The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Revenge of the Unicorn (Sixth Letter)

by Eromel

Letter the Sixth

I write not knowing whether you are alive or dead after this long interval, this virtual age of silence. To be sure, my intuitions and the manner in which your stars have progressed across the sky indicate to me that you are alive, and perhaps even prospering. Regarding myself, well, you shall see. Do not be dismayed at the strange characters in which these sentences are written. It is not that I have, as we often joked, good Telesio, conjured up a demon to do my secretarial tasks. It is the long intermission of my correspondence and the strain on my nerves which has caused the script to undergo a strange transformation.

How much I had informed you of previously I can scarcely remember. A good memory was one of the hallmarks of those who went to our school, the school of the Master, which shows you just how long it has been. I believe, before the conditions of my imprisonment became so harsh that I could no longer communicate, that I mentioned how the Lady Leonora disappeared. She had grown unpopular, not only in the city but at court, and the disappearance was considered a kind of joke, albeit a vulgar one. As you know Telesio, the science which we learned from the Master has no proper name, so when the absence of the princess regent became linked to my person, the wits at court started calling me, in French, “Le Batteleur”...the conjuror, which is what ignorant people always call us anyway. I am not so dour and melancholic that I don’t appreciate a good jest, and the picture of myself dissolving the princess into a cloud of smoke was, I admit, not without humor. If only Fra Scarpiglione had been willing to see the lighter side of it all, life would not have become so uncomfortable as it eventually did. After all, I had rid him of an expensive and meddlesome figurehead regent, and he was now well positioned to place the ducal diadem on his own head. Of course, had he done so the Pope would have instantly defrocked and disowned him, and the Emperor would have sent the Duke back to Italy at the head of an army to impale Scarpiglione through his excommunicated heart. I, in the meantime would probably have died an equally quick death. Fortunately for the both of us, at least in the short term, Scarpiglione had an uncanny knack for survival. It was some time after I had returned from Regrado that he granted me an interview, since he always liked to carry out his own investigations using indirect means before confronting the principles in any issue.

“Counselor Isidor,” he peeked ominously through the folds of his hood, “you have done your job too well. I only wanted you to keep the princess regent out of the way, not to loose her!”

“That’s out of the way, is it not?”

“Too out of the way. I can’t control the city without some connection to the old dynasty. Force is too expensive and the Duke is the Emperor’s man, so all that leaves is the Lady Leonora. I need, if not her presence, at least some contact with her. Can you tell me what has become of her?”

There was no point in dissembling, at least too far, with a wily inquisitor of Scarpiglione’s caliber. “She ran off with a Turk.”

The monk raised one bushy eyebrow and meditated for a while. “Well, there’s no accounting for tastes, especially where that woman is concerned. Perhaps an improvement over her previous paramour, eh? No doubt someone with stronger enchantments.”

I decided to ignore the insult. “I managed to follow her as far as Regrado.”

“Ah Regrado!” the priest half shut his eyes. “A wonderful place. I am a man of special needs. Sometimes it is only in a place like Regrado that I can exorcise my sinful nature so that I can return, refreshed, ready to wring the human heart clean of corruption. But be that as it may, where is she now?”

“Well, if she’s in the company of the Turk, I should suppose the palaces of ‘Stanbool are among the second most likely places to find her.”

“Second? What would be the first?”

“Those of Neptune.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the last time I saw her she was heading out on a merchantman bound for the Golden Horn overloaded with contraband. I doubt that she, I mean the boat, could have outrun the Venetian galleys.”

“Are you suggesting that the princess is dead?”

“I thought you would be overjoyed. Not on your own account, for I fully understand that the extinction of the dynasty would put you to considerable embarrassment, but, as a priest and a holy man, on behalf of Lady Leonora’s soul. I distinctly remember that wonderful sermon you delivered on the feast of St. Joseph of Egypt, wherein you described the providential drowning of Africans in the holds of Portuguese slavers. Here too, I would expect you to see the hand of providence closing in on the Saracens, like the waters of the Red Sea rushing in around the troops of Pharaoh. Moreover, would not the princess be infinitely better off in the cold and watery embrace of Neptune, than in ‘Stanbool turning Turk and renegade?”

