A Bad Spell in Yurt

by C. Dale Brittain

  “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?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Joachim slowly, and much more hesitantly than I would have wished. “Usually, if a person disinterestedly gives his life to save another, his soul is saved. But in this particular case, I would have to ask the bishop. I could send him a message by the pigeons.”

  “There’s not enough time. I’ll just have to risk it.” We sat in silence For several minutes more. I kept hoping that if I waited I would either start feeling brave or think of an alternate plan. “It’s probably too late for proper spiritual instruction now,” I said with an attempt at a smile. “I just wish I wasn’t so scared.”

  “Courage is doing what you have to do, no matter how frightened you are.”

  “Even I know that. But I still wish I wasn’t so scared.”

  Outside the chaplains’ window, we could hear voices and clattering as the castle began to go about the day’s business. I waited for but did not yet hear the sound of a mounted party preparing to head out.

  “I suspected you of evil once,” I said. “Will you forgive me?”

  “Yes, of course. I suspected you of evil more than once. Please forgive me as well.” I stood up at last. “I have to go now. I’ll leave it to your judgment what to tell the others. Just please don’t let the Lady Maria know I had to die because of her; it would upset her too much. But do try to warn her against future experiments with pentagrams. Let Zahlfast—he’s the teacher at the wizards’ school I told you about—hear the whole story, whatever happens. And tell the queen I love her.”

  “I’m going with you,” said Joachim, suddenly and intensely.

  “You can’t. It’s thirty miles, and it would take you most of the day on horseback. I can make it flying in half an hour.”

  “But I could—”

  There was a sharp rap on the door, causing us both to jump. It swung open, and Gwen came in for the chaplains’ breakfast tray.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, “but with everything so different in this castle, I lost track. I should have gotten it an hour ago.”

  “It’s all right,‘ Joachim said gently. She hurried away, closing the door behind her.

  The interruption made me realize that the precious moments were draining away. I tried taking deep breaths. “Good-bye,” I said. “I have no right to imperil anyone except myself. Pray for me.”

  Joachim was about to say something else, but he did not have a chance. I leaped out the window and was gone, flying back home.

  I dropped from a gray sky in front of the castle. A cold rain was starting to fall. After leaving the duchess’s castle with burning determination half an hour earlier, I now felt reluctant to go inside. The cracked parapets where the dragon had writhed in death looked like a row of broken teeth.

  I wandered toward the king’s rose garden, arguing unsuccessfully with myself that I needed to go inside at once. The individual rosebushes were all mulched and carefully covered, but the lawn was dead and sodden. I donned a protective spell against the rain.

  My eye caught a glimpse of something just beyond the garden. I went around to investigate and found a pile of white stones, rounded pieces of chalk, emerging from the last of the snow. The stones were positioned half under a shrub, where they would never be noticed in the summer.

  I continued on around the castle. There were four more of the piles of white stones. This, then, was the giant pentagram the old wizard had erected around the castle. The demon had escaped from the tower room, but it had been unable to escape from the castle.

  The thought passed wildly through my mind for the second time in twelve hours that perhaps I could leave the demon in the castle and find some reason to persuade the king and queen never to return home again, but to start a new life with their household somewhere else.

  I shook my head hard to dismiss this thought. Besides the unlikelihood that I could persuade them of any such thing, I knew that the piles of stones could be disturbed some day, whether anyone was living here or not, releasing the demon from its temporary prison. And the Lady Maria’s soul was in jeopardy no matter where she was. I shivered, set my jaw, and rose to fly over the castle walls.

  I dropped into the courtyard and stood still for a moment, listening. There was no sound but the dripping of water. But the cobblestones in the courtyard seemed unnaturally warm, like the surface of a stove. Something whizzed silently by my face. I jumped back, throwing up my arms, and realized it was a bat. More bats wheeled around the castle towers. What were bats doing out in the middle of the day?

  For several minutes I walked through the empty castle. Giant gray toads squatted in several of the rooms, and heavy flies buzzed against the windows. Small dark shapes that I recognized as rats scattered as I opened doors. The door to my own chambers was closed, but the magic lock was gone.

  I opened the door and stepped inside. Nothing looked disturbed, although the supernatural influence was very strong. I had worried about a stranger reading my books of magic, but a demon, whose own power could cut right through the natural powers of magic, would have no need to do so.

  It occurred to me that perhaps what I needed to do was to light a fire in my fireplace, sit down and get warm for an hour or two, and make sure I actually knew what I was going to say to the demon. Almost by force I dragged myself from the fireplace, where I was already reaching for the kindling.

