There was a small, very serious voice behind us. “Don’t listen to him. That’s not a real promise. He’s not your friend.”
Elerius gave a great start as though coming out of a trance. I whirled around, finding my voice again. “Antonia! What are you doing here?”
She buried her face in my shoulder to avoid looking at the demon, who appeared delighted to have her back. Her voice was indistinct but confident. “Mother was trying to calm down some of the littlest children,” as though she were not one of them. “So I tiptoed away. You didn’t hear me coming, did you! I got here just in time.”
I looked over at Elerius, still on his feet but swaying. His face was ashen and running with sweat-not just from the heat of the room. He broke his gaze away from the demon and sat down very suddenly. “Thank you, Antonia,” he murmured.
“I told you that you needed me here to help you,” she said, starting to tremble now.
She had tried to help Gwennie and the twins by taking them off on a flying carpet ride, tried to help the Dog-Man by summoning a demon of her own, and really had helped Elerius by showing up when she did. But my stomach knotted as I thought what she might do in the very near future, still convinced she was helping her friends, once the demon’s influence began to work fully on her.
“You’ve- You’ve negotiated with a demon before, Daimbert?” said Elerius hesitantly. “Somehow I never heard about that.”
“I don’t think anyone but Zahlfast and the Master ever knew,” I said shortly.
“I know all the protocols from the Diplomatica Diabolica, of course, and I was aware that one had to beware of temptations, but somehow I had imagined them taking the form of wealth and pliant maidens.”
“When you’re in charge of the school, Elerius,” I said quietly, “be sure the demonology courses make it clearer that power can be the greatest temptation of them all.”
“We’re negotiating here, remember?” interrupted the demon. “If you start talking to each other instead we’ll never reach an agreement!”
And maybe we don’t want an agreement, I thought, but that idea too was a temptation. Doing nothing would mean Antonia’s will slowly turning to evil even while the demon remained imprisoned, and at some point, far in the future or very soon, an escaped demon roaming gleefully through Yurt and Caelrhon.
“You have to come now, Wizard,” said Antonia to me. “That’s why I sneaked away from Mother, to tell you the people are here.”
“The king is back with the flying carpet?” I asked, keeping my face resolutely turned away from the demon.
“Not him. I couldn’t tell who they are. But a whole group of people are climbing up to the gate, and I think some of them have swords. You have to come see them.”
Just a short delay wouldn’t hurt anything, I thought, leaping to my feet. Antonia was right; a group of people arriving unsuspecting at a castle with a demon in it was the last thing we needed. “Come on,” I said to Elerius. “Now that we’ve gotten the initial temptations out of the way, we can continue this negotiation shortly.”
“You go ahead, Daimbert,” he said, shaking his head. Antonia was tugging now at my hand. “We don’t dare leave the demon, even imprisoned inside a pentagram, now that we’ve started non-binding conversation. He could talk to anyone who wandered into the room- do you want him asking one of the other children to erase the chalk lines?”
Logically it made sense. But I didn’t dare leave him alone. “I’ll stay, then. You go with Antonia.”
The demon was growing more and more irritated that we weren’t paying attention to him, but at the moment I only had eyes for Elerius. “You don’t trust me, do you, Daimbert,” he said quietly. “At least give me credit for the intelligence to realize the flaw in what he’s offering. He’s right that I’ve never worried overly about the eventual fate of my soul, but I really do intend to use my magic to help mankind, and the first thing a demon would do is to make me unable to tell the difference between helping and harming.” He managed a grim smile. “And I’ve always been admired for my wizardly skills; don’t you realize how galling it would be to know that my future abilities would not be mine but a demon’s?”
“But I have more experience-”
“And are much more likely,” commented Elerius dryly, “to throw away your life and soul together in a reckless effort to save your daughter. Now that I have seen the dangers, I shall attempt what other means might be found.”
“I want you to come, Wizard,” said Antonia to me, tugging harder.
Still I hesitated. “If I leave you here, Elerius,” I said slowly, “and I find that you’ve deluded yourself, like Cyrus, into thinking that you can use a demon’s help without it affecting your own judgment and will, then I shall have to kill you: quickly, immediately, before the powers of black magic make you invincible.”
Elerius’s face had slowly regained its color. “I don’t think I’ll be in any danger of death from you,” he said, managing a smile. I wondered if he meant it as equivocally as it sounded.
“Hurry up!” Antonia cried. “If you don’t hurry the people will be here, and if you make Elerius go instead I’ll stay here with you.”
That decided me. I scooped her up and found myself running flat out up the passage away from the ruined chapel, almost tripping over Cyrus, who was huddled by the door. A voice in the back of my mind asked if this urging from Antonia might be the first sign of the devil’s influence, taking me away from where I really ought to be.
It felt so good to be out of the demon’s influence, back in cool morning sunlight, seizing a startled Theodora and kissing her again when I thought I had done so for the last time, that I almost didn’t care.
Briefly I told her of our progress-or lack of progress-so far and looked out the window. A group of people had left their horses at the base of the cliffs and were climbing up the broken causeway toward the castle’s front gate. And with a far-seeing spell I recognized them: Celia and Hildegarde, their parents, and the bishop.