The monk’s face burned with rage. “Do you think I don’t understand that you mock me, Sirra Isidor? Do you think that I don’t realize that you are nothing but a vile necromancer wearing the mask of a Christian gentleman?”

“Whom you use when it suits your purposes...a fact that might distress your friends in the Holy Office.”

“I shall use whom I wish in whatever way I wish, and when your term of usefulness comes to an end be sure that you will burn at the stake, like the Nolan, the traitor to my order who was your master and tutor in sorcery. However that day has not yet arrived. I need you to contact the princess regent, somehow anyhow. I don’t care how it is done, except that you can’t search her out personally. Deputize, write letters, but you are confined to the palace. If clear proof emerges that she is dead, you will take personal responsibility and die immediately. In the meantime, squelch any rumors of her demise. Perhaps she is enjoying herself, in the East, in the West, it matters not what you say, and write the Duke to the same effect, but none of this business about the cold embrace of Neptune. Do you understand? The more dark rumors I hear circulating around the court, and I hear everything, the closer the corrective embrace of the Inquisition comes to your neck!”

He dismissed me and instructed the majordomo to provide me with secure but ample chambers within the palace. I lost no time engaging in my correspondence. Naturally my most urgent inquiries were addressed to the Chief Eunuch of the Seraglio and I initiated a correspondence with that most exalted personage. Also, in an effort to resume contact with Col. Kadhim, I addressed letters to the headquarters barracks of the Janissaries in ‘Stanbool. Unfortunately the treaty between Venice and the Turks had been violated that year, and rumors of war hung over the Adriatic and the Agean like a fog. The course of prudence was to entrust any valuable communication to the Genoese, whatever delay or extra expense this might involve. Thus the mail packets had to be dispatched through the Tyrrhenian Sea, around the Calabrian peninsula to Brundisi, hence across open water to the Moria, then through the Aegean and the Dardanelles before ever making sight of the Golden Horn. With luck and fair winds the passage could be accomplished in weeks, but under ill omens in the form of Venetian blockades and other calamities, those weeks could stretch into months. Scarpiglione was quite unsympathetic to my plight in the face of these obstacles, and after a few weeks had passed began to badger me with regard to news of the princess regent.

Therefore it was with considerable expectation that I received an epistle from the secretarial bureau of the Ottoman Imperial Palaces in ‘Stanbool. I was assured that no woman answering to the description the description of she whom I sought was being maintained in the Seraglio. Furthermore they informed me that there was no colonel named Kadhim stationed in the ‘Stanbool barracks. This was all rather disappointing, but hardly surprising, given the uncertain conditions which now prevailed in that part of the world. I struggled, without success, to find a pleasant way of informing Scarpiglione that our best hope of locating the Lady Leonora had vanished. I was indeed a comical and inept “bateleur” for it seemed that I had the knack of making things disappear but was powerless to bring them back again.

Scarpiglione’s reaction was quite definitive. He had me put under the observation of the Inquisition. This is not to say that he had me charged with any crime of heresy, sacrilege, or subversion. It was only a kind of preventive confinement enforced on those who might present a danger to public safety or morality. In the meantime a commission would review my case to see if, indeed, there were any reasons why I should be put on trial. Scarpiglione had, I knew, a lengthy dossier on me, but I also knew that he would not release the information until he was sure he had no further use for me. As it was, he suspected that I knew the location of the princess regent. She was, after all, far too valuable a person for a wily dabbler in the black arts, such as he took me to be, simply to relinquish to a Turk. He would continue to turn the screw, increasing the severity of my terms of confinement, until I either located, or confessed, the whereabouts of the Lady Leonora.

It took until the sun dipped down to the latitude of Capricorn before Scarpiglione lost patience and had me thrown out of the clean quarters in which I had been sequestered, removing me from the residential precinct of the palace past the inner walls and into the keep. There I was lead down into the bowls of the donjon, into an enormous hall, its ceiling being the floor of the donjon level with the ground, supported by massive corbelled arches. To the pillar supporting one of these I was chained, perhaps in chains forged by Pietro of Umbria. However I doubt that he was the sire of those irons, for they had not the quality of smooth perfection which that master craftsman was able to instill into the sprit of metal. After all, how exquisite, in its own way, was that bald black plate which he had fit so precisely to the crotch of the woman who had once been the titular regent of Parva, in a single stroke shielding her from sexual pleasures and ensuring that death would sooner overtake her than dishonor. No, these manacles were the work of a bumbler, someone who had no conception either of how wrists and ankles are contoured or of the locomotions proper to the human frame. Thus when I sat down, for the ring to which my chains were secured was low enough for me to sit, or even to recline, I sat down in pain.

