They walked up to the castle, where they were ushered into the antechamber of the king’s audience hall. It was a vast, gloomy room with numerous armchairs that stood in a square along the stone walls, which were hung with golden-framed paintings of Rudolph and his ancestors. Most of the armchairs were taken by other visitors. Fortunately, Hrot and Felix managed to find two seats in the farthest corner, near a life-size statue of a pig-eyed princess.
“I have to think over some formulae,” Felix said as he got comfortable and closed his eyes. “Seems we’ve got a long wait ahead, as usual.”
As the walls began to echo with the alchemist’s sonorous “thinking,” Hrot got up. He circled the chamber round and round like a fly, too excited to alight back on his chair. He did pause now and then, but only to take a look at the statues and paintings. He admired them with an open mouth at first, but the works soon lost all their attraction, and the large room grew more and more oppressive.
Three hours later, Hrot hated all the pale, conceited, and bloated faces of the useless bums who had never even tied their own shoes—and who were smirking at him from the dusty canvas. “It’s obvious that the king isn’t around, or that he simply doesn’t want to see anyone,” he whispered to Felix when he saw the thinker had opened his eyes. “Almost all the other petitioners are gone. I guess we should leave as well.”
Evidently comfortable in the padded armchair, Felix only yawned.
“I can’t wait to get home and shed these stupid itchy breeches,” Hrot continued as he sat down beside his friend. “And I’m going to personally burn this idiotic jacket and the ridiculous torture device they call a ruff. Who does this Rudolph think he is, anyway? Is other people’s time not valuable at all? I should be studying instead of wasting my life in here.”
Hrot fidgeted as if his seat were full of fleas. Then he shot up to circumvent the room anew—and to glare at the statues and portraits along the way. Felix closed his eyes and slumped in the chair. The mighty heaving of his chest told Hrot that his friend had just entered another round of reasoning. Then the door opened and a lanky man of about fifty walked into the antechamber.
The newcomer had a high, wrinkled forehead, thin, pale lips and stern features that made him look as if he were permanently scowling. He resembled a peacock as he strutted with his chin jutting forward and his chest thrust out. Hrot rushed to Felix and patted his shoulder.
Felix opened his eyes and frowned. “That’s Philip Lang,” he murmured. “He’s the king’s new pet valet. Take a good look at him, snotnose. You’ll never see a more conceited bastard in your whole life!”
Lang stood in the middle of the chamber and barked, “His Majesty isn’t receiving today.”
Hrot hung his head. He should have known the audience with the king was too good to be true. The handful of remaining visitors grumbled as they got up and left. Felix stood up as well. But he had no intention of leaving. “The king told me expressly to come this morning, and to bring my friend Hrot along.” His raspy voice boomed around the chamber. “He told me so just yesterday.”
“If you only had let me catch my breath,” Lang spat, even though he’d been silent for nearly a minute before Felix spoke. “I would have added that only you and your companion are to have the honor of speaking to His Majesty today. He is in the Lion Courtyard. You’re to join him there.”
“The Lion Courtyard?” Felix asked, his eyebrows rising in surprise.
“The Lion Courtyard!” Lang snarled. “Isn’t that noble enough for you, master alchemist? Are you to dictate where the king is to receive you? If you must know, His Majesty is with Aisha, as she is unwell. Now, if you have no more questions or comments, please follow me!”
“How much I hate this bastard,” Felix murmured as they trailed behind Lang out of the chamber. But Hrot only smiled. Unlike Felix, he didn’t mind Lang’s insolence. He didn’t even mind the long wait and the torturous ruff anymore. He was about to see the king!
“So what is this Lion Courtyard?” he whispered to Felix as they followed the valet down a long hallway of the northern wing. “And who’s Aisha? The king’s new mistress?”
“Kind of!” Felix chuckled, his mood suddenly improving. “You’ll see, my friend. You’ll see.”
