The Damiano Series (71 page)

It was not that the prize in this game was Gaspare's little soul; such as Gaspare was merely coarse bread and dry. But his peril was sure to bring Raphael fluttering in, for the angel watched his proteges like a hawk.

So Lucifer was understandably surprised to find himself under the assault of not a hawklike angel, but a small dove, round of keel—at the moment of his subtle plan's unfolding. With not the least peep of warning, this avian flew at his man-shape and pecked it smartingly under the eye. Lucifer flinched away from it, displaying very natural confusion and annoyance.

The greatest of angels had no interest in the animal kingdom. The world's furred, feathered, or finny creatures were as much beneath his peculiar temptations as the denizens of Tir Na nOg were beyond them. He was not even very knowing about animal behavior. Did this miserable atom think that Lucifer, wingless as he appeared in his present form, was yet a sort of greater bird and therefore a competitor? Did it have a nest nearby? He cast a glance around him, as the dove swooped to the ground at his feet.

Even as Lucifer perceived the obvious truth, that the creature was not a bird at all but a human shape-changer, it had swollen to its full status: that of a woman almost as tall as he stood in his Delstrego form.

“Liar!” she shrilled in his ear. “Filthy liar!” Curiously enough, she spoke a barbaric tongue of the far north.

Lucifer had no idea what a Lapp would be doing in a Piedmont village by the Lombardy border. He was further piqued to discover he didn't recognize this woman at all. Perhaps, he considered momentarily, he hadn't given the tribal primitives of the earth their share of his attention.

In certain ways they were so much like the beasts.

And he reacted to this unknown creature in the way in which he usually reacted to anything which frustrated him or set back his plans. He turned color and hissed at her, and prepared to strike her to cinders where she stood.

But, worse luck, this was not merely a shape-changer, but one of those unspeakable Lappish singing witches.

He felt her puerile sing-song cutting through his disguise like a razor through hide. As shape fell away, he was obliged to grope for wyvern form to cover his nakedness. He shot at the woman a blast of pure, shriveling hate, only to see it deflected by a thread of melody. The malice shuddered sideways and scraped lime off the wineshop wall.

She dared smile through her teeth as she said, speaking in heavily accented Italian, “You made another of your great mistakes when you took the face of Damiano, you greedy old man. I will crush you for it.” Then the bitch's song actually did try to squeeze him. Though Lucifer himself was far beyond being hurt by the spell, the wyvern he wore could not breathe.

With the vision of his spirit, the Devil was very aware of the round eyes and dropped jaws in the wineshop so near. Cursing, he gave up his present ambitions toward Gaspare and rose into the air, determined to escape this constraint and blast the beast-woman from the face of the earth.

Certainly Lucifer had the power to destroy one silly witch, once he'd recovered from his surprise and from the unbearable feeling of having been cheated by this beast-woman's popping from nowhere. Simple physical destruction was both Lucifer's pleasure (albeit not his highest pleasure), and his right.

The wyvern circled in the air, persecuted by the witch who was once more in dove shape. Lucifer snarled at the bird with the contempt he felt for all simple or straightforward creatures. Once lured out of human shape, the witch's ability to sing (and therefore her power) was sadly curtailed. The wyvern drew a deep breath, gathering fire.

But the bird's anger was so insane as to approach the maternal,

and she seemed unaware of her danger as she fluttered about the two-legged dragon-thing, pecking at its eyes.

Lucifer, once collected to himself, was a very clever spirit, and excellent at drawing together odd threads of information and making tangles of them. It occurred to him that there was some connection between this creature and the matter at hand; after all, it was the shape of Delstrego that seemed to set her off.

And then he remembered a small interchange with Damiano on the streets of Avignon in the mortal's last days: an interchange not comfortably called to mind.

He had dropped a gentle hint that the fellow had carried the plague with him into Avignon. (Not true, as it happens, but it very well might have been true, given the dreadful medical ignorance of the populace.) The man had dared to bray back at him a denial. “We were all clean. Saara said so.”

And when asked who this Saara was, Delstrego had replied, “Someone you don't know.”