I could not complain of being deprived of company in that place. For indeed, in the flickering torchlight I could commune with several, and see a great multitude spread out through the chamber, lolling in their confinement like a great heard of beasts. Such places, for all the thickness of their walls, can hold no secrets, and soon, as with any newcomer, curiosity as to my person manifested itself. “Who, and what,are you?” asked one of my cohabitants who was in speaking range.

“I am the one they call ‘Le Bateleur.’” It was easy for me to identify both myself and my vocation with a single phrase.

This excited great interest. Another ventured, “They say you killed that whore Leonora. They say you had your way with her and then you killed her.”

“They are wrong...and neither was the lady a whore.” I replied.

The same one responded. “That’s too bad, I hate her. I don’t care if she opened her legs or not, she opened our city to Scarpiglione...for that alone she should be cursed!”

Another voice spoke up, “You are wrong to talk of our princess regent that way. She was enchanted by the monk. And look, this man too is a bateleur, a conjuror.”

The first one spoke up again, “Conjuror, eh? Well, can you conjure yourself out of those chains?”

This seemed to strike the fancy of the prisoners in my immediate vicinity, and there were cries of “Fly away!” and “Cleave the wall!” as well as “Burst your chains!” Then a piece of half eaten fruit, probably from one of the spies who had been allowed extra food, struck the side of my head, followed by several other missiles, none to painful. There were more cries and catcalls which, with the natural ebbing of interest, died out rather quickly.

Such, honest Telesio, are the thoughts of the generality of mankind towards men such as ourselves...and why it is best to keep our art secret to the extent possible. Seeing that I could not move stone they believed that I could not master my own flesh, or that I could not control theirs if I wished. Yet I suffered their taunts since far greater men than me, or even you, have meekly endured the same without protest.

Among the population of the dungeon’s cellar there were not only many, but many types. One type consisted of creatures such as myself, the fanatics, on the schedule of the inquisition for reasons whose prudence I could hardly gainsay, for we wished to overthrow the general order of things. We did not talk among ourselves for we were divided into innumerable sects. Then there were those under confinement simply for being who they were, those who’s blood, it had been discovered, could be traced back to the tribes of Israel or Ishmael. In addition, there were the imprudent rich who, having failed to buy the good will of Fra Scarpiglione, found themselves imprisoned until they were willing to walk out free and poor. Last, and most fortunately, there was a tribe of vagabonds who, roaming though the city at night, spying as Scarpiglione’s agents and thieving with license, returned in the morning by the secret passages of the catacombs, to lock themselves into their diurnal chains, for this was their home, and it was a source of perverse pride to them that they, in their own way, made their abode in the palace.

In short, it was a subterranean world, stocked with all conditions of inhabitants, not just individuals but entire families. The most melancholy sound of all was not the screaming of those who were lead off to execution, or the groans of those who fell under the discipline of the lash, but the crying of children who, having been born into this world beneath the earth, lifted up their innocent eyes to the corbelled vault of the ceiling, mistaking it for the limit of the macrocosm, and the cosmos into which they had been thrust to be one ruled by the arbitrary whims of demons. No wonder I was held in contempt by my comrades as a false prophet, for they were in sore need of someone who would lead them out of bondage.

The gruff fellow chained to the pillar next to me continued his mockery. “You know what they say about the Good God in heaven? If he won’t help, how can he be good? If he can’t help, how can he be God? He doesn’t help...and neither do you conjurer. So what does that make you?” Thus he aimed his barbs at me day after day. At first I took him for some sort of philosopher, or perhaps a convert to one of the miserable sects of the north, but as time wore on and I gained more exposure to his rough speech, I concluded that he was a common uneducated man. He was among that rarest breed of persons, one who had by some chance stumbled upon the most important truth of all, that freedom is preferable to slavery. Naturally this made him a special object of Scarpiglione’s concern, and he rivaled even me in the abuse he endured from the monk’s minions.

