Peep and Choke came back into the church together and joined Brother Barrelmender at the altar. He ceased his prayer and stood up as they approached.
“Everything in order outside, Lieutenant?” Barrelmender asked Choke, his voice low. He shot a cautionary glance the three young women’s way to communicate to Choke why that was.
“Yes, Brother. I have stationed three men to guard the Wheel. We will rotate a guard as long as required. The wood for the pyre is being organized now,” Choke said quietly.
“Good. I have made good progress here. Those three are from a convent. That one in the kitchen was a nun there. Swallowtail was a priest at the abbey. Initially, the nun violated the girls herself in preparation to present them to him.”
Choke blinked in shock. “That’s… uah. Ahm. That’s horrible, Brother.”
“Yes. We three are now going to see what the woman has to say for herself. I have no real interest in redeeming her, though, so I hope this shall be brief. When we go in, I shall do all the talking. Lieutenant: I would like you seated at the table, to the side, taking notes. We may as well have our report and evidence all in one. Yes?”
“Yes, Brother.”
“Good. Let us get this done.”
Brother Barrelmender, Choke, and Peep entered the kitchen. Lisbet was seated at the table with a wooden cup of water in front of her. Knuckle was standing at the ready a meter-and-a-half behind her. Mariola was scrubbing the already clean kitchen bench.
Choke immediately went through the kitchen to Barrelmender’s room to fetch his writing kit.
“Mariola. Thank you,” Barrelmender said. “Please take a jug of fresh water and three cups into the church. Offer the three young women there a drink. Then sit with them. If they need anything, come and knock on the door to check about it. Though, I would prefer not to be disturbed. The ladies shouldn’t give you any trouble, but if they do, the scout fellow is still at the front of the church standing watch. What is his name?” Barrelmender looked to Peep.
“Shane.”
“Shane. Thank you. So, if they give any trouble, have Shane help you and alert us immediately. Any questions, Mariola?” Barrelmender asked.
“No,” Mariola said. She grabbed the water jug and hurried outside to refill it from the well.
“Otilla,” Barrelmender said. “Please check quickly with Sergeant Nikolas out back that everything is safe and in order.”
Peep nodded and followed Mariola out.
Barrelmender moved around the table, passing Knuckle as he did. He gave him a pat on the shoulder and moved him to within half a meter of Lisbet. Knuckle nodded with a smile and loomed even more.
Barrelmender set his staff in its nook at the edge of the bench and took his seat across from Lisbet. She had not moved since they had entered the kitchen. Her face was puffy and her eyes red, but she had been cleaned up. In her chains, she sat staring slack-faced at the full water cup on the table in front of her.
Lisbet and Barrelmender sat in silence, each staring at her water. Choke came in and sat down to Barrelmender’s right, sliding his chair closer so as to keep his ink and papers as far away from Lisbet as possible. He got a fresh sheet and wrote the date at the top before beginning writing the report of Thad Swallowtail’s execution. The quill’s scratching was loud in the otherwise silent room; the quick, precise strokes a heavy final reckoning.
Peep and Mariola came back in. Mariola quickly grabbed three cups and moved on through to the church, closing the door behind her. Peep looked to Barrelmender:
“All clear,” she said.
“Good. Thank you. You may sit, or stand. Whatever your preference.
Peep sat down to Lisbet’s right. She produced Libet’s jeweled dagger and set it on the table in front of herself. Peep drew the dagger and smiled as she tested its edges with her thumb. Then she sheathed it and put it away in her sleeve.
Barrelmender leaned to look over Choke’s shoulder at his writing. He nodded.
“Finish the preliminary report, Apparitor. We will proceed once you have. In your time. We want this done correctly.”
Choke nodded without looking up from his work. It was another few minutes before he sat up and gave Barrelmender a nod.
“Thank you, Apparitor. Now, I would like it noted that I cast a Detect Lies spell before interviewing Grace Somershire. That spell is still in effect.”
Choke’s quill scratching recommenced as he noted it.
“To be further noted: the other two young women with Thad Swallowtail were identified by Grace Somershire as her younger sister, Nathalie Somershire, and Petrina Oxbow. All were former residents of Saint Melifluina’s Convent in Saltwells.”