For a few minutes I could imagine that everything was going to be all right after all. I flew down and met them outside the gate, telling them immediately that all the children were safe but leaving out, for the moment, any mention of demons.
Prince Ascelin sheathed his sword and slapped me on the shoulder. His face was gray with exhaustion, and all the lines in it had deepened, but he still managed a laugh. “Thought you could slip away without my knowledge, Wizard? You may have wanted to protect me from what you would find here, but it’s not so easy when you’ve got the best tracker in a dozen kingdoms on your trail!”
I managed a smile in return. Let him think I had left him in Yurt out of concern for his safety. In fact, I hadn’t thought about him at all, only wanting to get to Caelrhon myself as fast as I could.
“I used to be able to hunt all day and all night-even on foot when everyone else was mounted-without getting this tired,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “Age is the best tracker of all; he gets on your trail and you never lose him. But by now I presume you’ve captured this Dog-Man and have the children all ready to go home?” he added cheerfully, looking up at the jagged turrets of the castle. “Terrible place, I must say, for children; good thing the twins didn’t know about it when they were twelve. It looks like your man used a spell to hide their tracks a lot of the way, but he was going fast and must have had gaps in his spells-plenty there for me to follow.”
I looked past him and the duchess to their daughters. “Celia?”
She gave me a grin. She still had all her hair and looked happier and more at peace with herself than she had all summer. “When you abandoned me like that, before I even had a chance to make my maiden vows, what choice did I have but to chase after you?”
“And,” put in Hildegarde, “she wanted to help me find Antonia.” She, like Ascelin, was wearing a sword.
Joachim stood at the rear, not saying anything. The part of me that wanted to be optimistic thought that bishops dealt with the supernatural every day, so Elerius and I could safely turn the demon over to him.
The part of me that was realistic knew that the aura of the saints around the bishop would so terrify the demon that he would refuse to talk to him at all-maybe retreating back to hell, but if so taking Antonia’s soul irretrievably with him.
Before I could say anything to him, I saw past his shoulder a flying dark red shape approaching rapidly: the flying carpet. Justinia dipped it over our heads and Paul and Gwennie waved. “You’re just in time to help out!” called the king. “There are a lot of eager parents waiting back in Caelrhon.”
The carpet shot in through a broken window high above us. Everyone clattered through the gates and up the stairs to join them. It was much easier finding our way through the castle in daylight, and without having to worry about Vlad, than it had been at night, especially with the castle invisible around us.
But it had been, I thought, a cold sweat breaking out down my back, a very long time since Evrard had gone off in search of Vlad …
The duchess went straight up to Justinia. “A pigeon-message arrived in Yurt for you about half an hour after you and the wizard flew off. It looked like it had been transferred a number of times: it was from Xantium.”
“Didst thou mark who had sent it?” said Justinia eagerly.
“I did more than that,” said the duchess, slightly shame-faced, producing it from her pocket. “I’m afraid I read it. Well, everyone else who transferred it probably read it too, so why shouldn’t I? It’s from a mage-I can’t pronounce his name-and he says that your grandfather and the Guild have worked out their differences. He’s going to come to Yurt himself to accompany you home.”
“This is joy and gladness!” cried Justinia.
So, I thought, Vlad wouldn’t have gotten anything from the Thieves’ Guild for Justinia anyway. There were distinct disadvantages to traveling slowly and only by night: one’s information could be seriously out of date.
Antonia ran to greet the twins, and Hildegarde swung her high over her head. “You had everybody worried, you scamp!” she said with a great laugh.
“I know,” said Antonia seriously. “I didn’t want to leave town without telling Mother. But I couldn’t help it.”
“That even happens to grownups sometimes,” said Celia, smiling. She turned to Joachim. “Your Holiness, I have been thinking ever since yesterday, when we all left the nunnery so abruptly. I don’t really have the vocation to be a nun. What took me there, I now realize, was only despair. Don’t think-” she added hastily as though the bishop had been going to interrupt, which he hadn’t. “Don’t think that I look down on women who want to devote their days to prayer. But I want to help others, not just worry about my own little sins. I intend to serve God but I will have to do so actively in the world.”
“Are you certain this is your own decision, my daughter?”
Celia smiled again. “Well, it’s certainly not my parents’, if that’s what you’re wondering. You’ve been with us the whole time, so you know they haven’t said anything one way or the other.”
“Though I had to bite my tongue more than once,” said the duchess with a grin. “And the fact that you’re twenty-one now did nothing to stop me. Rather it was the memory of all the things that people used to tell me I couldn’t do.”
“I shall have to write to the abbess,” said Celia more seriously. “She was very kind to me. And, Mother, we really ought to give the nunnery something. It’s not their fault I changed my mind.”
Paul and Gwennie were getting a second load of children onto the carpet, with Hildegarde’s assistance. Justinia, delightedly reading and rereading the letter from Kaz-alrhun, was no help. Most of the children were awake now, and some of the boys suddenly decided it would be exciting to race off and explore the castle rather than traveling home again, even on a flying carpet. Hildegarde’s long reach and her offer to let children who did not run off hold her sword stifled an incipient break.
