Prologue

 

The sun was just out of bed and still red-eyed, stretching his rays to right and left between the hills, when Mama Simone stepped out of her barnyard onto the path by the hedgerow. Two dozy chickens got in her way and squawked out of it again. Mama Simone walked fast because she had long legs. She stepped hard because she had big feet and wooden shoes, the kind people kick off beside the back door.

Mama Simone walked through the wet grass faster than the sun rose. By and by she reached the shadow side of the hills, and when the sun couldn’t see her any longer she felt as if she’d beaten something. She sat down on a log and shook a pebble out of one of her wooden shoes, as if she’d won back the last hour of the night and had it to spare.

On the shady side of the hill it was still spring. The trees on the other side were leafed out, but these still had catkins and flowers. Held back like country girls, thought Mama Simone, whose parents had dressed her like a little girl through her teens. “And not in anything as nice as these,” she said to the nearest tree. It quivered its pleated leaves at her and shook a tassel of catkins like spiky green caterpillars. “Sex, sex, sex,” was all it would say.

Mama Simone walked toward the hill’s edge, where sunrays made a haze up in the trees. The closer she got to the next valley, the further into summer she went. Trees pushed out their leaves, shoved their caterpillar catkins off to curl up on the forest floor, and then stretched their branches out and sighed. “Sun, sun, summer” was what they said then.

Down the valley she went, into a glade that the sun was just peeping into. She made a dark trail across dew-covered grasses to where a big old oak tree stood at the edge of the glade, looking back at the sun. “Hello there, old tree,” said Mama Simone.

The tree didn’t pay any attention to her, because it was looking at the sun. It sang to itself, long and slow. While she waited for the old tree Mama Simone sat down on one of its roots and pulled her feet up under her skirt. She looked around the glade, then behind the tree into the open space its shade made. She leaned from side to side to look around spindly young trees until a feeling of opening her eyes came over her and she saw four baby oaks with shade-pale leaves standing in what she had thought open space. Here their parent had dropped them, under its sheltering arms; here they had sprouted, and here they would die in its shade.

Mama Simone had the eyes-opening feeling again, as if a question had been answered without being asked. Her nose and the back of her throat hurt as she looked at the little trees that would never grow tall unless the big tree fell. She pressed her face against the old tree, hearing it sing to itself from far up in the sunlight, to far down in the earth, and tears filled her up until she shook with weeping, holding onto the tree as if it might turn and put warm arms around her.

 

There were six cars and a hearse in Mama Simone’s farmyard when she got back to it. People everywhere and none of them feeding the chickens or digging the garden; useless, all of them. People did like that, after a death. They made it an excuse to dress up and do nothing. Her daughter Gretyl was worst of the lot, poking across chicken-mud in her high heels. She was stout, shrill, and important, like a hen with a big worm.

“Mama, where were you? You can’t run off in the woods and leave the stove lighted, you could have burned the house down. You knew we were coming! I told you not to do anything till I got here. How do you think I felt, coming here and Daddy dead and you off God knows where —”

Of course I knew, thought Mama Simone. Why else would I run away into the woods? But she thought about the little oak trees. “I knew you’d see to things,” she said then. Gretyl got more important and less chickeny.

“I was worried about you,” she said. She had a heavy upper lip like her da’s, with beads of sweat already standing out on it. The sun dried up grass and made people come out in dew, thought Mama Simone. “People do queer things after a death,” said Gretyl.

“Well, why shouldn’t they? I couldn’t do queer things when your father was alive,” said Mama Simone. She washed her face at the pump and kicked her wooden shoes off at the back door, but she didn’t want to go inside. She sat down on the bench under the kitchen window and heard the kettle and frypan twittering inside. “Did you make breakfast? I’d like to eat out here. Bread and jam would do.”

“You never ate out here before.”

“That’s because your father wanted meat at every meal. You can only cut meat at a table. When you were a little girl, we used to eat apples in the orchard.”

“Well, you need more than apples,” said Gretyl. She went inside and Mama Simone could smell eggs, coffee, bread. “Who’s going to take care of you?” Gretyl said when she brought them out.

“I’ll take care of myself,” said Mama Simone. “I was taking care of your father until an hour ago, why would myself be any more trouble?”

“Somebody has to be here with you. We’ve all talked it over.”

