The Scar

7

On summer days the stone courtyard, which served as both a playground and a main square, glowed with heat like the floor of an iron forge, and the air over it shimmered and wavered. The streets of the village that clung to the cliff flickered, disappeared from sight, then reappeared, changing their contours. His teacher Orlan smiled mysteriously, “Appearance. The unfamiliar is concealed within the familiar; the unknown abides in the known. No matter how you tried, you could not dig to the bottom of this well.… However, what good is the bottom to you? Drink up, and be grateful.…”

Young Luayan did not immediately understand what kind of well his teacher was speaking of. In the courtyard on the cliff there was no well: water had to be hauled up from below, and it was quite difficult.

On the other hand, it was cool in the mage’s home, even on the most scorching days, and the steel wing fastened over the entrance was an appeal for the preservation of the inhabitants from adversity, illness, and enemies. Luayan knew all too well that as long as his teacher lived, so it would be.

As long as his teacher lived …

The dean tore his gaze away from the yellow flames dancing in the fireplace: after the Day of Jubilation, true autumn days, damp and chilly, had set in. His teacher had been in the habit of lighting a fire even in the middle of summer; Orlan maintained that a fire in the fireplace promoted reflection. It is possible that he was right, but Luayan had not adopted this practice, and so in the summer his fireplace stood cold and empty.

Who knows how his destiny might have unwound if Orlan had lived even a few more years?

So many mistakes. His whole life was a repository of mistakes, and always on the eve of disaster he felt a drawing cold in his chest. Just like today.

He turned around. Toria, his daughter, was sitting on the very edge of his desk, and her face, lit by the firelight, looked severe, even harsh. From out of this face another woman gazed reproachfully at the dean: her equally young and beautiful mother. The dean rubbed his temple pensively, but the hazy foreboding did not desist; behind Toria, the bloodshot eyes of Egert Soll gleamed in the half dark.

The dean turned a log in the fireplace, and the flames flared brighter. The dean recalled how the fire in the hut by the cliff had burned just as brightly, and how two armchairs with high backs had stood facing each other, an old man sitting in one, and in the other a young boy entranced by his elder’s words. I’m getting old, he thought sarcastically. The past comes to my mind far too clearly, but where does this aching, vague presentiment of evil come from?

“Five yesses,” Egert yet again muttered from the gloom. “Someone questions me five times? And I just need to answer?”

Toria was looking at her father with demand in her eyes.

He averted his face. How could Luayan solve this riddle; where would he find the answer? He needed help now, but the only man who could help him had been lying in a stone tomb, carved into the cliff, for the past several decades.

Toria flinched and Egert whipped his head around: someone was knocking erratically on the heavy door.

The dean lifted his eyebrows in shock. “Yes?”

Gaetan’s angular face peeked warily through the crack of the partially open door; other students stood behind him, whispering tensely and then shushing each other.

“Dean Luayan,” gasped Fox, “there … in the square. Lash.”

Egert felt a wave of sepulchral cold flood his chest.

The square was, as usual, filled with people, but it was unusually silent. The Tower of Lash had flung open its perpetually shut gates, and a thick wall of heavy smoke poured out of those gates, emitting a bitter odor. Gray robes flickered in the shroud of smoke, but none of the townsfolk, dazed by this unprecedented event, could make out what was happening in the compact, umber clouds.

A group of students sliced through the crowd like a knife; Dean Luayan served as the tip of this knife. Egert held back, and Fagirra’s insinuating voice resounded in his ears: Great ordeals are approaching, ordeals that all living things must endure. You must hurry, Egert … before that which must happen, happens. You will meet it with us, and you will find salvation, whereas others will cry out in horror.

The heavy brown smoke slowed and began to flow upward toward the sky. On the spot where it had just been eddying, a motionless human ring became apparent: the acolytes of Lash stood shoulder to shoulder, close together like the sharp, pointed stakes of a wooden fence. Their hoods were pulled low and their faces, turned toward the inhabitants of the town, were concealed by the coarse cloth. Egert sheltered behind someone’s back: it seemed to him that vigilant, focused gazes were searching for him from underneath the hoods.

“What’s all this for—?” Toria began derisively, but at that very moment a drawn-out note that pulled at the soul instantly stopped the mouths of everyone who had assembled in the square.

