The Spirit Ring (28 page)

      
A tiny scuttling noise crossed the chamber. Only in this stone-silence and night-stillness could Thur have heard it, exacerbated though his senses now were. The snake seemed to hear it, too. Its head rose and wove from side to side; then, coil by coil, it slid from Thur's leg and out from under the linen cloth. It seemed to take an age for it to remove its entire length. Thur held his breath for several more seconds, then let it go with an explosive huff. In a frantic, fluid motion, he rolled out from under his cramped table-prison and vaulted atop it instead. He grabbed for a dislodged iron candelabrum, felt but scarcely seen, before it could fall with a clang. His eyes, straining in the utter darkness beneath the cloth for so long, could actually make out dim shapes in the faint starlight reflecting from the lake through the deep window: his table, the crates on their trestles. The light was not good enough for him to see the adder, though.

      
"Master Beneforte," he quavered, "will you light me one candle?" No response. More hesitantly, "Uri? Please?"

      
His hands shaking, Thur felt along the tabletop. Papers, knives, cool metal tools. A little box. A tinder box? Thur opened it, but found it contained only a soft powder. He almost licked his fingers to try to identify it, but on second thought wiped them on his tunic instead. From the floor came odd scrabbling noises, clicking, and a weird, tiny animal shriek, which Thur tried to ignore. Could snakes climb table legs? He'd heard of snakes in trees....

      
Another, heavier box proved more lucky. Flint and steel made familiar weights in his hands. He struck sparks, found the tinder in their light, and managed after several tries to ignite a splinter. It almost went out before he could raise it to a candle wick, but after dying to a tiny blue globe, the yellow flame flared up from the wax. Thur, kneeling on the tabletop, decided it was the most beautiful flame he'd ever seen. He reignited the splinter and lit the entire candelabrum, six short, slagged, and nearly spent beeswax lumps. Then he looked around for the adder.

      
No wonder the snake had seemed to go on forever. The creature was four feet long. It was coiled to one side of the floor near a saucer of milk. Its jaws were stretched wide, its throat distended; the back half of a very large rat stuck out of its mouth. The rat's rear legs spasmed, and its tail twitched.

      
In a wild leap, Thur sprang upon the snake, grabbed it tightly with both hands around its stuffed throat to keep it full of rat and unable to twist and bite, ran to the window, and crammed it out through the bars. After a moment, a faint splash echoed back from the lake below. Thur sank to the floor, gasping for breath. Several minutes passed before his other troubles began to crowd back into his mind again.

      
Looking around, Thur decided Vitelli must have brought the saucer of milk for the snake. It certainly couldn't have been meant for the cat. Thur grimaced at the gruesome pile of animal parts left to coagulate in the center of a complicated diagram drawn on the floor in red and white chalk. Stepping carefully around the marks, he tried the door. The lock did not open from this side without the key, either. How much time had really passed? The guards upstairs must have missed him by now, searched—though not in here. Thur was fairly sure no one came in here voluntarily except Ferrante and Vitelli.

      
"Master Beneforte?" Thur whispered. "Uri? Master Beneforte? Can you open this lock again?"

      
No response from the spirits this time either. Yet Thur had
seen
Beneforte, earlier. His intense sense of Uri's presence had driven him down here. Thur eyed the papers scattered over the table. A conjuring compelled a spirit to appear whether it wanted to or not. Thur didn't suppose he'd be so fortunate as to find such a recipe jotted down. He turned the papers over. More Latin, mostly; he knew words here and there. "Master Beneforte,
please
."

      
"What?"
The irritated tone was sick, shaken, but somehow stronger. Not so effortful as Beneforte's earlier, desperate attempts to communicate. Thur turned, staring into every corner of the chamber, but no dust-ghost wavered in the draft that fluttered the candles. Only the voice.

      
"Where... where is my brother? Can you see him, from where you are? Why doesn't he speak?" Thur asked the emptiness.

