The Spirit Ring (24 page)

      
The stables opened onto the entry court, with its two massive towers and its marble staircase. The red tile fringing the tower tops blazed like enamel in the last high light of the setting sun, then faded to a shadowed earthy tone against the cool sky. A couple of helmeted heads moved in the crossbowmen's platforms, crenellated brick boxes open to the air that stuck up out of the skirts of sloping tile.

      
A faint golden glow of candlelight reflected from two shadowed slots halfway up one tower. Did it mark the chamber where the Duchess and Lady Julia were kept prisoner? Nothing thicker than candlelight or a crossbow quarrel was likely to escape from those pinched stone mouths.

      
Soft and insistent as a heartbeat, Thur's sixth sense drove him onward through the service entry on the other side of the courtyard. This time, he turned away from the kitchen into a dim stonework corridor. At its end he found a thick wooden door. A tired-looking Losimon with a short sword sat on an upturned barrel, his pike leaning against the wall.

      
The pikeman gave Thur a hard stare, his hand going to his sword hilt. "What d'you want, boy?"

      
"I'm... Lord Ferrante's new foundryman. I'm supposed to check the bars and metalwork down there, and submit a list of repairs to Messer Vitelli." There. That was the likeliest lie Thur could come up with. If that one didn't work... Thur eyed the pike.
Uri, I'm coming.

      
"Oh. Yes, I know the cell they mean." The guard nodded knowledgeably. "I'll take you to it." He rose from his barrel and pushed the door open.

      
A shout echoed up the stone stairs beyond the door. Another Losimon guard was toiling upward, holding a lantern. He paused to catch his breath when his comrade appeared at the head of the stairs. "Carlo! The lunatic's out again. Keep a watch up there."

      
"He hasn't come this way."

      
"All right, then he must still be hiding down here. We'll keep looking."

      
"I'll lock this door till you find him." The first guard motioned Thur through. "Here's my lord's workman, come to check the cell."

      
"Good." The second guard beckoned and turned back down the stairway. Thur descended, bewildered. But as his shoe leather scraped across the gritty stone, every step echoed his certainty.
Down. Yes. This way.
Behind him, the thick door swung shut in the gloom, and its iron bolt grated home into its slot.

      
The two men went down a second turning, and the corridor's walls changed from cut and fitted stonework to solid native sandstone. The corridor narrowed, then turned again and flared to accommodate a guard post and a garderobe. A barred window overlooked the lake, admitting the dim blue light of early evening. The window had to be cut right into the cliff face, beneath the garden wall. The garderobe's stone chute for slops tunneled through nearby.

      
The corridor sank a little further, passing a row of unusual doors. Each cell door was a rack of vertical iron bars, their iron hinges set deep into the sandstone. The cells, too, had tiny barred windows, making them not so airless, damp, or horrible as Thur had expected. In conjunction with the airy ironwork of the doors, the ventilation was excellent. But the cells were crowded, four or five men in each. Thur slowed, trying to make out faces, forms. Ferrante only held about twenty prisoners here. Uri was not among these....

      
"Here, workman." The guard frowned back at his laggard steps, and Thur hurried to catch up. On his left, he passed another narrow corridor leading... up into the castle? Too dark to tell. The guard pointed into an empty cell at the end of the row. "This one."

      
"What's wrong with it?" Thur asked. It looked identical to the others, except for being empty.

      
"Nothing, I wager," said the guard darkly. "
I
think it's magic. Magic and madness." Glumly, he rattled the door on its hinges, took a key from his belt, and unlocked it. "See? It was locked, just like this. Yet the madman has—dare I say—flown.”

      
Nervously, Thur entered the cell. A vision of the guard clanging the door shut behind him with a cry of
Ha! Caught you, spy!
flashed in his mind. But the guard merely rubbed his nose and stared, helpfully hoisting the lantern high. Thur stepped to the cubit-square window, and traced over and shook the iron bars set therein. Solid. A two-foot thickness of solid stone lay between the cell and the cliff face. The window was like a little tunnel. A slice of lake glimmered in the gathering gloom; in a tiny patch of sky, one star shone. Thur jerked his hand back as a large centipede scuttled from a crack and flowed over the stone to disappear over the outer edge of the window tunnel.

