Читать книгу The Lion Rampant - Robert Low - Страница 12

Westminster

Feast of St George, April 1314

The Pope was dead and the shiver of it added to the cold ache in the bones. Drip and ache, that was Easter, thought Edward, every miserable cunny-rotted day of it, when the damp crept up your back and no amount of stoked fire could keep the wind from looping in and up your bowels until you coughed and shat hedgepigs.

Like Father. He threw that thought from him, as he always did when it crept in like a mangy dog seeking shelter. Shitting his life down his leg; for all his strength and longevity brought low by a foul humour up the arse, king or no.

Death did not care for rank. The Pope had found that, just as Jacques de Molay had promised from his pyre. Edward, even as the delicious chill of it goosed his flesh, could not help the hug of glee that he was not his father-in-law, the King of France, who had also been cursed in the same breath.

Still, there was room enough for Edward to wonder if his own treatment of the Order of Poor Knights had inherited a waft of that smoke-black shriek from de Molay. He had been light on the Templars, but followed the Pope’s edict and handed their forfeited holdings – well, most of them – to the Hospitallers. Much good may it do them, he thought, though it does me very little for I cannot see the Order of St John coming to my army. The Templars made that mistake by joining my father’s army and the lesson in it is plain enough for a blind man to see.

He wished someone would come to his army, all the same.

‘Who has not responded?’ he demanded and de Valence made a show of consulting the roll, squinting at it in the bright glow of wax candle which haloed the small group in the dim room. No one was fooled; everyone there, the King included, knew he could recite it from memory.

Lancaster, Arundel, Warwick, Oxford, Surrey: the greatest earls of his realm. Plus Sir Henry Percy, bastion of the north.

‘We issued summons to all earls and some eighty magnates of the realm to prepare for war with the Scots,’ de Valence pointed out, as if to say that these six were nothing at all. Edward shifted in his seat, scowling and aching.

Summons to eighty magnates and every earl – even his 13-year-old half-brother, Thomas, Earl of Norfolk – not to mention Ulster and personal, royal-sealed letters to twenty-five rag-arsed Irish chieftains. But the realm’s five most powerful and the north’s shining star, Percy, had all refused and the gall of it scourged him almost out of his seat.

‘When we defeat Bruce, my liege, all matters will be resolved,’ de Valence went on, hastily, as if he sensed the withering hope of the King. ‘We will have twenty thousand men, including three thousand Welsh, at Berwick by this time next month, even without these foresworn lords.’

With smiths and carpenters, miners and ingéniateurs, ships to transport five siege engines and the means to construct an entire windmill sufficient to grind corn for the army. Plus horses – a great mass of horses.

Edward thought sourly of the man who had just left, elegantly dressed, with a plump face that had yet to settle into anything resembling features. But Antonio di Pessagno, the Genoese mercantiler who was as seeming bland as a fresh-laid egg, held the realm of England in his fat, ringed hand, for it was his negotiated loans which were paying for the Invasion.

Edward did not like Pessagno, but the Ordainers – Lancaster, Warwick and the other barons who tried to force him into their way – had banished his old favourites, the Frescobaldi, so he had no choice but to turn to the Genoese. The same earls who ignored him now, Edward brooded, feeling the long, slow burn of anger at that. The same who had contrived in the death of my Gaveston …

‘They claim’, he rasped suddenly, ‘what reasons for refusing my summons to defend the realm?’

‘That they did not sanction the campaign.’

The answer was a smooth knife-edge that cut de Valence off before he could speak. Hugh Despenser, Earl of Winchester, leaned a little into the honeyed light.

‘They say you are in breach of the Ordinances,’ he added with a feral smile.

No one spoke, or had to. They all knew the King had deliberately manipulated the affair so that he breached the imposed Ordinances by declaring a campaign against the Scots without the approval of the opposing barons. Honour dictated they should defend the realm, no matter what – but if they agreed, then they supported the King’s right to make war on his own, undermining everything they had worked for. Their refusal, however, implied that they were prepared to let the Scots mauraud unchecked over the realm and that did no good to their Ordinance cause.

They were damned if they did and condemned if they didn’t, so the King won either way, though he would have preferred to have them give in and send their levies. Still, it was a win all the same and, since Despenser had suggested the idea, he basked in the approval of the tall, droop-eyed Edward while the likes of de Valence and others could only scowl at the favour.

