The guard sergeant nodded, and his subordinate yielded the lantern to Thur.

"Don't get too close. He can grab you through the bars."

"I'll yell."

"Only if he doesn't grab you by the throat."

The guards returned to their immediate duties. Under the close eye of the sergeant who held a cocked crossbow, they traded dinner pails into the crowded cells in return for full slops buckets, which they carried off to empty in the garderobe. None of the prisoners seemed inclined to try a violent escape attempt this evening, though.

Thur watched the rocking castellan a while, then leaned against the wall opposite and closed his eyes. He hardly required the lantern now. He could find his destination with his eyes shut, he was certain. It thumped in his head, so close. Down. Down.

At a moment when the guards were thoroughly busy at the far end of the corridor, out of sight in the garderobe or their guard post, Thur picked up the lantern and trod silently into the dark cross-corridor. The walls brushed his shoulders, and the cut rock seemed to slant up toward the castle. For a moment he doubted his underground intuition, as the lantern cast a pool of orange light on the rising floor in front of him, but then he found the stairs, one set going up, one down. He went down.

A narrow hall at the bottom had four doors leading off it, all solid wood this time. Two were not locked. Neither unlocked door was the one he wanted, Thur was heart-certain, but he peeked within anyway.

Storage chambers. Barrels of flour, dusty wine casks ... provisions for the castle against a siege of man or weather. Green sparks flung back his lantern light from a corner, the jewel eyes of a scuttling rat. Spider webs festooned the corners. The spiders were smaller than the rats, but not as much smaller as Thur would have preferred.

He returned to the hallway. This door. He tried it again, rattled it futilely, then attempted to force it with his shoulder. The iron lock groaned, but held. He should have borrowed some tools from the other workmen and tucked them into his tunic before he'd started out. If he went back and got some, could he bluff his way back in here a second time? How long before the guards above noticed his absence? Now. Now or never. Uri, I'm here.

He squatted, trying not to pull his aching cut, and called softly under the crack of blackness at the bottom of the door. "Uri? Uri...." Why do I fear an answer? The twisting sensation in his gut had nothing to do with his gash.

The dust on the floor beneath his nose moved, swirling. There was no draft. Thur lurched hastily to his feet, sending a hot flash of pain ripping along his stitches. He stepped back till he was stopped by the stone wall, icy against his shoulders. He swallowed a cry and stood silent, heart pounding. Wait and see.

The dust swirled upward, each tiny mote spinning in the lantern light, into a familiar, tenuous figure ... big cloth hat, curling beard.... Don't think of him as a ghost. Think of him as ... as your future father-in-law, Thur told himself wildly.

"Hello, sir," Thur whispered. Panic and politeness squeezed his throat. "M . .. Master Beneforte. I came … "

The faint suggestion of a hat seemed to dip in acknowledgement.

Thur pointed to the lock. "Can you help... ?" How powerful a poltergeist was the dead mage? Could this be the secret of the mad castellan's escape? It was only slightly better than imagining Lord Pia turning himself into a bat and slipping between the bars.

The ghost of a figure seemed to shrug, like a man girding himself for a difficult task. The dust-features anticipated pain. A moment of preparation, and the dust contracted and fell from the air. Inside the lock, metal scraped, stopped, scraped again. A clank, and the door fell open a finger's breadth. Then silence, utter as the stone.

Thur took a deep breath, reached, and pulled the door open. Holding tightly to the lantern, he stepped over the threshold, and softly drew the door almost shut again behind him.

The room was larger than the other storage chambers, and had a barred window tunnel to the cliff face like the cells above, allowing good air. A trestle table was shoved against one wall, cluttered with boxes, jars, books, papers, a brazier ... it all reminded Thur uncomfortably and exactly of Abbot Monreale's magic workroom. A leather-topped footstool in the shape of a small carved chest sat among the papers. Two iron candle racks held a dozen thick, fine beeswax candles, half-consumed. Good work lights, for things done in the night. Thur eased his tallow candle from the lantern and lit a few. Only then did he force himself to cross the room and examine what lay along the opposite wall.

Two oblong crates lay side by side, each upon a pair of trestles. The crates were about six feet long, cobbled together from coarse pine planks. The pine lids were held on only by a single rope circling the middle of each crate.

Cautiously, Thur touched one rope. It did not rise to wind about his neck or any other trick of ensorcellment. He yanked the slip knot and the rope fell to the floor. Thur had no cloth tucked in his tunic to press to his face, so he merely held his breath, and slid the lid aside.

Well. Not altogether unexpected, this. The body of Master Beneforte, still wrapped in the gauze from its smoking, lay in a bed of glittering rock salt. Thur wondered vaguely why the apparition always appeared in the clothes he'd died in, and not this thin shroud, which seemed more ghostly. Maybe the velvet court dress was a favorite. The smell was not nearly so bad as Thur had feared, mostly the clinging, not-unpleasant scent of applewood. Still—Thur counted over the summer-heated days—Ferrante or Vitelli must have added some powerful spell of preservation. The tanned and bearded face was chill. No ghost could animate this thick and heavy clay the way it animated weightless dust and smoke. Thur searched his heart for superstitious dread, but the object before him seemed more sad than fearsome. A battered old naked man, who'd lost everything, even his vanity. Thur covered him back over with the pinewood lid.

Reluctantly, he turned and rugged the slip knot of the second crate, then stood a moment, screwing up his ... not courage, exactly. Hope. Maybe it isn't Uri. Many men have died this week in Montefoglia. For one moment longer, he could hope. Then he would know.

You know already. You've known from the beginning. And No! It won't be him! Thur shoved the lid back on a huff of decision.

His brother's face jutted from its matrix of salt, both familiar and alien. The once-handsome features were all there, undisfigured. But the animating humor, the sparkle and shout, hungers and ambitions, quick wit ... how empty this strange, drawn, pale visage was without them. He died in pain. That quality alone lingered in the stiff face.

Thur looked down the nude body. A single wound gaped darkly in its chest, of which Thur's hot belly cut seemed a thin parody. He died swiftly. Long ago. At least that half of the nightmare, of Uri suffering as a prisoner, could be laid to rest. If only you could have waited, brother. Hung on. I was coming. I was. ...

There was no shortage of new nightmares to take the emptied place. What did Ferrante intend this chamber and its strange equipment for? His own face feeling nearly as numb as his elder brother's, Thur walked around once more. A cleared area in the center of the stone floor bore traces of chalk, and less-identifiable substances. Black necromancy indeed. Grimly, Thur took a little tambourine from his tunic, whispered its activation, and, on tiptoe, found a place for it on a high shelf behind a jar. There. That one ought to give Monreale's listening monks an earful.

He returned to his brother and, for the first time, touched the cold face. Only a husk. Uri was gone, or at least, gone from this clay. But how far? Thur stared blindly around the chamber, realizing abruptly that both his nightmares were literally true. Uri was dead. And Uri was a prisoner in this terrible place. How do 1 release you, brother?