      
Thur gazed around the whitewashed walls of the cell. The chamber was small, but not inhumanly so; there was room for a taller man than Thur to lie down on the usual woven straw pallet, and, standing up, Thur's head didn't brush the ceiling. The walls seemed solid. Thur chafed under the gaze of the guard.
Go away, you.
He was close, close to Uri, he could feel it, if only he could win a few moments unobserved.

      
Rough voices echoed down the corridor, blended with a much stranger noise—laughter? A high shriek rang, "Eee, eee, eee!"

      
"Ah. They got him." The Losimon guard grimaced. "He doesn't get far. But how does he get
out
?" He shook his head and backed out of the cell. Thur followed, dogged by the darkness that seemed to seep from the corners as the lantern was withdrawn.

      
Two Losimons were manhandling a third fellow toward the cell. Their prisoner was a middle-aged man, tending toward stoutness. In another time, he might have been grave and stately. The torn and soiled velvet tunic, decent skirts to the knee, and silk hose he wore marked him as a man of rank, his graying hair as a man of dignity. But now his hair stuck out wildly, uncombed, and his beard-salted jowls were shrunken. Red-rimmed eyes stared out from bruised hollows. He shrieked again, twisted, and flapped his hands below the guards’ solid grip on his arms.

      
"Where did you find him?" asked the guard with the lantern.

      
"Downstairs again," panted the younger guard. "Same corner. We missed him first pass, but he was crouching there the second time I looked—God! Maybe he does turn into a bat."

      
"Don't
say
the word, you'll just start him up again," began his partner, their sergeant, but it was too late. Excitement flushed their prisoner's face, and he began to jabber and mutter beneath his breath, his body jerking.

      
"A bat. A bat. A bat's the thing. The black Vitelli is a false bat, but I am a real one. I'll fly away. Fly away from you, and you'll be hanged. Fly to my wife, and you won't stop me—vermin! Murderers!" His conspiratorial grin gave way to incoherent rage, and he began to buck and fight in earnest. The two guards flung him into the cell and slammed the door shut. He banged into it with a velvet-covered shoulder, over and over, while the two junior guards leaned against the bars to hold it closed while their sergeant thrust the key into the lock—it took three tries—and turned it. The Losimons stood away from the door, relieved, as the bolt caught.

      
The madman continued to bang and shriek his wordless bat-cry, alternated with stamping in circles and shaking his whole body as if he were a bat flapping its wings. It was absurd, but somehow Thur didn't find it funny. Tears leaked down the man's ravaged face as he piped his strange cries, and his indrawn breath churned in a raw throat. "I will fly. I will fly. I will fly..." He trailed off at last. He crouched to the floor, then sat heavily, weeping and exhausted.

      
"Who is the poor fellow?" Thur whispered, staring through the bars.

      
"He was the dead Duke's castellan, Lord Pia." The sergeant, catching his breath from the wrestling match, shrugged. “I think the battle and the bloodshed turned his brain. He doesn't half care for being locked in his own prison, I can tell you."

      
"But he doesn't
stay
locked in, is the trouble," muttered his younger comrade. "How does he do it? Vitelli swears there's no trace of magic on the lock."

      
The prisoner's eyes flashed up at the secretary's name, a scarlet, lucid, malevolent glare that crossed Thur's startled eyes, then buried itself in downward-looking muttering again.
Is he really mad? Or only pretending?
Or perhaps the castellan was both... strange thought. It was no wonder he was kept alone, though, even as crowded as the prison was now.

      
Thur examined the iron door. The bars were oiled, free of rust and corrosion. The hinges were deep-set in solid rock, and sound. He tapped down the long vertical rods. All rang true, no hidden hollows for a secret slide. He was no locksmith, but there was nothing wrong with the lock that he could see.

