Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (36 page)

"You will notice," said Elerius slowly, "that I have stopped the incantation to summon a demon."

I let out a shuddering breath. "Good," I said as clearly as I could. "Now erase the pentagram. You will notice that I still have my hand on the lead seal."

Elerius pulled his black eyebrows down heavily. "I am not yet ready to yield, Daimbert. I shall simply stand to one side."

It wasn't good enough, but there wasn't a lot I could do. "Order all the wizards with you to return to the school! Agree that you will stop this resistance to the kings and the masters of wizardry!"

But he was not defeated—only calculating his next move. "You and I can continue to make demands of each other, Daimbert, that the other will refuse to honor, until Prince Walther falls asleep from boredom. Why do we not instead agree now, rather than hours from now, that we have each other stalemated?"

"And what would a stalemate mean?" I asked cautiously.

"That we would separate, you with your Ifrit, me with my pentagram.

You can return to those obstinate western kings who still believe they can order the world's affairs better than a wizard could, and I shall continue to plan their destruction, but without the use of black magic. I really would prefer not to invoke a demon, you realize."

I realized nothing of the sort. "The prince comes with me," I said levelly.

"Or there's no agreement."

But this wasn't just a discussion between Elerius and me. "No!" cried Prince Walther, pulling back his shoulders and glaring. For a second I caught a glimpse of Hadwidis's stubbornness in her half-brother. Their mother, I thought irrelevantly, must be a queen one obeyed at all costs. "I am the royal heir to this kingdom and this castle!" Walther declared. "I shall defend them against anyone, warrior or wizard!"

And die with your father if I figure out how to get the Ifrit to obey me, I thought. But I nodded to the boy because there was nothing else I could do. "How can we trust each other not to attack the second the other's back is turned?" I asked Elerius.

"We shall both swear oaths," he said calmly, in charge once again.

"Swear to me, Daimbert, on magic itself, that you will not use the Ifrit's powers to attack me."

"Not something so sweeping," I said, careful because I knew he had to be plotting something. "The Ifrit is my ultimate weapon in this war, and I can't give him up."

"Then give me forty-eight hours' truce," said Elerius briskly "Neither of us shall attack the other for a space of two days. That should give me the time I need to prepare the castle's defenses so that even an Ifrit could not penetrate them."

He again exuded confidence, even rationality—yet the pentagram still glowed beside him. "What," I said carefully, "will you swear upon, Elerius?

I don't trust you to swear on magic. You've already broken the powerful oaths all of us had to swear in the school not to harm mankind."

That startled him, at least momentarily. "Well, I—"

I interrupted. "Swear on Prince Walther's life."

There was a long silence, during which the boy's eyes went very wide.

But then Elerius shrugged. "Of course. I shall be happy to swear on his very being not to summon a demon either now or later. I shall swear such an oath as soon as you have sworn yours."

I should have known better. It was late at night; I had just come back from an arduous trip to the East; I was being hailed as miraculously resurrected; and my leg was still not entirely healed from my run-in with the roc. But still I should still have spotted the fallacy in Elerius's proposition.

In the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language I swore the enormously solemn oath he wanted, not to use the Ifrit to harm him his castle, or his armies for at least forty-eight hours. He kept his eyes on me the whole time, as though waiting for the slightest deviant word. "Now you," I said rouffhlv thrusting the bronze bottle into my pocket.

And then he laughed, his head thrown back, and fire blazed from his fingertips. "You have sworn, Daimbert, but I have not! And now I have changed my mind!"

Mv hand shot to the lead seal on the bottle, but I froze without loosening it. I had just sworn, in the most powerful terms a wizard could swear, not to release the Ifrit.

What was a broken oath, I thought desperately, compared to the danger of the world's most powerful wizard working with a demon?

But I could not do it. My fingers had no intention of obeying me. I had believed in wizardry and magic down to my bones since a very young man, and I could no more break an oath sworn on them than I could have duplicated any of Elerius's other feats.

