“Hosanna!” repeated Horn. “Scharley, Reinmar! Get out and be quick! It’s our boys! Czechs! We’re free! Come on, at the double, to the stairs!”

He set off at a run, without waiting for them. Scharley followed. Reynevan glanced at the cooling, still steaming Occultum, at the imbeciles cowering in the straw. Then he rushed for the stairs, on the way stepping over the corpse of Tomasz Alpha who had been given not liberation but death by the explosion that destroyed the door.

“Hosanna!” Urban Horn could be heard greeting his liberators at the top of the stairs. “Hosanna, Brothers! Greetings, Halada! By God, Raabe! Tybald Raabe! Is it you?”

“Horn?” asked Tybald Raabe in astonishment. “You’re alive?”

“By Christ, indeed! So you’re not here because of me—”

“Not you,” said the Czech called Halada, who had a large red chalice on his chest. “I’m glad to see you in one piece, Horn, and Father Ambrož will rejoice… But we stormed Frankenstein because of them.”

“Them?”

“Them,” confirmed a giant in a quilted gambeson that made him look even bigger, pushing his way through the armed Czechs. “Scharley. Reinmar. Greetings.”

“Samson…” Reynevan felt a lump in his throat. “Samson… My friend! You didn’t forget about us—”

“How could I forget two men like you.” Samson grinned.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

In which our heroes—although liberated from the Narrenturm—discover they are not as free as they’d like to be. They participate in historical events, burning down several villages and small towns. Then Samson saves what he can, and various other things happen, until finally, our heroes depart. Their path—to use the poet’s metaphor—runs in parte ove non è che luca.

The snow lying on the roofs stung their eyes with its blinding whiteness. Reynevan staggered and would have fallen from the stairs if not for Samson’s shoulder. The roar and boom of gun and cannon fire reached them from the hospice. The bell in the hospital church moaned painfully, and the bells of Frankenstein’s churches tolled the alarm.

“Quickly!” yelled Halada. “Towards the gate! And keep down—they’re shooting!”

They were indeed shooting. A crossbow bolt whistled over their heads and split a plank. As they ran into the courtyard, hunched over, Reynevan tripped and fell to his knees in mud mixed with blood. The dead were lying near the gate and by the hospital: some canons of the Holy Sepulchre in habits, some lackeys and soldiers of the Inquisition, clearly abandoned by Grzegorz Hejncze.

“Quickly!” urged Tybald Raabe. “To horse!”

“Here!” A Czech as black and sooty as a devil, wearing armour and holding a flaming torch, reined in his steed. “Make haste, make haste!”

He swung and hurled the torch onto a thatched shed. The torch rolled down the wet straw and hissed as it landed in the mud. The Czech swore.