“Rixa, dear!” The person who spoke after a longer silence was none other than Scharley again. “I also had ancestors. I also have a heritage. In my family, various pearls of wisdom and adages, some short, some long, some that even rhyme, are passed down from generation to generation. ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone.’ ‘A fool and his money are soon parted.’ ‘Don’t put the cart before the horse.’ There was a huge number of those saws, among which one especially stuck in my mind. It went as follows: ‘Loyalty to principles is nothing more than a convenient excuse for apathetic clots floundering in idleness and lethargy to do nothing, since any kind of action surpasses their powers and invention.’ In order to live with it, those clots have made a virtue out of their incompetence. And vaunt it.”

“Splendid. And truth?”

“What about it?”

“What is truth?”

“Truth,” said Samson Honeypot in a calm voice, “is the daughter of time.”

“Conceived,” said Scharley, finishing off the sentence, “in an accidental, short-lived romance with coincidence.”

It was the late morning by the time they reached Cronschwitz. It was noon by the time knocking on the gate and then hammering on it had exhausted and wearied them. And even when they were almost hoarse from calling, the iron-bound convent gate remained tightly locked. And the stone edifice of the Dominican cenobium remained as it was: cold, lifeless and silent.

“We are here for Miss Jutta of Apolda! With her parents’ authorisation!”

“Pax vobiscum, sorores! The Archbishop of Magdeburg sent us! Open up!”

“I am a priest! In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti! Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae!”

“We are good Catholics! We swear on the Holy Cross!”

“We’ll donate to the convent fif– no, a hundred guilders!”

“Jutta! Say something! Are you there? Juuuttaaah!”

The iron-bound gate emanated icy cold and the hostile scent of rust. The convent was silent. As the grave. Like the stones of the wall surrounding it.

“The nuns are inside,” concluded Scharley, when, resigned, they had retreated to a nearby forest. “We only have one recourse. The Tábor is active nearby—that smoke is coming from somewhere near Gera, and Altenburg, which we passed yesterday, is also probably afire. I’ll ride over there, bring back a hundred boys and we’ll take the convent by storm.”

“They’ll plunder the convent. And the nuns won’t be safe, either.”

“They had their chance.”

“I’ll go to the convent again,” said Reynevan, pursing his lips. “Alone, this time. I’ll fall to my knees at the gate. I’ll beg—”

Samson suddenly bounded like a tiger into the dry thicket and dragged out a short and very unshaven individual by the collar.

“Let me go,” groaned the individual. “Let me go. I’ll tell you everything.”

“Who are you?”