Choke’s scratching began just a second after Barrelmender started speaking and kept up for about twenty more after he had finished. Barrelmender waited for Choke to catch up before proceeding:
“Further, Grace Somershire identified this woman here as Sister Lisbet, one of the nuns at the convent. She stated that Sister Lisbet would have sexual relations with her, and taught Grace to do likewise to her. Then, once Grace was comfortable with that, Sister Lisbet would bring her to Thad Swallowtail, a priest of Saint Melifluina’s abbey. Sister Lisbet, Thad Swallowtail, and Grace would have sexual relations together. Grace Somershire also stated that Nathalie and Petrina were subjected to the same process. In their turns, is how she put it. Finally, Grace stated that Sister Lisbet and Thad Swallowtail took the three girls out of the convent about three years ago. That means that Grace would have been sixteen years old, and the youngest, Nathalie may have been as young as fourteen. It must be assumed that the sexual abuse of these girls began some time before that. Finally, Grace stated that Sister Lisbet taught the girls how to pray to the moon in order to prevent pregnancy. None of what Grace told me was a lie.”
Choke wrote as fast he could while Barrelmender spoke. Once Barrelmender stopped, it was some time before Choke had caught up. He had filled the whole paper, with his writing having gotten smaller and smaller near the bottom.
“Let me see,” Barrelmender said as Choke finished. He carefully took the sheet with its still-wet ink and read it through. “It shall do.” Barrelmender slid the paper back to Choke.
Choke nodded and put the paper aside before preparing a fresh sheet.
Barrelmender held his hand out to Choke to stay any further writing.
“When I need further evidence noted, I will tell you. Thank you, Apparitor,” Barrelmender said.
“Yes, Brother.”
Brother Barrelmender sat and stared at Lisbet for some time. Eventually she sighed and raised her eyes to meet his gaze.
“What is your full name?” Barrelmender asked. “I assume you have at least one more. A family name you have shamed.”
Lisbet sneered.
“You need not tell me” Barrelmender said calmly. “We can go with Lisbet for these proceedings. With what Grace has given me, it all shall be found out in due course. And if you do not feel the need to speak, that is fine, too. You have heard the evidence against you. So if you stand mute, we can finish this, then.”
Barrelmender waited for just a second before leaning forward to stand up.
“Greatspring,” Lisbet said.
“Pardon me?” Barrelmender asked, easing back down into his chair.
“My name. Lisbet Greatspring.”
“Good. Make a note of that, Apparitor.”
Choke dipped his quill and quickly had it down.
“And you were a nun at Saint Melifluina’s Convent?” Barrelmender asked.
“You know it,” Lisbet said, giving Barrelmender a look of pure hatred. “You have some nerve to look at me like that after all you’ve done. You murdered him! He came here to help you with love, and you murdered him for it!”
“I am not here to litigate that with you, Lisbet.”
“Then what are you doing right now? You need to torment me now to make yourself feel big and strong. After you’ve destroyed someone beautiful. Something beautiful. What we had was beautiful. And he came here to share it with you, and you destroyed it. You pig! You filth! And then you dare to look down on us like we are the sick ones. When you’re the one who had your pig of a woman on the side, with your children that you send away like orphans. Shame-riddled weakling, lashing out because you’re too much the coward to have what you want! So don’t you dare look down on me! On him! On what we had! Just do what you’re going to do and let me join my husband!”
Barrelmender nodded. He sat and thought over Lisbet’s diatribe.
“You have me skewered well,” he finally said, looking exhausted and sad. “I have sinned. I have shamed myself. I have failed, time and time again. And I shall be judged for it. I must redeem myself. And so here I am with you. You say Swallowtail was your husband. Is that so?”
“It is. And you murdered him.”
“I suppose you were married at some point at Saint Melifluina’s Convent. In secret. Before the two of you violated those girls together.”
“Yes. It was lovely and wonderful. Transcendent. Something the likes of you could never understand!”
“Once again, we find ourselves in complete agreement, Lisbet,” Barrelmender smiled, suddenly looking a little less depressed. “You were the moon, yes? And he the sun. And those girls were your wedding gift to him. Do I have that correct, Lisbet?”
“A pig like you will see only perversion where this true light and love. Because your heart is a perversion. You twist everything to service your sickness!”
“I shall take that as a yes. It is no matter. Like I said, we are not litigating anything here. I only satisfy my own curiosity with this,” Barrelmender said, warming up further.
“Of course you do, pig! That’s all you pig priests do, is satisfy yourselves. However you please! And then you spit on people like me and Thad and burn us up so that you can hide your perversions behind your pious costumes! Sick! You are all sick!”
Barrelmender laughed. It was earnest.
“That’s right, pig! Laugh. Laugh at me, the woman under your boot heel. I’ll have you know that Thad never once touched me without asking first. The first man that didn’t. All you diddling priests, groping and touching. My whole life suffering your lot. And he was the first one to ask. He was the first one I wanted.”
The laughter faded from Barrelmender’s eyes.
