Damp earth had closed in around the grave of Lukas the bondsman. The proceedings were by no means over then: it took Harun some time to get away from the assiduous Sir Christian, who tried by force albeit only by verbal one, to lure the pilgrim into his hospitality, if not in the castle, then at least in a shed or some other building near by, from where the pilgrim's spiritual glory could shine for a short while on Sevenport. But Harun was firm – meaning Harun had said nothing and Wenzel was firm on his behalf.

“Very well,” Sir Christian sighed in the end. “You know best what you must do. I must admit, I admire your resolution to keep your vows. I myself was on such a journey, long ago, too long ago. I bid you farewell then. If I must return alone to the castle, I must. But you have been an inspiration to me nonetheless, reminding me of things I had long since forgotten. I should take out my old pilgrim’s gown, when I come back to the castle, see, if it fits me still…”

At that, the devout pilgrim, with many apologetic gestures, bowed a goodbye and departed very, very hurriedly. A castle guard was seen to follow him in the direction of the castle, shouting: “Wait! Wait for me!”

*~*~*~*~*

“You… stay here! Look out if… anyone is... coming!”

Harun grasped his aching side and gasped. He never new a heart could beat so quickly! Surely that was faster than anatomically allowed. He took the last few stairs and started down the corridor towards Sir Christian's chambers.

“Why… me?” Wenzel looked a sorry state, too. He was not quite so unused to exercise as the scribe, but he had his thick leather armour and weapons to carry. He was sweating and gasping for breath. At the moment, however, Harun had no time for pity. He opened the door to Sir Christian's rooms and stumbled inside.

“You’re a guard, aren’t you? So…. guard this… door!”

“And if Sir Christian approaches?” he heard Wenzel from outside. “What shall I do? Defend his chambers with my life against their rightful owner?”

“Giving me a signal will suffice, thank you.”

Harun took a moment to lean against the wall and catch his breath. The two of them had run up the spiral staircase like hares before hunting hounds. There was no knowing how quickly Sir Christian might decide to translate his intentions into actions, and once he discovered that the pilgrim’s gown was gone… well, there were limits even to Sir Christian’s short-sightedness. He might actually put two and two together and realize who his devout pilgrim had really been.

Sir Christian's chambers were situated right beneath the roof of the keep. From below, Harun could hear the creek of the keep doors as the other castle occupants entered, returning from the funeral.

“Hurry,” came Wenzel’s frenzied whisper from the staircase. “For God’s sake!”

Harun couldn’t help it, he smiled and the question came automatically. “Whose?”

“Mine, yours…Anybody’s as long as you just get out of there!”

The scribe darted towards a chest in the corner of the room, beside a desk littered with religious writings of every kind. He threw it open, struggled out of the coarse, woolen robe and stuffed it into the chest, making sure it was at the very bottom.

“They are coming up! Harun, please hurry!”

Harun ripped his hat off, tossed it on top of the pile of cloths and shut the chest. Then he hurriedly stowed the pilgrim’s staff under the Lord’s bed, where he had found it. He jumped up and ran out, onto the landing. He wanted to shut the door, but Wenzel held him back.

“Don’t! They’ll hear!”

Wenzel was right. There were voices coming up the stairs, and already very near. Well, then the door would have to be left open. Already Harun wanted to start down the stairs, but again, Wenzel’s arm grabbed his.

“Too late!” whispered the guard. “Listen how close they are. They’re already past the level of the floor beneath us! We can’t go down, there's no way we could evade them! What are we to do?”

“Go up. Follow me.” The scribe took hold of the guard's hand and pulled him up the tower stairs. Up at the top they found the door to one of the old guard chambers – not Harun’s own room, but a comparatively safe place to hide in, at least. The scribe threw open the door and pulled Wenzel into the dusty darkness. The door slammed shut behind them, pulled shut by the wind.

“What was that?” they heard a voice from below. Sir Christian.

