It was evening by the time the unit returned. Inquisitor Hejncze. Urban Horn with a bandaged hand. Egbert of Kassel from Kopaniec with a head wound. And twenty-four men. Of the thirty-six who set off with them.

They rode away in silence, deep in thought. Without needless talk, without the bragging about deeds and exploits typical in such circumstances. With the feeling of a task well completed. Of the sanctum et gloriosum opus they had accomplished.

While the black mass of the ruins of Sensenberg Castle burned like a torch against the starry sky, belching fire from all its windows.

“I dreamed of a fire last night,” said Reynevan, slinging the saddle onto his horse. “A great fire. I wonder what a dream like that could mean. Perhaps we should visit Master Zbrosław before we set off? For might it have been prophetic? Perhaps we are meant to hurry as though to a fire?”

“Let’s hope not,” said Rixa, tightening the girth. “Let’s make do without prophecies like that, without fire and conflagrations. Particularly since the day promises to be a scorcher.”

Chapter Fourteen

In which Hosts bleed and friends meet. Night falls over the town of Bolesławiec. And as we can read in Virgil, sleep overcame every living thing.

It was already warm at daybreak on the ninth of June Anno Domini 1429, while around three o’clock it was scorching; the heat was literally debilitating. On the ninth of June, the residents of Gelnau—a village located at the very mouth of the Nysa Gorge—who were forever looking vigilantly up towards the mountain of Warnkoppe, rising to the south, were lying in the shade, blissfully indolent and indifferent to everything.

A cry pulled them out of their torpor. A cry of terror.

“The beacon! The beeeacon!” yelled a farmer from the most distant field. As he yelled, he pointed at Warnkoppe, from the top of which rose into the sky a vertical column of black smoke.

In Jemlitz, a small town located to the south of Žitava, the parish priest of Saint Cyriacus walked through the church’s nave, wiping his sweaty face on the sleeve of his cassock. He was sweating, shouting and raging at the labourers repairing the storeroom of the presbytery. Now he was hurrying to the vestry to take a rest within its cool walls. He was constantly forgetting to stop on the way, kneel down and cross himself in front of the altar, and if he ever did it was mechanically and unthinkingly. The previous night, the parish priest had been visited by a dream, an evil dream, following which he vowed not to commit any further such derelictions.

He stopped and knelt down. And began to scream. In a voice so ghastly that the labourers heard and ran from the presbytery.

The altar was covered in blood. Blood that was dripping from the tabernacle.