The Spirit Ring

Chapter Eleven

Fiametta rubbed her drooping eyelids and stretched her arms high in an effort to fight off drowsiness. The watered wine and bread she'd had for supper was not so grand a feast as to induce torpor, but she'd slept poorly last night, turning over and over on the crackling straw, worrying about Thur, constantly disturbed by the rustling and coughing and movements of the other women in the overcrowded dormitory. Not to mention the fleas. She scratched a red welt on her elbow.

Abbot Monreale's workroom was warm, the plastered walls of the second-floor chamber still retaining the heat of the day, and the light from the single candle beside her was golden and cozy. She wriggled her hips on the hard perch of her barrel-seat, planted her elbows on the table, and let her chin sink back into her hands. On the tray before her the three remaining tambourines, the mouth-twins to the little ears Thur carried, remained stubbornly mute. Were they still working... ? Yes, her day's practice at keeping them enspelled had made it an almost automatic process, like absentminded humming. They conveyed nothing because they had nothing to convey.

In the next room she could hear Abbot Monreale pause to cough, pace, and continue his dictation to Brother Ambrose. A letter to the Bishop of Savoy, describing their desperate situation, calling for help, magical if not military. A futile letter. How did Monreale propose to dispatch it? The day had passed in an ominous, overheated quiet, without even the usual desultory exchanges of curses and crossbow bolts between the besiegers and the defenders on the monastery walls. No new herald or emissary had come to the gates today, no new refugees. No one at all. It was as if Lord Ferrante's grip tightened chokingly around them.

She stared at the little circles, willing them to speech. Three had come to life today, two in the afternoon and one at dusk, when she'd been gone to supper. Initiate brothers had taken each one off to their cells, where they sat with quills and paper ready to take note of important secrets. She trusted the brothers were all staying awake, too. But anyway, Thur had still been alive and free at dusk.

She stifled a yawn; if Monreale glanced in and saw her fading, he would send her to bed, and she might miss the next word from Thur. Why didn't the big fool think to speak into the ear-tambourines when he activated them and report on himself? She gritted her teeth on her next yawn. The white parchment circles swam before her eyes.

Then, without other warning, one—flared, Fiametta supposed she must describe it, though it was not an effect she saw with her eyes. She took a deep breath of anticipation and sat up straight. Thur's voice, whispering his badly accented Latin, drifted up from the tambourine to her straining ear. Talk to me, Thur! But there followed only a scraping sound, as of a jar shoved across a shelf. Footsteps crossed a stone floor, then a sad, meditative silence fell. Desperately, Fiametta tried to generate a picture in her mind from the mere sound. Stone floor, harsh echoes: a stone chamber? Rock walls—the Duke's dungeon? True intuition, or self-delusion? Her hand pulled at the thong around her neck, drew the lion ring from its warm hiding place between her breasts, and closed over it. What was Thur seeing? Talk, you Swiss lout!

But the deep buzz of a voice that came suddenly from the tambourine was not Thur's. She could not make out words. A tenor laugh followed, then a muffled clatter, hasty steps, a clunk and a clack. Words rang in her mind that did not come through her ear— Down, boy! She stiffened in panic. Papa? The sound of a door opening, then, and a stranger's light voice: "Do you smell hot wax, my lord?"

My lord? Where was Thur? Had he fled? Her heart hammered.

"From your lantern, Niccolo." The bored bass voice was Lord Ferrante's; his Romagnan accent was distinctive.

She heard an odd muffled thunk, as of something heavy being placed on a wooden table. "I think not, returned—Niccolo's?—voice. "These candles are warm." Then, "Ow!" A scuffle of slippers, as of a sudden recoil.

"Did you do that, Niccolo?" asked Ferrante in an interested tone.

"No!"

Ferrante laughed unkindly. "Beneforte is playing his little tricks again." His voice went mocking; Fiametta's imagination supplied a sweeping, ironic bow. "Thank you, my servant, for lighting my way."

A sucking sound—burned fingers being licked? "He's not our servant yet," growled Niccolo.

"Abbot Monreale," Fiametta whispered frantically, then reminded herself that sound only flowed one way through the little ear-and-mouth sets—could that be altered?—"Father Monreale!" she shouted. "Come quick! It's Lord Ferrante himself!"

Monreale hurried through the door from his adjoining office, followed, after a scrape and crash of a chair falling and being righted again, by Brother Ambrose, still clutching his inky quill. They bent over the tray of tambourines.

"Are you sure?" asked Monreale.

