The Spirit Ring

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Fiametta crouched on the cobbles, panting and watching. Uri strode into the courtyard, lighting it like a human torch. A gust of rain made him steam like a fumarole. "UBERTO FERRANTE!" he roared. The stones bounced back shuddering echoes. "Uberto Ferrante! Come out!"

  Half a dozen Losimon swordsmen exited the castle door and spilled down the marble steps. Their offensive onslaught slowed and froze to defensive postures as they saw what called them. They glanced at each other in horror.

  Lord Ferrante stepped outside and swept his gaze over the court. He wore his gleaming chain mail, silver-gilt in the springing firelight, and his black leggings and boots. He wore neither hat nor helm, and a few raindrops glittered like diamonds in his dark cap of hair. He stood very still for a moment, then drew his sword with a slow, deliberate scrape that seemed to go on forever, and made Fiametta's teeth ache. He turned his head and shouted over his shoulder, "Niccolo!" He then raised his chin and stared briefly at the north gate tower, and lifted his blade in salute to someone Fiametta could not see, as if to say, I dedicate this death to you. Then, alert, sword ready, he stalked slowly down the stairs.

  His guards, with backward nervous glances, spread out in a screen before him. For a little time, till Uri raised his hands and started toward them. To a man, they broke and ran. Ferrante watched them go without surprise, a little ironic smile playing about his lips. But he did go so far as to open his mouth and bellow, "Niccolo!" again, louder. “Niccolo! To me, now!"

  Did Ferrante sense himself to be outmatched? Fiametta thought so. And yet still he stood there on the last rain-silvered marble step, and did not retreat.

  "He's evil," whispered Thur. "But..."

  Fiametta felt it too. "Brave. Or fey." No wonder men followed this man. Fiametta had sometimes wondered why angels were reported to spend so many tears on sinners. They do not weep for the evil. They weep for the good that is wasted in it.

  "So," said Ferrante, and moistened his lips. "Sandrino's incompetent guard captain rises from the waves like Venus. I thought we'd killed you."

  "So," said Uri, with an attempt at matching irony. "My incompetent murderer. Care to try again?" He lifted his red sword in invitation. Ferrante, Fiametta thought, did irony better. He had the style for it. But Uri's rage burned visibly, in rising waves of heat, and what his words lacked in bite they made up in power.

  Ferrante cocked his head, half-smiling, and stepped off the stairway. "I think... you are in my secretary's department. But I shall do my best to entertain you till he arrives." And over his shoulder, his brows lowering and his lips rippling in irritation, "Niccolo!"

  "What so occupies him, that he does not come running?" whispered Thur.

  "I think I know," Fiametta whispered back, heartsick. But she could not yet race off through the castle searching for Papa; she had to stay with Uri and keep him heated. Ferrante lunged.

  The first flurry was brief. Ferrante's blade flicked past Uri's guard, but then clanged uselessly off the bronze skin. Ferrante skipped backward, his stunned fingers flexing on his sword hilt, and the last irony left his face, to be replaced by an expressionless concentration. He closed again to try for a stab at Uri's yellow eyes, then recoiled, teeth clenched, hissing with pain, as Uri's attempt to brain him with the head of the Medusa brushed past his cheek and raised a swathe of instant white blisters.

  "He cannot win. He's got to run. Why doesn't he run?" Fiametta whispered fiercely. She wanted Ferrante to run. Be a coward, yes, and utterly contemptible. But instead he closed on Uri again, clanging thrust and parry, parry —

  "He's testing himself," Thur said suddenly. "He wants to be the best. He wants to know he's the best. And he wants everyone else to know it, too."

  "He's mad."

  "What is Uri about? Why doesn't he just pick up Ferrante and crush him?"

  The method in Uri's attack came clear finally as he forced Ferrante to trip and fall backward on the marble steps. Uri's sword lashed out and pinned him there, pressing into his chain mail in the identical spot to Uri's own mortal wound. Uri's face tightened in wrath, and he leaned on his sword with all the inhuman weight of his dense metal body.

  "Niccolo!" screamed Ferrante. At last, a timbre of purely human terror.

  He is brought down, thought Fiametta. He is brought down. But it gave her no joy.

  The chain burst. The sword drove through Ferrante's chest, searing flesh and quenching blade in one motion. Uri stood bent, holding Ferrante in place, for one long, long moment.

