A Bad Spell in Yurt woy-1

by C. Dale Brittain

  We proceeded slowly up a long slope, out of the standing water, me half collapsed against Joachim and both his arms around me. Abruptly I stopped, and he stopped with me. “Oh, no,” I said. “I’ve broken the agreement by coming back to life. The demon must still be here.”

  “Is he?” asked Joachim, very low in my ear.

  I took a breath and managed to find enough words of the Hidden Language to probe for evil. There was none. When I had walked down this corridor into the cellars, the air had been so permeated with evil I had barely been able to move. Now there was nothing but abandoned store rooms whose floors flowed with icy water. I probed further. There was no evil mind in the castle, not even the oblique touch of the demon when he had been hiding from me. He was indeed gone.

  “It’s all right,” I said, fairly complacently considering that I was now shivering so hard I had trouble speaking through chattering teeth. “I thought I’d done the negotiations right. The demon killed me and went back to hell without either the Lady Maria’s soul or mine.”

  “Let’s keep moving, then,” said Joachim gently.

  We staggered on to the foot of the stairs. A big silver crucifix leaned against the open cellar door. Here Joachim did have to carry me, lifting me with a grunt over his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing me back to life,” I gasped.

  “I had nothing to do with it. The saints had mercy on you and interceded with God for a miracle.”

  I had my own ideas about who had enough influence with the saints to bring that about, but it was too hard to argue. Joachim carried me up the cellar stairs to the courtyard.

  The sky was dark, except for some faint streaks of light in the east. Swung across Joachim’s shoulder, I took as deep a breath as I could of the cold winter air.

  As we came into the courtyard, I saw a swirl of faces, of people I had believed thirty miles away, and heard a sudden incoherent murmur of voices. This was all too confusing to me in my present state, so I let my eyes fall shut again. Joachim paused, and the voices were all around us.

  “He’s alive!” he said in a tone of command that carried over all the rest. “Now, in the name of God, step back and let us pass!”

  They fell silent, and Joachim strode on, while I wondered without much curiosity what had happened.

  But when we reached my chambers, he had to turn and bend down so that I could reach out and touch the magic lock with my palm to free the spell. With the demon gone, my locks should be safe after this, and I would be able to write letters without the paper being permeated with the supernatural influence of a demon who had been rummaging through my possessions.

  Inside, Joachim pulled my drenched clothes off and wrapped me in blankets while he found me some pajamas. He pulled my bed close to the fire and knelt to rekindle the blaze. As I fell among the pillows, I saw that his clothes too were filthy and soaking.

  “I’m afraid you’ve ruined your new vestments coming for me,” I said. At the moment it seemed inexpressibly sad that he had done so.

  But he shook his head and smiled. “I’ll go change and come right back to sit with you. I want to make sure you don’t develop pneumonia.”

  “What day is it?”

  “It’s dawn of New Year’s day, the morning after you went to meet the demon.”

  “I think I’ll go to sleep now,” I said indistinctly, feeling warm waves of sleep breaking over me as I slowly stopped shivering. “But I think when I wake up I’m going to be very hungry.”

  IV

  I had of course done everything wrong. I thought about this with pleasant detachment some twenty-four hours later, from what seemed a great distance, lying comfortably propped up in a warm bed with the sun pouring through my windows, eating cinnamon crullers and drinking scalding tea. My breakfast tray was decorated with holly.

  Joachim had gone to celebrate morning service in the chapel, but I had managed to wake up enough to speak briefly to him before he left and to order my breakfast. Everyone, it turned out, was home again.

  The first place I had gone wrong was in being too frightened for months to admit the obvious to myself, that a demon was loose in Yurt. Nothing else, not even a master wizard, could have repeatedly broken my magic locks as though they were cobwebs, or filled the cellars with such a powerful sense of evil that even a first-year wizardry student would have felt it. I should have realized at once what was happening, rather than waiting until it brought a dragon down on us.

  My second mistake was going down alone to face the demon, when I could no longer ignore its presence. With the duchess’s assistance, I doubtless could have persuaded the Lady Maria to stay safely inside, at least for a few days, and the knights to delay their attack. That should have given me enough time to send a message to the City, to ask for help from one of the experts in demonology. Someone else might have been able to persuade the demon to leave in return for far less than a human life. In retrospect, this had probably not been one of the “little problems” that Zahlfast had said I would have to solve on my own.

  Finally, even if it was going to take a human life to return the demon to hell, I should have demanded at least a short period of grace. If I had had a day or two before what had almost been my death, I might have been able to use my own natural charms to win many more kisses from the queen.

  Gwen came in at this point in my deliberations. She did not meet my eyes. “I’d like about that much again,” I said, handing her the empty breakfast tray.

  She took it with a little duck of the head, not with a saucy look, not even with the smile an elderly uncle might deserve. I realized she had not said anything or even looked at me directly when she brought me my food originally. She was treating me with the same reserve she showed the king.

  “You can talk to me, Gwen,” I said, holding onto my end of the tray until she had to look up. “I’m not so weak that I must have absolute silence.”

