’ve got to negotiate for Antonia’s soul before sending it back to hell.”
He glanced up, looking disoriented. “That sounds like a good idea,” he said without any conviction.
“Unless you and I and Evrard can catch it first,” I said with even less conviction.
“Where is Evrard?” he asked.
Maybe I should look for him while waiting for the carpet. I pushed away from the wall, against which I had slumped, and headed for the stairs. I realized I probably hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, so part of the hollowness in my belly might be hunger—but most of it was fear. My feet felt encased in lead, and I didn’t even have the will left to keep going, only an inertial movement that wouldn’t let me stop.
But I hadn’t even left the room before Evrard himself staggered in.
He was covered with mud and trembling. But he managed a grin. “Who did you say transformed that wizard into a frog? You sure it wasn’t you, Daimbert? Because I remember that mess you made way back in Zahlfast’s exam, and this looks like your work. He must have gotten himself at least half-way turned back into a man.”
Just what we needed: Vlad at large in the castle again when the demon was already loose. Evrard settled himself gingerly next to Elerius and me. His good humor had not yet deserted him. “A pretty sorry spectacle we make,” he commented, “for three Royal Wizards.”
He had found the damp prints of a frog on stairs going down to the storage cellars and followed them, finding his way through the dark passages by repeated spells of light. When his spells suddenly wouldn’t work he knew that Vlad must have recovered enough of his powers to be able to block them. He never actually saw him, having quite sensibly retreated, but in the darkness he had become lost and at one point thoroughly mired in what must once have been the castle’s cess pit. He had not seen Hildegarde.
Elerius and I looked at each other. “We can’t wait for the demonology experts,” I said. “We’ve got to find Vlad at once, now, before he finishes breaking out of Antonia’s spell and gets his own weather spells working again. If we have to deal with him and a loose demon at the same time . . . Light’s the only advantage we have. Torches might do: not damp ones kept alight by fire magic, but clear-burning ordinary torches.”
“There are some dead pines growing out of the ruins lower down,” said Evrard. “Some of the wood should have been protected from the rain. I’d have thought of that myself, but I didn’t realize I’d need a torch until it was too late.”
I put a hand to my aching head, trying to plan. If I could just put everything in the right order, it might make sense. First get the final carpet-load of children out of here, along with the bishop and the duchess with her family. Then go after Vlad. Three western wizards ought to be able to catch him, even three as weary as we were, as long as any of Antonia’s spell held. Then contact the demonology experts and, with luck, have the demon back in the pentagram by tomorrow. Then make the bargain for Antonia’s soul that Elerius had kept me from making today.
So I still had a day to live. Instead of feeling grateful for the reprieve, I just felt at this point that I wanted to get it over.
Or maybe we should look for Vlad first, even before the carpet returned from Caelrhon. And we had to find Hildegarde. I shook my head. My thoughts felt so fuzzy—
Antonia trotted over. “Is Vlad that bad person I turned into a frog? I can help you catch him. The demon said he could do things for me, so I’ll make him do it. He has to obey me because I’m Mistress of the Pentagrams.”
“Antonia, no!” Elerius and I shouted together.
“I would just have him do it as a demonstration,” she said, puzzled.
Theodora lifted her up. “Remember, you yourself said a demon can’t be someone’s friend,” she said sternly. “Don’t even think of talking to him again.”
At the moment we still had some hope of saving Antonia. But at this rate, I thought grimly, the best negotiators from the school wouldn’t be able to save her—if they even cared to try.
“Vlad first,” I said to Evrard and Elerius, managing to get back on my feet after only a brief struggle. “Come on.”
“Where has Cyrus gone?” asked Elerius, looking around. The bishop was by himself now, standing by the window with his back to the room, his head bowed. “He must have been listening to our entire conversation with the demon.”
“He’s probably off in a corner somewhere vainly praying for forgiveness,” I said with supreme indifference. “Evrard, once we have the torches you’ll have to lead us, as well as you can, to where the magic of light failed you.”
But we had gone only a short distance when Hildegarde came toward us at a dead run. She didn’t even slow down as she passed, blond hair flying out behind her. In one hand she held a naked sword, streaked black with blood.
I turned back at once. The children screamed to see her, some in fear, some in simple excitement. Hildegarde stood for a moment looking wildly around, as though not seeing whom she was looking for or not even knowing who it was.
Then she spotted her sister. Letting the sword fall from her hand she threw herself onto her knees. “Celia,” she gasped, “you’ve got to help me. I’ve sinned horribly. I’ve just killed somebody.”
Celia dropped to her own knees and wrapped her arms around her sister. “Tell me,” she murmured.
They immediately drew an intensely interested audience of a prince, a duchess, a bishop, and three wizards. But Hildegarde paid no attention to any of us. “It must have been the ensorcelled frog,” she got out, her breath coming in great gulps. “I’d made a torch from a dead pine branch and was well down in the dark part of the castle. Several times I spotted what looked like damp frog tracks, and at one point I heard somebody cursing.”
“I think that was me,” muttered Evrard, “when I fell into the cess pit.”
