A plan beginning to take shape in her mind, Lillet crossed over to the workbench where Calvert had left his grimoire. The disgusting binding made her skin creep as she opened the book.
"What's that you have there?" Riesling asked, coming up next to her.
"It's Calvert's grimoire. He called it the Key to Avernus."
"I've never heard of that one."
"Well, it's not a regular grimoire like we use. It's not Rune magic, but full of old-style ritual."
Riesling glanced around the atelier, taking in the implements, the stubs of black and red candles, and the summoning circle drawn out on the floor.
"So he wasn't performing experiments in sorcery; this was just the only kind of magic he knew."
"Right," Lillet agreed. "Nothing but the worst kind of rituals, designed to call up devils with arcane and complex steps that even if done right don't necessarily work like they should. And judging by this, whomever wrote this book wasn't a normal magician anyway, but some kind of crazed devil-worshipper, which is about what you'd expect from a book bound in human skin. Some of these spells don't even seem to keep control over the summoned devils, but just call them up so the magician can bargain with them, even the weak ones." Lillet and turned and met the older woman's eyes. "I don't like the idea of destroying knowledge, but this book is dangerous. I think once we're done stopping Calvert, we should burn it."
"Is that your opinion or the opinion of your office?"
"Did you help rescue me just to pick a fight, Ms. Riesling?"
Riesling had the good grace to look sheepish.
"I...didn't mean it that way, Mage Consul. I just wanted to know the answer."
Lillet sighed. It seemed almost hypocritical to say that a book was too dangerous to keep when she herself was paging through it, looking for needed information. She reminded herself that the only reason she was doing that was to clean up the damage someone else had done by using the book in the first place.
And Riesling is right about one thing. I'm the Mage Consul now, so that it makes it my responsibility to decide. Do I want to give other people authority that's supposed to be mine and then regret it if they make choices that turn out badly?
"It's the opinion of the Mage Consul," she said firmly. "When this is over, we'll destroy it ourselves, officially." Sealing things away was never a permanent solution. Sooner or later, they always came unsealed. Lillet's experiences at the Silver Star Tower had been a textbook example, almost a worst-case scenario, of that truism.
"Ha!" she suddenly exclaimed as she continued to read. "This is it!" She left the book open and fetched some paper and the only writing instrument she could find, a stick of sketching charcoal.
"What is?" Riesling asked.
"The ritual that Calvert used to contact Malphas."
"What do you want that for?"
"Well," Lillet said with a smile that was positively evil, "you wanted Calvert back here, didn't you? And Malphas's mind is using his body right now, so I thought I'd summon him up."
Riesling all but exploded.
"You're going to summon Malphas? Here? Now? Have you gone mad?"
Lillet began to sketch out the pattern of the summoning circle from the book on a sheet of paper.
"I don't think so."
Ballatore snorted.
"It sounds like you've been hit on the head too hard to me."
"This ritual calls for blood sacrifice," Riesling all but shouted, looking at the page. "Do you think we'll allow that?"
"Don't be silly, Ms. Riesling. I'm not going to perform the ritual." She finished the sketch, then began to add further details of her own. "Among other things, the ritual doesn't serve to summon the physical devil, but just acts to contact its mind. That's how Calvert got into this mess in the first place. But what the ritual does provide is the specific symbolism that relates to Malphas individually. Working from that, I can create a Rune that will let me summon him. His spirit is present within Calvert's body but not fully freed in our world yet, so he's still subject to being conjured."
She continued to look through the ritual, her knowledge of sorcery enabling her to separate out what matters pertained to Malphas with the peripheral elements of the spell, but Riesling kept at her, refusing to be dissuaded.
"Mage Consul Blan, you can't seriously be expecting to...to just make up a rune to summon a duke of Hell."
"Why not? We know it can be done. King Solomon already did it. If I still had the Lemegeton, I would just use his Rune, but the principle still applies. And the ritual gives me the important knowledge that I couldn't make up on the fly. The hardest part is to key the summoning to a particular entity, and the more powerful the entity the more complex the identification. It'd be nearly impossible to do from scratch, but it shouldn't take more than a half an hour's work this way, if I get a chance to work uninterrupted."
Riesling was too busy staring, wide-eyed, to take the hint.
"If you...still had the Lemegeton?"
Lillet sighed.
