The Spirit Ring

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  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?"

  Monreale's lip twisted. "And in the end—if we win—both men must eventually burn at the stake. Hardly harmless in intent, even if legal in means."

  "If they win, are they even likely to bother with legality?"

  "To hold what they have taken, they must wrap their crimes in some cloak of public pretense. Eyewitnesses to the contrary will be... in very grave straits."

  "That includes me," Fiametta realized with a shiver.

  "It includes enough by now to guarantee a very massacre." Monreale sighed. "Well, I am ready. Until the lieutenant reports his men assembled, let us compose ourselves in prayer."

  I might have predicted that. But Fiametta settled herself upon her knees be
fore the crucifix on Monreale's office wall without demur. She did not lack things to pray about. She thought sadly of all the prayers she'd wasted in the past on her small desires... a lace cap, a silver bracelet like Maddelena's, a pony... a husband. Yet, in a backhanded way, all had been forthcoming; the cap and the bracelet from Papa, the white horse... Thur? What was this strange girl-power, to make the intractable world spit forth her wishes? Oh, I wish it were over.

  At length, Sandrino's surviving senior officer returned to confer briefly with Monreale. The soldier's eyes glinted grimly in the shadow of his steel helmet. His dented breastplate was dull and leaden. More determination than enthusiasm tightened his jaw, but perhaps that was the more durable emotion, under fire. The ten-year-old Duke's offer to lead his troops himself had been tactfully turned down, the lieutenant reported; but the man's spine seemed to stiffen in memory of it. Monreale blessed him and sent him on his way with a slap to his cuirass that echoed hollowly in the plastered office.

  Monreale then led Perotto, Ambrose, and Fiametta into his workroom. The prior followed as a witness. The prior was more an administrator than magician or healer or even, Fiametta suspected, monk, but he had been Monreale's practical right hand throughout the crisis, managing men and space and the daily bread.

  Monreale arranged his brothers standing around the table laden with the simple set for the spell. He bent his head in one more blessedly brief prayer, and extended his right hand to Ambrose and his left to Perotto. "Brothers, lend me your strength."

  Fiametta stepped to the table's fourth side. "Father, I will gladly lend mine."

  Monreale frowned, his brow furrowing. "No... no," he said slowly. "I don't want you exposed to the danger of the backlash, if this effort fails."

  "My little mite could be the difference between failure and success. And not such a little mite as all that, either!"

  Monreale’s smile was sad, though Brother Perotto frowned repellingly. "You are a good girl, Fiametta," said Monreale. "But no. Please do not distract me further."

  His raised palm blocked her protest, which she swallowed back into her tight throat. She stepped away from the table to the prior's side and locked her hands behind her back.

  "Ambrose, Perotto, join hands," Monreale instructed, and they reached across to each other to complete the ring. Monreale's grip tightened. "The first strike requires all our hearts, to overwhelm Sprenger." He bent his gaze to the symbols on the table, knife and wand, and began to chant in a healer's low drone.

  Fiametta could feel the power build, as if an invisible sphere were forming above the table. Monreale's control seemed very precise, meticulous, almost finicky, compared to her Papa's flowing, sweeping gestures. Monreale wastes nothing. And yet his economy wasted time and attention, it seemed to Fiametta. Abundance can afford to be daring.

  The sphere began to glow with a visible, coruscating white fire, shimmering in waves both upon its surface and within its heart, as its power built up and up. Now, that was wasteful. Papa had always insisted that a properly cast spell should be heatless and invisible. Perhaps it was some inevitable friction from trying to combine strengths from Ambrose and Perotto. Fiametta held her breath. Oh, strike now, or Vitelli will feel it and be warned!

  Still Monreale held his hand, building up his power. The lacy sphere cast the monks' shadows on the walls. Then the light began to pour down like water into the vessels of knife and wand. They filled; the knife blade gleamed like moonlight. Soundlessly, the gauze lifted and drifted across the two glowing objects, settling gently over them.

  Monreale's eyes opened; he breathed the last syllable of his chant. Ambrose grinned in triumph, and even surly Perotto's eyes lighted. Monreale inhaled, smiling, to speak.

  The dry willow wand exploded into flame, which flashed across the gauze, consuming it to crumbling blackness. White fire tainted with red flared up into Monreale's face like a powder flash from a misfired hand cannon. His features, lit from below, contorted. Red and green afterimages swirled in Fiametta's eyes, and she squinted futilely against them, her hands pressed to her mouth to stifle her scream.

  Monreale's eyes rolled back, and he fell, unaided, since Ambrose's hands were clapped to his eyes and Perotto, too, was toppling. Monreale's forehead cracked the table as he collapsed. All three men's faces were reddening from the burn.

  Fiametta and the prior jostled each other in their rush around the table. The prior knelt beside Monreale's bleeding head, but hesitated to touch him, still fearful perhaps of being guilty of interrupting some magic in progress. But there was nothing left to interrupt. Fiametta could feel it. The circle and the spell were broken.

