“They’ve excommunicated you,” Achilles Czibulka stated, placing the jars on the counter. “They cursed you. In the cathedral. On Septuagesima Sunday. Three weeks ago.”

Reynevan had befriended Achilles Czibulka in 1419, soon after he returned from Prague, having broken off his studies after the Defenestration and the outbreak of the revolution.

At that time, Czibulka had been an assistant at the Golden Apple—with a special role. He was the unguentarius or employee charged with preparing ointments. Almost everything Reynevan knew about ointments he had learned from Czibulka. Both Achilles’ father and grandfather had made ointments—but in Świdnica, so Achilles was a first-generation Vratislavian. He usually described himself as “Silesian, born and bred,” and did so with such haughty pride you’d have thought that the Czibulkas’ progenitors were wearing animal skins and dwelling in caves on the slopes of Ślęża long before civilisation arrived in the region. Czibulka’s pride in his origins was accompanied, however, by an almost insufferable contempt for any nations—above all Germans—whom he described as “incomers.”

Czibulka’s views had often annoyed Reynevan, but that day, though, he understood that the apothecary’s chauvinism might be just what he needed.

“They excommunicated you, the damned Germans,” said Achilles Czibulka angrily. “You must have heard? Why, it can’t have passed you by. Folk in the city were talking about nothing else. Should you be recognised in town—”

“It wouldn’t be a good thing.”

“Indeed not. But don’t fret, Reynevan, I’ll hide you.”

“You’d give sanctuary to an excommunicate?”

“I don’t give a fig about German anathemas!” Achilles said crossly. “We—I mean Silesian physici and pharmaceutici—must stick together, for we are one guild and one Silesian fraternity. All for one and one for all! And all of us contra Theutonicos, against the Germans. I vowed that, after the swine tortured Master Voigt to death.”

“Master Voigt, dead?”

“Tortured him to death, the bastards. For witchcraft and devil worship. It’s risible! Why, good Sir Zachariasz had studied The Picatrix, The Necronomicon, The Grand Grimoire and The Arbatel a little, had read a smattering of Pietro di Abano, Cecco d’Ascoli and Michael Scot. But witchcraft? What did he know about witchcraft? Why, even I am better at it than he was! Indeed!”

Achilles Czibulka deftly juggled the three jars, tossed them up, spread his arms wide and moved his hands and fingers. The jars began to move around and spin by themselves, faster and faster, describing circles and ellipses in the air. The apothecary slowed them with movements of his hands, then brought them down to land softly on the counter.