Madly I tried a paralysis spell, to stop him from speaking, but he was ready for me and brushed my magic aside with the ease of brushing away a fly. Spinning around, I tried to wrench the study door open, to escape in the few seconds I might yet have. It was no use. The door was shut fast with magic. "By Satan, by Beelzebub," the words rose behind me, "by Lucifer and Mephistopheles!"

On the far side of the room I spotted Prince Walther, terrified, trying unsuccessfully to open a window a hundred feet above the ground. I doubted he yet had learned how to fly, and anyway the window was magically locked. I crossed the room in long strides, making a wide detour around the pentagram, and wrapped an arm around the boy. He was too young to have to meet a demon, or to see the wizard he had believed good turn to evil. He pressed himself, shaking, against me, and we both waited with averted eyes for the inevitable.

Behind me in the room there was a great crack and a flash of light. The demon is here, I thought with a kind of dead resignation. I had met a demon twice before and felt no need to look. In a second my nostrils would be assailed by the smell of brimstone.

The scent of roses, months out of season, drifted across the room.

My head jerked up, and I reflexively clutched Walther tighter until he cried out. The light in the center of the room was rapidly growing brighter, until its brilliance was almost unbearable. The light washed out the glow of the magic lamps and of the pentagram, filling Elerius's study like water filling a pond.

In the center of that light stood a figure. But it was not a demon. It was a saint.

An old bearded man, burning with light, leaned on a staff in the center of where Elerius's pentagram had been a few seconds before. But the pentagram was gone, the chalk dust blown to the far corners of the room. I noted wildly that the man needed the staff because one of his feet was missing its big toe.

Visions in dreams I had often heard of, and had been very glad that I had never been visited with such a vision myself. But I knew now the true, annihilating terror of actually meeting a saint. The air of the study was soft, perfumed with flowers, more gentle than the air of the enchanted valley in the Land of Magic, and all I could feel was primordial fear.

Dazzled until I was almost blind, so overcome that my bones felt like water, I gazed with living eyes on Saint Eusebius, the Cranky Saint.

He rapped his staff hard, and the tower swayed around us. "What do you think you're doing, young man?" he rasped out, glaring at Elerius with a fierce frown. I would have whispered a prayer of gratitude that the saint was angry with Elerius, not with me, but somehow I couldn't pray to someone who was so palpably right in the room with us. "Thinking of yourself again," the saint declared, "and of no one else! This kingdom belongs to my spiritual daughter, who bears my name in religion, and I do not want a demon in it!"

Elerius staggered backward, clutching a chair for support. The times I had met a demon I had thought there could be nothing more terrifying. I had been mistaken. The supernatural power of good was just as overwhelming as the supernatural power of darkness, and one could not even console oneself that that power was ultimately wrong. If there was any evil in the room, it was in us.

Elerius's face was completely white, but still he managed to gasp, "How did you get in here? This castle is protected by powerful spells, against dragons, against—"

The Cranky Saint interrupted him with another sharp rap of his staff. "I am not affected by your natural magic. You have certainly been taught, young man, that magic is only effective in this world—and let me tell you, it is well past time for you to start thinking about your soul's welfare in the next!”

I fell to my knees, pulling Prince Walther down with me. "This kingdom doesn't belong to anyone's daughter," the boy mumbled, stubborn even in terror. "It belongs to me."

The saint swung toward us, and I pressed my face against the floor.

Walther, half under me, must have been nearly stifled. The saint said, somewhat more mildly, "I think, Walther my son, your destiny lies elsewhere. My spiritual daughter may not always be as obedient as I would wish, but she does try to follow the path of goodness, unlike some people, and I intend her to rule here."

My eyes squeezed shut, in fear, in reverence, in reaction to the blinding force of the light pouring from the saint. "Dearest Lord," I murmured, wishing I had, even once, asked Joachim for the correct way to address a saint, "I thank you for your mercy, your benevolence, your answer to my poor prayer—"

"Call no one Lord but God," the saint snapped, but then his voice softened for a moment. "Your prayers are not unheard, my son, but it is above all two others who have reached me with their constant imprecations: Bishop Joachim, and the woman who has taken the name of Sister Eusebius."

