The Spirit Ring by Lois McMaster Bujold
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 fo
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.
"Master Beneforte." Thur made his voice placating, plaintive. "Please let me out."
No response.
"For Fiametta's sake?"
All he could hear was the blood beating in his own ears.
"Uri, if you love me!" He swallowed the harsh edge of panic. In the unanswering silence the horror of being trapped in this cell with the dead and the subtle aftershock of black sorcery bore in upon him. "Help me!"
This time, the felt presence was not Beneforte's cool, coherent power, but something raw and wild. A strange blue glow like miniature lightning writhed over the iron lock. When the bolt clacked back the presence fell away like something wounded. Pain. The action had cost pain, and will. Uri was truly here. Mute, but by no means impotent. And not Vitelli's creature, not yet.
Thur bowed his head. "Thank you, brother," he whispered. Staggering a little, Thur relit the guard's tallow-candle lantern. It had sat on the floor by the table the whole time, unnoticed. Why should Ferrante's eye be caught by something so humble and familiar as his own army-issue equipment? Thur blew out the remains of the beeswax lights and slipped from the chamber as silently as he could. He pulled the door shut behind himself. I'll be back somehow, Uri. With a plan. With the abbot. With an army.
It took Thur a moment to reorient himself in the hallway. He trod cautiously up the narrow stairs, his ears straining for the slightest breath or creak of a guard waiting in ambush. None waited in the corridor to the prisoners' cells. The stairway twisted around itself like Vitelli's snake, rising into the castle. In the pitchy darkness at the top Thur found a solid oaken door. Locked, of course. He retreated to the corridor on the prison level.
It was his aching bladder that finally decided his course of action. From the pungent aroma, the dark space at the end of this corridor had been used as a makeshift garderobe by men before Thur. He relieved himself in the same spot, trying to splash quietly. He then blew out the lantern, tiptoed down the corridor, set the lantern down, lay on the stone floor, pillowed his head on his arm, closed his eyes, and pretended to be asleep. Weirdly distorted images of the night's events flickered through his imagination as he waited for a guard to discover him. He told over his tale to himself for practice, but his thoughts tailed off in darkness....
An explosive curse brought Thur awake, blinking. His body ached with the cold and pressure of the stone; his first attempt to lumber up was sabotaged by twinges of pain. A booted foot kicked him, though not very hard.
"What? What?" Thur choked blearily, his disorientation only half-feigned. He had slept in truth. The guard sergeant was looming over him with a lantern and a hard frown; his shout brought a second guard running with a drawn dagger. Thur sneezed.
"Where did you come from?" demanded the guard sergeant harshly. "Where have you been?"
A volley of sneezes delayed Thur's answer long enough for him to get his thoughts in order. "Mother of God," he wheezed, with feeling. "I have just had the strangest dream!" He sat up, rubbing his eyes and nose. "Did I fall asleep? I'm sorry, I promised to watch—the madman's not out, is he?" Thur clutched the guard sergeant's boot.
"No."
"Oh. Good. Thank God. For a minute there I..."
"For a minute you what?"
"For a minute I thought it was real. My dream. What time is it?"
"Almost dawn."
"It can't be. I just went down the corridor to piss a couple of minutes ago."
"You disappeared. You've been gone all night."
"No! You were just serving the prisoners dinner. I went down the corridor, and I was coming back. I heard the pails clanking. And then... and then..."
"Then what?"
"I felt so tired all of a sudden. It was as if something came over me—I just lay down here on the floor for a moment. And I had this wondrous dream, and then you found me and woke me."
The two guards eyed one another uneasily. "What was your dream, Foundryman?" asked the junior man.
"The mad castellan changed into a bat, before my eyes. And then he changed me into a bat, too. We flew south, to Rome. Absurd. I've never been to Rome." Thur ran his hands through his hair in a dazed way. "We could see it all at a glance from the air. Watch lights gleaming on the Tiber... the Pope, all in glowing white robes, was standing on the balcony of a great palace. The castellan—still in the form of a bat, with bat-ears, but he had the face of a man—landed on His Holiness's shoulder and whispered in his ear. And the Pope whispered back, and touched him with his ring. And then we flew home," Thur ended simply. He stopped his tripping tongue just short of adding, Oh, my arms are tired! Ferrante's guards had good reason to be credulous of the uncanny, but not infinitely credulous.
"But we've been over this corridor ten times!" said the younger guard. "You weren't —"
"Quiet, Giovanni!" the sergeant cut across him. He hauled Thur roughly to his feet. The sergeant was shorter than Thur, but strong. He stared at Thur with angry, worried eyes. "Do you think you might have been ensorcelled, Foundryman?"
"I... I... don't know. I've never been ensorcelled before. I thought it was a dream."
"I must have you checked. By an expert."
That was not i
"Where will you be working?" inquired the sergeant, narrow-eyed.
"In the garden, or back courtyard, or whatever you call it. I must build the furnace tomorrow—today, that is."
"Very well. So long as I know where to find you. Giovanni, escort my lord's foundryman to his work, eh? Speak of this to no one. I'll do the reporting."
*****
Thur had a strong sense that he had not much time left. He found his work mates from yesterday just rising to go to a kitchen-breakfast of hot mutton wrapped in bread. Whatever Ferrante's other sins, he made sure that his men were well fed. Thur took care not to bring up the topic of where he'd spent the night.
Thur and the laborers went out in the cold dawn fog to the foundry site at the end of the walled castle garden, The trampled grass was slippery underfoot. But the moisture was a tease; when Thur looked directly overhead he could see through the mist to the high blue vault of a cloudless heaven, already illuminated by a sun that had yet to clear the eastern hills. Glad as Thur was to see light after the night’s dark doings, he wished time would slow down. Pink rays touched the castle towers, Thur's new goal, all too soon.
Thur directed the workmen automatically, all the while trying to figure how to get away from them and into that tower. He stacked bricks around the proper curve of the oven-to-be's walls and tried to think through a throbbing head. He must deliver an ear to the Duchess—hang the extra two—and be gone from this accurst castle by noon at the latest. Then make it, somehow, back to the monastery and demand magical help for Uri. Could they sneak a boat with muffled oars to the base of the cliff wall, after dark? Climb, or levitate, to the tomb-chamber's window? And then what?
Or should Thur try to assassinate Vitelli this afternoon, before he could perform the next set of vile rites? Ferrante, though he was involved to the eyebrows, did not seem to be the driving will behind this wholesale foray into the black arts. Thur shivered at the thought of a blade in his hand, driving into the thick resistance of a man's flesh. Was it even possible to murder a mage? Foolish question—think of Master Beneforte. Death came to mages as to other men. Or... perhaps not quite as to other men. Would another murder create another malevolent ghost, or worse? Maybe Monreale could shrive it, and send it on its way. Shrive them all.