"He's testing himself," Thur said suddenly. "He wants to be the best. He wants to know he's the best. And he wants everyone else to know it, too."
"He's mad."
"What is Uri about? Why doesn't he just pick up Ferrante and crush him?"
The method in Uri's attack came clear finally as he forced Ferrante to trip and fall backwards on the marble steps. Uri's sword lashed out and pinned him there, pressing into his chain mail in the identical spot to Uri's own mortal wound. Uri's face tightened in wrath, and he leaned on his sword with all the inhuman weight of his dense metal body.
"Niccolo!" screamed Ferrante. At last, a timbre of purely human terror.
He is brought down, thought Fiametta. He is brought down. But it gave her no joy.
The chain burst, and the sword drove through Ferrante's chest, searing flesh and quenching blade in one motion. Uri stood bent, holding Ferrante in place, for one long, long moment.
Vitelli flew out the castle door and cannonaded off the marble balustrade, his black, symbol-decked robe flaring. He brandished his right fist in triumph. Upon his index finger gleamed a gold band with a mask in the shape of the face of a bearded man. "My lord, I have it!'
Fiametta breathed a silent wail, her fists clenching hopelessly. We were too slow ...
Ferrante rolled his eyes up toward him and gasped out, "You're late ... Niccolo. On purpose?"
"No, lord!" Vitelli screamed in horror, seeing him pinned there. A beat too late for conviction.
"Don't ... lie to me, Niccolo. I hate a man who lies. I saw you, hovering in there. Waiting. Saw the whites of your eyes. Damn your eyes, Niccolo ..." His mouth opened and his face contorted in rictus agony as Uri put his foot to his chest and drew the sword back out.
For just a moment, Uri hesitated, staring warily up at the sorcerer with a face so strangely set as to almost make him appear inert metal in truth. Then, in two bounds, the marble cracking under him, Uri leapt up the stairs between Vitelli and the door. Vitelli launched himself one-handed over the balustrade, and jumped to the cobbled court. His knees bent, and he grunted with the force of his landing, but he straightened and danced back with room to move, his hands sweeping his velvet robe straight.
"I have you, simulacrum!" he screeched at Uri. "Cold will freeze you where you stand, and birds will nest in your ears!" He muttered, gestured; Uri, advancing determinedly upon him down the stairs, slowed. Uri's red glow faded, and his new bronze gleam shone instead, on his nose, ears, toes. With a tortured effort, he raised his sword arm.
"Piro, piro, piropiropiro!" Fiametta cried. Uri shook himself, red-hot all over, and began to move again, cat-footed across the stones, maneuvering for his cut. Fiametta fell to her hands and knees.
Vitelli shot Fiametta a look that said,Later, And you'll wish that you'd never been born , but then was forced to turn his entire attention upon Uri. He trod backwards, and rubbed his new ring. His low-voiced muttering became intent, then rose to a shout: "Thus I release you! Fry, unbonded, and be free!"
The bronze Uri stopped short. Vitelli, his eyes narrowing in triumph, straightened and strolled closer to inspect the frozen hero.
"No," groaned Thur. "He has your Papa's spell, Fiametta! The one you said he used to release the baby spirit from Ferrante's first silver ring. We are undone! God help us, and Uri, too!" He hefted his sledgehammer, eyes rolling at Vitelli, and inhaled, ready to strike against the impossible odds. The smirking necromage circled around in front of the silent statue.
"No, wait," hissed Fiametta, scrambling up and clutching Thur's arm. "That's not right, it's not right, wait—!"
The bronze Uri grinned. His whisper reverberated off the castle walls.
"You cannot release me. I am not bound."
In a vicious, whistling flat arc, he swung his sword full-force, and took Vitelli's head; but not before his words were heard and understood, so that the last expression on that black-browed face as it rotated through the air was of the most confounded dismay.
It landed, rolled, stopped.
Silence fell, and gusts of rain. Fiametta looked around. About a hundred people were watching, standing back all around the perimeter of the court. Three smudged white women s faces were pressed to the window slits in the north gate tower. Most of the witnesses were Montefoglian townsmen, with a few dazed Losimons being held at sword's point. Distant shouts, screams, and crashes wafted from odd corners of the castle as the last of Ferrante's men were winkled out by the mob. Vitelli's blood, pooling on the cobbles, steamed gently in the cold night air. Uri steamed, too, standing back in the rain; his red glow was darkening, and the gleam of metallic bronze beginning to frost his edges and surfaces. Cold, and a kind of lonely premonition, quenched the bright triumph of his eyes. He must go soon from his temporary metal body. Go where?
And where was Papa? She thought of the new gold ring on Vitelli's dead hand, and started toward it. She must retrieve it. Maybe Abbot Monreale would know what to do with it. It had to be possible to release Papa from the ring, and the ring from Vitelli's will, for how could one dead man be bound to another?
Ferrante too was crawling toward Vitelli's decapitated body, Fiametta saw with shock. The Lord of Losimo was not as dead as she'd thought. The hot blade must have cauterized as it cut, so that despite his crushed ribs Ferrante was not bleeding to death as fast as Uri had. His face was a clay-colored mask of determination and pain.
She raced him toward the ring. Thur followed with his hammer, though she did not think Ferrante was in any condition to offer further physical threats. Still there was a kind of weird glory in his unyielding will, that dragged his useless body across the rain-sucked stones.
But as she reached for Vitelli's right hand, a cold blast knocked her backwards with the force of a club. Ferrante, too, jerked back, one hand flung up to ward the invisible blow. The effort broke something loose inside, for he gasped once, then his dark eyes grew fixed, and closed no more. Fiametta crouched, open-mouthed, her eyes filling with the impossible.
A form was condensing over Vitelli's body, as if night were being made palpable. A dark man, a blackness much deeper than any shadow in this torch-lit courtyard. Inside the black man it seemed to Fiametta that she saw other little half-digested ghosts, dozens of them, deformed and agonized.
"Oh, no," choked Thur. "We've made another ghost! Will it never end?"
"No," breathed Fiametta, her chest tight with terror. "Worse. Much worse. We've made a demon." Where was Papa? Inside the dark man? One of those subghosts was very fresh, and in terrible pain.
The dark man's face awoke, sharpening into definite and familiar features. Vitelli's black eyes opened, and glittered with their own red glow. He looked almost as surprised as Fiametta. He turned his hands over, and stared at them in wonder. A shining light encircled one black finger. Vitelli threw back his head and laughed, as he realized his continued existence and power.
"It worked! I live! I am immortal now!" The dark man actually capered, and swept a wild ironic bow toward Uri, who stood freezing and stunned. "I thank youl"
She'd done it now, Fiametta thought miserably. Abbot Monreale, in one of his many sermons on the subject, had once described a sin as the making of a really irrevocable mistake, with permanent consequences. She stared out at her vast mistake, and thought: The eighth deadly sin really is stupidity. And ignorance. She had no idea how to fight a demon, none. But she was heart-certain that if Vitelli once escaped, the consequences would be dreadful.