The mace.
The whip.
A coil of barbed wire.
The branding iron.
The cat-o’-nine-tails.
Ah, that last one would do. He could use it and hide the welts.
He retrieved the weapon with its nine leather braids and hard knots. He thought of the braids as snakes and imagined them on pagan Medusa’s head as he felt the smooth wood handle. Removing his clothes, he decided that twenty lashes would suffice.
Then his mother’s voice echoed through his brain: “Really? Twenty? Do you think that’s enough for all the sin in you?”
He felt a quivering in his soul whenever he remembered her standing above him, looking down, the cross at her neck winking in the sunlight streaming through the windows as she stood, holding a butcher knife in one hand and tapping it sideways against the palmof her other. Silently threatening. Causing a chill to run through his guts.
“I don’t think so.”
“Shut up.”
He closed his eyes, pushed her disapproving words out of his mind, refused to remember the downturn of her pale lips, the disappointment in her wide, gray eyes.
He wouldn’t think of her. Or of what she did.
He would deal with the here and now and cleanse the world. One sinning mortal at a time.
But first …
He raised the gleaming whip overhead, paused a second to contemplate his own sins, then cracked his wrist. “One.”
Snap!
Nine little bites on his back muscles. He flinched, grimacing, his body jumping with the first blow. Good. Of course, he couldn’t get as much power into the strokes inflicting the wounds himself, but it would do.
Again.
“Two.”
He struck. Hard as he could.
Felt the sharp pain. Sucked in his breath.
Again.
“Three.” He felt the first hot bloom of blood. The stinging cuts.
Again.
“Four.” His jaw tightened as the pain sharpened. Increased.
But he did not, would not stop.
He bit his lip to keep from crying out, then stopped before he drew blood and hence the possibility of attention. No. He would suffer in silence and control himself.
Again.
“Five.”