The Demon and the Fox

by Tim Susman

  “One day, perhaps.” Abel smiled. “For now, it’s enough that I know it’s there. It proves that this is not the only way we have to live, and lights a path to a better future.”

  “Let me tell you about Peachtree,” Kip said. Standing there against the wall, as he told Abel about the Georgia town, he really believed that there could be a better future.

  He begged off dinner with the two apprentices in the evening, not sure what time sunset would be happening in New Cambridge. Finally, he summoned Nikolon, who this time appeared as a robed male human, and ordered her—him—them?—to report to New Cambridge and let him see through their eyes. Nikolon perched atop the church steeple (it took Kip a moment to realize that) and showed him his home in the dim wet light of a steady rain. An intense longing to be there washed over him, but he recovered himself, aware of the effect of strong emotions on the demon binding.

  The sun had not set yet, but it looked close. So he directed Nikolon to the Founders Rest (“you may wait in the fire if you find it more comfortable,” but they chose to lie atop one of the rafters), and instructed them to wake him when Emily appeared, if he were asleep.

  The double vision of the Founders Rest and Cott’s workshop was more tolerable when the workshop was dark, but then it was cold, and so Kip lit a fire and closed his eyes to focus on the scene below him. Familiar people came and went as he watched, but he couldn’t focus Nikolon’s ears to catch any individual conversations, having to sort instead through the cacophony below. This frustrated him at first, but later allowed him to relax.

  Master.

  He snapped awake. Focused in Nikolon’s gaze were Malcolm, Emily, and Coppy, sitting at a table below him. These are the people you wish me to pass your words to?

  “Yes,” he said, speaking aloud as he rubbed tiredness from his eyes.

  His viewpoint drifted down until he felt as though he were seated at the table. Coppy sat to his left, Malcolm across, and Emily to his right. They talked in low voices and took no notice of him. All three looked as well as they had when he’d seen them the previous week, except that Emily’s hair was disheveled and Malcolm kept running his hand through his own. Coppy talked in a low voice about someone having or not having come to harm. Again the homesickness overwhelmed him, and again he fought it back to remain in control of himself and the demon.

  When you speak, they will hear your words, Nikolon said.

  Kip cleared his throat. “Hi,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  All three of his friends jumped and stared toward the invisible demon. “Kip?” Coppy said, and put his paw out.

  “I’m talking to you through a demon,” Kip said. Coppy withdrew his paw hurriedly.

  “We know.” Emily kept staring through him. “I wish you would hurry up and learn to translocate.”

  “I’ve had a hard enough time learning the things I’m assigned to learn,” Kip said. “What’s happened?”

  Emily and Malcolm both looked at Coppy, and the otter stared down at the table. “Sheriff Winters came looking for you yesterday. He said Alice Cartwright didn’t come home from school.”

  Didn’t come home from school. The words were always followed, as they were now, by a pause as everyone digested the name and mentally catalogued them with the list of other Calatians injured, missing, or killed, with a small hopeful notation that there was still time, they might turn up.

  “There’s more,” Emily said tightly. “Farley wasn’t at lunch or dinner today.”

  “Oh, no,” Kip said. “No, no.”

  “Adamson was at lunch.” Malcolm rested both elbows on the table, his rough hands clasped together. “But not at dinner.”

  “We think he went looking for Farley.” Coppy still wouldn’t look toward the place at the table where Nikolon approximately sat.

  “All right,” Kip said. “Nikolon, how quickly can you search through the town?”

  “Who’s Nikolon?” Emily asked.

  As quickly as we searched the ruins, master.

  “Don’t repeat what I say when I address you,” Kip said.

  “We’re not.” Malcolm leaned forward. “Listen, Kip, don’t you worry about this. We’re going to find her.”

  “No,” Kip said. “I mean, thank you, but I have a demon here. I’ll find her.” Then he said, silently, Nikolon, let’s go.

  In a moment, they’d left the confines of the Inn’s public room. If any of his friends had a parting word for him, Kip did not hear it. He described Alice and Farley for Nikolon, enough that the demon would be able to differentiate them from any other human-Calatian pair that was likely to be found.

