Malagigi nodded, adding enigmatically, “Among other things.”
“So the dead cannot hurt us if we are calm, but with demons all bets are off?” Erasmus clarified.
“Exactly.” Malagigi bowed and extended his hand, as if handing Erasmus a diploma.
We pushed off into the swampy river, Malagigi poling us past swirling clumps of long reed that seemed to reach for us as we sailed near them. Dead cypresses rose from the water, and a lone fig tree stood desolate, leaves gray, branches devoid of fruit. The stink of dead vegetation was everywhere.
“Christ sent that one down here,” Malagigi commented as we poled by the fig tree. “Got impatient with it for not producing fruit. Pointed his finger at it and, zup, it appeared here.”
“And this is that very fig tree?” Gregor shot to his feet and leaned over to get a better look at the tree, causing the craft to rock violently.
“It was but a little joke,” Malagigi apologized with a shrug, as he tried valiantly to steady us with his pole-oar. Gregor did not look amused, but he resumed his seat.
* * *
“SO, you were the Lord of Ardennes! I don’t think I knew that, Malagigi,” Erasmus mused. He was leaning over the edge, poking at things beneath the water with his staff. He had taken his dull and pitted Urim gauntlet from his belt and donned it rather than hold the staff in his bare hand.
“Ah, that was long, long ago, long before you were born, mon ami.”
“Ardennes?” Mab opened his notebook, made a face at the soggy paper, and closed it again. “I thought you said the Forest of Arden.”
“Arden. Ardennes.” Malagigi shrugged. “They are both the same.”
“Long before I was born?” Erasmus objected. “I am over five hundred!” He smirked. “I have the wisdom born of age.”
“I was older than that when we took Milan. I had passed my seventh century,” Malagigi replied. “So, do not speak to me of wisdom born of age! Recall that I was the son of Charlemagne, who ruled until the year 814. Really, you Prosperos have no proper sense of history. Most likely, you did not attend your instructors as children.”
“Either that, or the Orbis Suleimani mucked with the facts,” Mab muttered.
Malagigi continued. “As I said, it was long ago. Back in the days when faeries still ruled much of the earth.” He poled us forward, gazing off into the distance, his hood still resting on his shoulders. “My mother, Morgana La Fay, ceded part of the faery forest of Broceliande to my control. I lived there, bespelling rogues and raising unnaturally wise horses.”
“Raised horses, did you?” Mab commented. “Something you have in common with Miss Logistilla.”
“Ah … Logistilla! Her eyes! Her thighs!” Malagigi threw up a hand as if to ward off Gregor’s frown of brotherly disapproval. “No disrespect intended! Ours was a love that was not meant to last. She found me a bore and decided that form should follow function.”
Erasmus snorted with amusement, and even Gregor shook his head ruefully.
Malagigi continued, “Still, many lessons did I learn during my sylvan apprenticeship. The enchanted horses I raised after my indentureship as a beast of the wood made the wise Bayard look as ignorant as a babe … but, alas, the age of knighthood had passed, and there was no one to ride my fair steeds to fame, as my cousin Renaud once did. Instead, my noble steeds lived and died on some French battlefield amidst a thousand other steeds. The days of enchanted horses and magical swords had passed.
“But what days those were!” Malagigi gazed off into the distance, as if he could see through time to an earlier age. “Days of magic and fire, not as they are remembered now in history books. What fine beasts, my horses.” He turned to Erasmus. “Do you know your uncle Antonio had one of my horses? A distant descendant of Veillantif, one of my finest. He rode it the day we sacked Milan?”
“The day he died,” Erasmus murmured.
Malagigi shrugged again. “That was not the fault of my steed.” He was silent a moment and then added, “Antonio hungered after our magic like a dog after his master’s bone. He had no powers of his own but claimed the secrets he had once possessed that had been stolen from him. Perhaps, he lied, and yet … in life, I walked paths no one else could walk and spoke to spirits who would speak only to me … but Antonio, he knew things even I had never heard tell of! A charming man, he was, too. To hear it from him, he was innocent, and it was your father who was in the wrong.”
“Poor Uncle Antonio. I wonder what became of him,” mused Erasmus.