      
A long silence; Thur began to fear that Beneforte's ghost had fled the chamber and left him, when the reluctant reply whispered, "He is a weaker shade. He has not had the lifetime of the spiritual manipulation of the world of matter that my profession, my art, gave to me. Now that my clay has dropped away, my blind eyes are opened to such visions... but oh, I did not think I would miss the sensations of my gross flesh so much...." The slow voice died away in longing. It seemed to be centered in a position over the chalk diagram.

      
"How can I rescue you? What should I do? Vitelli says he means to enslave my brother tomorrow night!"

      
"Ferrante might not be so bad a lord to serve," Beneforte's voice murmured judiciously. "Ferrante, Sandrino, Lorenzo... a prince is a prince. Service is service.... Ferrante talks of having my Perseus cast."

      
"I'd think he'd be more likely to melt it down for cannon!" said Thur.

      
"True, he's been more a patron of the art of war than the art of sculpture. But he is not immune to the attraction of glory in that form. Glorifying himself with my Perseus, he would immortalize me...."

      
"But you're dead," Thur pointed out inanely. "Three nights ago you cried for help as if to save your soul!"
Literally.

      
"Well, souls, now..." The ghostly voice trailed off. "Why hurry to that world, after all?"

      
"Can you see another world?" Thur asked, awed. Frightened.

      
"I glimpsed a light... it almost hurt.
Did
hurt."

      
But you're supposed to go there. Not stay here.
This was not the urgent apparition of three nights ago speaking now, Thur realized with a chill. How much had the necromancers' black rites already sapped Beneforte's will?

      
"Vitelli is no prince. Do you itch to serve
him
?"

      
"That Milanese dabbler! Second-rate scum—I could have him under my..." A glow like a dazzled afterimage in the eye zigzagged through the chamber. A flash of... anger? Pure will?
Your Papa could be in danger of becoming a demon....

      
Thur felt a cold knot twist in his gut. If Beneforte's spirit was already becoming corrupted, for how much longer could Thur trust him? He scarcely seemed to be struggling against Ferrante any more.
Not too late, no!

      
But what could Thur do? The bodies—Vitelli and Ferrante seemed to need the bodies, to complete their vile rites. Could Thur steal them away somehow? He could not lift even one of those salt crates by himself, let alone two. And there were the stairs to climb and the guards to get past. A wild vision of setting the chamber afire and reducing the corpses to ash foundered on an obvious lack of sufficient fuel. If the bodies were only partly destroyed, could Vitelli still use them?

      
Thur was crouched before the lock, smiling in his desperation, when an oddly familiar flicker tickled the corner of his eye. He tilted his head, staring into the wavering candle-cast shadows across the room. Could Beneforte—or Uri—be struggling to take up material form? That liquid, moving shadow by the wall was no rat, nor (unsettling thought) another snake. The shadow stepped from the wall, taking on dimension as it did so, and skittered to hide coyly behind a trestle leg. A little manikin, not two feet tall....

      
"Good God," said Thur, startled. "I didn't know you had kobolds here!"

      
"There's quite a little colony of them in the hills west of town," Beneforte's ghostly voice remarked, eerily conversational.

      
"I thought they only lived in mountain wastes. Didn't go near men's towns."

      
"That's generally true. But they are attracted to magic. I had rather an outbreak of them for a while. They came up under my house to spy on my doings in my shop. Pesky, and they move things about, but not malicious if you don't attack them."

      
"Yes, that's the way ours are in Bruinwald," agreed Thur. The shadowy little figure flickered to shelter behind a nearer trestle leg. Beady eyes flashed at him.

      
"I trapped one once," Beneforte reminisced. "I made it bring me some raw silver, and beryls. It claimed there is no gold to be had in the ground in these parts. I finally let it go, and after that its kin grew wary and stayed away from my shop, and I was not troubled further."

      
"I thought they were mainly attracted to milk, which they cannot get underground. Or so it is in the mountains. They sometimes steal from unguarded pails, after the cows or goats are milked. And there was a wet nurse in the village who got in a lot of trouble when she was found to have silver nuggets in her possession—she was accused of stealing them, or of lying with the miners who had stolen them from work. But she claimed she was trading her milk to the kobolds."

