The Spirit Ring (32 page)

      
Vitelli himself had to look three times. "What...?" He bent to pick it up. After a moment, he swore. His hand closed on the parchment tambourine, crushing it; the orange light leaked briefly between his fingers, "Where did you get this?" he demanded of Thur.

      
Thur smiled dreamily, afloat in a sea of pain.

      
"Answer!" a guard yelled, kicking him again. Thur grunted, and paddled after a receding darkness that would take him away from all this.

      
"Never mind." Vitelli put out a hand to stop the guard's helpful efforts. "If there are more, I can use this to find them."

      
"What are they?" asked Ferrante, taking and comparing the crumpled circle with the other.

      
"I believe it is some kind of device for eavesdropping, my lord. It's rather fine work. I feel there are more about."

      
Ferrante glanced from the tambourines to Thur, pursing his lips. "He is a spy?"

      
"Without doubt," said Vitelli.

      
"He said he was Sandrino's guard captain's brother. Of course, he could be both." Ferrante beckoned to his soldiers. "Hang him from the south tower. On the side where he can be seen from the north tower."

      
Guards reached for Thur's arms, to drag him upright. Thur dimly recalled praying to God to save him for hanging.
I take it back.
Surely he'd been promised death pressed in earth and water, not death dangling in the air.

      
"Wait, my lord." Vitelli advanced to peer down into Thur's swollen and bloody face. "Brother to Captain Ochs? Really? They don't look much alike. Well, perhaps the chin."

      
"Does it matter?"

      
"There is an opportunity..."

      
"What?" said Ferrante in exasperation. "I get no pleasure in dragging this out. He is a spy and an assassin; fine, let him be executed at once, as a warning to others."

      
"Execute, yes, but... I believe we can make better use of his death. Below-stairs. Eh? Cats and cocks are but trifles, compared to a man. And if the man be truly a brother to... another, why then—I will have to recalculate all my diagrams. Oh, it's excellent, my lord!"

      
"Oh." Ferrante rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I see." He stood a moment in uncharacteristic indecision. "I wonder if he has another brother who will come popping out of the dark at me? Well... he is a condemned criminal, after all. Too bad. I rather liked him."

      
"All the better, my lord." Vitelli's eyes glittered.

      
Ferrante's lips thinned, but he turned to his soldiers. "Take him to the dungeon. We'll question him later, and execute him privately."

      
Two Losimons forced Thur to his feet. The garden spun around him in slow jerks, and his stomach heaved. His new gray tunic was all spoiled with bloodstains too, now, he saw with tearful regret. Mother would be unhappy.... They frog-marched him up the garden. The dimness of the castle swallowed the day. The hollow echo of plastered corridors floated past him. He stumbled down stairs into a perpetual stone night. Around a corner, past familiar barred cells. An argument hurt his ears, irritated voices: "... too crowded." "Not in there!" "Why not, we have to watch him all the time, anyway. Maybe this will stir something up." "Don't want him stirred up!"

      
The world, in the form of cold stone, came to rest at last, pressing against Thur's face. His hands felt across the gritty chill, and he turned his aching head carefully to the side. A little dim blue daylight reflected through a tunnel in the wall above him. Somewhere, a metal lock clanked shut, and footsteps receded.

      
A thick warm hand gripped his hair and turned his face around. Thur looked wearily into red eyes in an unshaven face, a beard like salt and pepper scattered across sagging jowls. Tufted brows rose.

      
"A bat's the thing," the mad castellan advised him kindly, opened his hand, and let Thur's cheek slap back to the stone.

Chapter Fourteen

"There goes the last of them," said grim Brother Perotto. A haze of orange light evaporated from the surface of the parchment tambourine on the table before him. The haze flickered uncertainly in the cool northern daylight of Abbot Monreale's work chamber, and was gone.

      
"All that work," moaned Brother Ambrose. The other monks ringing the table, each clutching a now-silenced mouth, grimaced in agreement. Fiametta fingered the last tambourine, sitting before her place. Dead. It had never even started to speak, but now its magic aura was not merely inactive, it was gone without trace.
Where are you, Thur?

