Having been forced to endure some hours of personal and very painful experience as the subject of it. Timoteo di Bolgia, like Bass Foster, did not like torture . . . unless circumstances dictated its use to achieve information or important ends, as in this present case.
Immediately His Grace di Rezzi and party had cleared the river bars and put out to sea, di Bolgia had set about the thorough rooting out of all the legate’s spies and agents within his household, his mistress’s, and that of King Tamhas. When he had a goodly selection of them, he summoned the King’s master executioner and they went to work, slowly untangling the Church’s web of informants, without the stubborn old man himself to impede them.
Although Master Mohamad al-Ahmahr maintained the most scrupulously clean facility of the sort that Timoteo had ever before seen, not even he could rid the room of the odors of its true character—spilled blood, dung, urine, sweat, vomit, hot metal, and burned meat. Therefore, and also because of his other, time-consuming duties and tasks, Timoteo spent as little time as possible in the room, especially during the early stages of an interrogation, entering only when the subject had begun to say interesting things.
Having been so summoned by one of Master Mohamad’s assistants, it Duce had taken only enough time to divest himself of his helmet and the heavier, more binding portions of his armor before hurrying to the room, a member of his staff providing him with a spice-scented pomander along the way. Leaving a brace of his guards outside, he entered and seated himself in the chair which stood close to the rack and its occupant, a Frisian serving woman night Ingebord.
Whenever he had noticed the middle-aged, faded-blond cleaning woman while still she had served in his household, Timoteo had often noted that although her wrinkled face and turkey neck were about as attractive as the physiognomy of an aged bloodhound, her body looked to be, under the shapeless clothing, rather toothsome yet.
“No more!” he thought. “If any doxy shed her clothes to reveal a body like that one is now become to me, the first thing I’d do is puke, the second thing I’d do is run. Hell, I feel like puking now.” He sniffed strongly at his spicy pomander and clenched his teeth, forcefully swallowing the sour bile that kept flooding his mouth.
A man of long and thoroughgoing experience in all aspects of modem torture, a true master of his profession. Master Mohamad had done no damage to the woman’s
face or throat; indeed, he had even kept in place a leather device during much of his work that had prevented her from biting her tongue, either deliberately or through mischance.
But below the neck, the body and limbs were become a horror of whip-wealed flesh, wide, deep burns, sprung joints, ruined digits, and certain signs revealing even more sickening abuse. For the nonce. Master Mohamad had placed a rough wooden support of boards and sawhorses under her body and partially slacked the ropes of the rack. As Timoteo entered, the executioner was trickling water into her mouth.
Looking up, the red-haired and -bearded Arab smiled warmly at his current employer. “My Lord, this subject has at last seen the great and most sinful error of her ways and is, thinks this unworthy one. now prepared to truthfully answer any questions that My Lord would care to put to her.”
Once seated, his body more or less under control, Timoteo leaned forward and stated, then asked, “Ingebord, we already know that you were set to spy upon me. Three other spies have named you, independently one of the other, so your denials of your guilt were useless from the start. What I want you to tell me now is to whom you reported aught that you had learned in my service.”
He “conversed” with the shattered female sufferer for some half hour. During that time, she only needed “prompting” by Master Mohamad twice, her resultant shrieks nearly deafening Timoteo in the enclosed space. Her answers to his questions filled in many gaping spaces in the puzzle, however, and he was well pleased as he arose to return to his more mundane duties.
At the door, he told the executioner, “Dose her well with opium. Master, and correct what you can of her injuries. Summon a physician if you feel it necessary, even a chirurgeon—though it has been my experience that men of your calling often know more of the human body, its functions and dysfunctions, than do any practitioners of artis medicus. even the best of them. At any rate, keep her alive and in as little pain as possible until I can determine her truthfulness, this day. If she lied, I’ll still want the truth out of her.”
“And if she was utterly truthful. My Lord . . .?” inquired the Arab.
Timoteo shrugged. “I leave that up to you. Master. I suppose that, as she now is, the merciful thing to do would be to kill her.”
In a tiny, stonewalled room at the very tiptop of one of the defensive towers of the city walls, Timoteo met with his brother, Roberto, and Le Chevalier Marc. With their respective squires guarding the landing immediately below and with a section of the di Bolgia bodyguards on each of the next lower landings, the chamberlet was about as secure a place to talk as they were likely to find in all of King Tamhas’s capital city or anywhere else within the now-shrunken borders of the Kingdom of Munster.
“That old bastard is a shrewd one,” commented the elder di Bolgia. “Wheels within wheels within still other wheels. You know, though I should’ve been suspicious when first I saw that Ingebord, for a woman doesn’t keep a figure that good through a lifetime of drudgery and the rough fare of servants.”
“Then who or what is she?” asked the younger di Bolgia. “And why was she playing the part of a servant in our household?”
“Ingebord is the bastard daughter of a Dutch bishop, long deceased, and up until as late as fifteen years ago she was Giosu6 di Rezzi’s senior mistress and housekeeper.”
“Uh-oh,” said Roberto. “How badly did the torturer do by her?”
Timoteo shrugged. “So badly that it will be less cruel to kill her than to let her try to live on in such a state, my brother. I told Master Mohamad to keep her alive only until I’m certain that she told me the truth. But that part doesn’t worry me; she’ll be worm food by the time di Rezzi returns, if he ever does, and we’ll just say she died of siege fever or something similar; such things happen, and she was, after all, nobody’s spring chicken.
“What does bother me is something else she told me, gentlemen. It would seem that Ingebord spied not only for di Rezzi but on him. as well.”
“For whom, pray tell? This, from Le Chevalier. “King Tamhas?”
il Duce di Bolgia made a rude noise. “Righ Tamhas couldn’t locate his arse with both hands and a pack of hounds, and we all know that for hard fact. His so-called spies were the first ones we caught, many of the inept bunglers before we’d been here a fortnight.
“No, the woman doesn’t know just for whom she was spying on her onetime lover, di Rezzi. of this, I am certain. Not even when Master Mohamad did certain things to jog her memory, as it were, did she tell me more of her employer. She could only say that a man posing as a chapman came two or three times each year, made his presence known to her, met her in some out-of-the-way place, and had her impart to him anything of interest— especially as regarded singular visitors, miraculous occurrences, or rumors of wonders—that had taken place since last he had visited. She is certain that this stranger also had some informants in Righ Tamhas’s establishment and that he visited other Irlandese cities as well as this one. but she is just as certain that he was neither Irish nor even a European.”
Le Chevalier pursed his lips and whistled softly. “How was she paid, did she say? In what coin?”
“In gold,” answered Timoteo, “but not in coined gold. The way she described her earliest payments, it sounded to me as if they were just fair-sized nuggets of alluvial gold; more recently, she has been receiving little flat bars, each weighing exactly one ounce, but unmarked in any way, other than the random bumps and scratches you might expect of being carried loose in a bag for some time.”
Le Chevalier shook his head. “Which tells us nothing, then. I know of a few places, mostly in Ifriqah and points well east, that sometimes use flatfish bars rather than coins, but all of them I’ve ever seen have been clearly marked as to weight, purity, and place of origin. Faced with such a blank wall here, what we now need to do is to try to reason out what principality would need such information of di Rezzi or anyone else residing in this appalling little backwater pocket kingdom.”