Demon Knight

cried out at the pain and snatched his hand away to suck the wound. He could taste the blood.

The squirrel danced in fury now on the edge of the hole, jabbering, 'Mine! Mine! Mine!' and 'Ours! Ours! Ours!' and sometimes, 'Go away! Go away!' It lashed its shiny tail around like a feather duster.

'I need them just for a little while. I will bring them back.' He reached up to grab the brute. It ran up the trunk out of reach, clinging to the bark with its claws.

'There is nothing there, shaman. The hole is empty.'

'Then you won't mind if I look?' He stretched as high as he could and felt inside the hole with his right hand. The squirrel jumped on his wrist and bit it. As he grabbed for it with his left hand, it dived into the hole, and suddenly he had both hands in the hole and they were caught there. He was trapped. Inevitably, the ground sank away under his toes then, leaving him hanging by his wrists. The tree bark was harsh and spiky against his skin. He knew what was going to happen now. This was Sergeant Mulliez's whipping post again.

The squirrel bit on his fingers a few times, then poked its head out between his hands to smile at him. 'You must promise to bring them back!'

'I promise,' he said.

The lash crashed across his shoulders and he gasped, but it was not quite a scream. He had made no sound before on the whipping post, and he would not now.

'Promise more faithfully!' sneered the squirrel. It was redder than ever, red as the blood he could feel streaming down his back.

'I promise!'

Crash! This time he had been ready for it.

'You are still lying. Swear, shaman!'

'I swear!'

Crash!

Someone was screaming.

'Stop that, Sorghie!' he said. 'You won't get around me that way.'

The roughness on his hands and face was stonework again. He was leaning against the wall with his arms over his head, still in his armor and soaked in sweat, not blood. His helmet had fallen off. He dropped his arms and turned around, but he continued to lean against the wall, for his legs were trembling. The shaman sat at his feet, doubled over her drum.

'Will nothing convince you?' she wailed.

'Not this. None of it makes any sense to me.'

'Again!' commanded the tutelary. 'This must be the last time. No matter what it does to him, leave him there until he stops struggling.'

Toby started to say, 'I've never admitted defeat in my life,' but they didn't give him time to get the words out.

CHAPTER FOUR

He sat in darkness, a warm and cozy darkness smelling of loam and animal fur. He was listening to a tantalizingly familiar voice. It spoke in Italian, but slowly and clearly, a soft voice with steely undertones:

'…problem is trust. After so many centuries of disunity, cooperation is foreign to us. Even when we face a common foe, we cannot combine because no state can ever trust another. Alliances change too fast.' The shape emerging from the darkness was not human. Human eyes were closer together and did not glow with that yellow light.

'Trent was a miracle, but it was a very brief miracle. One day's cooperation — yes, even Italians can agree for a single day when the enemy is in sight. But more than that…' The speaker sighed and smiled, animal teeth showing close below the eyes. 'As soon as the sun sets we start conspiring again. To let another's army march across your contado is hard. To put your forces under another's command is almost unthinkable. To send them off to guard another city and leave your own vulnerable — that is an impossible concession.'

The light creeping into the scene had the bluish tinge of daylight. The speaker was a fox, a very large red fox.

'Then we must plan accordingly,' said another voice, one that Toby did not recognize. Nor could he see the speaker. 'One day's cooperation, no marching through others' territory, no putting your forces under a stranger's command, no leaving your home city unguarded.'

'If you can devise a strategy that satisfies all those conditions, then you are indeed a military genius.' The fox was melting, shifting. The cave, too, was changing.

'It may be possible to come close, Your Magnificence.'

Il Volpe pricked up his ears. 'Indeed? How close?'

'Close enough, because no one makes alliances with the Fiend. You can trust your oldest enemy before you trust him.'

'Some have tried.' It… he… was becoming human, at least below the neck. The surroundings were beginning to look more like a room than a fox's earth, too, smelling less of loam and musk, more of polish, printer's ink, leather bindings, and wine.

'And lived to repent it, but not much longer. First, territory. Obviously someone will have to make a concession so that the separate states may bring their forces together. But this will not be a problem once the Fiend has already invaded, will it, messer? Any state will welcome its neighbors in if they come to drive Nevil away.'

Who was this Unknown? He was using almost exactly the same words Toby himself had used many times. He was certainly no Italian.

The fox sipped from a stemmed goblet. 'They may not agree so before it happens, but do continue.'

'Command, then. You said yourself, that command can be relinquished for one day. It happened at Trent, it can happen again.'

'One day?' The fox smiled. 'That might be negotiable.'

'Leaving the city unguarded — would you settle for sending your army out as long as it remained between you and the foe?'

The fox laughed. 'You bargain with a gentle touch, messer! Tell me your plan.' When did foxes ever concede anything? He was human from the neck down now, a fox-headed man covered with a red pelt, sitting back at his ease in a silk-upholstered chair. The earth was fast becoming a room, Pietro Marradi's little private office, which was a nook barely big enough for two, three at the most. It was lit by daylight but still dull, as if seen through smoked glass.

This was a distorted memory. The only time Toby had seen this room had been the morning when Marradi had summoned him in from Fiesole and announced that it was time to negotiate the condotta—meaning that all the sparring between Don Ramon and the dieci that had gone before was of no importance and the matter would now be settled by the principals, messer Marradi and messer Longdirk, man to man. Which is what they had proceeded to do. At the Carnival Ball that evening, the Magnificent had forced the dieci to accept the terms, then the next morning he had gone back on his word.

But it was a false memory. Sorghaghtani was weaving lies. Marradi had never had a fox's head, and Toby had never made the absurd promises the Unknown was making. This imposter with the barbaric accent must be the mysterious Shadow, the source of all the trouble, the one who had turned Marradi against Toby, tampered with Maestro Fischart's demons so that he died, betrayed Lisa — and even stolen that missing bag of gold.

'The Fiend must strike at Italy,' the Unknown said, 'can we doubt it? He rules his dominions by terror and cruelty, continually stamping out dissent. He cannot tolerate another defeat, for if he ever starts to seem vulnerable, all Europe will explode under his feet. He will come in the spring, and he will bring the hugest army he can raise. If he makes those mistakes, I can break him.'

The fox narrowed its eyes suspiciously. 'How? Why is size a mistake?' His fur was starting to look like