I was old enough to realise that this Martin character was being scapegoated. Wallenstein obviously had something against the man: either Wallenstein held a grudge as he had led Godke to believe, or Martin was restraining Wallenstein’s ambitions in some way. But I didn’t really care, or if I did I unconsciously suppressed my doubts. Maybe he was a witch and it was just a coincidence that Wallenstein had chosen him to die.

A town guardsman led the warband to the witch house, which was built of stone and had multiple chambers. Prague truly was in a different league to the previous towns I’d visited, and I marvelled that others were being tortured in rooms adjacent to the one I’d be working in. In Pisek, this building would have been the home of an aristocrat.

At last I came face to face with my first victim, Martin. He was manacled to the wall as Bohdan had been, but Martin already looked like he’d endured a beating or two. In lieu of dirt his skin as marked with bruises and dried blood stained the ground beneath him. Godke clearly noticed it because he murmured almost imperceptibly to Hurland, ‘see, the witch’s half-done already.’

Then he raised his voice and spoke to me. ‘You need to ask him to confess. See if he speaks German.’

‘Martin,’ I addressed him, and he seemed surprised that I was the one representing the warband. My voice had only recently broken and I spoke with an unpractised monotone. ‘You have been accused of witchcraft. Do you confess?’

‘Of course not! I am no witch, and no witness will confess that I have wronged them!’

‘That only proves that your family is powerful,’ said Godke, before motioning that I should continue. Only, I wasn’t sure what came next. ‘The Lord’s Prayer, Karl,’ Godke suggested, noticing my confusion.

‘Are you a good Christian, Martin Fruwein?’ I asked the man, and he didn’t respond. ‘Would you recite the Lord’s Prayer for me?’

‘I will not humour you,’ Martin said.

Again I was stumped, but Godke was watching so I tried to remember what had happened two years ago in Pilsen after Bohdan had recited the Lord’s Prayer. I noticed that Jacob and Hurland had left the room at some point.

‘Strip him naked,’ I said, and Gunnar stepped forwards to remove Martin’s clothing. I was astonished by Gunnar’s obeyance of my command, and I felt validated and powerful. I continued my power trip and motioned to Thies. He stepped forward with his razor and once Martin was naked, he set about shaving him. Martin protested at first, but a few blows from Gunnar taught him compliance.

Several minutes passed as Thies shaved and scanned the man’s body, prodding him with his cane to force him into the right positions. Eventually Thies shook his head: he did not have the Devil’s mark, at least not visibly.

‘You’ll have to use Thies’ tools,’ Godke said, before turning to Thies and Gunnar. ‘Thies, fetch your tools. Gunnar, fetch Jacob.’

I was surprised that Godke was pushing for the torture to take place right now, on the same day that we’d arrived. In Pilsen, he’d stressed the importance of letting the witch consider what was going to happen to his body, but here it seemed that Wallenstein’s desired expediency outweighed any need for the consideration of the witch’s human soul, if it still survived.

Jacob arrived first as he was only waiting outside, and Godke ordered that the rosary beads be placed over Martin’s head. Jacob said the Lord’s Prayer and then he and Gunnar left the room. Thies returned with his tools, but after handing me the basket he also departed. Only Godke stayed in the witch house with me, and I was glad of that. Godke was a good teacher, and I did not want the others knowing if I made mistakes.

‘Choose your instrument,’ Godke said. I noticed that Martin was watching the basket with fear-glazed eyes and I felt powerful.

I chose the thumbscrew as it was simple and I had already seen proof of its effectiveness, so Godke held Martin’s hand steady as I applied the thumbscrew to his left thumb. I tightened it so that there was gentle pressure on the man’s thumb, and he began to shift uncomfortably.

‘Do you confess?’ I asked him. I knew that it was important to give the witch an additional opportunity to confess at each stage of the interrogation.

Martin did not respond, so I tightened the thumbscrew. He began to wince in pain and though I felt some remorse, I also felt a fresh surge of power and I longed for the rush that followed the successful completion of a difficult task. I tightened the screw much more quickly that Thies had, but Thies’ witch had been much younger and less hardy so Godke thought it was a good idea.

