Cyrus was even more startled than I was. “Well, you’re welcome,” he said, flustered. “I’m glad you’re starting to trust me at last.” In a moment he recovered his composure and leaned suavely back, a gratified-but-humble expression on his face.
“Perhaps,” Justinia continued, her head tilted sideways, “thou and I might step into one of these other rooms and I could thank thee more personally.”
What could she be planning? To distract him from everything around him just long enough for Paul to stick a knife into him? The king, standing in the background twitching with readiness, seemed to think so.
“Well, my lady, you seem to be making a very attractive offer,” said Cyrus, blushing a little, “but at the moment Daimbert and I are busy planning our strategy, and you should also know that I am in training to become a priest.”
Before Justinia could make her offer of thanks even more attractive, the entire castle shuddered. There was a clang, as though from an unimaginably huge bell, and the castle shuddered again. All around us we could hear falling stone, as half-ruined walls and roofs subsided further. But the distant sounds of falling seemed to take place in the heart of a strange and eerie silence.
“What-” cried Cyrus, but his words were cut off. The fire, the fireplace itself, the couches and tapestries were abruptly gone. Cyrus and I smacked to the stone floor from the chairs on which we had just been sitting but which no longer existed.
He jumped up, looking wildly around a room now as bleak and bare as the one where Vlad had originally put us. Only one candle still burned-the rest had been upended. I reached wildly for Theodora, my heart pounding horribly, as raw, unfocused terror poured through the room.
“The storm!” cried Cyrus. “The storm!” That explained the strange silence. The thunder and the lash of rain had abruptly stopped, though the night was just as dark.
Panting hard, Cyrus started mumbling, too low and too fast for me to follow though it sounded like the Hidden Language. Nothing happened.
“My demon!” he cried in heart-broken despair. “My demon is gone!”
“Then let’s go!” cried Paul, jerking the now-rotten door open.
I sprang in front of him. The primeval terror I felt made it seem that a demon had just arrived, not gone, but I would try to understand that later. “Wait, Paul! It’s the demon’s magic that has protected us from Vlad!”
That demon’s thunderstorm and comfortable room had disappeared, and it was no longer answering calls from Cyrus. Vlad, suddenly not tied up with weather spells and able now to spot us with his magic, would be on us at once.
“Then it has also protected the children!” the king shot back. “We have to get to them before Vlad does!”
Theodora evidently agreed with him, for she grabbed my hand to pull me along. Cyrus glanced up from the floor and appeared to decide at the last second to accompany us. I thought briefly of binding him again and leaving him behind, but it wasn’t worth it. If he’d been abandoned by his demonic helper, all he had left was an irretrievably lost soul.
I tried a spell of light as we hurried out into the corridor, but it still didn’t work. The demonic spells were broken, but Vlad’s magic seemed to be operating fine. “This way,” said Paul, running down the broad stairs with the candle in his hand, the rest of us hurrying to keep up. Cyrus, at the rear, had begun sobbing uncontrollably.
“I am exceeding glad,” muttered Justinia beside me, “that this distraction came before rather than after I had to kiss him.”
Down the first corridor, through an open-roofed chamber where heavy clouds, no longer raining, hung overhead, down another passageway, Paul led us at a trot. He was right. Without a demon’s supernatural power hiding us from Vlad, that wizard would know at once that we had eluded his capture. He would also know that I had been trying to tamper with his spell that kept the children imprisoned and would guess that torturing them, especially when he found out which was my daughter, would make me grant him anything he wanted far faster than torturing me.
But what could have happened to the demon? Could-and for a second I felt wild hope-this mean that the bishop had arrived and overcome it?
I shook my head even as I ran. Even Joachim wouldn’t be able to make a demon obey him. Humans had been given free will in this world, which meant that saints and angels were very unlikely to step in and dispose of demons that humans had summoned.
Might Vlad have somehow caught the demon and imprisoned it in a pentagram? It was ironic, I thought, hurrying across an open area where I looked in all the shadows for Vlad, that I didn’t know whether that wizard might protect us from the demon or the demon from him. But if Vlad had caught the demon, it had been done extremely rapidly. According to the Diplomatica Diabolica it might take days even for demonology experts to capture and imprison a demon someone else had summoned. The quick way required negotiations-in hell’s currency of human souls.
And when I delicately probed with magic I could still sense-in the second before my mind drew convulsively back-the black evil of an active demon lurking somewhere in the ruined castle below us.
We reached the old secret stair in the wall, squeezed in, and started down. The candle flame flared wildly as we groped our way.
Except that we were suddenly not standing on broken steps but on air.
V
We all grabbed at each other, and the candle smashed and went out. But it too lay on what appeared to be solid air. My shoulder touched what felt like stone, yet my straining eyes saw no stone. All around us was a gray dimness, and the ruined castle, the stairs, the stones, and the eyeless windows, no longer seemed there.
“Cyrus?” I began fiercely.
He had been ranting to himself as we came down the narrow staircase, but he now paused and looked around. “Vlad knows where we are,” he said in desolation. “And he’s made the castle invisible from the inside as well as from the outside.”
This went far beyond any capabilities of mine. At least, I thought grimly, keeping such a powerful spell operational would require an active mind; this wasn’t the kind of spell you could set up and then walk away. Maybe his own magic would distract him for the moment from catching us.
“How do we get down to where the children are, Cyrus?” I demanded urgently. “You know the way-take us there, invisible or not.”
But he had begun to babble, swaying on an invisible step, looking wildly at the empty drop beneath his feet to the cliffs.
“Don’t look at it,” said Gwennie suddenly. “Close your eyes. It’s no worse than going into the storeroom for something and not bothering with a light. Paul, you know where the children are. Keep on going.”
He gave her a quick grin. “You’re better at this than I am. Hold my hand. Down to the bottom of the staircase, over that pile of stones-we’ll have to do it by feel-and then turn left.”
Our progress, already terror-ridden, now became a nightmare. Unable to see where we were, we groped by feel down invisible passageways, moving what felt incredibly slowly as Paul tried to recreate in his mind what he had seen both on earlier exploring jaunts and on our previous trip to the ruined chapel. Cyrus was no use at all. I tried it both ways, keeping my eyes squeezed tight shut and leaving them open. Neither seemed to work, especially as with every step we seemed closer to raw evil and to despair. The sky above, I noticed, was moving toward dawn at last, but Vlad’s cloud cover kept growing thicker, to keep any sunlight from reaching him.
I stopped abruptly, causing Cyrus to smack into me from the rear, but I hardly noticed. “Paul, wait,” I said desperately. “We’re going the wrong direction. You aren’t taking us to the chapel. You’re taking us down to the storage cellars.”