The Poisoned Pilgrim: A Hangman's Daughter Tale (30 page)

From his hiding place, the sorcerer’s hate-filled eyes stared at the group sitting around a lantern in the watchmaker’s laboratory.

In the flickering light, the man could see how that damned hangman was speaking to Maurus Rambeck, and how the latter fell to pieces. The sorcerer hissed like a snake and rolled his eyes. He had expected more dignity from the abbot, but it appeared he was actually intimidated by this group.

The sorcerer had listened to the entire conversation. This executioner and his family were more clever than he thought at first—though not clever enough for him. Nobody was. His real problem was his helper, who couldn’t carry out even the simplest orders. Three times this hangman’s daughter had eluded his grasp, but now it was clear she didn’t represent the greatest danger, nor did the effeminate bathhouse doctor; it was the executioner himself.

The sorcerer licked his dry lips. He should have disposed of this Kuisl long ago. He was dangerous. A falling sack of lime wouldn’t be enough, and a direct confrontation seemed too risky. Damn, this whole Kuisl family lay upon him like a curse.

Suddenly he began to grin. The idea was so good he had to be careful he didn’t start to chuckle out loud: there was indeed another way to get rid of all his problems, and it was a shame he hadn’t thought of it earlier. He’d have to give instructions at once for his plan to be carried out.

Until then, all he could do was wait.

As invisible as a shadow, the sorcerer continued to eavesdrop on the conversation in the watchmaker’s house.

Maurus Rambeck sat as still as stone for a long while as rain trickled down the bull’s-eye window in thin rivulets. The church bell tolled midnight, and not until the last sounds had died away did he turn to Jakob again. “Do you think you can find my brother?” he asked skeptically. “You, a dishonorable hangman from Schongau?”

“He may be dishonorable, but he’s also the smartest and strongest damned man in the entire Priests’ Corner,” Magdalena retorted. “If you only knew what my father has accomplished in his life, you wouldn’t talk like such a jackass.”

The abbot raised his hands apologetically and smiled faintly. “Pardon me, young woman; it wasn’t my intent to offend your father.” He shrugged in resignation. “What can I do? It doesn’t look as though I can exactly choose who’s going to help me, and in any case, it seems Brother Jeremias will be taking my position soon.”

“If we are to help you, you must tell us more,” said Simon, leaning forward in his rickety chair. “Tell us what happened to your brother.”

“As your father-in-law already said, he was abducted.” Rambeck buried his face in his hands and sobbed softly before continuing. “Some madman has taken possession of him and is threatening to kill him if I don’t hand over the hosts.”

“In other words, you stole the hosts only to save your brother?” Magdalena asked sympathetically.

The abbot nodded and rubbed his tired, bloodshot eyes. “This… this sorcerer, or whatever you want to call him… knew that only I or one of the other two keyholders would be able to enter the holy chapel, so he kidnapped my brother and sent me a message, along with the one I have here.”

Rambeck reached under his robe, pulling out and carefully
unwrapping a little package. When Simon saw what it was, he cringed. In the soiled cloth lay a blackened finger, a few tendons still clinging to it. It bore an engraved silver ring, which Simon noticed now was identical to the one worn by the abbot.

“This ring bears our family coat of arms,” the abbot whispered. “The Rambecks are an old family, and when we are gone, the family will die out.” He looked at Simon in despair. “Do you understand? This madman will stop at nothing. First he killed the apothecary’s assistant because he apparently knew too much; then young Vitalis when he came to the defense of his master. I had to give him the hosts.”

“How could the sorcerer be certain they were the real hosts?” Simon asked incredulously. “You could have given him anything, and—”

“That’s the reason he demanded the monstrance, too; don’t you understand, you imbecile?” Kuisl snorted, looking up angrily at the ceiling where the crocodile was still swinging in the breeze. “His Excellency had to bring the sorcerer the monstrance as proof.”

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.”

The others laughed, and Nepomuk could hear children cry out among them. When he saw a glowing object hurtling toward him, he quickly dodged to one side, scraping his shoulder on the
rough rock wall. Blinded with pain, he screamed as the torch fell to the ground beside him, flickered in the damp straw, and fortunately went out.

“Look how ugly he is,” shouted the man with the moon face. “The soldiers were right—he really looks like a fat toad.”

“Hey, sorcerer,” a woman taunted. “Can you fly? Fly up to us. Or have you lost your broom?”

Once again the crowd hooted and hollered. Nepomuk buried his head in his hands, trying to ignore everything around him, but then another object was hurled down at him. This time it was a heavy clod of clay that hit him on the back. Pain shot through his body. Stones followed, along with a few soggy turnips and cabbages, then a hail of all kinds of projectiles.

“Here, eat this, you fat toad,” a woman taunted. “Eat it so you can grow big and strong for the torture.”

“Get out of here! Go to hell!” The deep voice that spoke now came from a man accustomed to giving orders. “Just stop. You’re going to kill him for me.”

The crowd murmured, but the bombardment ended. “We paid good money to see the sorcerer,” a bearded man complained. “And now we’re not even allowed to throw things at him?”

Nepomuk looked up again. The torch tossed onto the straw had gone out, but in the dim light at the top of the shaft, he could make out the outline of a person dressed entirely in black. His wavy hair, however, was combed straight back and snow-white, as if the man had aged far before his time. He was perhaps forty and wore a tight jerkin that highlighted his broad back and strong arms. He looked into the hole, holding the torch down so that for a moment Nepomuk could look him in the face. The man’s eyes flashed red just like those of the rats sharing Nepomuk’s cell. He inspected his victim like an animal handed over for slaughter, and Nepomuk instinctively recoiled.

“Still looks to be in good shape,” he mumbled. “Thank God.” Then he turned to the spectators, who were no doubt jostling
him for a better look. “Just don’t mess up my work,” he growled. “If you kill him, you’ll owe me—and I promise it will cost you dearly. Do you hear?”