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Chapter 14


Ingolstadt, Upper Palatinate

Late June 1635


A servant admitted Paolo and his minions to the Collegium.

He looked at the huge crate, which the minions barely managed to maneuver through the door.

He turned around, looked down the length of the hallway, and considered the two flights of stairway, narrow steps, tight turns, and minuscule landings, that lay between the downstairs hallway that led from the service entrance and the episcopal apartments.

As the students had predicted, he called another servant, spoke to him in a whisper, and sent him scampering up the steps.

He turned to Paolo. “If you would consent to wait for a few moments?”

The second servant came scampering back. “They can unpack the wares here.”

“What am I supposed to use for tables?” Paolo was completely the concerned and twittery small businessman, nervous at the prospect of appearing before a social superior, now more anxious in the face of an unexpected dilemma. “May I open the large crate; then use the smaller crates containing the individual machines to display them? Or would you prefer to provide tables? Or…”

“I was not aware that there were smaller crates inside this one,” the servant said, all arrogant disapproval. “If you had informed me, then…”

While Paolo was sorely tempted to reply, “You didn’t ask, dim-wit,” he heroically refrained. What he did say was, “Oh, dear, I am so sorry. It didn’t occur to me. Perhaps I could …” He managed to twitter again.

“Too late now.” The servant’s life thus far had been innocent of exposure to Italian stage comedians; he took Paolo’s performance at face value rather than recognizing his appropriation of a certain stock pantomime character. “His Eminence is on his way down. Get to your unpacking.”

Before his minions managed to get any of the smaller crates open (there might have been some purposeful fumbling here and there), Bishop Westerstetten entered with due pomp. With his chancellor. With his private secretary. With…a loud, maddening, blare of horns from outside the building. Was every trumpet in Ingolstadt in use? The servant ran to the entrance and hauled the door open, which made the noise even louder.

“What? Are we under attack?”

“Students, probably, Your Eminence,” the private secretary said.

Jesuits streamed out of the Collegium. Faculty members streamed out of the university buildings. City watchmen streamed out of their headquarters, all looking for the source of the racket. When student pranks were allowed to get out of hand, they often got far out of hand.

There was no one source of the noise. There were trumpets on rooftops; trumpets on the city walls, trumpets in alleyways. Each one blaring a different tune or call. As musical instruments went, trumpets were highly portable; the trumpeters stayed on the move, the various forces of law and order in pursuit.

Westerstetten impatiently waved his secretary toward the door. “Go, take a look at what is going on.”

Paolo could hardly believe it when the secretary actually stepped outside and…closed the door behind him.

Which left three to two. Three in good condition, even if (he admitted to himself) one was well into middle age. Two who were elderly and, obviously, not. Several years of self-imposed isolation had done nothing for the physical fitness of the bishop of Eichstätt and his immediate staff.

The two Jaeger grasped the chancellor by each arm, backed him into an alcove, pinned him down at the foot of a statue of three unidentified, but lavishly gilded, saints, and efficiently applied a gag and ties. The river rat opened a door off the corridor, pushed the chancellor through, around a table, and behind a podium. The man’s robes slid nicely on the polished black and white square marble tiles that made up the floor. He closed the door again.

Paolo applied a careful pinch to the back of Westerstetten’s neck and then proceeded just as efficiently, bundling him into the large crate. Then he whistled, considered double-checking, and decided to throw himself on the mercy of Dame Fortuna as carelessly as Carlo ever would. She had already shown herself to be in a good mood today when the bishop’s secretary closed the door. The minions picked up the large crate. Paolo opened the door, nodded politely to the bishop’s secretary, who was still standing there on the steps, craning his neck, trying to ascertain the source of the uproar, followed the crate down to the ox cart, tipped the boy who had been holding the reins, climbed up next to the driver, and departed the precincts of the Collegium.

For once, Fortuna kept smiling on him.

Enough students had been waiting in the wings of the Collegium, close enough to hear the whistle. All the smaller crates in which Paolo packed his wares vanished quickly into the depths of the building—only to reappear, as if by magic, stacked in the erstwhile shoemaker’s shop where their contents had been on display the last few days, ready for the Vignelli sales representative’s ox cart to pick them up for his announced departure the next morning.

