“The church is not a gentle flock of lambs waiting to be slaughtered,” Nathanael said as his knife inched forward, cutting through the material. “The church has always needed people like me, and that’s the only reason it’s survived this long. It must punish and destroy, just as Saint John the Baptist prophesied about our Savior. Do you know the Bible verse, Kuisl? He will thoroughly purge his floor, separating the wheat from the chaff and gathering the wheat into his garner. But the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire.” The dagger had reached the hangman’s neck now. “And now you are the chaff, Kuisl.”
At that moment, the executioner’s fist shot through the canvas—right at the spot depicting the kindly, smiling mouth of the Savior—and the hangman grabbed the hand holding the dagger, pulling Brother Nathanael down. Gasping, the monk lost his balance and fell onto the canvas as his dagger clattered onto the floor. Kuisl’s other hand punched through the material and gripped Nathanael by the throat like a vise. Nathanael wriggled like a fish out of water and poked his fingers through the backdrop but couldn’t get hold of the man underneath. The monk shook and waved his arms about, but his movements became weaker and weaker until his forehead finally fell into the canvas. For a moment it looked as if he were kissing the painted Savior on the mouth. Then he rolled to one side and lay still on the stage floor with eyes wide open.
When Jakob Kuisl finally managed to extricate himself from under the backdrop, he cast a final, almost remorseful look at the dead Dominican. “Why did you always have to talk so much?” he said, wiping off his massive, soot-stained hands on his jacket. “If you want to kill someone, just shut up and do it.”
Only now did Kuisl notice the inferno raging around him. The flames had reached the seats in the middle of the hall, and even the backdrops at Kuisl’s feet had caught fire. The first heavy timbers from the balcony came crashing down.
Because of all the smoke, Kuisl could no longer see the trapdoor on the stage floor. He coughed, climbing down the stairs toward the main exit. One last time, he turned around and shook his head. Unless there was another exit, anyone still beneath the stage was doomed. At any rate, it would be insane to climb down there again.
He was already halfway to the back of the hall when he heard the squeak of a pulley.
In the meanwhile, the smoke down below in the crypt had become so dense that the upper third of the room was no longer visible. The ropes connected to the platform ended somewhere in a gray cloud. Simon stopped to think. The tunnel through which they’d entered was presumably already filled with smoke, so the only way out was, in fact, up. He ran to the platform, eyes peeled for the mechanism to set it in motion.
“There has to be a pulley here,” he shouted to Benedikta and Magdalena. “A lever, a crank—something! Help me find it!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Simon could see Augustin Bonenmayr still standing in the opening to the crypt, clutching the cross. The Steingaden abbot stared at the flames eating through the floor of the stage above, the flickering light reflected in his pince-nez, which was perched at an odd angle atop his nose. Bonenmayr’s murmuring grew louder, swelling to a long litany as the auditorium above him threatened to come crashing down. “And the first angel blew his trumpet,” the abbot intoned, “and hailstones and fire mixed with blood fell over the land…”
“Where is the damned pulley?” Simon shouted into Brother Lothar’s ear. The monk was staring, frozen with fear, at the cloud spreading across the ceiling. “If you want to get out of here alive, open your big mouth!”
Brother Lothar pointed silently to an inconspicuous crank on the wall next to a costume cabinet. Without another word, Simon ran to it and started turning the handle.
“Hurry!” he shouted to the two women. “Get onto the platform! I’ll pull you up. Once you’re there, let the lift back down again. Now hurry!”
Magdalena and Benedikta hesitated for a moment, then ran over to the platform. As Simon turned the handle, the lift squeaked to life. At the last second, the women jumped on.
“Watch out, Simon!” Magdalena suddenly shouted. “Behind you!”
A heavy blow struck the medicus on the back of the head, and as he fell, he saw the abbot standing over him with the cross.
“You set this fire, didn’t you?” Bonenmayr whispered. “You wanted to make sure the cross would burn. But you won’t succeed! Who are you, Simon Fronwieser? A Lutheran? A Calvinist? What connection do you have with this Templar gang?”
