They ran as fast as they could, animal fear giving them strength. They knew what being taken alive meant. A long, slow death in a torture chamber, sides burned with red-hot irons, broken joints, bones crushed in pincers and boots. A cruel death on the scaffold. Anything but him, thought Reynevan, bounding like a greyhound. Anything but Birkart Grellenort.

One of the men was catching up and Samson twisted back to slam him with the goedendag. Reynevan stabbed a second from below, in the groin. The man howled and curled up on the cobbles. A third tripped over him. Before he hit the ground, Reynevan slit open his face.

They ran on, having gained a little advantage. They saw Scharley indicating the way—into a narrow alley. They ran. Bisclavret was in front of them. Trutwein had vanished.

“Run! Now left!”

The sounds of their pursuers quietened somewhat; they must have briefly confused them, and they were being hampered by people hurrying with buckets to put out the fire. But Reynevan and Samson didn’t stop, they ran without pausing to draw breath. Mud squelched under their feet, water splashed, a dreadful stench assailed their nostrils, an awful fug of urine and faeces. Bisclavret and Scharley broke some planks with a bang.

“Get in! Go on, fast!”

It was some time before Reynevan understood that the Frenchman was instructing them to enter the black, circular hole of a latrine belching out a vile stench. Scharley had just vanished into it with a splash. Better shit than a torture chamber, he thought. He took a deep breath. The faeces below greeted him with pleasant warmth. And then a great wave as Samson dropped into it. The stench was overpowering.

“This way, ugh…” Bisclavret spat out what the wave had carried into his mouth. “To the canal. Heads up. It soon gets better. There’ll be more clearance later.”

They heard their pursuers approaching. Reynevan held his nose between his fingers and dived under.

Reynevan preferred to erase from his memory the trek through the clay-lined sewer on his hands and knees. The clearance to the brick vault increased and diminished by turns, so sometimes his mouth was above and sometimes below the liquid shit. His hands and knees sank into a thick layer with the consistency of potter’s clay on the bottom, which was shit that had settled there over the last sixty years, since, as Reynevan found out later, the Kłodzko sewage system dated back to 1368.