  I knew perfectly well what I was going to say to the demon. The negotiations were straightforward. If what the world’s demonology experts had to say in the Diplomatica Diabolica was correct, at the end the demon would agree to release the Lady Maria’s soul, would agree to return to hell, and would look around for the life it had been promised. And the life would be th
ere. I went back out into the courtyard, closing my door and putting on a magic lock. They would remember me in future years by the rooms that no one could enter.

  I started walking toward the great hall, thinking vaguely that I might meet the demon there, but stopped myself. I knew perfectly well where I would find it.

  But I wanted to do one final thing. I went to the little room by the main gate and worked the winch to lower the drawbridge. Even if the royal party did not return until the end of the twelve days of Christmas, someone from the village would see the bridge down and come in to investigate. The constable might be worried about the storerooms, in spite of the heavy locks on the doors, but I was more worried about my body. I hoped someone would find it before it was too badly nibbled by the rats.

  The bridge went down with a clang that vibrated through the whole castle. I opened the main gate wide enough to admit a man and forced my feet to cross the courtyard.

  Thin swirls of foul smoke were wafting up the cellar stairs. More bats flew up as I reached the top of the stairs. They flew back and forth, blind and disoriented. I took a final breath of clean air and went slowly down.

  The key I had taken from Dominic a month ago, when we had been chasing the stranger, turned with a rusty screech in the lock. I propped the door open and started down the long, black corridor.

  Part Eight

  The Cellars

  I

  The faint daylight faded away behind me, and I paused to turn on the magic light on my belt buckle. It cast just enough light for me to see a few yards ahead. Motes in the coils of foul smoke danced in the light of the moon and stars. I pushed aside the thought that I should go back for a lantern or a magic globe and walked determinedly onward.

  But my determination lasted only for a few steps. The cellars were absolutely silent except for the sound of my feet. Instead of being half a dozen yards underground, I could have been half a dozen miles. I did not even hear the dripping and scurrying sounds I had heard when last here. All I could hear was the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.

  “Maybe the demon’s gone,” the thought popped into my head. “In that case it’s silly for me to be down here.” But I dismissed the thought and continued slowly on. I might not be able to hear him, but I was pushing against a wave of evil like walking into a headwind.

  The hall turned, and I put my hand on the wall while trying to peer around the corner. The stone was wet under my hand, and the wet was stickier than water. I held my hand at the level of my waist to look at it in the faint light of the moon and stars. It was dripping red.

  I gritted my teeth and forced myself onward against a terror that threatened to overwhelm me. Soon I had proceeded farther than I had gone before, past the spot where the floor had been flooded. Now it was dry and ominously warm.

  My knees began to tremble so hard that each step became an effort of will. My steps came slower and slower until I found I had stopped completely. The smoke made me cough, as my lungs desperately sought purer air, and the sound of my coughing seemed to echo throughout the cellars. “Where are you?” I almost shouted but bit my lip just in time.

  “You know that’s not the way to open a conversation with a demon,” I told myself firmly. This was not a time for improvisation, for using good ideas and flashes of inspiration to cover up for a lack of preparation. If I was going to save my kingdom, I would have to be the wizard I never had been and proceed absolutely according to the rules.

  But I wished I would find the demon before I lost my nerve. I made my feet start moving again. “Merciful saints,” I breathed, then shook my head. The Lady Maria’s soul was beyond the prayers of even the saints. Her only hope of any kind, and the only hope for the life and happiness of all the people living in the castle of Yurt, was for a negotiated compromise with the demon. And as I had reminded myself once before, the saints do not negotiate.

  The corridor turned again and continued downwards. I glanced sideways at some of the rooms I was passing, afraid of what I might see in them. They no longer looked like storerooms. They looked like prison cells.

  Once again, I had to keep myself from shouting, “Come out! Let’s get this over with!” If the demon wanted to drive me back out of the cellars with terror, he was close to succeeding.

  I stopped, trying to steady my ragged breathing. I had no idea how much farther the cellars went. The absolute stillness seemed to bear me down as though under a physical weight. But barely had I thought that any noise would be better than this silence when I discovered just how wrong I was.

  A cloud of bats, squeaking frantically, rushed up the corridor toward me. Their wings flapped all around my head, and I felt the brush of tiny, hairy bodies against my face. At that I would have fled, heedless of the consequences, but my foot slipped and I crashed to the floor. Here the paving stones were damp, and as I sat up I could hear for the first time the dripping of water.

