Daughter of Magic

very tired by the time we got here,” she said. “And the Dog-Man took us to the room where you found us. Then another man came and stared at us. Or do you think he might have been another demon?” she asked thoughtfully. “He looked like he wanted to hurt us, though he didn’t try anything then. But the Dog-Man kept trying to push him back out of the room, and his eyes didn’t look like real eyes.”

“He was human, all right,” I said. “Go on.” As I spoke, I felt in my pocket for Vlad. Not there. He must have fallen or hopped away while Theodora and I were getting Antonia out of the chapel. For that matter, I wasn’t entirely sure how he had become a frog in the first place. Could Antonia possibly have transformed him? But that was unlikely; it would be very hard to put a spell on a wizard that powerful.

It didn’t matter, I tried to reassure myself, who had transformed him and where he was now. A quick magical probe didn’t find him, but my probes weren’t set up to find amphibians. He shouldn’t be able to break a transformations spell himself, even a somewhat weak one, while he was a frog, and Cyrus was unlikely to break it for him. I’d catch him later.

“After we were left alone almost everybody went to sleep. Maybe I did myself for a while,” Antonia added reluctantly. “But when I woke up I started thinking. I wanted to save the Dog-Man because I knew he was in big trouble, and I thought if there wasn’t a demon around pretending to be his friend, maybe he would take us all home. But I didn’t know how to catch a demon-that part of your book is hard. So I imp- imperv-”

“Improvised?”

She shot me a smile. Her sapphire eyes were still bright but her lids were drifting shut. “I remembered the way the book told to draw things in chalk and say magic words to call a demon from hell. I thought maybe because there was already one so close they’d just send him, the Dog-Man’s demon, into my pentagram.” She managed the word on the first try and looked pleased. “But they didn’t. That was the part where everybody fainted except me.”

When the masters had summoned a very small demon, just to show how it was done, in demonology class at the school, several wizardry students twenty years older than Antonia had fainted.

“They sent this different demon,” she said around a long yawn. “And he’s really scary. I didn’t want to cry because I’m a big girl, but I couldn’t help it. He asked me what he could do for me, and I told him to catch the other demon and make him go back to hell. He tried to argue with me but I told him he had to obey because I was ‘Mistress of the Pentagrams.’ Doesn’t that sound good?”

And with that she fell asleep in Theodora’s lap, her eyes shut tight and mouth slightly open. We sat still for several minutes, hardly breathing. Theodora spoke at last.

“God in Heaven, Daimbert. Our daughter has just sold her soul to the devil.”

PART EIGHT — DEMONS I

I scrambled to my feet. This all had to be a mistake. A mistake! I stopped myself just in time from driving my fist against the stone wall. Of course she had summoned a demon, and asked it for favors, a process that both wizardry and religion agreed led to eternal damnation. But she was only five years old!

Unlike Cyrus, she’d had the sense to keep it imprisoned in a pentagram rather than letting it run around loose. But that reminded me. There must still be unconscious children in the room with it, awash in the terror beyond terror of death which flowed from a demon, even an imprisoned one.

I hurried back to find that Paul and Gwennie so far had been able to shift about two dozen of the children. I needed to do something, anything, even worse than the king did. A demon, even an enormous horned demon who kept giving me a knowing smile, was not the most terrifying thing I could imagine. Lifting limp boys and girls with magic-I could manage five or six at once-and carrying them away from the chapel was an excellent alternative to dissecting Cyrus bone by bone and nerve by nerve.

He sat huddled in a corner by the arcading, his hands over his head, and Justinia, sitting a dozen yards from him, seemed to have given up trying, but Gwennie and the king kept grimly running up and down the passageway. She was strong and could easily carry two children at a time. Theodora settled Antonia in a corner and came to help.

The others made wide detours around the demon, but I, running with my head down, didn’t care-until my foot skidded and almost slid across the chalk line, which would by breaking the pentagram have let the demon out.

I wiped cold sweat from my forehead with a damp sleeve. All the things they had taught us in demonology class came rushing back. Someone who had sold his soul is even more dangerous to those around him than someone who has damned himself through ordinary sins. Cyrus had barely begun. First the demon fills a person with anger and bitterness, then offers spectacular ways to harm those with whom he imagines he is angry. And why worry about a few murders? His soul is already long gone.

And, if the demon is loose and able to work his own tricks, the situation only grows worse.

The children started to revive once they were away from the chapel. One little boy opened his eyes to find himself in Paul’s arms and asked with delighted surprise, “Are you the brave knight?”

“I guess I’d better be,” he said with a grin, ruffling the boy’s hair for a minute before putting him down and starting back for more.

In ten minutes we had them all spread out in the arcade, well away from the passage that led to the chapel. The king flopped to the floor and leaned back against the wall. He reached up with one hand to pull Gwennie down beside him. Her face was running with sweat and looked exhausted, terrified, and grimly satisfied. “You’ve always been the best friend I’ve ever had,” Paul said, meaning it. He gave her a hard hug as she settled herself on the floor, with no more romantic passion in it than the dozens of hugs he had just been giving children. “Once we’re home I’m changing your title from acting castle constable to permanent constable. When you told me you thought you could handle the duties, did you ever expect them to include facing a demon?”

We caught our breaths for a minute. All a big mistake, I told myself again. Baptized children went straight to heaven, as long as they had not yet reached the age of reason and therefore could not commit intentional sin. Didn’t they? What was the age of reason? Seven for sure. Yes, that was right. Seven. Antonia was only five.

Did demons recognize how old a person was in human years, or did they ask only if they had functioning reasoning abilities-if, for example, they could read and work magic?

“When I was little,” said Paul, “I always thought it would be exciting to meet a demon. Now that I have met one, I can’t say I particularly care to repeat the experience. Did you see that belly? Those eyes? But I do remember learning about pentagrams. Looks like your daughter, Wizard, must have drawn a pentagram to imprison it-she’s an amazing little girl, and you have no reason at all to hide her. One of her chalk lines, I couldn’t help noticing, looked scuffed, but it was redrawn carefully. And the demon appears pretty well trapped now.”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “It can’t move away or hide, and it can’t make itself invisible. As long as no one lets it out, it shouldn’t be able to do anything to terrify us, such as bringing more vipers and apparitions.”

“Oh, I’m terrified quite enough already, if it asks,” said Paul cheerfully. “But it looks like we’ve won, then! Cyrus seems to have broken down completely without his demon to help him,” with a glance in his direction, “and Vlad’s a frog, so once it’s a little lighter outside one of us can fly the carpet back to Caelrhon and tell the parents all their children are safe.”

That reminded me. I had better try to find Vlad again.

“And I guess sending the demon back to hell is something you wizards know how to do,” Paul continued lightly. He looked around at children starting to sit up groggily, many of them apparently deciding the whole episode had been a nightmare and lying down to sleep again. The Princess Margareta was awake but lay silently, as though trying to make it all make sense in her own mind.

“Maybe Mother has a point,” the king went on. “If I got married I could have