Read the wind's twelve quarters for Free Online

got things ready: sulfur, silver, chalk.... Though the room was dusty and littered, his little workbench was neatly and handily arranged. He was soon ready. Then he paused. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered, glancing out the window into the darkness where now one could only guess at the two square towers. A watchman passed below calling out the hour, eight o’clock of a cold clear night. It was so still he could hear the lapping of the Seine. He shrugged, frowned, took up the chalk and drew a neat pentagram on the floor near his table, then took up the book and began to read in a clear but self-conscious voice: “Haere, haere, audi me.. It was a long spell, and mostly nonsense. His voice sank. He stood bored and embarrassed. He hurried through the last words, shut the book, and then fell backwards against the door, gap-mouthed, staring at the enormous, shapeless figure that stood within the pentagram, lit only by the blue flicker of its waving, fiery claws.  
    Barry Pennywither finally got control of himself and put out the fire by burying his hands in the folds of the blanket wrapped around him. Unburned but upset, he sat down again. He looked at his book. Then he stared at it. It was no longer thin and grey and titled The Last Years of Villon: an Investigation of Possibilities. It was thick and brown and titled Incantatoria Magna. On his table? A priceless manuscript dating from 1407 of which the only extant undamaged copy was in the Ambrosian Library in Milan. He looked slowly around. His mouth dropped slowly open. He observed a stove, a chemist’s workbench, two or three dozen heaps of unbelievable leatherbound books, the window, the door. His window, his door. But crouching against his door was a little creature, black and shapeless, from which come a dry rattling sound,  
    Barry Pennywither was not a very brave man, but he was rational. He thought he had lost his mind, and so he said quite steadily, “Are you the Devil?”  
    The creature shuddered and rattled.  
    Experimentally, with a glance at invisible Notre Dame, the professor made the sign of the Cross.  
    At this the creature twitched; not a flinch, a twitch. Then it said something, feebly, but in perfectly good English—no, in perfectly good French—no, in rather odd French: “Mais vous estes de Dieu,” it said.  
    Barry got up and peered at it. “Who are you?” he demanded, and it lifted up a quite human face and answered meekly, “Jehan Lenoir.”  
    “What are you doing in my room?”  
    There was a pause. Lenoir got up from his knees and stood straight, all five foot two of him. “This is my room,” he said at last, though very politely.  
    Barry looked around at the books and alembics. There was another pause. “Then how did I get here?”  
    “I brought you.”  
    “Are you a doctor?”  
    Lenoir nodded, with pride. His whole air had changed. “Yes, I’m a doctor,” he said. “Yes, I brought you here. If Nature will yield me no knowledge, then I can conquer Nature herself, I can work a miracle! To the Devil with science, then. I was a scientist—” he glared at Barry. “No longer! They call me a fool, a heretic, well by God I’m worse! I’m a sorcerer, a black magician, Jehan the Black! Magic works, does it? Then science is a waste of time. Ha!” he said, but he did not really look triumphant. “I wish it hadn’t worked,” he said more quietly, pacing up and down between folios.  
    “So do I,” said the guest.  
    “Who are you?” Lenoir looked up challengingly at Barry, though there was nearly a foot difference in their heights.  
    “Barry A. Pennywither, I’m a professor of French at Munson College, Indiana, on leave in Paris to pursue my studies of Late Mediaeval Fr—” He stopped. He had just realized what kind of accent Lenoir had. “What year is this? What century? Please, Dr. Lenoir—” The Frenchman looked confused. The meanings of words change, as well as their pronunciations. “Who rules