The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [101]
Heinrich Kramer went to his son then, and the boy felt the soft baized wool of his father’s robe soak up his tears, gloved hands removing his oversized hat and stroking his hair as he cried and cried. Of course the Inquisitor could not publicly acknowledge the boy as his own, and of course Ashton understood. Even still, Heinrich Kramer was a gentleman and a loving father, and helped in every possible way with the boy’s desire to follow in his heavy bootsteps. Within a few years Kramer was denounced by first a local bishop and then the Inquisition as a whole for his radical methods and publications, but through his eager son the good work continued.
Ashton worked his way up through the local Dominican order with the invisible glove of his father unlocking the few doors that the boy could not pry open with his natural intelligence and zeal. Low means and low birth were no longer the barriers Ashton had supposed they would be, and his father’s close association with the archbishop of Salzburg meant that the boy was eventually appointed Inquisitor himself, albeit of a more remote region. He met with his father often, and together they would go over the finer points of Kramer’s witch-hunting manual that the Inquisition had claimed was out of line with doctrine.
Despite the Church’s betrayal of him, their most faithful son, Kramer knew that only through the flames of the Inquisition could the Empire and all her little princedoms, bishoprics, and prince-bishoprics be cleansed of the taint that had taken root, and if his son were to be his instrument, then so be it. Indeed, Ashton’s illegitimacy proved most beneficial for the two of them, the myriad enemies they made within both the Church and the universities unable to connect father and bastard son in any sort of discrediting manner. Kramer died a very happy and old man, and his son, Ashton Kahlert, proudly set to ensuring that his own father’s legacy would be as immortal as that of God the Father. That he had never mustered the will to properly question his mother before her eventual murder at the hands of one of the men she brought home Ashton considered his chief personal failure, but he tried not to dwell on it.
Kahlert’s effectiveness at ferreting out witches was not lost on the archbishop of Salzburg and his associates, but after the enemies of the Inquisition had successfully removed Kramer from power all true believers knew a more cautious route was in order. Kahlert’s official role as Inquisitor was thus obfuscated from as many records as was feasible, and his jurisdiction was expanded to wherever he set his feet.
As the most powerful living necromancer prepared to escape the prison of his body atop the Sierra Nevadas, Inquisitor Kahlert journeyed to Granada to assist the Spanish Dominicans with the ongoing expulsion of Jews and Moors from the lands united by the deceased Isabella and the demented Ferdinand—the kabbalists were up to their old tricks, adding blood to the matzos, and stranger sorceries still were credited to the Moslems. Reluctant to abandon the purging of his homeland though he was, Kahlert had learned from his father that the cleansing could not be limited to one area, lest honest men forever be taxed with the guarding of their borders from marauding witches.
Granada was a fair city, and so purged of Jew and Moslem that Kahlert could scarce believe a Moor had ruled it only twenty years before and allowed every sort of degeneracy to flourish. The Spaniards—some of them, anyway—understood the effectiveness of his father’s interrogation methods far better than the Imperial Inquisitors had, and Kahlert established himself in a quiet little house up in the Andalusian foothills overlooking the city. When he was not assisting in the more problematic interviews with the accused, he rediscovered his youthful love of the romance, and in only a few years had assembled a fine collection of melodramas and adventures by the greatest German, English, and Italian authors; the French he found