"Not mine," Matt muttered automatically—but he watched the gargoyles.
They were pacing about, snapping at one another, apparently quite agitated. As the first ray of sunlight struck the hillside above them, each of them began to dig. They went down into the ground very fast, of course, with steel claws and all that weight—down, and down, dirt gouting up about them though they stayed pretty much in place, reminding Matt of pigs wallowing into mud. In a few minutes, they had disappeared, their places marked only by mounds of dirt.
Yverne sat up, stifling a yawn and blinking about her. Then her eyes went wide. "They have gone!"
"No," Matt said, "only gone underground. They'll rise again at sunset, I'm sure."
"What will?" Fadecourt sat up, scowling. He saw the mounds of dirt, at least a hundred of them, and realized what they meant. "So. Our enemies await us without and withunder, do they not?"
"They do," Matt agreed. "My question is, will they dare come out if they know they'll be in sunlight?"
"We might try them," Fadecourt suggested. "How much is the knowledge worth to you—an arm, or a leg?"
Matt gazed at the dirt mounds, thinking it over.
"Mayhap the course of discretion is wiser," the cyclops suggested.
"Definitely. After all, I'm not eager to lose a member."
"There are other ways to test," Fadecourt pointed out. "Yet to be clear, we must wait till sunlight covers the ground outside of this shrine."
"I can wait."
He didn't have to wait long. The sun's rays soon covered the grass outside the shrine, what was left of it. Fadecourt nodded, satisfied, went back into the cave behind the grotto, and came back with a boulder. He bowled it toward the nearest dirt pile. Matt wondered whether it would be able to pass out of the gate.
It did, rolling a couple of feet away from a burrow. There was an explosion of dirt, a blinding flash of granite legs with a horrendous clashing. Steel teeth slashed, and the boulder was gone.
Abruptly, the gargoyle froze. Then, slowly, it turned toward the humans, giving them a look of such pure malevolence that Matt felt his heart trying to sink down into his boot tops.
"It knows we deceived it," Yverne whispered. "It would rend us limb from limb for that deception, if it could."
Narlh snorted behind them. "How many pieces can it tear you into? It was ready to do that last night."
But already, the monster's skin was dulling. It turned and dragged itself painfully back to its hole, where it wallowed down, sending up a cloud of soil that settled to hide it from the light.
"It can endure the sun," Fadecourt said, "though not for any great length of time."
"Long enough to tear us to shreds, though." Matt shook his head. "No, we're very effectively penned up here."
They were quiet, digesting the fact.
Then Yverne rose. "Well, we must proceed with the morning's duties, as best we may. By your leave, gentlemen." She turned and went away, behind the grotto, to the cave. Narlh lifted his head as she passed and gazed after her.
Matt knew the feeling. After seeing those gargoyles, he would never trust honest stone again.
"Well, Wizard," the dracogriff challenged, "how're you gonna get us out of this one?"
"I don't know," Matt confessed. "If these obscene; uh, works of art, really do come from Hell, any power I can wield probably won't be enough. It'd take a direct miracle, straight from Heaven."
"Is our plight so desperate that a saint might intervene?" Fadecourt asked.
Matt shook his head. "As I understand it, that takes direct, personal participation by a major devil. Subordinate demons like these aren't enough—they're no more than the evil ideas Satan lends his minions, to make people miserable." He wondered about the nature of that power. Since he could feel a sort of magical pressure around him when he was casting a spell, maybe Satan just gave his worshipers the ideas for verses; the magical power was always there, only needing to be shaped and formed.
It would be very chancy, he realized, working for Satan. You'd never know when that devastating power would hit you, as well as your chosen target. You could never be sure your boss wouldn't turn against you.
Yverne came back just in time to hear Narlh growl, "So what would happen if you prayed real hard, and a saint came to kick these monsters out?"
"That would just provide an opening for a devil to show up for a showdown. See, God leaves it to us to work out our own destinies, but He'll give us whatever spiritual help we need—and guidance, if we'll just shut up and listen to Him."
"That is Grace," Yverne murmured.
"Right. He'll even perform constant small miracles, if they'll help us improve our souls and not hurt anybody else's, and we really, sincerely, want them enough to help open the way—like an alcoholic going on the wagon, or an incurable illness going into spontaneous remission..."
" 'Spontaneous remission'?" Narlh frowned. "What is that?"
"What you call a miracle when you don't want to admit it's a miracle. And, of course, Hell is allowed its own low-key interference, except that it has to work through the human agents it cons into its service, not directly—and the result can be some really gruesome temptations to despair. But outright, open meddling isn't allowed—so no saint would show up without a devil to kick out."
"But a devil may appear, to interfere in human affairs?"
"It's been known to happen. Not very often, because the devils know that, against a saint who's a channel for God's power, they can't do anything—and the first thing the saint will do is banish them."
"But then," Yverne cried "if a saint did come to aid us, and a devil came to oppose him, the saint would banish the devil!"
"Yes—but the saint won't break God's rules. We have free will, after all—that seems to be the whole purpose of human existence, as well as I can understand it, which may not be much: for us to choose to go to Heaven, and transform ourselves into something good enough to belong there. Outright interference is too much influence."
"Hey, wait a minute!" Narlh frowned. "You're trying to say that to get to Heaven, we have to choose not to have free will, to just do whatever Heaven wants!"
"Yes, but we use free will in making that choice."
"But..." Narlh tried to follow the loop of the paradox, got lost, and grumbled, "Too deep for me."
"Me, too—I need an Aqua-lung. Of course, the trick is trying to know what Heaven wants; a lot of people have done some very horrible things, believing they knew God's will and were just carrying it out. And, of course, each of the few who really did manage to become a medium for God always had the temptation not to and had to constantly be choosing His will instead of their own. I understand it does require a lot of self-sacrifice. Wouldn't know from my own experience, of course."
Yverne eyed him narrowly, and Matt hastened to explain, "Of course, I don't really understand any of this."
"There are three of us who do not, then," Fadecourt said, with a quick glance at Narlh. "Yet I take it that all of this makes you believe you can do naught 'gainst these engines of Hell."
Matt nodded. "Unless I can figure out a way to harness some sort of natural force. I used to have a scab demon who had taken a liking to me—no, no, my lady, I'm not a sorcerer in disguise! He wasn't part of the Hell crew; in fact, properly speaking, he wasn't even a demon. Humans named him that, because they didn't know what else to call him. He was the personification of a natural process called entropy, and people called him Maxwell's Demon."
"Who was Maxwell?" Narlh grunted.
"A scientist—uh, that was the equivalent of a wizard, where I came from—and he never met the demon, just imagined that it might exist. Which it didn't, back home. But when I came here, I took a chance and called him up—and sure enough, here, he did exist!"