“Not now,” said Mama Simone. “After the funeral.”

“Oh my land, I have to go talk to the funeral director,” said Gretyl. “Eat up now. I ironed your black dress.”

 

 

Chapter 1

The Departmental Year in Review

 

Warren Oldham shut his eyes, the better to pound his head against his desk. It didn’t help. When he opened them, the Departmental Year in Review form was still lying there, still blank; no edifying faculty activities had appeared on it, and Warren was no closer to coming up with any. A filtered, rainy light came in from the window behind him and gave the offending document a colder and even more hopeless glow. Warren had walked into work on a dripping Friday morning, for this. A perfect end to the last week of the semester.

He shivered, rubbed his bald head, and glared at the form, growing crosser by the minute — not with the paper, which merely existed, but with the demand it implied that he somehow reframe the Demonology Department’s activities into public relations fodder for the Royal Academy of the Arcane Arts and Sciences at Osyth. Warren had many skills, but this was not one of them. Even though someone looking at his round pink face and walrus mustache might have thought him a cheerful fellow, he was more prone to depression than to boosterism, even after a good year; the one just passed had been ambiguous, at best, and required more spin than Warren could muster. He chewed the edge of his mustache in frustration and ran his fingers through the fringe of white hair over his ears.

“To hell with it!” he exclaimed, snatched up the fountain pen he had been given by the International Demonological Association when his term as president ended, and began filling in the form very quickly, as if to get it done before his bad mood ran out. This made it almost illegible, but Warren reckoned that as a plus.

‘1. Magisters Oldham and Cinea lost our souls when local demons took over the pentarium and began casting their own invocations,’ he wrote in the ‘Activities’ column. In the ‘Implications’ column, he wrote: ‘We have discovered a new way for demons to steal people’s souls and that soulless faculty are as effective on interdisciplinary committees as normal faculty. They are not, however, able to carry out those duties requiring magic.’ He stopped and re-read this. It made him feel much better and, the pump being primed, he went on to fill in the rest of the two columns.

‘2. Magister Rho was trapped in Magister Oldham’s grimoire with a demon, and emerged without his magic when the grimoire was destroyed. Implication: a second way to destroy employees’ talents.’ (And family heirlooms, Warren thought, but did not write.) ‘Temporary (possibly permanent) replacement needed.

‘3. The pentarium was shut down using the emergency switch, after a demon within it escaped from the pentacle. Implications: the emergency switch works. See above, regarding the limitations of soulless faculty. Magister Torecki deserves commendation for throwing the emergency switch.

‘4. The department invoked the possessing demon Antimora, which then spoke privately with each member at the same time. Implication: the repaired pentarium is not as impervious to demons’ magic as was hoped.’ Or to an exorcist’s magic, since the demon Antimora had once been chief of the exorcists — Wilfrid Rosemont, Lord Stimms (that was) — but the Dean knew all about Rosemont’s becoming the demon Antimora; it was the only thing the Dean did know about demons, and therefore came up in every conversation Warren had with him.

‘5. Magister Torecki resigned in mid-spring semester. Implication: delay in ongoing research programs including dissertation research. New faculty needed.

‘6. Magisters Whin and Ligalla pursued the demon Antimora into the Mystic Guild of Alchemists’ prison in the netherworld, trapping it therein, but releasing all the imprisoned alchemists. Implication: possible overthrow of existing governmental structures worldwide and disruption of the fabric of reality. Potential lawsuit. MGA will no longer repair our pentarium.

‘7. Magister Ukadnian loaned Magister Harding’s research camera arcana to a priest, who took it to Selanto and used it to record the second coming of the Bright Lady. The camera has been confiscated by the church as a holy relic. Implication: ‘ “Damned if I know,” Warren said, and after a moment’s fruitless thought wrote that down. It was one more thing for Linus Ukadnian and Will Harding to fight about, but the Dean wouldn’t care about that.

‘8. Magister Kalin counseled local demons on labor law. Implication: demon unionization, including demands for library and sports center privileges. Potential delay in or disruption of ongoing research.’

