The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,223

happened in the last hour. If Valentin was right, his daughter was in danger of suffering the same fate as her mother. He had to focus and find a solution. All his intelligence and all his knowledge were for nothing if he couldn’t protect his daughter now.

The child he didn’t even know.

26

IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, Johann desperately tried to figure out a way to get Greta out of Loch Prison. He felt like he was trying to square a circle—the legendary problem even the great Archimedes failed to solve.

He would often sit with Valentin and Karl at the command in the evenings. They met in the order’s library, a bare room inside the church, rarely used by the knights. Valentin spent most of his time here. The only furniture was a wobbly table and a few shabby stools, but there were so many books and scrolls on the shelves along the walls that some had fallen off. More books were piled on the table. Wax from the candles of a candelabra dripped onto the tabletop, forming mounds of tallow. Little Satan lay curled up at Johann’s feet.

Johann and Valentin had agreed that they wouldn’t tell Karl the whole truth—not yet. As far as Karl was concerned, Valentin was Greta’s uncle and an old friend in need. They didn’t tell him that Greta was in fact Johann’s daughter or about what had happened between the two men back in Heidelberg. Johann wanted to wait for the right moment to confess the sins from his past to his assistant. Thankfully, Karl was preoccupied with all the wonderful paintings, sculptures, and art treasures inside the churches of Nuremberg. Johann was under the impression that Karl was almost a little jealous of the effort his master put into trying to save a girl he didn’t even know.

“Loch is probably the most heavily secured prison in the entire empire,” said Valentin glumly. Lying on the table was a layout plan of the city hall that Valentin had secretly copied. “I visit the city hall regularly on administrative business. That building alone is heavily guarded, not to mention the jail below! All those doors . . .”

“Where do they keep the keys?” asked Johann.

“I’ve asked myself the same question.” Valentin sighed deeply. “The prison keeper always carries one set on his belt, and there’s another in the guards’ chamber.”

“Which is heavily guarded,” said Johann. He fell silent again and thought hard, but try as he might, he couldn’t work out a solution.

“What about bribes?” asked Karl.

“We might be able to bribe the keeper and one or two guards, but not all of them,” said Valentin. “There are too many.”

“Maybe we just have to accept that we can’t save the child,” said Karl with a shrug.

“If I’d said the same thing back in Warnheim, you wouldn’t be here now,” retorted Johann angrily. “I don’t need to mention in which circle of Dante’s Inferno you would be roasting right now.”

Karl said nothing.

“There must be a solution,” muttered Johann after a while as he rubbed his temples. “There simply has to be!”

By now he was convinced that it was no coincidence that Valentin had called him to Nuremberg. He had been watching the stars from the top of Saint Jakob’s Church every night. The comet couldn’t be far off now. It would be the third time Larua would enter Johann’s life. The first time had been at his birth, the second time he’d nearly joined an occult group of devil worshippers, and now God was giving him one last chance. Because of his selfishness and arrogance, Margarethe—the love of his life—had been tortured and executed.

But now his daughter had entered his life, as unexpectedly as an angel. As if Margarethe were reaching out to him in forgiveness.

God had given him a key to turn back the wheel of time.

Now or never.

“We keep thinking,” he said, staring at the map. “Worst case, we have to wait until they convict Greta. There might be a chance to free her on her way to the gallows.”

But he knew that he couldn’t wait that long. Every day down in that cell was one day too many for the child. It was strange that the Nuremberg authorities were holding Greta for so long without commencing torture.

Wolfgang von Eisenhofen inquired nearly every day whether Johann had found a lead regarding the devilish murders. Johann strung him along and garbled something about constellations he needed to observe more closely. He didn’t really care who was behind