      
"We've done all that," said the guard with the lantern impatiently, watching Thur.

      
"Have you searched him for a key? Searched the cell?"

      
"To the skin. Twice."

      
"To the skin. Um... I don't suppose he could have... that is, uh, did you —"

      
"No, he didn't stick a key up his ass," said the guard sergeant, dryly amused. "He didn't swallow and gag it up again, either." Thur decided not to ask how he knew. "Somebody's just going to have to watch him, day and night," the sergeant went on.

      
"I need to go fetch dinner," said the younger guard nervously.

      
The sergeant eyed him in an ominous sergeantly manner, but then shrugged. "We're short-handed all around. I'll ask the captain to assign us a convalescent. It would be easy duty. Just sit on a bench opposite the door and watch. And stay awake."

      
"I wouldn't sleep down here," said the younger guard fervently.

      
"Afraid of the spiders?" his comrade with the lantern mocked. "Or the rats? We ate the rats roasted, in the prison in Genoa."

      
"And fried the spiders in garlic and axle grease, no doubt," his comrade returned testily, nettled by what was apparently an oft-told tale of manly endurance. "It's not the spiders that bother me. But there's things in the walls. Uncanny things."

      
It disturbed Thur a little that no one denied this, nor accused the guard of drinking.

      
"Leave me the lantern," Thur suggested, "and I'll watch him for a while. Maybe I'll get some clue as to how he does it." The castellan was seated cross-legged on the floor now, rocking from side to side, gaze fixed on nothing, face like stone.

      
The guard sergeant nodded, and his subordinate yielded the lantern to Thur.

      
"Don't get too close. He can grab you through the bars."

      
"I'll yell."

      
"Only if he doesn't grab you by the throat."

      
The guards returned to their immediate duties. Under the close eye of the sergeant who held a cocked crossbow, they traded dinner pails into the crowded cells in return for full slops buckets, which they carried off to empty in the garderobe. None of the prisoners seemed inclined to try a violent escape attempt this evening, though.

      
Thur watched the rocking castellan a while, then leaned against the wall opposite and closed his eyes. He hardly required the lantern now. He could find his destination with his eyes shut, he was certain. It thumped in his head, so close.
Down. Down.

      
At a moment when the guards were thoroughly busy at the far end of the corridor, out of sight in the garderobe or their guard post, Thur picked up the lantern and trod silently into the dark cross-corridor. The walls brushed his shoulders, and the cut rock seemed to slant up toward the castle. For a moment he doubted his underground intuition, as the lantern cast a pool of orange light on the rising floor in front of him, but then he found the stairs, one set going up, one down. He went down.

      
A narrow hall at the bottom had four doors leading off it, all solid wood this time. Two were not locked! Neither unlocked door was the one he wanted, Thur was heart-certain, but he peeked within anyway.

      
Storage chambers. Barrels of flour, dusty wine casks, provisions for the castle against a siege of man or weather. Green sparks flung back his lantern light from a comer, the jewel eyes of a scuttling rat. Spider webs festooned the corners. The spiders were smaller than the rats, but not as much smaller as Thur would have preferred.

      
He returned to the hallway.
This
door. He tried it again, rattled it futilely, then attempted to force it with his shoulder. The iron lock groaned, but held. He should have borrowed some tools from the other workmen and tucked them into his tunic before he'd started out. If he went back and got some, could he bluff his way back in here a second time? How long before the guards above noticed his absence?
Now. Now or never. Uri, I'm here.

      
He squatted, trying not to pull his aching cut, and called softly under the crack of blackness at the bottom of the door. "Uri? Uri... ?"
Why do I fear an answer?
The twisting sensation in his gut had nothing to do with his gash.

      
The dust on the floor beneath his nose moved, swirling. There was no draft. Thur lurched hastily to his feet, sending a hot flash of pain ripping along his stitches. He stepped back till he was stopped by the stone wall, icy against his shoulders. He swallowed a cry and stood silent, heart pounding.
Wait and see.