C. Brittain - Daughter of Magic

Her automaton answered the door, stared at me with its flat metallic eyes for a moment, then motioned us inside. Antonia, staring, squeezed me around the neck until it was hard to breathe.

Justinia rose from the couch and came to meet me. I managed to loosen Antonia’s arms from around my neck and gave a reasonable approximation of the formal half-bow. “I trust you are finding everything satisfactory, my lady?” I said. From what Gwennie had said, she had better be. “Now that I hope you’ve had a chance to settle in, I’d like to learn more of why you had to leave Xantium.”

She waved me to a chair and reseated herself but did not seem immediately interested in talking about her affairs. Antonia perched on my knee. “That cold meat at luncheon, O Wizard,” Justinia asked, “prepared in a most bland style: was it perhaps beef?”

“Of course it was,” Antonia provided, with an air of showing off her own superior knowledge.

Justinia smiled. “Know then, my child, I have had but brief acquaintance with beef. It is eaten rarely in Xantium.”

Antonia thought this over. “How about chicken? How about bread? How about onions?”

But I interrupted before they could go into culinary comparisons of east and west. “Since the mage entrusted you to me, my lady, I hope you will allow me to ask what foes forced you to leave home, and what likelihood there is that they will follow you here.”

Justinia gave a flick of her graceful wrist, jangling her bracelets as though to dismiss such dangers as unimportant. “It is the old controversy between my grandfather and the Thieves’ Guild, of course,” she said in a bored voice. “It was destiny’s decree that the controversy arise again. All believed it settled a great many years ago, when I was but very small, back when-” and for a moment her voice became faint “-back when they assassinated my parents.”

“What’s assassinated?” Antonia asked, but I shushed her.

“My grandfather the governor declared that the thieves were becoming far too frequent on the streets of Xantium, even in the harbor which was forbidden them, and that he would shut down the Thieves’ Market if they could not conform to their earlier agreement. The Guild replied that they could not be responsible for the doings of non-Guild members, and that the governor’s taxes on their Market had risen most exceedingly. Tensions were such that- Well, my grandfather did not desire the lives of any of his family again used as negotiating tokens.”

“I understand, my lady,” I said gravely, glad Yurt had never had anything like this deadly political maneuvering. But then the wizards of the western kingdoms would never allow it to come to this. “But why did you come here ?”

She had been playing with her rings while she talked, but now she turned to look at me over a half-bare shoulder with her dark almond-shaped eyes. “It is very far from Xantium. Or if I may speak boldly, from anywhere else.”

This was reasonably accurate; Yurt, one of the smallest of the western kingdoms, would not normally be a place of which anyone in the East had heard. But our quest fifteen years ago had alerted a number of powerful people, not just the mage Kaz-alrhun, to the existence of Yurt. I hoped that none of them would be people in contact with the Thieves’ Guild.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought the mage operated out of the Thieves’ Market himself. Why should your grandfather trust him?” I had no intention of being manipulated into being part of a devious double-edged plot against a lovely young woman.

“When one’s life is in most dire danger,” she said in a tone that sounded not young but very old and weary, “one trusts no one.” She nodded toward the automaton. “That is why I brought him with me.”

And the mage had doubtless made the automaton as well. I had been able to work with him in the East because our purposes coincided, and we had eaten his salt-I wondered how long the beneficial effects of that were supposed to last.

As I left the Lady Justinia’s chambers one of the castle servants met me. “You have a telephone call, sir,” he said, looking anxious. “I think-I think it’s from the bishop.”

“Tell him I’ll be right there!” I darted across the courtyard, delighting Antonia, who was riding on my shoulder again, and opened the door to my chambers. “Stay here,” I told her. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t leave for any reason.”

“All right, Wizard,” she said agreeably. “Or should I call you Daimbert, the way Mother does? Would you like that better?”

I closed the door without answering and hurried to the telephone. Whatever the bishop had to tell me, I did not think Antonia should hear it. But I immediately began to imagine the harm she could do to herself in my rooms, starting with pulling down a bookshelf on top of herself.

The bishop was actually smiling. “I must apologize, Daimbert, for bothering you yesterday. The man has returned, and I believe all my questions have been answered.”

“Well, that’s wonderful,” I said in amazement. “But- What happened?”

“He came up to me in the cathedral after the noon service,” said Joachim. “As you can imagine, I was quite surprised.” So was I, but I almost dared be encouraged. A demon would not, I thought, enter a consecrated cathedral to talk to a bishop. “He told me he wants to be a priest.”

“A priest ?” First Celia and now the Dog-Man. I tried unsuccessfully to tell from the tiny image of Joachim’s face if he actually believed this or was only trying to persuade himself of it.

“He told me he has powers in himself he does not fully understand, but he feels God has called him and he wants to be trained to use those powers to help others.”

I myself didn’t believe a word of it. If what I had sensed down by the docks was accurate, this man had the highly unusual combination of magical abilities and contact with the supernatural. A holy man who could heal a wounded dog, maybe. A magic-worker who had the power to fix broken toys, just possibly. But this man had, if the stories were right, begun to kill just to restore life, and he did not dare talk to a wizard.

At least Antonia was safely in Yurt. “That’s good to hear, Joachim,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say without more information. “Let me know how it all works out.” As I returned to my chambers I thought that this man, whoever he was, seemed to have found the one certain way to defuse the bishop’s suspicions.

His questions might all be answered, but mine were just beginning. I found Antonia sitting in my best chair, legs straight out in front of her, poring over a book as though actually reading it. I smiled and reached for my copy of the Diplomatica Diabolica.

Leafing through it was not encouraging. I sneezed from dust; it had been a long time since I had had this volume off the shelf. It confirmed what I already knew, that a demon in human form would not be able to wander, unsummoned, into a cathedral. But a person who had sold his soul to the devil, who was using the black arts for supernatural effects, would still be able to do all the ordinary things, like enter churches, that the rest of us did, those of us who might well be damned but didn’t know it yet.

The book, being written by and for wizards, did not directly address the question the bishop might have asked, whether someone who had sold his soul could still save it by becoming a priest. But it was not encouraging. The book didn’t offer any way out at all for such a person-short perhaps (and only perhaps) of skilled negotiations by a demonology expert.

I reshelved the volume slowly, wondering if a demon would have too much sense of self-preservation to let the person who had summoned it spend time in close association with the saints who always clustered around churches. Saints, I told myself hopefully, should be perfectly capable of returning a demon to hell all by themselves, no matter what the book said.