  New Cambridge was not large, but Kip realized quickly that it would take hours for them to go through every room of every building. “You don’t have to search houses that have no fire or lamp lit,” he said after the third house whose residents were asleep. Nikolon confined their searches to houses where the residents were active, of which there were many fewer, but Kip grew frustrated with this search as well. Farley wasn’t going to be in the house of Mrs. Partridge, sitting up to read a paper from Boston. He would be in his mother’s house, perhaps, or out near the farm he’d used to own.

  Kip directed Nikolon to Mrs. Broadside’s house, but she was the only one awake in it, writing a letter by lamplight in her bedroom dressed only in a thin dressing-gown. Kip hastily directed Nikolon to leave, the fox’s ears flat with shame at the intrusion.

  The demon continued to search through nearby houses while Kip’s mind raced, trying to speed up the search. Farley would likely have a fire of some sort, he thought, whether in a lamp or in a fireplace. If Kip were there in person, he could perhaps locate fires through his sensitivity to them, something Master Cott had referred to but had only begun to teach him.

  Nikolon. Can you channel my power?

  I don’t know what you mean, master.

  Stop for a moment. The demon obliged, just outside a house where one lamp burned in the upstairs window. Kip focused on that lamp, on the fire within it. He couldn’t feel anything from it; it was as though he were trying to feel a drawing of fire in a book. He cast the spell Cott had taught him to increase his sensitivity, and then he could feel the fire, but could not reach out beyond it to find more of them. Frustrated, he told Nikolon to go on.

  But in every room, whenever the demon’s gaze passed over a flame, Kip reached out to it. He tried the tricks he’d learned over his few months in sorcery: remembering what the flame smelled like, feeling its hunger, losing himself in it. He even tried thinking of the Flower, but none of that worked.

  Not until they appeared in the home of the Pendletons, Saul’s parents. A modest house, but filled with small ceramic children, which Mrs. Pendleton loved. Mr. Pendleton spent most of his time downstairs in his leather workshop and store, but today he was hunched over a desk, staring at a piece of paper. Neither of Saul’s parents had much approved of the time their son spent with Kip, and though he’d tried to visit them after Saul’s death, they hadn’t received him.

  But he had been in their house once, when they were both downstairs in the store, when it was raining outside and Saul had dragged the fox upstairs to get out of the wet and dry his tail by the stove.

  Kip pushed the memory away; there was no time for that now. What he noticed was that knowing the room, knowing where the lamp stood and where the fire in it burned, that helped him connect to it. Not enough here to do anything with it, as his knowledge of the room was not quite certain enough. But if he found a place he knew better…

  He directed Nikolon to the home of the Coopers, where Tom sat working a piece of wood by lamplight while the noises from the other room suggested that Alicia and David had gone to bed without him. Kip asked Nikolon to shut out the sounds, but to linger in this room. He knew Tom’s workroom, had played here when his parents went to Boston. Five years older, Tom was old enough to be a playmate but responsible enough to watch Kip around the sharp woodworking tools, and his mother, like Kip’s father, was
a calyx (the senior Mr. and Mrs. Cooper had retired to the small apartment in back of the main house two years ago when Tom had taken over the business).

  So Kip knew this room well, and now when he tried to reach out to the fire, a faint flicker responded. Wait, he commanded, and Nikolon responded that they were already waiting and there was no need to issue an order twice.

  Ignoring Nikolon’s words, Kip stared into the flame and reached out again. I know you. I feel you, he said to it, and now, knowing where it was very precisely in his memory, the response came more strongly: heat and hunger no less fierce for being confined to a glass cage.

  Tentatively, he searched outwards, using the Coopers’ house as a base and trying to find other fires. For an agonizing several minutes, he didn’t think it was going to work. And then, like the stars at twilight, another lamp appeared to him. Then another, and then a fire in a fireplace.

  Can you follow my senses to those fires?

  Nikolon did not answer immediately. After a moment, they said, If you command me to follow them by looking into your mind for them, then I will be able to. I am bound by your orders and at this moment I cannot look into your mind.

