I moved a chair over to the big mirror in the wall of books. Mirrors themselves are no more magical than crystal balls, but both can be used for occult purposes, like the piece of chalk I used to draw a pentacle around myself and the chair. I sat down, tried some deep breaths, and then uttered my first call, summoning Putrid (not his real name) to be manifest in the mirror before me.
The room cooled and dimmed. It always shocks me when mere words can do that. Even the flames in the fireplace seemed to shrink, and I wished I had brought a lamp inside the pentacle with me.
I summoned a second time. Now the mirror showed very little more than my own white face with darkness behind it, and the air was filled with a nauseating stench. Think of every bad smell you have ever experienced-bad fish, cesspools, warm pig dung-add them all together and multiply by thirteen. Gagging, anxious to get the seance over with, I spoke the words a third time.
My scared face in the mirror blurred and melted into a reddish globe, which shrank back and resolved as the iris of an eye. The surrounding space cleared into scaly, scabrous flesh of an indeterminate green-purple color, like a very ripe bruise. The monster moved farther back yet, until a second eye came into view. Whatever shade or shape they choose for the rest of themselves, fiends always seem to prefer red eyes. Putrid had begun his apparition the size of a house, and even now I could see only part of his face peering in, huge as the mirror was. The less I saw the better.
“You!” he said. He slobbered and his breath stank even worse than the rest of him. “I will eat you.”
I peered at my script in the feeble firelight.
“You have a nice smell of fresh sin on you, sier Alfeo Zeno,” the fiend said chattily. “You should have been shriven before you called me. And your harlot also I will eat.”
Another rule is that you never listen to fiends.
“Putrid, I command you by your true name that if there was no murderer present on San Valentine’s Eve last in the room in this city where Ottone Imer the attorney displayed books to certain potential buyers, that you instantly quit this realm and return to the place from whence you came.”
The fiend coughed, spraying the inside of the mirror with spit and almost choking me with putrescent fumes. My skin crawled.
“That’s clever,” he growled. “Thought that up all by yourself, did you, Alfeo?” He was still there, which disposed of any last hope that the procurator’s death had been an accident.
“Look, Alfeo,” the fiend said. “Violetta with her customers. Let me show you what she does, Alfeo. Look!”
I did not look. “Putrid, I command you by your true name that until and only until I clap my hands three times you show me in this mirror before me the murder committed by the murderer who was present on San Valentine’s Eve last in the room in this city where Ottone Imer the attorney displayed books to certain potential buyers, and I further command you by your true name that when and only when I clap my hands three times that you instantly quit this realm and return to the place from whence you came.”
“Damn you,” the fiend muttered, but the hideous images faded from the mirror.
I was staring down into a tent. It was dim, lit by two small lamps suspended from the ridge pole, but luxuriously carpeted and furnished with elaborate chests, a divan, a silver ewer and basin. Steel mail and a sword hung on a stand by the entrance. Seemingly right below me, a man sat cross-legged on a cushion under the lamps, reading. I could see that the writing was Arabic, and needed no demon to advise me that I was spying on one of the sultan’s generals. His face was hidden from me by a turban shaped like a giant pumpkin, much bigger than his head, but he wore a sleeveless tunic and a complicated, multicolored skirt that barely reached his knees. He could not be the sultan himself-unlike his warlike ancestors, he stays home in safety in Constantinople, and he would command far grander quarters if he did venture into the field-but someone of importance. What was Putrid playing at? What loophole had I left in my instructions?
The man looked up, frowning and tilting his head as if listening to something. He was dusky and weathered; he had silver streaks in his beard, but his face was lean, vulpine, and still dangerous.
The flap lifted to admit a second man. He was young, short but heavyset, swarthy and bearded, and he wore very similar garb. He salaamed to the general. There must be millions like him in the Ottoman Empire, from Hungary to the Persian Gulf, from Libya to the Caucasus-fierce Muslims all, fanatically loyal to their sultan-but very few of those would have a fiend sitting on one shoulder as this one did. In shape the horror resembled a tailless rat with red eyes and a grin that showed sharp teeth, but its texture was slug-like, bluish and slimy.
The general had risen, but he clearly did not register the fiend, because he listened calmly to whatever the visitor said. I could not hear a word and would not have understood it if I had. The general salaamed in response to whatever message or instructions he had just received. He went over to the portable table with the ewer and basin and there proceeded to wash his hands. The visitor watched, smiling contentedly, while the fiend hugged itself in glee and chomped its teeth.
I still had no idea what was going on; I just knew that I could not approve of anything that a demon enjoyed so much. No doubt there are possessed walking the streets of Christendom, too, even here in the Republic. I was identifying this one and his rider only because I was seeing them through Putrid’s eyes.
Hands washed, the general returned to the center of the tent, knelt down with his back to his guest, and began to pray in the Muslims’ fashion, bending to touch the rug with his forehead, leaning back to raise his arms. To my astonishment, the fiend disappeared. The visitor did not seem to notice its absence any more than he had shown awareness of its presence earlier. What surprised me was that the Muslim’s prayers had dispelled it at least as effectively as a Christian’s would. Was the name of Allah as effective as the name of Christ? That was certainly not what the Church taught. If the unbelievers worshipped the Antichrist, how could their prayers banish demons? I would be burned as a heretic if I ever suggested such a thing.
The fiends must be trying to deceive me.
The general ended his prayers and the demon reappeared where it had been before. The general sat back on his heels, his visitor walked across the carpet to him, looped a cord around his neck, and strangled him. The fiend jumped up and down with joy as the general thrashed in his death agonies. I may have cried out in horror, but if so no one noticed. I had asked to see a murder, hadn’t I? Putrid had shown me the wrong one, perhaps the murderer’s first murder, his initiation.
When the assassin was certain his victim was dead, he drew his sword. At that point, I admit, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the corpse on the floor was headless and a blood-spattered turban lay empty and collapsed beside it. The visitor seemed neither upset nor especially pleased by his gruesome task, nor by the weighty leather bag he held. He was possessed, after all, and no doubt believed he was loyally carrying out his sultan’s orders. He probably was. Turning his back on his grisly work, he headed for the door-and his demon looked up and saw me.
I could not hear its shrieks of rage, but I could see them. The possessed turned again and returned to stand directly below my vantage point, but now his face was blank, his eyes lifeless. His passenger was dancing with fury, almost glowing with it, making clawing gestures at me and becoming larger, its spongy flesh swelling like dough, its eyes flaming redder. I was seized by a terrible, paralyzing, horror that it would leap out of the mirror at me.
I clapped my hands three times. The image blurred, steadied slightly, and then faded-all except those two red eyes. I yelled out the words of dismissal, but of course those were addressed to Putrid and I did not know the name of this other fiend, to which it had betrayed me. For a moment the mirror showed the two hate-filled red eyes superimposed on me and the atelier behind me. Then, mercifully, they disappeared.