The old bugger, the old fart, the paralytic orders me to call him “father” when he’s only my uncle, my father’s brother. But I must put up with it. For when he finally turns up his toes, I, the eldest Stercza, will at last become head of the family. The inheritance, of course, will have to be divided up, but I shall be head of the dynasty. Everybody knows it. Nothing will hinder me. Nothing will stop me…
What might hinder me, thought Apeczko, swearing under his breath, is this furore with Reynevan and Gelfrad’s wife. What may hinder me is a family feud making me fall foul of the Landfriede laws governing family feuds. Hiring thugs and killers may hinder me, as might the noisy pursuit, incarceration in a dungeon, ill-treatment and torture of a lad who’s kin of the Nostitzes, related to the Piasts and a vassal of Jan of Ziębice. And Konrad, Bishop of Wrocław—whose dislike of Balbulus is mutual—is just waiting for the first opportunity to give the Sterczas what for.
Not good, not good, not good.
And to blame for all of this, Apeczko suddenly decided, picking his teeth, is Reynevan, Reinmar of Bielawa. And he shall pay for it. But not in a way that would incite the whole of Silesia. He shall pay in an ordinary way, quietly, in the dark, with a knife in the ribs. When—as Balbulus guessed right—he appears in secret at the Cistercian sisters’ convent in Ligota, beneath his lover’s window. One thrust of a knife and he’ll land plop in the Cistercians’ carp pond. And hush! The carp won’t let on.
On the other hand, one cannot utterly ignore Balbulus’s instructions, if only because the Mumbler usually checks whether his orders are executed by giving the same orders to not one, but several persons.
What to do, by the Devil?
Apeczko thrust a knife into the table with a thud and drained his beaker in one draught. He looked up and met the gaze of the fat housekeeper.
“What are you staring at?” he growled.
“The senior master has recently stocked up with some excellent Italian wine,” said the housekeeper calmly. “Shall I have it drawn, Your Grace?”
“Indeed.” Apeczko smiled in spite of himself and felt the woman’s calm soothing him, too. “Indeed, please do, I shall taste what has been maturing in Italy. And please send a boy to the watchtower, have him bring me a half-decent horseman with his wits about him. Someone who’s capable of delivering a message.”
“As you wish, Your Grace.”
Hooves thudded on the bridge. The messenger hastening away from Sterzendorf looked back and waved at his woman, who was bidding him farewell from the embankment with a snow-white kerchief. And suddenly caught sight of movement on the moonlit wall of the watchtower, a vague moving shape. What the Devil? he thought. What’s creeping about there? An owl? A swift? A bat? Or perhaps…
The messenger muttered a spell to protect him from magic, spat into the moat and spurred on his horse. The message he was carrying was urgent, and the lord who had sent it cruel.
So he didn’t see a huge wallcreeper spread its wings, fly down from the parapet and noiselessly, like a nightly spectre, glide over the forests eastwards, towards the Widawa Valley.
Sensenberg Castle, as everybody knew, had been built by the Knights Templar, and not without reason had they chosen that exact location. Looming above a jagged cliff face, its summit had been a place of worship to pagan gods since time immemorial, where, so the stories said, the people of the ancient Trzebowianie and Bobrzanie tribes offered the gods human sacrifices. During the twelfth century, when the circles of round, moss-covered stones hidden among the weeds were all that remained of the pagan temple, the cult continued to spread and sabbath fires still burned on its summit in spite of several bishops’ threats of severe punishments for anyone who dared celebrate the festum dyabolicum et maledictum at Sensenberg.
But in the meantime, the Knights Templar arrived. They built their Silesian castles, menacing, crenelated miniatures of the great Syrian Templar fortresses, erected under the supervision of men with heads swathed in scarves and faces as dark as tanned bull’s hide. It was no accident that they always located their strongholds in the holy places of ancient, vanishing cults like Sensenberg.
Then the Knights Templar got what was coming to them. Whether it was fair or not, there is no point arguing over it; they met their end, and everybody knows what happened. Their castles were seized by the Knights Hospitaller and divided up between the rapidly expanding monasteries and the burgeoning Silesian magnates. Some, in spite of the power slumbering at their roots, very quickly became ruins. Ruins which were avoided. Feared.
Not without reason.
In spite of escalating colonisation, in spite of settlers hungry for land arriving from Saxony, Thuringia, the Rhineland and Franconia, the mountain and castle of Sensenberg were still surrounded by a strip of no man’s land, a wilderness only entered by poachers or fugitives. And it was from those poachers and fugitives that people first heard stories about extraordinary birds and spectral riders, about lights flashing in the castle’s windows, about savage and cruel cries and singing, and about ghastly music which appeared to spring up from nowhere.
There were those who did not believe such stories. Others were tempted by the Templar treasure that was said still to lie somewhere in Sensenberg’s vaults. And there were downright nosy and restless individuals who had to see for themselves.
They never returned.
That night, had some poacher, fugitive or adventurer been in the vicinity of Sensenberg, the mountain and castle would have given cause for further legends. A storm was approaching from far beyond the horizon and flashes of lightning flared in the distance, so far away you couldn’t even hear the accompanying rumble of thunder. And suddenly, the bright eyes of the windows blazed in the black monolith of the castle, framed against the flashes in the sky.
For inside the apparent ruin stood a huge, stately hall with a high ceiling. The light from candelabras and torches in iron cressets accentuated the frescos on the bare walls portraying religious and knightly scenes. There was Percival, kneeling before the Holy Grail, and Moses, carrying the stone tablets down from Mount Sinai, and Jesus, falling beneath the cross for the second time. Their Byzantine eyes gazed down upon the great round table and the knights in full armour and hooded cloaks sitting around it.
A huge wallcreeper flew in through the window on a gust of wind.
The bird wheeled around, casting a ghastly shadow on the frescos, and alighted, puffing up its feathers, on one of the chairs. It opened its beak and screeched, and before the sound had died away, not a bird but a knight was sitting on the chair, dressed in a cloak and hood, looking almost identical to the others.
“Adsumus,” the Wallcreeper intoned dully. “We are here, Lord, gathered in Your name. Come to us and be among us.”
“Adsumus,” the knights encircling the table repeated in unison. “Adsumus! Adsumus!”
The echo spread through the castle like a rumbling thunderclap, like the sound of distant battle, like the booming of a battering ram on a castle gate. And slowly faded among the tenebrous corridors.
“May the Lord be praised,” said the Wallcreeper, after the echo fell silent. “The day is at hand when all His foes will be reduced to dust. Woe betide them! That is why we are here!”
“Adsumus!”
“My brothers, providence is sending us another chance to smite the Lord’s foes and to beset the enemies of the faith,” the Wallcreeper intoned, lifting his head, his eyes gleaming with the reflected light of a flame. “The time has come to deliver the next blow! Remember this name, O brothers: Reinmar of Bielawa. Reinmar of Bielawa, called Reynevan. Listen…”