“—the hour of our death… Now and at the hour of our death… Elencza… My child… My child…”
It wasn’t anybody’s voice, for it wasn’t a creature capable of conversing, of whom one could, following the example of necromancers, ask questions. Like Egyptian canopic jars, or the anguinum, the druidic egg, or the crystal oglain-nan-Druighe, a hevai imprisoned the aura, or rather a fragment of it, remembering only one thing—the moment preceding its death. For the aura, that moment lasted an eternity.
“Save my child! Have mercy! Now and at the hour… Save my child… Help my daughter… Run, run, Elencza, don’t look back! Hide, hide, run into the bushes… Or they’ll find and kill you… Have mercy on us… Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. My daughter… Blessed Virgin Mary… At the hour of our death… Elencza! Run away, Elencza! Flee! Flee!”
The priest bent over and placed the hevai, throbbing with inner light, down on the lake shore. Delicately and carefully. So as not to break it. Not to disturb it. Not to disrupt the everlasting peace.
“Sir Hartwig Stietencron,” Tybald Raabe guessed at once. “And his daughter. But does that mean she survived? That she managed to escape or hide? They might have killed her later, after drowning him.”
“It doesn’t add up,” the grey-eyed man pronounced coldly. “The drowner counted sixteen bodies dumped in the lake. The tax collector, Stietencron, the six-man escort, four monks and four pilgrims. One body is missing. That of Elencza of Stietencron.”
“They might have taken her with them. You know, for sport… Played with her, slit her throat and tossed her into a pit in the forest somewhere.”
“She survived.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t ask questions, Raabe. Find her. I’m going now and when I return—”
“Where are you going?”
The grey-eyed man gave him a look. And Tybald Raabe knew not to repeat the question.
Gregorz Hejncze, Inquisitor a Sede Apostolica specialiter deputatus at the Wrocław Diocese, pondered long over whether to go to the execution, weighing up the benefits and costs. There were definitely more costs—if only the fact that the execution was the result of the bishop’s Inquisition, and therefore represented competition. There was actually only one benefit: it was nearby. The people found guilty of heresy and aiding the Hussites were going to be burned in the usual place on a piece of hard, bare ground behind Saint Adalbert’s Church, compacted by the hundreds of feet of people keen to watch others being tortured and killed.
Weighing up both sides, and somewhat surprised at himself, Gregorz Hejncze finally went to the execution. Incognito, he mingled among a group of Dominicans, with whom he took a place on the platform meant for clergymen and spectators of superior social or financial status. Among them, in the central stand, on a bench covered in crimson satin, lounged Konrad of Oleśnica, Bishop of Wrocław and the initiator and sponsor of the day’s spectacle. He was accompanied by several clergymen—including the venerable notary Jerzy Lichtenberg and Hugo Watzenrode, who had recently replaced Otto Beess as provost of Saint John the Baptist’s following the latter’s removal. There was, of course, also Jan Sneschewicz, the bishop’s assistant curate in spiritualibus, and the bishop’s bodyguard, Kuczera of Hunt. Birkart Grellenort was not present.
Preparations for the executions were at an advanced stage, and the condemned people—eight of them—were already being dragged up ladders and chained to stakes piled high with faggots and logs by the executioner’s servants. The pyres, in accordance with the recent fashion, were extremely high.
If Gregorz Hejncze had been deluding himself for so much as a moment regarding Bishop Konrad’s intentions, it was time he stopped.
But the Inquisitor hadn’t. From the beginning, he knew that the bishop’s spectacle was directed against him personally. Recognising some of the condemned people at the stake, Gregorz Hejncze was confirmed in his opinion.
He knew three of them. One, the altarist at Saint Elisabeth’s, had spoken a little too much about Wycliffe, Joachim of Fiore, the Holy Spirit and Church reform, but during the investigation had swiftly nonetheless quickly renounced his error, regretted it and after a formal revocatio et abiuratio was condemned to wearing penitential robes and carrying a cross for a week. The second, one of the painters of the exquisite polyptychs adorning the altar at Saint Giles’, came before the tribunal owing to a denunciation, and when it proved to be groundless was released. The third—the Inquisitor barely recognised him since his ears had been mutilated and his nostrils slit open—was a Jew who had once been accused of blasphemy and profanation of the Host. The accusation was false, so he had been released. Nonetheless, news must have reached the bishop and Sneschewicz, for all three of them were standing chained to stakes, with no idea that they owed their fate to the antagonism between the bishop and the papal Inquisition. And that a moment later, the bishop would order the faggots beneath their feet to be lit. To spite the papal Inquisitor.
Hejncze didn’t know how many of the remaining condemned were to die that day just to make a statement. He didn’t remember any of them. Not a single face. Not the woman with hair cropped short and cracked lips, nor the beanpole with his legs bound up in bloodstained rags. Nor the white-haired old man with the appearance of an Old Testament prophet, struggling to break free and yelling…
“Your Reverence.”
He looked back. And drew the edge of his hood from his face.
“His Eminence Bishop Konrad,” said a very young seminarist, bowing, “asks you to join him. If Your Reverence would follow me, I’ll take you.”
What to do?
The bishop made a curt and rather disdainful wave of the hand and indicated the seat beside him. He keenly sized up the Inquisitor’s face, searching for a sign of anything that would amuse him. He found nothing, since Gregorz Hejncze had spent time in Rome and was able to put on a brave face in any situation.
“In a moment,” snarled the bishop, “we shall delight Jesus and the Blessed Virgin. And you, Father Inquisitor? Are you glad?”
“Inordinately.”
The bishop snarled again, inhaled and swore under his breath. He was clearly angry and the reason was equally clear. Being on public display, he couldn’t drink and had already endured a few agonising hours.
“Then look, Inquisitor. Look. And learn.”
“Brothers!” yelled the white-haired old man thrashing around at the stake. “Awake! Why do you murder your prophets? Why do you stain your hands with the blood of your martyrs? Broooothers!”
One of the servants casually elbowed him in the belly. The prophet folded up, spluttered and was quiet for a while. But not for long.
“You will perish!” he howled, to the delight of the crowd. “You will peeeerrish! And the pagan hordes will come and kill some of you and take the others captive. Ravenous wolves and darkness will multiply against you and plunge you into the ocean depths. The Lord says: therefore, I will cast thee out of the mountain of God… I will destroy thee from the midst of the stones of fire. I will lay thee before kings…”
The mob roared with laughter and staggered in delight.