Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

by C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 06

  “Where have you been,” he demanded, “to be carrying something like that?”

  “Still don’t know what it is?” I asked teasingly, keeping an eye on Walther—Antonia would have been putting a spell together to work the object out of my pocket.

  “If this is something the Master gave you instead of me—” he started to say, with another flash of jealousy. But he stopped himself and started over, though his good-humor now was entirely unconvincing. “Don’t tell me you’re planning to issue hollow threats against me in my own stronghold, Daimbert.”

  I jerked the Ifrit’s bottle from my pocket. “The threats will not be hollow.”

  The bronze bottle lay heavy in my hand, shaped like a cucumber, green with age, sealed with lead imprinted by Solomon’s dread seal. For a moment the room was dead quiet, still

  enough for the Ifrit’s high, thin voice to carry. “I shall pluck the living nerves from your face, cast your body half way to the sun, set lizards into your guts—”

  Both Elerius and Walther stared. The boy would never have seen such a bottle before, but I knew Elerius had.

  “Surely,” I said, allowing myself to sound patronizing for a change, “you recognize an Ifrit’s bottle when you see it.”

  Elerius actually blanched. For one second I enjoyed the rush of triumph, the knowledge that at least for this moment he feared me. But I brushed the sensation aside almost immediately. This was not about proving my own abilities, but about Elerius recognizing the inherent limitations in his.

  “These are the choices,” I said, speaking slowly to give my words added weight. “Either you immediately surrender— give up your resistance and throw yourself on the mercy of the school—or else I release this Ifrit from his bottle. Listen: you can tell he is eager for release!

  With the first of his wishes he will grant me, I shall blast you and your castle into pebbles. I shall ask the Ifrit if he will spare the boy’s life, but I will make no effort to save yours!”

  This was pure bluff. The Ifrit was no more ready to grant me wishes now than he had been when I first tricked him into the bottle. But Elerius did not know this. “Come, Elerius,”

  I continued when he seemed to hesitate. “For all your talk of augmenting wizardly powers so that we can rule in absolute authority, you know that the Ifrit is more powerful than you or any wizard ever has been or ever can be.”

  Still he seemed to hesitate, watching me intently.

  Did he doubt my willingness to act? Did he know that all my talk of wishes was false? Did he sense my extreme reluctance to kill anyone,

  including him?

  The silence between us stretched out. Earlier I had felt half-frozen with fear; now sweat ran down inside my shirt.

  He kept his tawny eyes fixed on me.

  I broke first. “Dear God, Elerius, don’t make me do this!” Because this wasn’t a bluff any longer.

  Slowly, giving him every last second to change his mind, I reached for the edge of the lead seal and started to pry it open. In one second the Ifrit, furious with all the frustrated rage of an enormously ancient and enormously powerful being, who had been created to help shape the world but who had been tricked into complete helplessness, would burst from the bottle. In two seconds he would have destroyed this castle with all its inhabitants, Prince Walther, Elerius, and me.

  “Stop!”

  I stopped.

  Elerius’s words came out low and rough. “Give me the bottle, Daimbert.”

  I clung to it with both hands. “You are surrending here,” I said, my voice trembling. “Not me.”

  He rose then, for the first time since I had come in the room, and shifted his chair. The chair had concealed it, but I could see it now: a pentagram drawn in chalk.

  In horror and despair, I nearly dropped the Ifrit’s bottle. When he spoke again it was so quietly I could hardly hear him. “Don’t you make me do this.”

  “You can’t mean it,” I managed to gasp.

  “You’re not going to summon a demon!”

  “I will if you do not surrender the Ifrit.”

  Should I give him the bottle and make a run for it, letting him discover for himself that the Ifrit was bent on destruction rather than granting wishes? But I immediately rejected the idea. It would be bad enough to sacrifice myself in making sure that Elerius too was dead. But I could not give him the means to end his life—and Walther’s—while saving my own.

  Besides, I did not trust the Ifrit not to become all accommodating and friendly if Elerius was able to get his attention in the bottle, to explain to him that he who was opening the seal was not the same person who had closed it. Elerius with an Ifrit beside him would be almost worse than Elerius with a demon.

  He bent to touch up a few spots where the chair had scuffed a slight imperfection in his pentagram. Walther was again backed up against the window.

  “You just told me,” I said desperately, “that you didn’t want to let anyone think your magic was not all your own.”

  “It would indeed be a blow to my pride,” he said quietly, with a glance back at me over his shoulder. “But better to sacrifice my pride than not to take the rule that is rightfully mine.”

  “I don’t believe you! You’re bluffing!”

  “A bluff? I am completely in earnest.”

  He rose and dusted off the chalk on his trousers. His voice, louder now, filled the room, and at his voice the magic lanterns began one by one to go out. “By Satan, by Beelzebub,” he cried, “by Lucifer and Mephistopheles!” And as he spoke the lines of the pentagram began to glow.

  Part Eight The Cranky Saint

  l

  Stop!”

  Elerius stopped.

  For a wild second I thought that I myself had spoken. But it wasn’t me. It was Prince Walther.

  He was shaking hard, but he moved determinedly toward the pentagram. The light from the few lamps still burning cast wild shadows across the room. The prince’s walk had only the slightest limp, and his chin was raised in a desperate attempt at hauteur. “You warned me,” he said through the tremor in his voice, “you warned me against black magic yourself, Wizard.

  Don’t do this! Daimbert is our friend.”

  “A friend,” I added from between dry lips, “who will be able al off thto get the see Ifrit’s bottle far faster than you will be able to negotiate with a demon for the sale of your soul.”

  “I think,” said Walther in a low voice, cocking an eye at me and still trembling, “Daimbert doesn’t really care if the Ifrit kills him too, as long as it kills you.”

  Where had the boy gotten such a good insight?

  “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 levell
y. “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 thecastle’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 rouffhly 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.�
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  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