“Look, Milord!” That was Father Ignatius. “The door of your room is open!”

“The wind must have blown it open.”

“Yes, it can get quite drafty and cold in an old castle such as this.”

The hint of the priest was so clear that even Sir Christian could hardly fail to miss it. He did not react to it as hoped, however.

“Father, if it is God’s will to send his flock cold winds, who are we to question his wisdom? The lord giveth, and the lord taketh away.”

Father Ignatius made an indistinct noise. He might well feel that God may well send his children cold winds, but God had also sent his children the ability to build modern castles with firmly closed windows, so why not keep out the former with the help of the latter?

“Come inside, good father. There are some paragraphs I want to show you, in this interesting document concerning…”

The voices descended to an indistinct murmur, as the two people entered Sir Christian’s rooms. Yet they did not break off. Either from forgetfulness, or from a misplaced joy in the cold drafts sent by God, Sir Christian had left the door to his chambers open.

“What now?” asked Wenzel quietly. “Should we go down?”

“And what if they see us sneak past? How do you think could we explain what we wanted in a disused guard chamber at this hour? Sir Christian is not likely to make any logical deductions, but Father Ignatius can get surprisingly sharp, if the object is to get my good self into trouble. He’ll remember the noise of the slamming door, and if he should happen to look around the lord’s chambers and find anything disturbed…”

Wenzel scowled. “Got it. What else can we do?”

Harun looked around. Unfortunately, he was not very much wiser when he had done so. The only light that filtered into the chamber came from a narrow embrasure at the top of a worn, wooden staircase. The embrasure was covered against God’s own cold winds with a piece of old and chapped leather, which let in only a brownish glow by which one could hardly even make out the shapes of the rusted, cobweb-covered spears leaning against the wall, let alone anything more useful in their present surroundings.

Harun closed his eyes and put his ink-blackened fingertips to his temples. “Now,” he said, “let us approach this logically.”

“And by that you mean closing your eyes?” he heard the voice of Wenzel. “Very logical way of looking for a way out, I must say.”

“You couldn’t just see a way out anyway. I can’t even see the hand in front of my face.”

“Doesn’t surprise me really, with your eyes shut.”

“I mean I couldn’t even see it if my eyes were open.”

“Oh, that’s what you meant. I am sorry.”

“Let me think. We have to analyze our surroundings. Where exactly are we? We are in one of the tower chambers, yes?”

“Seeing as we entered it about a minute ago and haven’t moved since, I would have said so.”

“The tower chambers, together with the roof, were intended as the main defense area of the keep. The place from which arrows are shot and other unpleasant things dropped on the heads of besieging armies.”

“That’s about it.”

“So there must be some kind of connection between the tower chambers. It would not do for the defenders to have to climb down to the main hall and cross it to another tower and there climb up again – especially since that floor might already have been taken.”

“Is this an amateur lecture on the art of besieging castles?”

“The word you are looking for is poliorcetics.”

“I wasn’t looking for any word, actually.”

“I mean the art of besieging castles. The correct word for this would be poliorcetics. It is derived from the ancient Greek word polorcetica, which, it is mostly agreed denotes ‘things to do with the besieging and defending of…”

“That's funny,” the castle guard grunted. “I might know how to besiege a castle if I had to, but I had no idea there’s a special word for it.”

“That is the advantage of the educated. Our privileged knowledge raises us over the level of the common men.”

“Really. Then I suppose your privileged knowledge also includes information about how actually to besiege a castle?”

Harun was silenced. It didn’t, in fact. He wondered why. He was educated, he should know more than a common soldier, shouldn’t he? But perhaps common soldiers were there to do what they had to do after educated men like himself told them what this particular activity was rightfully called.

“Aren’t we wandering from the subject slightly?” He asked. “We were discussing how to get out of here.”

“Aye, and making huge progress.”

“You don’t have to take that tone. Actually, although you yourself may very well not have noticed it, I have, through logical thought, discovered the solution to our problem.”

