by T. C. Rypel
“Hai, so am I, for us all. What about Valentina? What will happen to her?”
The prelate shook his head mournfully. “About her I can feel no guilt. A plague-bearing harlot. But I know you’ve been a comfort to each other. Yet I’m afraid—that’s come to the council’s attention, as well. She is to be prosecuted along with you.”
* * * *
Gonji strained against the grating to see Valentina when she was brought back from the baths. She, too, searched him out, gazing deeply into his eyes. She seemed strangely subdued, though in great pain, her spirit broken. Gonji found this mildly disconcerting. Her acid tongue and vigorous approach to even the grotesque life of the dungeons had sustained him more than he’d admitted even to himself. Her hair was cropped short now, and her long lashes drooped lifelessly as she turned away.
A guard grabbed a handful of the back of her black sanbenito and thrust her into her cell. She cried out in pain.
“Cholera,” Gonji swore, unconcerned that he had shown another his lost equanimity. “Why don’t you try that with me?”
The guard stomped up and spat into his face. Gonji bore the great insult without a flinch.
“There’s going to be nothing left of you to try it with soon, witch.”
Gonji stared at him a hard moment. “Then you can sleep well—and dream of my deathless curse. We witches have an annoying habit of shucking the grave when unfinished business beckons.”
The sentry emitted a scornful hawking sound full of bravado and stalked off.
“Tina-chan?” Gonji called out loudly. “Are you well?”
He heard her move to the door.
“Well enough for what you have in mind. Are you still scratching at the walls in your new cell? Why don’t you cut a hole into mine big enough for your oriental manhood? No sense holding anything back now.”
Gonji forced a laugh, but he was disturbed at the listlessness in her voice that her attempt at coarse humor could not disguise.
“Val,” he whispered sharply, abbreviating her name as he did only in times of stress, “the emblem—did they—”
“My mat, Gonji—inside my mat,” she whispered back.
He bowed his head, more respectful than ever of the woman’s courage.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was a carefully composed nightmare of damnation.
Tended pillars of flame roared to the tops of the walls all along the promenade of the Zocodover square. A stiff autumn wind whipped and twisted the licking blazes back toward the area where the Burning Court presided, thronged-in on three sides by the massive crowd of excited spectators, who had come to view the disposition of the infamous Japanese witch.
Though night lay thick over Toledo, the square was harshly illuminated by the incendiary glare, hulking shadows crowding the walls. The crowd was repeatedly ordered to hush by the captains of the ringing troops, whose fellows massed on the walls amidst an impressive array of modern armaments. Pistols, muskets, and cannon poised from towers. Arbalests leaned out of gunloops.
Trouble was clearly expected. Gonji felt a wild glee inside to know that he had been the cause of it all. He could recall no more spectacular display of the awe he had inspired.
Iye, that’s not quite true, is it? He told himself in a moment’s honesty. They await the coming of Simon.
And Gonji permitted himself to entertain the thrill of expectation, the certainty that his friend the lycanthrope would indeed deliver him from the clutches of the Inquisition. Thus, he felt as detached from the proceedings as one of the most distant onlookers, barely hearing some of the incredible testimony against him.
He stood manacled to a pillar, alone, feeling somehow godlike, above the grim drama, a participant in a bizarre dream from which he would awaken.
Lightning flashed in the sky, tearing screams out of the crowd, followed by relieved laughter.
The wind pressed at Gonji, tugging his hair back, wild and invigorating, the pillars of flame bowing to him, streaking the Zocodover with lambent light and lurid color. A coach caught fire and was doused amidst shrieks and shouted orders, the scurry of an entire section of the audience.
There was a brief recess in the proceedings for a consultation among the sinister cowled priests. As always during such pauses, there came the reverberated blarings of the great pipe organ in its housing under the colonnade. Funereal strains vibrated the square. Gonji found himself humming in Gregorian chant again.
The organ ceased and the crowd was silenced. Another witness rose in support of the Inquisition. One of the lancers who had ridden out of Barbaso under Salguero and Gonji.
“…commanded monsters and flying demons…”
I’ll be freed from this madness. I’ll escape them any time now.
“…conspired with the warlock Domingo Negro…told us we’d all suffer eternal torments if we didn’t…”
How?
Another witness. A civilian. Gonji didn’t think he’d ever seen the man before.
“He can change into a jackal. I saw him once by moonlight—”
Gonji scanned the walls, passing the time by counting heads among the troops. He stopped at four hundred.
Simon will come.
“Cast a spell of seduction over my daughter—”
“Killed a man by a look from his demon eyes—”
“Caused a goat to be born with a human head—”
Someone will come.
“Make him change into an animal!” someone was yelling from the crowd.
“How about a gorilla?” a drunken companion added. The cordoning troops and clergymen strove to still them, to restore decorum. The crowd grew more raucous as their wine wound them higher.