‘What now?’ I asked him, and he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of the building to talk.

‘That’s up to you,’ Godke replied. ‘However, we’ve been rushing this somewhat. I’ve let you do so because if this man were going to confess easily our services would not have been required, but I think that at this point you should leave him overnight. That way he can have a chance to consider what’s going to happen to him. Tomorrow we can come back and try the rack.’

That was all I needed to hear. I’d never used or even seen a rack before, so I was curious to try. I let Martin’s thumbscrew sit for a few minutes even though his squirming and quiet panting had stopped, but soon I began to become bored so I removed the thumbscrew and we left the witch house.

‘You may do what you want with the day. You are old enough now to travel this city alone, but remember that there is always the potential for danger. You should use this time to seek what reward you wish to extract from this city as a reward for eliminating their witch problem,’ Godke advised me.

It was on that note that I began to explore Prague. The city was truly gargantuan and I could see why it was the capital of Bohemia. Artisans littered the streets where in Bielefeld or Pisek there would have been drunkards or peasants, and the marketplace was constantly bustling with raucous activity.

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I walked the wide streets in a seemingly random direction. Whenever I came to an intersection I took whichever branch seemed the most interesting at a cursory glance. Eventually, I came to a darker, dirtier part of the metropolis and I felt immediately uneasy. I was on the verge of turning back when I first glimpsed the item that I desired to take as a tax from this town:

A wheellock pistol.

It was shaped somewhat differently to Godke’s or to Thies’, but that only made me desire it more. Its back was arched in an elegant obtuse angle and the wheel mechanism stretched across the side of the wooden handle and part of the barrel. The bottom of the handle culminated in a spherical hilt of light-coloured polished wood.

I knew immediately that I wanted it.

At first I considered simply purchasing it, but then I remembered that I was searching for something to take as payment for witch hunting, a process that I had yet to conclude. Instead, I simply looked around for landmarks in an attempt to memorise the location of the seedy-looking vendor. He sat below a tall stone building with parapets that were half-crumbled, and I marked the pattern of their corrosion in my mind.

By this time the sky was beginning to darken and I quickly left this dangerous part of the city and returned to the tavern where the warband was beginning to gather. Gunnar and Thies stayed up drinking downstairs, but I quickly went to bed and allowed myself to drift off to sleep.

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In the morning I stumbled sleepily into the road outside the tavern and what I saw there caused me to awaken suddenly.

It was Jaromil.

He was sitting on the side of a horse carriage and staring up at the tavern window that looked into the room where we had spent the night. He hadn’t noticed me and though I was unarmed, and he was both taller and broader than me I approached him. He almost looked like a man now, and if he had followed us to Prague there was no doubt that he was armed, though it was possible that he had simply stumbled upon us. We were in his home country after all.

Jaromil noticed me when I was only a few metres away from him and lept off of the carriage to his feet. I broke into a run as he fled to the far side of the carriage and I followed him there, but I arrived with much haste but no caution and he broke my momentum with his fist against my nose.

I went down and he stood above me, seeming to contemplate whether or not to continue the assault. My head was ringing, but I could hear the sounds of townsfolk becoming interested in the scuffle and I sensed that Jaromil wanted to remain low-key.

After a few seconds he ran off and I was too dazed to follow him. I lay in the mud for a minute before a middle-aged Bohemian man helped me up. I thanked him in his language – I had begun to pick it up to a conversational level during my time in Pisek, as I had done with French while in Metz – and then returned to the tavern.

Godke was still inside, though instead of sleeping he was perched against the window looking outside. He had probably seen the whole thing, but I went to tell him about it anyway. The taste of blood pouring from my nose to my mouth made it difficult to speak, but I persevered.

‘Jaromil is here, in Prague,’ I said.

‘I was watching,’ Godke replied before shaking Thies awake. Thies became alert, suspecting the worst, but Godke simply motioned to me and Thies saw my wound and reached for the chirurgeon’s kit that lay beside his bed.