"I remember his voice from the banquet. I don't know the other man's voice, though. Ferrante calls him Niccolo. I think they are in a chamber beneath the castle."

"Ambrose, take over." Monreale nodded toward the mouth-tambourine.

I can enspell it as well as he can, Father! Fiametta, wrenched, held her tongue, and passed the spell-keeping to Ambrose. His lips moved silently a moment, then he settled in.

Ferrante's voice asked, "How much more dare we strengthen him, then, before I do control him?"

Niccolo replied grumpily, "He must be fed. And the very feeding brings him nearer to us. It's under control. I admit, I wish we could find his own damned notes on spirit rings. We could catch him by his own magic most finely. But he can't know that much more than I do. Well have him under our thumb soon enough."

"None too soon for me. I've had about enough of this midnight skulking." Ferrante spat, eloquently.

"Great works require some sacrifices, my lord. Hang the three bags on those hooks. Take care with the leather one."

"To be sure."

Rustling noises followed, as the two men arranged whatever mysterious burdens they had been carrying. Abbot Monreale's eyes narrowed, and his lips parted in concentration, like Fiametta trying to guess' at actions from their sounds. "Talk some more, blast you," he muttered under his breath.

"Oh, for a dove now," mourned Ambrose.

"They would not fly in the dark. And there's no time to launch a bat, nor could it see or hear much more than this. Sh!" Monreale waved him to silence as the tambourine spoke again.

"Well," said Ferrante's voice. "Shall we conjure Beneforte now, and compel him to tell us the secret of this saltcellar of his?"

"I'm certain I understand the secret of the salt, my lord. Our trials with the animals and the prisoner were most convincing. Alone, its ability to detect poison would make it a treasure for your table, but its ability to purify as well—pure genius!"

"Fine and good. But I do not understand the secret of the pepper. And I am not inclined to trust my life to something that holds secrets from me. Salt is white and pepper is black. What more logical than that the salt embodies a white magic and the pepper a black?"

"Slander!" Fiametta hissed. "Fool! Does he think Papa would—" Monreale's hand on her shoulder tightened, and she swallowed her outrage.

"Possibly," allowed Niccolo. "Beneforte would have had to smuggle it past inspection by that prig Monreale, though."

"Monreale should have been an Inquisitor. He has the long nose for it."

"He lacks the stomach for it."

"So he would have men believe," said Ferrante sourly.

"I know that voice," muttered Monreale by Fiametta's ear. "Niccolo. Niccolo what?"

Ambrose offered, "Lord Ferrante has a secretary named Niccolo Vitelli, Father. He's said to be Ferrante's shadow. I was told he's been in Ferrante's employ for about four years. Ferrante's men are wary of him—I thought it was for his slyness, but now it seems there's more to it."

Monreale shook his head. "That's not what I ... But I suppose this Vitelli could be the reason that Ferrante, who was never rumored to have any use for magic in his condottiere days, seems to be up to his ears in it now.

"The pepper did no harm to the animals." Lord Ferrante's voice came persuasively from the parchment.

"Of course not," Fiametta muttered. "They have no power of speech."

"—and the spell engraved on the bottom of the saltcellar worked fine for the salt," Ferrante continued. "The second one must work for the pepper. I think we should try it again, upon a subject more capable of reporting subtle effects than Lady Julia's lap dog."

"We?" said Vitelli in a suspicious tone.

"I will speak the spell," said Lord Ferrante, "and you shall place the pepper on your tongue. But don't swallow it."

"I see." An unenthusiastic silence was followed by a "very well. Let's get it over with. There are more urgent tasks waiting tonight."

Now Fiametta could picture the chinks and thunks as Ferrante squinting at the bottom of her father's saltcellar by candlelight, returning it to its ebony base, and installing a bit of pepper in the little Greek temple under the golden goddess's hand. In a rapid whisper, she interpreted the sounds for Monreale and Ambrose. Sure enough, Ferrante's voice soon intoned the Latin prayer of the pepper-spell.

"Try it now," ordered Lord Ferrante.

After a moment, Vitelli's voice reported, in the odd muffled intonation of a man trying not to dislodge a pinch of pepper from his tongue, "I feel nothi'g, my lor'."

"It can't be doing nothing. Pepper. Tongues. Do you feel inspired to eloquence, perhaps?"

"No."

"Hm. Do you feel you could sway men's minds? Tell me a lie, and convince me of its truth. What color is my hair?"

"Black, mlor."

"Say, 'red.' "

"Rrr ... black." This last was sputtered out so as to almost lose the pepper.