“He is here.” Malagigi spread an arm indicating Hell. “Not in the swamp, but lower.”
“He is?” we cried.
“Two times I have spoken to him,” Malagigi said. “The first time was when I was newly a shade. The second time was after I had joined the Brotherhood of Hope. I found him enthroned in some infernal palace and urged him to repent and come away with me. But he would not listen. He said…”—Malagigi shrugged his shoulders. “Eh … he was too caught up in the illusion of his past to come away.”
Erasmus frowned down at his hands. I recalled his fondness for our uncle and how it had been Erasmus who found Uncle Antonio when the latter was dying upon the battlefield—Antonio, who confessed to Erasmus that he had killed my first love, Ferdinand.
I recalled, as well, how earlier the same day, upon that battlefield in Milan, Uncle Antonio had accused Father of robbing a sacred library. After centuries of maligning him, I now had to admit that my uncle had been telling the truth. Father had stolen the enchanted tomes from the Orbis Suleimani. Apparently, most of Antonio’s magic had depended upon those books, even as ours now depended upon the staffs into which the books had been transformed.
Only, thanks to Seir of the Shadows, I now knew that each of those volumes had contained a demon bound within its pages, the same demons that now were bound within my brothers’ and sister’s staffs.
That the incubus Seir was actually Lord Astreus, who had been tithed to Hell by Queen Maeve for helping my brother Mephisto, I pushed from my mind. I could not allow my thoughts to dwell upon the elf lord again while I remained in this horrible swamp.
Seir of the Shadows claimed that my father and Antonio had been about to set the nine great demons free, when Father suffered a change of heart. Rather than release the demons that King Solomon had so carefully bound, my father stole the books and fled into exile, taking my infant self with him …
… Or so I had thought, until Mephisto revealed I was the daughter of the wizened old witch Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, and not of Father’s beloved wife, Lady Portia. So, apparently, I joined Father later, once he was already living on Prospero’s Island.
Father’s journal suggested that he had a supernatural ally in these matters, a “Fair Queen” whom he called “M.” This woman may have helped him escape with the magical, demon-infused tomes. My great fear was that “M” stood for Maeve, the Queen of the Elves—because I now knew that Maeve was merely a disguise of Lilith, the Queen of Air and Darkness, one of the Seven Rulers of Hell.
If Father’s “Fair Queen” was Lilith, what did that suggest about Father’s motives? Was he an accomplice, robbing the Orbis Suleimani of the demon tomes to help the Queen of Air and Darkness carry out her evil plans? Or had he been tricked by the Elf Queen, believing her to be only whom she appeared to be?
Could Father be our traitor? That made no sense, since he was the one who had been captured, and whom we had come to rescue. Was it possible that he had not been captured at all, but had merely led us into Hell to our doom? No, the idea was ridiculous. If Father wished to destroy us, he could have merely asked us to walk into Hell, and we all would have gathered our things and gone. There would have been no need for all this rigmarole.
No, Father could not be a traitor!
Besides, if Father were the traitor, he would have let the demons go, rather than bind them into staffs and guard them for five hundred more years. More likely, Mab was right, and Abaddon, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, was ly
ing. There was no traitor.
The very fact that, after five centuries, Father had never freed the demons, cut against my theory about the identity of “M.” This thought lifted my spirits, until I recalled what Mab had said about demons disliking each other. Perhaps, the Queen of Air and Darkness wished to keep these nine great demons imprisoned so as to increase her own glory. Or, perhaps, she wanted them in our hands. According to the essays in Father’s journal, exposure to infernal influences warped the human soul. Perhaps, Lilith believed that if the Family Prospero, the Heirs of Solomon and the Defenders of the Earth, were constantly in the presence of these demonic influences, the ill we would do, even involuntarily, would be greater than what these demons might achieve on their own, were they free.
All this was speculation. Much as I would have appreciated Mab’s input and that of my brothers, I did not feel an open gondola in the middle of the Swamp of Uncleanness was the proper place to discuss these matters. Father had kept all this secret for so long, it would be foolish of me to blurt it out where random demons might overhear us without first learning his reasons for secrecy.
