"Yes," said Thur firmly. He saw his mother dandling a grandchild on her knee, as Fiametta chinked away at some elegant goldwork, Ruberta cooked, and he ran a furnace, pouring pewter platters and candlesticks and other sturdy, practical things.
The colored vision faded at the thought of the advancing tramp of Losimon troops. Fiametta shared that dread; the fight faded from her eyes. "All for nothing, if Ferrante wins," she sighed.
"Yes. Let's ... go eat." Shyly, defying Ferrante and all the fates, he took her hand as they went out into the courtyard. She gripped his hand in return.
She paused to stare into the casting pit at the big clay lump, the fragile mold for the great Perseus. "So many works my father left unfinished. If I could do one thing to ease his poor shade, I would have this statue cast for him. Before the Losimons destroy the mold, or time and neglect crumble it away. We'll never get the metal for it, now."
Thur said glumly, "It's too bad we can't invest Uri into that old Greek hero, like the brass hare. He'd make Ferrante run."
Fiametta froze. "What?"
He stood very still. "Well, we can't ... can we? I mean, that would be serious necromancy. Black sin."
"Any more sinful than assassination?"
Thur stared uneasily at her intent face.
"And suppose ... suppose the spirit, Uri's spirit, was not bound against his will? Suppose he was invited—not a slave, but a free-will volunteer, like the spirit of Lord Lorenzo's great ring?" she said huskily. "Uri's spirit has already been strengthened for binding, if vilely, by Vitelli—we have the mold, the furnace, the wood, the spell is written out, oh, I understood it, Thur! It's not just words, it has an inner structure...." Her shoulders slumped. "But we still don't have the metal. Not Vitelli himself could conjure a hero's weight of copper out of the air."
A vision danced and dazzled in Thur's mind like a lightning flash. A grinning kobold, drawing an iron bar down into solid stone as if it were porridge ...
"I can't conjure it out of the air. Thurs breathless voice seemed to his own ears to be coming from a great distance, as across a sea. "But I swear I can conjure it out of the ground."
Chapter Seventeen
"Now this is truly and straightly forbidden," said Fiametta, glancing around the front work chamber at her companions. Friends. Allies. Ruberta and Tich sat on opposite sides of a double diagram Fiametta had drawn on the floor in chalk. In the center of one axis lay Uri's body; on an absurd, indefensible impulse, she had placed a pillow beneath his head, as if he were sleeping. He didn't look asleep. That gray stiffness was unmistakably death. Thur sat cross-legged in the center of the other axis, looking scared but determined. The room's shutters were closed and locked; candles at the diagram's cardinal points gave practical as well as symbolic illumination. "If anyone wants to withdraw, you'd better do it now."
Tich and Ruberta shook their heads, identically tight-lipped. "I'm ready," said Thur sturdily.
We must all be mad, thought Fiametta. Well, if they were, Ferrante had driven them so. Thus evil bred evil. Not all evil. I do not compel Uri's soul. I only beg of it. She once more checked through the recipe for a seance in her father's notes. If he had left nothing out, then neither had she.
"Are you sure I don't do anything?" asked Thur plaintively.
"You do nothing—in a, a positive sense. I think it must be harder than it sounds. You have to give up control." Fiametta reflected on this. "You have to really trust your ... your guest."
Thur shook his head, smiling sadly. "Any other—guest, no. Uri, yes."
"Yes." She pursed her lips. "Abbot Monreale starts every spell with a prayer. It seems a little hypocritical here, but ..." What to say? She could hardly ask for blessings upon this enterprise. She bent her head, and her companions followed suit. "In the names of Jesus and Mary we beg. God have mercy upon us, God have mercy upon us, God have mercy upon us all."
"Amen," murmured around the room. And an anxious, unvoiced presence assented, too.
She glanced for the last time at the notes, written in her father's flowing Latin hand. The spoken part of the spell was brief. She ran over the syllables in her mind, testing each one, and had a sudden insight. The substance of the spell was not in the Latin, but in a kind of under-structure of thought—was the insistence upon Latin merely a device to keep power from the ignorant? Uri did not speak Latin anyway, just German and Italian and a smattering of barracks-French. But now was surely not the time for experimentation.
Her lips formed the words anyway, a bridge of sound across a pattern held from second to second in her mind, of which the chalk tines were only a mnemonic reminder. "Uri, enter!" These were magic words, so blunt and plain? Her impulsiveness had spoiled the spell, they must start all over again—
Thur jerked, his eyes widened, his lips parting. His stoop-shouldered slump, partly weariness, partly a habit from ducking his height through unforgiving low mine tunnels, vanished. His spine straightened, like a soldier's on parade. An eager, hungry, almost frantic possession ...
"Fiametta, I am here." It was Thur's voice, but with Uri's accent and intonation, polished smooth and mellowed by his time in the south. And his eyes—his eyes were intent, and bright, and very, very angry. "It's hard to stay. Hurry!"
"Oh, Uri, I'm so sorry you were killed!"
"Not half so sorry as I am." The flash of wry humor was all Uri, truly. His anger was not at her.
"It was my fault, I distracted you when I screamed."
"It wasn't you, it was what fell out of that accursed footstool. Horrible."
A knot of guilty regret loosened in her heart. Uri/Thur's eyes closed. "Bless you, brother, for wresting me from the necromancers." The eyes pressed shut more tightly, as if in residue of some agony. "I tried to resist them. They did not ... fight fair."
"I imagine not," said Fiametta faintly. "God grant you grace."
"It was hard to think of God in that dark place. Some men find grace in dungeons and mineshafts, as if the color and noise and distractions of life blind them, and only in the darkness do they see clear. But I came too late, and to the wrong dungeon. Vitelli's shadow is a darkness empty even of God." His face was set with the memory of that emptiness, of that dark.
"Shh ... it's all right now." Well, hardly that, Fiametta thought, glancing at the gray corpse. "But could you—dare you—face him again?"
Uri/Thur flinched. "Vitelli?"
"Yes. But not so unevenly matched, this time. Uri—we have discovered a spell of Papa's, a wonderful spell. Instead of casting your ghost into a ring, I think we can use this spell to open a way for you into the great Perseus. He was you, after all, but for the face and the pock marks. A body not of flesh, but of bronze, tireless and immensely strong. It cannot be for long, though I plan to use my fire-spell to keep it hot and moving for as long as possible. But in that time you'd have a chance, one chance, to strike back at Ferrante and Vitelli. I cannot—I will not—compel or bind you in any way. But I will beg you. Uri, help us!"
"Make me a path to that end," breathed Uri/Thur, "and I will fly down it. Great Sorceress!" His eyes burned. "Sandrino trusted me with his life. And I stood right there, open-mouthed like a country buffoon, as Ferrante took it from him. I failed my oath, I was dishonored by surprise—I did not trust Ferrante, I should have been more forward, oh, Fiametta! To wash out my dishonor in Ferrante's blood, I'd give my soul for the chance!"