of the recessed stairway a man in Papal Blue stood at ease, halberd grounded on the flags in front of him. He came to attention stiffly as John’s guide passed. The priest descended the stairs stooping, sandals flopping on stone; John followed clutching sketchbooks and a satchel crammed with bottles and jars, inks and paints and brushes, pens, erasers, all the paraphernalia of an artist. The little monk was apprehensive already, trying to quiet his jangling nerves. The room in which he found himself was long and wide, devoid of windows except where to one side a line of grilles set close under the roof admitted livid fans of light. At the far end of the chamber an oil lamp burned; beneath it clustered a group of figures. John saw dark-dressed, burly men with the insigne of the Court, the hand wielding the hammer and the lightning flash, blazoned on their chests; a chaplain was mumbling over trays of instruments whose purpose he did not recognise. There were spiked rollers, oddly shaped irons, tourniquets of metal beads; other devices, ranged in rows, he identified with a cold shock. The little frames with their small cranked handles, toothed jaws; these were gresillons. Thumbscrews. Such things then really existed. Nearer at hand a species of rough table, fitted at each end with lever-operated wooden rollers, declared its use more plainly. The roof of the place was studded with pulleys, some with their ropes already reeved and dangling; a brazier burned redly, and near it were piled what looked to be huge lead weights.
The priest at Brother John’s elbow continued in a low voice the explanation on which he’d felt impelled to embark while crossing the town from their lodgings. ‘We may take it then,’ he said, ‘that as the crimes of witchcraft and heresy, the raising of devils, receiving of incubi and succubi and like abominations, the trafficking with the Lord of Flies himself, are crimes of the spirit rather than the body, crimen excepta, they cannot be judged, and evidence may neither be given nor accepted under normal legal jurisdiction. The admission of spectral evidence and its acceptance as partial proof of guilt subject to confession during Questioning is therefore of vital importance to the functioning of our Court. Under this head too belongs our explanation of the use of torture and its justification; the death of the guilty one disrupts Satan’s attack on the Plan of God, as revealed to Mother Church through His Vicar on Earth, our own Pope John; while dying penitent the heretic saved from greater relapse into the sin of subversion, to find eventually his place in the Divine Kingdom.’
Brother John, his face screwed up as if in anticipation of pain, ventured a query. ‘But are not your prisoners given the opportunity to confess? Were they to confess without the Questioning—’
‘There can be no confession,’ interrupted the other, ‘without compulsion. As there can be no answering the challenges of spectral evidence, the use of which by definition invalidates the innocence of the accused.’ He allowed his eyes to travel to one of the pulleys and its dangling rope. ‘Confession,’ he said, ‘must be sincere. It must come from the heart. False confession, made to avoid the pain of Questioning, is useless to Church and God alike. Our aim is salvation; the salvation of the souls of these poor wretches in our charge, if necessary by the breaking of their bodies. Set against this, all else is straw in the wind.’
The muttering of the priest at the far end of the chamber ceased abruptly. John’s guide smiled thinly, without humour. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Your waiting is ended, Brother.
They will start soon now.’
‘What,’ said Brother John, ‘were they doing?’
The other turned to him vaguely surprised. ‘Doing?’ he said. ‘They were blessing the instruments of the Questioning, of course…’
‘But,’ said Brother John, rubbing his pate as was his custom when bewildered, ‘what I don’t seem to understand is the question of impregnation by the incubus. If as you say the incubus, the demon in its masculine form, is able physically to fertilise its victim, then the concept of diabolic delusion is invalidated. Creation by a minion of Satan is surely -’ The priest turned on him quickly, eyes glittering. ‘I would advise you,’ he said, ‘to understand very clearly. You are on dangerous ground here, more dangerous than you realise. The demon, being a sexless entity, is unable to create; as its Master is impotent in the face of God. But by receiving as succubus the seed of man, and transporting it invisibly through the air, the thing can be arranged; and is arranged, as you will see. I am not a heretic, Brother.’
‘I see,’ said John, white to the lips. ‘You must forgive me, Brother Sebastian; we Adhelmians are technicians and mechanics, mere journeymen not noted in our lower orders at least for learning of such profundity…’
There was a distant flourish of trumpets, muffled by the vastness of the walls.
