The roof above them was creaking and starting to sag, and at any moment they knew they’d be buried beneath it.
“There has to be another way out!” Simon shouted over the deafening creaking and splintering.
Panicked, he looked around until at last, on the left, he discovered a passageway through the debris barely wide enough to pass through. He pushed Magdalena through the tiny opening, crawled in behind her, and found himself standing in what was once the bathing chamber. Here, too, the roof threatened to fall. The back part of the room had already collapsed completely, but in front, where the door had once been, a new hole had just opened up in the wall.
After nudging Magdalena through the hole, Simon scrambled through behind her. Just seconds later the entire ruin collapsed behind them with a terrible roar, and a cloud of dust rose up into the sky.
Coughing and panting, Simon and Magdalena lay on the ground, unable to speak. When the dust had drifted away, they could see Nathan and the other beggars standing nearby.
“Well done,” the beggar king said, tipping his hat. “Most of my fellows bet you wouldn’t make it out. It sounded out here like a whole load of gunpowder-”
“Shut your damn mouth!” Magdalena burst out, apparently having regained her voice. “We were nearly killed and you’re taking bets on it! Are you insane? You didn’t say a word about
“What could I have done?” Nathan replied meekly in a subdued voice. “I wanted to warn you, but the timbers were already cracking.” Then, lowering his voice, he continued. “By the way, you should quiet down a bit unless you want the entire neighborhood to come running.”
Simon noticed now that some windows had already opened in nearby houses and curious eyes were watching their little group.
“I would have called you soon in any case,” Nathan whispered. “There’s something I want to show you. It appears you weren’t the only ones to visit the bathhouse tonight.”
Taking Simon and Magdalena by the arm, the king of beggars led them to the other side of the burned-out building, where they crouched behind a collapsed stone wall. He pointed to a figure in a black cape who was clinging to the wall of a neighboring house like a bat.
“My boys didn’t even see him at first,” Nathan whispered. “He must have been prowling around here the whole time, and I think he had the same plan you did. Well, he sure won’t find anything now.”
“Oh, God, Simon!” Magdalena whispered. “That’s the stranger who was in the garden at Silvio’s house! The man who tried to kill me! He’s coming toward us!”
Nathan raised his hands reassuringly. “Don’t worry; you have me and my boys here now.”
“Your
“Well, see for yourself.”
The beggar king pointed to the doorway of a house, where two of his men loitered on the steps. As the stranger approached the ruin, presumably to get a better look, they lurched toward him. Simon noticed one of them was Crazy Johannes, Nathan’s right-hand man.
“My good fellow, a pittance for an old soldier who lost his sight in the Battle of Rheinfelden,” Johannes croaked, looking very much indeed like a down-and-out mercenary. “Just a kreuzer for a cup of mulled wine.”
“Away with you!” shouted the stranger. “I have no time for your twaddle!”
In the meantime the other beggars had reached the man and were jostling him. As the stranger faltered, Crazy Johannes raised a crutch and rammed it between the man’s legs, causing him to fall with a startled cry. Seconds later two more beggars on crutches emerged from the shadows of an entryway and began flailing away at the figure on the ground.
In one fluid motion the stranger jumped to his feet and pulled out his rapier. The beggars surrounded him like a pack of ravenous dogs, each waving a crutch through the air to hold the man at bay.
Unexpectedly the man lunged to one side, feinted to the left, then attacked from the right. Johannes let out a loud cry as the blade cut into his shoulder.
The cloaked stranger took advantage of the momentary confusion to jump onto a dung cart beside a nearby house. The beggars attacked the cart and tried to overturn it, but the man scrambled up to an open window in the second story, climbed inside, and disappeared. Moments later a woman’s scream was followed by heavy footsteps on a stairway. Simon looked up to see the stranger squeezing through a hatch in the roof, then dashing across neighboring rooftops in the direction of the Danube.
“Damn!” Nathan shouted. “We almost had him!”
Beggars arrived now from all directions to help their injured companion. In his sooty jacket Simon, too, rushed over to Johannes, whose wound, he saw immediately, was serious. The blade had pierced Johannes’s right shoulder clean through. The medicus was relieved to see that the blood seeping from the wound was dark in color rather than light, meaning the lung hadn’t been injured.
“Give me a hand!” he shouted, gesturing to some of the beggars. “We’ll carry him carefully to the catacombs, and I’ll see if there’s anything I can do for him there.”
Magdalena was still standing behind the collapsed wall, peering out over the roofs of Regensburg, where the red sun was just beginning to rise. She was so lost in thought she didn’t notice a boy standing directly in front of her. He was about ten years old, had strawberry-blond hair and a face so covered with freckles it looked as if he’d been splattered with mud. At first she presumed he’d come to see the collapsed house, but then she realized he was addressing her.
“Are you-uh-Magdalena Kuisl?” he asked fearfully. “The daughter of the Schongau hangman?”
“Who wants to know?” Magdalena snapped, scrutinizing him carefully. “You sure don’t look like a city guard.”
The boy shook his head shyly. “I’m Benjamin Teuber, the son of the Regensburg executioner. My friends and I have been looking for you everywhere. I have something to give you,” he replied, handing her a folded piece of paper. “It’s a letter from your father.”
Incredulous, Magdalena took the note. “From my father?”
Benjamin nodded and rubbed his toes together bashfully. “He gave it to my dad and asked him to find you and give it to you. And then I have a message for you from
“What’s that?” Magdalena asked.
“That your dad is a thick-skulled, pigheaded, low-down bastard.”
The hangman’s daughter smiled. There was no greater compliment anyone could give her father.
9
REGENSBURG
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, AUGUST 22, 1662 AD
This morning they began with the rack straightaway.
In silence the Regensburg executioner removed Kuisl’s bandages and bound his arms behind his back. Perceiving shadows behind the wooden lattice, Kuisl knew the doctor and the three inquisitors were already present. He fixed his eyes on the lattice as if by sheer force of will he might see through it to finally get a look at the man who’d set this awful trap for him.
Since Teuber had visited the cell to care for his wounds, only a single, agonizing night had passed and Kuisl had slept little. Instead, he’d spent the whole time brooding over the name Weidenfeld and where he might have heard it before. It was clear now that the third man whose face was hidden behind the lattice was an avenging angel risen out of his past. The same stranger had made all the inscriptions on the cell wall to remind the hangman of a time he’d long ago banished to the remote corners of his memory. The ghosts of the war had risen again, and the worst among them was hiding here, in the torture chamber in Regensburg behind a wooden lattice. Who was it? And why was he pursuing him?
Kuisl moaned softly as the executioner strapped him to a modified ladder rack. The herbal ointment Teuber
