"Welcome to Franconia. May I borrow one of your hot bricks? I've brought you a list."
"What now?"
"Independent lordships and imperial knights to be found in a triangle between here, Bayreuth, and Kronach, more or less. Mostly Protestant. Lots of people I sure would have never met if the Ring of Fire hadn't happened. There's a feud between families named von Künßberg und von Giech. They both want to tell us their troubles. Regular Hatfield and McCoy stuff."
He moved over closer to the fireplace. "Fascinating places I would never have visited if I had stayed uptime: Schney. Plankenfels. Thurnau. Schmeilsdorf. Burglesau. Mitwitz. Nagel. Teuschnitz. Schmölz. Veitlahm. Wildenberg.
"With castles. I never dreamed there were so many castles in the world. I read a National Geographic article about castles on the Rhine, once upon a time, for a school report. Those weren't a patch on the ones around here. Big things, some of them, but more of them are about the size of that absentee owner's house back home in Grantville—the one where they found the elephant gun. Or the one that the Clarks from New York built. Even the High Street mansion where we have the government offices now."
He tossed an envelope on Janie's pedestal. "That's the list. Right in the middle of the other guys, there's a little place called Marktgraitz that belongs to Bamberg, so we're going to have to think about getting the rights-of-way renewed. Plus, from the other direction, there's a report on the legal status of the Benedictine Abbey of Banz. Würzburg says it's subject to their bishop, the guys here say it's subject to the bishop of Bamberg, Fulda asserts some kind of a claim going back to the early middle ages, and the monks say that they don't owe nobody nothin'."
He paused. "Um. By the way. The couple of monks I found there, rattling around in the buildings, said that Gustavus Adolphus, or some division of the Swedish army, at least, took the abbot prisoner last summer. They'd appreciate it if we would try to locate him and send him back home. There's a note about that on the back of the report, if you would pass it on to Vince Marcantonio. Or to whomever-is-in-charge of locating misplaced abbots."
"Thank you Stew. I think. What next?"
"Next trip will be Kronach and up beyond it, if I have my itinerary straight. Further north. From what I've heard about Kronach so far, I'm not expecting a red carpet. It's a big fortress. On the main trade route from Nürnberg to Leipzig. In a pinch, I'll do what the Swedes did."
"What was that?"
"Go around it. At least, for this time."
"Good luck."
"I'll probably need it."
After Stewart Hawker sat through the next day's staff meeting, he was even more convinced that he would need luck. After he had listened to Matt Trelli's report on Kronach. On what, as Matt said, Gustavus Adolphus "apparently sort of forgot to mention to Mike Stearns" before Grantville sent its administrative team down to Franconia. That the Swedes hadn't actually taken Kronach. That it was still sitting there, unconquered and closed up, a fortress defended mainly by its own residents. The city militia.
When Matt got to the part about, "they have a history of making war, sort of independently, on the independent Protestant noblemen in the region," Stew waved for attention. As soon as Matt finished, Vince Marcantonio recognized him.
"I was working out of Lichtenfels, the last survey trip I made. It's not really `sort of independently' I think, from what I learned when I was going through the independent lordships up that way last week. There's a little town called Burgkunstadt this side of Wildenburg. It belongs to us—it's part of Bamberg, I mean. The Freiherren and the imperial knights that I talked to say that the people there and the people from Kronach actually do organized, cooperative raiding on the lands of the Protestant nobles in between them. And on their subjects, of course."
"It would be a good idea," Vince said, "if we got the other side of the picture."
"It would be a great idea," Stew agreed. "If the Kronacher didn't start shooting at anyone who approaches their city walls. Which includes us. They haven't been conquered and they aren't about to be."
"Who is likely to know something about Kronach?" Wade Jackson, the UMWA man, asked.
After a while, a silent while, Stew realized that he was going to have to say something. "Ah, Meyfarth maybe. Steve Salatto's adviser over in Würzburg. He worked for the duke of Saxe-Coburg before he died. People say that it was probably Coburg troops, fighting for the Swedes, who skinned five Kronach guys alive last summer. Guys who sneaked out of the the city while the Coburgers were besieging it, to try to spike their cannon."