Malagigi yelped and pointed at Erasmus’s sword belt. He leaned forward eagerly. “What is this? Is that not Durandel, the unbreakable sword of Orlando?” He tossed back his head, laughing aloud. “Legends still live!”
Malagigi turned to Mab. “Do you know Durandel? What a sword! Forged by fairies, they say. It once cut a pass through the Pyrenees! Originally, it was the sword of Hector of Troy, that noble knight who was slain by the deceitful Greeks. Hector’s mother threw it into the sea after he was slain, but when Roland, Orlando as you call him, needed a blade, I called up a mermaid to fetch it and bring it to him.”
“I thought you gave him the sword you won from the Saracen admiral, the flaming sword,” I said.
“Flamberge? But no! I gave Flamberge to my cousin Renaud.” Malagigi smoothed his mustache. “But enough ancient history. How is Logistilla?”
We glanced at one another.
“We don’t know,” Erasmus said bluntly.
“Oh?”
“Our sister, here”—Erasmus gestured at me—“summoned up the Hellwinds and scattered our brothers and sister across the length and breadth of Hell.”
“But why?” Malagigi gazed at me in astonishment.
“It was an accident,” I explained stiffly, as a fresh burst of resentment toward Erasmus assailed me. “I didn’t intend to call the Hellwinds. I just…” I hefted my four-foot pinewood flute and let my arm fall again. “I just played my flute.”
“She says that now,” Erasmus murmured, “but we have been told that there is a traitor in the family, and Miranda is the only one who fits the bill.”
“Professor Prospero,” Mab growled, “I told you not to put any faith in what Abaddon said. He’s a demon!”
“But you said yourself that these predictions often have some truth in them,” Erasmus countered.
Gregor leaned forward. “Isn’t it more likely that Abaddon meant Ulysses? The Angel of the Bottomless Pit thought I was dead. He must have believed Ulysses was loyal to him.”
“Ulysses?” asked Malagigi.
“Our youngest brother.” Erasmus explained. “Born after your death. He fell into the clutches of Abaddon, who ordered him to harm our family, to ensorcell Theophrastus, to kill Gregor…”
“To make sure that Gregor was no longer ‘a living man upon the earth.’” Mab read from his waterlogged notebook.
“So, Ulysses got Logistilla to turn Gregor here into a panther; he remained that way for eighty some years,” Erasmus finished.
“Actually, I spent the last few decades in an underground bunker on Mars,” Gregor interjected.
“Mars?” Malagigi looked up, though only lurid reds and clouds of steely gray were overhead. “Upon a spot of light gleaming in the night sky?”
“That’s why I left the Mars part out,” Erasmus commented blithely to Gregor. “Mars is a place, Malagigi. There’s a planet there … I mean the planet is a place, like France. Not a planet in the ancient sense of a dot of light in the sky. Earth is a planet. So is Mars.”
“But of course! And the sun is a place like Egypt.” Malagigi scoffed. “Come, my friend, are you sure that the noxious gases of the Swamp are not affecting you adversely?”
“Only our noses.” Mab sniffed dubiously and then crinkled his nose against the putrid stench he had just inhaled.
“I am quite well,” Erasmus replied. “Not my fault if you got yourself beheaded before the rise of modern science.”
“Whatever that may be.” Malagigi waved a hand airily. He nodded encouragingly at Gregor, who was currently holding the silver star. Gregor lifted his hand up higher, so that the silvery light surrounded the gondola. “So, you were going along about your day, troubling no one, when your sister called up the Hellwinds. Where? On the streets of Edinburgh?”
“We were on the Bridge across the River Styx,” I said.
“You were in Hell? All of you?” He glanced around as if to see which of us were not present. “Theo? Titus? Cornelius? Logistilla, too? Pourquoi?”
I said, “My father has been captured by demons. The Queen of Air and Darkness holds him prisoner. She plans to kill him on Twelfth Night, which, unless I have completely lost track of time, is the day after tomorrow. We were trying to rescue him,” I finished grimly.