  Her eyes were very wide when they finally met mine. “Excuse me, sir, I don’t want to seem rude,” she said hesitantly. “But- I never knew anyone who miraculously returned from the dead before.”

  I hadn’t either, of course, but I saw no reason that she should treat me with awe on that account. “That has nothing to do with me personally,” I said hurriedly. “It was the chaplain’s prayers that worked the miracle.” I realized I was as anxious as Joachim to disavow any personal merit-with the important distinction that he was wrong to do so and I was right.

  “But how did you know I was dead?” I asked when she remained silent. “Were you out there in the courtyard last night-or I guess it was night before last?” She stared at me without speaking, so I smiled and said, “All right, Gwen, I’ll ask you something simpler. Sit down-you can bring the chair closer than that! How about if you tell me why all of you left the duchess’s castle to come back here?”

  She examined one of her thumb nails with apparent fascination but spoke clearly. “We realized something was wrong when our chaplain took the queen’s stallion from the duchess’s stables. The stable boys couldn’t stop him. They ran to tell the constable, and he told the king. Nobody could imagine why he’d done it. They asked me if I knew anything, since I had just been up for the chaplains’ trays a few minutes’ earlier, and when I said that you’d been with him, they realized that you were gone too.”

  “But how did you know we’d come back to the royal castle?” I prompted when she fell silent.

  “Sir Dominic and the young count guessed it,” she continued with a quick glance at me. “They said there was an ‘evil wizard’ here in the castle, who had summoned the dragon. And they said that you must have gone back to fight him all by yourself, even though they’d offered to help you. And the count said- I really would just as soon not repeat it, sir.”

  “It’s all right, Gwen. Go on.”

  “-he said,” she paused, then went on defiantly, “he said that you would make matters with the evil wizard even worse through your ‘incompetence’! I knew you weren’t incompetent, sir. But th
ey wouldn’t listen to me. The count started to gather the knights at once.”

  “But they listened to the duchess?”

  “That’s right,” she said in surprise. “How did you know? She told them it wasn’t another wizard at all, but a demon in the cellars! She said that you and the chaplain must have gone without telling anyone because you were afraid that the knights would imperil their souls by trying to fight it without realizing what it was.”

  I considered this for a moment. “Did she say where the demon had come from?” I asked casually.

  “Well, from hell, I assume,” Gwen said in confusion and fell silent.

  So the duchess had not revealed everything I had told her. With luck, no one else had guessed that demons were unlikely to appear without reason in one of the smallest of the western kingdoms. I thought very affectionately of the duchess. Someone would have to have a long and private conversation with the Lady Maria; I would ask Joachim to do so. Maria might guess her own role in bringing both the demon and the dragon to Yurt, I thought, but I did not want to say anything to her myself. Besides, matters of the soul’s salvation were the chaplain’s responsibility.

  “It’s back in hell now,” I said to Gwen, who was giving me a wide-eyed stare again, “and I’m alive and still own my soul. But you haven’t told me yet why you’re all here.”

  “It was the king and queen. They said that if the two of you were fighting a demon to save their kingdom, it was their responsibility to be here with you. In the end, everyone came, though we had to leave the boar and the Christmas tree in the duchess’s castle. It was late evening when we got here.”

  “And what happened then?” I asked when she fell silent.

  She shook her head as though to shake off a strong emotion. “The castle was dark and empty, and strange-the stones were all oddly warm, and there were rats and bats and roaches all over the place-”

  She gave a shiver of disgust. I nodded; I knew exactly what it had been like.

  “I think the count would have gone straight into the cellars after the demon if he could have, but he couldn’t even get down the stairs. There were big yellow clouds pouring out of the cellar door; the duchess’s chaplain told us it was brimstone, from the demon.”

  I didn’t know whether to admire the young count’s courage or wonder at his foolhardiness-he had prudently stayed inside during the dragon’s attack.

  “Jon and I found our royal chaplain. He was lying in front of the altar in the chapel, and for a minute we were afraid he’d been killed! But when Jon touched him on the shoulder, he sat up suddenly-I’ll never forget the way his eyes looked.”

  It sounded as though the castle had been an exciting place while I was dead. I was sorry to have missed it.

  “He said-” Her voice dropped so low I could hardly hear it. “He said that you were dead, sir. And then he said that, in the name of Christ, we had to leave him alone to pray for you, and not to go into the cellars if we valued our immortal souls!

  “Jon and I told the king and queen at once. The duchess’s chaplain wanted us all to leave the castle immediately, but they said they wouldn’t run away, and besides it was too dark and too cold to go anywhere else. We didn’t even know if the demon was still in the cellars, or if you had been able to defeat it before it killed you, but there wasn’t much we could do but wait.

  “Nothing happened for most of the night. We were all too sad and frightened to go to bed. We sat in the kitchens or else went out in the courtyard to see if anything had changed. Even when the clouds of brimstone started to clear, we didn’t dare do anything. Then suddenly, toward dawn, our chaplain appeared in the courtyard. He was carrying the big silver crucifix from the chapel altar, and he went right by us as though we weren’t even there. When he came back from the cellars, an hour later, he was carrying you.”