      
Fiametta had just turned over to Monreale the mouth speaking, alternately clear and strangely muffled, from Lady Pia's sleeve, when it had emitted a cry and cut off. Monreale had hastily gathered his other listeners together to follow Vitelli's destructive progress through the castle; Sandrino's office, the infirmary, the groom's dormitory. The words the little mouths emitted before going dead had been few and businesslike: "Here's another, my lord." "Under the blanket. Ha!" Till the last, damning one, found on its shelf in the chamber of necromancy. Fiametta understood that mouth had kept Brother Perotto tinglingly awake last night even after she had gone to bed by Monreale's orders, but Perotto had been maddeningly vague about the events it had reported, at least to her. Vitelli's last whispered message had been brief and horrible. "It is you, Monreale, isn't it? I recognize your style. It's done you no good. Your fate is sealed, and your stupid spy shall die directly." A crackling, cut off, and the mouth in front of Brother Perotto had given up its so-painstakingly-invested magic.

      
Monreale sat bent over, pale, as if pieces were being torn bit by bit from his belly. Brother Perotto sat back and turned his palms out in helpless frustration. "What happened, Father? It seemed to be going so well, and then..."

      
"I greatly fear for poor Thur," said Monreale lowly into his lap.

      
Fiametta wrapped her arms around her torso, pressing the lion ring secretly between her breasts. She could still sense its warm, musical hum, its tiny heartbeat. If Thur's real heart stopped, would she know? She stared around the table at the array of gray-cowled men, solemn, authoritative, and helpless. "What's the use of you?" she demanded in sudden anguish.

      
"What?" said Brother Ambrose sharply, though Abbot Monreale merely looked up.

      
"What's the
use
of you? The Church is supposed to be our defense against evil. Oh, you ride about the countryside, terrorizing old hedge-witches about a plague of lice in their neighbor's hair or some stupid love potion which half the time doesn't work anyway, and threatening their souls with hellfire if they don't cease and desist, you're fine at pestering men at work in their shops, but when real evil comes, what good are you? You're too afraid to fight it! You persecute the little crimes of little people, that's safe enough, but when great crimes march in with an army at their backs, where is all your preaching then? Strangely silent! Great stupid louts of—of
boys
—are hanged while you sit and
pray
...." Tears were running down the inside of her nose, and she sniffed mightily, wiped her sleeve across her face, and bit her lip. "Oh, what's the
use
...."

      
Brother Perotto began an angry lecture on the proper humility due from ignorant girls, but Abbot Monreale waved him to silence.

      
"Fiametta is partly right," he said in a distant tone, then looked around the table and smiled bleakly. "All virtues come down to courage, at the sharp end of the sword. But courage must be tempered by prudence. Courage wasted by misdirection is the most heartbreaking of all tragedies. If there is an eighth deadly sin, it ought to be stupidity, by which all virtues are run out into dry sands. Yet where does prudence end and cowardice begin?"

      
"You sent Thur in there alone," said Fiametta breathlessly, "to confirm my charges of black magic and murder. Since my ignorant girl's word was not good enough against so great and
virtuous
a lord as Uberto Ferrante. Now my charges and much more are confirmed, through their own mouths. What do you wait for now? There is no reason to wait, and every reason to hurry!"

      
Monreale laid his hands out flat, palms down, upon his worktable, and regarded them gravely. "Quite." He sucked a little air through his teeth, then said, "Brother Ambrose, fetch the prior and the lieutenant of Sandrino's guards. Brother Perotto, Fiametta, you shall assist me. Begin by clearing all the rubbish from my table."

      
For all her passionate plea for action, Fiametta was taken aback by this sudden response. Her belly fluttered with fear as she busied herself scurrying around the chamber putting away, ordering, and fetching the objects of his art at Monreale's over-the-shoulder directions. Monreale was prepared, mentally at least; apparently all that time in meditation had been spent on more than prayer. When the lieutenant of the refugee Montefoglian guards arrived, Monreale sat him down with a map of the town and exact instructions for coordinating their magical and military efforts.

