The first signal of the return of the old friends was supplied—with the mediation of the dependable convent gardener—by rumours, at first vague and not very precise, and gradually increasingly detailed. Somebody had been distributing pamphlets in the town square of Brzeg, portraying a goat-headed monster with a papal tiara on its horned head. A few days later, pictures of a similar kind appeared in Wiązów and Strzelin—on them was a pig dressed in a mitre, with wording that left no doubt: Conradus episcopus sum.

A few weeks later, things became a little more serious. Some unknown perpetrators—the rumour multiplied their number to twenty—had attacked and stabbed to death on the Wrocław road Sir Rypert of Seidlitz, the deputy chief of the Świdnica counter-intelligence service, known for his cruel persecution of people suspected of pro-Hussite sympathies. A Grodków town hall scribe who had bragged of denouncing more than a hundred people was stabbed to death. In Sobótka, a crossbow bolt hit the parish priest from Saint Anne’s—who was particularly fierce towards his more free-thinking parishioners—as he was giving the sermon.

On the Friday after Saint Matthew’s Day, the twenty-fourth of September—before even the rumour about the village headman being stabbed to death in nearby Przeworno had reached the convent—Bisclavret and Rzehors appeared in White Church. They weren’t allowed through the gate, naturally, but had to wait for Reynevan in the grange outside the convent by the well. When he arrived, Rzehors was washing the blood off the sleeve of his jerkin in the trough and Bisclavret was perfunctorily cleaning his navaja which was sticky with blood.

“Enough lazing around, dear Brother Reinmar.” Rzehors wrung out the cleaned sleeve. “There’s work to be done.”

“Like that work?” Reynevan pointed to the bloody foam dribbling from the trough.

Bisclavret snorted. “I love you, too,” he sneered. “I missed you, too, and am glad to see you in rude health. Although a little gaunt, I’d say. Did you lose weight during Lent? Was it the convent vittles? Or the intensive lovemaking?”

“Put that damned knife away.”

“What? Don’t like the look of it? Hurts your feelings? I see the convent has changed you. Six months ago, you beat a man to death with your bare hands before my very eyes in Żelazno, near Kłodzko. For personal vengeance. And you dare look down on us, we who are fighting for the cause? You disdainfully turn up your nose at us?”

“Put the knife away, I said. Why have you come?”