Yet Edward was no fool; Despenser was not a war leader and de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, most assuredly was. Better yet, the Earl hated Lancaster for having seized Gaveston from his custody and executing him out of hand and Edward trusted the loyalty of revenge.

Edward leaned back, well satisfied. All he had to do was march north, to where this upstart Bruce had finally bound himself to a siege at Stirling and could not refuse battle without losing face with his own barons.

‘Bring the usurper to battle, defeat him and we win all – roll the main, nobiles. Roll the main.’

Roll the main, de Valence thought as the approving murmurs wavered the candle flame in a soft patting like mouse paws massaging the royal ego. But the other side of that dice game was to throw out and lose.

That is why they call it Hazard, he thought.

Crunia, Kingdom of Castile

Feast of St James the Less, May 1314

The port was white and pink and grey, hugged by brown land studded with dusty green pines and cypress – and everywhere the sea, deep green and leaden grey, scarred with thin white crests and forested with swaying masts. Light flitted over it like a bird.

Crunia was the port of pilgrims, those who had wearily travelled from Canterbury down through France and English Gascony into Aragon and Castile and could not face the journey back the same way. The rich, or fortunate beggars, would take ship back to Gascony, or even all the way to England – the same ships which brought the lazy or infirm to walk the last little way to the shrine at Compostella and still claim a shell badge.

Hal stared with bewilderment at them, the halt and twisted, the fat and self-important, shrill beldames and sailors, those who thought they could fool God and those footsore and shining with the fervour of true penitents. He had never seen a foreign land and it made his head swim with a strange fear that Kirkpatrick noted with his sardonic twist of smile.

‘Can suck the air from you, can it not,’ he said gently and laid a steady hand on the tremble of one shoulder. Hal looked at him, remembering what he had learned of Kirkpatrick’s past in the land of Oc, fighting Cathars in a holy crusade. Oc was not so far from here, he thought, though he had trouble with the map of it in his head – trouble, too, with the realization that Kirkpatrick was the closest to a friend he had left other than Sim, who came rolling up the quayside as if summoned.

‘No’ very holy,’ Sim growled, staring at the huddled houses before kneeling and laying a hand flat on the cobbles. ‘Mark you, any land is fine after yon ship. Bigod, I can hardly walk straight on the dry.’

No one walked straight on the dry, but Hal tried not to turn and gawp as they helped unload the heavy, precious cargo into the carts they had hired, making it seem as anonymous as dust.

Everyone, pilgrim and prostitute, seemed moulded from another clay entirely, while the stalls were a Merlin’s cave of jeweller’s work and carpets, tableware worked in silver, glass and crystal, ironwork made like lace.

There were Moors, too, swarthy and robed, turbanned and flashing with teeth and earrings; Hal would not have been surprised to meet a dog-headed man, or a winged gryphon on a leash.

‘Are we stayin’ the night?’ demanded Sim. ‘I had a fancy to some comfort and a meat pie.’

‘Little comfort in this unholy town,’ Kirkpatrick answered grimly, ‘and you would boak at the content of such a pie, so it is best we shake this place off our shoes. We will be escorted by the Knights of Alcántara, no less, to a safe wee commanderie some way on the road to Villasirga.’

Hal had seen the Knights arrive, a score of finely mounted men sporting a strange, embellished green cross on their white robes – argent, a cross fleury vert, he translated, smiling, as he always did, at the memory of his father who had dinned heraldry into him.

The new Knights were all in maille from head to foot, with little round iron caps and sun-smacked faces that made them almost as dark as the trading Moors, at whom they scowled in an insult that would have had them skewered in Scotland.

‘They frown at everyone,’ Kirkpatrick answered, when Hal pointed this out, ‘save Doña Beatriz.’

It was true enough – the leader of the Knights bowed and fawned on the elegant, cool and sparkling lady, and then was presented to everyone who mattered as ‘el caballero Don Saluador’, followed by a long string of meaningless sounds which Kirkpatrick said was the man’s lineage. Don Saluador looked at everyone as if he had had Sim’s old hose shoved under his nose.

‘But they hate those ones even more than they hate the Moors,’ Kirkpatrick added, nodding towards a group of men shouldering arrogantly through the crowds. Dressed richly, they had faces as blank and haughty as the statues of saints and wore billowing white blazoned with a red cross which looked like a downward pointing dagger.