One day, if day it was for there was no way of telling time other from judging by the influx and egress of Scarpiglione’s spies, we were greeted by a curious delegation. Two court ladies in the company of the steward of the keep and the jailer descended into the prison. It was my gruff companion whom they evidently had designs upon, for they stood him up and brandished the “cat” or nine stranded whip in his face. After he made some choice comments they turned him about and the jailer pinned him tightly to the column in such a way that his back was presented for scourging. It was the steward who was elected to do the honors, a wiry man, but one of fell and intense will. When I saw him drawing back in preparation for his strike, I decided to interfere. Before the cat had reached the half arc of his swing the muscles of the steward’s body froze. He struggled against the lock to no avail, at last collapsing in frustration, hands hanging limp by his sides. “A seizure!” he exclaimed without conviction.

The women were enraged at the prospect of being deprived of their entertainment. It is a sad state of affairs, O Telesio, that when the fairer sex are deprived of their natural enjoyments, the things of beauty which nature and art provide, they may be perverted to the enjoyment of lusts such as would make the demons shudder. I had noticed the process being carried out to its advanced stages in our unlamented princess regent. For when Scarpiglione rid our world of innocent joys, the only satisfaction left for ardent spirits was a perverse delight in those raw sensations which are inflicted in the course of judicial admonishment. But I cut her reign, and her perdition, short by transforming her from the agent to the patient of such punishments. And furthermore, as unsightly as it may seem to the eye of human reason, I imagine that if she is still alive somewhere on this Earth, and lashed to the stake in some hellish pit, that she is not merely enduring, but enjoying her condition. For such are the dark and contorted, yet understandable, workings of the human spirit, which even the followers of Aristotle and Galen fear to reveal, and yet which we take as the starting point of our art.

None the less, even Leonora’s disappearance from the court, and indeed from the visible world, had not left the prisoners in peace, for she had her understudies. These two were familiar to me, haughty, vain, and cruel. I am loath to recall their names, although I no doubt could with the aid of the Master’s memory system. One was thin and dark of hair and complexion, the other was full of figure, although not unpleasantly so, and fair. The thin one, enraged by the immobility of the steward, grabbed the cat from him and prepared to take matters into her own hands. It was difficult to release him and bind her at the same time, for they both had ugly and volatile spirits. The most that I could do was to increase the magnetism of her rage, so that the preparatory motion of her whip wielding arm was exaggerated. This limb swung backwards, like a trebuchet released from its spring, causing the lady to scourge herself in the manner of a penitent.

The unexpected self laceration and the howl of pain which accompanied it brought as much sympathy from her companions as one might expect from a quartet of demons. The corpulent woman laughed heartily at the misdirected stroke of her peer. The other, now doubly in rage and pain, could bear no further humiliation and rushed on the fair woman brandishing the whip. It happened so quickly that she got several good strokes in before being pulled away from her victim by the steward and the jailer. The corpulent woman, her beauty marred by lashings across her face and bosoms reached out and tore the bodice off the other lady, who strained to escape and wreak further vengeance. There was nothing for the steward and the jailer to do but to secure the thin woman in irons and leave her in the donjon while escorting the other, weeping, up the stairs and back to court.

The thin lady, clapped in irons with her breasts exposed, remained in our company screaming terrible imprecations, until liberated by no less a personage than Fra Scarpiglione. In her stead his minions securued the corpulent woman to the pillar. If there was any reason to this it was unfathomable to me, as the thin woman clearly had been the aggressor, but the court had its own political mysteries, and evidently the corpulent woman belonged to a loosing faction. Fra Scarpiglione gave me a piercing look and left with the guards. The upshot of the incident was the remission of any punishment for my rude companion, since he had been utterly forgotten in the midst of the fray.

I could tell that this unexpected reprieve weighed heavily on the soul of my prison comrade. He alone of all who witnessed the occurrence in the half-light of the donjon, was in a position to see that it involved effects which could not easily be traced back to causes. He ceased to torment me with his rude wit, and one day he made a gesture of friendship, exchanging an onion for a potato skin from our dinner slop. However we never conversed at great length or exchanged our true names. It bodes ill to become overly familiar in the prisons of the Inquisition, for there are always spies about, and any friendship one happens to strike up is likely to be cut short by the retirement of one’s companion to the examination chamber and hence to the scaffold.

