“Furthermore, the rake has acquaintances among the monks of the Monastery of the Holy Ghost in Brzeg, in the hospice. Our sly boots may have headed there, to surprise and mislead Wolfher. Which isn’t too difficult, in any case. Finally, the most important thing. Listen carefully, Apecz. It’s certain that our adulterer will want to play the trouveur, pretend to be some sort of Lohengrin or Lancelot. He will want to contact the Frenchwoman. And we will most likely catch him there, in Ligota, like a dog with a bitch in heat.”

“Why in Ligota?” Apeczko dared to ask. “For she—”

“Has fled, I know. But he doesn’t.”

The old fart’s soul, thought Apeczko, is even more twisted than his body. But he’s as cunning as a fox. And, to give him his due, he knows a great deal. Knows everything.

“But to achieve what I have just ordered,” Ofka translated into comprehensible language, “you’re not much bloody use to me—you, my sons and nephews, blood, apparently, of my blood and bone of my bone. Therefore, you will hasten as quickly as you can to Niemodlin, and then to Ziębice. When you get there… Listen carefully, Apecz. You will find Kunz Aulock, called Kyrie-eleison. And others: Walter of Barby, Sybek of Kobylagłowa and Stork of Gorgowice. You will tell them that Tammo Stercza will pay a thousand Rhenish guilders for the capture of Reinmar of Bielawa alive. A thousand—remember.”

Apeczko swallowed at each name, for they were the names of the worst thugs and killers throughout Silesia, scoundrels with neither honour nor faith. Prepared to murder their own grandmothers for three skojeces, never mind the astonishing sum of a thousand guilders. My guilders, thought Apeczko crossly. Because that ought to be my inheritance when that damned cripple finally kicks the bucket.

“Do you understand, Apecz?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Then begone, off with you. Out of here, to horse, carry out my orders.”

First, thought Apeczko, I’ll head towards the kitchen, where I’ll eat my fill and drink enough for two, you stingy old bugger. And then we’ll see.

“Apecz.”

Apeczko Stercza turned around. And looked. But not at Balbulus’s contorted, flushed face, which seemed to him, for the first time here in Sterzendorf, to be unnatural, out of place. Apeczko looked into little Ofka’s huge, nut-brown eyes. At Hrozwita, standing behind his chair.

“Yes, Father?”

“Do not let us down.”

But perhaps it isn’t him at all? The thought flashed through his mind. Perhaps it’s a corpse sitting on this chair, a half-dead carcass with its brain utterly eaten up by paralysis? Perhaps… it’s them? Perhaps it’s the women—girls, maidens and matrons—who rule at Sterzendorf?

He quickly drove away the preposterous thought.

“I won’t, Father.”