"I had to give it back to Mr. Advocat after I destroyed the Philosopher's Stone. That was the deal I made with him so he wouldn't interfere at the end." She supposed that from Riesling's point of view she was babbling incoherently; it wasn't as if the Watch magician knew the events of Lillet's past.
"You had King Solomon's grimoire?"
"Ms. Riesling," Amoretta said, "everyone knows that Lillet defeated the Archmage Calvaros when she was at the Silver Star Tower."
"Yes, but..."
Riesling took a step back and dropped into one of Calvert's hard wooden chairs, a stunned expression on her face.
"So this is really going to work?" put in the Inspector.
"If Lillet says it will, then it will."
"All right, then, why don't we just keep our traps shut and let her work."
It wasn't as easy as she'd made it sound. The ritual went on for several dozen pages of faded text on crumbling, worm-eaten pages. While Lillet was a master sorceress, her experience was largely with Rune magic, not the outdated and dangerous process of ritual sorcery. Sometimes she had difficulty in figuring out how to incorporate one part or another into her Rune, and at other times she found that the ritual was dangerously incomplete, particularly in the case of any binding aspects. She had to carefully extract the details of the spell that identified Malphas, then convert them to their proper symbolism in a Rune and combine them with elements to summon and control the devil. At the end, though, she was able to create a summoning Rune that she believed would work.
"That should do it," she said with satisfaction, putting down the charcoal stick. "Everyone, get behind me, over by the door. If something goes wrong, I want you to have a chance to get safely away--I mean it, Amoretta!" she snapped as her lover began to open her mouth in protest. "You took your risk already when you crashed in here to save me. This one is my turn."
"All right," Amoretta consented reluctantly. "I'm sure you'll succeed, though."
That was what she'd been going to say? Lillet felt badly for misjudging her.
"I think so, too, or else I wouldn't try this, but...it's just better to be aware there could be trouble. Now, this is going to be a strong and difficult Rune, and it should take about fifteen minutes to set up, so don't interrupt me."
"Fifteen minutes?" Ballatore asked. "Don't Runes usually take about a minute or less?"
"Those are normal Runes at their most basic level," Riesling answered him. "What she's doing...it's like taking a standard Rune and infusing it with mana all the way to it's most powerful form--except that each step on the way is harder than even, say, a Chaos Nest or Titania."
The Inspector shook his head.
"So you understand this, Janice?"
Riesling laughed hollowly.
"Understand? The theory, maybe. Just creating the Rune is so far out of my league...Maybe my father could do this with a research library, a day to use it, and a team of assistants. Maybe."
Lillet suppressed a sigh. The praise was a nice change, considering the source, but it was distracting for them to be chattering away behind her, and her head still ached. She probably had a mild concussion from when Calvert had knocked her out; hopefully elven healing could deal with that but it didn't help her now.
Quit whining, Lillet, and do this! she told herself sharply. Using her wand, she sketched out the Rune on the floor as she'd drawn it on the paper, each stroke leaving trails of the dull crimson light that was the hallmark of sorcerous Runes. She poured mana into it, the magical energy she'd stored within herself, but there was more to it then simply drawing a pattern and fueling it. A Rune was an act of will, the mind and spirit of the magician forcing the energies of the universe to obey. The mana and the pattern drawn were the key in the lock but Lillet had to turn it herself to activate the Rune.
She'd done the same kind of thing before, though, and she didn't fail now. Her design had not been flawed; a bell seemed to ring in her mind and the Rune blazed into existence, the entire shape glowing furiously on the floor before her, active and ready to use. Lillet took a deep breath, gathering herself, and invoked the power of summoning the Rune represented, calling on the spirit of the devil Malphas. The lines of the Rune blazed with hellfire--
--a reeking wind roared through the atelier, causing loose papers to swirl in the air, buffeting Lillet and the others--
--and Malphas was there.
Whereas before Lillet had seen only a twisted reflection, hints of the devil's presence, her summoning had pulled it forth in full possession of Calvert's body, the demented artist recognizable only by the clothes he wore and the topaz stickpin in his cravat, the stone shining with a leprous radiance in the reflected light from the Rune. The form was completely inhuman, with hands and feet like the talons of a great raptor, the head not unlike a giant crow, its beak a malevolent red, lined with saw-toothed projections, and with three balefully shining eyes. Massive sable wings sprouted from its back, each pinion glinting along their edges as if somehow honed to the keenness of a blade.