“I believe you, Lisbet,” he said gently. “I am sorry for it. But that is not me. I have sinned, yes. But not like that. I only took what was offered freely, and suffered under the yoke of it. Oh, how I have suffered it. What a rancid sweetmeat that transaction was,” Barrelmender drifted off, a look of horror haunting his gaunt features.
He soon caught himself and looked back to Lisbet, who was staring at him disbelievingly.
“I apologize. That is not relevant,” Barrelmender said.
“I think it is, you sad, pathetic man,” Lisbet returned.
Barrelmender shrugged. “Lamentable, what you suffered at the hands of evil men. I believe that you did. I am sorry. But all that can mitigate here is my feelings towards you. And then, only a little. For you took that ill-treatment in and then assumed the role of predator yourself. You became precisely the same sort of person that had hurt you.”
“No. This is what I was talking about. You twist everything. You people are the ones—”
“You are boring. How very boring of you,” Barrelmender interrupted.
Lisbet looked at him like he had slapped her.
“Do you know about vampires, Lisbet?” Barrelmender asked, sitting up excitedly, his eyes alight.
“Vampires?”
“Yes, vampires. The undead monsters that drink blood and transform into mist and bats. Vampires.”
“Those aren’t real,” Lisbet sneered. “They are a myth.”
“No. I assure you that they are not. Vampires are very real. People in our good Stronian lands simply believe they are a myth because Stronians like me are so good at destroying them. One sunlight spell and they are dust. Ludicrously easy. So it goes with much vermin in this world. Rats are not hard to kill when you have them out in the light. The trick is finding them.
“Now, the primary vulnerability of a vampire, as I already said, is sunlight. They must hide away from it. Interesting, though, that moonlight gives them no such trouble. Why is that, I wonder? Anyhow, that is not relevant here. Food for thought, though.”
“Fuck you.”
Barrelmender laughed.
“Oh, there you are. At last. Now, because vampires are so pathetically limited to darkness, they have a great need for help from non-vampires. To this end, they have a strong charm effect that they use to bend the weak-minded to their will. Usually this is used to soothe and lull their victims. However, vampires all keep at least one human helper around. This individual, that we refer to as the vampire’s familiar, is used to manage the daytime logistics of the vampire’s existence.”
Barrelmender paused here to state at Lisbet significantly.
“Now, why am I talking about this, you are probably asking yourself. I shall now enlighten you. All these vampires have such human helpers under the thrall of the monster’s strong charm effect. That is how they operate. In my time as an undead hunter for the Brothers of the Holy Stone, I was involved in three separate vampire hunts. In the first, I was a junior Brother. No more than a helper. In the second, I was the immediate subordinate of the lead Brother on the case. And in the third, I was lead hunter.
“A vampire hunt always follows the same investigative procedure. The vampires themselves are hidden away. Almost always solitary. The myths around these monsters love the trope of the vampire coven, a clan if you will, engaged in all manner of sexy, salacious hijinks. Breathy bodice ripping and such. That is nonsense. A vampire requires constant human victims. It is the steady disappearance of these victims that alert civil society, and then us, the hunters, to the vampire’s existence. To have even two vampires operating in the same area increases the risk of detection more than twofold. Yes?
“Now, a vampire hunt is almost entirely an investigation of the vampire’s human assistants. We must disentangle the network of non-vampire helpers who enable the predator. Many are unwitting. Others are culpable. Not all are charmed. Many are operating out of their own, often venal, interests. It is essentially a criminal network. The closer we get to the vampire at the network’s center, the more involved and complicit the individuals are. And, of course, those closest to the vampire, those in actual, direct contact with it, are invariably operating under the monster’s powerful charm effect. Finally, there is almost always one individual closest to the vampire: its familiar. An individual so in thrall, so complicit, so in love with the very notion of the vampire, that they will do anything to protect it.”
Barrelmender paused to check that Lisbet was still engaged with him. She very much was, staring at him with visceral hatred. Barrelmender then met the eye of Choke, Peep, and Knuckle in turn. He went on:
“So, Lisbet, having been a member of the Church, you may be aware of this. I should hope that Lieutenant Pekot and Sergeant Theodas remember it from their lessons with the Brothers. A Protection From Evil spell protects the subject from all charm, domination, and similar compulsion spells and effects. If someone has been magically charmed by an evil person or creature, they might resist the Protection spell. But, if the cleric’s will is stronger than theirs, the spell will take effect and suppress the charm compulsion for its duration. And then the cleric can speak with the subject in an uncharmed state. What many people do not know is that the consecrated ground of a church always has a Protection From Evil effect. Just by stepping into a church, we receive the boon of this spell effect. So, it follows that bringing a victim of a charm effect into a church will suppress that charm while they are there.