"But say red."

"I can't. Black!"

A brief silence. "My God," whispered Ferrante. "Can the pepper compel truth?"

"Took you long enough," muttered Fiametta.

"Truth is not something that much springs to his mind, it seems," observed Ambrose.

"No, don't spit it out yet," Ferrante's voice ordered firmly. "I must be sure. What ... what is your age?"

"Thirty-two, mlor."

"Your birthplace?"

"Milan."

"Your—oh, your name."

"Jacopo Sprenger."

"What?" Ferrante's voice from the tambourine blended in astonishment with Monreale's, as the abbot slammed his fists to the table and cried, "What? It can't be!"

Fierce sputtering sounds emanated from the parchment circle, and muffled noises as of a man frantically wiping his mouth out with a cloth.

"Does the spell compel truth?" Ferrante's voice demanded of his secretary.

"It seems so, my lord," said Vitelli/Sprenger in a distinctly surly tone. After a short pause filled by who-knew-what boiling glance from the Lord of Losimo, the secretary went on reluctantly, "I took the name Vitelli ... in my youth. After a ... little difficulty with the law in Bologna."

"Well ... so it is with half the scoundrels in my army. But I didn't think you had any secrets from me, my pet." Ferrante's tone was judiciously forgiving, but with a dangerous hint of steel underneath.

"All men conceal something." Vitelli shrugged uneasily. His voice went bland. "Would you care to try the pepper for yourself, my lord?"

"No," said Ferrante. The irony in his voice matched his secretary's. "I do think I believe you. Or believe Beneforte, anyway. But God! What a treasure! Can you imagine how valuable this could be when questioning prisoners? Or people who are attempting to hide their gold or goods?" The excitement of this vision sharpened his voice.

"God," Abbot Monreale moaned, in quite a different tone. "Is any magic, any intention of men, ever so white that it can't be perverted? If even truth itself isn't godly ..." His lips drew back on a grimace of pain.

"Who is Jacopo Sprenger?" Brother Ambrose whispered, apparently, like Fiametta, unable to quell the secret conviction that if they could hear Ferrante, Ferrante could hear them.

"Is it possible... ? The fellow on the tower—but he's grown so thin! I'll tell you—later. Sh." Monreale bent his ear to the tambourine again, trying like Fiametta to guess what the rustling noises of Ferrante and Vitelli s next preparations meant. This time the occasional muttered word or order, or scraping sound, seemed to convey more to Abbot Monreale than to Fiametta, for he began to murmur interpretive guesses for Ambrose and Fiametta's benefit.

"I believe they are drawing a sacred diagram upon the floor. Lines to contain the mystic forces of the planets, or of their metals . .. sacred names, to compel or contain the forces of their spirits. A peculiar combination of higher and lower magics, I must say."

"Are they going to try and enslave Papa's spirit to that awful putti ring now?" asked Fiametta unhappily.

"No ... not tonight, I think. I don't hear anything that sounds like them setting up a furnace, do you? The ring must be new-cast from molten metal at the time of the investment, you see. The metal must be fluid to take up the internal form of the spirit."

Fiametta, remembering the making of her lion ring, nodded.

"They could not recast that putti ring for your father anyway," Monreale went on. "Silver is for a female spirit. They should use gold for Prospero Beneforte, ideally. If they have any idea of what they are doing. Which, unfortunately, they seem to. If Vitelli is Sprenger, that's no surprise.... He was a brilliant student of—" Monreale broke off as voices began again.

"The black cat for the sorcerer, the black cock for the soldier," said Vitelli. "Hand me the bag with the cat, my lord, across the lines, after I enter the square and close it." His voice went off into another string of Latin, far more purely intoned than Thur's or even Ferrante's.

"He enspells his blade," Monreale muttered.

"What is he going to do with it?" asked Fiametta tensely.

"Sacrifice a cat. Its life—I hesitate to call it its soul, but anyway, its spirit—will be given to your father's ghost, to ... strengthen it. Like a meal."

"Is it still alive?" demanded Vitelli's voice uncertainly.

A weak and piteous meow, full of suffering and pain, was made to answer him. "Just barely," said Ferrante.

Fiametta and Ambrose exchanged a look of horror. "Unlucky cat," said Ambrose. His thick hands wrung.

"Just what are they doing to it?" asked Fiametta.

"Enough for two men to burn for. Sh," said Monreale impatiently.

The cat's voice rose to a terrified squall, cutting across Vitelli's Latin drone, then went abruptly silent.

