Close to the foot of the bound figure he placed the glowing shoe. Then he motioned to Hull to take up the other side of it with his pincers, and put it in place so that the foot of the victim should be clamped to it and burnt away.
John Hull took up the long pincers, and caught hold of one side of the shoe.
Johnnie turned his head away; he looked straight through his black hood at the three people on the daïs.
The notary was quietly writing. The surgeon was looking on with cool professional eye; but Don Deza was watching the imminent horror below him with a white face which dripped with sweat, with eyes dilated to two rims, gazing, gazing, drinking the sight in. Every now and again the Inquisitor licked his pallid lips with his tongue. And in that moment of watching, Johnnie knew that Cruelty, for the sake of Cruelty, the mad pleasure of watching suffering in its most hideous forms, was the hidden vice, the true nature, of this priest of Courts.
At the moment, and doubtless at many other moments in the past, Father Deza was compensating, and had compensated, for a life of abstinence from sensual indulgence. He was giving scope to the deadlier vices of the heart, pride, bigotry, intolerance, and horrid cruelty—those vices far more opposed to the hope of salvation, and far more extensively mischievous to society, than anything the sensualist can do.
The bitterness of it; the horror of it—this was the wine the brilliant priest was drinking, had drunk, and would ever drink. Into him had come a devil which had killed his soul, and looked out from his narrow twitching eyes, rejoicing that it saw these things with the symbol of God's pain high above it, with the cloak of God's Church upon his shoulders.
As Johnnie watched, fascinated with an unnameable horror, he heard a loud shout close to his ear. He saw a black-hooded, thick figure pass him and rush towards the daïs.
In the hands of this figure was a long pair of blacksmith's pincers, and at the end of the pincers was a shoe of white-hot metal.
There was another loud shout, a broad band of white light, as the mass of glowing metal shot through the air in a hissing arc, and then the face of the Inquisitor disappeared and was no more.
At that moment both Commendone and the sworn torturer realised what had happened. They leapt nimbly on to the daïs. From under his robe Alonso took a stiletto and plunged it into the throat of the notary; while Johnnie, in a mad fury, caught the physician by the neck, placed his open hand upon the man's chin, and bent his head back, slowly, steadily, and with terrible pressure, until there was a faint click, and the black-robed figure sank down.