These were the same men who had told him he would be crippled, Kreyssig reflected. He flexed his arm, feeling the powerful muscles ripple beneath his doublet. Ignorant charlatans! Fortunately he had found a better way to heal his wounds. If the Black Plague should try to take him, he would know how to beat it back.
Kreyssig stopped in the street, alarmed by the turn his thoughts had taken. All of his life he had learned never to rely on anyone. The beneficence of a master, the loyalty of a friend, the fidelity of a servant, none of these could be trusted. Yet he was becoming dependent on the magic of a witch, an ambitious noblewoman at that. He was too clever to be taken in by her intrigues, or deceived by her amorous attentions. She was using him, exploiting him to get closer to the Imperial throne. Even knowing this, however, he couldn’t escape the fascination she held over him. At times he felt like a fly caught in a spider’s web, every effort to escape only drawing the trap tighter about him.
He cast a wary glance at the street around him. At this hour, the lane was nearly deserted. The days of early-morning productivity were long past, casualties of a rumour that held the plague was most active during the threshold hours of twilight and dawn, those moments midway between night and day. Only the harshest stewards were able to rouse their households at such times and even then to little effect. Those shops that still had wares to peddle wouldn’t be open until well past the dangerous time.
What companions Kreyssig had as he ventured through the streets were those too dejected or desperate to cling to shelter. Beggars rummaging in the gutters, muck-rakers shovelling night-dirt, rat-catchers clearing out their traps before hungry cats or even hungrier peasants did the job for them. By rights, such rabble should be restricted from the districts of the rich and powerful, kept to their shanties and hovels beyond the walls and across the river. But, like so much since the plague had struck, the diligence of the Altdorf city guard, the Schuetzenverein, had diminished. The Schueters were suffering the same shortages as the rest of the city, losing men to plague, murder and outright desertion. Most of their best had been drawn away by conscription into the army Duke Vidor had used to chase the traitor Boeckenfoerde, the confused horde Altdorfers alternately called the ‘replacement army’ or ‘Vidor’s Graues Haufen’. What was left were the old, the young and a thuggish rabble too undisciplined for soldiering. Given the choice between beggars and patrols of the Schueters, most of the nobles had brains enough to risk catching disease from a tramp over a knife from a guard.
Even in such lowly company, Kreyssig was careful. The shabby cloak he wore enveloped him from head to foot, making him seem just another peasant scavenging in the streets. No armed escort, no panoply of attendants, nothing that would make anyone suspect that the Protector of the Empire was abroad. A few Kaiserjaeger in the nearby streets watching for spies was the only entourage he needed. The best defence, he had always felt, was to be inconspicuous.
With a last look around, Kreyssig shifted direction, darting into the cramped alleyway between two houses. He had passed this spot several times already in his circuitous ramble through the neighbourhood, allowing his Kaiserjaeger ample opportunity to catch any tails he had acquired. Now he would delay no longer.
Reaching an iron-banded door set into the wall bordering the alley, Kreyssig fished a key from his pocket. The portal groaned as he opened it and slipped into the shadowy environs of a small wood room. Piles of logs, heaps of kindling littered the floor — and something more that came to his attention only as he locked the door and started to walk towards the opposite entrance. It was a curious object to find, a single leather shoe sitting in the middle of the room. It was enough for Kreyssig to puzzle over, but not enough to alarm him.
In the kitchen beyond the wood room, Kreyssig found the other shoe. It was still attached to the foot of a liveried servant, the steward of Baroness von den Linden’s household. The man was lying sprawled before the brick oven, his head mashed into a red paste. From the way the rug he was sprawled upon was curled, it looked as though the man had been struck down in the wood room and dragged here.
Kreyssig’s fist closed about the dagger he wore beneath his cloak, dragging the blade from its sheath. He spun around, intending to retreat back through the wood room, but even as he started to move, the route was cut off. The door of the pantry exploded outwards, disgorging a trio of tatterdemalion figures with drawn, starveling faces and a vicious gleam in their eyes. Each of the men held a cudgel in his hand.
The men from the pantry blocked the entrance to the wood room. As Kreyssig turned towards the other doorways leading out from the kitchen, he found more antagonists rushing towards him. Some were less ragged than the three from the pantry, some weren’t quite so haggard and sickly in condition, but there was the same rage smouldering in each eye.
The mob descended upon Kreyssig in a mass. The first to reach him howled as his dagger slashed out, a forearm cut to the bone. A second foeman pitched to the floor, clutching at a stabbed belly. Then they were on him, smashing him down with wooden clubs and the iron hilts of knives.
‘Don’t kill him!’ a commanding voice boomed. From beneath the confusion of kicking boots and flailing clubs, Kreyssig saw a hulking shape in a black cloak descend the half a dozen steps between dining hall and kitchen. ‘This creature must burn with the witch!’
The witch-taker’s words brought fresh savagery to the mob. Brutally, they dragged Kreyssig to his feet, ripping away the concealing cloak in the process. One of the rabble, his tones more cultured than the rest, gasped in horror as he recognised the face of their captive.
‘Commander Kreyssig!’ the man wailed, drawing back in fear. His fright spread to the rest of the mob, who relented in their violence, cringing away from their terrible foe.
It needed but a moment more and the mob should have fractured and fled. But that moment was denied Kreyssig. From the doorway, Auernheimer berated his followers for their fear. ‘Seize this spawn of Chaos!’ he roared. ‘Do you fear a man more than you fear the gods?’
Kreyssig tried to break away as Auernheimer’s oratory poured courage back into his mob. He was too slow. With an angry growl, the rabble was on him again, catching him and pinning his arms behind his back.
‘This is treason!’ Kreyssig raged. ‘Your heads will rot on the palace walls for this!’
Auernheimer sneered from the shadows of his hood. ‘What matter a man’s head when his soul belongs to the gods?’ He pointed at his prisoner. ‘Solkan has guided us here, set us to where we might fight the canker that rots the Empire. You, the so-called Protector! You, the pawn of daemons and witches! The corruption that makes the gods turn their faces! The wickedness that would damn us all to plague and famine!’
The witch-taker swept his hand, waving the mob into the dining hall. ‘Bring this heretic,’ he snarled. ‘Solkan has given us the honour of purging this blight from our Empire. This creature burns with his mistress!’
Struggling against his captors, Kreyssig was dragged up from the kitchen and marched across the dining hall. The great table that had once dominated the room was gone, smashed into kindling and piled along with other pieces of furniture at the centre of the room. The bodies of several servants lay draped about the base of the pile. More servants, bound and gagged, lay higher up on the heap. At the very top, her body fairly smothered in rope and chain, her mouth banded about with choking straps of leather, Baroness von den Linden fixed a despairing gaze upon Kreyssig.
‘There is purity in fire!’ Auernheimer declaimed as the mob began to tie Kreyssig’s arms behind him and lash his legs together. ‘By fire did Great Solkan cleanse the fog-devils from Westerland, by fire were the heathen Kurgan driven into the Wastes!’ The witch-taker brandished a steel mace adorned with razor-edged flanges. ‘By fire will we purge this place.’ He glared into Kreyssig’s eyes. ‘The flames will consume your evil, your pain will cry out to Great Solkan and draw His eye upon our suffering! He will know the justice of our cause when we deliver to him the souls of an arch-traitor and his witch!’