"Surely Papa would refuse such an unclean offering," said Fiametta. "He wouldn't ... eat? The poor kitty!"

Monreale shook his head, face grim as granite. But his brows wrinkled in puzzlement as Vitelli's chant started up again. "What are they ... can there be two?"

The mysterious scene was reenacted, but this time it was the squawking and flutter of a cock that fell to silence at the bite of Vitelli's darkly blessed blade. A familiar name flashed past, embedded in Vitelli's pure Latin.

"Uri Ochs?" Fiametta repeated in horror. "Oh, no! Is he—is Captain Ochs dead, then?"

"He must be," said Monreale blackly, "to be a recipient of that spell. That would explain why he was neither among the wounded prisoners or the dead who were returned.....errante fancies a spare ring, it seems."

"Poor Thur ... ," breathed Fiametta. Where was Thur? He'd had scarcely time to escape, between the time his breath had activated the little ear and the time Ferrante and Vitelli had entered the chamber of dread. Yet he must have escaped, or he'd have been discovered by now.

"No ... ," Monreale corrected himself judiciously, "Captain Ochs must have been selected first, by Ferrante, on the very day he fell. He had no known relatives in town, to demand his body for burial. It was your father, Fiametta, who was added as an afterthought,"

"There." Vitelli's voice sounded satisfied; slapping sounds followed, as if he were rising and dusting chalk, and worse, from the knees of his robe.

"How much longer must we spend on this pedantry?" Ferrante asked querulously. "I want my rings. Events of State will not wait on your thaumaturgic fiddling."

"Beneforte's is a very dangerous ghost to attempt to invest, my lord. He is hostile, and he knows far too much. One little mistake ..." Vitelli paused reluctantly, then added, "I think we can invest the soldier as early as tomorrow night. That is the sensible order of things, for then we can use him to help control the mage. You bring the new bronze for the ring. I'll see to the fuel. Then you will have at least one ring, ah, to hand."

"I'd rather have the Swiss anyway," Ferrante remarked in a brighter tone. "He's not such a tricksy weasel as the Florentine. As a soldier, he will doubtless understand obedience better."

"Perhaps I should keep the mage's ring, then," suggested Vitelli, in a casual tone that did not quite hide an eager quaver. "There are two rings, two of us—it would be difficult for you to manage both."

Said Lord Ferrante distantly, "No, I don't think so."

The silence after that was distinctly sticky, till Vitelli broke it with a curt, "Let us be done. If you will take down the leather bag with the adder, my lord."

The next noises were very hard to interpret, until Vitelli said, "Are you quite certain you have the head end pinned through the leather this time, my lord?"

"Yes," snapped Ferrante impatiently. "Open the bag and reach in. Or would you rather I did?"

"I—well, if you wish, my lord. I'll get the knot."

"Ah ... ha! Got him. Right behind the head. See him grin for you, Niccolo? Heh-heh."

"Ah—not so close, if you don't mind, my lord. His venom would be wasted on me. Come along. We're almost done for tonight, and I am weary to the bone."

Ferrante grunted reluctant agreement. A clattering sound, like pine boards being wrestled about, was followed by actions Fiametta couldn't even guess at, plus more of Vitelli's Latin, sprinkled with some Hebrew, or perhaps it was outright gibberish. Fiametta could scarcely tell.

"What are they doing now?" she asked Monreale.

"I believe it is a spell based upon the principle of contrarity." Monreale listened intently. "It seems to be quite original.... I believe they are forcing the puff adder to, er ... I'm sorry, Fiametta—bite the corpse, or the corpses. It seems to be part of the preservation spell."

More rattling about, and then, suddenly, a shout: "Watch out! It lashes—"

"Don't drop—" The rapid scuttling of feet, "Catch it!"

"You catch it!"

"It's going under the table!"

A brief silence.

"You have boots on, my lord," said Vitelli suggestively.

"They will not protect my arms, reaching under there in the dark, if that is what you are implying," said Ferrante coldly. "You reach under there for it. Or enspell it out. My little mage."

"I am exhausted with spells." Vitelli's voice sounded like it, low and slow.

Ferrante spat again, but did not deny this. After a pause he said, "Come back and clean this place up in the morning. When you can see better. Catch it then. Or perhaps by then it will have escaped, slithered under the door. Come down from there, now."

"Yes ... my lord," said Vitelli wearily.

