The Spirit Ring

Chapter Nineteen

Thur held his palm near the statue's face. The bronze, though no longer glowing with its own light, was still too hot to touch. But Uri was no longer there to touch even if Thur could. The streaming rain would cool the metal soon enough. Thur raised his face to the sky, and let the cold drops mix with the hot ones from his eyes, disguising his grief before all these strangers. Their world would know Uri no more, would soon forget that he'd ever lived or laughed. But I swear I will remember.

When he'd blinked his vision clear, Thur saw that soldiers, Montefoglian soldiers, were arriving through the ruined gates. A couple of them pointed at the statue in startled recognition of their late captain's features, but then hurried about their work. Fiametta stood in the scintillating rain looking small, and exhausted, and very wet, her crinkly black curls escaping her braid only to be plastered flat to her skin. Thur wanted to offer her a cloak, but he himself possessed only the sodden old robe turned down around his loins. He rucked it back up over his shoulders and stood barefoot in the puddles and shivered, partly from cold, partly from reaction.

Fiametta turned her wan face to Monreale. "How did you come here, Father? When they carried you off to the infirmary at Saint Jerome under Vitelli's spell, you were lying almost as pale and still as a dead man yourself. Brother Mario wouldn't let me see you."

Monreale hung on his crozier, his sandaled feet apart. He tore his pensive gaze from the cooling bronze. "The spell was broken late yesterday evening. Was that your doing, Thur?"

"I ... think it may have been, Father. I did not know for sure what spell was broken, but it distracted Vitelli when I swept a spell-set from the table. It was just before I escaped from the castle dungeon with my brother's body."

"Indeed," said Monreale. "I woke, but I was very sick. Hie healers kept me abed until morning, when I finally regained enough strength to ride over them. It was not until afternoon that I discovered you were gone from Saint Jerome, Fiametta, and no one seemed to know for how long. I sent out my birds, but could learn little except that Vitelli and Ferrante were not abroad, and Thur was not yet hanging by his neck from the castle tower.

"Sandrino's officers and I agreed we must attack, try as we'd planned yesterday. But I decided I must close the distance before attempting to grapple again with Vitelli. His powers had clearly grown to an extraordinary degree. We made ready, settling on a night assault to disguise our thin numbers." Wearily, he rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes narrowed and glinted with the press of these recent memories.

"We sallied out at dark, and had a sharp fight with the besiegers that delayed us again. We finally broke through, and made for town. The soldiers needed the few horses we had, but a brother found that white one wandering among our sheep. Our remaining sheep. Is that the beast your Papa bought in Ceccnino, Fiametta? He was robbed. Well ... it saved my strength, I suppose.

"But when we all came up to the town gates, expecting a desperate battle, the Losimons were gone from them, pulled out by a mob of townsmen. So instead of leading the populace to the castle, we followed them. I had by then gained the idea that you were mounting some sort of magical attack, Fiametta, and I rode ahead as fast as I could, in great fear that Vitelli's demonic powers might indeed have grown so transcendent as to conquer death. And so it proved." Monreale vented a depressed sigh. "Not that this second-rate old man imagined himself a match for that dark power."

"Yet you came anyway," said Thur.

"Father, we would have been destroyed without you. In fact," Fiametta's brows drew down, puzzling this out, "none of us alone was a match for Vitelli. I could release Papa, but I could not hold Vitelli. Papa could hold Vitelli, but could not exorcise him. You could speed him to banishment, which thing neither Papa nor I were capable of ... but only if he were held. And we could never have entered in here at all without Uri, who would not have been made without Thur. We may all of us be lesser folk, but we were a first-rate company together."

"Huh. Monreale smiled slowly, his eyes half-lidded. "Could that be the lesson God had been trying to teach me, all this time? From the mouths of babes."

"I am not a babe," said Fiametta with some determination.

"Child, from the vantage of my half-century, you all look like babes." Monreale pulled himself up by his crozier, straightening painfully. He gazed a moment more at the bronze statue, "No. You are not a babe. And so you stand in a grown woman's danger."

"Father," said Thur. "There's something you had better see, right away before it gets disturbed. I left one of your monks to guard the door.

Monreale nodded. 'Lead me, boy. For there is much yet to do."