“Now, of course, if a victim has been in the thrall of the predator for a long time, their mind will have been warped by this prolonged trauma. They will almost invariably have some degree of identification with the aggressor. And so, even if the active magical charm is dismissed or suppressed, they likely will continue to behave as the predator’s puppet, just out of force of habit, really. To put it another way, the victim becomes an active participant in their own victimhood.”
Again, Barrelmender paused to look over everyone. They were all riveted. Lisbet was trembling. Barrelmender continued:
“I told you how I have been involved in three separate vampire investigations. The third, where I was the primary investigator, had a very unique element to it. In that case, the vampire was a petty wilderness baron up in the Kingdom of Parat. A barony not so unlike Spaggot here. Now, you may think that to have the nobleman of a fiefdom be a vampire would make this investigation quite difficult. But, it is quite the opposite. With complete control of its environment, the vampire baron was able to indulge itself completely. Quite obvious. And never being seen in daylight? Well, tongues wag, don’t they?
“As for getting to the monster through its soldiers and whatnot, that is really not so difficult. There were not so many left, and those that remained were cravens. Further, the Brothers of the Holy Stone answer solely to the Archbishop himself. If any nobleman were to impede our righteous and legal investigation, they would find themselves the subject of a short, surgical holy war. If well-executed, it might even have only the one casualty. That is the way of it.
“So, my team and I came to the Barony and began poking around. Like I said: child’s play. When one has supreme authority over their domain already, what need do they have for a secret network to enable their evil? In this case, it was the Baroness herself that was the vampire’s familiar. She was his public face. She kept the shambles of the barony’s administration stumbling on. Not surprising at all, in this situation, of course.
“What was surprising, though, was what I found when I had the Baroness dragged into the church. There was no charm compulsion upon her. None. Everything she did, she did completely of her own free will. The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent souls she fed to the literal monster that was her husband, all of them; she did that to them of her own volition. It was her choice.”
Barrelmender stared at Lisbet for a long while. When he continued, his tone was that of a judge passing sentence. Which, of course, was exactly what he was, at last.
“Lisbet Greatspring. You did not choose to be the victim of those men that violated you. Violated the trust they had been given to protect you. But yet you went on to choose to violate others in the same manner. I do not regard your earlier victimization as an excuse for your actions. Most victims of such abuse do not go on to abuse others. Indeed, if that were so, one prolific predator would create hundreds more from all their victims. You, Lisbet, made the choice to become a predator yourself. You offered innocents in your charge up to a heretical sexual predator. You have engaged in persistent, active heresy. Upon the truthful and lawful testimony of Grace Somershire I find you guilty of Solluna Union heresy and sexual deviancy. Do you have anything to say in your defense to mitigate sentencing in this matter?”
Lisbet said nothing. Trembling, she stared at Barrelmender in hatred with tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Very well. You are guilty. Do you wish to confess you sins so that you may repent of them in your execution?”
Again, Lisbet said nothing.
“Good. Good. Apparitor: please make note of my judgement, and the convicted heretic’s silence,” Barrelmender said.
Choke began writing immediately. As he wrote, Barrelmender looked back to Lisbet.
“Earlier you said something to the effect that you wish for me to send you to rejoin Swallowtail. Well, Lisbet, he died an unrepentant heretic. You know what that means. And if you think your devil moon will protect the two of you from Altas’ judgement, think again. You both swore holy vows to Altas when you joined the Church. You gave your souls to Altas when you swore your vows. You both betrayed those vows. Altas shall judge you. Stron is merely the agent of delivery here. But Stron’s Holy Fire may purge some of that sin from your soul before it meets its final judgement. To receive that cleansing, you must earnestly confess and repent. And Stron’s fire will be the judge of your earnestness.”
“You do as you please, pig,” Lisbet spat at Barrelmender.
Barrelmender stared back wearily.
“Not in quite some time, I am afraid,” he returned. “The vampire’s baroness I spoke of: she is the only human I have ever burned alive on the Wheel. You shall be my second.”
By this time, Choke had finished writing. Barrelmender looked to him and gestured to his document before addressing Lisbet:
“Lisbet Greatspring: I sentence you to burn upon the Wheel. Tomorrow at dawn, you shall receive your wish. You shall be place upon the pyre and burned with the mortal remains of the heretic Thad Swallowtail. Before that time, you shall have one more opportunity to confess and repent your sins.”
Barrelmender waited until Choke had finished writing before standing up. Both Choke and Peep stood as well. Barrelmender looked to Knuckle and Choke:
“Take her to the crypts below. Chain her to the wall and leave her in darkness.”
Choke gave a curt nod. He and Knuckle each grabbed one of Lisbet’s arms to drag her down below the church.
Muse Vassal 