Elerius, half hiding behind a chair on the far side of the room, peeked out and said, "You can't keep me from summoning a demon. That would violate human free will."

"It would do nothing of the sort," said the saint with a snort. I lifted my head—I could just bear to look at him as long as his eyes were not fixed on me. "Don't you wizards learn anything about metaphysics? Certainly we allow you to make your own decisions, even damn your own souls if that is your determined choice. But if humans call for our aid, of their own will, it is certainly within our powers to respond. Or," and he glowered until I, in Elerius's position, would have used a spell to sink bodily into the floor,

"did you think that demons could be summoned, but that humanity was somehow immune from the influence of saints?"

"Well, no, Your Sanctity," muttered Elerius, eyes averted, with no more idea of how to address a saint than I had. "But I thought—"

"I do not care what you erroneously thought," announced the saint with another snort. "I found you here in the process of breaking the most solemn oath you could imagine—and the detail that you had not yet spoken the words does not make it any less solemn! Perhaps that is all that I should have expected from you—although I hope you do know it is within the power of your will to seek the good! I must say, I was rery disappointed with your conduct at Daimbert's funeral. Instead of reverently commending his soul to God, all you could think of was asserting some claim of worldly authority, completely disrupting a sacred ceremony!"

"But Daimbert wasn't dead!" Elerius protested, sweat run-ling down his face.

"You didn't know that," the saint shot back, "and, indeed, you hoped he was. Do not try to deny it! Do you think I didn't know your inmost thoughts, your wicked hope that if he did not intend to help you he would be killed? No, you are clearly not one to be trusted. Therefore I intend to keep this castle safe from demons until my spiritual daughter can reclaim it. You may stay here as long as you like, but I shall be watching! Any further attempt of yours to summon a demon here, in defiance of the oath you should have sworn, will utterly fail.

"Beyond that—" and he spun toward me again with another rap of his staff "—you are left to your own devices. I may have helped you and guided you a few times in the last few weeks, Daimbert, my son, but you are now approaching a difficult test. Demons I can save you from, at least demons summoned by Elerius, but I cannot save you from yourself."

I made an affirmative mumble, wondering wildly what he could mean—did he think that
I
was about to summon a demon?

"As for all this nonsense about running your wizards' school," the saint continued, "I have not the slightest interest in any of it. Work that out if you must, but set yourself above all, all three of you, to work out your souls' salvation! And be assured that you shall do so with absolutely no demons here."

Strong winds swirled around the Cranky Saint, even here in Elerius's tightly-sealed study, lifting his gray beard and whirling his cloak as he began to glow even more brightly. Elerius on the far side of the room had buried his face in his arms. Another enormous crack rent the air, and even through my eyelids I could see the great burst of light that accompanied the saint's transit from this world into the world of the supernatural.

And for a second, in spite of all my terror in his presence, I felt a tearing sense of loss. I had, for a few moments, been in the presence of supernatural good, and the ordinary world reasserting itself around me, material, neither good nor evil but fundamentally confused, was achingly empty without that goodness.

But I had no time to consider the sensation, for as soon as the saint disappeared Elerius's magically-locked window flew open, and I found myself plucked from the floor and Prince Walther wrenched from my grasp. My own spells were completely ineffective. I was catapulted through the air, sailing away from the castle far faster than I could have flown myself—even faster than Naurag could have flown.

The Ifrit's bronze bottle was still heavy in my pocket—not that his power could ever be even slightly comparable to that of a saint. My dazzled eyes blinked hard, trying to readjust to the darkness through which I flew. I was able to identify the army's encampment ahead, toward which I was speeding. The fire around which the kings had taken counsel was still burning, though low now, and only a few soldiers waited there, leaning on their spears.

The saint's power let me go then, leaving me feeling even more naked and alone than when he disappeared. I dropped the final thirty feet under the power of my own magic, to land next to the startled guardsmen.