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 be mine but a demon’s?”
“But I have more experience-”
“And are much more likely,” commented Elerius dryly, “to throw away your life and soul together in a reckless effort to save your daughter. Now that I have seen the dangers, I shall attempt what other means might be found.”
“I want you to come, Wizard,” said Antonia to me, tugging harder.
Still I hesitated. “If I leave you here, Elerius,” I said slowly, “and I find that you’ve deluded yourself, like Cyrus, into thinking that you can use a demon’s help without it affecting your own judgment and will, then I shall have to kill you: quickly, immediately, before the powers of black magic make you invincible.”
Elerius’s face had slowly regained its color. “I don’t think I’ll be in any danger of death from you,” he said, managing a smile. I wondered if he meant it as equivocally as it sounded.
“Hurry up!” Antonia cried. “If you don’t hurry the people will be here, and if you make Elerius go instead I’ll stay here with you.”
That decided me. I scooped her up and found myself running flat out up the passage away from the ruined chapel, almost tripping over Cyrus, who was huddled by the door. A voice in the back of my mind asked if this urging from Antonia might be the first sign of the devil’s influence, taking me away from where I really ought to be.
It felt so good to be out of the demon’s influence, back in cool morning sunlight, seizing a startled Theodora and kissing her again when I thought I had done so for the last time, that I almost didn’t care.
Briefly I told her of our progress-or lack of progress-so far and looked out the window. A group of people had left their horses at the base of the cliffs and were climbing up the broken causeway toward the castle’s front gate. And with a far-seeing spell I recognized them: Celia and Hildegarde, their parents, and the bishop.
For a few minutes I could imagine that everything was going to be all right after all. I flew down and met them outside the gate, telling them immediately that all the children were safe but leaving out, for the moment, any mention of demons.
Prince Ascelin sheathed his sword and slapped me on the shoulder. His face was gray with exhaustion, and all the lines in it had deepened, but he still managed a laugh. “Thought you could slip away without my knowledge, Wizard? You may have wanted to protect me from what you would find here, but it’s not so easy when you’ve got the best tracker in a dozen kingdoms on your trail!”
I managed a smile in return. Let him think I had left him in Yurt out of concern for his safety. In fact, I hadn’t thought about him at all, only wanting to get to Caelrhon myself as fast as I could.
“I used to be able to hunt all day and all night-even on foot when everyone else was mounted-without getting this tired,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “Age is the best tracker of all; he gets on your trail and you never lose him. But by now I presume you’ve captured this Dog-Man and have the children all ready to go home?” he added cheerfully, looking up at the jagged turrets of the castle. “Terrible place, I must say, for children; good thing the twins didn’t know about it when they were twelve. It looks like your man used a spell to hide their tracks a lot of the way, but he was going fast and must have had gaps in his spells-plenty there for me to follow.”