  Vitelli flew out the castle door and caromed off the marble balustrade, his black, symbol-decked robe flaring. He brandished his right fist in triumph. Upon his index finger gleamed a gold band with a mask in the shape of the face of a bearded man. "My lord, I have it!”

  Fiametta breathed a silent wail, her fists clenching hopelessly. We were too slow....

  Ferrante rolled his eyes up toward him and gasped out, "You're late... Niccolo. On purpose?"

  "No, lord!" Vitelli screamed in horror, seeing him pinned there. A beat too late for conviction.

  "Don't... lie to me, Niccolo. I hate a man who lies. I saw you, hovering in there. Waiting. Saw the whites of your eyes. Damn your eyes, Niccolo...." His mouth opened and his face contorted in agony as Uri put his foot to his chest and drew the sword back out.

  For just a moment, Uri hesitated, staring warily up at the sorcerer with a face so strangely set as to almost make him appear inert metal in truth. Then, in two bounds, the marble cracking under him, Uri leapt up the stairs between Vitelli and the door. Vitelli launched himself one-handed over the balustrade and jumped down to the cobbled court. His knees bent, and he grunted with the force of his landing, but he straightened and danced back with room to move, his hands sweeping his velvet robe straight.

  "I have you, simulacrum!" he screeched at Uri. "Cold will freeze you where you stand, and birds will nest in your ears!" He muttered, gestured; Uri, advancing determinedly upon him down the stairs, slowed. Uri's red glow faded, and his new bronze gleam shone instead, on his nose, ears, toes. With a tortured effort, he raised his sword arm.

  "Piro, piro piropiropiro!" Fiametta cried. Uri shook himself, red-hot all over, and began to move again, cat-footed across the stones, maneuvering for his cut. Fiametta fell to her hands and knees.

  Vitelli shot Fiametta a look that said, Later. And you'll wish that you'd never been born, but then was forced to turn his entire attention upon Uri. He trod backward, rubbing his new ring. His low-voiced muttering became intent, then rose to a shout: "Thus I release you! Fly, unbonded, and be free!"

  The bronze Uri stopped short. Vitelli, his eyes narrowing in triumph, straightened and strolled closer to inspect the frozen hero.

  "No," groaned Thur. "He has your Papa's spell, Fiametta! The one you said he used to release the baby spirit from Ferrante's first silver ring. We are undone! God help us, and Uri, too!" He hefted his sledgehammer, eyes rolling at Vitelli, and inhaled, ready to strike against the impossible odds. The smirking necromage circled around in front of the silent statue.

  "No, wait," hissed Fiametta, scrambling up and clutching Thur's arm. "That's not right, it's not right, wait —"

  The bronze Uri grinned. His whisper reverberated off the castle walls.

  "You cannot release me. I am not bound."

  In a vicious, whistling flat arc, he swung his sword full-force and took Vitelli's head; but not before his words were heard and understood, so that the last expression on that black-browed face as it rotated through the air was of the most confounded dismay.

  It landed, rolled, stopped.

  Silence fell, and gusts of rain. Fiametta looked around. About a hundred people were watching, standing back all around the perimeter of the court. Three smudged white women's faces were pressed to the window slits in the north gate tower. Most of the witnesses were Montefoglian townsmen, with a few dazed Losimons being held at sword's point. Distant shouts, screams, and crashes wafted from odd corners of the castle as the last of Ferrante's m
en were winkled out by the mob. Vitelli's blood, pooling on the cobbles, steamed gently in the cold night air. Uri steamed, too, standing back in the rain; his red glow was darkening, and the gleam of metallic bronze began to frost his edges and surfaces. Cold, and a kind of lonely premonition, quenched the bright triumph of his eyes. He must go soon from his temporary metal body. Go where?

  And where was Papa? She thought of the new gold ring on Vitelli's dead hand, and started toward it. She must retrieve it. Maybe Abbot Monreale would know what to do with it. It had to be possible to release Papa from the ring, and the ring from Vitelli's will, for how could one dead man be bound to another?

  Ferrante too was crawling toward Vitelli's decapitated body, Fiametta saw with shock. The Lord of Losimo was not as dead as she'd thought. The hot blade must have cauterized as it cut, so that despite his crushed ribs Ferrante was not bleeding to death as fast as Uri had. His face was a clay-colored mask of determination and pain.