Thur beckoned him into the castle by the servant's entry and down the now-familiar corridors into the dungeon. At least they were out of the rain. A monk held a torch for his abbot. Thur was not sure how the stone-cut halls could be any darker at night than in the day, but they seemed so. The strength that relentless terror had lent him was passing off, and he bumped into the walls as he walked. Limped. Every muscle he owned seemed shot through with rust and grit, twinging when he moved, aching when he stood still.

The racks of iron bars that were the cell doors stood open; the prison was half-emptied of prisoners. The hale had already departed to join the fray. The injured were being helped out by Montefoglian townsmen, some of them relatives.

Thur's little procession wound down the stairway to the lower half. A white-faced monk stood holding Thur's sledgehammer outside the shattered, splintered door to the necromancers' magic work chamber. They all entered after Monreale, and Thur took the one burning candle and lit the slagged remains of others from it.

Monreale's breath hissed out between his front teeth. The trestles were knocked over, and the salt crate dropped and split and spilled where Thur and a monk had snatched the lid in their haste to bring out Master Beneforte's body. Upon the floor spiraled a complex double diagram; one lobe was emptied— Thur had lifted up Master Beneforte's remains himself, when the frightened monk had refused to touch them—the other lobe framed yet another corpse. A naked young man, dreadfully mutilated, his throat slit.

"That was the power by which they finally forced Papa into the spirit ring," breathed Fiametta, peering fearfully around Monreale. "The new ghost. I saw him, inside Vitelli. Oh, Father." She turned, and closed her eyes, and swallowed hard.

That could have been himself, Thur thought, looking, but out of the corner of his eye. "Who is this poor wretch, Father?"

Monreale moistened his lips, and cautiously approached and knelt by the dead man's head. But whatever magic had been generated by this dark deed was apparently now consumed. "Yes. I know the boy. He's one of my brethren ... his name was Luca. He is the monk I sent to spy two days before you, Thur, and heard no more of. Vitelli must have selected him for this from among the prisoners, after you escaped. He has a family in town, parents and brothers and sisters ... Murder, murder of the blackest." He bent his head in deep sorrow, and began the rites of blessing.

When he rose, Thur asked in worry, "Should we have this room boarded up, or something?"

Monreale sucked grimly on his lower Up, and walked around, muffling his shock, examining the evidence with the cool thoroughness of one who realizes he must soon write an official report upon it all. "Hm? No .. ." He gathered up the notes and papers on the worktable. "These should not be left about, however. No, Thur, quite the contrary. This room should be left open, and every guard and citizen who can should be brought to view it. Let the evidence of Vitelli and Ferrante's wrongdoing be made public before as many witnesses as can be gathered." He paused. "As many witnesses as saw a bronze statue get up and walk, and slay two men. At least that many witnesses."

He turned on his heel to face Thur and Fiametta. "You two know what you have done, and we will talk of it further. Later. The first reports to the Archdiocese, the Curia, and the general of my Order will be written by me. In the meantime ... you may be certain that the most fantastical rumors will be flying among the people about tonight's events. I hope as many of those rumors as possible may attach to Vitelli, and not to yourself. Do you understand?"

Fiametta nodded rather doubtfully; Thur shook his head in honest bewilderment. Monreale motioned him over, and lowered his voice. "Look, boy. It is absolutely essential that Fiametta never come to be questioned by the Inquisition. They would burn her for her hot tongue alone at the end of the first day, the evidence go hang. Understand?"

"Oh ..." Thur could see it, yes.

"If you love her, help her keep her head down and her mouth shut. Church politics are my department. If necessary, well, a man or two owes me a favor or two. But Fiametta must take care not to offend her neighbors, or to appear ... too unusual. Or I might not be able to control all of the consequences."

"Uh ... would getting married and setting up shop in her father's house be too ... unusual?"

"No. That would be ideal. Her setting up shop without getting married, now that could be dangerous."

Thur brightened. "I'll help her all she'll let me, Father."

"You'd better be prepared to help her more than that, boy, if necessary," Monreale murmured dryly.

"With all my heart, sir."

Monreale gave Thur a short nod, and turned to go out. Thur paused for one last disturbed sidelong look at the sacrificed man lying in his pooled blood.

"He was ... my scapegoat. Luca." He must remember that name, even as he hoped others would remember Uri's.

Monreale pursed his lips. "Yes, in a sense ... though if you had died yesterday, it would not have saved him tonight. Still, I charge you to light a candle for him each Sunday in Montefoglia Cathedral, and pray for his soul."

"Yes, Father," said Thur, comforted.

Monreale nodded, and led them out.

