deluded himself that capturing the demon she had summoned would somehow be helpful. He did not realize that he would thus destroy the one chance we still had to save her.
“There’s a flaw in the other pentagram,” commented the demon. “It would never hold him.”
Cyrus looked around, frustrated, then spotted Antonia’s lost piece of colored chalk, lodged against the base of the cracked altar, and snatched it up. Quickly he redrew the line that he himself had erased when Antonia’s demon had lied to him, suggesting the restoration of his powers in return for freedom. He then turned and made a tiny opening in the pentagram around his own demon.
“Now, go!” he said when the demon seemed to hesitate. “And return at once. You
The chapel was now completely dark. Behind me I could hear people breathing, but none of them spoke. The only ones who could save us now were the saints, I thought, but they still seemed remarkably slow to become involved. We were reduced to waiting and watching Cyrus.
For a second the passage stank of brimstone, and a sudden onslaught of new terror made my bones feel as if they were made of water. With a loud bang and two flashes of light, two demons appeared in the pentagrams in the chapel. Cyrus redrew the line to imprison his.
“I order you,” he cried, “as your Master, to return to hell!”
There goes Antonia’s soul, I thought, closing my eyes. I wondered if it would be better to kill her with my own hands than to have her grow up to a life of evil. I doubted I could do it.
My eyes flicked open again. No! He was commanding his own demon. And it was already far too late to worry about
“But I’ve barely returned from hell, Master,” replied the demon, sounding peevish and pulling thin lips back from his teeth. “I thought you were delighted to have your powers back!”
“And I intend to use them for good!”
“Doesn’t that seem a little foolish? It’s not as though you could still ‘save’ your soul, as that bishop you so admire would put it. Since doing good will help you not in the least, whereas doing evil-”
“I don’t care!” shouted Cyrus. “As your Master, I command you! Return to hell at once!”
“All right,” said the demon reluctantly. “But don’t expect me to answer so quickly the next time you summon me.” With a flash and a thundering that shook the entire castle, he vanished.
The barrier collapsed before me. I started to leap forward, but a hand grabbed my collar and jerked me back. I spun around, furious, thinking it was Elerius.
It was Joachim. He shook his head and held on tight, with far more strength than I could have resisted at this point. There was just enough light for me to see the intensity in his eyes.
Cyrus staggered, almost falling. But with his powers of black magic gone, he whirled toward the other demon with nothing more than the strength of half-learned eastern magic and sheer human stubbornness. “By Satan, by Beelzebub,” he cried, “by Lucifer and Mephistopheles. Binding negotiations!”
The bulging red demon came to life, and a sudden cloud of brimstone made all of us in the passage start desperately coughing, but Cyrus did not appear to hear. “Don’t you realize you’re negotiating from a distinctly weak position?” asked the demon with a leer. “Your soul already belongs to the devil!”
“I’m not offering my soul!” Cyrus shot back. “I’m offering my life!”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer non-binding conversation?” asked the demon. He seemed to be growing more and more enormous, until his horns brushed against the ceiling. “A life for a soul is not a bargain I would care to accept.”
“For a soul to which you are not fully entitled,” Cyrus said clearly, “I offer my life: a life which should have been long, eventful, and filled with whatever I most desired, because of the soul I long ago sold. You can kill me now, but you must return to hell at once, and as you go you must release Antonia’s soul.”
Vlad might never have dealt with demons himself, but he had certainly taught the art of demonology to his apprentice-who must also have been listening closely to Elerius and me.
The chapel and passage had become almost suffocatingly hot. “Those other wizards were also arguing about Antonia’s soul,” said the demon with a deep and resonating laugh. “I’ve never seen such stubbornness.” He looked past Cyrus and showed his teeth. He knew very well we were there.
Joachim’s grip tightened like steel, and his hand stayed perfectly steady.
“No!” cried Cyrus, furious. He was shaking so hard he could hardly stand, but fury and a kind of strange exaltation kept him going. “She is below the age of reason, she never intended to sell her soul, she acted only from pure motives, and she did not even get what she requested of you, the other demon thoroughly back in hell, because I was able to summon him again. On any of these points you might argue, but not on all of them. She is not truly the devil’s, and a life can redeem her.”
“There are quite a few other people who are more than willing to throw away their lives for her,” said the demon slowly, shifting his bulging belly. For the first time I even dared hope: by not denying what Cyrus had just said the demon had agreed with him. “Why should it have to be you?”
“Binding negotiations!” he almost screamed. “You have to answer!”
There was a long pause during which I was afraid the demon would not say anything at all, but then he began to speak. “By Satan, by Beelzebub,” he said slowly, fire shooting from his eyes, “by Lucifer and Mephistopheles. In the space of what you in the natural world call one minute, I shall return to hell, not to return to this world unless deliberately summoned by woman or man.”
I couldn’t have moved even if I wanted to. This was so close to being me. All I could do was listen, my eyes squeezed shut, for the slightest deviant word.
“I release, give up, and free Antonia’s soul,” the demon continued. “But before I go, you shall die. Agreed and accepted?”
At the last moment I thought Cyrus would change his mind. I opened my eyes to see him stiff and white. Any promptings from his conscience would have been the promptings of a conscience perverted by evil.
But then he turned his head and looked toward us. His eyes slid past me and stopped. Twice he opened and closed his mouth. Then suddenly his face took on, just for an instant, that look of shattering goodness that I had seen in him once before. He gasped out, very low but still intelligible, “Agreed and accepted.”
The demon’s booming laugh came one more time as he bent his mouth, huge now and filled with hundreds of teeth, toward Cyrus. “See you in hell!” he cried, and the air exploded.
When our ears stopped ringing and we could see again, the chapel was empty of life. Part of the outer wall had vanished, letting in morning sunshine on the two still-smoking but empty pentagrams and Cyrus’s decapitated body. The bishop strode forward without hesitation and began reciting the last rites over him.
With only minimal hesitation, I followed him and dropped to my knees to begin rubbing out the pentagrams. If anybody
Joachim finished the words of the liturgy as I rose shakily to my feet from the flagstones. They were empty now of all but Cyrus’s blood. The others had retreated back up the passage. “I should reconsecrate this chapel,” said the bishop distantly. “Not today. I should come back with some priests next week and do it.”
“Why did you stop me from going after Cyrus?” I asked, uninterested in consecrated chapels. “I presume he told you exactly what he intended to do?”
“No.” Joachim held me with his dark eyes. “But I guessed his heart. He wanted somehow, desperately, to make amends for at least some of the evil he had done.”
I grew weak all over again. “I thought you knew what you were doing the whole time and didn’t want me to give up my life and soul needlessly when Cyrus, after all, had already forfeited his.”
He was silent for a moment before answering. “I am the bishop, Daimbert. I could not have made a choice between you, if that’s what you mean, even though I would have wanted to. All I knew was that he intended to atone for his deeds, and I had to give him the chance to do so.” He paused briefly again. “And I think he has.”
“He didn’t think he could still save his soul at this point, did he?” I asked incredulously.
The bishop shook his head. “He wasn’t trying to save his soul. He was trying to save Antonia’s. He had finally come to the realization of just how deeply he had sinned in embracing evil: especially against the children and