‘Fitchy,’ Hal said, still dizzy with the sights and smells of it all.

‘Just so,’ Kirkpatrick confirmed. ‘The cross fitchy of the Order of Santiago – the wee saint’s very own warriors. The Order of Alcántara is so new it squeaks and yon knights never let them forget it.’

‘You have it wrangwise,’ Sim answered, wiping the sweat from his face, and Kirkpatrick, scowling, turned to him.

‘There are others they hate even harder,’ Sim went on and nodded to where the black-robed former Templars walked, stiff-legged and ruffed as dogs, refusing to be anonymous or duck under the scorch of stares from all sides. For all that they sported no device, everyone knew them by their very look, though none dared call them out as heretics.

Christ betimes, Hal thought, the world is stuffed with God’s warrior monks, and it seems the only fighting they do is against each other.

By the time the carts were loaded and ready, the sun was brassed and high, the road crowded with pilgrims fresh from Mass and still in the mood to sing psalms along the dusty road, as if their piety increased with the level of noise they made.

The locals knew better and sneered, both at the singing of these lazy penitents and their foreigner stupidity at walking out in the midday heat. They did not sneer at the Knights of Alcántara, Hal noted, who were riding out in the midday heat with four carts and a motley of strange foreigners.

Rossal and the others took their leave of de Grafton, who had volunteered to stay with the Bon Accord, as if only he was capable of defending it; they needed the ship victualled and ready if they were to succeed, so it seemed sensible – but Hal saw Kirkpatrick frowning thoughtfully over it and wondered at that.

Beyond the port, the air was so clear that it seemed you could see every tree on the foothills that led to the dust-blue horizon etched against the gilding sky. The pilgrims rapidly ran out of enthusiasm for psalms and the column began to shed them like old skin, each one tottering into some panting shade and groaning.

‘Fine idea,’ Sim declared, mopping his streaming face. ‘If I was not perched on a cart, I would be seeking that same shade.’

‘You would not,’ Kirkpatrick answered grimly and jerked his chin to one side, where distant figures squatted, patient as stones.

‘Trailbaston and cut-throats,’ he said with a lopsided grin. ‘Waiting for dark and the passing of the fighting men to come down and snap up the tired and weary, like owls on mice.’

‘Christ betimes, they are robbing pilgrims,’ Sim said, outraged.

‘So they are – almost. The wee saint’s warriors are busy protecting the proper pilgrim route, the Way of St James. Since there are two roads to Santiago, it takes them all their time – though the northern route is used less these days, now that the Moors have been expelled from the road from Aragon to Castile.’

‘This is what happens when you try and cheat God,’ Hal added with a grin.

He had lost the humour in it by the time the day died in a blood and gold splendour, wiped from his lips by too much heat and dust, the ten different languages that made the psalms a babble, the quarrels that broke out on every halt, the stink that hung with them in the dust.

Hal was sharply aware that this was but a lick of what Crusaders had experienced here and that it was worse by far further south and east, in the Holy Land itself; his estimation of his father went up when he thought of him enduring this in the name of God. By the time they turned off the road and into a tree-shaded avenue, Hal was heartily sick of the Kingdom of Castile and the commanderie of St Felix was a blessed limewashed relief.

Stiff-legged, he climbed off the palfrey he had been given and had it removed by a silent figure, blank and shadowed as the dark which closed on them. Led by flickering torches, Hal and the others were escorted into a large room with a stout door to the right and a curtained archway to the left; there were tables and benches, fresh herbs and straw.

‘It is not much,’ said a smooth voice, the French accented heavily, ‘but it is what we use as bed and board.’

They turned to see a tall man with the Alcántara cross on a white camilis that accentuated the dark of his face and the neatly trimmed black beard; his smile was as dazzling as his robe and Doña Beatriz hung off his arm with a familiarity intended to raise the hackles of the black-robed Templars, even if it was only his sister.

‘I am Don Guillermo,’ he announced, raking them with his grin. ‘I assure you, this is really how we live – you see, we can be as austere as Benedictines. Up to a point.’

Rossal, unsmiling, bowed from the neck; the others followed and Hal saw the scowl scarring the face of the German.

‘Our thanks for your hospitality and escort. I will see to my charge before prayers.’

