Too restless even to contemplate sleep, Colonel August sat long after midnight in his war room answering correspondence and bringing his journal up to date.
“I feel now as if my coming here was providential,” he wrote in the journal.
If war is coming, it is these all too porous borderlands that will feel it first. And much of a war’s future course can be foretold in those initial engagements; the swing of the foeman’s steel, the volley of his guns, the extent to which the people of the margins recoil—and then respond!
I have found, by meticulous probing, a weak point. And it is not weak by reason of fear or ignorance. It is wilfully weak, weak by its own wickedness. Narutsin is a place that has forgotten all vows of fealty and all ties of civilisation. In time of peace it could be chastised and reclaimed, but this is not a time of peace and there is no leisure for debate.
An example must be made, and it must be so clear that none misunderstand.
August set down his pen. He had more to say on this subject, and a pressing need to say it: he found himself troubled, still, at the implications of what he had decided. Posterity deserved a full explanation of his thought processes. How else would it forgive him? And without the sense of that forgiveness, trickling backwards through time from some unimaginable future of ease and plenty, how would he be strong enough now to do what must be done?
But his eyes were tired and his mind was running on erratic courses. He could swear he had just heard, from the kitchen immediately below him, the clash of arms. As though Pokoj had become a battlefield! Or perhaps it was merely haunted by the ghosts of battles fought there in former times.
On any other night he would have shrugged off the presentiment and laughed at himself. Tonight he found himself unable to do so. He needed to know that there was an innocent explanation for those sounds, so he took the lantern from his desk and went to see what was happening.
The door of Molebacher’s kitchen was wide open, but the room seemed at first to be entirely empty. When the colonel ventured inside, however, he saw by the light of his lantern a figure standing by the butcher’s block. The light was not good—it was only firelight from red embers and the diffuse radiance of his lantern—but even with no more than a silhouette to go by, August could see that it was not the sergeant himself but his doxy, the gypsy woman who performed the puppet shows.
“You,” he said. “Woman. Was Sergeant Molebacher here just now? I thought I heard a sound, from upstairs. An altercation.”
The camp follower laughed—a strident, unlovely sound. “There was, sir, an exchange of words,” she said. “For look, my dear Mole was killing a capon just now, to braise it with onions and marjoram for your lunch tomorrow. But when his steel took off the bird’s head, see how it painted me!”
The woman gestured towards her face. August did not understand what she meant until, raising the lantern a little higher, he saw the streak of dark blood across her cheek and forehead. It was a startling and disgusting sight, and the colonel recoiled a little from it in spite of himself. “So he’s gone now,” she went on, “to fetch a wet kerchief to wipe me with, for I’d be shamed to be seen out like this. And—he took his candle with him, which is why you find me here darkling, sir.”
“Mole is a good man,” August said inanely. He could think of nothing that was more to the purpose.
“A very good man,” the doxy agreed. “Bound for heaven, I’m sure, be it late or soon, for what does he lack of virtue?” And she laughed again, somewhat louder. August wondered if she might not be a little crazed in her wits. He had never noticed it before, but there was something amiss in both her face and her voice. But her story explained the clang of steel he’d heard, and he saw besides that Molebacher had left one of his butcher knives—a large and fearsome one—lying on the block, which, like the woman’s face, was streaked and smeared with blood.
“Well,” the colonel said. “Commend me to him when he returns.”
“I will, sir.”
He was about to leave, but a happy thought struck him. “And have him broach one of those barrels of brandy,” he said. “Let the men have two glasses each, those who are yet awake, to drink the archduchess’s health.”
“I’ll tell him so, sir. Depend on it.”
“Thank you.” August nodded—the most he could bring himself to do by way of courtesy—and took his leave quickly.
Drozde waited until he was gone, and then until the light of the lantern faded, before sinking to her knees.
She had seen the colonel coming down the stairs as she was about to leave the kitchen, having already unbolted the door. There was no way she could get past him without being seen, and then she had realised with a thrill of horror that he was heading straight towards her.
She might have fastened the bolt again, but would the colonel not wonder who was inside at such an hour? If he had business with Molebacher he would knock and stay until someone answered. She’d be trapped all over again.
So she ducked back inside and ran across the room to the butcher’s block. The light from the fire would pick her out there, and if luck was with her the colonel would glance immediately in her direction—overlooking the hacked and mountainous corpse lying in its own blood off to his left.
The whole while she had talked with him, Drozde had felt her own blood seeping from the rent Gertrude had opened in her side. She had not even dared yet to explore the depth and extent of it, but she knew from the lightness in her head and the weakness in her legs that it was no flesh wound.
The blood ran down her legs and into her boots. A faint spattering sound told her that it had also soaked her shift and was dripping onto the flagstones in front of her feet. If August shifted his lantern and happened to see it she would have to kill him too, and she kept her hand close to the handle of the cleaver in case that should happen.
At a certain point in the conversation, when he said that Molebacher was a good man, it occurred to her that she could kill him anyway. August’s death might at the very least mean a delay in the execution of his orders. But she could not be sure that she would be able to do it. In her present state, she could not even be sure of standing upright once she had let go her hold on the butcher’s block. So she held to her first course and waited him out.
It was as hard, in its way, as the murder had been.
Now, kneeling in a pool of her own blood, Drozde turned her attention belatedly to her injury. She needed to stop the bleeding, but the wound’s location made that very hard to do. She took one of the lengths of cloth she’d brought to deck out the theatre and bound it around her chest as tightly as she could, without much effect. Blood welled from under it and quickly drenched it through.
She was starting to feel cold. She drew closer to the fire, but felt almost no warmth from it. It did, however, give her an idea. She took the cleaver, Gertrude, and laid it flat across the flames.
Then when the steel was hot enough, and starting to glow red along its edge, she applied it to her wound.