A Bad Spell in Yurt woy-1

by C. Dale Brittain

  “I have to wash and change myself,” said the duchess gaily. I guessed that she might have thrust in the final spear herself, but at this point I scarcely cared. “Come on, Wizard.”

  As I carefully dressed in the red and black velvet suit that had been my best suit until a short period on Christmas morning, I realized that I was looking forward to dinner in the assumption it was the last meal I would ever eat on earth.

  III

  There were indeed tales of the hunt at dinner, which I scarcely heard. At the servants’ table, two of the kitchen maids were giggling and one was almost in tears because the cook, faced with five hundred pounds of pork to deal with, had discovered that her own best butcher knives had not come from Yurt, and she was not at all sure that the duchess’s would do.

  The Lady Maria had come down with a slight limp and had a small bandage placed artfully on one cheek. She told the story of her fall several times, with embellishments, including the despair of “her knight,” who was apparently me, when he had thought she might have been killed. When the fruitcake had been served, I whispered in her ear, “Could I come see you in your chambers, my lady?”

  She laughed and even blushed, though after all this time I would have expected her to realize that my intentions were strictly honorable. As the dessert tray went around a second time, she and I slipped away. I helped nurse the fire in her room back to life, and we were soon cozily settled in soft chairs.

  “I don’t want you to go riding again,” I told her.

  She smiled. “You’re a dear man, but you really do worry too much. Everyone who rides gets thrown sooner or later.”

  “But I think you’re in special danger.”

  “You’re thinking of what I told the duchess? Well, we’ll be back in the royal castle soon, and then I’ll be lucky again.”

  I was afraid I knew where her “luck” came from. Since I was also fairly sure she would not answer a straightforward question, I started telling her my best guesses, in the hope that she would confirm them. “You told me once, my lady, that you’d seen time run backwards. Was that when you had recently come to Yurt, and you and Prince Dominic tried to get the old wizard to teach you some magic?”

  “How did you know?” she said with a laugh.

  “Oh, I just guessed,” I said cheerfully. “You know I told you time can’t run backwards, normally, so it must have been pretty powerful magic, so I’d like to hear how it worked.”

  She looked at my face, to see if I was going to accuse her of anything or scold her, but she saw only an interested smile. I did not say that I had at last realized, long after I should have, that the key event that touched off the situation in Yurt four years ago was not the arrival of the queen so much as the arrival of the Lady Maria with her.

  “Well, the old wizard told us to come up to his room in the tower,” she said. “It was very exciting and mysterious, because normally he would never let anyone in his chambers. He wasn’t like you that way at all.”

  I decided to let this pass. It was far too late for me to become exciting and mysterious.

  “And then he said a spell, a really long spell-and I knew it must be important to get every word right, because he had it written out on a piece of parchment that he looked at just before he said it.”

  The wizard might want to be sure such a critical spell was said correctly, I thought, but the Lady Maria, with her ear for the Hidden Language and her total ignorance of the dangers, would have needed no such prompting.

  “And you’ll never guess what appeared!”

  “A demon.”

  “No, silly!” She slapped at me playfully with a cushion. “First everything grew very dark, and then a man appeared, but a very tiny man, maybe only six inches tall. And you’ll never guess! His skin was bright red.”

  A demon, I thought, but said nothing.

  “The old wizard had drawn a complicated star on the floor, and the little man appeared right in the middle of the star.”

  No wonder, I thought, that the old wizard had at first denied that the supernatural had ever been active in the castle. He would not have wanted to admit, even to me, that he had been showing off for Dominic and the Lady Maria. After all those years without an apprentice, and with nothing other than dessert illusions to occupy him….

  “And then the little man asked if we wanted anything! The old wizard said we wanted a demonstration of time running backwards.”

  “And did you get it?”

  “Well, I thought his was a pretty silly demonstration, but he did it! We each drank a glass of water, and then, it was the strangest thing, the water was coming back up our throats and into our glasses, and then we had to drink it again. And even when we poured the water on the floor, the little man made it run back up into the glass!”

