Monreale blessed his empty worktable while Brother Ambrose, chanting, circled the chamber with a thurible dribbling incense smoke. "To clear away the lingering echoes of previous spells," Ambrose explained. Fiametta nodded; her father had practiced a similar sort of housecleaning now and then, before casting particularly important, delicate, or complex commissions. Or ones of which he was not too sure of the outcome. The ritual seemed to order the mind more than it did the room, Fiametta reflected, coughing in the smoke.
Monreale himself laid out the props of his intended spell. "It is to be a spell of spirit over spirit as much as spirit over matter. The symbols must be chosen correctly to concentrate the mind. Still, I could wish for some material connector. A lock of hair, an article of clothing actually worn.... I might as well wish for the Papal army to appear over the hill while I'm at it." He sighed, then brightened. "Still, I have Vitelli's true name. This would have miscarried for certain without it, and I would not have known why." He took a new stick of white chalk, and began to laboriously trace a diagram upon the tabletop.
When he'd finished the chalk pattern, Monreale laid a knife with green and gold thread tied around it parallel to a wand of dry willow circled with threads of red and black. Ferrante and Vitelli, the soldier and the spiritually sapless mage. Monreale stood back and studied them. "Is it enough ... ? Such a distance we must carry, over a mile."
They should be crossed, upside down, to represent their entanglement and their evil, thought Fiametta, but did not speak. Her father had severely chastised her for daring to offer suggestions in public. Surety Monreale knew even more about what he was doing.
Monreale folded a gauze cloth beside the knife and wand. It was actually a piece of cheesecloth fetched from the monastery kitchen. "Silk would be better," Monreale muttered. "But at least it is new."
Spider-silk would be even better, Fiametta thought, but she quailed at the thought of volunteering to go collect some, though there were plenty of odd corners in the monastery where spiders might be obtained. Very odd corners.
"It will be a spell of deep sleep," Monreale explained, "the same basic spell as that used by our healers, when a patient fears some little surgery. Powerful enough, but we must strive to make it more powerful, to overcome two men at once, neither anxious to cooperate and one fully capable of the most strenuous resistance. And he may have set wards ..."
Why not enspell them one at a time? Vitelli first, of course.
"My greatest worry," Monreale muttered, "is to this spell's quality of whiteness, or spiritual benignity. It's very doubtful."
"What," said Fiametta, "why? It won't kill them— unless one is leaning over a balcony as it strikes, which seems unlikely—it won't even hurt them. They just go to sleep. A healer's spell, what could be whiter?"
Monreale's lip twisted. "And in the end—if we win—both men must eventually burn at the stake. Hardly harmless in intent, even if legal in means."
"If they win, are they even likely to bother with legality?"
"To hold what they have taken, they must wrap their crimes in some cloak of public pretense. Eyewitnesses to the contrary will be ... in very grave straits."
"That includes me," Fiametta realized with a shiver.
"It includes enough by now to guarantee a very massacre." Monreale sighed. "Well, I am ready. Until the lieutenant reports his men assembled, let us compose ourselves in prayer."
I might have predicted that. But Fiametta settled herself upon her knees before the crucifix on Monreale's office wall without demur. She did not lack things to pray about. She thought sadly of all the prayers she'd wasted in the past on her small desires ... a lace cap, a silver bracelet like Maddelena's, a pony ... a husband. Yet, in a backhanded way, all had been forthcoming; the cap and the bracelet from Papa, the white horse ... Thur? What was this strange girl-power, to make the intractable world spit forth her wishes? Ok; I wish it were over.
At length, Sandrino's surviving senior officer returned, to confer briefly with Monreale. The soldier's eyes glinted grimly in the shadow of his steel helmet. His dented breastplate was dull and leaden. More determination than enthusiasm tightened his jaw, but perhaps that was the more durable emotion, under fire. The ten-year-old Duke's offer to lead his troops himself had been tactfully turned down, the lieutenant reported; but the man's spine seemed to stiffen in memory of it. Monreale blessed him and sent him on his way with a slap to his cuirass that echoed hollowly in the plastered office.
Monreale then led Perotto, Ambrose, and Fiametta into his workroom. The prior followed as a witness. The prior was more an administrator than magician or healer or even, Fiametta suspected, monk, but he had been Monreale's practical right hand throughout the crisis, managing men and space and the daily bread.
Monreale arranged his brothers standing around the table laden with the simple set for the spell. He bent his head in one more blessedly brief prayer, and extended his right hand to Ambrose and his left to Perotto. "Brothers, lend me your strength."
Fiametta stepped to the table's fourth side. "Father, I will gladly lend mine."
Monreale frowned, his brow furrowing. "No ... no," he said slowly. "I don't want you exposed to the danger of the backlash, if this effort fails."
"My little mite could be the difference between failure and success. And not such a little mite as all that, either!"
Monreale smiled sadly, though Brother Perotto frowned repellingly. "You are a good girl, Fiametta," said Monreale. "But no. Please do not distract me further."
His raised palm blocked her protest, which she swallowed back into her tight throat. She stepped, away from the table to the prior's side, and locked her hands behind her back.
"Ambrose, Perotto, join hands," Monreale instructed, and they reached across to each other to complete the ring. Monreale's grip tightened. "The first strike requires all our hearts, to overwhelm Sprenger." He bent his gaze to the symbols on the table, knife and wand, and began to chant in a healer's low drone.
Fiametta could feel the power build, as if an invisible sphere were forming above the table. Monreale's control seemed very precise, meticulous, almost finicky, compared to her Papa's flowing, sweeping gestures. Monreale wastes nothing. And yet ... his economy wasted time, and attention, it seemed to Fiametta. Abundance can afford to be daring.
The sphere began to glow with a visible, corruscating white fire, shimmering in waves both upon its surface and within its heart, as its power built up and up. Now, that was wasteful. Papa had always insisted that a properly cast spell should be heatless and invisible. Perhaps it was some inevitable friction from trying to combine strengths from Ambrose and Perotto. Fiametta held her breath. Oh, strike now, or Vitelli will feel it and be warned!
Still Monreale held his hand, building up his power. The lacy sphere cast the monks' shadows on the walls. Then the light began to pour down like water into the vessels of knife and wand. They filled; the knife blade gleamed like moonlight. Soundlessly, the gauze lifted and drifted across the two glowing objects, and settled gently over them.
Monreale's eyes opened; he breathed the last syllable of his chant. Ambrose grinned in triumph, and even surly Perotto's eyes lighted. Monreale inhaled, smiling, to speak.
The dry willow wand exploded into flame, which flashed across the gauze, consuming it to crumbling blackness. White fire tainted with red flared up into Monreale's face like a powder flash from a misfired hand cannon. His features, lit from below, contorted. Red and green afterimages swirled in Fiametta's eyes, and she squinted futilely against them, her hands pressed to her mouth to stifle her scream.