by Eric Flint
She shook her head again. “I don’t know where the prisoners are.” She pointed at the still-open door through which the torturer had fled. “He ran through there.”
The blacksmith headed for the door.
“Be careful,” Noelle cautioned. “I missed, when I shot at him.”
The blacksmith’s answering grunt made it crystal clear that he was not especially worried. Given his own size, and that of the three journeymen following him, that wasn’t perhaps surprising. Especially since all four of them were carrying heavy hammers.
A few seconds later, she heard him call out. “In here, Fraulein Murphy!”
When she passed through the door, with Eddie on her heels, she found herself in a corridor. Several heavy doors lined it on the left. Finally, something that looked like it was supposed to! Those were cell doors, she was quite sure. Leaving aside their heavy look, the hinges faced into the corridor.
But she didn’t give them more than a glance. Her eyes were drawn to the figure sitting against the far wall, over whom the blacksmith and his journeymen were hovering.
It was the torturer. He was moaning, and had his hands clasped over the ribs on his right side.
“Apparently you did not miss with one of the bullets, Fraulein,” the blacksmith said cheerfully.
He reached down, seized the torturer by the scruff of his coat, and jerked him roughly to his feet.
“Up, swine. I have business with you.”
The torturer shrieked. The blacksmith ignored him, turning instead to one of his journeymen. “Start prying the hinges off the doors, Hans. Easier than trying to break the locks.”
The younger blacksmith nodded.
“You have a chisel with you? If not, you can use mine. When I’m done with it.”
The journeyman reached into the big pouch on his work belt and drew forth a heavy chisel.
“Good,” the blacksmith said. “Mine might be a bit slippery.”
He moved toward Noelle, hauling the torturer with him. “Come with me, Dieter and Axel. You can help Hans in a moment. Please be so good as to stand aside, Fraulein.”
She and Eddie stepped away from the door. After the blacksmith and his two assistants passed through, they followed.
“This will do,” the blacksmith said. He slammed the torturer against the heavy chair. The man groaned again.
“Grab his hair, Dieter. Axel, press his head against the wood. I want the neck braced.”
Before Noelle could quite grasp what they were doing, the two journeymen had the torturer’s head and neck pinned against one of the thick wooden legs of the chair. The blacksmith drew out a chisel. It was very big, perhaps an inch and half across the blade.
He placed the chisel firmly against the man’s neck. Right against the spine. Then, lifted his hammer.
“Jesus,” Noelle whispered.
The blow was hard, sure, craftsmanlike. The torturer jerked once. Then his body became slack. The unmistakable stench of urine and feces filled the air.
The two journeyman let the body slide to the floor. The blacksmith stooped and took the time to wipe off the chisel blade on the dead man’s coat, before rising to his feet.
The look he gave Noelle seemed as hard and solid as the metal he worked with. “The ram has taken Halsgericht now. This swine”-he gestured with the hammer-“once executed one of my apprentices. For a theft so petty he should not have been more than flogged.”
All Noelle could do was nod. Looking down, she saw that she still had the pistol in her hand. She’d forgotten all about the gun, and the fact that it was still armed and cocked.
Dan Frost would have words to say about that, if he ever found out. Carefully, Noelle disarmed the weapon.
By the time she was done, she heard familiar voices in the corridor. Then Emma and Meyfarth were coming through, and she was able to shake off the horror of the past minutes.
“You’re all right?”
Emma nodded, as did the pastor.
Noelle turned back to the blacksmith. “What’s happening in the rest of the castle?”
The blacksmith grinned. “Die Neideckerin has everything well in hand. The Schloss now belongs to the ram.”
“The soldiers?”
Amazingly, the grin widened. “Die Neideckerin reminded them of what happened at Mitwitz. At some length. I do not foresee any problems.”
* * *
Fuchs von Bimbach noticed that at the edges of the field, some of the people in the crowd were beginning to move, turn their heads.