  A demon, firmly within the pentagram, will, if asked correctly, perform a few very basic tricks. I personally thought even the trick with the glass of water might have been skirting the danger-line; at school they had sent the demon back as soon as it appeared, without asking anything at all. A demon may be willing to make a brief demonstration of its power for free, but very soon it will be demanding payment in human souls.

  “And what happened next?”

  “That was actually it. I’d been hoping that maybe I could ask it for something, and I was certainly planning to ask for something better than a trick with glasses! But the old wizard said some words, really quickly, and it was gone, and he rubbed out the star.”

  “And what happened next?”

  “Nothing at all,” she said complacently.

  Since I knew this wasn’t true, I took a teasing tone. “Well, I know something else happened. You decided to try the spell yourself, didn’t you! You can’t hide your secrets from wizards!”

  Making jokes and coy statements was the last thing I felt like at the moment, but it worked. She laughed. “I should have known you’d guess it sooner or later. After all, you saw me repeat your spell with the telephones! By the way-did you ever get them working?”

  “No,” I said, refusing to let her distract me. “Go on about how you summoned the little man yourself.”

  She giggled. “Do I really have to tell you? Well, since you’ve already guessed most of it, maybe I do, though it’s actually rather silly. I’d asked Dominic, of course, if he wanted to help me, but he seems to have turned against magic for some foolish reason, and he didn’t want anything more to do with it.”

  Dominic, I thought, had had the good sense to be terrified of a demon. It was at last finally clear to me why the hoped-for match between Dominic and the Lady Maria had never come about. Aside from the differences in their personalities, he would never have allied himself with someone he feared might at any time foolishly summon a demon.

  “So I had to do it myself. I made the star, just like the wizard had, and I repeated the spell.”

  “And the little man appeared,” I said through frozen lips.

  “And I told him I wanted to see time run backwards, but not just as a silly trick. That is, I-”

  “You asked to become younger,” I said, because she seemed to be having trouble saying it herself.

  She nodded, grateful for my understanding. “And the man explained that I didn’t really want time to run backwards, as that would just make everything exactly as it had been years ago, but that instead I wanted to get some extra youth.”

  “And he said he could do it.”

  “First, though, he said I had to rub out the star, so he could move about more easily. When I did it, he grew so that he was the size of a normal man, and his skin wasn’t red anymore. He said he had to find the extra years for me.”

  “And he found them.”

  When the old wizard had discovered the demon, I thought, Dominic had offered to help him catch it. He had managed to keep secret the Lady Maria’s responsibility for summoning it, but he had had more problem with me, since I was too obtuse even to realize what was happening in Yurt. The old wizard had re
tired, convinced that the demon was locked safely away, and Dominic had no reason to think it had escaped, but he could tell that the king was continuing to grow weaker. He would have had to admit his own original involvement to tell me openly that there was a demon in the castle, but he certainly hoped I would be able to overcome its evil magic, prompted by his hints.

  The Lady Maria looked at me with eyes that were suddenly brimming with tears. “He found some extra youth for me for a few years. But when I talked to him most recently, he said that it was too late for that-”

  I had been a fool since the day I arrived at Yurt. It should have been obvious at once where the demon had gotten the extra years he had given the Lady Maria. He had taken them from the king.

  When the saints had intervened and saved the king from death, her years had been reclaimed from her, and the demon couldn’t get them back again. This was when she had decided to ask for something entirely different. This was when she had told the demon she wanted to see a dragon.

  “You fibbed to me,” I said, shaking my finger at her until she giggled. “You told me no one had been in your chambers that day, when actually you were requesting things from your magic man.”

  Did she realize that her “request” had nearly destroyed the castle? Since the dragon’s presence had been extremely exciting, even romantic, and since, as it turned out, no one had been killed and the damage to the castle all seemed reparable, she was just delighted to have been able to see a real dragon.

  “Maybe he couldn’t make me younger anymore after he had been back in that star,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Was that just before I arrived?”

  “It was, actually,” she said, surprised. “The old wizard had left two days earlier, and the constable told us you were coming at the end of the week. It was a very strange experience. I hope you won’t think I imagined it.”

  “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 it kills me, will it take my soul as well?”