The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,257
didn’t know what he’d had to do with it all. Why had Tonio chosen him? Why did the sorcerer believe that Johann was special? Just because of a comet that appeared every seventeen years? Sometimes, during the long nights on his travels through the empire, Johann woke up screaming because he’d dreamed of a beautiful knight—a knight whose French name he no longer spoke out loud.
On those nights, he thought about a phrase that Tonio the sorcerer had voiced down in the crypt and that, when he remembered it later on, struck him as deeply disturbing. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Because you’re the son of a great sorcerer yourself.
His mother had never told him who his father was. His stepfather had spoken about a traveling scholar and juggler, and that was all he knew. What did Tonio know about his father?
The son of a great sorcerer.
“Karl has finished setting up the booth stage and people are waiting for the puppet show. Are you coming, Uncle?”
Johann started up from his palm reading. It still felt strange when Greta called him by that title. He looked up and saw her cheerful face with the ever-smiling lips of her mother and the dark, mysterious eyes of her father. Greta was fifteen years old now and almost a woman. She was strong and nimble with full blonde hair to her shoulders and a constellation of freckles on her face that gave her a slightly impertinent look.
The traumatic events from a year ago didn’t seem to have left a lasting effect on her—probably helped by the fact that she hardly remembered anything about them. Johann had told Greta that she’d been given a potion at the Loch Prison back then to make her docile for torture and questioning. He, Karl, and Valentin had rescued her. Whatever had happened in between was nothing but a bad dream for Greta.
And he hadn’t told her about Valentin’s sacrifice.
“Are you all right?” asked Greta, still smiling.
“Of course,” he replied after a few moments. “I’m just focused on a particularly difficult chiromancy, that’s all.”
The farmer’s wife nodded gravely.
In his stories by the evening campfires, Valentin was an old friend and nothing more. He had been stabbed to death while freeing Greta. The girl had cried for many nights, but now she had gotten over it. And she’d called Johann “Uncle” ever since.
One day he would tell her the truth—he just didn’t know when.
“Um, you’re going to get a grandson.” He concluded the reading abruptly and gave the corpulent woman a pat on the back. “A healthy boy who will carry on the farm.”
“When?” asked the woman, trembling with excitement.
“Oh, certainly this fall—”
“But my daughter isn’t even expecting!”
“Are you absolutely sure?” Johann grinned and left the dumbfounded woman where she was.
He jumped down from the box seat and let Little Satan lick his hand. The huge wolfhound had waited patiently for his master and trotted alongside him now. Little Satan was fully grown, a giant of a dog standing more than three feet at the shoulder. Superstitious folk truly believed he was the devil.
When the commander Wolfgang von Eisenhofen had found out that Johann had left Nuremberg, he’d sent his knight Eberhart von Streithagen after him. “A gift from the commander,” Streithagen had growled and, with an expression of disgust, handed him the squirming puppy as well as the box with the stargazing tube and Johann’s books. “His Excellency believes that it is bad luck to keep the possessions of a wizard, most of all his dog. His only request is that you never set foot in Nuremberg again.”
Johann had nodded and held Little Satan tightly. Even without the commander’s request he would have given Nuremberg a wide berth in the future.
He walked around the wagon, where Karl had set up a wooden booth. There was no laterna magica—times had become too dangerous for that. People were burning at stakes far and wide as the church tried to defend itself against false preachers but also rebels with honest intentions. Johann sometimes thought the world was sitting on a powder keg that might blow up at any moment. And he wasn’t planning on ending his life prematurely as a black magician and necromancer. Besides, he preferred the puppet theater to the laterna magica—there was more room for dreams.
And it didn’t remind him of Margarethe.
He hadn’t returned to the tower by the Alps. He feared Tonio might be there. In his dreams, the sorcerer was standing atop the platform, the strange stargazing