While passing again through the now nearly deserted prison corridor, one level up, Thur heard a faint moan. "Wait ..." He ducked back to the end cell. Sure enough, a bundled shape lay on the woven straw pallet. "Why has this door not been opened? Where is the key? Thur called.

An elderly townsman appeared from the guard station, rattling the key ring. "They told us he was mad, sir. Is the proper sergeant coming, to take these?"

"I'll take them," said Monreale, unburdening the townsman of the ring. He passed it to Thur, who bent and opened the lock.

Lord Pia lay alone in the cell under a thin blanket. His face was very gray, and his glazed eyes seemed not to recognize Thur. The wound in his arm had never been bandaged, and was thickly clotted with blood. Judging by his mottled bruises, he had been badly beaten upon his final recapture. To satisfy his mind, Thur stuck his head out of the cefl window. One bar remained at the side; around it were tied the points of a stretched-out silk hose leg, its foot in turn tied to another to make a rope of sorts, now hanging limp and wet against the cliff face. How very simple. Thur was both relieved and slightly disappointed. Lord Pia had not flown down like a giant bat to Vitelli's dark chamber window last night after all. Thur imagined he would have liked to.

Monreale sent for help, and soon had the poor castellan laid on a plank and carried out of the dungeon before them by a sturdy monk and another townsman-parishoner. They all arrived back at the courtyard to find a swirl of shouting people coalescing around Duchess Letitia, who had been released from the tower. She had called Sandrino's surviving officers to her, and was organizing them to regain control of her castle, first from the remaining Losimons, and then from the Montefoglian townsmen. The Montefoglians, while scorning to steal from their late Duke directly, were not above relieving any captured or killed Losimon looters of their booty. Monreale was promptly drawn into the Duchess's whirlwind.

Lady Pia ran to her husband's side, looking distressed. Lord Pia seemed to recognize her, despite his debilitation and uncertain mental state. He smiled weakly up at her, and grasped her hand as she knelt by him. She immediately browbeat some passing men into carrying him upstairs to their apartments in the tower, once more a home and not a prison, and ruthlessly diverted a healer-monk in Monreale's train to her aid.

Somehow, the center of all this midnight chaos had shifted, from them to Monreale to the Duchess. Thur was just as glad. The rain was letting up, turning to a fine misting drizzle. Thur put his arm around Fiametta's shivering shoulders.

"I guess we can take your Papa's body home, now."

"If my house is still standing. What ....hat of Uri?"

"You mean the statue? Leave it, I suppose. It's only a statue, now. Nobody's going to steal him without the aid of a couple of yokes of oxen."

She nodded, her eyes wide in the wavering half-light. They picked their way to the crate lid resting on the cobbles with its shrouded burden. "Thur, I don't think I can carry my half," she worried.

"I don't think I could either, right now," Thur said honestly. "D'you want your horse back?"

The white horse was sniffing dolefully at the cobbles, where no grass grew. It had not wandered far, and for some reason no one had attempted to abscond with it while Monreale's back was turned. Thur captured it by walking up to it and scratching it behind the ears. It rubbed its head against him, scraping Thur's skin on the bridle studs and shedding wet white hairs.

Thur handed the reins to Fiametta, and went to look for a piece of rope. He found a coil hanging on a nail in the stables. No one disputed his claim of it. He tied one end of the rope to a stirrup, wound it around the headboard of the crate lid, and tied the other end to the other stirrup, converting the lid to a makeshift drag or sledge. The white horse flared its nostrils in worry at the scraping sound behind it, and sidled, giving Thur a mad vision of the beast bolting across the country with Master Beneforte thudding and bouncing along behind in one last wild ride. But after a moment the horse settled down to its usual tired plod, and Thur judged it safe to help Fiametta aboard. She wrapped her hands in the long mane, and drooped over the animal's thick neck. Thur led them out the ruined castle gate and down the hill.

The streets of Montefoglia were growing quieter as the night waned. They passed only two small groups of excited men with torches, who yet swung as wide as the narrow streets permitted around Thur's little cavalcade. Thur was too tired to do anything but ignore them. They arrived at the wrecked oak door to Fiametta's house without being accosted. The walls were still standing, nor had the tile roof fallen in. That was nice, if unexpected.

Thur helped Fiametta down; she stumbled inside. His fingers numb, Thur picked at the knots in the rope, and freed the crate lid. By that time Tich came out with a lantern and led the horse around to the high gate into the back garden.

