return to patrol this area,” he said. “At the moment the bailiffs are down at St. Emmeram’s Square, so it will probably be a while before they come back. I’ll whistle when they do.”
Magdalena nodded. She was happy to have Nathan and a dozen beggars along. The beggar king had advised her to wait to visit the ruin until the early-morning hours because the city guards would be nearing the end of their shifts, eager to be relieved, and thus patroling only halfheartedly. Although Simon had been against involving the beggars in their plans at first, it hadn’t been hard to convince him: in a city like Regensburg it was never a good idea to wander about alone at night, but in the company of Nathan’s colleagues they were as safe in the streets as Lazarus in the lap of Abraham. Here again it was evident how helpful the beggars guild could be. All along the Wei?gerbergraben they posted lookouts to send word at the slightest sign of danger.
“Then let’s not waste any time,” Magdalena whispered.
With a lantern in hand, the hangman’s daughter searched the pile of charred beams for an opening she could slip through.
“Magdalena,” Simon whispered. “The place will collapse and bury you. Perhaps it would be better if we-”
“Just come along,” she interrupted Simon curtly. “
She nudged a beam to one side, setting off a chain reaction that ended with a portion of the mountain of debris collapsing with a great crash. She jumped aside as a cloud of ash rained down on them.
“What did I tell you?” Simon whispered. “You’re digging your own grave!”
Magdalena pointed to a new opening in the debris. “At least now we’ve found a way in,” she said. “This is about where the boiler chamber with the well must have been.”
She crouched down and crawled into the ruin, holding the lantern in front of her, and in just a few moments disappeared inside. Simon murmured a quick prayer and crawled in after her. If they were going to die, then at least they would die together.
“Good luck,” he could hear Nathan call after him. “Don’t worry. If the whole thing collapses, we’ll dig you out, dead or alive.”
“Thanks, that’s very kind of you,” Simon scoffed, though he knew the beggar king could no longer hear him.
The medicus could feel his back scrape against the charred beams, and a muddy layer of ash and dirt clung to his knees. They were making their way through a tunnel of masonry stones and large pieces of rubble when Magdalena’s lantern brightened in front of him and the space around him opened up.
He rose to his feet carefully, realizing they’d in fact made it back into the bathhouse boiler room. Most of the equipment here was unrecognizable, though: the brick oven had burst into pieces, and the copper kettle used to heat bath water seemed to have completely disappeared. It took a while for Simon to notice shiny black pieces on the floor that reminded him of slag. The kettles had melted! What hellish temperatures must have prevailed here!
Meanwhile, Magdalena pushed aside a pile of bricks and gazed into a black hole directly beneath her.
“The well shaft,” she said. “The rungs are still here. Now it gets interesting.”
With these words she began her descent. Before long the medicus heard her call again. “Simon, you were right! This-this is unbelievable!”
When she fell silent, Simon leaned over the hole. “Magdalena, what’s wrong?” he whispered. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here in the back.” The voice of the hangman’s daughter echoed strangely, as if she were now much farther away.
“Is there really a secret passageway?” Simon asked excitedly.
“It’s best you come down and see for yourself.”
Simon reached for the iron rungs, casting a quick glance at the splintered beams and loose stones above him. If the roof caved in now, they’d either drown or starve to death down in the well. He couldn’t imagine Nathan and his beggars taking up shovels and digging them out.
Hand over hand, the medicus climbed down the rungs into the shaft until he reached the opening. The flames had gutted the hidden storage room, and the sacks and boxes they found there on their last visit were reduced to ash. But Simon discovered something else now.
Farther back there was yet another entryway, this one only waist-high. Simon ducked into the low opening. The ground was strewn with charred wood, some of it still marked with whitewash. He had to smile.
Carefully he peered inside. In the large room before him the fire had left its mark, though not so thoroughly as in the first room. In one corner stood a charred table; a blackened shelf that had fallen from the wall now lay on the floor. In the middle of the room the chimney of a huge stone furnace rose up to the ceiling, and all around it were smashed pots and splinters of glass that he suspected were once polished lenses.
Simon stepped over the broken glass and ran his hand along the balance bar of a scale: still warm, scorched and twisted almost beyond recognition by the heat.
“I’ll be damned if this wasn’t an alchemist’s workshop,” he whispered. “Your uncle is looking stranger and stranger by the minute.”
“I wonder whether Hofmann’s murderer searched this room,” Magdalena said.
Simon thought for a moment, then nodded. “It’s quite possible he didn’t. Your uncle kept his laboratory well hidden. I assume the fireplace is connected to the chimney in the boiler room so no one would notice he was down here working with distillation flasks. A bathhouse operator has to always keep the water boiling, after all, and thus the chimney was always smoking.”
“But what does that have to do with the patricians?” Magdalena picked up a piece of a glass lens and examined it as if this shard might hold the answer to all her questions. “Until now we’ve assumed the aldermen had my uncle killed because he was one of the leaders of the freemen-retaliation, nothing more.”
“Apparently it’s not that simple,” Simon replied. “It’s safe to say that someone was looking very hard for this secret room. The terrible mess in the apothecary’s room on the second floor is evidence of that.”
“Could Mamminger be behind it?” Magdalena asked.
“He has something to do with it at least.”
The medicus continued reflecting on this as he made his way through the room, now and then picking up a fragment of pottery or a piece of melted glass. Underneath the toppled bookshelf he found a few scorched boards connected by thin bars, and then, as he continued rummaging around, he came upon a few small blackened bones.
Animal bones.
“It appears your uncle was keeping animals in cages down here,” Simon said. “Not especially large ones. These bones could have come from rats or cats.”
Disgusted, he tossed the bones aside and walked to a far back corner of the room, where a knee-high pile of ash still smoldered. Carefully he reached into the faintly glowing black mass.
Slowly he sifted the warm ashes through his fingers, letting them fall to the ground. There were bits the fire hadn’t consumed entirely, which shimmered bluish white in the lantern light. Sniffing them, he recognized the same slightly sweet odor he had noticed a few days earlier while inspecting the moldy flour in the bathhouse supply room. Could this enormous pile of ash be simply burned flour? Or was this the remains of some alchemical powder he’d never heard of?
He suddenly heard a loud crack and stones began falling to the ground. A moment later the world around them seemed to explode.
“Damn it, the house is collapsing!” Simon shouted. “I was afraid it would. Let’s get out of here fast!”
Magdalena was already in the front supply room, scrambling like a cat up the rungs. Before Simon followed her, he frantically filled his purse with the bluish ash. Maybe he’d have a chance later to examine the powder more closely. Then he, too, rushed off toward the well shaft.
A loud thundering sound suggested the beams were breaking apart under the weight of the rubble. Up in the boiler room Magdalena stood amid the melted kettles while rubble and stones hailed down on her.
“The way out is blocked!” she shouted, pointing at the narrow tunnel now closed off by a mountain of bricks.
