The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1041: Eleanor’s Crisis of Faith (Part One)

Time passed with agonizing slowness in Eleanor’s cell. In the morning, the day after Percivus burned her robes, the Inquisitor sent one of his acolytes to ask if Eleanor intended to give Percivus the names he required. When she refused, the acolyte dragged her off the simple cot so he could carry away the thin straw mattress and other bedding, leaving her with nothing but the rough wool blanket that was barely large enough to cover her body.

She thought his name was Samlet or Samlin, but too much of her attention the day before had been focused on Percivus and what was happening to her to be sure. The message he brought with him, however, was abundantly clear, delivered with the casual cruelty of a man who was clearly working hard to imitate his mentor as he barely acknowledged her existence when he took away the mattress. Once he’d moved her out of his way, he acted like she wasn’t even in the room as he quickly folded up the bedding and whisked it away, leaving her alone once more.

Her meal, when it was delivered, contained another small indignity. The bread was rock hard and from the look of it, it had been baked at the same time as yesterday’s loaf before being left out to sit all day. The cup of water, however, was even worse. Along with the bread, it had been left out overnight, in the cold winter air somewhere outside, and a thick layer of ice had formed on top of the cup.

She wanted to gulp down the water, to finally quench the thirst that haunted her since late in the night. Instead, she could only take occasional sips from the cup as the ice slowly melted, and even then, the bar between her wrists made drinking incredibly cumbersome. She nearly broke down in tears when she fumbled with the cup, spilling precious drops of water on her thin shift, but she forced back the tears along with the sobs that threatened to spill from her tight throat.

This was what Percivus wanted from her. He wanted her suffering. He wanted her desperation. He wanted her to be willing to do anything in order to make it stop... because he wanted her to name names in his twisted quest to unearth a conspiracy that didn’t exist. And so, because he wanted those things, she refused to give them to him.

Instead, she curled up on the rickety cot, clutching the blanket tightly around her frail body, and confronted the question that haunted her ever since she’d seen Percivus summon Holy Fire to burn her robes.

Everything she knew, everything she had been taught by the Church, said that it shouldn’t be possible for both of them to call upon the blessings of the Holy Lord of Light when they stood in such stark opposition to each other. If he was right that she had strayed from the path of her faith, then she shouldn’t be able to call upon even a minor miracle of Light, and yet she had. But if she was still a Confessor, still one of the Holy Lord of Light’s servants in this world, then Percivus shouldn’t have been able to burn her robes and cast her out.

"But, what if he was the one who had given himself over to the demons?" she wondered. What if his flames weren’t truly Holy Fire, but some other manifestation of dark, demonic power masquerading as Holy Flames?

It seemed impossible, and yet... When she compared Percivus to Diarmuid, the difference between the two men couldn’t be more clear. One of them was deeply principled, committed to finding the truth, even when the truth led him to uncomfortable places. He was willing to stand up for victims, to speak on behalf of the dead who had been wronged, even when the men who were responsible for those crimes sheltered behind their titles, wealth, and the privileges the world afforded to those born into positions of privilege.

Percivus, on the other hand, was a fanatic, consumed by a desire to mete out punishment. While he claimed to hunt the guilty, and he seemed to be every bit as driven as Diarmuid was to oppose men of power and privilege, there were clear cracks in his devotion.

Percivus bowed down to Marquis Bors. He submitted to worldly authority, turning himself into the loyal bloodhound of the Lothian ruler. And in so doing, he gained the freedom to sink his fangs into anyone of lesser stature than the most powerful man in the whole of Lothian March, though whether that extended to others in the Church remained to be seen.

Diarmuid spoke on behalf of the victims, but Percivus used victims as a weapon in his hunt to drag down the powerful. He didn’t care who died along the way. People were either conspirators and sinners who were part of the plot, or they were useful innocents whose death could be laid at the feet of the ’truly guilty’ party.

Percivus was a madman, a rabid dog who would bite his own master if he wasn’t kept on a tight leash, but Marquis Bors seemed to have let go of the leash entirely... If there had ever been a leash to begin with.

The more Eleanor tried to solve the puzzle of Percivus’s flames, the more she came to an uncomfortable conclusion. If she could see his madness, surely his superiors in the Inquisition could see it as well. Which meant that either they accepted it, or that they too shared the cracks in their devotion that allowed Percivus to run wild now that he had received the Marquis’ blessing to hunt members of the aristocracy in the name of rooting out a non-existent conspiracy.

"The whole abbey in Maeril may be like this," she realized. But... was it really just the abbey? She’d seen men like Percivus before, zealots who burned with a desire to punish even minor transgressions against the faith as though they were heresy.

She’d even seen it within her own order... Confessors who had no mercy left in their hearts for the lost men and women they had sworn to guide back to the light. Women who felt that only great suffering could absolve the wicked of their misdeeds and took delight in the screams of the penitent who submitted to the cruel ministrations of a merciless Confessor in the hopes of finding salvation.

"It can’t be that the whole Church is like this," she whispered as her body began to tremble in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. "But... how much of it is?"