A careful thump—Vitelli letting himself down from a tabletop?—was followed at length by a bit more rustling and rattling, footsteps, a door closing, and the grating of a key in an iron lock. Then unbroken quiet. When a nightingale warbled from outside Monreale's own workroom windows, Fiametta jumped. The candle guttered low.

Ambrose shook himself from his concentration, and went to light new candles from the old before it went out. The added illumination seemed to bring everyone back to the present. Monreale rubbed his face, grooved deep. Fiametta stretched muscles gone rigid with tension. The tambourine spoke no more; surely Thur must have somehow escaped the chamber before Ferrante and his pet sorcerer had entered. Fiametta could only be glad he could not have witnessed the dreadful abuse of his brother's corpse and spirit.

"Papa resisted that horrible offering Ferrante made ,.. didn't he, Father Monreale?"

Monreale made no immediate answer, though he gave her a small strained smile. "The two necromancers thought their effort a success," he said at last. "But they could be mistaken. Self-delusion is a common fault of those who dabble in the black arts."

Fiametta judged this weak reassurance to be the desire to comfort her, warring with honesty; Monreale being Monreale, honesty had the edge. In a way, she was glad.

Ambrose drew up a wooden chair for the abbot, and a stool for himself, and sat heavily, his brow channeled with dismay. "Who is Jacopo Sprenger, Father? Besides, apparently, Niccolo Vitelli the clerk."

Monreale settled back wearily, looking deeply disturbed. "For a moment, I thought he must be a demon himself. Till more natural explanations occurred to me.

"About ten years ago, the Order sent me to study advanced spiritual thaumaturgy at the University of Bologna, under Cardinal Cardini, that the Church might qualify me to issue licenses to such master mages as your father, Fiametta. In my college at that time was a brilliant young student from Milan named Jacopo Sprenger. He was of humble origins, but had completed his bachelor's work in the seven liberal arts, and was close to being qualified as one of the youngest doctors of theology and thaumaturgy ever. Too young, in my opinion. Brilliant, but not ... wise. That happens, sometimes." Monreale sighed.

"He was training to be an Inquisitor. Again, too heavy a burden for his age, though I fear his intellectual pride was such that he would have been the last to recognize it. He was drawn into a deep study of black witchcraft, ostensibly to aid the Inquisition as a specialist witch-smeller, to stamp out the evil of witches perverted by the service of demons. He was working on a treatise, which he meant to dedicate to the Pope, that he'd titled "The Hammer of Witches." The subject excited him greatly. Too greatly, we finally recognized—too late. He fell into the temptations of the object of his study, as wizards sometimes do; he began to actually experiment with demonology, and it soon got out of hand. Who shall guard the guardians?" Monreale stared into the candle flames, and rubbed his exhaustion-numbed face with tired hands.

"I fear I had not a little to do with the discovery of his, er, after-dark career. He was expelled, and brought to trial very quietly, so as not to damage the reputation of the school. I testified against him. But before the verdict was issued, he suicided in his cell. Swallowed a poisonous sublimate smuggled in to him—or so I was told. Now I think his body must have been carried out still alive, counterfeiting death through some combination of medical and magical means,

"A committee consisting of Cardinal Cardini, myself, and a doctor from the college of law took up the problem of his papers. Cardinal Cardini thought at first merely to put his book on the Index, until we examined it more closely. Sprenger had a hungry mind and a phenomenal memory—his accumulation of spells, anecdotes, folklore and hearsay could have filled ten volumes. But he had no sense. His style was facile, even compelling, but his scholarship was weak, his credulity unlimited, his practical understanding of real courts—the doctor of law threw up his hands. Sprenger seriously recommended that accused black witches be compelled under torture to name accomplices! I know the tortures the Holy Inquisition uses, and the sort of men that apply them—can you imagine the spate of wild accusations that would result, each triggering more arrests, more accusations—why, in a little time an entire district would be in an absolute uproar! It was all incendiary to the point of hysteria, I think it represented Sprenger—the daytime Sprenger—struggling desperately against his night-self. I recommended the book and all his notes be burned."

Ambrose, himself a scholar in a minor way, winced. Monreale spread his hands. "What would you have? Better to burn the book than the poor old hedge-witches, who in my experience—yours too, you've worked in the country districts—are nine times out of ten either mumbling old women with foggy minds, or the malice of a neighbor trying to fix blame for the death of her maltreated cow or for some perfectly natural event like a hailstorm. And the book was bad theology, to boot, ignoring the power of the name of Christ ... tremendously dangerous. We burned it all. Cardinal Cardini was not so sure, but I felt like a surgeon who had successfully stopped a gangrene through a timely amputation.