Now Lucifer laughed, and ashes sullied the hot air around him. So even that septic little trading of insults could be turned to good use.

Someone he didn't know. Perhaps. But such an oversight was quite easily rectifiable. He beat off the drab-colored dove (quite gently) with a wing as hard and as supple as chain mail, and he peered at her with new curiosity.

A mascot of some sort? She could have meant little more, farouche as she was. Pretty enough, in human shape, but he knew quite well that Italians liked their women both clinging and coy. Probably a pet. Whatever, she was doubtless of some value to his sentimental brother, and Lucifer was not one to turn his face from fortune. He cringed from the bird and fled upward.

Saara's anger was like a wind which blew through every room of her soul, cleaning it of years of suffering.

Not since she left the fens had she had an enemy she could fight with whole heart: an enemy she had no compunction about hurting. And she had no fear for herself, for after losing two children and three lovers to death, it was a very familiar presence to her. In fact, there was nothing more appropriate which could happen in her life now, after all she had been through, than to be given the Liar himself as target and a clear field of attack. Especially when she remembered the miserable confusion this breath of wickedness had caused in Damiano, both to the man's head and his heart, before cutting short his life.

Along with Saara's slow-blooming happiness. Saara had never thought to ask herself why the Liar had oppressed Damiano so; she knew that too much interest in that demon's mentations only invited him into one's life. But still she could hate him for it.

For she had loved Damiano and loved him still, not with the wise passion Saara had felt for other men in her time, but with the sweet and choking emotion always before reserved for her children.

Saara had neither hope nor plan for survival as she spun about the loathsome, heavy reptilian shape, buffeted by the wind of its wings and suffocated by fumes; survival was meaningless next to the chance to do harm to the Father of Lies. This wild and selfless fury with which a bird weighing all of three ounces flung herself at the Devil he mistook (as he always must) for lack of brain.

Up they went in a flurry of wings, until the air about them grew cooler and lost the flavor of earth, and the sun spun about the sky as a dizzying white disk. Without warning, Saara traded her bird shape for that of an owl, and her talons raked the wyvern in its great yellow eyes. But the owl was half-blind in the light and the wyvern, disdaining battle, escaped it with a bob and dart to the right.

Saara followed, her muffled white wings straining, and for a moment she hung above the wyvern, untouching. Then suddenly the witch flickered and changed shape again, not this time to any sort of bird but to an enormous white bear of the north, which dropped like stone onto the reptile's back.

The wyvern's wings collapsed like sails of paper, and both beasts plummeted toward the earth.

After his first shock at this attack, Lucifer decided to let the bear fall—he could escape the wyvern form before impact: let the witch do the same, if she could. But then he shrieked, for the bear had its massive jaws around the snake neck of the wyvern and those jaws were closing. He suffered a certain amount of pain before he could dissolve his physical form, fleeing Saara now with no more substance than a passing thought, nor any more ability to do harm.

In an instant the bear, too, had vanished, and though it took Saara precious time to pull out of the tailspin caused by this last transformation, the pale dove skimmed the Lombard forest unharmed and returned to her pursuit, chasing nothing more than a nasty glitter in the sky.

There was no hope she could catch a disembodied spirit, however,

and furious though she was (with the taste of the Devil's blood in her memory, if not in her mouth), she had half a mind to give up and return to San Gabriele.

Gaspare deserved some explanation, after all.

But against all expectation, she saw the Liar resume his damaged wyvern form in the sky high above her. She flapped harder to catch up, wishing she had studied the shape of the chimney swift instead of that of the dove.

She could not gain on the creature, but neither did she fall behind. Now they were so high above the earth that she was giddy, and her small lungs worked like bellows in the thin air. The wyvern, too, seemed affected, for its wings beat more slowly and blood sprayed in sunlit droplets from its wounded neck. It looked behind it and hissed.

Then Saara's giddiness grew very serious, for down seemed suddenly to become sideways, and the dove lost its purchase in the air and fell sickeningly before righting itself in a different attitude.

