But first he needed to get out of here.
Johann scrutinized the walls around him. He and Father Jerome had gotten in, so there had to be a way out. Only, where? Still shivering with cold, he stood up. He needed some clothes or else he would freeze before he thought of anything. Repulsed, he looked at the bent corpse of the priest in the corner. The bloodstain wasn’t as big as Johann expected; evidently, Father Jerome had died of internal injuries. And so, after some hesitation, Johann undressed the dead body and slipped on the woolen robe. He tried to force aside the thought that it was the blood-soaked robe of a dead man—at least he was beginning to feel warmer.
Then he examined the walls.
There were no slits or cracks anywhere that might have suggested the existence of a hidden door. The narrow windows were high above ground and far too small to squeeze through. Johann thought with horror that this chamber had probably served as a prison for the children Poitou, Henriet, and La Meffraye hunted and caught like rabbits. Their cries had probably echoed all the way down to the township. But no one had come to help them.
After the walls, Johann examined the floor; like the ceiling, it was made of large flagstones. But he searched in vain. Increasingly desperate, he returned to the walls. He noticed that, unlike the ceiling and floor, each wall was made of one huge piece of rock. There were no individual squares. Only in the corners, where the walls met, were there lines of mortar. An idea sprouted in Johann’s head, but it required scraping the mortar from the joints. How could he do it? He had no knife, not even a stick, nothing. Except . . .
Johann hesitated only briefly. He returned to the priest’s body. The broken-off crossbow bolt still protruded from the wound, and Johann pulled it out with one quick movement. The bolt was a little longer than his index finger and bore a sharp metal point. A parting gift from Father Jerome.
Carefully, trying not to break the tip, Johann began scraping the old mortar out of the joints. He decided on the wall opposite the arrow slits, and indeed—behind the mortar was a gap about as wide as a finger. It was much too dark in the room to see anything in the gap. Johann knelt down, pushed the tip of the bolt into the gap, and slowly pulled it upward.
At about hip height, the tip caught on something. Johann pushed harder.
Something clicked.
“Please, please,” he whispered. “Not for me—for Greta.”
He pushed against the wall and it swung open.
On the other side he found a small, dark room and some stairs leading down. The construction was as simple as it was ingenious. Despite his desperate situation, Johann couldn’t help but admire the probably long-since-deceased architect. A metal rod had been inserted down the center of the thin stone wall, allowing the wall to swivel like a revolving door. A snap lock ensured that once it fell shut, it couldn’t be moved from the inside.
Unless one removed the camouflage of mortar and pushed the bolt back up by force.
Johann left the door open so that a little light streamed into the room beyond. Cautiously, he climbed down the stairs, which ended in a corridor. The priest must have come from here. After deliberating for a few moments, Johann turned left. The corridor was low and smelled faintly of blackpowder. Soon he passed an old cannon, its rusty barrel pointed outside through an embrasure. More embrasures and cannons followed. When Johann dared a glance through one of the small windows, he saw the moat on the castle’s southern side, and beyond, still shrouded in morning mist, the small town of Tiffauges. He walked faster, then started to run. Evidently he was inside the casemates, the fortified defensive corridors underneath the castle walls. He only hoped he wasn’t running toward a dead end. After a while he came to a small, very sturdy-looking door. It was barred with a thick, rusty bolt that looked like it hadn’t been moved in a long time. Groaning with effort, he pushed against it. The bolt broke free with a crunching sound, and the door creaked open.
Mist rose from the moat directly in front of him.
A narrow ledge led from the door along the wall toward the bridge that he and Karl had used to enter the castle a few days ago. Johann didn’t see anyone, only a handful of horses grazing peacefully in the shadow of the projecting bastion. They weren’t tied up, and Johann guessed they belonged to the troop of mercenaries traveling with Viktor von Lahnstein. Johann couldn’t see any guards and thought that most of the soldiers were probably inside the castle they had invaded the night before.
He decided to try his luck.
He moved toward the horses, most of which were saddled. Perhaps the soldiers responsible for looking after the animals were busy catching them one by one and leading them into the castle. There was a good chance that someone would return soon.
Johann ran the last few yards as fast as he could. He decided on a young-looking mare who struck him as strong enough for a long ride. She was black, with a long mane and flashing eyes—the perfect mount for a vassal of the devil. A full saddlebag hung at her side. Without another look around, Johann jumped into the saddle and kicked his heels into the horse’s sides, making it bound forward with a neigh. He raced across the bridge toward town, and no one stopped him. Then he pulled the mare hard to the right and galloped toward the woods, which were bathed in a milky fog this early in the morning.
Johann didn’t know where Tonio was, but he did know that his