      
The ring of Losimon besiegers encircling Saint Jerome was known to be thin. Monreale urged the Montefoglian guards to leave just enough crossbowmen to keep the enemy away from the walls, and, breaking through the ring, make a sally toward town. With Ferrante and Vitelli incapacitated by the spell he planned to cast, and in the face of this sudden attack, Monreale hoped the Losimon troops would be thrown into confusion. Sandrino's—now Ascanio's—men could then rouse the townsfolk to their support.

      
"The Losimons have made themselves odious enough," Monreale judged. "All our people need is some real hope of success to quell their fears of reprisal, and they will pour into the streets for you. Drive all the way through to the castle and the Duchess on the first rush, if you can. Though with their leaders gone, the Losimons might be willing to surrender on terms even from behind sealed gates."

      
Fiametta grew chill, listening to this. Well, Ferrante's Losimon bravos were ruthless, but perhaps their loyalty did not run to self-sacrifice. They wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice others, though. The complexity of the military situation daunted her heart. There was more to fighting their way out of this monstrous coil than merely waving a magic wand. Yet if anyone could pull all the disparate threads together, it was surely Abbot Monreale. Even Papa had called on him.

      
Monreale blessed his empty worktable while Brother Ambrose, chanting, circled the chamber with a thurible dribbling incense smoke. "To clear away the lingering echoes of previous spells," Ambrose explained. Fiametta nodded; her father had practiced a similar sort of housecleaning now and then, before casting particularly important, delicate, or complex commissions. Or ones of which he was not too sure of the outcome. The ritual seemed to order the mind more than it did the room, Fiametta reflected, coughing in the smoke.

      
Monreale himself laid out the props of his intended spell. "It is to be a spell of spirit over spirit as much as spirit over matter. The symbols must be chosen correctly to concentrate the mind. Still, I could wish for some material connector. A lock of hair, an article of clothing actually worn.... I might as well wish for the Papal army to appear over the hill while I'm at it." He sighed, then brightened. "Still, I have Vitelli's true name. This would have miscarried for certain without it, and I would not have known why." He took a new stick of white chalk, and began to laboriously trace a diagram upon the tabletop.

      
When he'd finished the chalk pattern, Monreale laid a knife with green and gold thread tied around it parallel to a wand of dry willow circled with threads of red and black. Ferrante and Vitelli, the soldier and the spiritually sapless mage. Monreale stood back and studied them. "Is it enough...? Such a distance we must carry, over a mile."

      
They should be crossed, upside down, to represent their entanglement and their evil
, thought Fiametta, but did not speak. Her father had severely chastised her for daring to offer suggestions in public. Surety Monreale knew even more about what he was doing.

      
Monreale folded a gauze cloth beside the knife and wand. It was actually a piece of cheesecloth fetched from the monastery kitchen. "Silk would be better," Monreale muttered. "But at least it is new."

      
Spider-silk would be even better
, Fiametta thought, but she quailed at the thought of volunteering to go collect some, though there were plenty of odd corners in the monastery where spiders might be obtained. Very odd corners.

      
"It will be a spell of deep sleep," Monreale explained, "the same basic spell as that used by our healers, when a patient fears some little surgery. Powerful enough, but we must strive to make it more powerful, to overcome two men at once, neither anxious to cooperate and one fully capable of the most strenuous resistance. And he may have set wards..."

      
Why not enspell them one at a time? Vitelli first, of course.

      
"My greatest worry," Monreale muttered, "is to this spell's quality of whiteness, or spiritual benignity. It's very doubtful."

      
"What," said Fiametta, "why? It won't kill them—unless one is leaning over a balcony as it strikes, which seems unlikely—it won't even hurt them. They just go to sleep. A healer's spell, what could be whiter?"