"At last!" it laughed, its voice booming and yet high-pitched like a keening scream over the wind. "At last I am freed from this cur's shreds of will!" Lillet had expected this, that invoking the devil would also grant it full ascendancy over Calvert in the body it possessed, but hearing it, seeing it, still gave her a twinge of sorrow. Whatever crimes the man had committed, the devil's evil was much, much worse. "In return for your kindness, I shall make your death swift and painless, Lillet Blan."
Of course Malphas had been within Calvert the entire time, so it certainly knew Lillet, but hearing her name come from its maw was still disconcerting. She couldn't let anything distract her, though.
"Free?" Lillet challenged. "You aren't free, Malphas. I summoned you. I am your master."
Malphas roared with laughter.
"Master? A puny human magician thinks to master me? I am not some petty demon to be ordered about at your whim. I am a duke of Hell's legions! No mortal commands me!"
Lillet had been in this position before. At the Silver Star Tower she'd tried to order the devil prince Grimlet back to Hell, but her commands had been so much dust in the wind to him. Even the Archmage Calvaros had only been able to master Grimlet with the use of the Philosopher's Stone, the ultimate expression of magical power. Lillet had beaten Grimlet, but by trickery, not by force.
"But you are no Grimlet," she declared, answering not its words but her own doubts. Lillet hurled her will at it, invoking the power of her Rune, the binding it placed on the summoned devil to serve the summoning magician. A trickle of fear played at the back of her mind, thoughts of what would happen if she failed and lost control. Amoretta's life, her own, the two Watch officers, the people of the capital.
But mostly Amoretta.
So don't let it happen!
"And. You. Are. Mine!"
The Rune blazed anew. Malphas screamed in rage and defiance, then dropped to one knee within the circle.
"Now leave that man's body and return to Hell," she ordered immediately, not giving it a chance to say or do anything more, even as she felt the force of its mind clawing at her control. All at once, in a very anticlimactic puff of smoke, it was done. The drumbeat of Malphas's will against her own, fighting for supremacy, was gone, and all that remained was Gaylord Calvert. His eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped to the atelier floor in a dead faint, his mind and body unable to stand the strain of what had happened.
"It's all right," Lillet said, sighing heavily. "You can take him now, Inspector."
Ballatore was hesitant, then regained himself and stepped forward. With deft, experienced motions he manacled the unconscious man's hands behind his back to keep him out of further trouble.
"How dangerous is he--without the devil I mean?" he asked.
"Not very," Lillet said, "at least magically. It was Malphas that could call up imps and other minions, not Calvert, and so long as he doesn't have magical paraphernalia or his grimoire Calvert won't be able to do anything else. It wouldn't hurt to treat him as a magician, though, and if he ends up in an asylum instead of on the gallows he should definitely have his powers, such as they are, sealed just in case." She wobbled a bit as a wave of exhaustion hit her, and Amoretta was immediately by her side, taking her arm and supporting her weight. Serves me right, I guess, for doing major magic with an aching head.
Riesling was staring at Lillet open-mouthed; she looked like she'd been frozen that way since Malphas's summoning and banishment.
"That...that was impossible!" she babbled. Lillet would have ignored her, but she was hurt, tired, and too short on energy to be patient any longer.
"No, Ms. Riesling, that is why Her Majesty made me Mage Consul regardless of whom I choose to love." She had the petty satisfaction of seeing the older woman flinch.
As Amoretta helped her towards the door, Lillet took one last look around the atelier. It was a mistake; her eyes fell upon the unconscious artist, his hands chained, a pathetic picture. Had the taint been in him from the beginning, the madness leading him to the unholy? Or was he just another victim, a dabbler in the arcane who'd opened the wrong book and found himself being corrupted from within? What was his degree of guilt? Malphas's partner, or merely prey?
Ultimately, she supposed it didn't matter. Lillet didn't want to pass judgment or lay blame. The killer had been stopped, people were safe, and Amoretta freed from the burden of Calvert-Malphas's sick obsession with her. That was what mattered. It was over.
"Yes, it is," Amoretta said, and Lillet realized she must have said the last part out loud. Amoretta smiled at her with that look full of innocent, sweet joy that Lillet loved to see. "I'm so happy."
"Because the killer was stopped?"
"Yes, but more than that. Usually, you're the one who rescues me from danger. This time, we rescued each other," she said, and the light of her happiness was as bright as the rising sun outside.
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