The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,242

.

Greta!

He shot up and was overwhelmed by a wave of nausea. He threw up and retched, and still everything around him was black. Had he gone blind? Was he in hell?

He tried to focus on his body. The ground below him was cold; it appeared he was lying on a stone floor. Carefully he tried to move his limbs, first his legs, then his hands. He felt damp straw. A sharp pain shot up from his right hand and made him scream out. Something had happened to his hand but he couldn’t remember what. An image flashed through his mind.

A curved dagger glinting in the light.

He screamed again. It was strange to hear his own voice, as if it didn’t belong to him. It echoed as if he was deep below ground. He had a terrible headache and trouble breathing, as if something was blocking his nose. Why on earth couldn’t he see a thing?

With his left hand—burnt from reaching into the glowing brazier—Johann gently touched his face and found that it was almost completely wrapped up in a bandage. He started tugging at the rags and was instantly punished with excruciating pain in his head, worse than the pain in his hand. He threw up again, and his mouth burned like fire as he spat out the caustic bile.

“I would leave the bandage where it is,” uttered a hoarse voice nearby. “It may be dirty, but they soaked it in oil of Saint-John’s-wort to prevent inflammation. I can smell it from here.”

Johann froze. He knew the voice.

“Va . . . Valentin?” he said with a raspy voice. “You . . . you’re alive?”

“More dead than alive. That monster broke something inside me. I . . . I can’t move. But yes, I’m alive.”

“What happened?” asked Johann quietly.

“You really want to know?”

When Johann didn’t reply, Valentin spoke slowly.

“After you drank the black potion, the leader cut off your little finger. He said that was the first sacrifice.”

Johann winced. The wound on his hand throbbed, and he thought he could still feel his finger. But he knew it was no longer there. Another image emerged in his memory: Tonio had thrown the finger—his little finger that used to hold playing cards and make coins disappear—into the baptismal font.

But that wasn’t all.

“And the second sacrifice?” he asked quietly. “What was the second sacrifice?”

Silence spread through the room, a heavy silence that was almost harder to bear than the darkness around him.

“Speak up, damn it!” gasped Johann. “What was the second sacrifice?”

“They . . . they cut out your left eye.”

Johann groaned. He felt sick again but he had nothing left to throw up. He was tempted to touch the bandage with his hand, but he knew that every touch would result in agonizing pain and could lead to infection. He probably suffered from fever already.

“They went about it very professionally,” said Valentin with a shaking voice. “They used proper surgical instruments—I’m guessing one of the masked men was a Nuremberg physician. I think they wanted you alive.”

“For the third sacrifice,” whispered Johann.

“Yes, but it never came to that. Something happened. I must have passed out for a while, but I heard shouts and swearing, and then they locked us up in here. I suspect we’re in some forgotten cellar below the Sebaldus Church. I don’t know what happened next.”

Silence descended over their prison chamber again while Johann’s eye socket throbbed. The pain was surprisingly bearable—probably an aftereffect of the black potion. Johann guessed the drink contained henbane or devil’s trumpet, or both. That would also explain the hallucinations. Johann remembered seeing people in the glistening surface of the basin. First Tonio—or a younger version of Tonio—and then a knight. He’d thought the man was Gilles de Rais—a name that had been haunting his dreams for years. No wonder that it should appear in his hallucinations.

“May I ask you something, Johann?” Valentin’s voice roused him from his musings. “That potion they gave you. I thought it was poison and you would never regain consciousness. And yet you’re awake, you speak—”

“Ash,” said Johann tiredly.

“What did you say?”

“Ash. I ate ash. When they dragged me to the basin, I held on to one of the braziers. I pretended to stumble, grabbed some cold ashes from the edge, and stuffed them into my mouth.”

Johann ran his tongue along his gums and teeth. He could still feel the foul-tasting crumbs in his mouth. “The ancient Greeks knew that ash is detoxifying. I hoped it would lessen the