“Yes, well, I believe Mr. Chesney does sell it for quite a lot on the other side,” Barnabas conceded, “but that’s nothing to do with me. I can explain—”
“There’s no possible explanation that can satisfy me,” Reville said. He was leaning beside Querida with his arms folded, looking as grim and lordly as Talithan. “You were stealing, and you are not a member of my guild. Wizards, I demand that this man is handed over to Thieves Guild for trial. By our law, he should have both hands cut off.”
Barnabas shuddered and looked piteously toward Derk. “Derk, you’re my friend!”
“Not anymore,” Derk said from beside Mara. Kit and Blade exchanged glances. They had never seen Derk look so stern. “Why did you take the spells off the soldiers?” Derk asked.
“I had to,” Barnabas explained. “Fifty of them were under contract to the mines. Last year’s overseers were getting impatient, because they couldn’t go home until the new ones arrived, you see. They were pressuring me. And the new overseers were all stuck in the camp having to fight a battle every week.”
“Some of them weren’t,” Reville said. “They kidnapped Sukey.”
As Reville said this, an acid-bath chill began to wash across Blade’s mind. It was a feeling he had had twice before. He looked to see where it was coming from this time and saw blueness swelling up from the cracks around the paving stones where Barnabas was standing, cunningly mixing with Talithan’s haze. Blade wondered whether to shout.
Be silent or I shall eat you, too, the demon told him.
“Well, how was I to know that?” Barnabas demanded. “All I knew was that they hadn’t—”
The blueness rose up around him. Barnabas’s voice became a long, thin, bubbling noise. Talithan jumped backward as the demon began to spin. Its blueness spun faster and faster, and Barnabas became a twisted dark swirl, spinning inside it. The swirl grew longer and thinner as it spun and shreds threw off it, but Barnabas did not stop screaming until the darkness had faded into the blueness completely. It seemed to take a century, though it only lasted for seconds. So that’s how demons eat, Blade thought, swallowing hard and very queasy. Everyone was pale and still as they watched the blueness sink back into the terrace again.
“Yik!” said Kit.
Geoffrey stood up barefoot beside Shona, looking as if he was trying not to be sick. “I want to know more about those mines.”
“So do I, young man,” said Miss Ledbury.
Elda looked toward the Pilgrims and saw Blade and Kit standing behind them. She sprang across the terrace, shrieking, bouncing from one pair of feet to the other in the spaces between dwarfs and Pilgrims. “Mum! Dad!” she shrieked. “Blade’s back! Kit’s here!”
Dwarfs had to scramble out of the way as Mara, Derk, Shona, Don, and Callette surged after Elda. Blade found himself in the middle of a happier reunion than he would have believed possible that morning. Shona kissed him, kissed Kit. Derk barged Shona aside to hug him and then collided with Mara, who was in the middle of turning from hugging Kit to hugging Blade and crying out, “Oh, Blade! These clothes I sent you are too small!”
“I started to grow,” Blade told her, as well as he could from under Callette’s massive wing and being bumped about between Elda and Don, who were trying to griffin-dance with him in spite of Derk, who was now trying to hug Blade and Kit at once. Beaks stroked Blade’s face and clacked on Kit’s beak. Three sets of arms tried to fold on them. Feathers swiped and caressed them. And I used to think we had no family feeling! Blade thought. He wished Lydda was here to share in it, too.
And Lydda was there, almost as Blade thought this, dropping neatly from above on a truly magnificent wingspread, screaming to join in. “Oh, thank the gods—I was so worried!” Derk said, and Callette said, “That’s good. Now it’s everyone.”
Blade glanced upward to see where Lydda had come from. He was in time to see the tip of one of Scales’s huge claws slicing through the rest of the magic dome. For an instant or so Scales could be seen as a mighty shadow above the milkiness. Then Derk’s defenses crumpled away and folded downward, letting in a burst of extra light from under Scales, who wheeled about and landed on most of the garden monsters. He sat up, rearing higher than the dome had been.
“Forgive the intrusion,” he rumbled at Derk. “We need to talk.”
Scales was wearing the battered coronet. At least, Blade realized, it was the coronet that had seemed to be battered, until you noticed that a coronet had to be a strange, irregular shape in order to fit the head of a dragon. Now it looked more like a crown. And what everyone had thought of as the broken gold chain was hooked to the spikes of Scales’s neck to dangle gleaming and complete on his chest.
Mara went to the edge of the terrace with her arm over Lydda, still smiling from the reunion, and turned the smile up to Scales. “Forgive me, I only realized who you were awhile ago. You’re Deucalion, who was once king of the dragons, aren’t you?”
“I hope I still am!” Scales rumbled. He raised his crowned head to look at the other dragons crouching along the hills over Derkholm. “How say you, dragons?”
The other dragons lifted their heads in reply and hailed their king in a musical roar, each dragon crying a different note in a massive bugling chord. A number of the dwarfs crouched down and covered their ears. The house, the ground, the terrace, and the whole valley shook. Blade thought, deafened and astonished, The Oracle said a dragon would teach me magic! Why?
Meanwhile the angry Pilgrims outside and the extremely irritated wizards with them had seen the dome collapse and surged toward the gates. They stopped short when Scales landed, started to surge forward again, and stopped once more when the dragons roared on the hills. Nobody could move during a sound like that. But as soon as the great cry stopped, the Pilgrims in front began edging on, through the gate, and into the space by Deucalion’s great right wing. Most of them were shouting that they were going to kill that Dark Lord, but they stopped yet again and all backed into one another when the demon rose high on its three legs in front of the terrace.
Scales rose up to meet it. “Tripos!” he growled. “Demon king. Go!”
If you exorcise me, you’ll regret it, Deucalion, the demon replied. You need me.
The bleach burn of its talk was enough to cause utter silence, except for a woman Pilgrim near the gate who said, “Is that the Dark Lord? But I thought—” and stopped with a gulp when one of the demon’s three eyes turned to look at her. Or maybe it was the thunder of Scales’s answer.
“Need YOU?” the dragon roared.
The demon, rather slyly, untwisted its tail from around its three legs. The tail went snaking out across the terrace and stabbed the air with its wormy blue tip, somewhere between Querida’s wall and Prince Talithan’s magic haze. The air there writhed about and split apart with a pop. The split became a neat arched opening.
Mr. Chesney stood in the arched space, staring around the terrace with his mouth set into a grim upside-down smile. He nodded at what he saw there, as if it was even worse than he had expected.