Free Black Easter by James Blish

said. ‘Enough, ungrateful monster. Cease thy witless plaudering and discharge thine errand. I dismiss thee.’
    The crowned figure snarled, and then, suddenly, reverted to the form in which it had first showed itself. It vomited a great gout of fire, but the surge failed to pass the wall of the triangle; instead, it collected in a ball around the demon itself. Nevertheless, Baines could feel the heat against his face. Ware raised his wand.
    The floor inside the small circle vanished. The apparition clashed its brazen wings and dropped like a stone. With a rending thunderclap, the floor healed seamlessly.
    Then there was silence. As the ringing in Baines’s ears died away, he became aware of a distant thrumming sound as though someone had left a car idling in the street in front of the palazzo. Then he realized what it was: the great cat was purring. It had watched the entire proceedings with nothing more than grave interest. So, apparently, had Hess. Ginsberg seemed to be jittering, but he was standing his ground. Although he had never seen Jack rattled before, Baines could hardly blame him; he himself felt sick and giddy, as though just the effort of looking at M ARCHOSIAS had been equivalent to having scrambled for days up some Himalayan glacier.
    ‘It is over,’ Ware said in a grey whisper. He looked very old. Taking up his sword, he cut the diagram with it, ‘Now we must wait. I will be in seclusion for two weeks. Then we will consult again. The circle is open. You may leave.’
    Father Domenico heard the thunderclap, distant and muffled, and knew that the sending had been made – and that he was forbidden, now as before, even to pray for the soul of the victim (or the patient, in Ware’s antiseptic Aristotelian terminology). Sitting up and swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, breathing with difficulty in the musky, detumescent air, he walked unsteadily to his satchel and opened it.
    Why – that was the question – did God so tie his hands, whydid He allow such a compromise as the Covenant at all? It suggested, at least, some limitation in His power unallowable by the firm dogma of Omnipotence, which it was a sin even to question; or, at worst, some ambiguity in His relationship with Hell, one quite outside the revealed answers to the Problem of Evil.
    That last was a concept too terrible to bear thinking about. Probably it was attributable purely to the atmosphere here; in any event, Father Domenico knew that he was in no spiritual or emotional condition to examine it now.
    He could, however, examine with possible profit a minor but related question: Was the evil just done the evil Father Domenico had been sent to oversee? There was every immediate reason to suppose that it was – and if it was, then Father Domenico could go home tomorrow, ravaged but convalescent.
    On the other hand it was possible – dreadful but in a way also hopeful – that Father Domenico had been commanded to Hell-mouth to await the emission of something worse. That would resolve the puzzling anomaly that Ware’s latest undertaking, abominable though they all were, was for Ware not unusual. Much more important, it would explain at least in part, why the Covenant existed at all: in Tolstoy’s words, ‘God sees the truth, but waits.’
    And this question, at least, Father Domenico need not simply ponder, but could actively submit to the Divine guidance, even here, even now, provided that he call upon no Presences. That restriction was not prohibitive; what was he a magician for, if not to be as subtle in his works as in his praise?
    Inkhorn, quill, straightedge, three different discs of different sizes cut from virgin cardboard – not an easy thing to come by – and the wrapped burin came out of the satchel and were arranged on top of his dresser, which would serve well enough for a desk. On the cardboard discs he carefully inscribed three different scales: the A camerae of sixteen divine attributes,