He turned to the second page and listed the faculty, with their status. Magisters Cinea, Ukadnian, Graham, Whin, Kalin, and Regan, full-time. Magisters Ligalla, Hoth, Harding, and Teale — half time, joint appointments with Department of Public Health. Magister Torecki, resigned. Magister Rho, indefinite leave. Magister Oldham, fed up. His pen skipped on the last word, which made that part even more illegible than the rest; Warren felt a sneaking relief at this, but shoved it away. He folded the form and put it into an envelope before he could lose his nerve. His computer chimed, a reminder that in twenty minutes he must be in the pentarium, calling up one of the demons that were agitating for use of the Academy’s squash courts and swimming pool. “This is not what I went into magic for,” Warren said venomously, addressing the envelope. He took it with him and dropped it into the campus mail slot beside the stairwell, and that was that. He was officially fed up.

Regret seized him as soon as he heard the letter whoosh into the void, growing stronger with every step down the stairs that led to the pentarium until it became a kind of cold despair, filling him like ice water. How could he have put such a gloomy face on everything? It wasn’t all bad, after all. Nobody had been killed, thanks to Neil’s quick work in the pentarium, when Warren and Russell were incapacitated by the loss of their souls. Even that loss, ashamed as Warren was of it, hadn’t been as black as he’d painted it. Dozens of people had lost their souls, over the years, but only he and Russell had ever gotten them back, although the charm that did it had been burned with the rest of Warren’s grimoire.

Even Rho, who’d caused all the trouble last semester, had tried his best to resist the demon controlling him and had leapt into the grimoire to save Warren’s own soul from being trapped therein. He had actually sacrificed himself for Warren … they were all decent sorts, heroes in their own way, and now Warren had let them down. The demon Antimora had been right when it said Warren was past it, in decline, a tool of the administration and a blunt tool at that. He’d accomplished nothing this academic year except mistakes, and now he was failing at paperwork, the defining job of an administrator.

He stopped his descent in the sub-basement, but his heart kept going down. Linus Ukadnian’s sharp voice came through the door to the pentarium shower room, Teddy Whin’s answering. What had Teddy done but rescue a bunch of people who had been suffering for three hundred years? Yet he had just reported it as a plot against the civilized world … an administrator had no right to indulge his bad mood at faculty’s expense, neither when reporting their accomplishments nor when leading them in the invocation of a demon.

Warren summoned all his resources to push depression away, yet even as he put his hand on the door remorse seized him again, an almost physical presence at his side. He stood frozen, a chill deeper than that of Osyth’s cold, wet spring striking into him. The cauld grue, it was called, and it meant a demon stood beside him, summoning this bad mood and feeding on his soul through it — and had no doubt stood beside him in his office while he wrote, he thought, remembering how he had shivered and grown gloomier by the minute. A demon had come into his office, through the Academy wards and the building wards, and oppressed him as he sat at his desk; it had followed him to the very door of the pentarium shower room, one of the most heavily protected spots on campus; and this, Warren thought, could not be made into anything positive, not by the best spinmeister in all Osyth. Something very bad was going to come of this.

 

***

 

Inspector Ric Massey of the Selanto Guard would have agreed with Warren. He would even, had they been intimate enough, have given Warren a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, because Ric appreciated hard-working people who second-guessed themselves. He was that sort of person himself. Unfortunately, the Selanto Guard hired few such people, tending more towards quick-thinking fellows who reacted fast and realized their mistakes afterward.

“I didn’t know it was a child!” the patrolman cried in despair. “I thought it was an ape, or an imp, or a wudiwiss!”

Ric wanted to yell at him. What would a wudiwiss be doing in this suburban development? There wasn’t an unmanicured plant within twenty kilometers. But it was a reasonable mistake, on some grounds. Daybreak on June first was the prime time for woodland arcana, and the thing that had attacked this patrolman, and now lay bleeding on the lawn, didn’t look human. The sorcerer beside it looked up and shook his head. His knees were soaked with blood. Ric heard distant sirens, racing with time. “You have to keep her going till they get here,” he said.

“All I can do is freeze her.” The sorcerer pulled charms out of an insulated case and began to hang them on the girl.

Ric tried to look through layers of filth and his own rage to see the little girl under the rags, her face pale and glistening with shock. She couldn’t have been more than twelve, and the charm straps wrapped two, three times around her bony wrists and elbows. The right side of her chest had been laid open by bullets — how many had the fool used? — and pink froth spilled out of it with every shallow breath. The stink of feces began to go away as her body cooled. Grue from the demon inside her ran through him, like ice-water poured into the marrow of his bones. It was too familiar, and Ric shook his own head hard to jostle memories back down into storage.

