Jan of Ziębice laughed dryly. In principle, that laugh ought to have sufficed Borschnitz as an answer. The duke, however, decided to enlarge on it.
“God is merciful and forgiving,” he began, “but occasionally, He goes so far in His mercy that He doesn’t know what He’s doing. Konrad, Bishop of Wrocław, told me that once, and the bishop isn’t just any village priest, so he knows a thing or two. Thus, before God forgives a sinner, said the bishop, one must make sure that here in this vale of tears the sinner suffers adequately for his sins and crimes. So said the bishop and I think he was right. Thus, Reinmar of Bielawa and his whore will suffer. Adequately. And when, after their torment, they stand before God, let God forgive them if that be His will. Understood, Marshal?”
“Indeed, Your Grace.”
The deep blue of the sky heralded a snowstorm. And something even worse. Worse, for being unknown.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In which Reynevan makes a choice. But not everything ends well.
Reynevan avoided Frankenstein, skirting the town from the south, via Sadlno. He had a dreadful headache, but his spells weren’t working, his hands clumsy with anxiety. The pain was making him dizzy.
He rode as though in a dream. In a nightmare. The road, the Kłodzko road, part of the Wrocław–Prague trade route, suddenly stopped being an ordinary road, the route Reynevan knew well. It changed into something Reynevan didn’t know and had never seen.
In the dark, overcast sky, a cloud of dense, swirling blackness suddenly billowed, like ink in water. A savage, strong wind blew up, bending the trees over. His horse tossed its head, neighed, whinnied and thrashed around. Reynevan rode, barely able to see the road in the pitch black.
Flaming points glow in the darkness. And red eyes. The moon shines limpidly behind black clouds.
The horse neighs. Rears up.
There’s no village where the village of Tarnów ought to be, just a graveyard among misshapen trees. Crosses lean over graves. Some have been stuck in upside down. Fires burn between the graves, shapes swaying to and fro in the flickering gleam. The cemetery teems with monsters. Lemures scrape the graves with their talons. Empusas and necurats wriggle out of the frozen earth. Murons and mormoliks raise their heads and howl at the moon.
Drosselbart sits among the monstrosities, Reynevan can see him clearly. Now, after death, he is even thinner than when he was alive. More cadaverous than a cadaver, he looks like a mummy, dry skin stretched over old bones. One of the lemures is gripping his arm in his teeth above his elbow, biting and chewing. Drosselbart appears not to notice.
“As far as the good of the cause is concerned,” he calls, looking at Reynevan, “individuals do not count! Prove that you’re ready to make sacrifices! Sometimes we must sacrifice what we love!”
“A stone tossed at the ramparts!” howl the lemures. “A stone tossed at the ramparts!”
There’s a crossroads outside the cemetery. Rzehors is sitting with his back against a cross. His face is half-covered and he is wrapped in a shroud, a blood-soaked piece of sackcloth.
“The chariot of history runs on,” he says indistinctly, with effort. “No power is capable of stopping it. Sacrifice her! You must sacrifice her! For the cause! For the Chalice! The Chalice must triumph!”
“A stone at the ramparts!” croak shretls, hopping, ears flapping. “Toss her like a stone at the ramparts!”
“In any case, she’s doomed,” says Bisclavret, getting up from a roadside ditch. How he spoke was a mystery since there was only bloody pulp where his throat and jaw should have been. “Jan of Ziębice won’t let her go. No matter what you do, you won’t save her. She’s as good as dead. She’s lost.”
Gelfrad of Stercza climbs out of a ditch on the other side. Headless. Holding his head under one arm.
“You vowed,” says the head. “You gave your verbum nobile, your parole. You have to sacrifice her. I sacrificed… myself. I did my duty. I swore to him… Hodie mihi, cras tibi… Hodie mihi, cras tibi…”
Horses’ hooves strike the earth. Reynevan gallops, bent over in the saddle. The village of Baumgarten ought to be somewhere around. But it isn’t. There are bare, ancient trees, a wild forest, a winter wilderness.
“You were a pretty couple,” calls a green-skinned creature with eyes glowing like phosphorous. “Joioza and bachelar. Oh, you were! You were!”
“A stone tossed at the ramparts!” Pale wights howl as they rise from a hollow. “A stone tossed at the ramparts!”
Tall, dark-skinned, white-haired alps with pointed ears peer out from behind tree trunks.
“Tempus odii.” Their intrusive, clearly audible whispers creep towards him. “Tempus odii, a time of hatred…”
The village of Bukowczyk ought to be there. It is not.
“The New Era!” shouts Krejčíř, the Orphans’ preacher, suddenly leaping up. He’s completely covered in blood; it is gushing from a stump ending above the elbow and from a dreadful gash on his head. “The New Era! And may the old world perish in flames! Sacrifice her! Sacrifice her for the cause!”
“A stone tossed at the ramparts! A stone tossed at the ramparts!”
“The Kingdom of God will dawn!” howls Krejčíř. “The true Regnum Dei! We shall triumph! The true faith will triumph, the end of immorality will arise, the world will be changed! For it to happen, you must sacrifice her! You must sacrifice her.”
The Totentanz, the danse macabre, descends the hillside in an unending procession. Hundreds of skeletons attired in shrouds cavort and hop, jiggling in clumsy, grotesque, swinging strides. Ragged standards and pennants flutter and flap. Hellish drums clatter. Bones rattle and teeth snap. And an uneven chorus is sung in screeching voices:
Ye, who are warriors of God
And of his law!
Thousands of crows, rooks and jackdaws circle and caw above the skeleton host. The wind carries a foul, rotten stench.
Bones rattle, teeth snap. There’s yelling and hellish wailing. And a song.
Ye, who are warriors of God
And of his law!
A stone at the ramparts. You must sacrifice her.
Reynevan presses his face against the horse’s mane and jabs with his spurs.
The hooves thud on the frozen ground.
The nightmare finished as abruptly as it began. The gloom dispersed in an instant. The normal world returned. The normal December sky with a pallid moon hanging over it. The village of Frankenberg was where it ought to have been. Dogs barked. Smoke crept over thatched roofs, rolled over fallow land. Far away to the south, the direction he was riding in, and thus probably in Bardo, they were ringing the Nones.
Reynevan rode. The horse jerked its head, resisting.
His headache subsided.
He passed Bardo, which still bore the marks of fire and destruction. He crossed to the Nysa’s left bank. He climbed up a ridge over a bend in the river, rode past the village of Eichau and descended to the Kłodzko valley.
Vespers were being rung in Kłodzko.
He circled the town from the north, once again fording the Nysa. He reached a junction, a place where the Mezilesí road crossed the road leading to Lewin and Náchod.
And there, outside a village whose name he didn’t know, he was stopped by a Hussite hlidka or patrol consisting of three mounted crossbowmen.