monks

some food. They don’t need questioning. They need a square meal and a place in a household.”
The priest nodded. “Alas, sir knight. This is a poor parish. There are many such souls.”
Sachs, glaring back at Kat, attempted a commanding sneer. The expression failed of its purpose; seemed more childish than anything else.
“These are mere lies! And the poor you have with you always. It is their souls, not their bodies we must deal with. Now, as your senior in the church I order you to put them out of here, Father—ah—”
The priest’s name had obviously escaped him. “Priest. I will have a word with Bishop Pietro Capuletti, and see you are moved to a more worthy station. We’ll have the truth out of them. The Servants of the Trinity have ways of dealing with the most hardened servants of Satan.”
A look of pleasure came into the abbot’s hooded eyes. The kind of pleasure that comes to a man when he finds himself back on his own ground after stumbling into a marsh.
Kat shivered. The knights, she suspected, would obey the abbot—however reluctantly—if the priest who had actual authority here denied sanctuary to her and the children. And how could once-fat, timid little Ugo Boldoni stand up to this?
“Yes, servants of Satan have no place demanding sanctuary,” put in one of the two monks unctuously. “Such rights should be denied the likes of them. And the abbot is your superior!”
That was apparently the wrong thing to say to Ugo Boldoni. His spine straightened. “You attempted to remove them from the sanctuary of the Church? You? You had no right!” He glared at the abbot. “Nor is he my ‘superior.’ In this see, that is the Metropolitan Michael—no other! In this church I am the final ­arbiter.”
The little priest’s anger was peppery hot. “Get out of this church! Get out right now. Go.”
And that was enough—more than enough—to end the whole affair. The knights were entirely in support of the priest, not the abbot. Within a minute, all of them were gone, the abbot and the two monks scurrying ahead of the knights as if afraid that if they didn’t move fast enough they would be manhandled out. Which, Kat suspected, was not far from the truth. On the way out, Manfred seized the still-groaning Pappenheim