Walden worked slowly. The more complex an invocation was, the more important it was not to rush it. She tried not to notice the battle going on in the same room, tried not to see the splatter of blood across the kitchen table when one of Old Faithful’s knife-waves hit, tried not to hear Laura’s cry of pain. Each band of spellwriting had taken months of laborious development before she finalised the designs. They illuminated one after another. They did not burn as the siphons had; they were not affected by the strong magical currents of the demonic plane. They were, intentionally, as self-contained as it was possible for a work of magic to be. They depended on Walden and on Walden alone.

Only a handful of magicians in the world had ever summoned a demon above the ninth order.

Walden was one of that handful.

She had not chosen the form her fellow traveller took. She had been expecting it to be horrible; reified demons were usually horrible. But the image trapped under her tattoos was rather lovely, really: a coiling, long-winged firebird, feathered with rich red and golden plumes, a sharp raptor’s head with a wickedly hooked beak, two scaly feet spread wide, each adorned with a violently orange spur.

This demon was of the tenth order. It had not had a name when Walden first summoned it. So she called it Phoenix: because she’d met it in that high-security lab in the Arizona desert, and because it was glorious. It had been totally quiescent ever since Walden finished her dissertation defence. But as she went oh so slowly through the layers of spells that bound the demon to her skin, it woke.

She felt it first; the rich and sensual warmth of a suddenly enormous pool of magic at her disposal, like being presented unexpectedly with a marvellous hot bath. Only then did she see it move. The feathers under her epidermis ruffled. A scaled foot flexed open and closed. The firebird opened its eyes.

Out of pure curiosity, Walden had done this in front of a mirror once. So she knew that by now her hair and fingernails had taken on a flame-bright tone, and her eyes were a solid glowing gold.

Look at you, Old Faithful had said, eating magic like you’re one of us.

You have no idea, Walden thought.

And as demonic power spread its wings inside her, she turned back to the struggle that was Chetwood’s Chief Marshal losing and losing badly to Old Faithful. As she watched, Laura’s sword sliced deep into the demon’s upper arm. It did not react at all. Pain was not something it chose to feel.