Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 (33 page)

Cyrus was even more startled than I was. “Wel, you’re welcome,” he said, flustered. “I’m glad you’re starting to trust me at last.” In a moment he recovered his composure and leaned suavely back, a gratified-but-humble expression on his face.

“Perhaps,” Justinia continued, her head tilted sideways, “thou and I might step into one of these other rooms and I could thank thee more personaly.” What could she be planning? To distract him from everything around him just long enough for Paul to stick a knife into him? The king, standing in the background twitching with readiness, seemed to think so.

“Wel, my lady, you seem to be making a very attractive offer,” said Cyrus, blushing a little, “but at the moment Daimbert and I are busy planning our strategy, and you should also know that I am in training to become a priest.”

Before Justinia could make her offer of thanks even more attractive, the entire castle shuddered. There was a clang, as though from an unimaginably huge bel, and the castle shuddered again. Al around us we could hear faling stone, as half-ruined wals and roofs subsided further. But the distant sounds of faling seemed to take place in the heart of a strange and eerie silence.

“What—” cried Cyrus, but his words were cut off. The fire, the fireplace itself, the couches and tapestries were abruptly gone. Cyrus and I smacked to the stone floor from the chairs on which we had just been sitting but which no longer existed.

He jumped up, looking wildly around a room now as bleak and bare as the one where Vlad had originaly put us. Only one candle stil burned—the rest had been upended. I reached wildly for Theodora, my heart pounding horribly, as raw, unfocused terror poured through the room.

“The storm!” cried Cyrus. ‘The storm!” That explained the strange silence. The thunder and the lash of rain had abruptly stopped, though the night was just as dark.

Panting hard, Cyrus started mumbling, too low and too fast for me to folow though it sounded like the Hidden Language. Nothing happened.

“My demon!” he cried in heartbroken despair. “My demon is gone!”

“Then let’s go!” cried Paul, jerking the now-rotten door open.

I sprang in front of him. The primeval terror I felt made it seem that a demon had just arrived, not gone, but I would try to understand that later. “Wait, Paul! It’s the demon’s magic that has protected us from Vlad!”

That demon’s thunderstorm and comfortable room had disappeared, and it was no longer answering cals from Cyrus. Vlad, suddenly not tied up with weather spels and able now to spot us with his magic, would be on us at once.

“Then it has also protected the children!” the king shot back. “We have to get to them before Vlad does!”

Theodora evidendy agreed with him, for she grabbed my hand to pul me along. Cyrus glanced up from the floor and appeared to decide at the last second to accompany us. I thought briefly of binding him again and leaving him behind, but it wasn’t worth it. If he’d been abandoned by his demonic helper, al he had left was an irretrievably lost soul.

I tried a spel of light as we hurried out into the corridor, but it stil didn’t work. The demonic spels were broken, but Vlad’s magic seemed to be operating fine. “This way,” said Paul, running down the broad stairs with the candle in his hand, the rest of us hurrying to keep up. Cyrus, at the rear, had begun sobbing uncontrolably.

“I am exceeding glad,” muttered Justinia beside me, “that this distraction came before rather than after I had to kiss him.” Down the first corridor, through an open-roofed chamber where heavy clouds, no longer raining, hung overhead, down another passageway, Paul led us at a trot. He was right. Without a demon’s supernatural power hiding us from Vlad, that wizard would know at once that we had eluded his capture. He would also know that I had been trying to tamper with his spel that kept the children imprisoned and would guess that torturing them, especialy when he found out which was my daughter, would make me grant him anything he wanted far faster than torturing me.

But what could have happened to the demon? Could—and for a second I felt wild hope—this mean that the bishop had arrived and overcome it?

I shook my head even as I ran. Even Joachim wouldn’t be able to make a demon obey him. Humans had been given free wil in this world, which meant that saints and angels were very unlikely to step in and dispose of demons that humans had summoned.

Might Vlad have somehow caught the demon and imprisoned it in a pentagram? It was ironic, I thought, hurrying across an open area where I looked in al the shadows for Vlad, that I didn’t know whether that wizard might protect us from the demon or the demon from him. But if Vlad had caught the demon, it had been done extremely rapidly. According to the Diplomatica Diabolica it might take days even for demonology experts to capture and imprison a demon someone else had summoned. The quick way required negotiations—in hel’s currency of human souls.