“No, he will not transform willingly for us,” Anton Balaerik declared, striding before the seated Inquisitors with a dramatic flourish. “But he may yet lure to divine justice his familiar—lobis homem. The wolfman! Tell us where he may be found, witch, that you may yet save your immortal soul!”
Gonji was but dimly aware that it was he whom Balaerik was pointing to, that he was the one being challenged.
How in hell will they do it?
“Obscurantism—”
I must remain alert, be prepared for the signal.
“…simplistic dismissal of divine fiat as some sort or unfathomable magic…”
The night dragged by.
“…even would have us tolerate the Reformation heretics, by all the holy saints!”
His throat ached with thirst.
“…one charge at a time. Now this business of his being a zoanthrope is utterly absurd. There is no proof but for the word of one frightened farmer. Por favor, pardon my…”
Father Martin. How small you look down there. Arigato, friend priest. You risk much by trying.
Another hour passed without deliverance. Gonji thought he had begun to see spirits again. He shook his head to banish the weird sensation.
Duke Alonzo Cervera took the witness podium, looking sheepish and curiously out of place. He passed Gonji the merest glance and dropped it at once.
For the first time in hours Gonji took an interest in what was being said about him. The duke spoke truly, telling of their relationship, Gonji’s honorable service to him. His voice caught when he began to speak of Theresa…
“He violated your daughter, milord?” Balaerik blared.
Cervera seemed to sift through his thoughts before answering. Then: “No—it wasn’t like that—”
“He seduced her, and they conceived an unholy child out of wedlock!”
The duke stood, his face flushing. “Donado, whatever your office, do not use that tone when you’re speaking about my beloved daughter.”
Gasps of shock.
Izquierdo aimed a finger at him. �
��Mind that you address an official of the Holy Office of Inquisition!”
“Lo siento mucho. I am very sorry,” Duke Cervera said to the Inquisitors’ bench. He seemed cowed as he sat back down.
But it was Balaerik who responded for them as though he alone had been addressed. “Quite all right. I can understand how upsetting it must be for you to see the witch so near at hand.”
Cervera winced up at Gonji but turned his eyes away quickly.
“So your beloved daughter was seduced, and she conceived a child. And both mother and child were destroyed by the monster this heathen witch became,” Balaerik bellowed.
But Gonji’s voice roared still louder, silencing the entire square.
“It’s a lie!”
A woman’s scream broke the stillness from somewhere outside the promenade walls. Scores of people sucked in breaths at once amid shrills of alarm. Soldiers scampered off in response.
Now. It must be now—
Gonji tested his manacles. Useless to struggle. He cast his gaze all about the square, searching for the surreptitious rescuers. But none came. The disturbance ended as swiftly as it had begun.
Balaerik pressed Cervera again. “Is it not even as I have described, milord?”
The duke was on his feet again. “No—!” Oohs and ahhs accompanied his surprising response. “Now that I’ve heard it put like that, you see, I—it can’t be true. I refuse to believe it, or to have any word out of my mouth be used against this man!” He took two steps off the podium and locked eyes with Gonji. “Forgive me, my son. For permitting a father’s broken heart to cloud my mind.”
Gonji experienced a profound suffusion of relief and pity toward the now tearful duke. “Arigato goziemashite, milord,” he replied with great politeness, for indeed, the duke had spoken the words Gonji had traveled so many deadly miles to hear.
When the rumbling of the crowd had been brought under control and the pipe organ had ceased its dirge-like droning, Gonji himself was unshackled from the post and brought to the witness podium. A tremor of anticipation rolled through the morbid, superstitious audience. Crucifixes, relics, and various sacramentals were produced and extended in a grotesque display of public warding of Gonji’s evil spirits.
The samurai steeled himself, for he knew that the ordeal of the next few moments might well be more intolerable than that of the entire imprisonment of the past year.
Preliminary questioning… Gonji’s full title, mimicked by boors in the crowd… He abided it without a blink.
Balaerik faced him squarely, not a yard away.
“We’ve all heard the accusations against you, time and time again throughout the night. Attested to and corroborated and repeated in an endless rondo the holy angels themselves must find insufferable.”
No more so than you, bastard of Arrogance and Evil. Where in hell are my compadres?
“We’ve heard your impressive honorifics—‘Deathwind of Vedun,’ eh?” Balaerik smiled condescendingly.
Gonji bit his tongue, swallowing with difficulty.
“But we will have an end of this. There is but one charge I would see you answer to yourself. I refer to the charge averred by no less than the French knights of the Order of the…but my vow against speaking the most holy name forbids me—”
“The Order of the Holy Ghost,” a prelate completed from the long bench of cowled prosecutors.
“Gracias,” Balaerik replied. “This charge concerns black magic which led to the obliteration of a town near Avignon, France. Black magic perpetrated by you, witch. You destroyed every man, woman, and child in Pont-Rouge—”
“There were no children in that town,” Gonji retorted as he leaned forward emphatically. “They were sacrificed, by their own parents, to Satan—your master!”
Gasps of outrage broke from the stunned gathering.