No danger, though, he was sure. There couldn’t be. Margrave Christian’s troops were here-a guarantor that the up-timers would not be sending any more men through Bayreuth than the number to which von Bimbach had agreed. In any case, people were looking toward the Schloss, not away from it. Pride prevented him from turning his head around.
* * *
The captain of von Bimbach’s mercenaries did look around. There was chaos at the castle gate. Not people trying to force their way in. People trying to force their way out, it looked like. He was dismounted; someone had led his horse back to the paddock area. He started to run, clumsy in his high-heeled riding boots on the dry hummocks of sheep-grazed grass.
* * *
Ableidinger smiled. The gawkers and onlookers at that end of the field were breaking toward the castle gate, far faster than the captain was moving. Meeting the party that was forcing it way out. Fifteen to twenty people there, if they hadn’t lost anyone when the servants and staff seized the castle. Not experienced fighters, any of them; mostly women. But it hardly mattered, as Ableidinger had known it wouldn’t-especially with that somewhat peculiar but very capable and determined young American woman set lose in their midst.
It could not have been that hard, really. The Freiherr was not the world’s most popular employer. Sixty-three points still held the record for specific grievances from any Franconian lord’s subjects, as far as he was aware.
Ableidinger would have liked to run toward the castle also, but he had to be a model of discipline. He held himself steady. Wearing up-time clothing, hair short, closely shaved, inconspicuous within the small knot of officials behind Anita Masaniello’s chair.
There was a ring of his people, now, around those who had come out of the castle.
About half the onlookers were running away. Uninvolved. Real spectators. Prudent people. The rest, his own, were starting to turn toward the end of the field behind him.
Yes. The right livery. Margrave Christian’s men. Reinforcing the few troops of the Franconian administrators; interposing themselves between von Bimbach’s mercenaries and the up-timers; ringing the party coming out from the castle, a second defensive perimeter around the people in the center.
Von Bimbach had risen from his camp chair, drawn his sword; one of the margrave’s men was on him, too, holding a pistol, telling him to sit back down; two more of the margrave’s men there, standing at that side of the table.
No shots, so far. No blood.
The party from the castle reached the table. Frau Thornton and Herr Pastor Meyfarth, on their own feet. Frau Masaniello, Salatto’s wife, running to embrace them. Herr Thornton following her. Two menservants, liveried, their hands crossed to make a chair, carrying an old woman. Die Neideckerin. Both of her legs splinted. The up-time EMT, the medic they called him, running to her.
A well-dressed woman; far too well-dressed to be a servant. The Freiherr’s mistress, then. Sent from Bamberg to his estates, six years ago, for safety. The old woman’s daughter. Von Bimbach’s leverage against die Neideckerin. Holding a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order in one hand; a book in the other. The Book of Mormon. Judith Neidecker had not been so cowed as to accept her mother’s abduction and torture meekly. With Fraulein Murphy, she had organized the servants; even, according to the Fraulein, had said that if the ram would send her an ice pick, she would save them all a lot of trouble by putting it through the Freiherr’s eardrum and into his brain while he snored.
; Ableidinger shivered. The female of the species. Martha Kronacher, who now seemed to consider Pastor Meyfarth to be her property. Ableidinger smiled to himself; Meyfarth had not noticed yet. His own deceased wife. Every man would do well to remember that his wife was one of them. Judith Neideckerin. Judith with the head of Holofernes.
The medic, Matewski was his name, put die Neideckerin on the table; Anita Masaniello sat down again.
The captain of the Freiherr’s mercenaries, still running towards the castle, caught his spur in one of the hummocks of sheep-gnawed grass, stumbled, fell on his face.
Ableidinger laughed, a booming laugh heard all across the field. Tensions dropped a notch. Except for Dr. Lenz, who jerked up from his chair. He had been sitting, frozen, through it all. Two of the margrave’s troops grasped his arms, held him down.
Anita stood up.
“What should we do with him?” one of the troopers asked her. “Hand him over to you up-timers?”
“Not,” Ableidinger said, moving out from the knot of officials. “Not quite yet. There is something that I need to do. Or want to do.” He stood there, as if thinking.
