The letter arrived at the inn addressed to Doctor Johann Faustus, wherever he may currently be lying about his business.
Faust read it twice before handing it wordlessly to Isfrid.
[Doctor Faustus — I have reviewed the tribunal record of Erfurt with considerable interest. A seal granted with such unusual speed, by a Fürstbischof's clerk who has since been quietly relieved of his post, invites questions I intend to ask in person. I trust we will have the pleasure soon. — Brother Anselm, Investigator of the Holy Office.]
"He's already relieved the clerk of his post," Isfrid said, reading it a second time. "Faust. He's investigating the man who forged our authority."
"Then he's a competent investigator," Faust said, with the particular calm he reserved for genuinely bad news. "Which is, unfortunately, the worst possible kind to have hunting us."
They made inquiries quietly over the following days, and the picture that emerged did nothing to ease Faust's mind. Brother Anselm was precisely the sort of Inquisitor Faust had least wanted to encounter. He was no zealot, convinced of demons behind every shadow. He was a bureaucrat who believed, with grim and total conviction, in fraud. A man who had built a decade-long reputation exposing false relics, false miracles, and false healers. Every genuine mystery he couldn't immediately dismiss was simply a lie he hadn't caught yet.
"A man who doesn't believe in demons is, perversely, the most dangerous kind of man to meet while impersonating one's own persecutor," Faust admitted over a late, gloomy supper. "He won't be frightened off by anything supernatural we show him. He'll keep pulling threads until something honest comes loose."
"So we avoid him."
"We avoid him," Faust agreed. "For exactly as long as it takes him to become genuinely interesting to us."
Isfrid frowned across the table.
"What does that mean?"
"It means, godson, that a man who has spent ten years exposing fraud has learned where fraud tends to hide." Faust turned his wine glass slowly, watching the candlelight bend through it. "Which makes him either our greatest liability or, handled correctly and at exactly the right distance, the single most useful map to real corruption either of us is ever likely to find."
"You want to be caught by him."
"I want to be found interesting by him," Faust corrected. "There's a considerable difference. Our continued freedom depends rather heavily on us landing on the correct side of it."
Isfrid did not look reassured.
He looked instead at the letter one more time, at the neat, unhurried hand that had written it, and felt, for reasons he couldn't entirely name, a colder unease than anything the tribunal barns had given him all week.
"He's going to find us eventually," he said quietly.
"Undoubtedly." Faust folded the letter away into his coat, beside the seal it threatened to unmake. "Let's simply ensure that by the time he does, we've made ourselves considerably more trouble to catch than we're worth."