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What sensations did that metal body bear him? The very heat that animated it
made it impossible for Uri to embrace his brother, or kiss Fiametta good-bye.
Fiametta, on her knees, prayed for strength, and murmured "Piro!" one last
time. Only the bronze lips flushed dark red.
"Father, bless me, for I have sinned," the hollow voice whispered like the
faintest flute. "Though not nearly as much as I would have liked."
The corner of Monreale's mouth flicked up, but he murmured, "Don't joke. It
wastes your little time."
"All my little time was wasted, Father," the fading voice sighed.
Monreale bent his head in acknowledgement. "Tis a fair complete confession. Do
not despair, for it is a sin. Hope, boy."
"Shall I hope to rest? I am so tired& "
"You shall rest most perfectly." By the time Monreale's hands had passed,
nothing stood before them but a lifeless casting.
Not quite as it was first cast, Fiametta realized, looking up. The bland Greek
face had not returned. Instead Uri's own distinct, alert, imperfect features
were stamped permanently upon the bronze. There was even a touch of humor
about the curve of the lips, most alien to the classic original.
And, she saw with a shiver, the Medusa's face too had changed. Black-browed
Vitelli had the immortality he'd craved. Of a sort.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Thur held his palm near the statue's face. The bronze, though no longer
glowing with its own light, was still too hot to touch. But Uri was no longer
there to touch even if Thur could. The streaming rain would cool the metal
soon enough. Thur raised his face to the sky, and let the cold drops mix with
the hot ones from his eyes, disguising his grief before all these strangers.
Their world would know Uri no more, would soon forget that he'd ever lived or
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laughed. But I swear I will remember.
When he'd blinked his vision clear, Thur saw that soldiers, Montefoglian
soldiers, were arriving through the ruined gates. A couple of them pointed at
the statue in startled recognition of their late captain's features, but then
hurried about their work. Fiametta stood in the scintillating rain looking
small, and exhausted, and very wet, her crinkly black curls escaping her braid
only to be plastered flat to her skin. Thur wanted to offer her a cloak, but
he himself possessed only the sodden old robe turned down around his loins. He
rucked it back up over his shoulders and stood barefoot in the puddles and
shivered, partly from cold, partly from reaction.
Fiametta turned her wan face to Monreale. "How did you come here, Father? When
they carried you off to the infirmary at Saint Jerome under Vitelli's spell,
you were lying almost as pale and still as a dead man yourself. Brother Mario
wouldn't let me see you."
Monreale hung on his crozier, his sandaled feet apart. He tore his pensive
gaze from the cooling bronze. "The spell was broken late yesterday evening.
Was that your doing, Thur?"
"I& think it may have been, Father. I did not know for sure what spell was
broken, but it distracted Vitelli when I swept a spell-set from the table. It
was just before I escaped from the castle dungeon with my brother's body."
"Indeed," said Monreale. "I woke, but I was very sick. His healers kept me
abed until morning, when I finally regained enough strength to ride over them.
It was not until afternoon that I discovered you were gone from Saint Jerome,
Fiametta, and no one seemed to know for how long. I sent out my birds, but
could learn little except that Vitelli and Ferrante were not abroad, and Thur
was not yet hanging by his neck from the castle tower.
"Sandrino's officers and I agreed we must attack, try as we'd planned
yesterday. But I decided I must close the distance before attempting to
grapple again with Vitelli. His powers had clearly grown to an extraordinary
degree. We made ready, settling on a night assault to disguise our thin
numbers." Wearily, he rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes narrowed and
glinted with the press of these recent memories.
"We sallied out at dark, and had a sharp fight with the besiegers that delayed
us again. We finally broke through, and made for town. The soldiers needed the
few horses we had, but a brother found that white one wandering among our
sheep. Our remaining sheep. Is that the beast your Papa bought in Ceccnino,
Fiametta? He was robbed. Well& it saved my strength, I suppose.
"But when we all came up to the town gates, expecting a desperate battle, the
Losimons were gone from them, pulled out by a mob of townsmen. So instead of
leading the populace to the castle, we followed them. I had by then gained the
idea that you were mounting some sort of magical attack, Fiametta, and I rode
ahead as fast as I could, in great fear that Vitelli's demonic powers might
indeed have grown so transcendent as to conquer death. And so it proved."
Monreale vented a depressed sigh. "Not that this second-rate old man imagined
himself a match for that dark power."
"Yet you came anyway," said Thur.
"Father, we would have been destroyed without you. In fact," Fiametta's brows
drew down, puzzling this out, "none of us alone was a match for Vitelli. I
could release Papa, but I could not hold Vitelli. Papa could hold Vitelli, but
could not exorcise him. You could speed him to banishment, which thing neither
Papa nor I were capable of& but only if he were held. And we could never have
entered in here at all without Uri, who would not have been made without Thur.
We may all of us be lesser folk, but we were a first-rate company together."
"Huh." Monreale smiled slowly, his eyes half-lidded. "Could that be the lesson
God had been trying to teach me, all this time? From the mouths of babes."
"I am not a babe," said Fiametta with some determination.
"Child, from the vantage of my half-century, you all look like babes."
Monreale pulled himself up by his crozier, straightening painfully. He gazed a
moment more at the bronze statue, "No. You are not a babe. And so you stand in
a grown woman's danger."
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"Father," said Thur. "There's something you had better see, right away before
it gets disturbed. I left one of your monks to guard the door."
Monreale nodded. "Lead me, boy. For there is much yet to do."
Thur beckoned him into the castle by the servant's entry and down the
now-familiar corridors into the dungeon. At least they were out of the rain. A
monk held a torch for his abbot. Thur was not sure how the stone-cut halls
could be any darker at night than in the day, but they seemed so. The strength
that relentless terror had lent him was passing off, and he bumped into the
walls as he walked. Limped. Every muscle he owned seemed shot through with
rust and grit, twinging when he moved, aching when he stood still.
The racks of iron bars that were the cell doors stood open; the prison was
half-emptied of prisoners. The hale had already departed to join the fray. The
injured were being helped out by Montefoglian townsmen, some of them
relatives.
Thur's little procession wound down the stairway to the lower half. A
white-faced monk stood holding Thur's sledgehammer outside the shattered,
splintered door to the necromancers' magic work chamber. They all entered
after Monreale, and Thur took the one burning candle and lit the slagged
remains of others from it.
Monreale's breath hissed out between his front teeth. The trestles were
knocked over, and the salt crate dropped and split and spilled where Thur and
a monk had snatched the lid in their haste to bring out Master Beneforte's [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]