The tribunal hall in Erfurt smelled of candle tallow, wet stone, and the particular mildew that seemed to collect wherever men gathered to decide the fates of women they'd never properly spoken to.
Faust had expected to observe.
He had not expected to be handed the gavel, figuratively speaking. The actual object was a chipped wooden mallet belonging to a magistrate currently indisposed with gout.
He received it within an hour of presenting his seal.
"An outside authority is exactly what this case requires," the local Dean had said, with the particular relief of a man passing a burning coal to the next available hand. "The accused's family has friends among the guild masters. No local ruling will satisfy anyone."
The accused was a widow named Brigitta, sixty years old, who had apparently been caught speaking to her dead husband's grave in a manner three witnesses found "unnaturally familiar", and whose garden, that same season, had produced cabbages of unusual size.
Faust looked at the cabbages, entered as physical evidence and now wilting sadly on the evidence table, and felt something in his chest that might have been the ghost of an actual, honest laugh.
Isfrid, beside him in his new dark coat, looked uncomfortable being addressed as the aide by men twice his age.
"Doctor Faustus," the Dean said, gesturing him toward the raised bench, "the tribunal would be honored by your ruling."
'The tribunal would be delighted to have someone else's name on the record if this goes badly,' Faust corrected silently, but he mounted the steps unhurriedly.
He laid his hand flat against the silver box in his coat, feeling for the familiar hum beneath the filigree, and exhaled slowly, the way he'd learned worked best when he wanted a particular card rather than whatever nonsense the deck felt like offering him under duress.
'Hierophant,' he thought, deliberately, calmly, the way one might address an old and difficult colleague. 'Lend me your robes.'
Or at least Faust believed that it would work... this method proven itself to be as random as usual shuffling of the deck.
This time, at least, he had time to shuffle it.
The card came to his fingers on the second try, which he privately considered an excellent result.
He closed his hand around it inside his pocket and felt the change settle over him like a second coat.
"Brigitta of the Löbertor," he said, and his own voice surprised him with how thoroughly it had stopped sounding like his own. It sounded, instead, like every tedious cleric he had ever sat across a dinner table from. "The Church does not condemn a woman for speaking to the dead. Christ Himself spoke with Lazarus before raising him, and no one accused our Lord of witchcraft for the courtesy." He let that land, watched three separate faces shift from suspicion to genuine, startled agreement. "As for the cabbages." He picked one up and turned it with theatrical solemnity. "I would remind this tribunal that God's earth does, on occasion, simply produce a large cabbage, and that this is not, in itself, heretical, however inconvenient it may be for a jealous neighbor's own garden."
A ripple of poorly suppressed laughter went through the guild masters' section.
The neighbor in question, a red-faced man Faust had already marked as the true author of all three accusations, went the color of a boiled ham.
"The accusation is dismissed," Faust said, and brought the borrowed gavel down once. "The tribunal thanks the widow for her patience, and suggests the good neighbor examine his own soil before he examines his neighbor's soul."
Isfrid, watching from the aide's bench, mouthed a single word at him across the hall: how.
Faust only smiled, released the card, and felt the borrowed weight lift off his shoulders like a coat shrugged onto a hook, leaving him underneath exactly as much of a fraud as he'd walked in.
Using [V — THE HIEROPHANT], he summons the authority of the institution or rather it grants the feeling of authority, never the actual knowledge behind it.
Brigitta wept with relief on her way out.
The red-faced neighbor did not meet anyone's eyes.
And somewhere in the hall, unnoticed by anyone but Faust's own restless, doubled vision, a thin, dark thread of unease still lingered where the man had been sitting.
It was the particular scent of someone who would remember this humiliation for a long time, and repay it eventually to whoever happened to be standing closest.