“Did you expect me to be, perhaps,” he suggested gently, “wearing a shirt?”
Ms. Connor lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug.
“Everybody told me that you make eccentric fashion choices, and I’m sure that’s a very fashionable hairstyle,” she said. “But frankly, it looks like a cat has been sleeping on your head.”
Magnus offered Caroline Connor a coffee, which she declined. All she would accept was a glass of water. Magnus was becoming more and more suspicious of her.
When Magnus emerged from his room wearing maroon leather pants and a glittering cowl-neck sweater, which had come with a jaunty little matching scarf, Caroline looked at him with a cool distance that suggested she did not find it to be a huge improvement on his pajama pants. Magnus had already accepted the fact that there would never be an eternal friendship between them, and did not find himself heartbroken.
“So, Caroline,” he said.
“I prefer ‘Ms. Connor,’” said Ms. Connor, perched on the very edge of Magnus’s gold velvet sofa. She was looking around at the furniture as disapprovingly as she had looked at Magnus’s bare chest, as if she thought that a few interesting prints and a lamp with bells were somewhat equivalent to Roman orgies.
“Ms. Connor,” Magnus amended easily. The customer was always right, and that would be Magnus’s policy until the job was completed, at which point he would decline to ever be employed by this company again.
She produced a file from her briefcase, a contract in a dark green binder, which she passed over to Magnus to flip through. Magnus had signed two other contracts in the past week, one graven into a tree trunk in the depths of a German forest under the light of a new moon, and one in his own blood. Mundanes were so quaint.
Magnus scanned through it. Summon minor demon, mysterious purpose, obscene sums of money. Check, check, and check. He signed it with a flourish and handed it back.
“Well,” said Ms. Connor, folding her hands in her lap. “I would like to see the demon now, if you please.”
“It takes a little while to set up the pentagram and the summoning circle,” Magnus said. “You might want to get comfortable.”
Ms. Connor looked startled and displeased. “I have a lunch meeting,” she noted. “Is there no way to expedite the process?”
“Er, no. This is dark magic, Ms. Connor,” said Magnus. “It is not quite the same as ordering a pizza.”
Ms. Connor’s mouth flattened like a piece of paper being folded in half. “Would it be possible for me to come back in a few hours?”
Magnus’s conviction that people who arrived early to meetings had no respect for other people’s time was being confirmed. On the other hand, he did not really wish for this woman to remain in his house for any longer than necessary.
“Off you go,” Magnus said, keeping his voice urbane and charming. “When you return, there will be a cecaelia demon in place for you to do with as you wish.”
“Casa Bane,” Magnus muttered as Ms. Connor left, his voice not quite low enough to be sure she wouldn’t hear him. “Hot- and cold-running demons, at your service.”
He didn’t have time to sit around being annoyed. There was work to be done. Magnus set about arranging his circle of black candles. Inside the circle he scratched a pentagram, using a rowan stick freshly cut by faerie hands. The whole process took a couple of hours before he was ready to begin his chant.
“Iam tibi impero et praecipio, maligne spiritus! I summon you, by the power of bell, book, and candle. I summon you from the airy void, from the darkest depths. I summon you, Elyaas who swims in the midnight seas of eternally drowning souls, Elyaas who lurks in the shadows that surround Pandemonium, Elyaas who bathes in tears and plays with the bones of lost sailors.”
Magnus drawled the words, tapping his nails on his cup and examining his chipped green nail polish. He took pride in his work, but this was not his favorite part of his job, not his favorite client, and not the day for it.
The golden wood of his floor began to smoke, and the smoke rising had the smell of sulfur. But the smoke rose in sullen wisps. Magnus felt a resistance as he pulled the demon dimension closer to him, like a fisherman drawing on a line and getting a fish who put up a fight.
It was too early in the afternoon for this. Magnus spoke in a louder voice, feeling the power rise in him as he spoke, as if his blood were catching on fire and sending sparks from the center of his being out into the space between worlds.
“As the destroyer of Marbas, I summon you. I summon you as the demon’s child who can make your seas dry to desert. I summon you by my own power, and by the power of my blood, and you know who my father is, Elyaas. You will not, you dare not, disobey.”
The smoke rose higher and higher, became a veil, and beyond the veil for an instant Magnus glimpsed another world. Then the smoke became too thick to see through. Magnus had to wait until it dwindled and coalesced into a shape—not quite the shape of a man.
Magnus had summoned many disgusting demons in his life. The amphisbaena demon had the wings and the trunk of a vast chicken. Mundane stories claimed it had the head and tail of a snake, but that was not in fact true. Amphisbaena demons were covered in tentacles, with one very large tentacle containing an eye, and a mouth with snapping fangs. Magnus could see how the confusion had arisen.
The amphisbaena demons were the worst, but cecaelia demons were not Magnus’s favorites either. They were not aesthetically pleasing, and they left slime all over the floor.
Elyaas’s shape was more blob than anything else. His head was something like a man’s, but with his green eyes set close together in the center of his face, and a triangular slit serving as both nose and mouth. He had no arms. His torso was abruptly truncated, and his lower parts resembled those of a squid, the tentacles thick and short. And from head to stubby tentacles, he was coated in greenish-black slime, as if he had arisen from a fetid swamp and was sweating out putrefaction from every pore.
“Who summons Elyaas?” he asked in a voice that sounded like a normal, rather jolly, man’s voice, with the slight suggestion that it was being heard underwater. It was possible that this was simply because he had a mouthful of slime. Magnus saw the demon’s tongue—like a human’s but green and ending in a thick point—flicker between his sharp slime-stained teeth as he spoke.
“I do,” said Magnus. “But I rather believe we covered that when I was summoning you and you proved recalcitrant.”
He spoke cheerfully, but the blue-white flame of the candles responded to his mood and contracted, forming a cage of light around Elyaas that made him yelp. His slime had no effect upon their fire whatsoever.
“Oh, come on!” Elyaas grumbled. “Don’t be like that! I was on my way. I was held up by some personal business.”
Magnus rolled his eyes. “What were you doing, demon?”
Elyaas looked shifty, insofar as you could tell under the slime. “I had a thing. So how have you been, Magnus?”
“What?” Magnus asked.
“You know, since the last time you summoned me. How have you been keeping?”
“What?” Magnus asked again.
“You don’t remember me?” said the tentacle demon.
“I summon a lot of demons,” Magnus said weakly.