“But I still didn’t spot anybody. Then I climbed over some fallen stones and saw—it was horrible! It was partly like a man, but it had legs like a frog.”
“Yes?” prompted Celia.
“He was mumbling to himself, and I don’t think he’d heard me coming. But then he saw me, and he jumped at me with his frog legs, and his face was all white but he had these pointed teeth—”
“And so you killed him,” said Celia quietly.
“Not yet. I threw the torch at him. That’s when he started to come apart. But he was still coming. He was disintegrating, but the teeth especially, as though they themselves were alive— That’s when I put the sword into his heart.”
Hildegarde started to sob then. “God still loves you,” murmured Celia, rocking her like a child. “He loves us all, even terrible sinners.”
Vlad had been preparing his spells again as fast as he could transform himself back into a man, I thought. He was ready for a wizard but not for a young woman carrying a torch. And it never would have occurred to him that she had a sword.
“As soon as he was dead,” Hildegarde continued in a minute, lifting a tear-streaked face from her sister’s shoulder, “he stopped being a frog at all, but he fell apart. That might have been the worst part of all. His arm fell off, and half his face . . . There’s nothing left of him now but scraps. And those started to stink, as though he’d already been dead for months.” She looked up toward Prince Ascelin. “Father, have you ever had to kill someone? When they’re teaching you to fight, why don’t they tell you how horrible it is? He might have been awful and half a frog, but at least he was alive until I got through with him!”
Vla
d was dead. I turned away, not wanting Hildegarde to see the intense relief on my face. Now that we’d gotten rid of one nearly hopeless problem, the dark wizard, all we had left was the impossible one, the escaped demon.
Antonia put her head out from behind the bishop; I hadn’t even realized she had been listening. With an expression of deep distress, she went over and put a hand gently on Hildegarde’s shoulder. “Maybe you shouldn’t try to be a knight after all,” she said. “It sounds too scary.”
Ascelin swung her up and passed her, protesting, back to Theodora, who had been desperately trying to keep the rest of the children calm. But then he said soberly to his own daughter, “I think it’s too late to make that choice. You are a knight now. There’s a lot more to it than knowing how to fight. It looks like once we’re home again I’d better start you on real training.”
Hildegarde, still clinging to her sister, appeared not to hear, but Celia gave their father a quick smile over her head.
“Do you think,” suggested Evrard in my ear, just as though I might need something else to worry about, “that the demon will try to reanimate Vlad?”
Before I could shape a reply, the castle shuddered to the clang of what might have been an unimaginably huge bell. For a second a wind reeking of evil fumes whirled through the room, then it whooshed down the passage toward the ruined chapel. I heard Cyrus’s voice, but this time it was raised in a frenzied cry of pure triumph.
“I have my powers again!”
V
The air at the entrance of the ruined chapel, when I slammed into it, had turned to glass. Of course. With the powers of black magic restored to him, Cyrus would have no trouble recreating Vlad’s spell which had created an invisible barrier around the chapel.
I clawed at it frantically, then tried to calm myself enough to start on spells. The chapel was dark again, lit only by a deep, orange glow. If Cyrus had been able to locate the demon and persuade it to work with him, then it must now be there. If I could reach it I could bargain for Antonia’s soul before anything else happened to stop me. I gestured for everyone else to go back and then turned away from them. This was between Cyrus and me now.
The spell that made the air solid remained impervious to my magic. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I could see the pentagram glowing and the demon in the middle of it.
But the demon looked strangely different. He had been deep red with an enormous, quivering belly. Now he was cadaverously thin and colored a pale orange, although the fiery eyes and razor-sharp teeth remained unchanged. “Thank you, Master,” he was saying, and even the voice sounded different. Its tone could have been mistaken for pleasant. “It is much more interesting on earth than in hell.”
I stared until my eyes stung. When I had spoken to the demon, he had been in the right-hand of the two pentagrams Antonia had drawn. He was now in the left. It wasn’t the same demon.
Dear God. Now we had two demons in the castle: Antonia’s, merrily running around loose somewhere, and Cyrus’s, trapped for the moment—but I feared only the moment—back in the pentagram in which Antonia had imprisoned him before returning him to hell, from where Cyrus had once again summoned him.
At the moment I would almost have been willing to sacrifice all of us, me, Antonia, Theodora, Joachim, the duchess’s family and all the children, if the saints would just appear and open an enormous hole and send the entire castle, with both demons, down to hell. But this seemed very unlikely. If I was ever in a position to give advice on the metaphysics of creation, which had seemed less and less likely for some time, I would say that this business of free will had gone entirely too far.
“I want you to do something for me,” said Cyrus urgently to the demon.
“Of course, Master,” he replied suavely. “Do not doubt for a moment I am yours to command. As long”—and he showed all his teeth—“as I have the opportunity for evil!”
“There’s another demon in this castle,” said Cyrus, talking fast. “Yes, the demon who captured you. I’m going to free you from the pentagram but only for a minute. You have to bring him back and put him in this other pentagram, and return here yourself.”