Anita sat back down.
Ableidinger beckoned. “Bring him here.”
The margrave’s men handed the lawyer over to two Jaeger who were wearing the ram badge on their armbands. One of them was Gerhardt Jost.
* * *
Tom O’Brien, in charge of the USE/SoTF troops on the field, held his breath.
Ableidinger laughed again. It didn’t seem to make Lenz feel any better.
Ableidinger’s voice. That booming voice, everyone could hear it. “Ladies and gentlemen!”
O’Brien let his breath out.
“I shouldn’t do this, I suppose. But then, I am not a gentleman, anymore than Brillo is a gentleman. Am I?”
The onlookers roared their approval from the edges of the field.
“I present to you! The man who chaired the commission that expelled me from the law school at the University of Jena. Because I had married my late wife rather than leaving her to have our son by herself.” Ableidinger put his arm around a boy who had run to him from among the spectators.
Another roar.
“I have wanted to do this ever since.” Ableidinger walked up to Lenz, paused an arm’s length away, reached out, and twisted his nose. Very hard. It started to bleed.
The crowd loved it.
The voice again. “I probably shouldn’t do this, bad for my dignity and prestige you know, and not suitable to a leader. But I’ve wanted to do it for so long. And I’m a scroungy down-time ram you know, no aristocrat.”
Ableidinger turned around, dropped his pants, and mooned Lenz. Including an audible fart.
“All right. Now they can have him. Due process and all that. Give him to the proper authorities.”
The crowd went wild.
Tom O’Brien’s shoulders sagged a little with relief. Too soon. Anita was saying something.
“Matewski, if you’re about finished with Frau Neidecker’s legs? Could you scour off the table? This isn’t going to take very long, I think. It’s my third. And no way am I going inside that castle.”
Chapter 16:
“Now You’re Scaring Me To Death”
Wuerzburg, September, 1634
Steve Salatto would have liked to hang them all from the nearest tree. Friends as well as foes. However, he had Anita back safe; baby Diana, too. She had fuzzy hair.
The commander of the regiment that Gustavus Adolphus had sent down to Franconia had offered to blast von Bimbach’s castle into rubble and eradicate the whole family. Steve had thanked him kindly, but said that it wouldn’t be necessary.
It wasn’t. Margrave Christian had already taken care of the “blasting into rubble” bit and had escheated the Freiherr’s Bayreuth estates to himself. The Freiherr’s relatives had run off to Saxony. As for the lands in Bamberg, Steve told Cliff Priest just to occupy the administration building-it wasn’t a fortified castle-and told Vince Marcantonio to escheat the estates to the SoTF and have Stewart Hawker and his folks arrange some equitable lease arrangements for von Bimbach’s tenants and submit them for approval.
“As for the final disposition of the individuals involved, leave it up to the courts.” It hurt to say it, when he would have liked to squash the Freiherr like a cockroach, but he managed.
Scott Blackwell had some difficulty in getting the mercenary commander to swallow those orders. But he managed, too.
* * *
Ed Piazza and Arnold Bellamy looked at Steve’s final-or, if not final, at least most recent-report on Franconia.
“’Sorry about all the publicity’!” Ed exploded. “Sorry about it? It’s some of the best we’ve had all year!”
“Professional civil servants don’t see things quite the same way you do,” Arnold said apologetically. “They’re temperamentally inclined to work behind the scenes. And it was his wife who had a baby in the presence of a couple of thousand spectators. I can understand how he feels. I would have been very embarrassed if Natalie had ever done such a thing.”
He pointed to the rest of the papers on Ed’s desk. “You’ll find a draft of our proposal to congress enclosed. In brief, our recommendation is that the SoTF congress just scoop up all of the little Reichsritterschaften and petty lordships in Franconia and incorporate them. Not confiscate the property from the owners, mind you; just end their jurisdictional authority over their so-called subjects who are now our citizens. The people in general voted for incorporation. If you want to, I suppose, we could do an individual referendum in each of them, but I don’t think it’s necessary.”