  She raced him toward the ring. Thur followed with his hammer, though she did not think Ferrante was in any condition to offer further physical threats. Still there was a kind of weird glory in his unyielding will, that dragged his useless body across the rain-slicked stones.

  But as she reached for Vitelli's right hand, a cold blast knocked her backward with the force of a club. Ferrante, too, jerked back, one hand flung up to ward the invisible blow. The effort broke something loose inside, for he gasped once, then his dark eyes grew fixed, and closed no more. Fiametta crouched, open-mouthed, her eyes filling with the impossible.

  A form was condensing over Vitelli's body, as if night were being made palpable. A dark man, a blackness much deeper than any shadow in this torch-lit courtyard. Inside the black man it seemed to Fiametta that she saw other little half-digested ghosts, dozens of them, deformed and agonized.

  "Oh, no," choked Thur. "We've made another ghost! Will it never end?"

  "No," breathed Fiametta, her chest tight with terror. "Worse. Much worse. We've made a demon." Where was Papa? Inside the dark man? One of those sub-ghosts was very fresh, and in terrible pain.

  The dark man's face awoke, sharpening into definite and familiar features. Vitelli's black eyes opened, glittering with their own red glow. He looked almost as surprised as Fiametta. He turned his hands over and stared at them in wonder. A shining light encircled one black finger. Vitelli threw back his head and laughed, as he realized his continued existence and power.

  "It worked! I live! I am immortal now!" The dark man actually capered, and swept a wild ironic bow toward Uri, who stood freezing and stunned. "I thank you!"

  She'd done it now, Fiametta thought miserably. Abbot Monreale, in one of his many sermons on the subject, had once described a sin as the making of a really irrevocable mistake, with permanent consequences. She stared out at her vast mistake, and thought: The eighth deadly sin really is stupidity. And ignorance. She had no idea how to fight a demon, none. But she was heart-certain that if Vitelli once escaped, the consequences would be dreadful.

  "What have you done with my Papa?" she quavered to the Vitelli-demon.

  She should not have attracted its attention, she realized as it bent those red eyes upon her. "His will is mine, now," Vitelli whispered in a voice like ice. "You are too late." It smiled a hellish smile. "He is too late, also." Its face rose toward the gate.

  A horse's hooves clattered and scraped on the cobbles. Fiametta's heart leapt up, and she wanted to scream triumph and relief. It was Abbot Monreale, riding to their rescue on a white horse.

  "Fiametta! Thur!" he shouted.

  Her scream melted away in her throat as she took in the doubtful details. In the first place, there was the horse. She knew that horse. Even the cavalry saddle Monreale had borrowed from somewhere failed to conceal its swayed back. It stood wheezing and blowing, its nostrils red and round in its gray muzzle, its expression mournful and its legs trembling. Abbot Monreale must surely be a miracle worker beloved of God, for he had somehow forced the beast to trot uphill.

  Monreale wore his gray monk's robe, rucked up with his bare legs sticking out and his sandals all awry from beating at the old horse's sides. His hands were a tangle, managing his crozier, the reins, and a couple of bottles. His hair stuck out as wildly as his bushy eyebrows, and he had a big lumpy purple bruise on his forehead. "Fiametta!" he cried again, then choked as his eyes took in the tableau in the courtyard.

  "I was going to say," he continued in a strange, mild, conversational tone, "Fiametta, whatever you do, don't kill Vitelli."

  His gray eyes locked with the red ones of the dark man. Fiametta, gratefully, felt herself slide from Vitelli's dangerous attention. Everything about Monreale looked absurd, just now, except for his eyes.

  Never breaking his gaze, Monreale swung his right leg over the white horse's sagging neck and jumped lightly down. He tucked the bottles into his robe, stood his crozier upright, and ran a hand thoughtfully down its length. He walked forward, then stopped with a jerk, as if feeling the same cold blow Fiametta had.

  "Jacopo Sprenger. Though your spirit is parted from your body, you still partially exist in the world of will. While your will is free, you may yet effectively repent, confess your sins and profess your faith; I swear to you God is greater than any evil you can encompass. Stop. Stop now, and turn your face around!" Monreale's voice was anguished in its sincerity.