“Your Eminence, snap out of it!” Simon panted. “Why would we set this fire? We’ll burn to death ourselves if we don’t hurry. We have to, both of us—”
Bonenmayr swung the cross at him again. Simon had just enough time to put his hands in front of his face, but the blow was so hard that, for a moment, he thought he would pass out.
The sound of a pistol firing brought him back to his senses. Apparently, Benedikta had reloaded her weapon. The abbot was still standing over him, the cross raised high for one last fatal blow. But then he put his hand down to his side where a red spot was slowly diffusing across his white tunic. Astonished, he looked at the fresh blood on his hand. “The same place the Roman soldier’s lance pierced the body of our Savior,” Bonenmayr murmured, looking up at the ceiling in ecstasy. “Now there is no more doubt that God has chosen me!”
Simon tried to get up, but his legs buckled under him. Lying on the floor, he had to watch as Augustin Bonenmayr, despite having been shot in the side, ran toward the two women, swinging the cross like a club.
“You accursed lot of heretics!” he shouted. “The cross has returned to the bosom of the Church! God has sanctified this place by delivering it to me! You will not stop me!”
As the abbot raised his hand to strike again, Benedikta ducked and managed to trip him. Bonenmayr stumbled, his glasses fell to the ground, and he staggered toward the wall on the other side, just managing to catch himself before he fell. He leaned on the cross, exhausted, as blood dripped down his robe. Still, he didn’t seem to have lost much of his strength.
“Damn it, Brother Lothar!” he gasped.
His assistant’s face filled with tears as his whole body started to shake like a little child’s.
“Pull yourself together. Those before you are enemies of the Church. Heretics! Do what I have taught you to do! Deus lo vult!”
The final words awakened the monk from his panicked stiffness. He pulled himself together, the trembling stopped, and with a loud cry he charged at Magdalena, who was running to help Simon. The hangman’s daughter was accustomed to giving an impudent workman a good slap in the face, but Brother Lothar was something else. He was almost six feet tall, with the muscular arms, broad shoulders, and the huge hands of an Augsburg raftsman. When he charged toward her, she ducked behind one of the shelves. She had no plan; she just knew she had to get away from the monk at all costs. Perhaps she would think of something as she ran from him.
Magdalena dodged again, but Brother Lothar was right at her heels. She dived under shelves, jumped over metal contraptions whose purpose she couldn’t guess, and climbed over stone sarcophagi and piles of rubble.
Suddenly, she came to a huge cabinet of costumes. She slipped inside, hoping the clumsy monk would run past. The dusty garments inside had the mildewed smell of fabric stored in a damp place too long.
The hangman’s daughter sensed she was not alone. She smelled the sweaty odor of a stranger breathing heavily beside her.
Pushing aside a silver angel costume, she saw Benedikta crouched in front of her. Benedikta put her finger to her lips, motioning for her to remain silent. Only a few inches separated the two women. Magdalena had never been so close to her rival. Benedikta, too, had a terrified expression on her face, and all the refined French mannerisms had vanished. Sweat poured down her face, her hair was in tangles, and the expensive lacework of her precious clothing was smudged and torn. But behind all that, Magdalena saw something else, something she had never seen until then—a wild fire burning in the
eyes of the merchant woman from Landsberg, a readiness to fight, an unbending will, and an inner strength that would put many men to shame. Magdalena had seen eyes like that before.
In the mirror.
The two women stared at each other for a few seconds, until a grating sound pulled them out of their thoughts. Looking to one side, Magdalena was shocked to see that the closet was tipping over.
“Benedikta, watch out!”
Through the back of the closet, Magdalena could hear Brother Lothar panting as he pushed against the closet, finally toppling it and burying the women under it, along with the moldy costumes. Something was burning nearby; evidently, the costumes around them had caught fire.
Frantic, Magdalena pushed against the door of the wardrobe, but something was blocking it. The smoke was thickening, and alongside her, Benedikta was coughing. As Magdalena flailed her arms around wildly in all directions, she noticed light coming through a crack near the top of the cabinet. She pushed against the top and it popped off, crashing to the ground and letting in air and light. The two women crawled out, coughing, just in time to see the Steingaden abbot and the cross ascending on the lift toward the auditorium above. In the crypt, Brother Lothar was furiously turning the crank.