It was shortly thereafter when, indeed, I was paid a visit to the jailer, who unlocked my shackles and led me up the stairs. It appeared likely that the Inquisition had opened my trial. We came to a twisting stairwell and climbed steadily upward. After ascending several hundred steps, we arrived in a narrow room with a single window and a single door...that through which we had entered. It seemed a cramped venue for judicial proceedings.

Before I could express my doubts the jailer commented. “Fra Scarpiglione has decided to give you a private room. You’re no good to him down in the cellar. He thinks you can find the princess, and he wants you treated well. You can have anything you want within reason, books, maps, stationary for correspondence.”

I looked about. The room was cramped but it was light due to the open window. There was a table and a bed, and on the wall between the door and the window was a tapestry. I looked out the window and saw that I was at the top of the keep’s tower, there being a drop of more than a hundred feet below. It was quite suitable. At last I would be able to write you, to pursue my studies, and indeed to continue my life as if the likes of Scarpiglione never existed. “Excellent,” I replied, “my needs are simple.”

“I’m glad you like it,” the jailer smiled without affectation, “it’s the most famous room in the keep, and everyone who lodged here was famous. Of course they were each famous in their own way: Traitors, embezzlers, leaders of fanatical sects...and perhaps most interestingly of all, one or two who were the paramours of a Duchess, which may explain the presence of a romantic tapestry in such an otherwise sparse chamber. Yes, they were an odd lot, as odd as you bateleur.” Then he stepped out of the room, mentioning as he closed the door, “But they did have one thing in common...none of them ever left this room alive.”

And it was thus, Telesio, that I entered the Chamber of the Unicorn. At least, within the confines of that fatal chamber I had the consolation of a window, within whose synopsis I could take in both the prospect of the city and the heavens. Therefore I waited, day after day, while the sky made its appointed revolutions, in the assurance that the heavenly mill was grinding down upon the grains of Scarpiglione’s fortune, as surely as upon my own. For I knew, as all political men in Europe knew, that he was trapped between the upper and nether millstones of Emperor and Pope. Yet the future, for all the assurance of the stargazers, is never surely known, and Scarpiglione is one of that breed of men, among whom you and I are included, who are able to warp the fabric of time and events to their will. For all my tolerance of solitude, the fearsome prospect of the hypocrite escaping the web of justice opened the gates of doubt within my soul and turned my narrow cell into a den of cares.

Four times did fiery Helios dip beneath the dragon’s tail, and three times did it emerge, triumphant at its head, until my solitary soul had seen so many solstices that to me the state of confinement took on the aspect of the state of nature, and I began to rejoice in having exchanged the cares of human commerce for the snug certainties of solitary isolation. It was in that year, when the orchards of the Apennines were starting to ripen, that I heard a commotion in the city. There were cries and alarms accompanied by the report of muskets and shortly thereafter I could smell the sulfurous fumes of battle which had wafted up into the lofty region of my chamber. At the time the only tidings I had were those of the heavens themselves, but those were ominous enough, since Saturn, signifying Scarpiglione himself, was hard pressed and entering into a retrograde station, while fiery Mars was dignified within the first decan of the Ram. This was of course, portentous, but I knew that the term of time for which I was waiting had not yet run its course. None the less Telesio, O you to whom the human heart holds no secrets, you will see how I was, like any mortal, quick to put a favorable interpretation on the signs of heaven. In this I was not alone, for there were many others who had let the false assurances of the astrologers overrule the consensus of their native faculties.

What had actually happened I could only piece together much later. The Imperial forces under Wallenstein had been defeated at Lutzen by the heretic armies and the Parvan contingent had been disbanded after the Duke and the flower of the city’s chivalry had fallen on the field. This close, indeed, had Scarpiglione’s plan come to fulfillment, for he was now the undisputed lord of Parva, having foreseen how Leonora’s father, with malefics in the fifth and eighth houses, would be betrayed both in his household and on the battlefield. However certain Lombard worthies, fleeing after Wallenstein’s disgrace and the death of their lord, had managed to return across the Alps and beat their way to the gates of the city. They, finding the state in the hands of a tyrant and now owing their best allegiance to a Duchess-elect who’s whereabouts were unknown, sensed treachery and managed to rally the better part of the citizenry, tired of monkish hypocricy, to their standard.

