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Hi up on a pulpit in the middle of a church, and a prosperous Swiss town, a minister

impatiently waited for his congregation to settle.

His eyes were penetrating, set deeply in a stern face.

His gaze was harsh.

Confronted by that site, the low buzzing of a hundred voices echoing from stone floor

to wooden rafters slowly faded away.

As the minister's eyes moved over the interior of his church, he drank in the sins of his

flock.

He knew everything that happened here.

This church had dominated the center of this town for centuries, going back into the

Middle Ages.

Thin, autumn sunlight poured in through plain glass windows.

It narrowly illuminated the empty niches carved into the whitewashed walls.

The congregants awaited their sermon from unadorned wooden benches.

The minister knew who among the town's inhabitants was doing things they shouldn't

be.

Over there was Otto Gründler, the elderly printer, who had fathered a child with a servant.

While in a frobin, the wife of a beer-brewer was spreading malicious gossip about a neighbor

she disliked.

Jakob Bullinger, the son of a magistrate, had blasphemed one night when drunk.

...