What could possibly be happening? I tried again to shoulder my way through toward the front of the crowd, not wanting to practice magic this close to a church with everyone speaking of a miracle. The crowd was too intent on the bishop to pay any attention to me, although several people almost stepped on my toes.
“So if you didn’t call down the saints to save our homes,” a booming voice shouted from almost next to me, “then who did?”
“The Dog-Man!” someone else shouted, and a dozen voices took it up. “The Dog-Man, the Dog-Man!”
“Cyrus!” called a woman’s voice from the front of the crowd. It rose almost to a scream. “Cyrus!” I looked to see the source of the voice and saw that it was Celia.
One big cathedral door opened, and the seminary’s newest student popped out like the figure in some child’s game. “It was Cyrus who worked the miracle!” screamed Celia as though in ecstasy. I saw Hildegarde take her by the arm, but she shook her sister off. “Praise God! Praise God!”
Cyrus, his sharp face sober, stood beside Joachim with his arms extended in an identical pose. The bishop turned his head and came as close as he ever did to looking irritated.
“Give not me the praise, but the saints who heard my humble prayers,” said Cyrus when after a moment the crowd’s wordless shouts died away. “My merits are but meager; it is the sincerity of my heart that the saints have answered. Come, let us worship together!” He spun around, apparently finding nothing wrong with inviting Joachim’s flock into Joachim’s own church, and led the way as the townspeople poured up the steps after him.
Celia was one of the first through the doors, but I reached the Lady Maria before she managed to descend from the building materials on which she had so precariously perched. She gave me a smile when she spotted me. “Right on time!” she announced and launched herself into the air. I was just able to catch her, both with my arms and with magic, and set her carefully down.
“How nice to see you, Wizard,” she said conversationally, straightening her dress. “And what a marvelous thing that a miracle-worker has come to the twin kingdoms and that our Celia is studying with him!”
Things were happening much too fast for me. “So you came because Celia wrote you?” I asked, hoping for at least one solid piece of information. Celia had said something yesterday about telling all the people who had supported her in her religious vocation that Cyrus was going to teach her.
“And fortunately I got here just in time to see his first big miracle!” continued the Lady Maria cheerfully. “Come on-we don’t want to miss the service!”
“What miracle?” I demanded, blocking her path.
“Restoring the burned buildings, of course,” she said blithely. “When I arrived this morning everyone was talking about it. Don’t tell me,” with a playful smile, “that just because you’re a wizard you’re going to pretend it never happened!”
“Um, go ahead into the church and I’ll catch up,” I said and shot off without waiting for an answer.
But she was quite right. The burned street had been restored.
The buildings stood silent and empty now, since everyone was in church, but the charred remnants I had seen late last night were back to their former state, as solid as ever. Wood and plaster structures leaned over the high street, and sunlight glittered on window panes I had seen smashed. I wandered down the street, doubting my own eyes, and tried pushing against the timbers in a half-hearted and futile attempt to persuade myself it was all an illusion.
I put my head into the doorway of an inn, blinking in the dimness. There was spilled ale on the wooden bar, filth in the straw on the floor, and dirty plates and mugs on the tables. A brown rat poked its nose out of the straw to look at me and scurried away again. Whatever saint had restored this street seemed to have been very literal. If I had been working a miracle, I would at least have cleaned up the place a little.
Flabbergasted, I leaned against the rough plastered wall outside. This certainly let the Romneys off from accusations of arson. The inn sign, its paint peeling, creaked over my head. Perhaps all the events of the day before had been my imagination, I thought wildly. But if so all the townspeople now at the cathedral, treating a quite willing Cyrus as though this was all due to his own merit, shared the illusion.
The air around me almost glittered with the force of the supernatural. The city always had a touch of the supernatural anyway, evident to any wizard, because of the presence of the cathedral, but this went much further.
Mixed with the aura of the saints was the faint but unmistakable imprint of evil.
III
Afternoon sun shone on the polished wood of the bishop’s study. Joachim, bareheaded but still in his formal scarlet, sat behind his desk, his enormous dark eyes fixed on me. “I cannot leave my cathedral and my people now,” he said quietly, “not until I know what is happening here.”
“It’s not complicated,” I said, irritable because my insides felt so cold my legs were trembling. We could hear, faint in the distance, laughing and singing from the high street, where the innkeepers had announced free ale for everyone in honor of the miraculous restoration of their businesses. “Cyrus is working with a demon.” How, I asked myself, could I ever have imagined there was anything good about him? “And as long as you won’t let me take him out of the cathedral there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“It could have been as he says,” Joachim said somewhat uneasily. Whatever else I might have done, I seemed to have made the bishop doubt his own judgment. “The saints might have answered his prayers and restored the buildings.”
“I thought you just said the saints don’t do things like that,” I shot back.
He shook his head slowly. “I have never known of such a thing. A saint might act to protect his own shrine, and saints of course keep demons out of the churches as long as the hearts of the priests are pure, but they do not usually concern themselves with the material things of this world.”
“Then if it wasn’t a saint,” I said firmly, “it’s got to be a demon.”
“Even a demon could not restore a soul from death,” Joachim objected. He spoke quietly but his gaze was intense.
“We’re not talking about restoring a soul,” I said, looking away. This could not be any easier for the bishop than it was for me. Fingernails dug into my palms. “I think he’s made time run backwards, very locally. That’s how he rebuilt the houses, how he repaired the toys, even how he brought animals without souls back to life. Let me call the demonology experts at the school.”
Joachim lifted an eyebrow. “You did not call them from the cathedral office when you said you needed to call Yurt?”
For all I could tell he might have been making a joke. “Of course not. I don’t lie to you, Joachim. I called Yurt because Antonia’s safety is even more important to me than your demon.”
“It is not,” he said, no trace of humor now, “my demon.”
The thought crossed my mind that if Cyrus indeed was working supernatural black magic, then he could not have been behind the undead warriors; that had been perverted but natural magic. Which meant that I had another faceless enemy to worry about as well as the Dog-Man. “Whosever demon it is,” I snapped, “we need an expert to find it and send it back to hell.”
The bishop rose with a swirl of vestments. “Let us go speak to Cyrus together then, Daimbert. I will not have you or any other wizard bullying one of my seminary students.”
“He may be infecting the rest of your students with evil,” I said as we went out through the study door, the same one I had slammed behind me yesterday morning as I came to murder the bishop. A fine one I was to talk about infection-although the madness seemed to have passed off him as quickly as it had passed off me.