Eric Flint - This Rough Magic

Benito thought about that for a moment.

"If I were some kind of agent, or someone wanting a baby for a ritual, the last thing I'd pick to kidnap would be a teething baby," Francesca persisted. "You can't reason with it, and you can't shut it up without hurting it. You can't even shut it up by hurting it. So what if this isn't a kidnapping, as Maria thinks it is? Who else would want a baby?"

"Who would want a baby-except a mother?" He looked up to see Maria nodding thoughtfully.

"Somebody who lost a baby already? And maybe can't have any more?" Francesca pursed her lips and sat up a little straighter. "And you've got a little china-doll right here, about as pretty as anybody'd ever want. All right, that makes sense. But who?"

"Remember, Benito, we are probably looking for someone who isn't entirely well balanced, but it's also probably someone too careful to give herself away by disappearing with it. Lord only knows why they took the baby-"

Benito felt a finger of ice trace the line of his spine. "You don't-you don't think they'd hurt her, do you?"

"Not if it was someone looking for a baby to care for. They'd try to look after her."

"Which leaves harming her by accident." His heart sank again. "Saints. If the baby starts fussing again, wakes up and starts crying-"

It was around dusk when the young Corfiote boy came panting in. "Down near the southern wall! There's a building that's been pretty well wrecked in the shelling, milord. No one living down there. But I heard a baby!"

Benito got to his feet. "Let's go."

Maria struggled to keep up.

Emeric's bombardment had turned from being largely focused on the front wall to working on the morale of the besieged by shelling the buildings inside the wall. The result was that the forequarter of the city, inside the southern curtain wall, was largely uninhabitable with many damaged buildings. It was to this part that the boy led them, into a small square.

"It was here I heard it, milord."

At precisely that moment, a baby cried. A fierce howl of pain and frustrated anger. Benito knew that it had come from directly overhead. He knew that cry, knew that baby-voice. It was his baby, his little girl-

Anger he'd been carrying around inside since the abduction exploded into a white rage.

He went up through the skeletal remains of the building without a thought to fragile masonry. But at the third floor level he was confronted by a piece of staircase that was plainly newly fallen. This stopped Maria, but it didn't stop him. Not for an instant. He climbed across on tiny stubs of masonry, willing them to be big enough to hold him.

He gained the landing. "Get someone with some planks!" he called back to Maria. He pushed open the door at the top.

The room here was virtually intact. And leaning over the cradle at the far side of the room was a woman they'd supposed safe in the hospital. Mrs. Grisini's hair was awry, gray straggling locks hanging about her face. Her eyes, looking up from Alessia and into his, were unfocused, the pupils wide. She saw him and screamed in competition with Alessia.

"It's all right," said Benito, trying for an air of reassurance. She looked mad enough to do anything and Alessia was right within her grasp. He walked slowly forward, making no hasty movements.

She screamed again, and snatched the infant from the cradle, holding it so tightly against her that the baby howled in protest at this mishandling.

Benito froze where he was. She edged away from him, step by step, until her back was against the outer door that had once led to another room. Before Benito could stop her, she kicked the door open and dashed out onto what was left of the structure.

Torches and lanterns lit her eerily from below. She looked like one of the condemned souls in the Holy Book. "Get away!" she cried, her eyes wild, waving her free hand at him. "Get away from me!"

Benito walked toward her, through the broken masonry, then out into the room one slow step at a time. "I won't hurt you, signora," he said, as quietly and calmly as he could and still be heard over the baby's screams. "I've just come for my little girl."

His heart pounded painfully in his chest, and his throat was too tight to swallow as she backed up another step. A cool, reasoning corner of his mind was calculating footing, the length of his own lunge, the amount of safe wood still behind her. The rest of him wanted to shriek and grab for his baby, now.

"You can't have her!" The woman said, shaking her head violently. "She's mine, not yours, she was meant for me. I saw it in the dreams!"

"What dreams, signora?" Benito asked, edging another foot closer. The wood creaked dangerously underfoot, and the whole building swayed again. He made a drastic revision of his safety margins.

"The dreams, the holy dreams," the woman babbled, clutching her hand in her hair while the baby subsided to a frightened whimper, as if she somehow sensed the danger she was in. "She's mine, she was meant for me-"

He was almost within reach-

Suddenly she looked over his shoulder, as light poured from the door behind him, and her eyes widened still further. "Benito?" Maria called. There was a murmur of shocked and frightened voices, and someone stifled a cry of despair.

"Stay back!" he warned sharply, as the woman took another two steps backward onto wood that moaned under her weight.

"Signora," he said urgently, recapturing her attention. "Signora, the dreams. What about them? What did they tell you?"

She transferred her attention from whoever was behind him back to his face. "You don't care about the dreams," she said accusingly. "You just want my-"

The wood gave.

Benito made a desperate lunge as the woman shrieked and teetered on the brink of the gulf, one arm flailing wildly, the other still clutching the baby. He reached her-she fell, just as his hands brushed the cloth-

He grabbed for it and held, as he was falling himself.

A blow to his chest knocked breath and sense from him, but he had a handful of fine linen fabric, and he held onto it past all pain and sense. The universe spun, then came to rest again.

He was dangling face-down over the street, three floors down to the cobblestones. With one hand and both legs he held on to the timber-strut that had saved him. The other hand was clutched in the linen dress of the little girl-baby, who was likewise dangling head down over the empty darkness, howling at the top of her lungs.

He edged back until his chest was supported by the timber, then drew her up. Only when she was safely cradled against his chest did he breathe again.

And held her carefully, like the precious thing she was, murmuring her name over and over, hardly daring to believe he had her back safe. He might even have burst into tears of his own at that point, but suddenly the others were on him, hauling him to safety, praising him to the skies. Arsenalotti, Arsenalotti wives everywhere, pounding his back, touching his sleeve, crying over the baby. Maria, her face as white as fine porcelain held Alessia, and stared down at her, fierce tears in her eyes.

No one seemed to be thinking about old Mrs. Grisini. Benito tilted his head to look down; and then, wincing, looked away. The torchlight showed enough. The crazed old woman's body was a broken ruin.

In the crowd below, Bianca Casarini turned and began walking away. She was disgruntled, a bit, at the failure of the scheme-but not excessively so. It had been Fianelli's idea in the first place, not hers. Emeric's servant was now desperate to do anything that might placate his master, given that all the other attempts at treason and sabotage had failed. No matter how petty the attempt might be.

Under pressure, Bianca had agreed to inflict the dreams on the old woman. She hadn't wanted to, herself, because she could sense the net thrown by Eneko Lopez and Francesca de Chevreuse closing steadily around her. But Countess Bartholdy had insisted.