The sand at Sky’s feet shifted, as if at a strong wind. Sky herself jerked like a marionette in the hands of a toddler, shifting. The body fell limply to the ground, and over it stood the demon.
Larger than a horse it was, a creature of flames the color of magic. Eight fragile limbs held its apparent hulk off the wet sand, but there was nothing arachnoid about the rest of the demon. A tail of gold and red ever-changing flames hit the edge of the rune with a crack, driving Lord Halvok to the ground at the unexpected pain.
But there was no question who was hurt worse. The demon screamed, an unearthly trill that covered the spectrum of sound, as a blue-green light flashed from the rune to its tail. When it was through, the demon crouched in the center of the rune, swaying back and forth.
“Halvok?” called Sham.
“Fine,” he said, though he sounded hoarse. “The rune will hold her.”
“Three times bound was I,” said the creature using Lady Sky’s voice. “Three dead wizards litter the cold earth. Your binding too. I shall come through in better condition than you, wizard. Get what power you can while you may, you will be dead soon enough.”
“I will die,” Sham agreed readily, “as all mortal things do. But before then I will see you home again. Talbot, what’s the tide like?”
“If you destroy me,” continued the demon, “I will haunt you and your children until there is one born I might use, witch. I will take that one’s body and hunt until your descendants walk not upon this earth.”
“Not yet,” answered Elsic, listening to the sea as he fingered the flute, “but soon.”
Talbot gave the blind boy a sharp-eyed look. “It’s still out.”
“Jetsam,” purred the demon, shifting its graceful neck so it was peering at Elsic, “—cast-off selkie garbage. If you aid in my binding, I will seek you out when I am free, and throw you back to the sea where your own people will rend you and feed you to the fish as tribute.”
Elsic smiled sweetly. “I aid in no binding.”
The demon paced sinuously within the outer bonds of the hold-rune. It was careful not to touch the edges.
“Now,” said Elsic.
Dimly Sham heard the muted roar of the returning waves begin. Elsic put the flute to his lips and blew a single pure note that pierced the night as cleanly as a fair-spent arrow. After a few experimental scales, he slipped into an unfamiliar song in a minor key.
Sham felt the magic begin to gather. She took a deep breath, and silently reminded herself that most of the magic she would work were spells she already knew. She’d spent half the night memorizing the only one that was new until she could recite the steps backwards in her sleep. If her concentration or confidence faltered, it would release all the power of the Spirit Tide into flames that would swallow them and Purgatory as well—inspiration for the poorest of students, and she had never been that.
In the original version the death of the sacrifice gave power to the spell. The sympathetic magic of death sent the demon to where it belonged as the soul of the sacrifice traveled home. She intended to replace both functions with the Spirit Tide as it came home to the cliffs.
The magic that the tide generated was formed by the sea, and humans worked only with unformed magic. Like limestone and marble, the two kinds of magic were formed by the same materials with tremendously different results.
Elsic gathered the green magic of the sea, and the flute transformed it into its raw form. Sham had to hold the gathering forces until the last moment before she worked the final spell. There would be no second chances.
Sweat ran off her forehead and she swayed with the effort as the magic grew exponentially with the progress of the monumental wave of water that had begun to swallow the sand. Someone gripped her shoulders briefly and steadied her.
Still the magic grew. The first two spells were easy, nothing that she hadn’t cast a hundred times before. She began to draw on the magic.
First to set the subject.
The demon screamed as she worked the spell, weaving it around the creature.
Second to name its true name.
Demon, Chen Laut, bringer of death, stealthy breaker of bonding spells laid upon it by greedy men. Avenger, killer, lonely exile. Sham understood the demon, and wove her knowledge into the spell. It was enough—she knew it. She could feel the demon trying to break the naming, but it was futile.
“Southwood lord,” called the demon, “Bind me to you and I will help you drive the Easterners from Purgatory. If you allow her to destroy me, they will never go.”
Halvok stiffened, like a hound scenting fox.
“If she chooses to bind rather than destroy, Shamera will not drive them away,” continued the demon persuasively. Sky’s voice rang clear through the growing roar of sea and wind. “She’s in love with the Reeve. She’s too young to really remember how it was, what it felt like to hold your loved ones as they die. But you do, don’t you? You remember your wife. She wasn’t beautiful, was she? Not until she smiled. She was wonderfully kind. Do you remember how much she loved your children? Then the Easterners came, while you were fighting elsewhere. You returned home and found only what the soldiers had left. She fought to protect the children, your wife, even after what they had done to her.”
“Halvok,” said Sham, her voice trembling with the effort of speaking while she tried to hold both the magic and the demon. If Halvok dropped the tune at the wrong time, it could spell disaster. “Halvok, that world is gone. Driving the Easterners out of Southwood will not set time back. It won’t restore your wife, nor even the person you were before they came.”
She had told Kerim that what the demon wanted most was to go home—she knew how the creature felt. As she exacted vengeance from those men who had crippled Maur, she had known that it was only a substitute for what she really wanted: to return to what once was, to go home. “Only death will come from seeking it, Halvok. Not just nameless Easterners will die—but your friends and colleagues. People you’ve come to know and care for. And once the killing starts, it won’t be Eastern blood alone that feeds the soil. Hasn’t there been enough death?”
“Yes,” said Halvok. “I am sick of—”
The demon struck the rune.
Halvok fell limply to the sand and the steady glow the rune had been emitting flickered wildly.
No time to question. Running to the place where Halvok lay, Sham drew her knife, nicked her palms, and placed both hands on the gold thread. Power surged through her from that contact and she cried out. The magic from the waves buckled and the skin of her hands turned red and blistered from the wild magic that seeped out of her control, but the blood made the difference as she had known it would. It made the rune hers again, no matter how the magic surged and fought it.
She couldn’t let the rune fail until just before the wave hit the cliff, or she wouldn’t be able to open the gateway to the demon’s realm no matter how much power she had. She would have to break it, symbolizing the breakage of the bonds that held the demon to this world. It shouldn’t have been difficult. Halvok could have done it by dropping the two ends of the wire separately, but Sham was tied to the rune by blood.
She needed Halvok, but he lay silently on the ground, Talbot kneeling at his side. She hoped he was alive.
Still the magic grew. She couldn’t see the Spirit Tide, but the sound of the water rushing over the sand had become deafening. Ignoring the smell of singed flesh she continued to gather the magic.
“Now,” shouted Kerim and Talbot together.
She broke the rune. Bound to her by blood, the rune’s death hurt her, making her hands cramp until she had to force herself to her feet so that the tension of the wire would pull it from her grasp. Pain wasn’t the real problem, or rather not the whole of the problem. It was what the pain did to her concentration that mattered.