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-binding 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.”
I couldn’t have moved even if I wanted to. This was so close to being me. All I could do was listen, my eyes squeezed shut, for the slightest deviant word.
“I release, give up, and free Antonia’s soul,” the demon continued. “But before I go, you shall die. Agreed and accepted?”
At the last moment I thought Cyrus would change his mind. I opened my eyes to see him stiff and white. Any promptings from his conscience would have been the promptings of a conscience perverted by evil.
But then he turned his head and looked toward us. His eyes slid past me and stopped. Twice he opened and closed his mouth. Then suddenly his face took on, just for an instant, that look of shattering goodness that I had seen in him once before. He gasped out, very low but still intelligible, “Agreed and accepted.”
The demon’s booming laugh came one more time as he bent his mouth, huge now and filled with hundreds of teeth, toward Cyrus. “See you in hell!” he cried, and the air exploded.
When our ears stopped ringing and we could see again, the chapel was empty of life. Part of the outer wall had vanished, letting in morning sunshine on the two still-smoking but empty pentagrams and Cyrus’s decapitated body. The bishop strode forward without hesitation and began reciting the last rites over him.
With only minimal hesitation, I followed him and dropped to my knees to begin rubbing out the pentagrams. If anybody else wanted to summon a demon to this castle, they would have to draw their own. I found the stub of Antonia’s chalk and hurled it with all my might out into the empty air.
Joachim finished the words of the liturgy as I rose shakily to my feet from the flagstones. They were empty now of all but Cyrus’s blood. The others had retreated back up the passage. “I should reconsecrate this chapel,” said the bishop distantly. “Not today. I should come back with some priests next week and do it.”
“Why did you stop me from going after Cyrus?” I asked, uninterested in consecrated chapels. “I presume he told you exactly what he intended to do?”
“No.” Joachim held me with his dark eyes. “But I guessed his heart. He wanted somehow, desperately, to make amends for at least some of the evil he had done.”
I grew weak all over again. “I thought you knew what you were doing the whole time and didn’t want me to give up my life and soul needlessly when Cyrus, after all, had already forfeited his.”
He was silent for a moment before answering. “I am the bishop, Daimbert. I could not have made a choice between you, if that’s what you mean, even though I would have wanted to. All I knew was that he intended to atone for his deeds, and I had to give him the chance to do so.” He paused briefly again. “And I think he has.”
“He didn’t think he could still save his soul at this point, did he?” I asked incredulously.
The bishop shook his head. “He wasn’t trying to save his soul. He was trying to save Antonia’s. He had finally come to the realization of just how deeply he had sinned in embracing evil: especially against the children and against you. He was trying to do good to you and to one particular child for the sake of goodness itself.”
“That sounds like pure motives to me,” I said slowly. “So what happens to his soul? He’s not going to make heaven after all, is he?”
Joachim shook his head again, and for a second the angles of his cheek bones gave the faintest approximation of a smile. “Religion is not like wizardry, reducible to formulae and protocols and spells learned from books. Only God can know a soul’s ultimate destination. I myself, Daimbert,” he hesitated briefly, “I think he might possibly be in purgatory.”
We slowly returned to the others. Theodora was squeezing our daughter tight and crying hard. Antonia waved me over. “Why is Mother sad, Wizard? She says she isn’t sad at all but she just keeps crying and crying. You can tell me what’s wrong. I’m a big girl.”
I put my arms around both of them, very close to crying myself. “Nothing’s wrong at all. In fact, everything’s right.”
“Grownups are very strange sometimes,” pronounced Antonia. I had to agree.
There was a cheerful shout outside, and the flying carpet sailed in again. “I think we can get the rest of you on here,” said Paul, his usual vigor apparently completely recovered. “Whoof, what’s that smell? Have you gotten the demon back to hell yet, Wizard?”
“Yes,” said Elerius, answering for me.
“It was scary again while you were gone,” said a little boy accusingly to the king.
Paul looked around in assessment, at the twins sitting by the window hugging each other, at the haggard looks on everyone’s faces, at me clutching my family. “You didn’t wait until I was gone to have adventures behind my back, did you, Wizard?” he asked suspiciously.
I shook my head. But the king, I knew, would feel that I had cheated him once again. This might be the last adventure I would ever be allowed to have where he himself wouldn’t run a serious chance of being killed. The only solution, I thought hopefully, was to have Yurt go back to being the peaceful kingdom it always used to be.
As we were getting everybody onto the carpet, suddenly I said, “Wait. I need to get Cyrus’s body. I’ll tell you about it later, sire.”
“We could always drop him into the old cess pit,” suggested Evrard, loud enough for me to hear but not quite loud enough that I had to respond.
“He should be buried with honor in the cemetery at Yurt,” I said firmly. “But I need something to wrap him in.”
Paul handed me his cloak without a word and Gwennie added her apron. They waited while the bishop and I returned a final time to the chapel. Cyrus’s head had rolled into a corner. We put it with the rest and wrapped him up carefully, making sure no bits were left exposed to terrify the children. When I lifted him with magic he hardly seemed to weigh anything at all.
“I’m sorry, my lady,” said Paul to Justinia as the carpet shot away from the castle at last, “that you weren’t in Yurt at a more propitious time. Usually it’s not nearly this dangerous! But it will be good to have a chance to meet the mage; I heard all about him when I was little. You’ll have to come back for a visit just to see us again, not to hide from your enemies. How about Christmas?”
“I fear,” said Justinia with a shudder, “that it would be quite cold at Christmas.”
“But I expect you’ve never seen snow,” said Paul, somewhat uncertainly. “You might like it.”
She shuddered again but did not answer. Gwennie, sitting on the other side of the king, gave a small smile intended for no one but herself.
Theodora squeezed my hand as we flew along. “I’ve been thinking, Daimbert,” she said, very softly. “You know you have- For six years now you-” She paused, apparently embarrassed to go on.
“Yes?” I prompted.
She put her face on my shoulder and laughed a little. “That’s it. You know what I mean. That’s what I’m saying. Yes.”
I pushed her away to look at her, feeling a great surge of hope. The dimple came and went in her cheek. This was not exactly the most private place to have this conversation, sitting on a flying carpet surrounded by thirty children and several of the chief dignitaries of two kingdoms, but I didn’t care. “Yes, you’ll marry me?”
Elerius glanced toward us then discreetly looked away. Theodora laughed and hid her face again. “We know we love each other,” she murmured, “and for a while we were competing for who would die for the other. Everybody knows about us now, or at least everyone in Yurt and Caelrhon. Your king,” dropping her voice even lower, “doesn’t seem to plan to dismiss you for having a liaison with a witch. And your school’s best graduate has been nothing but gracious to me. I said for six years that I didn’t want to marry you because marriage would destroy your career. Now that it’s clear that it won’t, it would be churlish of me to refuse.”
I held her tight, too happy to speak for a moment. Warm summer air whipped past us as we flew. “I don’t know where we’ll live or what we’ll do,” I said then, “but we’ll work out something. As soon as we get back to Caelrhon, or tomorrow for sure, after we’ve recovered, we’ll have Joachim marry us.”
Over her head I caught the bishop’s eye for a second. On his lips was a genuine smile.
“And maybe,” she added shyly, “we could think about a brother or sister for Antonia. Maybe not a dozen children like your king wants, but wouldn’t it be exciting to have two?”
I looked over towards our daughter. She had climbed into Hildegarde’s lap and was trying to cheer her up. “If you stop being sad,” she promised, “I’ll teach you how to turn somebody into a frog.”
“Exciting,” I said, “is not the word for it.”