And when I delicately probed with magic I could stil sense—in the second before my mind drew convulsively back—the black evil of an active demon lurking somewhere in the ruined castle below us.

We reached the old secret stair in the wal, squeezed in, and started down. The candle flame flared wildly as we groped our way.

Except that we were suddenly not standing on broken steps but on air.

V

We al grabbed at each other, and the candle smashed and went out. But it too lay on what appeared to be solid air. My shoulder touched what felt hke stone, yet my straining eyes saw no stone. Al around us was a gray dimness, and the ruined easde, the stairs, the stones, and the eyeless windows, no longer seemed there.

“Cyrus?” I began fiercely.

He had been ranting to himself as we came down the narrow staircase, but he now paused and looked around. “Vlad knows where we are,” he said in desolation. “And he’s made the castle invisible from the inside as wel as from the outside.”

This went far beyond any capabilities of mine. At least, I thought grimly, keeping such a powerful spel operational would require an active mind; this wasn’t the kind of spel you could set up and then walk away from. Maybe his own magic would distract him for the moment from catching us.

“How do we get down to where the children are, Cyrus?” I demanded urgendy. “You know the way— take us there, invisible or not.” But he had begun to babble, swaying on an invisible step, looking wildly at the empty drop beneath his feet to the cliffs.

“Don’t look at it,” said Gwennie suddenly. “Close your eyes. It’s no worse than going into the storeroom for something and not bothering with a light. Paul, you know where the children are. Keep on going.” He gave her a quick grin. “You’re better at this than I am. Hold my hand. Down to the bottom of the staircase, over that pile of stones—we’l have to do it by feel—and then turn left.” Our progress, already terror-ridden, now became a nightmare. Unable to see where we were, we groped by feel down invisible passageways, moving what felt incredibly slowly as Paul tried to recreate in his mind what he had seen both on earlier exploring jaunts and on our previous trip to the ruined chapel. Cyrus was no use at al. I tried it both ways, keeping my eyes squeezed tight shut and leaving them open.

Neither seemed to work, especialy as with every step we seemed closer to raw evil and to despair. The sky above, I noticed, was moving toward dawn at last, but Vlad’s cloud cover kept growing thicker, to keep any sunlight from reaching him.

I stopped abruptiy, causing Cyrus to smack into me from the rear, but I hardly noticed. “Paul, wait,” I said desperately. ‘We’re going in the wrong direction. You aren’t taking us to the chapel. You’re taking us down to the storage celars.”

He looked back at me. “This is right,” he said quiedy but firmly.

“Don’t you smel it?” I cried. Faint on the air before us was a whiff of brimstone.

And then, as suddenly as it had come it was gone again. The demon coming up for a quick peek? But he seemed to have abandoned Cyrus and al the spels he had been helping him with. I shook my head.

“I’m sorry, Paul. Keep going.”

We crept onward. The king was leading more and more slowly now, stopping at every intersection to grope, to pace off distances, to consider whether to turn or continue straight. I listened, both with my ears and with magic, for either children’s voices or Vlad’s footsteps, but heard nothing but our own breathing. He had not come after us at once, not even to get revenge on his own pupil who had so recently tried to thwart his magic. That meant— I didn’t want to think what it meant, but I feared the logical conclusion was that he was starting with the children.

“Wait,” said Paul, so quietly I hardly heard him. He stood facing an invisible wal, feeling along it in both directions with his hands. “There’s supposed to be a door right here, into the last passageway that goes to the chapel. I can’t find it.”

Then we had taken a wrong turning someplace, I thought. “Back the way we just came?” I suggested.

Paul shook his head. “No, this should be it. I know that last turning was right. Unless—” We al waited. Fatigue and the strain made the king’s face hard and tight in the dim predawn light. He did not curse, he did not shout at Cyrus, who should have at least as good an idea as he did where we were. Instead he said after a moment, “Wait for me. Let me retrace our steps just a little way—” And abrupdy the castle was back. We stood in a dark, enclosed passageway, without even a night sky above us. The solid rocks under our hands were no longer invisible.