“How about you?” the sorcerer asked, giving him a sharp look.

“It’s not about me,” said Ric. “What kind of parents don’t report a possession?”

The sorcerer shook his head again. The siren stopped with a squawk as an ambulance arrived. The small crowd of onlookers — neighbors in jackets or golf shirts, wives in suits or housecoats, and a smattering of dog-walkers and commuters — scattered as it pulled into the driveway.

Ric watched paramedics jump out; nobody followed them. “Where’s Magister Pasqueflower?”

 “In an exorcism on the North Side,” said the paramedic. “Can we transport?”

“No.” The sorcerer stood up, rubbing his chilled hands together. “We’re lucky if we have half an hour.”

The paramedic shouted back to his partner, and Ric heard her speaking into the ambulance’s radio. But he was distracted as Derek came up beside him.

“There’s a window broken at the back,” said Derek. “That must be how she got out. Car’s still in the garage.”

The sorcerer looked a bit taken aback, the usual response to Derek, who was wearing jeans and a tight yellow tee-shirt under a studded denim jacket. His blonde curls reached to his collar in back and his mustache ran down on each side of his mouth. He looked like a teenager trying to look older than he really was, and ironically that made him look younger than he really was. Though they were both in their thirties, people dealing with the two of them automatically turned to Ric, with his narrow face and grey suit, as the adult.

Ric frowned. Did the car’s presence mean the girl’s parents were still here, in the crowd or walking away?

Derek anticipated this question. “None of the neighbors know the man who lives here,” he said. “It was a younger man, no woman. He kept to himself — nobody knew he had a child in the house.” He looked at the girl, still and cold, and his mustache drooped further. “This is big trouble,” he said.

“Will we save her?”

“I don’t know,” said Derek. “I can’t see enough.”

“Will we get the demon out of her?”

Derek shook his head again. “I can see her inside the pentacle, but I don’t see an exorcist with her — it’s just not clear! This is going to be a big mess.”

With all due respect to seers and foretelling, Ric thought, any fool could see that much. “You’re right about that. We don’t have an exorcist.”

“Damn! What’ll we do?”

“Lord Stimms is coming,” said the second paramedic, appearing behind her partner. “By magic.”

“Sweet Lady Jane!” said Ric.

“We’ll need all the magicians here for the pentacle,” said Derek. “Who’s going to take care of his transport?” Not even Lord Stimms could jump across Selanto by magic and still have power enough to perform an exorcism. Somebody else, a transport magician, would have to use up their magic to bring him; and that person couldn’t drain power from the rest of them to refuel, because they would all — Ric, Derek, the sorcerer, and the two paramedics — be helping in the exorcism. Transporting magicians had died of shock in such situations. Ric was damned if it’d happen on his watch and, perversely, grateful for this new emergency. It gave him an excuse not to think about the girl and what might be going on in that body, the cold greasy feel of a demon inside you…

“We need crystals,” he said to the paramedic. “Pull ‘em out of all the equipment you won’t need. And you –” the unhappy patrolman looked up, surprised — “You’re taking care of the transport. Know the protocol?” The patrolman nodded. “Get every camera crystal those rubberneckers are carrying. Out of their cell phones, as well. And extra crystals anyone is wearing. I mean every crystal!” he called after the man, who had leapt into action to redeem himself. “Anyone who comes away from here with pictures cares more about them than about that transport magician’s life, and I’ll make sure everyone in Selanto knows it.” The sorcerer and a paramedic were already pulling recharging necklaces out of their shirts when he turned back to them. “We’ll need a double circle,” he said, as Derek collected their crystals. “We’ll do it airlock-style.”

Derek nodded and jogged away, fishing a box of gold chalk out of his pocket. He and the paramedic began to draw a pentacle on the driveway behind the ambulance. Arguing voices rose from the crowd of neighbors on the sidewalk; the patrolman was being officious, but Ric decided to let it go. The man’s career was probably over. Let him get what satisfaction he could out of bullying onlookers and looking after the transport.

“Transport’s ready,” announced the paramedic with the cell phone. “They’re using Gower’s Ring.”