“Maybe I should rethink those dozen children,” said Paul to Gwennie, prying loose from his leg a sobbing girl who had been more terrified of the carpet than anything else until she saw Hildegarde’s sword. “Even aside from what my queen would think …” He looked at her silently a minute. “Though I don’t think I’ll be getting myself a queen for a while. It’s going to take me a very long time to find another woman who could be half as much my friend as you are.” He let it hang, still looking at her, then suddenly turned and shouted to some boys, “Sit down again! Don’t you know how dangerous it can be to stand up on a flying carpet?” This was a curious comment given that they had, for once, been sitting demurely.
“You realize,” the bishop said to Celia, “you still cannot be a priest.”
“I thought you would say that,” she said soberly. “How about visiting the sick as your representative? How about talking to women who are confused and want spiritual guidance but have good reason to feel uncomfortable around men? How about just sitting very quietly in the back of classes in the seminary?”
Joachim lifted an eyebrow. “You seem to have thought of a number of possibilities. I shall have to give the question of seminary classes some consideration. Many of the students are still trying to reconcile themselves to giving up close association with women…. But then they will have to deal with women as well as men through their ministry for the rest of their lives,” he added briskly. “Yes. When we are all home again, come talk to me at the cathedral office, and we will see what can be arranged.”
Celia kissed his ring with a barely concealed look of glee and hurried over to finish settling children onto the carpet. At last I had the bishop to myself.
For several minutes, surrounded by people who, if not reaching their hearts’ desire, were at least working out compromises that might temporarily satisfy, I could put the demon out of my mind. But he was still there, trapped in the pentagram in the ruined chapel, not thirty yards away. He still had Antonia’s soul. And unless I did something very soon, my nerve would fail me completely.
“I’d like you to give me the last rites, Joachim,” I said quietly. “Though it’s not going to do much good. Antonia has sold her soul to the devil trying unsuccessfully to save Cyrus from his demon-Theodora can give you the details-and it’s going to take my life and soul together to redeem her.”
He was going to give me an argument. I just knew it. “There’s nothing you can do,” I said, speaking rapidly. “You know priests can’t exorcise people who have summoned demons themselves, only those who have been invaded by free-roaming demons. And you could use the liturgy to drive the demon out of this castle, certainly, but he would have her soul just as certainly.”
Before Joachim could reply-and he looked very ready to do so-I heard a step in the passage leading to the chapel and whirled to see Elerius emerging through the doorway.
He was so haggard he could hardly stand. “Maybe you’d better try again yourself, Daimbert,” he gasped. “That demon intends to drive a hard bargain.” He noticed with vague interest the others who had arrived and then looked back at me from dark-rimmed eyes that had lost all their irony and calculation. “I haven’t given in to his offers, if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s the raw terror, I think, that wears you down, until he hopes you’ll agree to anything just to get away. Watch! I can still walk right up to a bishop.”
He staggered more than walked. “Even Cyrus can walk up to the bishop,” I snapped, not completely sure whether to believe him, then stopped.
“Help me!” a voice echoed down the passage from the chapel. “Help me!” That was Cyrus’s voice.
What could I do? For twenty-five years I had been trying to help mankind, sometimes with limited success but trying. Without even making a conscious choice I flew down the passage into heat and darkness, gritting my teeth against the wave of evil waiting for me. And then I realized that Cyrus was not calling for my help.
“I can’t go on without my powers! Help me get them back!” He was calling to the demon.
I dropped to the ground just inside the passage from the chapel and leaned my forehead against the stone doorframe. This was it. No matter what Cyrus was trying to talk the demon into, successfully or unsuccessfully, when I went in there to join him I wasn’t going out. I hadn’t gotten the last rites from the bishop, I hadn’t said good-bye again to Theodora, but twice was all I could manage. If I had to face that raw terror and raw evil a third time, I would just have to let Antonia be lost.
“And why should I grant any particular powers to you?” the demon was saying. “It is not as though you still possessed a soul with which to bargain!”
I looked a last time up the passageway, in the direction of daylight and the people I hoped I would never see again, because they, unlike me, would be in heaven. Elerius put his head into the passage but I waved him back, and he retreated, looking relieved.
“But I used to be able to do things!” cried Cyrus. “Good things! I helped children! I rebuilt the high street of Caelrhon, and they loved me for it! And now,” his voice cracking, “the angels won’t listen to me, and my demon is gone, and I can’t do anything!”
Let the demon explain it to him, I thought, trying to take deep breaths to steady myself. The poisonous fumes floating across the room didn’t help.
“You wizards really are difficult to deal with,” said the demon, sounding irritated. “You always try to pin us down with specious protocols and bargains you have no intention of keeping, and then make ridiculous demands. Can’t you understand that the demon who used to help you is no longer here?”
I was barely listening, trying instead to rally what little strength I had left. No more of this non-binding conversation, in which a demon might blithely offer anything. I would force him to accept binding negotiations, in which he would swear by Satan’s name to release Antonia in return for my immediate death and the reception of my soul in hell.