Ornias Hurled the Seal at Beelzebouls Chest

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The Spirit at the Quarry Edge

The workman had been losing blood for weeks before Solomon heard about it. Something came for him at the Temple works night after night and left him thinner every morning, and Ornias was a vampire spirit with no reason to take an interest in a man who cut stone for wages, but he had found one and would not let go. So the king went down to the works himself and took him with the seal ring.

The first sentence Solomon passed on him was not a curse. It was labor. Ornias would cut stone for the house he had been feeding beside, and he cut it, since the ring left him nothing to say about the matter. Chisels rang all day at the quarry edge. Dust settled on hands that were not hands. The workman slept a whole night through, and then another.

But one bound spirit is one pair of arms, and the swarm over the city did not answer a ring it had never been shown. The unclean spirits took their orders from Beelzeboul, who held them the way a general holds a field, and no man could carry a summons into a place like that and walk back out of it.

Solomon Took the Ring Off

So Solomon called over the demon he had just enslaved and put the only thing holding it into its hand.

The ring came off his finger. For as long as it took to cross the space between them, the king of Israel was a man standing in a room with a vampire spirit and nothing in his fist, and the spirit knew exactly what he was looking at. Then Ornias closed his fingers on the seal. "Away with you," Solomon said, "and bring me the prince of all the demons."

Ornias went.

Who Is This Solomon

Beelzeboul heard the summons out and did not move. "Tell me, who is this Solomon of whom you speak to me?"

Ornias did not argue rank, because he had no rank to argue from and nothing in his mouth that would have impressed a prince of spirits. He hurled the ring at Beelzeboul's chest. It struck, and the name came with it. "Solomon the king calls you."

Beelzeboul roared, and fire came out of him in a sheet, and the ground around him took a heat that had never been near a forge. None of it mattered. The seal had already closed. He got up and followed a stone-cutter back to Jerusalem like a dog on a short rope, and standing in front of the throne he promised the whole roll of them. Onoskelis came first, wearing the shape of a fair-skinned woman with nothing human under it, and then Asmodeus behind her, and each one had to give an account of what he was and what he could wreck. Solomon listened the way a judge listens when the accused has been made to name his own tools.

The Old Man Wanted His Son Dead

The house went up on demon labor and cedar together, and when it was finished the rulers came from every direction to look at it, the Queen of Sheba among them, a sorceress herself, arriving to find the edge of what Solomon could do and not finding it.

An old man came too, though not to admire anything. He stood in the judgment chamber and accused his own son of striking him, which is a charge that stains a whole house, and the young man denied it with everything he had. The father would not take a settlement or an apology. He wanted the life, and he wanted it under law. Two men were shouting at each other in front of the throne when laughter cut across the room.

It was Ornias. Solomon rebuked him at once, since a bound spirit does not mock the court that binds it, but Ornias answered without flinching. "I pray you, O king, it was not because of you I laughed, but because of this ill-starred old man and the wretched youth, his son. For after three days his son will die untimely, and, lo, the old man desires to make away with him foully."

The Fifth Day

Solomon did not rule. He sent them both home and let the days run, which is a strange thing to do with a capital charge, though the alternative was to take a demon's word or a father's word, and he would not yet take either.

On the fifth day he called the old man back in. The boy was already dead, three days after the laughter, without a hand laid on him and without a sentence from the throne. The father stood in the chamber with his accusation still good in law and nothing left to do with it. A demon had told the truth from the floor of the court, and the only man in the room who had wanted the young man dead was the one who had come asking for justice.