It presented me with a dilemma, for I had become habituated to my narrow quarters. The human mind cannot be limited to spatial bounds, and what exercise my body required could be obtained by circumambulating my writing table. Moreover I was on good terms with the jailer, a strong but simple man who sometimes brought me delicacies from the kitchen. Above all I reverenced the teachings of our Master, who told us never to show our hands but to live as other mortals do, even under conditions of duress. Yet now I could hear the rapidly ascending footsteps of the jailer on the flagstones leading up to my chamber. Evidently he was anxious to check the security of his prize ward, for I could hear the sounds of strife below, as if a contingent of the rebels had broken into the grounds of the keep in an effort to liberate the prisoners. There is always, is there not Telesio, something in the mood of a festival or a riot which beckons even the most melancholic to join in, and so it was with me. My better sense told me that I was better staying in my cell, but my blood was of another opinion.

The jailer hastily unlocked the door to my cell, as he had a thousand times before to collect dishes or linens, and I saw relief in his eyes that I was still sitting in my chair.

“Let’s take a stroll.” I said looking at him firmly.

“Where do you wish to go master?” He responded blankly.

“Anywhere as long as it leads to freedom.”

“I will be punished.” He said, as if forcing the words out.

“No. I will take you with me.”

He smiled and gestured for me to follow him out the door. We wound down the stairwell until we arrived at the arched door which marked its communication with the ground level of the keep. The door was open but blocked by a figure robed in the black mantle of the preachers. There was nobody there except the monk, Fra Scarpiglione.

It was not a time to waste on considerations of mercy or elaborate scheming. Using the same voice with the jailer as I had with Leonora I shouted, “Kill him!”

The jailer was an enormous man, as large as Pietro of Umbria, although his skill was in the use rather than in the forging of iron. He could easily have crushed a smaller man’s skull with his bare hands, but his weapon of choice was a knife, really a short sword, which he was now withdrawing from its scabbard. He lunged for the monk, a bare few feet in front of him.

“Halt you weak-minded fool!” Fra Scarpiglione commanded in a high-pitched wailing tone which made the ears ring. Instantly every muscle of the jailer’s body took on the aspect of a marble statue. Then the monk uttered in the same tone, “It’s your escaped prisoner who is telling you this, it is he who must be killed!”

The jailer did as instructed, now facing me with drawn blade and ready to lunge.

“Turn back towards the door.” I intoned. “Kill the one in monk’s robes.”

Again the jailer wheeled around and made as if to strike at Scarpiglione. However he was stopped in the act by a skillful word or two from the monk, his muscles locking just a moment before striking at the tyrant, and then being subtly redirected to threaten me. Thus we continued I and the monk, like two courtiers playing badminton, parrying the hulking and unwilled body between us like an inanimate object. We were both unarmed and too concentrated on the controlling the will of the enormous man to think of any other means of attack or defense. It was the first time that I had any inkling that Scarpiglione was skilled in the fell art of appropriating a living person’s corporeal substance for use as a golem, and indeed able to put up stiff resistance, but it should not have surprised me. After all, we were similar in that we were both celebate, he in the service of his gods and I in mine, and in the case of myself enforced by the circumstances of my imprisonment, furthermore we both exercised ourselves in the building up of vast reservoirs of psychic energy under the rubrics of ritual and meditation. From this starting point it is easy, as you know, though an operation of contagion, to extend one’s spirit into any object which is capable of locomotion, self-willed or otherwise. Thus the unfortunate jailer found himself subjected to the iterations of our alternating currents of control, twisting this way and that like a marionette in the clutches of quarrelsome puppeteers.

Scarpiglione was a difficult adversary, but in time I was able to maneuver the jailer closer and closer to the door, until he was within a handbreadth of the monk’s heart. The latter was showing signs of exhaustion and he staggered back into the atrium which connected the tower to the main donjon of the keep. The jailer, now largely under my control, had attained the threshold and in a matter of seconds I would have been able to slip past him, and then the both of us, two bodies under one will, would have unleashed a concerted attack on the staggering monk. However I heard a volley and it was not the monk who staggered but the hapless jailer, felled by a torrent of musket balls. There was nothing that I could do, for Scarpiglione was screaming at his men-at-arms, who had rushed into the atrium at a crucial instant, telling them that I was a dangerous sorcerer and neither to be killed with iron nor looked upon. Thereupon the mercenaries, will all the circumspection of Perseus parrying the Medusa, backed me up the stairwell at the point of their pikes and daggers until I had once again attained the chamber of my confinement, all this while keeping hands and visors over their eyes lest they too suffer the enchantment of the unfortunate jailer.