Ed looked up. “Will the congress go for that? Especially the House of Lords?”
Arnold nodded. “I think so. Most of the lower house of the congress consists of commoners who have been angry at these petty lordships for centuries. And the larger rulers in the House of Lords, the counts and such, have been annoyed by them for just as long. It’s one of the few topics on which the commoners and upper nobility are in harmonious agreement. Both of them think that the quasi-independent lower nobility are big pests and a plague on the landscape. It goes right back to the days when the Swabian League went on a campaign to wipe out as many of the robber barons as it could lay hands on. That’s more than a century ago. Plus, it also fits well into the national project of abolishing internal tolls and tariffs. I think it will be safe to present it. Especially if you go on to the next item.”
Ed read on.
“If the SoTF congress agrees to this, just incorporating them as we propose without any further fuss and feathers, then Margrave Christian of Bayreuth, upon behalf of himself and his nephews, will petition for admission into the State of Thuringia-Franconia on the same terms as the other of its counties and with a seat for each of the principalities in the SoTF House of Lords. The only special point he will be making is that he wants the approval of congress to do unto the Reichsritter and petty lords who have enclaves within his and his nephews’ territories just what we are proposing to do unto them in Wuerzburg, Bamberg, and Fulda.”
Ed frowned. “Does the margrave actually mean this?”
“I think so. Informally, apparently, he has already taken oaths of allegiance from a lot of their subjects. Backed up by the ram. Given the geography of Franconia, he’ll be a lot stronger if he can manage that. He’ll have us as a buffer between him and Gustavus Adolphus when the crowd of the dispossessed start spewing petitions and lawsuits like a volcano. For that matter, he will have our military to back up his if they go into revolt. Not that that’s very likely, given what happened to Mitwitz and von Bimbach. Apparently, he’s willing to accept being, for all practical purposes, a constitutional monarch within Bayreuth County, Thuringia-Franconia, as a reasonable trade-off.”
“Is Gustavus Adolphus going to like it? The arrangement he made with Mike, whatever it was, didn’t include having us swallow his allies.” Ed was sure of that.
“The king, ah, empero
r, can’t do much about it. Margrave Christian is volunteering. His politics are local; his main interest has always been keeping the war out of Bayreuth. Right now, he sees us as his best bet for doing that. No guarantees that he would continue his allegiance if we fall flat on our faces at some future date, of course. But for right now, I think, our honorable captain-general will just have to live with it.”
“I’ll put the best face on it that I can. Mike should love it, even if he has to keep his own face poker-stiff. Next?”
“All right. Steve’s final point. The Nuernberg city council is increasingly worried about the quasi-independent status of Nuernberg as an Imperial City and an independent state within the USE, separate from Thuringia-Franconia.”
Ed raised his eyebrows. “Do they have reason to be?”
Arnold looked at him. “Not right now. After all, Rhode Island managed to survive. It will depend, in the long run, if they’re good enough politicians to hang on. If they aren’t…”
“Speaking of politicians, what’s Big Bad Brillo doing at the moment?”
Arnold smiled. It was a rather thin smile. “Running for congress. He was thrown out of law school, you know. What else is left for him, when he isn’t organizing a revolution?”
Magdeburg, October, 1634
“I still don’t like capital punishment,” Mike Stearns said softly, in a tone of voice that was more thoughtful than accusatory. He was standing at the window of the USE prime minister’s office, looking out over the Elbe river, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Yes, Michael, I know you don’t,” came Francisco Nasi’s voice from behind him. “But-be honest-that’s not so much a moral or religious stance on your part, as it is a matter of… I’m not sure what to call it. Class antagonism, perhaps.”
Mike considered his words. “I guess that’s fair enough. The one thing I always noticed, back in the up-time US of A, starting from when I was a teenager, is that you never saw a rich man on Death Row. Never. Didn’t even see ‘em serving life sentences that often. So I concluded by the time I was twenty that, once you stripped away all the bullshit, the death penalty was just another way for rich people to kill poor people-and I figured they already had enough ways to do that.”