  "Father Monreale? Father Monreale!" cried the prior in anxiety. Monreale's face was dead white, mottled with red patches. His singed eyebrows gave off an acrid whiff of burned hair. Overcoming his hesitation, the prior pressed his ear to Monreale's robed chest. "I hear nothing...."

  Fiametta ran to the cupboard and snatched up a fragment of broken mirror stored there, and thrust it under Monreale's nose. "It clouds. He breathes...."

  Perotto moaned; Ambrose lay as oddly as his abbot.

  "What happened?" asked the prior. "Did Vitelli counterattack them somehow?"

  "Yes, but... Vitelli's counter-surge might have been contained. Should have been contained. It was the excess heat, and the tinder-dryness of the willow. Abbot Monreale let too much heat build up."

  The prior frowned at this critique, and wiped the blood away from the rising lump on Monreale's forehead. He palpated the skull. "Not broken, I think. He should come around soon."

  I don't think so. It wasn't just the crack on his head that was incapacitating Monreale. It was the spell, turned back on its source; she wasn't sure how Vitelli was doing it, but it was almost as if she could see a dark hand pressed to Monreale's face, as a man might hold his enemy under water. Strange. She shook her head to clear it of the ghostly impressions. She'd been steeped in too much magic of late; it was as if her senses for it had been sanded to an almost painful new receptivity. Maybe Ambrose could lift the spell hand, when he recovered. If he recovered.

  Brother Perotto sat up on his own. Brother Ambrose's eyes opened at last, but he was dazed and incoherent. After another moment of uncertain observation, the prior ran to fetch the senior healer, Brother Mario. The healer directed several more monks to gather up the stricken men and take them to their beds. Fiametta waited for Mario to ask her what had happened, but he didn't, so she tried to tell him.

  "You!" Perotto, supported between two brothers, turned on her. "You ruined the spell. You don't belong in here!

  "Me! Abbot Monreale ordered me to be here!" said Fiametta.

  "Impure..." moaned Perotto.

  Fiametta drew up in indignation. "How dare you! I am a virgin!" More’s the pity. And doomed to remain so, for all the rescue Thur seemed likely to receive now. At least until the Losimon soldiers took the monastery by storm. Ought she to suicide before Saint Jerome was overrun? But that way lay damnation, too. Her heart burned in rage, and outrage. Why should she have to die and be damned for the crimes of men? She would rather fight, claw, and run away from the dismal fate of women and orphans.

  The prior took her by the arm and steered her out onto the gallery overlooking the cloister. "Yes, yes, he meant no insult. But truly, it is improper for you to be in this part of the building. Go back to the women's quarters, Fiametta, and stay there."

  "Till when? Till the Losimons come over the walls?"

  "If the Abbot does not regain his senses from that knock soon..." The prior licked dry lips.

  "He is enspelled. He won't come round until the spell is lifted. It must be possible to determine how to lift it. Vitelli labors under the same disadvantages of distance as we do."

  "I will have the healers do what they can."

  "It will take more than a healer!"

  "Be that as it may, healers are what we have left, unless Ambrose recovers first."

  "What will you do if neither man r
ecovers soon? Or at all?"

  The prior's shoulders bent, as the full weight of Monreale's burdens seemed to fell on them. "I will... I will wait the night. Perhaps the morning will bring better counsel. But if Ferrante's emissary returns to plague us again... perhaps it would be better to surrender on terms. Before it is too late."

  "To Ferrante? You think he would honor his terms for five breaths?" cried Fiametta.

  The prior's hands made impotent fists down by his sides. "Go back to the women's quarters, Fiametta! You understand not the first principle of the affairs of men!"

  "What first principle? Save your own head, and let the devil take the hindmost? I understand that very well, thank you!"

  "Go to —!" the prior began to roar, then dropped his voice to hiss between clenched teeth, "Go to your quarters! And hold your tongue!"

  "Will you at least let me try to lift the spell of sleep, if the healers fail?" Fiametta begged in desperation.

  "Perotto is right. You do not belong in here. Go to!"

  In a moment, he would beat her in his frustration, and call it a just chastisement; Fiametta could see it coming. She bared her teeth at him and ducked away, stalking stiff-backed out of the cloister. She should have kept silence. She should have spoken up. She should have... she should have...

  In the women's quarters, two children were puking, three were crying, and a sharp argument between two mothers over the last of the clean swaddling cloths had degenerated into hair-pulling and shrieking. Fiametta fled again. Her attempt to see Abbot Monreale in the infirmary was turned back sternly by Brother Mario. A Montefoglian guard in the refectory tried to squeeze her breast, in passing, and whispered a lewd jest into her ear as she twisted away from him. The old lay sister in charge, capped and kirtled, gave him a box on the ear and a sharp rebuke, invoking his mother by name. He fell back, grinning and holding his nose, as Fiametta dove into the chaotic, infant-squalling, vomitous sanctuary of the women's dormitory.