“The cross! I’ve saved it!” Bonenmayr screamed, staring up at the opening from the platform. “It’s ascending into heaven while the heretics are burning in hell! It’s such a pity that this play will never be performed. It really deserves an audience.”
With these words, the abbot disappeared into a black cloud while the stage flooring began raining down on those trapped below.
Just before reaching the main portal, Jakob Kuisl turned around again to see a figure in a bloodstained white robe emerge onstage from below. The figure held a cross at about shoulder height and shouted something Kuisl couldn’t quite make out over the ever-louder crackling of the flames. He thought he heard the words heaven and hell. Though the hangman was not an especially religious man, for a brief moment, he thought he was witnessing the Savior’s return to earth to judge mankind with blood and fire.
Was Judgment Day at hand?
Jakob Kuisl blinked and only now realized that the white form staggering across the burning stage was the Steingaden abbot, who was evidently wounded. Bonenmayr was looking for a route down into the auditorium, but the stairway was already in flames. The hangman hesitated. What in the name of the Holy Trinity had happened down there under the stage? Just a moment ago, Kuisl had heard a shot; there must have been some sort of fight. But with whom?
In the meantime, Augustin Bonenmayr had recognized the hangman through the clouds of smoke. He screamed, pointing his clawlike fingers at Kuisl. “You will not stop me, either!” he shouted. “The devil sent you, Kuisl! But God is on my side!”
Holding the cross in one hand, Bonenmayr ran to the left side of the stage, where a narrow spiral staircase led to the upper balcony. The top third of the stairway was already a charred, glowing skeleton, but that didn’t stop the abbot. Taking a huge leap, he managed to get one foot on the balustrade. With the cross still tucked under his right arm, he clung by one hand to the railing above the auditorium.
“For God’s sake, just throw the damned cross away,” Kuisl shouted. “Or you’ll meet God face-to-face in a minute!”
In the inferno, though, the abbot couldn’t hear him. He was trapped in a world of fire, hatred, madness. In vain, he tried to pull the wooden cross up with him over the balcony railing. Instead, he hung there like a huge pendulum, kicking in all directions, trying to get a foothold on the balcony. But then the burning railing gave way, breaking into pieces in a spray of sparks, and with a scream, Bonenmayr plunged headfirst into the flames that were eating through the rows of seats beneath him.
The cross seemed suspended in air for a moment before finally crashing down on the Steingaden abbot and shattering into pieces.
For a brief moment, Kuisl thought he saw a hand appear from beneath the seats, fingers desperately reaching for something, but then a mass of glowing debris showered down, and all that was left of Bonenmayr was a memory.
From the open doorway, the hangman watched the fire consume the theater. The entire auditorium had become one huge funeral pyre.
Glowing pieces of wood and burning scraps of curtain rained down on Simon and the two women. As the fire burned slowly through the stage floor and cellar ceiling, the air became so hot that it was harder and harder to breathe, and the smoke burned their eyes and lungs.
After he’d hauled the abbot up on the lift, Brother Lothar tried to crank the platform down into the cellar again, but the rope caught fire and the lift crashed to the floor, breaking into pieces. Now the monk looked around in panic. He was imprisoned with the same people he’d just tried to kill. Would they attack him? Why had the abbot abandoned him?
Simon struggled to his feet again. His head ached and blood spurted out of his nose and from a wound on his temple, but at least he could walk again. “We’ve got to leave through the underground passage,” he croaked, “through the locked door in the monastery where we were before. Quick! Go before everything crashes down on us!”
Ignoring the monk, the three ducked and ran toward the low doorway as burning pieces of the ceiling continued to rain down around them. Brother Lothar stood in the middle of the room, petrified and undecided. Finally, he tore himself away from the spot and hurried after the others, but the smoke had now become so thick he couldn’t see where they’d gone. The huge man groped through the smoke, coughing, bumping into shelves, and knocking over statues of saints.