      
"Milk, yes," came a thin hopeful voice from behind the trestle. "We
like
milk."

      
"I used milk to bait my kobold trap," Beneforte confirmed. "At home they mainly eat a bread made from fungus, which they grow underground in their colonies. Milk is better than wine to them. I never heard of them stealing wine."

      
"My mother leaves milk out for them in secret on All Hallow's Eve," Thur confessed. "With a prayer for safety in the mines. Brother Glarus would not approve. It's always gone the next day."

      
"They swim through the rock as a man might swim through water. Strange." Beneforte's voice hesitated. "I can see them now. Though my eyes are... See all around, see through the rock. There have been half a dozen of the rock-folk hanging around under the castle since Vitelli arrived and began his... activities. I think Vitelli worries them, a little."

      
Vitelli worries all of us.

      
A twiggy finger pointed from behind the trestle toward the saucer of milk. "Not a trap, my lords?" it inquired. "You don't want it, yes?"

"It's not my milk," said Thur. "You can have it, for all of me. Vitelli put it there for his snake. But I can't guarantee it's not poisoned or something."

      
"You need my saltcellar," Beneforte said smugly.

      
Thur glanced at the table. "They took it with them." Solid gold, Ferrante would hardly have left it lying about even without its magic properties.

      
"Do I even need the salt now, to focus...?" Beneforte's voice went meditative. "My eyes are wide, if I dare see...."

      
Thur saw nothing, but a felt
presence
near the saucer of milk made the hairs stir on his arms. The opaque white surface of the liquid shivered.

      
"Vitelli has laced it with an opiate, to stun the snake," Beneforte's voice reported. "Can I...
dare
I..."

      
A blue flame rose from the surface of the milk, burning off in a long streamer.

      
"It's purified now," said Beneforte. His voice was elated. 'I couldn't have done that, when I was clouded by my flesh."

      
Thur glanced uneasily at the diagram and its spent, unclean offering on the floor nearby.
You could not have done that yesterday, I'll wager.

      
The kobold crept warily out to the saucer, "Thank you, my lord," it addressed Beneforte. Wherever he was.

      
A second kobold, and a third, oozed up out of the stone beside the first. They all knelt down on their gnarled little hands and lapped at the milk, for all the world like three scrawny barn cats around a bowl. These hill-kobolds were lighter in color than the granite-gray little men of Bruinwald, with a yellowish cast to their skins like the Montefoglian sandstone. The two new ones were naked, though their leader wore an apron much like its mountain cousins. The milk level dropped rapidly; the leader picked up the saucer, as large as its head, and licked it clean. It gave Thur a black-eyed stare over the rim of the crockery, then, abruptly, all three melted down into the stone and were gone without even a thank-you.

      
Thur blinked, and tried the door lock again. It still held fast. "Master Beneforte? How should I save you? And my brother?"
And myself?

      
"I grow weary," the ghostly voice breathed. "I cannot speak any more..."

      
Evasive, was what Master Beneforte's shade grew, Thur decided unhappily. Not good. He tried to think through the haze of exhaustion that numbed his face and filled his head with fog. He was swaying on his feet. He felt in his tunic. He still had two little ears left. Three, should he chance upon some better place to hide the one he'd left in the grooms' loft. Abbot Monreale had explicitly urged him to try to smuggle an ear to the imprisoned Duchess, if he could, up in her tower. Well, he'd made his way down to the dungeon, right enough. It was Monreale's job to fight black magic. It was Thur's job to follow Monreale's orders. If he could. His jaw tightened.

      
He could not get past the guards till he solved the problem of getting out of this room. Enough odd tools were scattered on the table and shelves; if nothing else he could simply take the blasted lock apart. But when Thur approached it with a hastily grabbed awl in his hand, he found he could not make the metal penetrate the keyhole nor dig beneath the nails. The lock was ensorcelled, protected as if by some invisible, unbreakable glass. Beneforte's ghost, of course, had not had a problem with it. Beneforte's ghost walked through walls, if it chose. Thur ground his teeth.