Michael Gave Solomon a Ring to Bind Every Demon

It came at sunset, after the tools went down.

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It took half the boy's pay and half his food, which he could have lived with. Then it took his right hand and sucked the thumb. Every evening for weeks, on the site where the Temple of Jerusalem was going up, something with no body of its own drank out of a child through the pad of one finger, and every morning the boy went back to the work a little lighter than he had been the day before.

Nobody else on the crew saw a thing. God made the shedim at twilight on the sixth day and the Sabbath arrived before they were given bodies, so they came away with souls and nothing to carry them in. The air has been thick with them since, like dust in a shaft of light, and what they lack they take from whoever is nearest and smallest.

The King Who Could Not Solve It

Solomon solved things. Hiram of Tyre sent riddles down from the coast along with the cedar, and Solomon sent them back answered and collected the forfeits. The house of God was going up in seven years because God was in the work, while the palace would take him thirteen, since that was only men. So when the king noticed a boy losing weight on his own building site, he expected to be able to account for it.

He loved this boy more than any of the artisans and had shown it the plain way a king shows things. "Do I not pay you twice what the others get? Do I not give you a double portion of food? Why do you grow thinner by the hour?"

The boy went down on his knees. He told him about the sunset, and the half of everything, and the thumb. "My soul is crushed, and my body wastes away."

No guard could stand watch over that, and no wage could outrun it, because the thief was not taking money in the end. So Solomon went into the Temple and prayed, night and day, for authority over the thing that was eating his favorite worker.

What Michael Brought Down

The answer came in the hand of Michael.

A small ring, with a seal cut into the stone of it, and the terms came attached. "Take this. With it you will lock up every demon on the earth, male and female, and with their labor you will build Jerusalem. Wear the seal of God."

Solomon had asked for one demon. He was given all of them, and a workforce, and a building schedule.

Then he sent for the boy and put the ring into a child's hand.

The Boy Waits at Sunset

"When it comes tonight, throw this at its chest and say: in the name of God, King Solomon calls you. Then run to me. Do not be afraid of anything you hear behind you."

The boy carried the ring through the whole day's work. Then the tools went down and the light went orange over the courses of new stone and the crew walked off toward supper, and he stayed where he was.

It came the way it always came, like a fire walking, and it came for the money first. The boy had the ring shut inside his fist and his arm did not want to open. For weeks his own hand had been the thing that fed this creature, so every trained part of him said stand still, keep quiet, let it finish, and throwing was the hardest movement he had ever had to make.

He threw it. It struck the demon in the chest, and the seal took hold.

The Demon Dragged to the Throne

The thing began to scream. Ornias, it was called, and the shriek went up over the half-built Temple loud enough to carry.

"Child, what have you done to me? Take the ring off me and I will give you all the gold of the earth. Only do not lead me away to Solomon."

An hour earlier the boy would have handed over anything it asked for, since that was the arrangement between them. But he had been told to run, so he ran, and the bound thing had no choice except to come after him. It followed him down through the unfinished city, howling, bargaining, hauled along behind a child on a band of engraved stone.

The king watched them come in through the door: the boy first, out of breath and laughing, and behind him the fire that had been drinking out of his hand, audible now to every man in the room, and made to stand still.