“The great and dread magician Prospero? This is astonishing news indeed! And you all came to rescue him! Amazing! How lucky that you have Miranda’s Lady to guide you, for I cannot see how mortals could hope to make such a trip without the supernatural help of the Bearer of the Lightning Bolt!”
“Actually…” My tongue would not move in my mouth. I hid my face in my hands.
“My sister was defiled by a demon,” Gregor said bluntly. “The White Lady of Spiral Wisdom no longer heeds her.”
Thank you, Gregor, that was tactful, I thought. I hope that’s not how you handled your parishioners during confession. Tears threatened to well up, but my eyes remained dry. The peace the star brought sustained me.
“Ah … this is dire news!” Malagigi’s eyes grew round and watery as the implications sunk in. “But did not your family rely upon Water of Life for your immortality? Without a Handmaiden of Eurynome to travel to the Well at the World’s End, how will you maintain your eternal youth?”
“We won’t,” Erasmus replied, his voice flat. “In a mere few decades, we will all grow old and die.”
“I sorrow for you all!” Malagigi lowered his head in silent prayer. Looking up, he said, his voice serious, “You know, of course, that without Divine Eurynome to guide you through Hell, you have no chance.”
“An angel told us to come,” I replied defiantly. “She said we had the tools we needed to succeed.”
“Mephisto has the scrying ball of John Dee—Merlin’s ball, the one Solomon used when he came down here disguised as Asmodeus,” Erasmus explained. “If we can find Mephisto, we can use it to find Father and the others. And, of course, we have our staffs.”
“Ah!” Malagigi’s eyes flickered over the three staffs of power we carried—the staffs that were our Prospero Family legacy: Gregor’s Staff of Darkness, Erasmus’s Staff of Decay, and my flute, the Staff of the Winds—before coming to rest upon Durandel riding in its sheath at Erasmus’s side. Softly, he murmured, “Maybe, with Heaven’s help, you have a chance after all.”
“Yeah,” muttered Mab, “a snowball’s chance!”
Narrowing his eyes, Mab began surveying our surroundings carefully, as if attempting to discern exactly what the proverbial ball of frost’s chances might be.
CHAPTER
THREE
The Greatest Swordsman of Christendom
“A traitor lurks in your midst,” Malagigi mused as he poled, “and, yet, you do not fear Mephistopheles, Prince of Hell? We are certain, are we not, that when we find him, he will refrain from sticking us upon his pitchfork and roasting us over the coals, yes?”
Mab and I exchanged nervous glances again. Malagigi watched this carefully. He stroked his mustache and then gave a quick shrug, as if to say: “What is this to me?”
As we punted underneath a growth of diseased palms filled with spiderwebs, Mab leaned over, all the while keeping a wary eye on the web’s inhabitants, spiders as large as cats, with the faces of women.
“Begging your pardon, Ma’am,” he whispered in my ear, “but are we certain that the Harebrain is on the level? He is, after all, a demon. Maybe that’s what Abaddon meant by there being a traitor in the family.”
“You told us not to worry about Abaddon’s warning!” I whispered back.
“True,” Mab allowed softly, “but I wasn’t thinking about the fact that you had a demon in the family. Demons love ratting each other out.”
Mab pulled out his waterlogged notebook, frowned at it, and stuck it back in his trench coat. Searching his pockets, he pulled out the notebook Father Christmas had given him, the pages of which were waterproof. With a quick shake and a wipe with his handkerchief, it was as good as new. To his delight, the Space Pen he had received upon the same occasion worked, too.
Flipping the waterproof notebook open, Mab quickly wrote out a list of my siblings’ names, with Mephistopheles at the top. Above this, he scribbled: POSSIBLE TRAITORS.
Meanwhile, Malagigi, who was pushing through the sticky white tangles with his pole, was speaking to my brothers. “Ah, Mephistopheles Prospero! What a fine swordsman your brother was! It was a pleasure to watch him, which is much to say as he was cutting down my men! Of course, I did not know any of those men personally. It had been several centuries since I had ventured from Ardennes, except to visit my siblings in our tower in the vale of Orgagna, but I cared for them on principle, since they were Merovingians … I mean … what is the new word?… Frenchmen. Still, Mephistopheles was a wonder!”
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