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identified a new enemy: witches. Satanists, people who were prepared to turn their backs on God and all things pure and sacred for the sake of a little temporal power to work harm against their neighbors. It would have been a pretty terrible crime, if it had actually existed, and witches were declaring their wicked deeds on every rack in the continent. It was a legalistic process, the witch hunt, there were degrees of torment imposed in regular sequence and forms of confession to be gone through, and it worked with an efficiency that seemed like divine justice.
    Incubi, succubi. Demons that came and made love to you in your sleep, seduced you into giving your soul to Satan. The trouble is, you don’t remember too well what you were doing when you were asleep, so it’s a hard accusation to defend yourself against. The same applied to luning. No one remembers it all that well. It was hard, then, to deny you’d had commerce with the Devil while you were luning, that he hadn’t come to you in the form of a man and called you to heel, in the form of a dog and had sex with you, in the form of a rat and made you eat him in a black Communion. Certainly hard to deny it when you were hanging by your arms in the strappado.
    People were losing themselves. Years ago, when I was a girl, even to read old library books about it was enough to give me bad dreams. It was as if the world had lost its soul. People carried away non children who weren’t guarded by luning parents, lunes killed other lunes every moon night. Hungry enough to eat each other, desperate enough to run wild on moon nights, that’s what apologists say about them now. At the time, all anyone thought was that they were evil. Luning, already regarded by the Church with the suspicion that sex, childbirth, and all the other carnal upheavals the human frame fell prey to, became a matter of panic. The Inquisition came down hard; they went on the hunt. The Dominicans, the founders of it all, took up their nickname like a banner:
Domini Canes,
the Hounds of God, appointed to run down Satan’s wolves. Protestants, who by then were killing Catholics with equal fervor, declared luning to be an unregenerate state, because you were incapable of faith while under its influence. Pious citizens who feared temptation to sin, or frightened citizens who didn’t want to find themselves at the stake, take your pick, but people began locking themselves away. They hammered bars across their windows, they called in priests to bless a room in their house and anointed the thresholds with holy water and nailed crosses to the doors, and went inside to wait out moon nights in the hope of Christ’s protection.
    And for the most part, it was granted. The odd person slipped through the net, but by that time, the curfew had done its work, and while witches were still dying in the flames, people began to breathe again about moon nights.
    We were useful, back then. People needed us.
    It was a Papal Bull that settled it. We were marked out by the affliction God had laid upon us, we were to be his guards. We were created. It wasn’t a monastic order, the Order of St. Giles, Aegidius Romanus: we were lay brothers and sisters, allied to God’s law. It was voluntary, officially, no one need join who had no vocation, but of course, we joined. There were liable to be some serious questions asked, questions involving shackles and thumbscrews, if we didn’t. And we’d suffered, we’d been suffering more than most, with lunes roaming the highways starving from the famines, with accusations of witchcraft flying and liable to land on those who didn’t fit in. Aegidians did not get accused of witchery. We listened to the accusations, we bore witness in the trials, we patrolled and inspected the lock-ups people were creating for themselves. Initiates didn’t starve, we were paid out of the tithes and had enough to eat and some security in the world and were the new guardians of laws that, in those days of