‘Of course,’ Guillermo answered smoothly. ‘Be assured, our best men guard those carts.’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ Rossal answered. He turned to look briefly at Kirkpatrick and then went out, trailed by de Villers. Sim stretched noisily and farted.

‘Not a bad lodging, mark you,’ he declared, glancing at the wall whose bare, rough whiteness was broken by a trellis of poles supporting a short walkway reached by an arched doorway. It was the height of two tall men from the floor.

‘A gallery for minstrels,’ he said and grinned. ‘Some entertainment later, eh, lads?’

In a commanderie of a religious Order? Hal looked at Kirkpatrick, who held the gaze for a moment, and then moved to the nearest door, which was beneath the gallery. It was clearly locked. The curtained archway on the other side of the room led to some steps and Kirkpatrick was sure they reached up to a belltower he had seen on the way in.

‘As neat a prison as any you will see,’ he offered to the returned Rossal, who nodded grimly, and then turned to the door he had been escorted through; the rattle of the locking bar was clear to everyone and he frowned.

‘Where is Brother Widikind?’

The Lothians

At the same time

They roared through the March, looting and burning and with no care now that they had rid themselves of the Welsh. Using fire, using blade, using lies and deceit, they harried the wee rickle of fields and cruck houses in Byres, Heriot, Ratho and Ladyset. They felled ramparts and broke wooden walls, ravaged the Pinkney stronghold at Ballencrieff and showed their faces to the frightened burghers of Haddington.

Fell and bloody were the riders of Black James Douglas, who gorged on fire and sword and pain and never seemed to have enough of it to drive out the hatred he felt for all that had been taken from him.

Then they came down on the weekly market at Seton, because that lord was firmly in the English camp and Black Jamie wanted him scorched for it. They rampaged through the screamers, scattering them with half-mocking snarls and a waved blade. There was little of fodder anywhere, Dog Boy noted, and Jamie nodded, pointing to the church.

‘You can rely on God to make sure of his tithe,’ he said, and bellowed at the others to be quick and to take only the peas and barley, the live chooks and the dead coneys.

They were good, too, careful when loading the stolen eggs and ignoring trinkets – well, in the main. Everyone took a little something, as a keepsake or a token for a woman somewhere, while a bolt of new cloth was blanket and cloak both on a bad night.

Jamie and Dog Boy rode up to the stout-walled tithe barn and Dog Boy skipped off the garron and kicked open the double doors; it was an echoing hall, bare even of mice, and Jamie’s eyebrows went up at that. At the nearby church, the door of it clearly barred from the inside, the priest stood outside, defiant chin raised.

‘The silver is buried,’ he said bitterly, ‘and you are ower late to this feast – others have beaten you.’

Jamie, leaning forward on the pommel, calm as you please, offered the man a smile and a lisping greeting in good Latin.

‘Father Peter,’ the priest replied, clearly unable to speak the tongue, which Dog Boy knew was common enough among parish priests, who understood only the rote of services and would not know Barabbas from Barnabas.

‘Your wealth is safe enough – silver-gilt chalice, is it?’ Jamie replied easily. ‘A pyx, of course – silver or ivory? A silver-gilt chrismatory, a thurible, three cruets and an osculatorium.’

Dog Boy turned to stare in wonder at Jamie, but the priest was unimpressed.

‘One cruet, for we are not rich here. And a pewter ciborium, which you forgot – but since this is the minimum furnishing for a house of God, as any learned man knows, I do not consider you to have the power of Seeing.’

‘God forbid,’ Dog Boy offered and everyone crossed themselves.

‘These others who came’, Jamie went on lightly, ‘were equally restrained, it appears, and only took fodder – unless you have also hidden the contents of your tithe barn.’

‘I wish it were so. They sought food only, as you do,’ the priest replied coldly. ‘Came out of Berwick, but were no skilled raiders, only poor folk starving in that place.’

‘Berwick …’

Dog Boy knew why Jamie was so thoughtful. Berwick was a long way off and if the residents were scourging the country from that distance, then they were starving right enough. Which was news enough for Black Sir James to smile, wish the priest well – and his women and weans, too, which brought a scowl, but no denial.

It was all friendly enough, but Dog Boy threw the first torch that fired every house in the vill, so that they rode away from it leaving flames and weeping and sullen stares in the smoke. I am filled to the brim with shrieks and embers, Dog Boy thought, and wondered if there would ever be an end.

