Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 (39 page)

I turned back at once. The children screamed to see her, some in fear, some in simple excitement. Hildegarde stood for a moment looking wildly around, as though not seeing whom she was looking for or not even knowing who it was.

Then she spotted her sister. Letting the sword fal from her hand she threw herself onto her knees. “Celia,” she gasped, “you’ve got to help me. I’ve sinned horribly. I’ve just kiled somebody.” Celia dropped to her own knees and wrapped her arms around her sister. “Tel me,” she murmured.

They immediately drew an intensely interested audience of a prince, a duchess, a bishop, and three wizards. But Hildegarde paid no attention to any of us. “It must have been the ensorceled frog,” she got out, her breath coming in great gulps. “I’d made a torch from a dead pine branch and was wel down in the dark part of the castle. Several times I spotted what looked like damp frog tracks, and at one point I heard somebody cursing.”

“I think that was me,” muttered Evrard, “when I fel into the cess pit.”

“But I stil didn’t spot anybody. Then I climbed over some falen stones and saw—it was horrible! It was partly like a man, but it had legs like a frog.”

“Yes?” prompted Celia.

“He was mumbling to himself, and I don’t think he’d heard me coming. But then he saw me, and he jumped at me with his frog legs, and his face was al white but he had these pointed teeth—”

“And so you kiled him,” said Celia quiedy.

“Not yet. I threw the torch at him. That’s when he started to come apart. But he was stil coming. He was disintegrating, but the teeth especialy, as though they themselves were alive— That’s when I put the sword into his heart.”

Hildegarde started to sob then. “God stil loves you,” murmured Celia, rocking her like a child. “He loves us al, even terrible sinners.” Vlad had been preparing his spels again as fast as he could transform himself back into a man, I thought. He was ready for a wizard but not for a young woman carrying a torch. And it never would have occurred to him that she had a sword.

“As soon as he was dead,” Hildegarde continued in a minute, lifting a tear-streaked face from her sister’s shoulder, “he stopped being a frog at al, but he fel apart. That might have been the worst part of al.

His arm fel off, and half his face. . . . There’s nothing left of him now but scraps. And those started to stink, as though he’d already been dead for months.” She looked up toward Prince Ascelin. “Father, have you ever had to kil someone? When they’re teaching you to fight, why don’t they tel you how horrible it is? He might have been awful and half a frog, but at least he was alive until I got through with him!” Vlad was dead. I turned away, not wanting Hildegarde to see the intense relief on my face. Now that we’d gotten rid of one nearly hopeless problem, the dark wizard, al we had left was the impossible one, the escaped demon.

Antonia put her head out from behind the bishop; I hadn’t even realized she had been listening. With an expression of deep distress, she went over and put a hand gently on Hildegarde’s shoulder. “Maybe you shouldn’t try to be a knight after al,” she said “It sounds too scary.”

Ascelin swung her up and passed her, protesting, back to Theodora, who had been desperately trying to keep the rest of the children calm. But then he said soberly to his own daughter, “I think it’s too late to make that choice. You are a knight now. There’s a lot more to it than knowing how to fight. It looks like once we’re home again I’d better start you on real training.” Hildegarde, stil clinging to her sister, appeared not to hear, but Celia gave their father a quick smile over her head.

“Do you think,” suggested Evrard in my ear, just as though I might need something else to worry about, “that the demon wil try to reanimate Vlad?” Before I could shape a reply, the castle shuddered to the clang of what might have been an unimaginably huge bel. For a second a wind reeking of evil fumes whirled through the room, then it whooshed down the passage toward the ruined chapel. I heard Cyrus’s voice, but this time it was raised in a frenzied cry of pure triumph.

“I have my powers again!”

V

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 spel which had created an invisible barrier around the chapel.

I clawed at it franticaly, then tried to calm myself enough to start on spels. 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 spel 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 bely. 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 hel.” 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 hel, from where Cyrus had once again summoned him.

At the moment I would almost have been wiling to sacrifice al of us, me, Antonia, Theodora, Joachim, the duchess’s family, and al the children, if the saints would just appear and open an enormous hole and send the entire castle, with both demons, down to hel. 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 wil had gone entirely too far.

“I want you to do something for me,” said Cyrus urgendy 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 al 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 hel, 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 stil 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 seling 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 stil 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 hel!”

There goes Antonia’s soul, I thought, closing my eyes. I wondered if it would be better to kil 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 hel, Master,” replied the demon, sounding peevish and puling 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 stil ‘save’ your soul, as that bishop you so admire would put it. Since doing good wil help you not in the least, whereas doing evil—”

“I don’t care!” shouted Cyrus. “As your Master, I command you! Return to hel at once!”

“Al 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 colapsed before me. I started to leap forward, but a hand grabbed my colar 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 faling. 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 al 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 nonbinding 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 fuly entitled,” Cyrus said clearly, “I offer my life: a life which should have been long, eventful, and filed with whatever I most desired, because of the soul I long ago sold. You can kil me now, but you must return to hel 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 wel 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 exultation kept him going. “She is below the age of reason, she never intended to sel 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 hel, because I was able to summon him again. On any of these points you might argue, but not on al 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 wiling to throw away their lives for her,” said the demon slowly, shifting his bulging bely. 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 al, 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 cal one minute, I shal return to hel, 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. Al 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 shal 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 stil inteligible, “Agreed and accepted.”

The demon’s booming laugh came one more time as he bent his mouth, huge now and filed with hundreds of teeth, toward Cyrus. “See you in hel!” 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 wal had vanished, letting in morning sunshine on the two stil-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 folowed him and dropped to my knees to begin rubbing out the pentagrams.