“Don’t tell me,” Ric said, nodding toward Derek. “Tell him.”

She ran over to Derek, who nodded and drew the Gower’s Ring sigil inside the inner pentacle. He was just finishing when Ric reached him; he drew the last line of the pentacle, put one stick of chalk down just outside it, and backed away to where Ric was standing. The patrolman ran up panting, holding a hat full of power crystals and looking better pleased with himself, and they drew the outer circle of the airlock around him and the pentacle so he stood uneasily in the space between them.

“We’re ready,” Ric told the paramedic with the cell phone. Now he had a minute to catch his breath and get nervous. It would be bad enough to kill any transport magician, but to kill one of Lord Stimms’ team! Ric felt sick at the thought.

Exorcists were the ultimate heroes and Lord Stimms was the ultimate exorcist, leader of them all, the one who made new exorcists out of ordinary obnoxious human beings. Being Named an exorcist by Lord Stimms was a bigger deal than being knighted by the king. Ric had seen the old Lord Stimms, Rosemont, at court functions. But Rosemont was gone. He had become the demon Antimora a year ago, and Ric had only once come near the new Lord Stimms, Gerald Manley. That had been the night the God of the Sacred Flame had scheduled its second coming, and he had a private suspicion that Lord Stimms had helped keep that second coming from actually happening. People said, and Ric believed, that Lord Stimms could banish a god if he chose.

This has to go right, Ric said to himself, looking around for any trouble spots, but then his eye fell on the little girl lying beside the sorcerer and shame hit him in the throat. There was no way it could go right for her.

 

A silver mist filled the inner pentacle, and everyone in the squad stood up straighter. Then the mist cleared to reveal two figures: Lord Stimms, tall and surprisingly young in his red robe, and a stocky, white-haired magician who wavered a moment at Lord Stimms’ side and then sat down hard on the pavement. His Lordship opened the pentacle and changed places with the patrolman. It was standard procedure, and they did it smoothly; the patrolman was already laying power crystals across the transport magician’s chest when Lord Stimms stood from closing the pentacle and turned toward Ric.

Exorcists never looked you in the eyes. Even Milicent Pasqueflower, who worked with Ric all the time, looked over his shoulder or a little to his right. It was meant to keep you from being defined by their opinions, Ric knew, but it always made him bristle. Wasn’t he an equal? Didn’t he deserve a little respect?

He might not have felt that way about Lord Stimms, who wasn’t his equal, but Lord Stimms didn’t look over his shoulder or past his ear. Lord Stimms looked directly into his face with large, dark eyes. The skin around them was webbed with tiny lines. Fragile, Ric thought, and then the exorcist’s magic took hold. Ric felt competence flood through him. He ran through everything in his mind, faster than possible yet as calmly as if he had hours, and nodded as he finished the checklist. They’d done everything right. This would work, he knew it — he was going to be safe — and then Lord Stimms nodded as well. He bent to break the outer circle and Ric was discarded, cast back into a maelstrom of doubt. It’s just the exorcist’s talent, he told himself. It’s not about you.

He held his breath. If there were any flaw in their airlock, this was the moment when he would feel the transport magician pull his own magic out of him. He almost stepped back, but there was no point. None of them were out of range. A mistake would drain all the magicians on the lawn, and then the girl would be lost; she would die with a demon inside her, and it would take her soul with it for whatever it chose to do, forever. This was what he’d been trying not to think about… Lord Stimms stood, and Ric realized the airlock had held. The transport and his need were safely contained within the inner pentacle, and now within the outer circle too as Derek re-set it. Ric took a deep, shaky breath of relief. Then there was no time for thinking, as he raced toward the girl.

Lord Stimms, a few steps ahead of him, was somehow able to run in that robe without seeming hurried or disarranged. He had the kind of dignity, Ric thought that every teen in Selanto wanted; the kind that came from scorning the very concept of dignity. Ric grasped at analysis, as if it would protect him from the confusion inside him. He catalogued the new Lord Stimms’ height and youth, his dark hair and weightless run. His face, pale and mustached, was familiar from tabloid photos. Yet in person, Stimms did not look right. There was that fragile something about the eyes… Ric had no chance to gather more data now, for he stood behind his Lordship, at one point of the gold-tape pentacle the sorcerer had laid down around the child, and could see nothing of Stimms but the red robe and dark, feathery hair. Derek, the sorcerer, and the two paramedics stood at the other pentacle points. They held smudging candles and chanted the invocation as his Lordship knelt beside the child. He spat on one pale hand and placed it on her forehead.