In retrospect it was clear that the rebellion had no chance of success. With the prospect of the Lady Leonora’s return appearing increasingly remote, the hypocritical monk appealed less and less to religious and dynastic fidelity and more and more to fear. Resented by the bishops of Lombardy for usurping all ecclesiastical authority in Parva, and restrained from making further indictments through the agency of the Holy Office, he relied increasingly on what was called the “nocturnal council” to wit, his own network of spies and secret police. Furthermore, he introduced into the the city a Free Company of mercenaries, more than a hundred strong, bivouacking them just inside the city gates for the maintenance of civil order. Thus, when the inevitable storm broke, and the decimated remains of the Duke’s cavaliers joined forces with the outpourings of the city’s streets and jails, Scarpiglione was well prepared.

My suffering, though unique and thus incommensurable, was but one instance among many of all who had risked, and lost, their freedom and fortunes in that rebellion. I sat in my cell, lamenting the death of the jailer, who had always seemed a worthy, though rather dull, fellow. Moreover he had been, for most of the past four years my main contact with humankind, and I wondered who, if anyone, would replace him. Then I noticed a scraping sound outside the locked door which provided the only access to the chamber. I went over to check what was afoot, and saw, through the grill in the door several workers bending over some task. Before I could apprise the situation a guard, looking at me askance and with the horror of one who gave credence to my reputation as a medusa, poked at me through the grill with his pike and shouted at me to step back from the door. This I was only too glad to do, and resumed my seat at the table while the scraping activity continued. After perhaps another half hour I heard somebody unlock the wooden door, but nobody entered and I had better sense than to go over and to test it while the scraping noise continued. I had immersed myself in some study and was oblivious to the noise, until it finally occurred to me that it had ceased. Then I rose and went to the door, seeing that it was dark behind the grill ventured to test the lock. Surprisingly the door swung inwards as it always had, but now, instead of revealing the passage way down the tower, there was a solid brick wall blocking the entrance. At the very bottom there was a small space created by the omission of one or two bricks, a space not large enough for the passage of a linen box or a dust bucket, although perhaps sufficiently high to permit the entrance of a bowl of soup or a cup of water.

I had been severed from the world. Scarpiglione knew that my art was not so strong as to enable me, like Joshua, to cause walls to come tumbling down. However he had seen what I could do with people and was taking no further chances. Evidently he had given up on using me to contact Leonora, who would now by rights be the Duchess-elect of Parva. Of course I had known all along that she had ceased to exist, regardless of whether the dancing girl who had taken up the strings of her destiny had perished or not. So much for Leonora of Parva. But what of myself, Isidor the Conjuror? I had found Scarpiglione more than a match in his ability to warp the threads of fate. But he had changed the end game, and had denied me the martyrdom on the scaffolding which I had expected. By now he certainly had sufficient evidence to convict me of sorcery. Perhaps it was that, even in the procedure of the Holy Office, a trial had to be interposed betwixt crime and punishment, and Fra Scarpiglione was concerned that he might be implicated in the course of the proceedings.

No, it was not only that. He had said that we were much alike, and he spoke truth, for we both delighted in irony. Now here I was, Isidor the fool conjuror, “Le Bateleur” who could make things disappear but was powerless to bring them back. Thus I found myself locked in a box, not unlike the box that conjurors use for making items vanish, only somewhat larger and suited to a fool such as myself. I had now, like Leonora, exited the annals of human events. Indeed, whether I existed or not was immaterial, for I was sealed from all influences and all influence on others. Whether I would hear a plate scraping in the space below the wall and hungrily gulp down the prolongation of my life, or whether I would be left to starve...what did it matter? It was a thing to be left to chance...like this letter that I write to you, a letter to someone who perhaps no longer exists, written by someone who perhaps, likewise, no longer exists.

And more I cannot write for my heart is heavy,