Without even thinking I tried a spel of light. And it worked. The corridor lit up for a few seconds as bright as day.

“Ha!” cried Paul, the tension gone from his face. “I knew I was right! I’d just forgotten we had to turn left and walk twenty feet along this arcading first. Come on! We’re almost there.” Spels of light were too hard to keep going constantly; a flare would glow for only a few seconds unless there was something to burn. In the dark again, our eyes too dazzled to see at al, we folowed Paul as quickly as we dared.

Cyrus’s hand closed around my shoulder. “How did you do that? Vlad speled this castle against the magic of light!”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfuly. Vlad had also made it invisible just a short time before. Were he and the demon engaged in some gigantic clash that had diverted both their attentions?

“And down here to the chapel,” the king caled back cheerily. “I think I may see some light at the end of the passage—perhaps the children have lit a bonfire?” But Vlad, if he had truly overcome the demon, would have had plenty of time to reach the ruined chapel before us. I had no idea what might be happening, but that did not keep my mind from churning out terrifying possibilities.

We stumbled forward, almost running. Paul, in the lead, tripped and hit the floor hard. ‘Watch it,” he gasped, waiting to catch his breath before even trying to sit up, “there’s something big and damp in the middle of the passage.”

A pool of blood? I cast another spel of light to see for a moment. Sitting in the middle of the passageway, looking at us with mournful eyes, was an enormous green frog. I lifted it slowly, staring in disbelief as my magical light faded. “Ugh!” cried Justinia. “How did it arrive here? Put it down, Wizard!”

But I did not put it down. I turned it slowly, probing with magic now. The frog was held by a transformation spel that trembled just over the line into success. The transmogrified creature was strangely misshapen, and something was wrong witJi its eyes. “Daimbert?” asked Theodora quiedy.

“Sweet Jesus,” I said at last. “I think it’s Vlad.”

I stuffed the frog into my jacket pocket; I would have to strengthen the spel that held him, but it would do for the moment and even more urgent things demanded my attention. Squaring my shoulders I pushed ahead of Paul, down the passage toward the chapel. Whatever was there, I thought a wizard ought to see it first.

As I came cautiously nearer, I too saw the light that Paul had thought might come from a bonfire. But the chapel itself at the end of the passage appeared completely dark other than that ghastiy orange glow.

The light did not flicker. Vlad kicked in my pocket, but this wasn’t his magic; as a frog, he wouldn’t be able to shape the words of the Hidden Language. This was something far more powerful—and even worse

—than anything of his.

Panting as from a long run, I reached the doorway and stopped, holding on to the doorframe with both hands. The chapel was very quiet except for the sound of one smal person sobbing. My heart suddenly felt as though it had been crushed inside my chest, for that voice was Antonia’s.

In the center of the chapel were two pentagrams, drawn with colored chalk. One of the pentagrams was empty, though a little yelow brimstone floated in the air over it. Glowing bright red in the middle of the other was a being with curved horns, an enormous bloated bely, two writiing snakes for legs, and eyes that burned with real flames.

The demon smiled, revealing twice as many teeth even as Vlad, a smile suggesting that we were old friends and he was delighted to see me again.

When I stopped dead in the doorway Paul and Theodora, behind me, first tried to push forward, then froze themselves. “May God be merciful,” murmured Justinia in horror.

But the sobbing continued. The pentagram was closed, I saw, holding the demon trapped. Theodora, Paul, and I wrenched ourselves from the doorframe and sprang forward. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done.

The demon turned avidly to folow our progress. I didn’t like the way he looked at me—meeting Vlad had already been one reunion too many with an old enemy— but I averted my eyes for something far more important. On the far side of the pentagram, chalk clutched desperately in one smal hand, sat Antonia.

Theodora and I nearly ripped her in half as we both snatched her up. Somehow we managed on the second try. The chalk dropped from her fingers to rol away into darkness. The demon continued watching but had not spoken; maybe he couldn’t while trapped unless addressed by the person who had summoned him.

I saw then, al around, the stil forms of the other children. Dead? I thought, my insides going to ice. But they were breathing, rapidly and shalowly, but breathing.