Daughter of Magic

been since the Black Wars. We’re close to the border of the kingdom of Yurt here. This is the castle I told you about that I was exploring earlier in the summer.”

I did remember now that he mentioned it. “Well, you must be mistaken,” I said wearily, not even trying to wipe the streams of water from my face. “I know it’s hard to tell distances from the air.”

Suddenly I stopped and grinned. Maybe we had them after all.

“You’re absolutely right, sire. A ruined castle would be exactly the place to hide a large group of children. And all the easier if you’re a wizard with the powerful spells to make a whole castle invisible.” Vlad’s obsidian castle in the Eastern Kingdoms had been invisible unless he wanted someone to see it. If it weren’t for Theodora’s witch- magic breaking through his defenses for a brief moment, and for Paul’s knowledge of local geography, we would have gone right by these cliffs without a second look.

“Now I just have to find the way in,” I said fiercely. Antonia was still alive. “The castle’s stones are here though hidden, and we could rip the carpet landing on a jagged wall even if we can’t see it.” With the heavy darkness and the rain, we wouldn’t have been able to see much of the castle even without a spell of invisibility.

“Down at the bottom of the cliffs,” said Paul, “there’s a back entrance that was probably where they once brought up goods from the river.” I immediately directed the carpet slowly downward. Rain was now falling so hard it bounced from the carpet’s surface. “Do you think, Wizard,” the king added as we descended, “that they’ll know we’ve arrived?”

“They’ll have a pretty good idea,” I said shortly.

Would it just be Cyrus we had to face, I wondered as I gently landed the carpet amid jagged rocks that must have fallen from a ruined wall above, or did he have Vlad with him now? And had these two dark wizards brought a demon along?

“The rest of you had better stay outside,” I said quietly, setting my jaw determinedly. “I don’t know how long this may take. But if I’m not back by dawn, Justinia, take the carpet and-”

But none of them wanted to be left behind. Theodora cared as little about her personal safety as I cared about mine when it came to Antonia, and Paul flatly refused to wait patiently for the adventurers’ return. Justinia insisted she would freeze to death if forced to stay out in the driving rain for five more minutes, and Gwennie had no intention of being left alone on a night of magical darkness and hidden evil.

It was going to be hard enough to get myself out of this alive without worrying about all of them. I should have dumped them all off miles ago. But then I would never have located the castle. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s try to find the way in.”

PART SEVEN — THE RUINED CASTLE I

“Here’s the door, Wizard,” called Paul, feeling his way along a cliff face streaming with water. “I can’t see it but I can touch it.” Standing next to him I could feel it as well, a half-open old door, falling from its hinges, with a musty passage beyond.

I had groped for and found pieces of driftwood that had come ashore here where cascades from the hills above flowed together to form the river: torches if we could discover a way inside out of the storm. “Hold hands,” I told the others over the rumbling of thunder, and led them straight into and straight through what looked, in what little light we had from lightning flashes, like unbroken rock. Theodora was right behind me, and I could feel the bite of her fingernails as we passed through the illusion of solid cliff face, but no one spoke until we were all inside and wringing out our hair.

At least this castle was perfectly visible once we were within the walls. “God be praised, it is dry in here,” said the Lady Justinia

Paul blew out the air between his lips and commented, “Glad you never decided to make my royal castle invisible, Wizard.”

Theodora and I lit the torches with fire magic; they never would have burned properly without a spell. With me in front and she in back, we started cautiously up the tunnel before us. The torchlight showed a shadowed and dismal passage, hung with dusty festoons of cobweb, its floor strew with rubbish where animals had denned.

“It’s not very far,” Paul said in a low voice, “a straight way leading slightly upward, and then the big storage cellars. It’s possible the children are there.”

Sitting in the dark, I thought, in utter terror. Would we see them even if they were there, or would they be as invisible as the castle itself was from the outside?

The light flickered on the uneven walls, and our footsteps echoed hollowly. It really would be night soon, I thought, and the night would be Vlad’s, with nothing to stop him before the dawn. The weight of the cliffs above seemed to press down on us, and a fetid odor rose in the stale air from beneath our feet.

I kept straining, both with my ears and my magic, for indications of life, and at first found nothing, either good or evil. The sound of the thunder was very distant here, and I could hear nothing beyond our footsteps and our rapid breathing. Were the children even in this castle, or was it all an elaborate feint? But after only a few dozen yards I picked up the sound of distant moaning.

We came to an abrupt halt. “Antonia!” Theodora whispered.

But I shook my head. “Wait,” I whispered back. The floor before us came alive in the torchlight: glossy black cockroaches, spiders, and a six-foot viper that looked at us with glittering eyes, then slithered away. Gwennie was at my shoulder, and I could feel her trembling. In any of the others’ position, I would have run screaming back down the passageway, with a new appreciation for spending the night in the pouring rain, but no one moved.

Then, faint in the distance, I picked up a sound like the rattling of dry bones.

“What was that?” hissed Paul.

“Oh, Christ,” I said, mostly under my breath. It sounded to me exactly like a skeletal apparition, the residue of death and evil left over in this old castle from the time of the Black Wars, now given life by a demon. It seemed to be getting closer.

The slightest whiff of brimstone, I said to myself, and I’m gone.

As if in response, the roughly-quarried stones on either hand rapidly began to grow warmer. Justinia, in relief, started to lean against the wall, but she pulled away with a sharp intake of breath as it grew hotter and hotter. Raw horror, even beyond what was rational given what I had just seen and heard, seemed to roll down the tunnel toward us. And wafting through the air came a small cloud of stinking smoke, poisonous yellow in the torchlight.

“Right,” said a rational voice in the back of my brain. “Zahlfast can’t argue with you any more. Time for the demonology experts. Fly the carpet back to Yurt and telephone the school.”

“And when will they arrive?” I asked myself testily.

“Tomorrow,” said the rational voice, sounding less certain. “And in the meantime, while we’re waiting, you can try to locate Elerius and Evrard-they must be around somewhere, looking for you.” But I couldn’t wait for tomorrow. Antonia was in this castle now.

And could she and all the other children be sitting, not just in the dark, but in a dark they shared with vipers, with brimstone, with skeletal apparitions, and with a demon that was even now killing them one by one with terror?

“No, of course not,” babbled the rational voice. “Cyrus loves children. He may use a demon to help his magic, but he doesn’t want to hurt them. He’s always wanted the children to love him back.”

The voice had a point. If Antonia was indeed still alive, then Cyrus must have brought the children here for a reason, rather than dumping them into the first convenient widening in the river. He therefore wanted them for some specific purpose-ransoming perhaps, or a refined revenge-even if he did not love them for themselves.

And I therefore had to find them before his purpose took effect.

This mental argument with myself had taken only a few seconds. “The children are not in the big storage cellars,” I said in a low voice, not mentioning what I was fairly sure was there. “Sire, is there any other way up to the rest of the castle without going through the cellars?”