And send Antonia’s demon back to hell, her soul with it. I pounded desperately on the invisible barrier with my fists, without success. They couldn’t hear me. Cyrus had doubtless taken tips from what Antonia had done and deluded himself that capturing the demon she had summoned would somehow be helpful. He did not realize that he would thus destroy the one chance we still had to save her.
“There’s a flaw in the other pentagram,” commented the demon. “It would never hold him.”
Cyrus looked around, frustrated, then spotted Antonia’s lost piece of colored chalk, lodged against the base of the cracked altar, and snatched it up. Quickly he redrew the line that he himself had erased when Antonia’s demon had lied to him, suggesting the restoration of his powers in return for freedom. He then turned and made a tiny opening in the pentagram around his own demon.
“Now, go!” he said when the demon seemed to hesitate. “And return at once. You have to obey me.” And with a blinding flash, the demon vanished. There would be, I thought grudgingly, one advantage to selling your soul. No more having to negotiate with demons: they had bound themselves to obedience.
The chapel was now completely dark. Behind me I could hear people breathing, but none of them spoke. The only ones who could save us now were the saints, I thought, but they still seemed remarkably slow to become involved. We were reduced to waiting and watching Cyrus.
For a second the passage stank of brimstone, and a sudden onslaught of new terror made my bones feel as if they were made of water. With a loud bang and two flashes of light, two demons appeared in the pentagrams in the chapel. Cyrus redrew the line to imprison his.
“I order you,” he cried, “as your Master, to return to hell!”
There goes Antonia’s soul, I thought, closing my eyes. I wondered if it would be better to kill her with my own hands than to have her grow up to a life of evil. I doubted I could do it.
My eyes flicked open again. No! He was commanding his own demon. And it was already far too late to worry about his soul.
“But I’ve barely returned from hell, Master,” replied the demon, sounding peevish and pulling thin lips back from his teeth. “I thought you were delighted to have your powers back!”
“And I intend to use them for good!”
“Doesn’t that seem a little foolish? It’s not as though you could still ‘save’ your soul, as that bishop you so admire would put it. Since doing good will help you not in the least, whereas doing evil—”
“I don’t care!” shouted Cyrus. “As your Master, I command you! Return to hell at once!”
“All right,” said the demon reluctantly. “But don’t expect me to answer so quickly the next time you summon me.” With a flash and a thundering that shook the entire castle, he vanished.
The barrier collapsed before me. I started to leap forward, but a hand grabbed my collar and jerked me back. I spun around, furious, thinking it was Elerius.
It was Joachim. He shook his head and held on tight, with far more strength than I could have resisted at this point. There was just enough light for me to see the intensity in his eyes.
Cyrus staggered, almost falling. But with his powers of black magic gone, he whirled toward the other demon with nothing more than the strength of half-learned eastern magic and sheer human stubbornness. “By Satan, by Beelzebub,” he cried, “by Lucifer and Mephistopheles. Binding negotiations!”
The bulging red demon came to life, and a sudden cloud of brimstone made all of us in the passage start desperately coughing, but Cyrus did not appear to hear. “Don’t you realize you’re negotiating from a distinctly weak position?” asked the demon with a leer. “Your soul already belongs to the devil!”
“I’m not offering my soul!” Cyrus shot back. “I’m offering my life!”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer non-bindin
g conversation?” asked the demon. He seemed to be growing more and more enormous, until his horns brushed against the ceiling. “A life for a soul is not a bargain I would care to accept.”
“For a soul to which you are not fully entitled,” Cyrus said clearly, “I offer my life: a life which should have been long, eventful, and filled with whatever I most desired, because of the soul I long ago sold. You can kill me now, but you must return to hell at once, and as you go you must release Antonia’s soul.”
Vlad might never have dealt with demons himself, but he had certainly taught the art of demonology to his apprentice—who must also have been listening closely to Elerius and me.
The chapel and passage had become almost suffocatingly hot. “Those other wizards were also arguing about Antonia’s soul,” said the demon with a deep and resonating laugh. “I’ve never seen such stubbornness.” He looked past Cyrus and showed his teeth. He knew very well we were there.
Joachim’s grip tightened like steel, and his hand stayed perfectly steady.
“No!” cried Cyrus, furious. He was shaking so hard he could hardly stand, but fury and a kind of strange exaltation kept him going. “She is below the age of reason, she never intended to sell her soul, she acted only from pure motives, and she did not even get what she requested of you, the other demon thoroughly back in hell, because I was able to summon him again. On any of these points you might argue, but not on all of them. She is not truly the devil’s, and a life can redeem her.”
“There are quite a few other people who are more than willing to throw away their lives for her,” said the demon slowly, shifting his bulging belly. For the first time I even dared hope: by not denying what Cyrus had just said the demon had agreed with him. “Why should it have to be you?”
“Binding negotiations!” he almost screamed. “You have to answer!”
There was a long pause during which I was afraid the demon would not say anything at all, but then he began to speak. “By Satan, by Beelzebub,” he said slowly, fire shooting from his eyes, “by Lucifer and Mephistopheles. 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.”
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