  He had ridden through the night not to destroy Vitelli, but to save him, Fiametta realized. And she saw too a dreadful danger in it. Vitelli might try to trick Monreale, challenge him into dropping his guard. Despite all doubts, Monreale's own conscience would compel him to try Vitelli in all good faith....

  But Vitelli's pride in his power scorned to dissemble. The dark man crossed himself mockingly with an obscene gesture. The next gesture was something more effective, and when the swirling colors departed from Fiametta's eyes and the roaring from her ears, Abbot Monreale was on his knees, and not in prayer, He brandished his crozier, though, and counterattacked; Vitelli seemed to shrink into himself, but only for a moment.

  Uri could be no more help. He was freezing to cold bronze even as Fiametta watched, and there was not enough fire left in her spirit to make him hot again. She could not even stand up, but sank to her knees, then her hands and knees, and finally to the wet cobbles. Any passing Losimon could cut her throat this moment and she might do no more than look dully at him. Thur crouched worriedly beside her, and caught her shoulders.

  The spirit ring. The gold gleamed on the corpse's hand, not two yards off. No wonder spirit-magic was so rare. So hard to accomplish, so fragile when invested! If only she knew her Papa's spell of unbinding—she pictured the moment: Ferrante's upraised hand, the crack and flash of the silver ring, the smell of burning flesh....

  But she did know rings. She had laid a little part of herself into the gold of her lion-ring. It was held there by... held there by... "Structure," she muttered muzzily. The spell had fallen into the molten metal like a seed crystal into the alum-water that the dyers used, and from it structure had feathered out like frost, intricate and beautiful. The reverse must be... the reverse must be...

  She rolled over on her face on the paving-stones a little way from that dead adorned hand. She had not enough power left to reanimate Uri, no. But she had some. Gold was a softer metal than bronze, and there was little more than a thimbleful in that ring. It was enough. It would do....

  "Piro," she whimpered. "Piro."

  The gold mask sagged, slagged; the metal dripped as the flesh it encircled scorched, spattered, steamed and blackened. The acrid scent of burnt meat seared her nostrils.

  The dark Vitelli screamed as the band of light on his shadow-hand vanished. He whirled, his red eyes flaming rage, and focused on Fiametta. She smirked at him from the circle of Thur's arms, quite unable to move.

  He seemed to inhale, towering up and up into a spindle of black smoke that slid sinuously into the open mouth of the bronze Medusa-head, held high in Uri's frozen left
hand. The little snakes upon the skull turned cherry-red and began to squirm. The head's eyelids slitted open in hot white lines. The face twisted slowly, and the ghastly eyes opened wide, and found Fiametta.

  He will burn me to ashes where I lie. "Thur, get away! Get back!" She tried to twist from his protective arms, which tightened in distraught confusion.

  And then, between her and that obscene head, the rain man appeared. He was made all of dense suspended diamond droplets, glittering like tiny rainbows in the torchlight. He shone as bright and brilliant as the shadow-Vitelli was dark. He was amazingly beautiful. He wore a glittery pleated tunic, a big round hat like rain-brocade; his beard was fog, and his eyes were liquid and luminous.

  "Papa," Fiametta breathed happily.

  He blew her one kiss, or was it a raindrop landing chill on her skin? She rubbed her cheek in wonder, trembling.

  A beam of incandescent fire lashed out in a double line from the Medusa's eyes. All the rain in its path turned to steam, boiling clouds of it, but the rain man reformed unharmed, only whiter for the added fog.

  "Come out of there," demanded Master Beneforte querulously. "That's mine." He crouched, his hands cupped. With the slowness of tar, the black shape was drawn forth from the Medusa's mouth again. The rain man encompassed it. Fiametta could see it inside him, a spasming black manikin, screaming in silence.

  Master Beneforte turned to Abbot Monreale. "Quick, Monreale! Send us now, together, while I hold him! I cannot hold him long."

  Monreale, his face stunned, levered himself up on his crozier. "Where does your body lie, Prospero?"

  "The Swiss boy knows."

  "Thur." Abbot Monreale turned to him. "Go at once—take these men"—for a couple of panting monks had arrived belatedly in Monreale's wake—"and fetch forth Master Beneforte's mortal remains. Hurry!"