His way was first barred by a rushing stream, then a hill and ravines among bizarrely shaped rocks. He waded through the thigh-high water of the stream without thinking and ran towards the ravines. And suddenly changed his plan. The ravines were too obvious an escape route, they might furthermore drive him into a trap, into a cul-de-sac with no way out. He began to scramble quickly up the steep slope, soon reaching a treeless summit where he sat down, trembling, squeezed between two rocks. A few short heartbeats later, the stream was churned up by snorting horses and about a dozen horsemen in black cloaks. Having crossed the stream, the pursuers rode deep into the ravine.

The sky to the east had begun to lighten a little. Reynevan was trembling, his teeth chattering. The wet clothes stiffened on him, freezing, and the cold nipped like a fierce dog.

It was utterly silent.

Chapter Eleven

In which Reynevan is—by turns—attacked, rescued, captured, fed and finally abducted, while owing to a certain priest, mandrake is sown on the southern foot of the Karkonosze Mountains.

The only thing moving in the area was a murder of crows circling over the trees. The only thing that could be heard was their plaintive cawing.

There wasn’t a trace of the black riders and the wind had stopped carrying the cries of “Adsumus. ” He appeared to have lost his pursuers. In spite of that, Reynevan didn’t leave his hiding place on the hill for a long time. He wanted to be utterly and completely certain. Furthermore, the hill offered the opportunity to get his bearings in the forested, rocky wilderness.

The hill wasn’t high enough, though, to command an extensive enough view from the top since it was obscured by other, higher hills. To be more precise, he couldn’t see the Old Woman or the Maiden, the towers of Trosky Castle, the sight of which would have given him his bearings.

He calculated that he had walked for more than an hour underground from Trosky, which gave a distance of around a quarter of a mile. Then there was the gallop through the trees, followed by the lengthy escape on foot. Assuming he had galloped and run in a straight line, he had covered ten furlongs at most. So he couldn’t have been far from where he left the underground tunnel, where Grellenort had surprised him. Where Samson…

Grellenort, he thought, had been frightened by Samson. Birkart Grellenort, Peterlin’s killer. The sorcerer capable of changing into a bird, the timor nocturnus, the destruction that wasteth at noon, the bishop’s thug, the thug whom Jan Smiřický claimed in Prague that the bishop himself feared. And a character like that is panic-stricken at the sight of Samson Honeypot, the giant with an idiot’s face.