Brother John left Dubris by a rutted track that wound through the scrubland to the north of the town. He sat his horse untidily, slumped forward in the saddle with his eyes on the ground. The dusty red gown, soiled now and frayed at the hem, flapped round his calves; he held the reins slackly so the animal meandered from side to side of the road, picking its own way. When it stopped, which was often, John made no attempt to urge it forward. He sat staring fixedly; once he lifted his head to gaze blankly at the horizon. His face had lost its colouring, acquiring instead a greyish sheen like the face of a corpse; fits of shivering shook him, as though he was suffering from a fever. He had lost a great deal of weight; his girdle, once tightly drawn, now hung loosely round his stomach. His satchel of equipment still swung from the pommel of the saddle but the sketchbooks were gone, were already if Brother Sebastian was to be believed on their way by special courier to Rome. Before parting, the Inquisitor had complimented John on his application and the fineness of his work, and attempted to cheer him by pointing out the immense setback the hearings had been to the cause of the Devil in Kent; but getting no answer had left him, not without a backward glance or two and a searching of the spirit. For he had become convinced during the weeks of their association that heresy burned somewhere in the heart of Brother John himself. There were times when he had almost felt tempted to bring the matter to the attention of Father Hieronymous, but who knew what repercussions might have resulted? The Adhelmians, in spite of what John himself had described as a certain lack of scholarship, were a valued and respected Order in the land, and the limner had after all held a commission from Rome. Brother Sebastian was a zealot, tireless in the prosecution of his Faith; but there are times when even the devout find it advisable to turn a blind eye…
A farm cart passed rumbling, trailing a cloud of whitish dust. John’s horse curveted; the priest chided gently, vacant-faced. Through the deep channels of his brain noises still echoed. A susurration, rising and falling like a shrill and hellish sea; the shrieks of the damned, and the dying, and the dead. And the sizzling of braziers, thud of whips splitting flesh; creaking of leather and wood, squeak and groan of sinews as machines tested to destruction the handiwork of God. John had seen it all; the white-hot pincers round the breasts, branding irons pushed smoking into mouths, calf-length boots topped up with boiling lead, the heated chairs, the spiked seats on which they bounced their victims then stacked the lead slabs on their thighs… The Territio, the Questions Preparatoire, Ordinaire, Extraordinaire; squassation and the strappado, the rack and the choking-pear; the Questioners stripped and sweating while the great mad Judge upstairs extracted from the foamings of epileptics the stuff of conviction after conviction… Pencil and brush recorded faithfully, flying at the paper with returning skill while Brother Sebastian stood and frowned, pulling at his lip and shaking his head. It seemed John’s hands worked of their own, tearing the pages aside, grabbing for inks and washes while the drawings grew in depth and vividness. The brilliant side lighting; film of sweat on bodies that distended and heaved in ecstasies of pain; arms disjointed by the weights and pulleys, stomachs exploded by the rack, bright tree shapes of new blood running to the floor. It seemed the limner tried to force the stench, the squalor, even at last the noise down onto paper; Brother Sebastian, impressed in spite of himself, had finally dragged John away by force, but he couldn’t stop him working. He drew a wizard in the outer bailey, pulled apart by four Suffolk punches; the doomed men and women sitting on their tar kegs waiting for the torch; the stark things that were left when the flames had died away.’ Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,’ Sebastian had said at his parting. ‘Remember that, Brother. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live…’ John’s lips moved, repeating the words in silence. .
Night overtook him a bare half dozen miles from Dubris. He dismounted in the dark, awkwardly, tethered the horse while he fetched water from a stream. In the stream he dropped the satchel of brushes and paints. He stood a long time staring, though in the blackness he couldn’t see it float away.
At his rate of travel it took many weeks to reach his home. Sometimes he took wrong turnings; sometimes people fed him, and then he blessed them and cried. Once a gang of footpads jumped him but the white mouth and staring eyes had them backing off in fear of one bewitched, or taken by the Plague. He finally entered Dorset miles off course at Blandford Forum. For a time he followed the westward meanderings of the Frome; beyond Durnovaria he turned north for Sherborne. Somebody recognised the crimson habit, put him on the road, filled his scrip with bread he never ate. In mid-July he reached his House; at the gates he gave the horse away to a ragged child. His Abbott, appalled, had him confined in the sickbay and took immediate steps to recover the animal, but it had vanished. John lay in a room bright with summer flowers, with fuchsias and. begonias and roses from the monastery grounds, watching the sun patches glide on the walls and the fleecy piling of clouds in the blue sky. He only spoke