  She fell silent, and I lay back in bed. This explained the faces and voices I had half perceived in the courtyard.

  “We knew then that his prayers had been answered,” she continued quietly after a moment, “and that you had been returned to life. All day yesterday, he sat with you and wouldn’t tell us anything, except that thanks to God you were alive. I think the duchess may have tried to speak to him briefly, but everyone else, even the king, stayed away from your room. But this morning, before service, the chaplain stopped at the kitchens to say you were better.”

  Gwen suddenly jumped up. “I’m sorry to keep you talking, sir. I’ll get your food right away.”

  “Maybe ask the cook for a cheese omelet this time, to go with the crullers,” I said. “And bring another pot of tea. By the way, are you ever going to tell me what Jon gave you for Christmas?”

  She shook her head, blushing, and hurried out.

  Joachim came in as she was leaving, taking the door from her. “There were a lot of people at chapel service this morning,” he commented.

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “I’ll go tomorrow myself if I can walk that far, or the next morning for sure.”

  He sat down on the bed next to me and gave me a long look from under his eyebrows. “Whenever you can come to chapel, I’ll celebrate a special thanksgiving service for your return to life. You already look better.”

  “I feel better. Could you hand me the wash basin and a comb?”

  I scrubbed my face, getting the last of the aura of brimstone off, and looked critically at the roots of my beard and hair while I was combing them. Three days ago, at the duchess’s castle, I had seen chestnut colored roots starting to appear and had thought I would have to apply the grey dye again once I was home. But I had no dark roots now. My hair and beard were coming in white.

  “But how about you?” I asked Joachim. “Haven’t you let anyone else sit with me?

  He shook his head. “I’m responsible for you.”

  “Have you even gotten any sleep in the last two days?” Several times, during the day and the night that I had slept, I had awakened, but always to see him sitting nearby, to hear his voice saying something, although I had always been asleep again before he had completed the sentence. Now his eyes looked as peaceful as I had ever seen them, but the skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones.

  “A little. I dozed in your chair last night. But I didn’t want to leave you.”

  “You should go get some rest now,” I said. “I’ll be all right by myself.”

  He stood up, yawning. “Maybe I will.”

  “But there’s one thing I want to ask you, before Gwen comes back. Since I’ve already died once, with a pure heart, does that count? When I die again, will they have to assess my soul again, or will the previous assessment still stand?”

  He smiled, even though I had been perfectly serious. “Maybe some day I really will understand your sense of humor. To answer your question, I don’t think enough people have ever come back from the dead to make this point theologically clear. There are things that none of us will ever know on this earth. But if you’re asking for my opinion, not the theologians’ position, as long as you live you can do good and you can sin, and your soul will be judged accordingly.”

  “Or will I maybe never die again? Doesn’t the Bible say that, after Lazarus was brought back to life, he became immortal?”

  This time he laughed. “You’re not Lazarus. Besides, that story isn’t in the Bible, which only tells us that Christ raised him. It’s the kind of story young priests like to tell, but it’s not true. All of us are going to die, and you’re not an exception.”

  He smiled cheerfully, as though he had just said something very comforting; and in a way he had. He went out as Gwen came in with my second breakfast.

  She hurried away without a word, and when I heard a step outside a few minutes later, I assumed Joachim was returning, having forgotten something. “Come in!” I called, when the step seemed to hesitate.

  My door swung open, but it was not the chaplain. It was two wizards, one in a tall red hat and the other with piercing blue eyes and an enormous white beard: Zah
lfast and the Master of the wizards’ school. “May we indeed come in?”

  V

  “Yes, yes, come in,” I said, flabbergasted. I struggled to raise myself from the bed, to make the wizards the full bow, but fell back without success. “What are you two doing here?”

  They entered in a stately manner, closed the door, and found chairs. “The supernatural influence is gone, I note,” said Zahlfast. “We saw the remains of the dragon’s carcass down by the edge of the forest as we flew in, and then your constable told us you’d overcome a demon! He took us for an escorted tour of the cellars, including the hole he said the demon made when it returned to hell.”

  “The hole?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “It’s at the very end of the cellars,” said Zahlfast soberly, “a black hole about two feet across, and it’s still smoking. When you look down, you can’t see anything, only darkness so black it’s almost solid, and when you drop something down, you can’t hear it hit. We put a triple pentagram around it. As you know, nothing should come back up unless summoned, but it seemed to make your constable feel better, and we wanted to save you the trouble. He plans to cover everything over.”

  That sounded like an excellent plan to me.

  “Now,” said the Master, “could you tell us exactly what’s been happening?”

  I told them, although when I had left the City for Yurt and imagined some day telling the Master of my triumphs, I had not imagined doing so sitting up in bed in yellow pajamas. Besides, it wasn’t a triumph I was describing.

  “So I guess it’s all right now,” I finished, “even though I’ll know, if it ever happens again, to get a demonology expert right away. Someone else, more expert, might have been able to negotiate a settlement with the demon without having to offer it his own life. But what are you doing here? Did the chaplain send you a message?”