“Enough lazing around, dear Brother Reinmar.” Rzehors wrung out the cleaned sleeve. “There’s work to be done.”
“Like that work?” Reynevan pointed to the bloody foam dribbling from the trough.
Bisclavret snorted. “I love you, too,” he sneered. “I missed you, too, and am glad to see you in rude health. Although a little gaunt, I’d say. Did you lose weight during Lent? Was it the convent vittles? Or the intensive lovemaking?”
“Put that damned knife away.”
“What? Don’t like the look of it? Hurts your feelings? I see the convent has changed you. Six months ago, you beat a man to death with your bare hands before my very eyes in Żelazno, near Kłodzko. For personal vengeance. And you dare look down on us, we who are fighting for the cause? You disdainfully turn up your nose at us?”
“Put the knife away, I said. Why have you come?”
“Take a guess.” Rzehors crossed his arms over his chest. “And when you hit upon it, move your arse. We told you: there’s work to be done. The Vogelsang is counter-attacking, and you are still the Vogelsang; no one has removed you from the Vogelsang or freed you of your responsibilities. Prokop and Neplach have issued orders which also apply to you. Do you know the risk of failing to carry them out?”
“I love you, too.” Reynevan didn’t bat an eyelid. “And I’m fucking overjoyed to see you. But soften your tone a little, lads. As regards orders, you are envoys, nothing more. I give the orders. So, therefore, I order you: say your piece and make it short and snappy. That’s an order. You know the penalty for insubordination.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” said Bisclavret, laughing. “Didn’t I tell you not to talk to him like that?”
“He’s grown up,” said Rzehors with a smile. “The spit and image of his brother. Just like Peterlin. Or perhaps he’s even surpassed Peterlin.”
“They know it.” Bisclavret, after finally putting away the navaja, bowed dramatically. “Brothers Prokop the Shaven and Bohuchval Neplach, called Flutek, know it. They know what a zealous Utraquist and ardent supporter of the cause of the Chalice Peterlin’s brother is. Thus, the above-mentioned brothers—via our unworthy lips—request Reynevan to prove his loyalty to the Chalice once again. The brothers humbly request—”
“Shut up, Frenchman. You speak, Rzehors. Briefly and in plain language.”
Prokop’s order for the Vogelsang was indeed brief and ran: reconstruct the spy ring. And do it quickly. Quickly enough for the network to be used during the next strike on Silesia. Prokop didn’t specify when the strike would occur.
Reynevan had no idea how he was meant to personally reconstruct something about which he had only a general and rather vague idea—a ring about which he knew almost nothing apart from the fact that it reputedly existed. When taken to task, Rzehors and Bisclavret confessed that they mainly saw his help in the sense that—as they expressed it—three was safer than two.
In spite of the task’s supposed great urgency, Reynevan didn’t agree to set off immediately. He wanted to teach the Vogelsang some manners and respect for him. But, above all, he had to sort out the situation with Jutta. He thought the second matter much more difficult than the first. But actually things went better than he had expected.
“Oh well,” she said, when the hot wave of anger had passed. “I might have expected it. Galahad loves, promises and vows for ever and ever. But in truth, only until news of the Grail arrives.”
“It’s not like that, Jutta,” he protested. “Nothing has changed. It’s just a few days. Then I’ll return… Nothing has changed.”
They spoke in church, in front of the altar and the painting portraying—what else?—a soaring dove. But Reynevan had before his eyes the unfortunate Maifreda of Pirovano burning at the stake in the Piazza del Duomo.
“When do you set off?” she asked, now calmer.
“The morning after festum angelorum.”
“So we still have a few days.”
“We do.”
“And nights.” She sighed. “Good. Let’s kneel and pray to the goddess.”
On the thirtieth of September, in the morning after Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, Rzehors and Bisclavret returned. Prepared for the journey.
Reynevan was waiting for them. Also ready.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In which the spirit of destruction—simultaneously the spirit of creation—returns, as it were. And Reynevan faces a choice.
In the few years of its existence, the Vogelsang had managed to create in Silesia quite an extensive and many-branched network of sleeping agents, so in principle the basis for its reconstruction was in place. The problem was that the wave of oppression passing through Silesia must have left its mark on the agents. Some of them, one had to fear, had died martyrs’ deaths and may not even have left any ashes. Some of those who survived—feeling the unrelenting presence of the Inquisition—might have fundamentally revised their views and come to the conclusion that they’d had enough of sympathising with Wycliffe and loved Huss much less than previously. Among the latter were also those who, of their own free will or under compulsion, had fundamentally modified their loyalties. Having switched their allegiance, they now waited for agents to report to them. And when they did, to inform on them at once to the relevant authorities.
Thus, contacting former agents always bore a considerable risk and could not be carried out without taking suitable precautions in advance. And there was no doubt it was a hundredfold easier for three to take precautions than two.
For over a month, Reynevan, Rzehors and Bisclavret roamed through Silesia—sometimes in the cold, wet autumn weather, sometimes in bright sunlight and gossamer threads. They visited plenty of places—beginning with large towns and cities, such as Wrocław, Legnica and Świdnica, and ending with villages whose full names were quite forgettable. They visited various people and reminded those various people—using a variety of methods and with varying results—about the vows of loyalty they’d once taken for the cause.
Only four times did they have to make a rapid exit. First in Racibórz, when Rzehors escaped a trap set by the Inquisition by jumping from a first-floor window into the town square, followed by a dramatic chase down Long Street all the way to Saint Nicholas’s Gate. Then the three of them fought their way out of a trap outside Ścinawa, when they were greatly helped by a fog that rose on cue from the marshes of the Odra. In Skorogoszcz, they had to gallop like hell to outrun a mounted squad that went after them when a mercenary unit guarding the customs post on the Nysa became suspicious of them. And outside Namysłów, a local cooper was listening to Rzehors and Reynevan when Bisclavret, who was covering them, caught the cooper’s son, who had been sent in secret to alert the guard in the town, and hauled the twelve-year-old into the chamber. Before you could say “Judas Iscariot” three times, the boy was writhing on the dirt floor, stabbed by the navaja, the cooper was wheezing with blood gushing from a severed throat, his wife and daughters were wailing at various pitches and the company were hurdling fences to reach their horses which had been left in the thicket.