Dactylius followed him. So did Irene. He wondered for a moment why she chose such inconvenient times not to listen to him. He had no time to argue, and the only way to force her to go back would be to drag her, which would mean he couldn’t help Father Luke. Resolving to take it up with her later (a wasted resolution if ever there was one, as he knew even at the time), he hurried to catch up with the priests.
Then Father Luke, confusing things further, spun around on his heel and ran back into the church. He emerged a moment later, leaving George mystified. “Let’s go!” he said, and go they did.
The open square by the cistern was almost bare of people: of living people, at any rate. A couple of women were down and not moving under shards of what had been the roof. Others writhed and wailed. The liquid puddled around them was red and sticky and of no interest to demons concerning themselves only with water.
“By She Who bore God!” Father Gregory gasped when he got his first glimpse of the water-demon looming out of the cistern. A few smaller copies--or parts--of the demigod still stood in puddles left by shattered water jars. They were hideous, too, but hardly worth noticing with the great one about.
Those red eyes swung toward the newcomers. The demigod made a strange, wet, bubbling noise, something that sounded as if it might be a question about what people were doing coming toward the cistern rather than running away from it. A good question, George thought. He wondered what he was doing, too. But he kept doing it. Each foot kept going in front of the other.
Father Gregory shouted, “In the holy name of God, go back to whatever accursed place spawned you!” He made the sign of the cross.
He must not have been listening when George warned of what the Slavic powers could do. Or, possibly, he hadn’t believed George, who was, after all, only a shoemaker.
A power from the days of the pagan Greeks would have been routed. A power from the days of the pagan Greeks, though, could never have made its way into Thessalonica in the first place, not when the city was warded by God through St. Demetrius.
Far from being routed, the water-demon roared angrily and reached out for Father Gregory. As it was several times longer than a man, it had a correspondingly longer reach. George shot an arrow into its arm. A slight mist sprinkled down onto him. Other than that, the shaft had no effect.
Dactylius aimed for the thing’s torso. In what might have been the shot of his life, he sank an arrow that should have pierced the demigod’s heart. It seemed, however, not to have a heart: at any rate, his arrow did no more good than George’s had.
“Run!” George shouted. He didn’t know whether he meant it more for Father Gregory, on whom the water-demons hand was closing, or for Irene. No, that wasn’t true: he did know. He wanted his wife away from the power. The first denial must have sprung from embarrassment at putting her safety above that of the holy man.
It didn’t matter. Neither his wife nor the priest listened to him. The huge hand closed on Father Gregory. He screamed like a lost soul. Considering his circumstances, that seemed fitting enough. He called on God and the Virgin and on Christ, using the holy names as if they were curses. They did no good against the Slavic demigod. George, in the midst of his own terror, was saddened but not surprised. Revenge and reverence were not the same.
Father Luke ran toward the cistern. The water-demon reached out its other hand toward him. George and Dactylius both sent arrows into that arm. The shoemaker never knew for certain whether that did any good. What he did know was that, when the demigod snatched at the priest, it missed.
Instead of grabbing again at once, it chose to pay attention to Father Gregory, whom it had already seized. It raised him high, then threw him down onto the cobbles of the square. Blood splashed out from his body when it struck, as if he too were a shattered jar. He screamed no more.
That brief hesitation, though, had let Father Luke reach the side of the big concrete basin with the wrecked roof. He pulled a small jar out from inside his robe, yanked off the stopper, made the sign of the cross over the jar, and tossed it up into the cistern. The demigod reached down to treat him as it had his colleague. Father Luke waited, unafraid. A moment before those great hands grabbed him, George heard a small splash: the jar had gone into the water.
The demon disappeared.
Silence slammed down in the square, silence punctuated by distant screams. George realized he’d been hearing those with the back of his mind for some time, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that the water demigod had appeared in every cistern in Thessalonica. As he stood there still half-stunned by his escape, those screams changed in tone from terror to amazement, which was a good argument in favor of the notion that, whatever Father Luke had done, whatever force he had called upon, had rid every cistern in Thessalonica of the demigod in the same instant.
On legs still wobbly with fright, George walked up to him, taking a few steps around the smashed horror that had been Father Gregory. “Bless you, Your Reverence,” he said, most sincerely.
“Bless you for your courage,” the priest answered, sounding as shaken as the shoemaker felt. “Without courage and faith, I fear, we shall be lost in the dark days that He ahead.”
George nodded. He looked back toward what was left of Father Gregory. The other priest had proved not to have quite enough of either, there when the ultimate test came. George suspected Father Luke would have found a way to prevail even without… whatever he’d thrown into the cistern. George’s bump of curiosity, always easy to excite, began itching furiously now. “What was in that jar, Your Reverence?” he asked.
“Water from the baptismal font,” Father Luke answered. “Fighting fire with fire is as ancient a proverb as I know. Here I thought it better to--”
“--Fight water with water,” George interrupted, an enormous smile stretching itself across his face. The priest showed himself a man of enormous charity as well as piety: he did not get angry with George for stepping on his line.
Dactylius and Irene came up then. George put an arm around his wife. She shivered against him for a moment, but then said, “I’ll have to buy a new jug to replace the one I broke here.”
More than jugs had been broken in the square. Along with Father Gregory, several women lay there. Some might be helped. One was groaning and shrieking and clutching her leg, which streamed blood out onto the cobbles. A big chunk of concrete from the roof the demigod had destroyed lay by her.
George used his sword to cut a strip from the bottom of her tunic to bandage the leg. She screamed abuse at him all the while, as if the tunic were more important than anything else. He took no notice of that; the lower part of the leg was out of true with the rest. “A bandage isn’t all she needs,” he said, pointing. “That leg is broken.”
“I’ll fetch a physician,” Dactylius said. “This could have been Claudia, as easily as not.” George might not have bet on the water-demon against Claudia, but he knew the little man was right. Dactylius hurried away.
Father Luke came up to the woman and prayed over her. His entreaties might have eased her pain a little, but no more than that. Routing the Slavic demigod was a matter of power against power. Something as mundane as a broken leg wasn’t, barring a miracle. Barring--
“Pity we can’t take her to the healing spring outside the city,” George said. “But the Slavs have to be prowling there nowadays.”
“It is the will of God,” Father Luke said. “We are in His hands.”
He believed that with every fiber of his being. Not least because of his strong faith, he’d been able to vanquish the water-demon. But had he not had the wit to bring with him water from the baptismal font, all his faith would have done him no good. George, shorter on faith, tried to be sharp of wit. He had trouble understanding how God’s purpose included things like a broken leg inflicted, so far as any man could tell, at random.