Daughter of Magic

“Do not try to tempt me with talk of benefits, Demon,” said Elerius sternly. “We are here to talk about Antonia.”

“And I am delighted to do so. Since you seem so concerned about her, why don’t we arrange a simple trade, your soul for hers? Now before you start to tell me this is an unequal trade,” holding up a huge red hand, “wait until I tell you what else I can give you as part of the bargain.”

“You cannot give me anything I could not obtain on my own,” said Elerius. It came out low and thick.

“Elerius-” I started to say, but he motioned me to silence.

“Don’t interrupt,” he said in an undertone. “I should be able to negotiate better than you can, because I don’t have personal feelings to interfere.”

“You wizards must be the most exasperating mortals there can be to deal with,” said the demon with an evil chuckle. “Even priests aren’t nearly as stubborn, once they get past their initial hesitation. Of course there are things you want, Elerius, that you could not obtain without me. To start with, how about the immediate leadership of the wizards’ school?”

There was a long pause while I waited for Elerius to answer, and he did not.

So far my knees had been holding up fairly well. Now they started to shake so badly that I had to sit down quickly before I fell.

“The school already has a Master,” Elerius brought out at last in a thin, tight voice, completely unlike his normal way of speaking.

“Your choice then. Shall he have a little accident, or will he suddenly decide that failing health makes it necessary for him to step aside?” That was the problem of trying to deal with a demon. He might not know someone’s higher thoughts and aspirations, but he knew all too well the dark imaginings and cravings that one tried to hide even from oneself.

“I choose neither one,” replied Elerius after only a brief pause, appearing to rally slightly. “I plan to take over the school’s direction with my own unaided powers, but not for some years yet.”

“You’re certainly quick now to reject what you know you’ve always wanted,” said the demon softly. I tried unsuccessfully to speak, but this had nothing to do with me. “Why waste the best years of your life, the years of your greatest strength and mature abilities, waiting for an old man whose only real skill is an unusual ability to prolong his own life? Daimbert, I see, would like to give you an argument, but he’ll come around quickly when he realizes that I’ll let his daughter have her soul back as part of our bargain.”

Elerius ran his tongue along dry lips and barked out a very unconvincing laugh. “If I take over the school it will be to help humanity, not to further your own evil plans. This bargain will not help me at all.”

“Just too dismissive,” said the demon, shaking his horned head, “that’s your problem, just too dismissive of good ideas if they don’t accord with your own prejudices. Suppose we add a little rather unusual twist to our agreement? I’ll make sure you take over the school at once, but then I’ll step aside. I won’t try to tempt you further or direct your plans; you’ll be able to do all the ‘good’ you want without my interference. I promise!” He laid a heavy hand over what would have been his heart if he had one.

Dear God, I thought, unable to say anything, shouting mentally at Elerius to refuse at once and getting no response. All the damage a master wizard could do if he had sold his soul flashed through my mind. Between his own powers and the added abilities of black magic, not all the western wizards combined could stand against him. And someone like Elerius, who had always thought that one needed to bend a few rules to reach the final good and justifiable end, would find himself bending more and more rules, and would be quite surprised to find that he was entirely alone in believing that his goals were good.

I had come here intending to find a way to save Antonia. Now it looked like I would have to save Elerius’s soul as well-and it was almost too late.

III

There was a small, very serious voice behind us. “Don’t listen to him. That’s not a real promise. He’s not your friend.”

Elerius gave a great start as though coming out of a trance. I whirled around, finding my voice again. “Antonia! What are you doing here?”

She buried her face in my shoulder to avoid looking at the demon, who appeared delighted to have her back. Her voice was indistinct but confident. “Mother was trying to calm down some of the littlest children,” as though she were not one of them. “So I tiptoed away. You didn’t hear me coming, did you! I got here just in time.”

I looked over at Elerius, still on his feet but swaying. His face was ashen and running with sweat-not just from the heat of the room. He broke his gaze away from the demon and sat down very suddenly. “Thank you, Antonia,” he murmured.

“I told you that you needed me here to help you,” she said, starting to tremble now.

She had tried to help Gwennie and the twins by taking them off on a flying carpet ride, tried to help the Dog-Man by summoning a demon of her own, and really had helped Elerius by showing up when she did. But my stomach knotted as I thought what she might do in the very near future, still convinced she was helping her friends, once the demon’s influence began to work fully on her.

“You’ve- You’ve negotiated with a demon before, Daimbert?” said Elerius hesitantly. “Somehow I never heard about that.”

“I don’t think anyone but Zahlfast and the Master ever knew,” I said shortly.

“I know all the protocols from the Diplomatica Diabolica, of course, and I was aware that one had to beware of temptations, but somehow I had imagined them taking the form of wealth and pliant maidens.”

“When you’re in charge of the school, Elerius,” I said quietly, “be sure the demonology courses make it clearer that power can be the greatest temptation of them all.”

“We’re negotiating here, remember?” interrupted the demon. “If you start talking to each other instead we’ll never reach an agreement!”

And maybe we don’t want an agreement, I thought, but that idea too was a temptation. Doing nothing would mean Antonia’s will slowly turning to evil even while the demon remained imprisoned, and at some point, far in the future or very soon, an escaped demon roaming gleefully through Yurt and Caelrhon.

“You have to come now, Wizard,” said Antonia to me. “That’s why I sneaked away from Mother, to tell you the people are here.”

“The king is back with the flying carpet?” I asked, keeping my face resolutely turned away from the demon.

“Not him. I couldn’t tell who they are. But a whole group of people are climbing up to the gate, and I think some of them have swords. You have to come see them.”

Just a short delay wouldn’t hurt anything, I thought, leaping to my feet. Antonia was right; a group of people arriving unsuspecting at a castle with a demon in it was the last thing we needed. “Come on,” I said to Elerius. “Now that we’ve gotten the initial temptations out of the way, we can continue this negotiation shortly.”

“You go ahead, Daimbert,” he said, shaking his head. Antonia was tugging now at my hand. “We don’t dare leave the demon, even imprisoned inside a pentagram, now that we’ve started non-binding conversation. He could talk to anyone who wandered into the room- do you want him asking one of the other children to erase the chalk lines?”

Logically it made sense. But I didn’t dare leave him alone. “I’ll stay, then. You go with Antonia.”

The demon was growing more and more irritated that we weren’t paying attention to him, but at the moment I only had eyes for Elerius. “You don’t trust me, do you, Daimbert,” he said quietly. “At least give me credit for the intelligence to realize the flaw in what he’s offering. He’s right that I’ve never worried overly about the eventual fate of my soul, but I really do intend to use my magic to help mankind, and the first thing a demon would do is to make me unable to tell the difference between helping and harming.” He managed a grim smile. “And I’ve always been admired for my wizardly skills; don’t you realize how galling it would be to know that my future abilities would not