Erich could see the archers draw back their arrows, taking aim at the trapped knights. He looked around him for something, anything he could use to help his comrades. All he found was Aldinger trying to pull himself out from under the writhing body of his horse. A caltrop had stabbed through the flesh of his hand, three others piercing the body of his horse. Erich made his decisions at once, rushing to the knight’s aid. Maybe he couldn’t help the men in the plaza, but he could help Aldinger.
As he helped the pinned knight lift the body of his horse, Erich kept his gaze fixed upon the plaza. Grand Master von Schomberg was both brave and bold. He wouldn’t submit meekly to a tyrant.
‘Sigmar will be my judge!’ von Schomberg’s voice rose in a defiant shout. At his order, the knights in the plaza spurred their horses towards the caltrops, forcing the huge animals out from the trap, urging them to trample the bodies of wounded men and horses.
The command to loose arrows was given. The shrieks of horses and the screams of men rang out from the plaza as the volley struck. Others, however, came thundering out into the road. Many of the knights fell, the hooves of their horses punctured by the spiked caltrops, but others fought their way clear. Archers rushed over the rooftops to shoot them down, but the effort was too late. Erich could count at least twenty knights galloping away into the growing dawn, scattering into the streets of Altdorf.
He dragged his eyes away from the scene, closing his ears to the moans and cries of injured men. His arm supporting Aldinger’s weight, he led the wounded dienstmann into the shadow of an alleyway. He leaned the injured man against the plaster-covered wall.
The Kaiserjaeger would be coming soon, looking for survivors. There was only one way to foil such expert trackers. Erich knelt to the ground, brushing away snow until he uncovered the stone cover of a sewer drain. It took him valuable minutes to pick away at the grime caked around the cover. While he worked, he could hear the Kaiserjaeger moving among the fallen Reiksknecht, evaluating each of the wounded. A ghastly gurgle told when they found a knight they thought too injured to stand trial.
The cover came free just as the Kaiserjaeger began searching the field of caltrops. Hastily, Erich lowered Aldinger down into the reeking warmth of the sewer. The captain followed a moment later, dragging the lid back into place before dropping down into the darkness.
Just as the lid settled into place, Erich heard the voice of the Kaiserjaeger officer again.
‘Leave that one,’ the officer snarled. ‘Commander Kreyssig will want him no matter how beat up he is. It isn’t every day you get to hang a Grand Master.’
Nuln
Kaldezeit, 1111
‘We live in an age of science and reason, not idiotic superstition!’
The statement was given voice by Lord Karl-Joachim Kleinheistkamp, a wrinkled old man, his bald head unconvincingly covered by a horsehair wig, the buttons on his broad coat displaying a veneer of tarnish and smut. He affected the pompous confidence of a man secure in his authority and with no time for anything that did not fit neatly into the world described in his books and papers. All in all, Kleinheistkamp was typical of the Universitat’s professors.
Walther was discovering that frustrating fact. Klein-heistkamp was the third professor he’d managed to lure to the Black Rose and he was the third to openly laugh at the rat-catcher’s story. He cast a despairing glance towards Zena, but all she did was shake her head and vanish into the kitchen. Hugo might have been more sympathetic if he wasn’t too busy trying to teach the three ratters how to sit up and beg.
Bremer wore a big smile though, happily refilling the professor’s stein at every opportunity. Walther winced each time he saw the taverneer grab for Kleinheistkamp’s mug. For an old man, his lordship had a prodigious capacity, especially when Walther was paying. It seemed a noble title wasn’t enough to keep some people from guzzling another man’s beer.
‘What you describe is simply impossible!’ Klein-heistkamp declared, wiping foam from his moustache with the back of his hand. ‘This is an enlightened age! We know now that there are rules to spontaneous generation. A salamander is created by fire, flies generate from unburied corpses, but higher forms, things like cattle and swine, must be created in the proper manner. We know that maternal impression causes malformations in offspring, not the diet or habits of the mother as simple herb wives would have it. We know that a cockatrice is spawned from the egg of a rooster exposed to the rays of Morrslieb and that it is not, as our less educated forebears would have us believe, the result of a serpent having congress with a hen.’
Walther could feel the veins pounding in his forehead. The professor had been prattling on like this for the better part of an hour, straying into subjects beyond either his ability or his desire to follow. ‘That is all well, my lord, but about the rat…’
‘Such a creature is impossible,’ Kleinheistkamp said, tapping the wooden counter by way of emphasis. Bremer decided to take it as an appeal for the stein to be refilled. ‘A rat as large as you describe would be crushed under its own weight! It wouldn’t be able to move, much less launch itself at a grown man and bite out his throat!’
‘I’ve hunted rats all my life,’ Walther growled back. He held his hand out so that the professor could see the scars. ‘I know what a rat bite looks like.’
Kleinheistkamp smiled and shook his head. ‘I know you think you know what you saw,’ he explained, his voice adopting the condescending tolerance of a parent teaching a child. ‘But I’m afraid you just don’t have the understanding to make a judgement of that sort. Isn’t it more likely that the vigilantes were right? Somebody cut the fellow’s throat and your imagination did the rest. You are so accustomed to seeing the violent handiwork of vermin that you unconsciously made a similar creature responsible for the tanner’s murder.’ The old man took a long pull from the stein and rose from his chair. ‘I grant that the mob was impetuous blaming plague victims, but I guarantee that a human malefactor was responsible. Robbery, not monstrosity, was behind the tanner’s death.’
Chuckling under his breath, Lord Kleinheistkamp tottered off. Walther felt his stomach turn as he watched the pompous old man leave. The professor had marked his last chance to get somebody at the Universitat to listen to his story. Entertaining the scholars while they smugly dismissed what he had seen with his own eyes had cost the rat-catcher the better part of twelve schillings. He would be weeks recouping the loss.
Bremer reached out to clear away Kleinheistkamp’s mug. The taverneer squinted at the stein as he lifted it. ‘His lordship left a bit,’ he said, turning towards Walther and offering the mug to him.
‘Drink it yourself,’ Walther hissed, clenching his fist in frustration. Bremer shrugged and downed the rest of the professor’s drink.
‘They’re fools,’ Walther snarled. ‘Blind idiots who won’t believe anything unless it’s written down in one of their precious books! They wouldn’t accept this monster as real unless it crawled up and bit them in-’
‘Then why keep bothering about them?’ Zena demanded. There was colour in her cheeks, a tremble of anger on her lip. She knew as well as Walther how much he had gambled on the scholars. The loss of money was one thing, but the loss of hope was something she knew the rat-catcher couldn’t afford. ‘The Universitat aren’t the only ones who would want to buy such a beast.’
Walther stood, glaring at Zena, all the pain of his dashed dreams rising to his tongue. ‘Who else would buy the thing? Ostmann? At a penny a pound?’
Zena glared back at the rat-catcher, her own anger rising. It wasn’t just Walther who was depending upon a windfall from the monster. Against her best judgement, she cared about him. His defeat was her defeat. And she wasn’t going to allow that to happen.