“Wait for me!” he gasped. “Where are you? Where—”
At that moment, an especially large chunk of the ceiling directly above the monk broke loose and came crashing to the ground. Brother Lothar could only watch in horror as he was buried in burning timbers. After a few moments, his plaintive cries ceased.
In the meantime, Simon and the two women opened the door they’d used to enter the crypt. The medicus was relieved to see that the smoke in the tunnel behind the door was not as dense as he’d expected—the door had held it back, for the most part. They ran down the corridor, past the intersecting tunnel, until they finally arrived back at the entrance to the monastery. Benedikta leaned against the door, just as she had the last time, and pushed as hard as she could, but the wooden door would not budge this time, either. She cursed and rubbed her shoulder.
“Let me try,” Simon said. He took a running start and hit the door as hard as he could. A sharp pain went through his leg, but still, the door didn’t budge. Behind them, the corridor was already filling with smoke.
“You did close the door into the crypt, didn’t you?” Simon asked uncertainly.
Benedikta shrugged and pointed to Magdalena. “I thought she had—”
“Aha, it gets even better,” the hangman’s daughter responded. “First your shot misses the abbot, and now you’re blaming other people.”
“You were the last, you silly little twit,” Benedikta shouted.
“Cut it out!” Simon replied. “We don’t have time for your petty quarrels! If a miracle doesn’t happen, we’ll suffocate here like a fox in its den. I’ve got to get this damn door open!”
Stepping even farther back, he took another run at the door, screaming loudly.
Too late, he noticed that the door had opened silently and an astonished monk was staring at him. “What in the world…?”
Simon ran into him at full speed, knocking the monk down.
“Sorry to bother you,” the medicus gasped, standing up quickly, “but this is an emergency. The monastery is on fire.”
The monk’s expression changed from astonishment to horror. “The monastery on fire? I’ll have to let the abbot know at once.”
The two women headed up a narrow stone stairway with Simon right behind them.
“I’m afraid that’s not a very good idea,” he called back to the monk. “His Eminence is very busy at the moment.”
At th
e top of the stairway they came to another door, but unlike the last, this one opened easily. Stepping outside, Simon realized they were in the same cloister where he and Benedikta had first met Augustin Bonenmayr an eternity ago.
A group of white-robed Premonstratensian monks ran toward them excitedly, but to Simon’s astonishment, they continued past them toward the rear exit of the cloister, paying the intruders no mind. In the distance, a shrill bell began to ring.
“Fire! Fire!” everyone was shouting. “The playhouse is on fire!”
Taking advantage of the chaos, the three followed the monks. As they rushed outside, they looked back at the monastery wall, where flames shot up into the night sky and people ran back and forth shouting.
“The playhouse!” Benedikta shouted. “Clearly, the cross was not in Saint John’s Chapel, but in the theater! The underground corridor must lead from there to the cloister. What a labyrinth!”
Simon quickly realized that it was too late to save the burning building. All that remained of the two-story structure now was a glowing shell. When the roof collapsed, the physician could only shake his head. The theater! He had clearly overlooked something in the solution to the last riddle, but none of it mattered now. Simon wondered whether the abbot had managed to flee or had burned to death inside.
And with him, the cross of Christ!
He felt overcome by exhaustion now as the burden of the last few days’ events came over him. Magdalena and Benedikta seemed weary and drained, too. Together, they dragged themselves to a small snow-covered cemetery nearby to watch the building consume itself like an enormous funeral pyre.
“Our search was for nothing!” Simon finally lamented, tossing a chunk of ice into the darkness. “Our dream of all that money came to naught! Now I’ll no doubt end up as the poor town doctor of Schongau…”
Benedikta stood there silently, clutching a ball of snow so hard that water ran through her fingers.
“Do you think that crazy Bonenmayr got away?” Magdalena asked.
Simon stared into the fire. “I don’t know. If he didn’t, we’re in big trouble. If the abbot was telling the truth, then the whole world knows that Benedikta and I defiled the holy relics in Rottenbuch. Bonenmayr is the only one who could have helped us.”