  Kip took a breath. In his heightened state he knew it would be easy to slip up in his orders, and allowing a demon unfettered access to a sorcerer’s mind—he didn’t need Odden to tell him how dangerous that would be. But it could mean the difference between minutes and hours in finding Alice.

  He thought through his command for a moment, and then reached out to Nikolon. Follow the flames as I sense them with my mind. Do not look for any more time or matter than is necessary to locate the next flame. And if I tell you to stop, withdraw completely from my mind.

  Yes, master. And they were off toward the nearest flame in Kip’s awareness. He continued reaching out to sense more of them, sparing only a moment of attention as Nikolon reached each flame to examine the room and ensure that Farley and Alice were not there.

  He had lost count of the number of flames they’d jumped to when his vision opened onto a stall in an old barn, a lantern hanging on one wall. Stop here, he said.

  I already have, Nikolon replied, and their presence withdrew from Kip’s mind.

  Alice Cartwright lay with her paws tied behind her back on a bale of hay. Her muzzle was unbound, but she remained quiet; this barn must be on the edge of town and far from the farmhouse that owned it. On either side of another bale of hay, Farley and Victor Adamson stood arguing, Farley holding a long knife in his right hand. Three sheets of paper and an open book lay on the bale, but Kip didn’t order Nikolon to move close enough to read them. The mug next to them along with the knife told him all he needed to know.

  Can you translocate Alice to her home?

  No, master.

  Can you paralyze both of those young men?

  Not for very long, master. If they are sorcerers then they would be able to break the binding.

  Of course Odden wouldn’t have given him a demon with any great powers. Kip chewed his lip and thought. Alice was at the back of the stall, so she would have to run out past the two. They could go find the Watch, but how long would it take for the Watch to get to the barn?

  Let me hear them, he said.

  “—know it still rankles you,” Farley said.

  “That has nothing to do with it.” Adamson looked as furious as Kip had ever seen him. “That is an underage girl.”

  “It’s his bitch,” Farley said. “He wants to have a litter on her, he’ll be back here soon enough.”

  “And then what? You’re going to try this spell, which you’ve never cast before? Penfold has summoned demons.”

  “He won’t summon nothin’ without a calyx’s blood. Which I’ve got and he ain’t got.” Farley brandished the knife. “You told me that.”

  “I told you that I heard he had successfully summoned a demon. I was not witness to it, and Patris did not specify that a calyx’s blood was involved. I assumed that blood was involved because it would be extraordinary if he were able to summon a demon without it, and Patris did not treat the summoning as extraordinary.”

  The knife swung around, glittering in the lamplight. “An’ meanwhile he’s in London learning what you an’ I ought, and if we wait much longer we won’t have a chance to give him the skinnin’ he deserves. No,” Farley said. “We’re doin’ this now. You don’t like it, there’s the door.”

  “I don’t like it,” Victor said, but he didn’t budge. “I’ve told you, apply yourself to learning magic and I will open doors for you that Penfold has no chance of passing through. This blood feud is going to end with one of you dead.”

  “See, I knew you was smart.” Farley pointed the knife at Adamson’s head. “Even if you are pigeon-livered. Bested once by an animal and now afraid of it? That’s not how you deal with ‘em.” He swung the knife to point at Alice. “They think they bested you? You take back twice over from ‘em. Show ‘em their place and if they won’t stay in it, shove ‘em back.”

  “You can’t ’shove them back,’ as you say, forever. What you can do is keep moving your own place ahead.”

  “Ha.” Farley gestured with the knife. “Maybe such as you can move ahead. I know those like me get left behind. My father served the Empire, died in its service—”

  “You’ve told me.”

  “—and what did me and my mom get? We got dilberries.”

  Adamson’s face twisted in distaste. “If you’d simply listen to me, you could improve your lot.”

  “Oh, I tried that. Nearly got meself burnt up, and you tellin’ me I’d be safe. Carmichael told me the way you was lookin’ at us, how you ran out the back of the tent. Now he’s gone an’ it’s just me, and I’ll be twice-damned if I’ll let you push me around any more, you cock robin.”