Lang led them out into a sunlit square, across Deer Moat, and past the chestnuts, maples, and hazels that hemmed the Royal Garden. As Hrot soon found out, the Lion Courtyard wasn’t a figurative name. His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when he saw the wild beasts glaring through the thick bars of massive enclosures. The cages stood some two yards apart around a rotund pavilion. Six or seven of them really held lions. In some of the other cages, bears and tigers and leopards paced nervously back and forth; in the rest, chimpanzees and orangutans played in large swings. A flock of parrots was chained to the branches of fruit trees behind the pavilion.
Hrot noticed a man whose puffy yet strangely long face he knew well from coins and paintings. Surrounded by four guards, the king stood in front of one of the cages. He peered at an emaciated black tigress that sprawled on her side in the middle of the cage, wheezing and panting like a French bulldog. Her incredibly long tongue was all the way out, its tip covered with the sawdust she was lying in.
“Your Majesty,” Lang nearly whispered as they approached the king. “Felix and the gentleman known as Hrot are here.”
The monarch didn’t react. Lang turned to the two friends and said pompously and ceremoniously, “His Majesty Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, and Slavonia.”
Hrot and Felix bowed. The king glanced at them and flashed them a weak smile. Then he turned back to the cage.
Fifty years old, Rudolph looked more like a rich merchant than a monarch. A plain brown doublet and a pair of matching breeches enveloped his slightly portly figure. Fleshy bags hung under his large, kind eyes. His red mustache drooped over his thick beard. His hair was disheveled as if he’d gone to the menagerie straight from bed.
“Poor Aisha,” he sighed through the bars. One couldn’t be sure whether he talked to the beast, to the newcomers, or to himself. “It would be such a shame if we lost her. Such a great shame. A black tigress—completely black! One in a million. We got her from that king of Bengal . . . if we could only remember his name . . .”
The king sighed again and then he turned to the visitors. It looked that he was finally ready to pay them some attention. The parrots screeched when a falcon appeared on the horizon. But the falcon merely made a few circles above the menagerie and flew away, and the parrots quieted down. The king scrutinized Hrot without a word, making him blush and look down. For a long time, Aisha’s moribund wheezing was the only thing to be heard.
The silence made Hrot so nervous he lifted his head and stammered, “Let me thank you for granting me this audience, Your Majesty.”
When he saw Lang shake his head and roll his eyes, Hrot remembered he should have let the king speak first. Hrot winced as if he had a cramp. Rudolph, however, didn’t seem to mind—or notice—the breach of protocol.
“We were curious about you, young man,” he finally said. His voice was gentle and drowsy. “A man who has, in the span of a few months, saved the life of one of our grandest alchemists . . .” Here he glanced and smiled at Felix. “And the life of—well, of a person who is very dear to our heart—does deserve an audience.”
Rudolph turned back to the cage, and his face clouded up. At one point it almost looked as if he were going to weep. The tigress lolled her head and wheezed. More sawdust had stuck to her tongue, making it look like a battered trout.
“As you can see, we are quite occupied here.” The king finally turned his head back to Hrot. He suddenly looked restless and agitated. “Why don’t you make a wish, and we will consider whether we could grant it?”
Hrot did not hesitate a second. “I would like to become a royal alchemist, Your Majesty.”
The king laughed and clapped his hands. “We knew you’d ask that!” he exclai
med, resembling a little child laughing through tears. “Lang, Lang, didn’t we tell you he would ask that? Oh yes, Felix told us that Hrot always spends the whole day in the library, with his nose buried in alchemical manuscripts.”
“That is true, Your Majesty,” said Hrot. “But I’ve already studied almost all the material available outside the castle, and I’m dying to get my hands on more. Oh, Your Majesty! If I could only access the royal library! If I could only put my knowledge to use in a real laboratory! My head always bursts with ideas now, but without proper instruments, setting, and guidance, I feel that—”
“Oh, that’s enough.” The king raised his hand. “You make our head spin.”
“I apologize, Your Majesty,” Hrot said with a blush. He realized he’d blundered again by jabbering away in front of the monarch.
