“You deserve credit. So tell me, how did you fall in with them at all? It can’t have been easy.”

“It wasn’t.” Reynevan smiled at the recollection. “To tell the truth, an almost miraculous accident—a coincidence—was required. And just imagine, one occurred. On a certain very hot July day, Anno Domini 1426.”

Svatopluk Fraundinst, chief physician of the hospital of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, was a man in his prime, well built and handsome enough without special effort. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, he seduced and fucked the pre-revolutionary Benedictine nuns who had been driven by the Hussites from their own convent and were working in the hospital. Hardly a week went by without the doctor dragging a sister into a cubbyhole, from which groaning, moaning and appeals to the saints could soon afterwards be heard.

Reynevan had suspected that Svatopluk Fraundinst was a sorcerer from the very beginning, from the first day he took up work at the hospital and began assisting the surgeon with operations. Firstly, Svatopluk Fraundinst was a Vyšehrad canon, a doctor medicinae from Charles University with licentia docendi in Salerno, Padua and Krakow. He had been a student of Matěj of Bechyně and a close associate of the famous Bruno of Osenbrughe. In his day, Master Bruno of Osenbrughe had been a living legend of European medicine, and Matěj of Bechyně was strongly suspected of a fondness for alchemy and magic, both white and black. The very fact that Svatopluk Fraundinst earned his living as a surgeon was also significant—university physicians didn’t engage in surgery, leaving it to executioners and barbers; they did not even stoop to phlebotomy, which was extolled in their own faculties as a remedy for everything. Physicians who were also sorcerers, however, didn’t shun surgery and were good at it—and Fraundinst was quite simply an extremely able surgeon. If you added the typical mannerisms of speech and gesture, the ring with a pentagram he wore quite openly, and the seemingly unimportant and casual allusions, one was left almost without any doubt that Svatopluk Fraundinst had more than a nodding acquaintance with magic, and that he was trying to sound Reynevan out regarding the same matter. Reynevan, of course, was very much on his guard, bluffing and avoiding traps as cleverly as he could. Times were hard and one couldn’t be certain of anyone or anything.