  The bats were gone. I stood up, rubbing my bruises. It didn’t matter if I had cracked any bones, because I would soon be dead anyway. All I had to do was keep moving until the demon showed himself. Now the air was thick with scurrying noises, with unidentifiable reptilian calls, and with distant and ominous moans. Emboldened by any change from the deadly silence, I walked on as quickly as I could make my feet move.

  Rats scampered down the corridor in front of me, and several times I nearly stepped on a scorpion or a snake that slithered across my path. Another cloud of bats burst out of a side room, but this time I was ready for them. But I did not like the moaning sound, and I was drawing closer to its source.

  A flutter of movement caught my eye, just on the edge of my peripheral vision. I jerked around so fast I nearly lost my footing. It disappeared as I turned, but I had had a faint glimpse of an apparition with a human face.

  I braced my back against the stone wall and felt more dank blood seeping through my clothes. Giant roaches scuttled by my ears. The light from my belt was very faint, but I managed, after a few panic-stricken moments, to increase the brightness momentarily.

  I was standing at a widening of the corridor where many doorways opened on either side. In each doorway was a barred gate, rusted open. There was no possibility of imagining that these were storerooms. These were prison cells.

  A white form moved in the cell I was facing and started toward me. It wailed as it came, with a cry that melted my bones. It was a skeleton. It rattled with every step, and its eye sockets were gleaming. I tried the two words of the Hidden Language to break an illusion, and it kept on coming.

  Fingers made of dozens of tiny bones reached toward me. My arms went up over my face, and I pressed back hard against the wall, waiting for the skeleton’s deathly touch.

  The touch did not come. I opened my eyes again.

  The skeleton was gone. I did not know if it was an illusion, given voice and propelled by stronger magic than mine, or if it was a real skeleton, given life by black magic. All I knew was that the demon apparently did not intend to kill me by proxy. Either he still hoped to frighten me away, or he was saving me to kill himself.

  This thought gave me the confidence to glance around at all the other barred cells. Skeletons or ghostly apparitions were in most of them. I had never known much of the history of Yurt and was unlikely now to learn more, but I remembered that, generations ago, there had been wars in the western kingdoms. These then would be manifestations of the souls of traitors, of prisoners, of men broken under torture. I shuddered as a ghostly hand passed through me, insubstantial but leaving a chill as an illusion never did. These apparitions might not be planning to kill me, but they could be drawing my soul toward hell with theirs.

  I pushed away from the wall and staggered onward. Maybe I was being presumptuous, I thought, to try to save the Lady Maria’s soul when she herself had willingly sold it away. Maybe I could keep the cellars locked up, since I had the only key, and talk the young count and the knights out of their mad plan to attack the “renegade wizard.” Maybe, having nearly
killed the king and then nearly lolled us all with the dragon, the demon would now be satisfied and cause no more trouble.

  But these thoughts scarcely slowed my steps. I had already had all these arguments with myself many times and had won—or lost, depending on whether or not one thought my own life worth preserving.

  The dripping was steadier, and I had to step carefully, because a thin film of water was coursing over the floor. I had no idea how far I had come or how long it had been since I left the courtyard. It briefly occurred to me that I might be dead already.

  The corridor turned again, and I paused, for ahead I thought I could see a light burning. Again, I barely stopped myself from calling out, “Who’s there?” I knew perfectly well who was there. The floor grew warmer and drier with every step I took, and the noxious fumes grew thicker.

  I turned another corner and found myself looking into a wide chamber, at the very end of the cellars. I walked warily into the room. The walls were glowing red, and the heat was nearly unbearable. The room seemed empty.

  A voice spoke behind me. “Were you looking for me?”

  I made myself turn around slowly and deliberately. The demon was standing in the doorway. I was struck dumb. He was only about a foot high, bright red, and had horns and burning eyes. If he hoped to lull me into complacency by appearing small, he was mistaken. He smiled, which gave his face the final touch of absolute evil.

  “Greetings, Daimbert,” he said in a high voice. Since everyone in the castle called me Wizard, it was extremely startling to have someone use my name again, especially a demon.

  I found my voice and closed my eyes against his face so that I could concentrate on the words of the Hidden Language. “By Satan, by Beelzebub, by Lucifer and Mephistopheles,” I said, as this was the correct way to begin a conversation with a demon. “I have come to offer you a bargain.” I spoke rapidly, before the pervasive evil could drain from my mind the memory of the words I had to say, before I could change my mind. “In return for a soul to which you may not be fully entitled, I offer you a life.”