Saara looked around her and cursed, for her perceptions had been quite correct; down had
become sideways, and below her naked tucked feet she beheld a broken regiment of peaks, touched here and there with snow. What it was that had happened to bring her here she was not quite sure, and how to return, if there was any question of return, she had no idea.

But the wyvern was still ahead of her, and that was what counted. She chased the scaly thing down among the mountain peaks; it seemed so weary now and weak from loss of blood that she slowly gained on it.

A spirit could not be destroyed utterly: not even the spirits of little things like mice and frogs, let alone a strong spirit older than mankind. But if she could get over the wyvern again and crash it into the rocks below, then she could do harm to the Liar—oh yes, real, satisfying harm.

With the prize so near, Saara's own weariness dropped away. She saw the wyvern disappear behind the shoulder of a gaunt gray peak, but she found it again in moments. Once more she lost the creature and once more found it.

Now purplish blood spattered the bare stone shelves below as the wyvern snaked its way deeper into the cracks of the mountains. It was heading for one high, solitary cone shape on the horizon. Perhaps there to make a stand.

Saara pressed still harder, for she did not want to encounter this thing on the ground, where even a bear of the north would be no match for the half-dragon. She wanted to drop it from the sky—to smash it to jelly. She was almost upon it.

But the wyvern, with all the appearance of terror, put on a burst of speed and together they approached the face of the mountain, tiny beak to writhing great tail. Saara cried in fury, and the wyvern bellowed back its wrath.

There was a window in the sheer cliff of the mountain: a perfect, tall, arched window, larger than the doors of men. The dove gave one astounded blink and cry, watching the wyvern disappear into it. She beat her wings wildly to the front, but it was far too late to stop her own progress, and Saara fluttered rolling into Satan's watchtower.

Lucifer, seated in his tall chair, caught the bird easily as it skidded across the table. He prisoned her within the compass of his fingers and lifted her, feet upward, into the light for better viewing.

In neither his appearance nor demeanor was there any trace of the wyvern he had been: no scales, no blood. He was in his most usual and comfortable form, that of a king in red (red showed off his golden hair to good advantage), and the family features rested agreeably on his face. He regarded the rumpled dove with a certain curiosity.

But none of this is to say he was in a good mood, or that he had forgotten the jaws of the white bear on the wyvern's neck. Pink flesh showed between the rutched feathers and down of the dove's breast and belly. The little legs kicked, and the head which protruded from between his finger and thumb squirmed right and left. Lucifer felt the tremor of her heart, quick and nervous as a tree of leaves in the wind.

He discovered that when he squeezed the creature, her tiny twiglike beak opened, and when he released the pressure of his hand, it closed again. He amused himself in this fashion for a minute or so, and then he said calmly, “You have a sadly inflated idea of your own abilities, little hen.”

Suddenly the dove writhed in his hand, and at the expense of a few feathers, twisted around enough to deliver a sound peck on the skin between his thumb and forefinger.

Lucifer cursed and shifted his grip. He called Kadjebeen, and before many seconds had passed, the small raspberry-shaped demon had erupted through the door in the floor.

“Bring me string,” said Satan very quietly. Kadjebeen disappeared once more through the door.

After the demon's disappearance, Lucifer's complacent smile returned. Kadjebeen was his current favorite among the palace staff, being quite handy and even more afraid of him than most. Very soon he returned with a spool of red twine, which he carefully tied around one of the dove's legs.

The other end of the length of twine was attached to one of the barbed turrets of the image of the palace on the table. Kadjebeen bit his lips anxiously as this was done, for he feared damage to his handiwork.

Lucifer was aware of his servant's trepidation, and it gave him a good deal of satisfaction. Throwing the spool of red twine at Kadjebeen's head, he pointed to a far corner of the room, to which the demon retired.

Saara was dumped onto the tabletop, where she lay panting and blinking. After a moment or two Lucifer found the sight of the tied dove less than interesting. He gestured vaguely toward her and her bird shape melted into Saara shape, complete with bare feet and embroidered blue dress, but no bigger than the dove had been.