"Be that as it may, Sprenger himself was by the time of his—we thought—death, utterly corrupt, his will given over entirely to the pursuit of demonic power. Yet I felt I'd personally lost a soul for God, the night I heard he'd suicided, and the Devil laughed at me." Monreale shook his head in memory.

"What are we going to do now, Father?" Fiametta asked, as the silence lengthened.

An ironic smile, full of pain, twisted Monreale's lips. "God knows. I can only pray He will confide it to me."

"But you have to do something to stop them!" quavered Fiametta. "It's black magic, it's in your holy vows to fight black magic! Tomorrow they mean to enslave poor Captain Ochs. Then Papa. And then Ferrante's troops will arrive, and then there will be no chance!"

"If we are to try ... anything, it must be before the Losimon infantry arrives," Ambrose agreed diffidently.

"I don't need you to tell me that, snapped Monreale. He controlled his nervous irritation with a visible effort, squaring his slumped shoulders. "It's not a simple problem. It's hard to conceive of a force sufficient to stop Ferrante that does not itself partake of black magic. Some evil intent, seeping through to imperil the soul."

"But ... everyone's depending on you. Like a soldier. Soldiers do awful things, but we need them, to protect us from ... from other soldiers," said Fiametta.

"You need not tell me what soldiers do," said Monreale dryly; Fiametta flushed. "I'm well acquainted with the whole vile argument. I've seen it used to justify crimes you can scarcely imagine. And yet ..."

Fiametta's eyes narrowed. "There is something. You have it in mind, something you can do, don't you. Something magical."

"I must pray on it."

"You pray a lot. Will you still be praying when Ferrante's army marches to the gate of Saint Jerome and batters it down? When Ferrante commands spirits with the wave of his hand?" Fiametta demanded hotly. "If all you're going to do is pray, why not hand over Lord Ascanio and everything now? Why not yesterday?"

"We might," said Brother Ambrose slowly, "live to fight another day. Lay charges of black magic later upon Lord Ferrante."

"And what Herculean sergeant-at-arms shall we send to arrest the miscreants, after they have made themselves undisputed lords and masters of two states?" said Monreale softly, staring again into the flames. "Sprenger must remember me, as surely as I do him. I know he must, he's been so very careful to keep from my sight. I wonder if I would live to lay charges anywhere."

"Well, then!" said Fiametta.

His fingers told over the beads in his lap. He glanced up at her from under tufted gray brows. "I am not.... a powerful mage, Fiametta. Not as powerful as your Papa, or even some of the lesser mages here in Montefoglia ... God knows, I tried to be, once. It has been my burden to have an understanding greater than my talent. Those who can, do. Those who can't ..."

Ambrose interjected a little negative huff, spreading his hands in denial. "Not so, Father!"

One corner of Monreale's lips twisted up. "My good Brother. By what standards do you imagine you judge? Did you think it was only a monastic calling that holds me here in Montefoglia? First-rate talents go to Rome, go to the Sacred College. Lesser men find themselves buried in rural provinces. In my youth, I dreamed of being a Marshall by the time I was twenty-five. I put away those military follies only to replace them with dreams of becoming a Cardinal Thaumaturge before I was thirty-five ... God gave me humility at last, for God knew I needed it.

"Sprenger—if Vitelli is indeed he—had a talent stronger than his understanding. Now, after it has had ten years to grow cunning in dark and secret, he's found a powerful patron, who protects him, funds him, lends him his animal vitality—for Ferrante has great strength of will, make no mistake. Add to that a spirit-slave of the order of Master Beneforte, and their potency will be ..." He broke off.

Ambrose cleared his throat. "I confess, Father, your words unsettle my stomach."

"My calling is to save souls, not lives." Monreale's fingers worked.

"Souls can be saved later," Fiametta pointed out urgently. "When you lose lives, you lose lives and souls both."

Monreale shot her a peculiar grin. "Have you ever considered taking up Scholastic studies, Fiametta? But no, your sex forbids."

An insight shook her. "You're not afraid of losing your soul. You're just afraid of losing." Afraid of having his self-accusation of second-ratedness finally confirmed.

Ambrose drew in his breath at this blunt insult, but Monreale's grin merely stretched. His eyes were lidded, unreadable.

"Go to bed, Fiametta," he said at last. "Ambrose, I will send Brother Perotto to watch and maintain this ear through the night. Though I suspect the show is over for the moment." He stood up, shook out his robes, and rubbed his face. "I'll be in the chapel."