An awkward thing to notice about a difficult colleague in the middle of facing down an archdemon. But the archdemon had already decided they were too much trouble and was slouching away. Kenning spoke a rapid four-syllable banishment—Marshal spells were so fast—to give it a good kick in the behind as it went. Walden waited for her to pull out of the pentagram so that she could begin the dismissal sequence and close the incursion.

The archdemon disintegrated.

Kenning said, “What did you—”

“Laura, get out of there,” snapped Walden.

But it was too late.

chapter three OLD FAITHFUL

Their new visitor was hard for Walden’s magical senses to perceive clearly, in the way that an ocean is hard to comprehend by standing on the seashore. Walden felt the great catspaw of its intentions land across the summoning array—which was, after all, only a fourth-order pentagram drawn by students—and start to force it further open. “No, you don’t,” she said, and by a solid effort of will managed to manifest a secondary pentagram, drawn in lines of pure force, around their original array. She had lost track of where the sixth formers were. She prayed they had the sense to stay quiet and out of the way. “Laura!”

Kenning was right underneath their new visitor. What was she doing?

Oh, Walden realised a second later. She was trapped.

Kenning was tangled in a great mass of demonic magic, more like the wild growth of a jungle than the elegant, ordered lines of magical intention that Walden taught to her students. She was hacking hard at it, her sword and little slices of combat spells doing the work of a machete, but the demon’s power was gigantic and the tangling spells were regrowing as fast as she could cut them down. All the while, at the edge of her thoughts, Walden could hear soft, cruel whispers.

She closed her mind to them, invoking layers of personal defence and warding, as the demon poked and probed for insecurities, doubts, and desires. This was not a dim little imp to be satisfied by chocolate digestives. It was not even a mere archdemon, a creature of force and hunger. This worrying at Walden’s mind was subtle, complex, and vicious—the work of a gigantic, malevolent intelligence.

Kenning had stopped fighting. She stood still in the morass of coiling magic that was boiling out of the pentagram. It had started to reify into pale, writhing shapes, like a heap of coiling maggots. Walden swore. “Laura!” she shouted. “Marshal Kenning! For the love of God, don’t listen to it!”