Commanderie of St Felix in the Kingdom of Castile

Feast of the Invention of the Cross, May 1314

He was called Brother Amicus, though there was nothing friendly about him.

‘You should repent and confess your sins, Brother,’ he spat. ‘If you go unshriven, you go to Hell, to be broken on the wheel by foul demons, smashed over and over for the sin of pride. You will be thrown into freezing water until you scream for your arrogance. You will be dismembered alive by gibbering imps armed with dull knives for your impiety, thrown into a boiling pit of molten gold for your pride, forced to eat rats, toads and snakes in remembrance of your greed.’

He paused, breathing heavily and frothing at the corners of his mouth.

Widikind laughed through his burst lips, the words coming slowly because his arms were twisted up behind him and fastened by chains, which suspended his whole weight and constricted his breathing. He was naked and streaked with his own and other people’s foulness.

His voice came in spurts for he found it hard to get air into his flattened lungs – but he had breath enough for this.

‘You may dream of it, torturer. I have suffered all that and more in the service of God and the Temple, even to the eating of toads and snakes. However, I am sure you can verify your visions – I will be seeing you in Hell, certes.’

The Inquisitor scowled and turned away, leaving Widikind in his pain. The start of it had been the blow, sharp and sudden, which had whirled stars into him as he went to check the carts. Even as he went down, he knew what it was, even if he did not quite know who.

He learned that soon enough, knew it even when he could not raise his head to look – her perfume, spiced and insidious as a snake’s coils, left him in no doubt as he hung in the shadow-flickering room.

‘You would do well to speak, Templar,’ Doña Beatriz said softly. ‘My brother needs what you know and he will not be kind.’

Widikind was more ashamed of his nakedness than concerned for future agonies, but he knew now that his soul was safe and he only laughed; he knew, by the stiffness in her body, that she was irritated, felt the grip in his beard as his head was raised. The Moor, her servant, held Widikind’s stained beard in one fist so that he could see both their faces; his was unsmiling as a stone, but hers was a blaze of fury.

‘You will speak,’ she said, her voice a razor, and smiled like a sweet sin as she waved another man into Widikind’s eyeline. This one was lean, grizzled and seemed nothing – until you looked in his eyes. There was nothing in them at all, save a bland, studied interest and Widikind knew what he was at once.

‘This is Rafiq,’ Doña Beatriz said. ‘Buscador de demonios.’

She turned away and left. For a moment, Piculph hesitated, flicking his eyes sideways to the blank-eyed Rafiq, and then he relinquished his grip, so that Widikind’s head fell forward and he lost sight of them all.

But he was aware of Piculph’s going, more aware still of the one they called ‘seeker of devils’ stepping close; Widikind heard him crooning, soft and melodious as a monk at plainchant, wondered if it was a psalm against evil, or a spell.

He would have been surprised to discover that it was a lullaby. He was not surprised to discover that Rafiq was an expert and that his skill was in pain. He hoped that he had been missed, though he expected no rescue, for the others would now have their fears confirmed.

He would have been gratified to hear them discuss his absence.

‘It seems your fears may be justified,’ Rossal admitted grudgingly to Kirkpatrick. ‘In which case, we should take some precautions.’

‘What is happening?’ demanded Sim, an eyeblink before Hal did. Rossal issued crisp orders and the other two began turning tables up on their ends.

‘I was of the opinion’, Kirkpatrick answered slowly, ‘that this Guillermo and his lady sister would make some move against us.’

‘The gold …’

‘Aye, just so.’

There was no urgency in the man, nor in Rossal now that the tables had been upended like a siege pavise, and Hal could not understand why this Guillermo and his sister should wish to attack them – and why everyone seemed acceptingly calm about it. He said so and Rossal clapped him on the shoulder.

‘In a moment, we will know whether this Guillermo is to be trusted.’

‘Look to your weapons, mark you, in case he cannot,’ Kirkpatrick added, ‘but keep behind our defences – I am sure he has used that wee minstrel gallery before this.’

Minstrel gallery, Hal thought. And pigs have wings.

‘If they mean to red-murder us and steal the gold,’ Sim blustered, confused and angry at the feeling of it, ‘then we should not be sittin’ here like a set mill.’

‘Doucelike, Sim Craw,’ Kirkpatrick said, laying a hand on the man’s big shoulder and smiling into the bristle of his beard. ‘I may have it wrangwise. We might be locked in for our own safety.’