Ric almost dropped his candle. He heard Derek choke on his right. An exorcist never touched the possessed! An exorcist spoke to the demon, cozened it, and fooled it into taking his opinion seriously; then he turned that talent for approval and dismissal full on it, making it as weak as he thought it, and lent the victim strength enough to push it aside. Touch was insanely risky. It gave the demon a chance to leap into the exorcist, and turn that power against all around it.

But the girl had opened her eyes, and now Lord Stimms was speaking to her as if to an old acquaintance — no, he was speaking to the demon as an old acquaintance, Ric realized. Exorcists sometimes became that familiar with the monsters. He relaxed a little. If Stimms knew the demon’s name, he would have more influence over it. And this proved to be the case, for girl and exorcist had not spoken for more than five minutes when she gave a shudder and lay still, smaller than before. Lord Stimms drew a ward from his pocket and slipped it over her head, to keep the demon from re-entering her, and then leant toward Derek to break the circle and let the banished monster return to the netherworld. Ric saw his profile, and again had the feeling of something not quite right.

“What the hell!” the sorcerer cried, and plunged toward the girl. “That’s a summons!” Ric took a step forward and saw for himself. The sparkle of a fading glamour was all around the girl’s face, and under it he could plainly see the pentacle drawn on her forehead that had invited the demon into her and trapped it there. Lord Stimms’ wet hand had broken its lines. “Somebody gave this child to the demon,” said the sorcerer.

Lord Stimms had not risen from his knees, and Derek seemed frozen looking at him. Behind them, shouting began in the spectators around a tall man Ric hadn’t seen before. He had the shimmer of a dissipating charm around him as he backed away from the crowd, his hands up in warning. They shouted, he shouted, the paramedics shouted. Even the patrolman was shouting, from where he crouched inside the circle with the transport magician, but through it all Ric could hear the little girl’s voice, shrill and desperate.

“Daddy!” she shrieked. “Daddy, Daddy!” The tall man reached into his shirt and stopped — whatever extra power he had counted on was gone with the demon.

Ric walked forward, cautiously. “You don’t want any trouble,” he said. “Come along quietly. Don’t you want to say goodbye to your daughter?”

The man’s face twisted, but Ric felt no pity. Ice ran through his veins again. They remembered what a demon felt like, coiling through the blood. His bones knew how it ached in every joint. He could just see the girl on the lawn out of the corner of his eye, the sorcerer and paramedics clustered over her. Even if she lived, she’d never get rid of it. She’d never forget that feeling of no control. Just this moment, Ric thought as he reached out toward the tall man. Just one minute out of control …”Daddy!” the girl cried. Too late, Ric realized that he should have felt no grue, the demon having been driven out of her — “Daddy!” the voice was from just behind him. The grue jarred his vertebrae against each other.

Ric was so close to the demon when he turned that he had to step back, into the tall man, and words froze in his mouth. But the demon was not interested in Ric. It stood within a half-meter of him, nude and filthy, a sexualized parody of the girl it had been called into. “Daddy, don’t you love me anymore?” it piped, and the man behind him answered with a groan.

He clung to Ric’s arm like a drowning swimmer, and Ric shook him off. Just like that. Just to reach for his gun, though what use was a gun against a demon? Just to put a hand on his ward and reassure himself and just like that the demon reached past him, around his side. Its hair struck sparks off the shield his ward made around him, and just like that it took the man, plucking him from behind Ric as if it picked an apple. Then it and the man were gone, the crowd went silent all around him, and Ric spun to stare at the vacant spot where the man had stood.

He heard Derek cry out and as he turned back things seemed to happen slowly, so that he could watch every detail. He could watch Lord Stimms crumple, not even trying to catch himself, while Derek reached out for him. He could see the hand that had touched the possessed girl land on Derek’s shoulder. And then Derek folded forwards too, as if he were emptying something from himself into Lord Stimms, yet his Lordship seemed no better for it, and then they were both crumpled on the ground, the paramedics turning toward them to do what little they could without crystals or equipment.