Duke Ormin lay motionless on his back on the floor, in a huge pool of dark blood. His throat had been cut. A thin, flattened metal shaft protruded from above his heart. The flat metal shaft was the handle of a thin knife made all of metal. I recognised it. It was one of the Doctor's scalpels.

I think I lost the power of speech for a while. I lost the power of hearing too, I believe. The Doctor was still shouting at the men. Then she saw me and shouted at me, but I could not make out what it was she was shouting. I would have fallen to the floor had I not been supported by the scruff of the neck by the two guards holding me. One of the guardsmen knelt by the body on the floor. He had to kneel at the head of the Duke to avoid the still spreading pool of darkness on the wooden floor. He opened one of Duke Ormin's eyes.

A piece of my brain still functioning told me that if he was checking for signs of life this was a foolish thing to do, given the amount of blood that had flowed over the floor, and the quite stationary shaft of the scalpel protruding from the Duke's chest.

The guardsman said something. I have a feeling it was «Dead» or something similar, but I cannot recall.

Then there were more guards in the room, until it became quite crowded and I could not see the Doctor.

We were taken away. I did not hear things properly again, or find my own voice until we arrived at our destination, back at the main palace, in the torture chamber, where Duke Quettil's chief questioner, Master Ralinge, was waiting for us.

Master, I knew then that you must forsake me. Perhaps I was not supposed to be forsaken, according to the original plan, for that note, purportedly from you, did use the word «privately» which implied that the Doctor was to go alone, and not take me along with her, so I could believe that I had been supposed to remain innocent of whatever the Doctor was accused of. But I had followed her, and I had not thought to tell anybody else of my fears.

I also had not thought to stand my ground when the man who must have been the real murderer of Duke Ormin came thundering down the hall towards me. No, instead I had taken flight, jumping down the stairs and hiding in a cupboard. Even when the fellow had banged into the cupboard door, I had stayed back against the shelves of the cupboard, hoping he would not look inside and discover me. So I was complicit with my own downfall, I realised, as I was brought struggling into the chamber where last the Doctor and I had been that night when we had been summoned by Master Nolieti.

The Doctor, for those moments, was magnificent.

She walked erect, her back straight, her head raised. I had to be dragged, because my legs had entirely stopped working. I think, for myself, that had I had the wit I would have shouted and screamed and struggled, but I was too stunned. There was a look on the Doctor's proud face of resignation and defeat, but not of panic or fear. I was not so deceived as to imagine for a moment that I appeared to be anything other than the way I felt, which was shaking and quivering with abject terror, my limbs reduced to jelly.

Do I shame myself to say that I had soiled my breeches? I think I do not. Master Ralinge was an acknowledged virtuoso of pain.

The torture chamber.

It seemed very well lit, I thought. The walls were studded with torches and candles. Master Ralinge must prefer being able to see what he was doing. Nolieti had favoured a darker and more menacing atmosphere.

I was already preparing myself to denounce the Doctor and all her works. I looked at the rack, the cage, the bath, the brazier, the bed, the pokers and pincers and all the rest of the equipment, and my love, my devotion, my honour itself turned to water and drained out through my heels. Whatever it was required of me to say, I would say, to save myself.

The Doctor was doomed, of that I was certain. Nothing I could do or say would save her. Her actions had been arranged to fit this accusation. The suspicious note, the odd locale, the route left open for the real murderer, the timely appearance of the guard, so mob-handed, even the fact that Master Ralinge looked so bright-eyed and happy to see us and had arranged and lit all his candles and stoked his brazier… all spoke of arrangement, of collusion. The Doctor had been forced to this by people capable of wielding great power, and therefore there was absolutely nothing I could possibly do that would save her from her fate or in any way mitigate her punishment.

Those of you who read this and think, Well, I would have done whatever I could to have reduced her torment, I beg you think again, for you have not been marched into a torture chamber to see the instruments there waiting for you. When you see those, you think only of a way to stop them being used against you.

The Doctor was taken, without a struggle, to a floor sink, where she was forced to kneel while her hair was cut off and her head shaved. That seemed to upset her, for she started to shout and scream. Master Ralinge did the cutting and shaving himself, in a loving, careful way. He bunched in his fist, brought to his nose and slowly sniffed each bundle of hair he removed from the Doctor's head. I meanwhile was strapped upright to an iron frame.

I cannot recall what the Doctor screamed or what Master Ralinge said. I know they exchanged words, that is all. The master torturer's motley collection of mismatched teeth gleamed in the candle light.

Ralinge ran his hand over the Doctor's head, and at one place, over her left ear, his hands stopped and he looked more closely, muttering in his soft voice something which I could not make out, then he ordered her stripped and placed on an iron bed by the brazier. As the Doctor was manhandled by the two guards who had brought her to this awful place, the torturer slowly undid and pulled off his thick leather apron, and then began to unbutton his trousers in a deliberate, reverential manner. He watched the two guards — four eventually, for the Doctor put up a remarkably powerful fight — as they stripped my mistress naked.

And so I saw what I had always hoped to see, and was able to view what I had envisaged during many hundreds of shameful soporific imaginings.

The Doctor, nude.

And it meant nothing. She was struggling, pulling and heaving and trying to punch and kick and bite, her skin mottled with exertion, her face hot with tears and reddened with fear and fury. This was no soft dream of lust. Here was no emollient vision of loveliness. Here was a woman about to be violated in the most base and disgusting ways possible, and then tortured, and then, eventually, killed. She knew this as well as I, and as well as Ralinge and his pair of assistants did, and as well as the guards who attended us.

What was my most fervent hope at that point?

It was that they did not know of my devotion to her. If they thought me indifferent, I might only hear her screams. If they thought for a moment, for the merest heart-beat, that I loved her, then the very rules of their profession would require that my eyelids be cut out and I would be forced to watch her every torment.

Her clothes were thrown away, landing in a heap in one corner by a bench. Something clinked. Master Ralinge looked at the Doctor as she was secured, quite naked, to the iron bed frame. He. looked down at his manhood, stroking it, then he dismissed the guards. They looked both disappointed and relieved. One of Ralinge's assistants locked the chamber door behind them. There was upon Ralinge's face a bright and shining, almost luminescent smile as he moved towards her.

The Doctor's dark clothes settled where they had fallen.

My eyes filled with tears, thinking of how she had thought to check her progress as she had left her apartments, being so careful as to go back and pick up that stupid, blunt and useless dagger that she carried with her whenever she remembered. What good could that do her now?