“Sacrilege!”
“Insolent swine!”
“You’ll burn for that, you—”
Balaerik pressed for silence. “Is that so? And can you produce any witness to corroborate this…this…”
“You know I can’t, or else you wouldn’t posture so smugly.”
“But I can testify to the truth of what the prosecutor says. Someone help me—por favor?”
The audience began to murmur as the man who had called out from among them was duly recognized and aided to the prosecutors’ platform. He was blind, his eyes patched over with oblong pieces of black fabric that lent him an eerie cast.
And Gonji could not believe his own eyes. Until he met Balaerik’s maddeningly complacent look.
“That man is dead!” Gonji could scarcely muster conviction enough to voice what he was whispering, so momentarily shocked was he by this apparition. “I killed him.”
“Did you.” It was a rhetorical statement that accused him of failure or self-delusion.
Or perhaps something worse, Gonji began thinking, apprehended only by the samurai. An admission of something Balaerik himself had done that outweighed the violence implicit in Gonji’s statement. And he realized, when he saw the nattering and head-turning of the cowled priests, that his accusers had heard him clearly enough. Gonji had added nothing toward convincing anyone of his pristine innocence.
The truth was that Gonji and his late companion Emeric had both had to deal with this witnessing revenant. Emeric had put out the man’s unearthly eyes to stay their ghastly power, and Gonji had ended his twisted life. So he had thought.
“This is Monsieur Perreault. He will relate a tragic tale of human misery. The very least of which was his savage blinding at the hands of this witch and his cohorts.”
Balaerik’s dramatic phrasings set the stage for the revivified fiend’s lies. Gonji could not believe the things he heard, for he and his companions were being substituted for the perpetrators of the most callous and inhuman act of evil he’d ever seen.
“My little ones,” the undead Perreault sobbed tearlessly. “Sacrificed that this monster might gain unholy power—”
“It’s an evil lie!” Gonji roared. “Make him swear by the Christ—someone lay on him the crucifix of the Christ!”
“Be still, witch,” Balaerik commanded with deadly calm, pointing a finger. “Say not the Most Holy Name.”
“—forced me to watch what they did to my children and then put out my eyes so that I would live forever with the memory of that last terrible vision!”
“Take away his eye patches! See what lies beneath!” All control fled Gonji now, the nightmare seizing him in its nerve-racking grip. He strained uselessly at his shackles.
“Stay thyself!” the Grand Inquisitor bellowed in Latin, executing a warding gesture at Gonji from the bench, where he now stood in wrathful attitude.
“The golden Rhone ran red with blood,” Pearreault’s reanimated corpse intoned mournfully. “Now only the mistral cries where once there were the sounds of children.”
“Nooo!” Gonji shouted. “You’re all loco—don’t you see what they’re—?!”
Balaerik strode up to Gonji with mock outrage and slapped at him. Gonji’s head twisted to evade the blow. Hands and feet shackled to a post, he could do nothing in reply but concentrate his rage into the gaze he now slanted at his enemy.
“Forgive me,” Balaerik said with a veneer of sincerity. He reached out with both hands to caress Gonji’s face as if in patronizing affection. The samurai jerked his head back but could not evade the evil donado’s cold touch. “I can see now that you cannot help what you are.”
He withdrew and addressed the throng now. “Don’t you see, Your Eminence, honored brothers and sisters, that he is possessed by the demon that brings the moon-madness we have known so well? I cannot disgrace this holy court by prosecuting this poor, tortured soul further.” He walked off.
Gonji’s teeth ground as
he strove to regain control over his trembling body, his blood-streaked thoughts.
“Enough, donado,” Bishop Izquierdo said with a wave of his hand, calling the assemblage to order. “We have heard enough. By the holy power invested in me by the High Office of Inquisition…”
Gonji heard little of what the Grand Inquisitor said and cared less.
“…witchcraft and demon-possession and murder most foul…”
His eyes were riveted to the pompously strutting Balaerik.
“…to be burned at the stake when tomorrow’s sun has fled the fall of darkness…”
If I must return from the grave as a wolf myself, Agent of Evil, I will stalk you, and I will find you, and I will avenge the unutterable insults you have done me. Upon the honor of my ancestors, I swear that it shall be so…
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I can’t understand what’s come over him these past months, but I fear the worst.”
Father Martin de la Cenza wrung his hands as he strode from the reception hall with the new visiting oblate, his voiced concern for the interim Inquisitor stooping his narrow shoulders. But he was cheered withal. For this unexpected guest’s entourage had arrived only minutes before, accompanied by the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Texeira, and had brought important news from His Holiness regarding the matter of the condemned samurai.
The archbishop had gone to the cathedral briefly but now returned and approached them down the long, carpeted corridor.
Before the Nuncio was in earshot, de la Cenza added quickly, to the new arrival, “I must say, Father Sebastio, that I’m comforted to at last be in the presence of at least one other man of God who shares my feelings.”
