"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," shrugged the sergeant, catching his breath from the wrestling match. 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've got to go fetch dinner," said the younger guard nervously.
The sergeant eyed him in an ominous sergeantry 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 corner, 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.
The dust swirled upward, each tiny mote spinning in the lantern light, into a familiar, tenuous figure ... big cloth hat, curling beard.... Don't think of him as a ghost. Think of him as ... as your future father-in-law, Thur told himself wildly.