I knelt beside his bed and let him wipe my face free of blood with a cloth while I continued to talk to Godke. ‘He must have been following us.’

‘Nonsense,’ Godke responded and though I disagreed, I felt comfort in that he was taking control of the situation and that he didn’t seem worried. ‘If he had been following us, we would have seen him at Metz.’

‘Or at Pisek,’ Thies added. ‘Now hold still.’

‘But he was looking directly at that window,’ I said, pointing to the window Godke was perched against. ‘He knew where we were staying.’

‘Told you we should have killed him,’ Gunnar said, yawning into consciousness. He and Thies were the only people still asleep in the room when I had entered it, no doubt a result of their evening spent in the bar.

‘Probably,’ Godke concurred, ‘but that’s not how we do things. We don’t kill children. Only witches, and those who stand between us and our sacred duty.’

‘Even now?’ I asked, and Godke shook his head.

‘This changes things. He clearly recognises us and he’s old enough to present a genuine threat to our mission. If you see him, try and detain him but kill him if necessary. If we detain him instead, we can kill him after we finish with the witch and avoid starting a conflict during our stay,’ Godke said.

‘Don’t worry, boy,’ Gunnar said to me. ‘I’ll keep an eye on you.’

And true enough, for most of the rest of my stay in Prague he never wandered too far from me. I felt safe with the gargantuan Swede watching my back, and never was this better exemplified than on one occasion when a young man bereft of teeth or hygiene menaced me in a deserted street. He wore a tattered hood and one of his hands was inside the folds of his cloak. I feared that he would reveal a dagger, but Gunnar stepped out of the shadows and the man kept walking.

‘I didn’t know you were there,’ I said, unnecessarily.

‘I said I’d keep an eye on you,’ he replied, standing beside me.

‘Thanks.’

‘We all started like you,’ Gunnar said, kneeling so that he was only a few inches taller than me. ‘Well, we weren’t all acolytes. But we all had to find our roles within the warband, and learn how to hunt witches.’

‘Even you?’ I asked. He’d always seemed so confident, so relaxed.

‘Even me,’ he answered. ‘Though I was the first person to join Godke.’

‘Why did you join?’ I asked. I’d only joined because I had nothing left in my previous life, though it was also true that adventuring had a certain appeal.

Gunnar took a deep breath as he recalled the tale. ‘Did I ever tell you that I was once a soldier?’ I shook my head, so he continued. ‘I was a warrior of Sweden. The call to arms led me and ten thousand of my countrymen to Poland, not too far from here.

‘At first we had some successes, hard-won successes. I was sent to Riga, and there was a woman there. A witch, though I took no action at the time. She sang a haunting tale of death, of the deaths of thousands of Swedes. Their deaths would be serenaded by the flight of thousands of metal horses, she said.

‘I didn’t know what she meant at first, but a few days later we fought the Poles at a place called Kircholm. We were devastated by the Winged Hussars of Poland, cavalrymen who bore a wooden frame of bird feathers that gave the appearance of flight as they charged. I was lucky to survive the battle. I knew that she had put some unholy curse on us for invading her country and that had caused our defeat.

‘I went back to Riga looking for her, but she was gone. I couldn’t get back to Sweden because all of our boats had left and the ports we had captured had been retaken by the Poles, so I went to Saxony instead. I met Godke at a tavern in Leipzig. He was hunting witches and needed some muscle so we decided to form a warband.’

I nodded. It was a good story, one worthy of Hurland. The others didn’t like to talk about themselves very often and this was the first I had heard of the warband’s formation. ‘Why didn’t you go back to Sweden?’

‘I had nothing there. No land, no woman. I was assumed dead and the army had disbanded or fled so there was no dishonour in choosing a different path,’ Gunnar said. His eyes were no longer on me, they were far away, as if recalling some distant memory. He was silent for a moment, then he turned his gaze back to me. ‘Don’t you have something to be getting on with?’