“You won’t believe,” Axleben decided to pretend not to hear the whispers, “what he told me when he was under. Which is also why I’ll keep it to myself. Why blab it out, since you won’t believe it? I’ll only say he gave me various pieces of advice when he was in a trance. I shall, indeed, try to employ them and we’ll see with what results.

“This polymath and polyglot with the face of a dimwit,” he continued after a moment devoted to the Alicante, “regaled me with—among others—a longish quote from The Divine Comedy. He cautioned me against submitting to temptations of vanity. To remember that everything is vanity and no misdeed will go unpunished. For among sorcerers, admittedly, Albertus Magnus meets Dante in Paradise, but Michael Scot, Guido Bonetti and Asdente, punished for necromancy, are damned in the Eighth Circle of Hell, Malebolge, the Evil Ditches, in the Fourth Cavern. They groan and weep there, shedding copious tears, and devils torment them by twisting their necks and heads backwards so that their tears pour down their arses. A fine prospect, eh? And this was recited, it should be added, by your Samson in a perfect Tuscan accent.”

Štěpán of Drahotuše and Scharley exchanged smiles and meaningful glances. Axleben swept his dark-circled eyes over them and indicated to Tvrdík to charge his glass again.

“For a moment,” Axleben announced, “the thought occurred to me: perhaps he is the Devil? The very Devil incarnate? Ha, don’t say it hasn’t occurred to you, either. Why, it’s a veritable textbook devilish trick: beguile, entice, deceive with appearances. Diabolus potest, as the classicists would have it, sensum hominis exteriorem immutare et illudere. He can achieve it in many ways, for example by transforming the very organ of sense, meaning our eye, by adding something to the ocular substance, owing to which the object we are looking at is seen as the Devil would have us see it. Bonaventure, Psellos, Pierre Lombard all wrote about it years ago, as did Witelo and Nicholas Magni of Jawor, so it would be no bad thing to revisit the works I’ve mentioned.”

“Blockhead,” whispered Fraundinst.