  Adamson tried to step forward, but Farley spoke a few syllables quickly and raised both arms. They glowed a bright lime green. “Nah, nah, I can still do a few tricks you can’t,” the heavy bully jeered. “Now, you can walk out on two feet or get carried out with help, and I don’t much care if you hit some walls on your way to a pile of horse shit.”

  Victor took a step back. “How do you suppose Penfold will even know where you are?”

  “Oh, I’ll tell the demon to go fetch him,” Farley said.

  “If the summoning even works.” Victor straightened, his voice gaining cold bravado. “Simply because Burkle isn’t here anymore doesn’t mean he’s available for anyone to summon.”

  “It’s the only name I got!” Farley shouted, his face reddening. “What of it? If it don’t work…I suppose the other animal’s told him his broodmare’s missing. They notice, y’know. So maybe I got to wait for him to come to me. Don’t matter. I can best him once he’s here, then he’ll watch his bitch bleed and I’ll have his tail for my wall.”

  “Just the tail?” Adamson kept a wary eye on the knife.

  “Aye. The rest can go on the dung heap.”

  Nikolon. Whisper very softly in Alice’s ears that she must be ready to run, and then loosen her bonds.

  Alice had remained calm through this, though her nostrils flared and her breath came in quick pants. Kip’s chest swelled with affection and pride. He had only known Alice as a pleasant, engaging young girl, but her bravery here in front of the men callously discussing her torture and calling her by degrading names would have done credit to anyone Kip knew. He hoped she wouldn’t startle too much at the demon’s voice.

  Again, she comported herself well. A flick of her ear was the only indication that Nikolon had spoken to her, but around her paws and feet, hidden in the shadows from Farley and Adamson, the rope holding her loosened until it hung more like a grotesque decoration than a bond. All through this, her lips moved without sound, probably reciting a prayer.

  In the meantime, Farley had threatened Victor yet again, and the blond boy now stood at the entry to the stall, apparently hesitant to leave. Farley, like Kip, thought that Adamson hoped his presence would forestall what he�
��d planned, so he brayed a laugh. “Watch if you want,” he said, and turned toward Alice.

  Bind him now!

  Farley stopped cold, frozen like a statue. His face twisted into a grimace.

  “Alice, run!” Kip called.

  She rolled off the hay bale and struggled to get to her feet, but fell again. She tottered toward the mouth of the stall, where Adamson backed up, confusion on his face. But as Alice reached for the frame of the stall door, she too froze in place. Unbalanced, she fell to the hay and lay there motionless.

  Sweat dripped from Farley’s brow though the night must be cold. “Vermin!” he shouted. “Can’t hold me!” His face twisted and then his limbs moved slowly. “Show yourself!”

  Adamson ran. Kip cried to Nikolon, Hold him!

  I cannot, master. He surpasses my abilities.

  Farley’s arm lowered toward Alice, the knife blade glittering in it. Make him drop the knife!

  Whatever was holding Farley back gave way, and his arm shot downward, but his fingers flew apart and the knife fell to the floor inches from Alice’s muzzle. Breathing hard, Farley knelt and reached out for the blade; as soon as his fingers closed around it, they flew open again. “Right,” he snarled. “That’s how you wish it.”

  He recited the syllables again and his arms glowed. Alice came free, struggled to her feet, but the knife was lifting from the floor.

  Stop it, hold the knife!

  Master—

  It wouldn’t work, he already knew it. Farley was stronger than Nikolon and the knife was already turning, hovering, following Alice as she pulled herself toward the door and through it and in a moment it would bury itself in her throat.

  “No!” Kip howled, and pulled magic into himself from the earth, drew flame from the lantern where it still hung on the wall, and consumed the stall in it.

  Only the walls; he did not touch Farley directly, though only with the great restraint Cott had drilled into him. But fire blanketed the walls, caught the hay and the wood, sprang up in the doorway as a barrier that Farley shrank back from. Alice stumbled away from the stall, and Farley, blind now, sent the knife through the air where it embedded itself harmlessly in the opposite wall of the barn.