“I’m impressed.”

“And so you should be. As I said, there has to be some connection between the different towers, and the only way is over the roof. I remember a door in my own tower bedchamber which presumably was used for that purpose. Now, assuming that, as is very likely, all these tower chambers are built alike, it should be somewhere over there…”

Wenzel heard steps going away from him. There was a clank, a thump, and a curse in a foreign but all the more expressive tongue.

“Found something?” He asked, innocently.

“Yes!”

“A door?”

“No, damn you! An old amour. Rusty and with edges so sharp it would be more use as a sword than as armor.”

“How can that be? After all, there must be a door here, you have logically proven it.” Wenzel scratched his scruffy beard, in mock thoughtfulness. “Perhaps you have found none ‘cos you went off that way. See, your tower is the west tower. The door to the roof has therefore to lead out to the east. Now we are in the east tower. I, of course, am no master builder or learned scholar, but I would have thought it could lead to unfortunate abrupt events if one had installed a door here in the eastern wall – like stepping into empty air and falling into the moat, for instance.”

Wenzel stretched out his hands and felt around.

“I believe I may have found something,” he said, placidly.

Harun got up, groaning. The hurt to his pride was overshadowed considerably by the one caused by his bruises. What an unfair world this was. Why on earth did there have to stand a rusty amour here? A sack full of wool would have been much more appropriate. And softer.

“Does the door lead out onto the roof?” he asked.

“No. It’s barred from the outside, I think.”

For some reason, Harun immediately felt better.

“There you see,” he grumbled. “what use your great ideas are.”

“The idea was yours, actually. You just walked against a wall before having thought it through.”

The scribe chose not to answer to that.

“What about Sir Christian?” he asked. “Has he closed his door by now? Perhaps we could still sneak past.”

They listened intently. No, the voices of Sir Christian and Father Ignatius were still clearly audible from below.

“What are we going to do now?”

“Sit down and wait,” Wenzel suggested with the calm air of a man whose job it was to stand around waiting for an enemy to attack. To him, their current situation didn't seem too bad. There was no enemy in sight, and as an added bonus, they didn't have to stand but could sit down.

Once again he felt around, but not for a door this time. “We have no choice but to wait for them to close the door or go away. There are some barrels here we can sit on. Come on.”

“Sit down and wait – that is good. And what do you propose we do with our time? Count the pieces of fluff and the dead flies floating down from the ceiling?”

“Can’t you shut down your mind for a minute and just relax?”

“No I cannot. Don’t ask me why, my mind does what it wants, not what I would like it to do. Otherwise, I would long since have known who is behind Lukas' murder.”

“Very well then, if the intellectual has to be preoccupied, you can tell me your newest conclusions. We haven’t had a chance to talk since Lukas was burried.”

“All right.” Cautiously, Harun made his way across the littered floor of the chamber to the barrels Wenzel was already sitting on. He took a seat next to his friend. “But first you tell me how your talk with Daniel went. Did he send you off as an interfering busybody?”

“Nay, he didn’t.” The pride in the guard’s voice was evident. “He could not resist my resourceful questioning, and told me all I wanted to know. And it confirms what I have been saying all along: The peasants had no hand in this crime. They couldn’t have had. All of them were in the tavern at the time Lukas was killed.”

“Were they indeed…” murmured Harun.

Wenzel, slightly affronted at his discoveries being passed of so lightly, persevered: “So I was right, wasn’t I? Neither Karl, nor Michal, nor Daniel – damn it – could have committed the murder.”

“Yes.”

“So I had it from the very beginning.”

“Yes.”

“The three are totally innocent.”

“Yes. Which means of course that Henrik the smith must be our man.”

“W- what?”

The guard’s mouth fell open.

“Henrik must be the murderer. There is no other solution.”

