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and the other members of her family, who were following her sullenly. Peter and Paul in particular were dead tired and whined softly as they gripped their father’s hand. Jakob Kuisl stomped ahead of them silently.
    “Do we still have far to go?” Magdalena asked after a while in a tired voice. “The children are hungry, and my feet hurt. Besides, I don’t like walking for hours through a strange city after nightfall. All sorts of riffraff are wandering about.”
    The hangman just shrugged. “Executioners don’t live in the central market square, and since my last visit a lot has changed.” He looked around. “Damned fog. We should just head north here and follow the city wall.”
    “The wall is behind us,” Simon interrupted, pointing back over his shoulder into the darkness. “I just saw it a moment ago by the little square with the fountain—”
    “Aha, Herr Son-in-Law will now tell me, perhaps, where I can find my own brother?”
    “Herr Son-in-Law is just trying to help you, that’s all,” Magdalena replied. “But, as always, you know better.” She sighed. “Why do you men have to be so stubborn when you’ve made a mistake?”
    “I didn’t make a mistake—it’s just dark and foggy,” Kuisl grumbled as he hurried along. “You could have stayed at home. I’m just doing this so I can see Georg again, and certainly not because of my brother, the old stinker. I wonder why he’s even inviting us to his wedding.” He spat in the dirt. “When I think about how the Steingaden executioner is taking over my work in Schongau in the meantime, it makes me sick. It will be a real mess.”
    As Magdalena walked along behind her father, her vague feeling of anxiety grew. In the narrow, unlit lanes it was already so dark and foggy she could hardly see to the next intersection. Occasionally she heard a whooshing, scraping sound as if someone or something was following her through the little alleys. She turned around to look at the others and could see that Simon and Barbara were also looking around anxiously. She couldn’t help but think of the ashen-faced watchman at the tower, and his final words.
    What do you know about this damned city?
    Did the watchman have something to hide? Something that had to do with this beast that the wagon drivers had told them about? The severed arm had belonged to a wealthy citizen. Perhaps a nobleman from Bamberg?
    When Magdalena looked once more into the darkness, she suddenly understood where her strange feeling was coming from. It was so obvious, yet she’d not really noticed it until now.
    The houses, she suddenly realized. Many of them are empty.
    And in fact, the windows on many of the buildings they passed were boarded up. Other houses were missing a door, or there were black holes where there once had been bull’s-eye windows. Frowning, Magdalena examined the abandoned buildings more closely. They were clearly not the shabby houses of the poor but were the homes of those who’d once been patricians and wealthy citizens. Some of the houses were now nothing but ruins, though some had been rebuilt or renovated. Magdalena remembered all the cranes, pulleys, and sacks of mortar they had passed on their way through the little streets. Simon, too, now seemed to take note of the empty buildings.
    “What’s going on with all these houses here?” he asked, addressing his father-in-law. “Why are so many of them unoccupied?”
    “Well, the war was fought here in Bamberg, as well,” Jakob replied, stopping at the next fork, trying to get his bearings. “And it was pretty bad. The city was attacked by soldiers more than a dozen times. That may have been twenty years ago, but many Bambergers fled then and didn’t return. When I was here some years ago, things looked even worse. It takes a while for a city to recover from something like that. Some never do, and all that remains of them are a few abandoned ruins with the wind whistling through them.”
    “But Schongau