Rambeck nodded. “On Monday night right after the mass, I took the monstrance and hid it in the fireplace here in my brother’s house. Those were the instructions. Then Virgilius was to be released and the empty monstrance left in the fireplace.” He laughed softly. “No one would have noticed a thing. I could have simply placed other hosts in the silver monstrance and smuggled it back into the chapel on the day of the festival, in the same way as I stole it.”
“Unfortunately, Count Wartenberg demanded entrance to the chapel the following morning to pray. So the plan was discovered.” Simon rubbed his sweaty arms. He’d begun to shiver, and not just because his jacket was soaked from the thunderstorm. Disgusted, he stared at the blackened ring finger still lying in the abbot’s lap.
“The madman didn’t keep his promise,” the medicus finally said. “Your brother is still missing.”
“He… he didn’t come back, nor did the monstrance,” Maurus replied hesitantly. “Last night I was here looking for Virgilius, but then I heard sounds and was afraid.”
“That was just me,” the hangman replied in a low voice. “You should have just come in-it would have saved us all a lot of time and trouble.”
“You? But why…” The abbot seemed irritated at first but then continued in a sad tone. “When I got your news today I thought everything would work out now, but now it seems all is lost. The monstrance and the hosts have vanished, the position of abbot will go to Brother Jeremias, and my brother is presumably dead.” The abbot collapsed on the floor with a sob.
Magdalena took him gently by the shoulder as she would a small child. “You mustn’t give up,” she said softly. “Perhaps it will all work out in the end. My father has already spared many others from disaster.”
“And chopped the head off just as many on the gallows,” Kuisl responded. “I just hope you’ve been telling us the truth.”
Rambeck raised his head. “I swear by the Virgin and all the saints. This is the truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“Very well.” The hangman rose and knocked out his cold pipe against the chair. “Then let’s get to work now. Three days remain before the Festival of the Three Hosts. If we haven’t found the monstrance by then, there will be hell to pay, and if we haven’t caught the culprit, things will look very bad for Nepomuk. The Weilheim executioner is a bastard and doesn’t waste much time.”
“And my brother?” the abbot asked hopefully.
With his huge right hand, Kuisl picked up the blackened index finger from the monk’s lap and examined it carefully.
“A clean cut,” he said, in an appreciative tone. “The work of someone who isn’t finished with his victim, who doesn’t want him to bleed to death. It’s quite possible your brother is still alive and that we’ll be receiving another piece of him.”
The hangman placed the finger carefully back into the hand of the abbot, who had turned a ghostly white. As the hangman turned to leave, his massive frame filled the open doorway, blocking the moonlight, and for a short while the room was plunged into almost total darkness.
Nepomuk Volkmar stared at the walls of his cell in Weilheim, which were stained with blood and feces. He’d been imprisoned in this dreary dungeon for only a few hours, but he already remembered the monastery dairy in Andechs as almost a paradise.
This cell in the so-called Faulturm, or Rotting Tower, was a square hole eight paces deep and accessible only by a ladder. After the bailiffs drew up the ladder and closed the trapdoor, Nepomuk crouched in a corner, trying not to think about what awaited him in the next few days. The dungeon was just wide enough for him to stretch out his legs in the filthy straw, which crawled with fleas, lice, and other vermin. The cell smelled so strongly of garbage that Nepomuk felt like he had to vomit for the first few hours.
The worst, though, were the rats.
They came out of dozens of invisible holes in the stone, crawling over his arms and legs and fighting near his feet over a few moldy crusts of bread that the guards had thrown down for him. Nepomuk had never liked rats-there were people who believed they carried disease-and in this dungeon, he came to hate them even more. Their shining eyes made them look evil and intelligent, and their squeals sounded like the high-pitched voices shouting for his painful, slow death.
You are a warlock, Nepomuk. The Weilheim hangman will torture you with glowing red tongs; he’ll pull your limbs until they are wrenched out of their sockets; he’ll pull out your fingernails one by one; and in the end, he’ll commit you to the fire, Nepomuk, and you’ll scream as you burn to death.
Nepomuk tried to shake off the nightmare. Sitting in the dark, he’d lost all sense of time. What time was it? Midnight? Dawn? The trip in the oxcart from Andechs to Weilheim had taken perhaps three or four hours at a walking pace through the villages where people stood at the side of the road gawking at the box with the sorcerer. Peeking through cracks in the box, Nepomuk studied the faces of farmers watching the strange procession with a mixture of disgust, fear, and excitement. Many had crossed themselves and made signs to ward off evil.
Nepomuk couldn’t help thinking of his last visit with Jakob Kuisl. His friend told him not to give up hope, but how could he find hope in this hell? And what could a dishonorable executioner from Schongau do if the Weilheim district judge personally-not to mention the abbot of Andechs, the prior, even the whole world-wanted to send him to the scaffold? Nepomuk closed his eyes and fled to dreams of better days. It helped him distance himself somewhat from his anxiety, until these memories turned bloody as well…
It’s winter, near Breisach on the Upper Rhine. He and Jakob are together on a battlefield, surrounded by corpses buried under the snow, forming little mounds on the otherwise barren countryside. All day long they ride through destroyed, forsaken villages and burned cities, where stooped-over men pull oxcarts full of corpses through the streets-victims of the Plague. These men are often the only living things in an otherwise empty world. Nepomuk has read the Bible and knows the prophesies of Saint John. Is this the apocalypse? Sometimes he wonders why he and Jakob don’t turn into animals like so many others. It’s probably their long conversations in the evening around the fire-about the laws of mechanics, medicine, and morals-that save them, or the many books they rescue from the charred ruins, or the faith Nepomuk feels, kneeling before a desecrated altar in a small village church. While Nepomuk prays, Jakob waits outside. The son of the Schongau executioner doesn’t want to pray to a God that permits all this to happen. Jakob says he believes in his reason and the law, and nothing else.
But when Nepomuk finally emerges from the church with his reverent mien, he thinks he sees something like a glimmer of envy in his friend’s eyes.
A scraping sound overhead startled Nepomuk from his reveries. When the monk looked up, he saw a slender crack of light that grew larger and larger. Someone was opening the trapdoor, and evidently dawn was just breaking outside.
Even the dim light was enough to blind Nepomuk. Blinking, he held his hand over his eyes. After a while he was able to make out about a half dozen faces staring down from far above, not guards but strangers clothed in the simple garb of peasants and workmen. Some of them thought they’d seen Nepomuk the day before as he was pulled out of the box amid the raucous cries of the mob and led into the Rotting Tower.
“Hey. Is he still alive?” asked one man with a face as round as a full moon. “He isn’t moving, and I can’t see anything. I want my money back if he’s not alive anymore.”
“Throw down a rock, and then you’ll see,” said a bearded man beside him. “But be careful not to hit his head-we’d miss a beautiful execution.”