Lois Bujold - THE SPIRIT RING

"Then you are as ready to start as I am." She rose again. "Come with me."

Fiametta led them through the courtyard toward the kitchen. She walked wide around the chained Losimon, who was awake and gagged again. He made a menacing lunge toward them, was brought up short by his chain, and sneered. The tall woman garnered her cloak away, not in fear, but as one might draw away from a leper, and gave him a direct and murderous stare. Despite his bindings he managed to return an obscene hand gesture, but then gave up and sat down sulkily as Thur appeared, hefting his sledgehammer. Thur and Tich accompanied the women into the kitchen, where Thur raised the trapdoor for them.

Fiametta lit the lantern, and led the woman down into the root cellar, a chamber half the size of the kitchen partly lined with shelves and stone jars. Thur also let himself down the narrow stair, almost a ladder. Ruberta and Tich watched anxiously from above. Fiametta upended a crate, and the woman seated herself on it as gracefully as on a velvet-covered chair.

The walls were surfaced with cobbles. The floor was beaten earth but for an outcrop of stone; Montefoglian soil was thin. Fiametta set the lantern down, and squatted next to Thur, who was staring at the rock as if he might see through it. However limpid it might look to Uri's ghost, the rock remained stubbornly opaque to her. Thur spread his hands out on the rough surface, and cocked his head as though listening.

"Smear some milk on the stone," Thur suggested after a moment. The nameless lady rose, undid her bodice, and leaned over to place a squirt of milk where he pointed. Fiametta rubbed it about and, rather desperately, called, "Here, kobold, kobold, kobold!"

"You're not calling a crowd of alley cats!" criticized Tich, looking down into the cellar. "Shouldn't you chant something?"

All the more stung because she was wondering the same thing, Fiametta snapped, "If you know so much about it, you chant something. Here, kobold, kobold, kobold!"

Dimness; the wavering glow of the lantern; silence. Not even the scuttle of a rat or the skitter of a roach. They waited. And waited.

"It's not working," said Tich, nervously biting his finger.

Fiametta glanced apprehensively at the tall woman. "Maybe just a little longer ..."

"I'm not in a hurry," the woman said. Patience for her vengeance dripped like vitriol from her voice; even Tich was quelled.

"Here, kobold, kobold, kobold," Fiametta tried again. Tich screwed up his face, apparently deeply offended by this dreadfully domestic, unsorcerous proceeding. But then his eyes widened.

Dark shapes twisted upon the wall, and upon the sloping outcrop, shapes not made by the lantern light. Two, three, four ... six ... twiggy little men rose up, as if instead of casting shadows they were cast by their shadows. Silently, they crept up around the tall woman, seated on her crate. The boldest reached out to touch her skirt, and tilted his head in a shy, sly smile. "Lady?" he piped. "Nice lady ..." She gazed back gravely, and did not flinch.

"You shall have milk," said Thur, "but not yet."

"Who are you to say, metal master?" asked the kobold leader. It frowned at him, thrusting out its bony chest.

"He speaks for me," said the tall woman quietly. The kobold hunched and shrugged, as if to say, No offense meant. Its bright black eyes were avid upon her.

Thur said, "In the garden court at Montefoglia Castle sits a stack of copper pigs. Each of you who helps to bring them through the earth to the courtyard of this house will be permitted to drink his, er, her ... its fill. When the copper is all transported. And not before."

"Too much work. Too heavy," whined the kobold.

"Not if you work together."

"We can't run in the sun."

"The day is cloudy, and almost done. The shadow of the wall is across that end of the garden by now."

"Just a little sip, on the lip, first, metal master?"

Thur wiped his fingers across the milk smear on the outcrop, and twiddled them under the kobold's nose. "You like this? Good? Then bring us the copper. First."

"You'll trick us, cheat us. Eh?"

The tall woman said, "If you do as he asks, you shall have your reward. You have my word on it." Her eyes held the kobold's. Its eyes darted away, as if scorched.

"Lady's word. You heard," it chanted to its comrades.

"Be careful, little ones," Thur warned. "Avoid the dark man called Vitelli. I think he could hurt you."

The kobold gave him a pained stare, its lips twisting. "This we know, metal master."

"Have you—" Thur's eyes went suddenly intent, "have you seen Lord Pia? Is he killed, or does he live?"

The kobold ducked away, crouching. "Friend Pia lives, but does not rise. Many tears are in his eyes."

"And Lady Pia? The Duchess and Julia, what of them?"

"They are kept too high in the air. Kobolds cannot venture there."

"Very well. Go. The sooner you return, the sooner you will have your reward." Thur sighed, and stood, mindful of his head on the beams above. They all climbed again to the kitchen, where Ruberta carefully wiped and poured ale into a Venetian glass, slapped Tich's hand away from it, and gave it to the tall woman, who sat and sipped obediently. Fiametta, Thur, and Tich went back out into the courtyard.

She and Papa used to take breakfast on a rustic wooden table in this courtyard, when they first moved to Montefoglia. The space had been almost a garden, cool and soothing, with potted flowers and a gurgling fountain. Now the Perseus project filled it from wall to wall. The old breakfast table was shoved away under the gallery, half-buried under a pile of tools and trash. The furnace, a beehive of bricks as tall as Thur, sat on a mound of rammed earth dug from the casting pit; the pretty paving stones had been torn up and incorporated into its base.

Fiametta peeked into the furnace. Thur had already laid in the first layer of seasoned pine. Tich had carefully swept and covered the channel, made of wood thickly lined with clay, sloping from the bottom of the furnace to the gates at the top of the mold. The big-beamed crane that had lowered the mold painstakingly into the casting pit, and was intended to raise the finished statue, was rotated out of the way for now. The huge clay lump was wound round with iron bands, just like a bell casting Papa had said, to prevent the mold from bursting when the great weight of molten metal poured into it.

Fiametta walked around the pit, planning her spell. She would lay Uri's body on the side opposite the furnace. No need to include the furnace itself in the diagram of forces. For one thing, Thur and Tich would have to cross and recross her lines, to add wood, stir the melt, and adjust the play of the bellows. There was no call for magic in the purely physical process of melting the bronze. The moment when Thur knocked out the iron plug at the base of the furnace and the metal flowed across her line, that would be the proper moment to start channeling Uri's urgent ghost into this creation. Fiametta realized she was really vague about cooling times. Those iron bands would have to be broken loose to release ... Uri, but if done too soon the mold might burst and the statue slump; if too late, it might grow too stiff. Scaling up was always a problem. Papa had said. And she was scaling up this spell with a vengeance. I must be mad.

An unexpected sharp noise came from the chained Losimon, that Fiametta finally realized was a shriek, pushed out around his gag. The startled guard had recoiled to the end of his chain. On the other side of his pillar two kobolds lugging a bar of copper recoiled from him with twittering cries.

The Losimon tried to cross himself, and gargled through the cloth in his mouth, "Demons! Demons in broad day!" "

Ugly! Ugly Man!" squeaked the kobolds.