“Wait just a minute. Why must he be the murderer? How could you know? You haven’t even had a chance to talk to him. You haven’t questioned him about where he was, what he was doing…”

“Exactly, and that is the reason.”

“You’re talking rubbish.”

“Certainly not. We had four suspects, did we not? Three of them are proven innocent – it follows that the fourth, the only one remaining, must be guilty.”

“So what you are saying is, that the only suspect you haven’t exchanged one word with must be guilty ‘cos the burial of his supposed victim was over too quickly for you to interrogate him? What sort of logic is that?”

Harun shifted uneasily. It was a sort of logic he was himself not all to comfortable with, admittedly, but you could not get away from it, logic remained logic, however illogical it might be.

“It is not only that,” he defended himself. “We have excluded every other possible alternative – he must be guilty, following the logic of Socrates.”

“Then Socrates can go and kiss my…”

What exactly Socrates could have kissed, Harun never discovered, for at this moment, there was a noise from below. Footsteps. Wenzel and Harun threw panicky looks at each other. Without realizing it, their voices had risen from the level of a friendly conversation to that of a heated argument that must have carried through the door and down the steps to Sir Christian’s chambers. Again, the footsteps could be heard.

“Strange,” they heard the lord’s voice. “I thought I heard voices from up there.”

“Who can it be?” asked Father Ignatius. “Shall we go and look?”

“No. Surely, I must be mistaken. There is nothing up there but a few old weapons and barrels of pitch. No Christian soul would think of sitting up there in the dusty darkness.”

Wenzel snorted, and received a warning elbow in the ribs from Harun.

“Let us go back,” the two of them heard Sir Christian say.

“As you wish, Milord.”

Further footsteps indicated the priest’s and the lord’s retreat into the latter’s chambers. Yet again, however, the door was not closed behind them. This didn't matter much to Wenzel, at the moment, though. He was too preoccupied with what Harun had last said to be worrying about the length of time they would yet have to stay up here.

“Now listen,” he hissed. “You are my friend, and I don’t doubt you meant to do nothing but good by starting all this investigating business. Whether you’ll end up doing good, or exactly the opposite, is another matter however. You leave Henrik alone, do you hear? He’s a decent, hard-working fellow, and no murderer, even if he had got a thousand swords stashed away under his bed and would be the only one remaining on a list of hundreds of suspects!”

“Hmmm...” Harun put his inky fingers together, deep in thought. “Logically, I have proven that he is guilty, but what would be the next step?”

“Did you hear me, Harun? Henrik didn’t do it! All that has got to stop, or you’ll make a terrible mistake any day now.”

“Think ahead, Bertram advised me. That was sound advice, for now I must think about what to do next.”

“Henrik is not… Bertram? Who on earth is Bertram?”

“The prove I hold may be enough for a clear, logical, learned mind like myself, but for the common lot of men, it is not enough,” Harun continued, still completely ignoring the increasingly agitated Wenzel.

“And that does not suggest to you that the common lot of men might have a point? By the way, you have not answered my question: who is Bertram?”

“The brother of the victim, Karl – he is the only one who could actually accuse Henrik of the murder.”

“Karl accuse one of his best friends of murder? Harun, I tell you, Henrik didn’t do it! And Karl will never…”

“But he is also not a particularly intelligent man.”

“Well that’s large of you, master walk-into-the-rusty-armor.”

“Negative reasoning will not be enough for him. To persuade him to accuse the murderer, I will need definite proof linking the murderer with his crime.”

“Fine,” the guard growled. “you do that. Go off and find proof against the murderer – as long as you remember that the murderer ain’t Henrik!”

“Wenzel?”

“Aye?”

“I need your help.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ten Chapters!! Ten! (Jumping with joy!!) And today I have a special question: Who is your favorite character, and why? Please leave me a comment, I'd love to have some feedback on that point :)

Als always, votes & Fans a more than welcome, too.

Cheers

Robert

P.S: the external link leads to my twitter page, where I twitter stuff :)