‘Pigs have wings,’ Hal muttered.

The Seeker of Demons was Satan’s own creation, Widikind was sure of it. He caressed with blades, peeling back skin until the pain was so burning intense that the German felt the rawness like ice. He worked through the long hours, while Widikind hung and dripped sweat, blood and vomit.

At some point – Widikind did not know day from night – the Seeker of Demons broke off to eat bread and cheese and refresh himself with wine, and began on the hot irons.

The smell of his own flesh roasting nauseated Widikind, but he swallowed it rather than give the torturer the satisfaction of knowing it. But this time the pain was enough to make him call to God, to the Virgin, and he found himself babbling in German. But he knew what he said and it was nothing they wanted or could use.

He slipped into a grey veiled world, was aware of figures moving in it and recognized the perfume of the lady. The man with her, his voice clearly used to command, snapped at another, his voice sharp and grating with annoyance, and the man’s soothing assurances confirmed him as Brother Amicus, who called the one he spoke to ‘Don Guillermo’.

He heard Guillermo speak again, softer this time and in French, rather than the elegant Castilian of the court.

‘This de Grafton – is he to be trusted?’

‘No, darling brother, but he can be relied on to serve our interests as long as he is serving his own.’

Doña Beatriz’s voice was a sneer and Widikind heard her brother laugh.

‘Go to Crunia. Search the ship – the treasure must be there. Send word in a hurry.’

‘What of the crew?’

There was silence, which was answer enough.

Afterwards – it might have been a minute, an hour or a week – the Seeker of Demons took Widikind’s eye with a white-hot iron, a lancing shriek of agony that had him bucking and twisting as he dangled in chains, feeling his flesh bubble and dissolve in the heat, pouring down his cheek, sizzling like meat on a skewer.

He surfaced from the cool dark of oblivion into the agony of life.

‘Where is the Templar treasure?’

It was the first thing the Seeker of Demons had asked, the first time he had spoken and the only sound he had made other than the crooning gentleness of song.

Widikind, who wondered what he had babbled while his mind cowered elsewhere, grinned a bloody grin, for he knew by the question that he had said nothing of value. He remembered the feeling of his own flesh melting on his cheek like gold and what Brother Amicus had promised. For his pride. He was proud of resisting, yet aware that such arrogance was unfit for a Templar, proscribed or no.

Yet he could not resist it.

‘Found any demons?’ he mushed and laughed his way back to the coverlet of dark.

The sluice of cold water slashed him into the light again, into the world of pain the torturer had made with vicious beatings. He could feel his arms and realized he had been lowered a little and refastened so that his hands were now bound with rope rather than chain and the suspension on his dangling arms could be alleviated if he raised himself on the balls of his feet.

Whose toes had been broken, so that doing so seared agony through him like a knife.

He raised his wobbling head and stared with his one good eye into the face of the torturer and saw no pleasure in the other’s witnessing of his realization. Which was, he thought, worse than a leering grin; Widikind let his head loll, though he could see the man’s face through the spider-legs of his remaining lashes.

The Seeker of Demons, his face still blank, touched the white-hot iron to Widikind’s abdomen and, for the first time, showed emotion: surprise at the lack of response.

He wonders if he has gone too far, Widikind thought.

‘Where is the Templar treasure?’

Widikind heard the querulous note in his voice and knew it was time. He wanted him near, wanted him close with his hot iron. He felt fingers at his neck, checking pulse, felt the length of forearm on his chest, so he knew where the Seeker of Demons stood. He was a Knight of the Temple and had the power of God still with him …

He swept his legs up and locked them round the man’s waist, crossing his ankles until his broken feet flared howls from him; he welcomed the pain, for there was more triumph and anger in it now and the agony fuelled his strength like fire in his veins. God give me strength …

The man was strong but Widikind had trained every day for years in every facet of horsemanship; his feet were broken, but the thighs and calves on him were crippling and the Seeker of Demons arched and shrieked, unable to break free. He tried to beat Widikind with his one free hand, the one with the hot iron in it, but each time he began, Widikind crushed him further until something snapped. The man twisted and screamed.

‘That was a rib breaking,’ Widikind told him, so close that the blood from his cracking lips spotted the Seeker of Demons’s cheek. ‘There will be more if you do not do as I say. If you resist me further, I will break your back and you will never stand unaided again.’