His secretary murmured Amen, picked up a candle, and gestured Fiametta and Thur out of the room ahead of him.

On the way to the hospice, which was situated near the front gate, they passed through a courtyard with a covered well. Even at this late hour, past midnight, two monks, a soldier, and a woman stood waiting to draw up water. A monk had his hand on the crank, but was not turning it.

"How goes it, Brother?" asked Brother Ambrose in passing.

"Not good," the monk at the crank replied. "It's coming up muddy. We're waiting for it to settle between buckets, but it's taking longer and longer."

He began cranking at last, and poured the well bucket out into vessels held by the soldier and the woman. He let the rope down and began waiting again. Brother Ambrose followed after the soldier.

"A water shortage?" asked Thur.

"Unless it rains and refills our cisterns," said Ambrose. "We normally house about seventy brothers. Now we've taken in some fifty or sixty of Duke Sandrino's guards, many of them wounded, their families, others who've fled from the violence in town—there are over two hundred people packed in here right now. The infirmary is overflowing. Abbot Monreale is considering giving the hospice entirety over to the women, and putting the wounded in the chapel, if we get any more."

The water-lugging soldier turned aside as they passed the infirmary. Fiametta peeked after him through the door into a long, stone-arched dormitory. Straw pallets were set between wooden-framed beds, most occupied by blanketed forms. In the dim light of a couple of oil lamps a man's open eyes, glassy and feverish, gleamed in his stubbled face. A hooded monk moved among the beds; toward the end of the row a man in pain moaned continuously, like a cow lowing.

Brother Ambrose guided them through another door and into the area of the hospice proper, ordinarily the only area of the monastery open to visitors. He handed Fiametta off to a tired-looking older woman, dressed in night robes with her gray hair in a braid down her back. Fiametta recognized her as a lay sister from the Cathedral chapter in town. Ambrose took Thur off with him through the visitors' refectory toward the men's sleeping area. Thur glanced back uncertainly over his shoulder at her, as he passed around the corner, and waved a left-handed good-bye.

The women's dormitory was another stone-arched chamber similar to the infirmary, but smaller and more crowded. Again, its original beds were supplemented with woven straw pallets and even hastier piles of loose straw with blankets atop. Some twenty-five or thirty women and perhaps twice that number of children and young girls were bedded down every which way. The older boys were presumably housed with the men.

Fiametta picked her way past the strewn bodies, through a door at the far end of the room to an overworked and odoriferous latrine. She began to realize why the abbot considered holding out through a long siege, even without having to repel attack by Ferrante's infantry reinforcements, a dubious proposition at best. This time last night, she'd imagined that if only she could win through to Monreale, he would somehow fix everything. And it seemed she wasn't the only Montefoglian with that idea. But now ...

When she emerged from the latrine the lay sister guided her to a pile of loose straw, already occupied by two sleeping girls. Fiametta peeled off her ruined shoes and flopped down between them. It was bed enough for now.

Uri. Thur blinked open bleary eyes to see the dim vault of the men's dormitory ceiling, and stretched himself on the thin bedding, loose straw with a blanket thrown atop. The evil dream from which he'd wakened vanished away like mist even as he tried to remember it. By the aching spots all over his body, the straw had done little to protect him from the stone floor, though to be fair most of the bruises had been administered by that terrifying Losimon swordsman he'd fought last night. How much pain did Uri, far worse than bruised, lie in right now in the prison of his enemies? How much terror? Thur had straw and a blanket and freedom. Perhaps Uri had only bare stone.

Some men were up and moving, some still slept. Beside Thur, a stubble-faced Montefoglian guard smelling of several days dried sweat squeezed his eyes shut, rolled over taking the blanket with him, farted, and started snoring again. Creakily, Thur rose and went to join the line for the latrine. At least Uri's prison could scarcely be more crowded than this.

He had no problem getting dressed; he'd slept in his clothes. His only clothes, since he'd lost all his possessions in the fight last night. Well, he fit right in here among the possessionless monks, even though his poverty was accidental rather than vowed. He would dedicate his poverty to God like the brothers, along with a prayer to please make it as brief as possible.

A monk in the refectory was portioning out brown bread, ale, and watered wine when Thur entered. The servings were not large. It was good bread, but under the circumstances Thur hesitated to ask for more. The ale was a blessing, washing out his gummy night-dry mouth.

As soon as his voice was his own again, Thur began questioning men who looked like they might have known Uri. They welcomed him with interest for Uri's sake, and told Thur their own gruesome stories of fight and escape, but none of them had any later sight or better guess of their Swiss captain's fate than had Abbot Monreale or Fiametta. The morbid uncertainty made Thur's neck ache.

There were women in the refectory, but Fiametta was not among them. Their voices were subdued, but for one sharp female whose complaints sounded with nasal clarity, till she sat abruptly on the floor and started crying. Another woman led her away to their dormitory. Thur rubbed the lion ring, and wondered if he might approach a woman to ask after Fiametta. But as he was working up his nerve, Brother Ambrose appeared and touched him on the shoulder.

"Thur Ochs? Abbot Monreale would like to see you."

Thur licked the last stray crumbs from his fingers, drained his mug, and returned it to the hosteller. He followed Brother Ambrose.

The secretary-monk led him through a courtyard and corridors, across the cloister, and up first stone and then wooden stairs. They came out on a flat roof above the office where Thur had met the abbot last night. The buttresses of the chapel arched just to the north. A wooden dovecote occupied one end of the roof. Monreale, his hood pushed back, stood next to it. Brother Ambrose paused, signalling Thur to wait.

A speckled gray dove fluttered uneasily on the abbot's hand. Monreale seemed to be speaking to it; he touched his lips to the bird's head, then held his hand aloft. With a burbling coo and a thrumming of wings like a drumroll, the dove climbed into the sky, circled the chapel twice, then flew away to the south.

Thur and Brother Ambrose crunched across a light peppering of sun-dried guano toward the abbot, who turned at the sound of their footsteps, smiled briefly at them both, and scanned the sky.

"Have any returned yet, Father?" Brother Ambrose asked deferentially.

Monreale sighed, and shook his head. "Not one. Not one! I fear for my flock."

Ambrose nodded appreciation of the double meaning, and they both gazed southward into the pale morning blue, their hands shading their eyes. With a downward fist-closing gesture Monreale at last indicated an end to it, and led them back down the stairs to his office and through another door into an adjoining chamber.

Thur stared around in fascination. The chamber was well lit from the north through large high windows, and lined with chests and boxes for books. Shelves held a riot of brass, ceramic, and earthenware jars, colored glass bottles, and mysterious little boxes with labels in Latin. Two big worktables stood, one in the center of the room and one against a wall, strewn with clutter and stacked with papers and well-used cloth-bound notebooks. In one corner a narrow barrel held staves of various woods, and, snout up, the long stiff form of a dried and mummified crocodile, its leathery lips wrinkled back on a jaw half-emptied of teeth. Bags hung from the beams, including one of red silk netting holding a delicate tangle of papery dried shed snake-skins. A corner featured a plastered fireplace. The beehive form of a small furnace, just the size to fit in the fireplace, sat cleaned and ready for use on the slate hearth.