"Master Beneforte," he quavered, "will you light me one candle?" No response. More hesitantly, "Uri? Please?"
His hands shaking, Thur felt along the tabletop. Papers, knives, cool metal tools. A little box. A tinder box? Thur opened it, but found it contained only a soft powder. He almost licked his fingers to try to identify it, but on second thought wiped them on his tunic instead. Odd scrabbling noises came from the floor, clicking, and a weird, tiny animal shriek, which Thur tried to ignore. Could snakes climb table legs? He'd heard of snakes in trees....
Another, heavier box proved more lucky. Flint and steel made familiar weights in his hands. He struck sparks, found the tinder in their light, and managed after several tries to ignite a splinter. It almost went out before he could raise it to a candle wick, but after dying to a tiny blue globe, the yellow flame flared up from the wax. Thur, kneeling on the tabletop, decided it was the most beautiful flame he'd ever seen. He reignited the splinter and lit the entire candelabrum, six short slagged and nearly spent beeswax lumps. Then he looked around for the adder.
No wonder the snake had seemed to go on forever. The creature was four feet long. It was coiled to one side of the floor near a saucer of milk. Its jaws were stretched wide, its throat distended; the back half of a very large rat stuck out of its mouth. The rat's rear legs spasmed, and its tail twitched.
In a wild leap, Thur sprang upon the snake, grabbed it tightly with both hands around its stuffed throat to keep it full of rat and unable to twist and bite, ran to the window, and crammed it out through the bars. After a moment, a faint splash echoed back from the lake below. Thur sank to the floor, gasping for breath. Several minutes passed before his other troubles began to crowd back into his mind again.
Looking around, Thur decided Vitelli must have brought the saucer of milk for the snake. It certainly couldn't have been meant for the cat. Thur grimaced at the gruesome pile of animal parts left to coagulate in the center of a complicated diagram drawn on the floor in red and white chalk. Stepping carefully around the marks, he tried the door. The lock did not open from this side without the key, either. How much time had really passed? The guards upstairs must have missed him by now, searched—though not in here. Thur was fairly sure no one came in here voluntarily except Ferrante and Vitelli.
"Master Beneforte?" Thur whispered. "Uri? Master Beneforte? Can you open this lock again?"
No response from the spirits this time either. Yet Thur had seen Beneforte, earlier. His intense sense of Uri's presence had driven him down here. Thur eyed the papers scattered over the table. A conjuring compelled a spirit to appear whether it wanted to or not. Thur didn't suppose he'd be so fortunate as to find such a recipe jotted down. He turned the papers over. More Latin, mostly; he knew words here and there. "Master Beneforte, please."
"What?" The irritated tone was sick, shaken, but somehow stronger. Not so effortful as Beneforte's earlier, desperate attempts to communicate. Thur turned, staring into every corner of the chamber, but no dust-ghost wavered in the draft that fluttered the candles. Only the voice.
"Where . .. where is my brother? Can you see him, from where you are? Why doesn't he speak?" Thur asked the emptiness.
A long silence; Thur began to fear that Beneforte's ghost had fled the chamber and left him, when the reluctant reply whispered, "He is a weaker shade. He has not had the lifetime of the spiritual manipulation of the world of matter that my profession, my art, gave to me. Now my clay has dropped away, my blind eyes are opened to such visions . .. but oh, I did not think I would miss the sensations of my gross flesh so much. .. ." The slow voice died away in longing. It seemed to be centered in a position over the chalk diagram.
"How can I rescue you? What should I do? Vitelli says he means to enslave my brother tomorrow night!"
"Ferrante might not be so bad a lord to serve," Beneforte's voice murmured judiciously. "Ferrante, Sandrino, Lorenzo ... a prince is a prince. Service is service.... Ferrante talks of having my Perseus cast."
"I'd think he'd be more likely to melt it down for cannon!" said Thur.
"True, he's been more a patron of the art of war than the art of sculpture. But he is not immune to the attraction of glory in that form. Glorifying himself with my Perseus, he would immortalize me...."
"But you're dead," Thur pointed out inanely. "Three nights ago you cried for help as if to save your soul!" Literally.
"Well, souls, now ..." The ghostly voice trailed off. "Why hurry to that world, after all?"
"Can you ... see another world?" Thur asked, awed. Frightened.
"I glimpsed a light ... it almost hurt. Did hurt."
But you're supposed to go there. Not stay here. This was not the urgent apparition of three nights ago speaking now, Thur realized with a chill. How much had the necromancers' black rites already sapped Beneforte's will?
"Vitelli is no prince. Do you itch to serve him?"
"That Milanese dabbler! Second-rate scum—I could have him under my ..." A glow like a dazzled afterimage in the eye zigzagged through the chamber. A flash of ... anger? Pure will? Your Papa could be in danger of becoming a demon... .
Thur felt a cold knot twist in his gut. If Beneforte's spirit was already becoming corrupted, for how much longer could Thur trust him? He scarcely seemed to be struggling against Ferrante any more. Not too late, no!
But what could Thur do? The bodies—Vitelli and Ferrante seemed to need the bodies, to complete their vile rites. Could Thur steal them away somehow? He could not lift even one of those salt crates by himself, let alone two. And there were the stairs to climb and the guards to get past. A wild vision of setting the chamber afire and reducing the corpses to ash foundered on an obvious lack of sufficient fuel. If the bodies were only partly destroyed, could Vitelli still use them?
Thur was crouched before the lock, smiling in his desperation, when an oddly familiar flicker tickled the corner of his eye. He tilted his head, staring into the wavering candle-cast shadows across the room. Could Beneforte—or Uri—be struggling to take up material form? That liquid, moving shadow by the wall was no rat, nor (unsettling thought) another snake. The shadow stepped from the wall, taking on dimension as it did so, and skittered to hide coyly behind a trestle leg. A little mannikin, not two feet tall. ...
"Good God," said Thur in startlement. "I didn't know you had kobolds here!"
"There's quite a little colony of them in the hills west of town" Beneforte's ghostly voice remarked, eerily conversational.
"I thought they only lived in mountain wastes. Didn't go near men's towns."
"Thats generally true. But they are attracted to magic. I had rather an outbreak of them for a while. They came up under my house to spy on my doings, in my shop. Pesky, and they move things about, but not malicious if you don't attack them."
"Yes, that's the way ours are in Bruinwald," agreed Thur. The shadowy little figure flickered to shelter behind a nearer trestle leg. Beady eyes flashed at him.