Together, they tied it out of range of the spring onions and lettuces of the kitchen vegetable plot. Tien brought the beast a bucket of water, which it drank thirstily, with a grateful snuffle that blew slobber all over him. In the general filth and soot of Tich's tunic it was scarcely noticeable.

"We'll have to find it fodder in the morning," Tich said in a tone of judicious expertise. "This little bit of grass won't last."

"Not the way it eats. I'll help you go look for your mules tomorrow, too."

Tich nodded, satisfied, and they locked the garden gate. Tich helped Thur carry Master Beneforte's plank inside, to lay in the front room next to Uri's; someone had moved him to rest again in this quieter place.

"They should be buried soon," said Thur. "Properly."

"There's going to be a lot of funerals tomorrow in Montefoglia, from what we've heard," said Tich.

"They'll make room for these two," said Thur. "I'll make them make room."

"Ruberta has put bedrolls for us in the front hall," said Tich. "She says we can guard the door that way till it's fixed."

Thur half-smiled. "I don't think anyone is going to bother this house." Bedroll. What a beautiful word. Thur could have wept at the beautiful charity of someone making a bedroll for him.

Tich retired to his bedroll before it had entirely cooled, but Thur stumbled one last time into the courtyard. A light shone there, candle or lantern—both, he saw, entering. Fiametta had stuck a candle-stub upright in the dirt beside the empty casting pit, and was holding up a lantern for closer inspection of the damages.

The place looked like a midden. Abandoned furnace, empty casting pit, broken-up furniture, scattered tools. The center of one side of the gallery was gone, the whitewash above it was black with smoke stain, and charred timbers swung dangerously loose in the corners.

"They got the fire out," Thur noted brightly.

"Yes," said Fiametta. "Ruberta and Tich and the neighbors. I did not know ... I had such friends." She sat down heavily upon the cinder-scattered flagstones in her sodden velvets. "Oh, Thur! My poor house is a shambles!"

"Now. Now." Gingerly, he eased himself down beside her and stroked her shaking shoulders. "Maybe it won't look that bad in the morning. I'll help you fix it up. That gallery's the easy part. I used to help build mine-timbering, you know. I can build you a gallery that won't ever come down."

Her breath puffed out between her quivering lips, whether in a laugh or a sob Thur could not tell. 'Is there anything you can't do?"

"I don't know." Thur considered this. "I haven't tried everything."

Her brows rose quizzically. "Do you want to try everything?"

He took a breath, for courage. "I'd like to try being your husband."

She blinked, rapidly, and rubbed her eyes with a soot-smudged hand. "I'd be a bad wife. My tongue is too sharp. Everybody says so. You'd get henpecked."

Thur wrinkled his brows. "Was that yes, or no? Come. Where else will you find a fellow brave enough to marry a girl who can set him on fire with a word?"

"I'd never!" Her spine straightened. "But truly. I talk a lot—Papa said so—and I'm not very patient."

"I'm very patient," Thur offered. "I'm patient enough for us both.'

"You weren't very patient with the caking bronze." Her lips curved up.

"Yes, well... it wasn't right. I needed it to be excellent." He needed to be eloquent. He shouldn't be trying to say these things when he was so damned tired he couldn't even see straight. He looked up, and was startled by an orange tinge outlined by the shadowy black square of the tile roof. Was the town afire? "Why is the sky that funny color?"

Fiametta looked up, too. "It's dawn," she said after a long moment. "The clouds are breaking up."

So it was. An apricot luminosity edged slate-blue masses. "Oh." His brains felt like porridge.

Fiametta giggled, and sniffled. She ought to be in a bedroll, and in a dry gown, too. He gathered her into his lap, and hugged her for warmth. She did not object. In fact, she twined her arms around his neck. And so they sat for a time, while the sky lightened.

"It looks worse," Fiametta observed in a dreamy voice.

"Huh?" Thur jerked awake.

"It looks worse. In the morning."

He stared over her rat's nest of hair at the wreck of a courtyard. "Well. Yes."

Fiametta's nose wrinkled. "Yes."

"Yes what?" Thur asked after a minute's pause decided him that he no longer had any idea what they were talking about.

"Yes. I want to marry you, too."

"Oh. Good." He blinked, and hugged her closer.

"I think it's because you understand excellence. What it takes."

"What is?"

"Why I love you."

A slow grin fought its way onto his exhaustion-numbed face. "Of course. That's why I love you."