Paolo, the crate, the driver, the other minion, the ox, and the cart, exited a gate in the old walls, turned left, and tucked themselves up for the night behind some Ingolstädter’s fully leafed-out damson trees, next to his grape trellises, discreetly disguised by his ambitiously espaliered pears. A gardener had put a lot of work into this little allotment. It was as warm as an evening was likely to get; the fresh earth smelled wonderful.

When Westerstetten’s secretary returned, he saw that the corridor was empty, assumed that the bishop and chancellor had gone back upstairs, and decided that rather than make an extra trip up and down those stairs, he might as well check on a problem that the finance office had mentioned. He turned right at the corner before the stairway, encountered a tangle of paperwork, and didn’t make it back to the episcopal suite for an hour and a half.

Upstairs, the staff assumed that the bishop was still inspecting business machines.

Nobody found the chancellor for a day and a half. The river rat had shoved him through the service door of a room that was only used for formal diplomatic receptions, which had been rare events the past several years. The servant in the first search party had only opened it and given the room a superficial glance.

***

One ox cart—for that matter, one ox—looks much like another if no one has any reason to examine them closely. One of the restless Ingolstadt students was the son of a miller. He was perfectly capable of driving an ox cart.

Two men, in rough worker’s tunics with capes thrown over after they finished bringing a load of equipment out of a shop and securing it on an ox cart, had no distinguishing characteristics.

One passenger, particularly a man wearing a loose hooded cape, looks much like another in the chilly early morning mist. Especially if no one has any reason to examine him closely and his paperwork is in order.

One of the charming things about duplicating machines, after all, was that they produced duplicates. Nearly identical duplicates.

If one cart with three men and a large crate rolled out of the new walls right before the changing of the guard; if another with three men and several small crates rolled through the inner wall and out the new walls right after the changing of the guard; if no one had any reason to be raising alarms… What sleepy guard was likely to wonder if someone else was using the same authorizations?

Coffee had not yet caught on in Ingolstadt.

***

Jurgen Lux had assumed that the group would use the Kreuzertor on the way out, since, fortunately, it was possible to go from Ingolstadt to Eichstätt in a more or less direct line, and given his men instructions accordingly. Paolo’s Jaeger assistants assured him that they would be prepared to head in that direction.

“Ah, but we won’t be going in the direction of Eichstätt when we leave with our cart and crate. We will head back to Nürnberg, the same direction from which we came in. I am but a peaceful merchant, heading home!”

Nürnberg, of course, although an ally, was not in the USE. Its city council would undoubtedly be most unhappy at an overspill of Krystalnacht into its territory. Basically, the city-state had closed itself to both fugitives and any CoC columns that might be chasing fugitives.

“So we have to keep it in Franconia. Plan to head north on the main road until we get out of Upper Palatinate territory. That’s to preserve Duke Ernst’s…” He switched to English. “plausible deniability. Then we’ll turn off and cut cross-country to deliver Westerstetten to a party of the Würzburg CoCs waiting for us a short distance outside of Eichstätt.”

“Why aren’t you cooperating with the Bamberg CoCs?” Lux had asked somewhere during the organization process. “That’s closer.”

Paolo had just looked at him. “The SoTF capital? If he were taken there, if he were known to be there, then whatever fate befell him, even if the CoC’s performed the act, would be the immediate responsibility of the SoTF administration. Whereas Würzburg is merely a regional center now—it was more important when Gustav Adolf first turned Franconia over to the up-timers, but now it only has a few offices dealing with agriculture and such. Surely, any fate that befalls Westerstetten there can be ascribed to—alas, unidentified—rogue CoC elements.”

They made the cross-country trek with some difficulty, in the absence of local guides, on not-so-good rural roads.

The ox expressed its opinion, not silently, as it struggled to haul its load across a less-than-perfectly maintained ford. Strong as an ox was an accurate adage. Nobody had ever suggested quiet as an ox. But mice did not haul carts. Although there had been that charming movie he saw in Grantville…but the mice were transformed into horses first.

“Well, I forgot about guides.” Paolo’s face assumed an innocent expression. “Nobody’s perfect. Certainly not I.”



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