The king pressed his fingertips to his forehead as if he were really dizzy, and Lang shook his head and clucked his tongue. The guards looked at each other and snickered. Even the chimpanzees seemed to be appalled, as they began to screech and fight. Hrot cringed, fearing that the king would get angry and turn him down. Felix, however, beamed and nodded in admiration of his young friend’s zeal.
Aisha made a gurgling sound, like an old man clearing his throat. The king looked through the bars for a while, and then he turned to Felix. “If this young man becomes our alchemist, you’ll be responsible and liable for all his actions and results. Are you prepared to accept that?”
“I would put my hand into fire for this boy, Your Majesty,” Felix said solemnly. “The same goes for his knowledge and intellect.”
“So be it,” the monarch said. Then he turned to Hrot. “On Monday, you’ll start working in the laboratory under Felix’s supervision. Your salary will be eight thalers a month. What day is it today, Lang?”
“It’s Wednesday, Your Majesty.”
“Excellent!”
“Thank you so much, Your Majesty,” said Hrot, but the king had already turned back to Aisha. When the alchemists bowed and left, they heard Rudolph murmuring as if he were trying to convince the hands of death to unclench her stomach.
CHAPTER NINE
The darkness of the following night found Hrot at his desk, hunched over a copy of Theatrum Chemicum. The words swam in front of his eyes, however, and they poured out of his head as soon as he absorbed them. In a few days, he was to become a royal alchemist and put all his vast knowledge into practice.
As Anath had hinted, she might not be able to help him out of the pact. Fortunately, he still had more than nine years left to make his great discovery and persuade the Emissary to leave him alone. Hrot hoped it would be enough. If he failed, he would become the fiend’s reaper of souls.
The candle burning on his desk sputtered. The thought of the Emissary’s horrid realm filled him with loathing. The Emissary always skulked in the depths of his mind like an unforgotten nightmare, his lips stretched in that sweet smile and his eyes gleaming with malice.
Hrot closed the book and turned his weary eyes to the bed. He couldn’t concentrate on reading when his mind was in this state. The best thing he could do was to try to get some sleep. As he lifted his hand to the top button of his doublet, a loud knock shook the front door.
Hrot took the candle and shambled to the hallway, wondering who it could be at this hour.
“Who is it?” he called, noticing that a sudden fear squeezed his stomach. His hand trembled, and the candle threw quaky shadows over the whitewashed walls and the groined ceiling. What if it was the Emissary? The fear of the fiend had always lain in the pit of Hrot’s stomach like an indigestible dinner. Now it began to bubble and ferment. But the monster wouldn’t bother knocking.
“It’s the king’s messenger.” A gruff voice came from the stairway. “His Majesty wishes to communicate something following your audience.”
Hrot’s heartbeat slowed down. It was strange that the king would send a messenger at midnight. But then, the king was a strange man.
Hrot decided to open up a notch and peek outside. Although he wedged the door with his foot, the uninvited guest rammed it so forcibly it flew wide open and hit Hrot in the face. Unbalanced, Hrot staggered and fell. Just before the draft blew out the candle, he saw two masked men rush inside.
They turned him on his back. Hrot groaned when he felt a knee digging into his spine, but the groan died out when they forced a rag into his mouth. Fear rattled Hrot’s frame so much that all his muscles throbbed. The rag tasted so badly of sour sweat that he feared he would choke on his own vomit. The men blindfolded him, tied his hands behind his back, and pulled him to his feet. They pushed him outside.
Hrot’s knees gave in halfway to the stairway, and the men dragged him down the stairs and into the cool night. He perceived the unmistakable smell of a horse, and he heard a coach door squeak open. Knowing that all would be lost if he let them push him into the coach, he kicked his feet and wriggled like a hooked worm. The men, however, held him firmly under the arms. As he tried to give the man on his right a kick, Hrot hit his shin on something that felt like the coach’s wheel. He howled through the rag and stopped struggling, which gave the men a chance to lift him up.
The top of the door frame scraped his skull as they shoved him inside. The coach swung like a boat when they climbed in. They sat beside him, each on one side, pinning him to the seat with their shoulders.
“Let’s go!” one of them shouted to the driver. A whip cracked, and the coach lurched forward.
They were going straight for a while, and then they turned right. Even though Hrot tried to guess where they were going at first, terror soon obliterated his reason and made him give up. He felt the coach was going up a steep hill. Were they still inside the city, or had they already trotted into some forsaken woods beyond the walls? Was he about to be murdered? And what was to come next? Would the Emissary snatch his soul and drag it into his terrible realm? That thought made him retch so badly that the men had to pull the rag out of his mouth.
“Calm down and breathe deeply,” said the one on the left. As he spoke, the coach filled with the smell of raw onions.
“Where are you taking me?” Hrot asked as soon as he managed to fill his lungs with oxygen. “What do you want with me?”
The only answer was a gruff cough coming from the right. They soon gagged him again.
Hrot somewhat calmed down when he heard that the horse’s hooves began to clap on cobblestone. They were still in Prague, then, and in one of the richer neighborhoods on top of that, as only muddy dirt paths crisscrossed the slums. The coach halted, and they led him out. As they’d been trotting mostly uphill, Hrot expected a fresh breeze to buffet his face. The air was calm, however, as if they were in an enclosed space, like a small square. Or a churchyard.
An unnerving thought made him lose control over his knees, and he slumped in the men’s hands as if he’d fainted. The kidnappers had to be acting on the orders of the clerics!
Felix had told him the clandestine Inquisition had spies even at the castle. They must have found out about the audience—and that was why they’d posed as the king’s messengers to fool him into opening the door for them. Felix had also told him about the monstrous cruelty of some of the “men of God.” Were they about to drag him into a torture chamber beneath a church? Were they going to crush his bones and burn his skin for saving the life of one of the people on their blacklist?
Nausea burned in his throat when a door creaked open in front of him. The cold breath of ancient stone walls greeted him in grim silence. He screamed with terror, but only in his head.
THE ALCHEMISTS WERE sitting in a large, torchlit banquet hall, around a long table that creaked under the weight of bowls, plates, and glasses. Although the feast had only started an hour ago, festive mood trickled through every vein. Most of the twenty men were already drunk.
Felix was beaming with happiness: earlier that day, he had unexpectedly gotten the chance to “test” a brand-new mattress. His latest catch was the wif
e of a merchant who had just come to Prague from Hungary. She had silky thighs, slim ankles, and a wonderful pair of breasts. What Felix appreciated the most, however, was the fact that she spoke neither Czech, nor German, nor Latin.
“She’s a pretty hot stove, and the best kind of a lover,” he was now telling a lanky, bald man on his right. “She’ll never whine, or ask for presents, or demand to know whether I love her. What else could a man ask? So raise your tankard, my friend! Let’s drink to the health of—of that Hungarian beauty, whatever the hell her name is!”
“Wait a minute, Felix,” the other alchemist said. “Aren’t you half Hungarian, after your mother? I’ve surely heard you speak Hungarian before.”
Felix grinned and said, “Of course you heard me. But what’s-her-face never did, haha-haa! And since I didn’t need to speak to peek under her skirt, I decided to keep my linguistic skills a secret.”
“Oh, you old goat!” The other man laughed and patted Felix on the shoulder. “You’ll never change!”
They looked up when the door opened. All the alchemists hollered and clapped their hands when two footmen pushed in the blindfolded Hrot. Felix rushed toward them, took off Hrot’s blindfold and gag, and gave him a crushing hug.
“Look at you, my little snotnose!” Felix roared with laughter. “Your face is all white, and you’re trembling like a lapdog!” That made the alchemists laugh even harder. The kidnappers chuckled as they untied Hrot’s hands.
“What is this?” the bewildered Hrot asked. Having braced himself for meeting an inquisitor, he couldn’t believe he was seeing his friend. “What’s happening?”
“Oh, it’s just a little ritual of initiation, that’s all.” Felix led Hrot to the table and made him sit down. “I decided to throw this banquet for you to celebrate your new post. And somebody had the idea to take you here by force, you know, to give you a little scare and a big surprise. And I just had to agree! But cheer up, my friend! It’s your feast! Eat and drink until you explode!”
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