The fiery red robe of the dwarf flashed through the gray circle of hoods; another sheaf of smoke puffed up behind backs that were still as stone, and then, as if elevated on these clouds, the Magister rose up over the square. It is possible that Egert alone knew that this was the Magister: everyone else saw only a white sphere of disheveled silver hair, which rose like the moon over a battlement of hoods.

The square was suddenly full of whispers, rustles, and exchanged glances; the peeling sound repeated, and again a dead silence, unnatural for a crowded place, fell. The heavy smoke grudgingly drifted up into the sky, as if against its will.

Once again red flashed through the circle of hooded men, and the dwarf, carrying his instrument, also seemed to be rising up over the crowd. His thin lips moved—or did it just seem so to Egert?—and words tumbled out of the trumpet, accompanied by more heavy smoke.

“It approaches!”

Egert’s blood ran cold. Great ordeals are approaching.…

“Prepare yourself. Prepare your home. Prepare your life.”

You must hurry, Egert.…

“The Ages have flowed by. The Ages have run out. The river is not eternal. The Age has passed. It is close. Prepare yourself. The End of Time approaches!”

The square remained silent, uncomprehending.

“The End of Time…” The hollow words were punctuated by plumes of smoke, weaving over the trumpet. “The End. Lash beholds the End of all things. He is there before you. Stretch out your hand.… He is there. A week, maybe two or three … Maybe just a day, or an hour … That is all that remains until the End. Lash beholds all. Lash beholds all. The End of the World. The End of Life. The End of Time. Lash beholds…”

The dwarf took the trumpet away from his crooked lips and spit slowly, with relish.

“The words have been spoken!” the Magister yelled in a penetrating voice. “The sand is flowing out of your hourglasses. The End!”

As if obeying an unspoken command, the gray figures slowly raised their arms; wide sleeves fell back, and a cold wind blew over the assemblage. It seemed to many that the wind reeked of the grave.

“The End,” The murmured chant rose up from beneath many hoods. “The End … The End…”

And smoke again began to pour out of the Tower, but this time it was black, as if the entire world were burning. The smoke obscured the Magister, the red-robed dwarf, and the wall of motionless, faceless men from the eyes of the people in the square: this spectacle was so majestic and yet sinister that a woman who stood near Egert in the crowd started rambling hysterically.

“Oh! Oh, dear people, oh! Oh, how can this be? No, no, no! It can’t be! I refuse…”

Egert turned his head toward her: the woman was pregnant and as she wailed she pressed her palms first to her wet cheeks, then to her enormous round belly.

The formation of robed men mutely disappeared through the gates of the Tower. The gates closed just as silently, and the smoke was shut off: only trickles crept out from underneath the iron doors. These black trickles writhed like harassed vipers.

Egert rushed to the dean’s side. The dean, catching sight of Toria’s inquiring glance, smile wanly. The smile was pensive and reassuring, but Toria only frowned more deeply.

The dean dropped his hand onto her shoulder. “We should go.”

The crowd dispersed. Dispirited people hid their eyes. Somewhere a frightened child sobbed, and the lips of many a woman trembled traitorously. An old man, apparently deaf, snatched at all and sundry by the sleeves, trying to find out what “these folk in capes” had said; people brushed the old man aside, some sullenly, some crossly.

A strained, unnatural laugh suddenly broke out over the crowd. “Here now, they made it up, didn’t they? It’s their little joke, right?” The man who was laughing received no support, and his laughter faded pitifully.

A crowd of students stood by the entrance to the university, right between the snake and the monkey. All eyes followed the dean, but he passed by without saying a word, walking through a path that had formed in the crowd, and the unvoiced questions of the youths were left unanswered. Egert and Toria followed after Luayan.

In the university courtyard they ran into Fox. He had installed himself on the shoulders of a sturdy youth, and, blowing out his cheeks so far they seemed about to explode, Gaetan assiduously blew into a tin trumpet and cried out dismally from time to time, “It approooooaches … Aaaaaaa…”

There came a day when another man sat down in the armchair of his teacher.

The boy had heard of Lart Legiar from Orlan many times, but his first encounter with the archmage, who appeared one day at the hut by the cliff, could have cost Luayan dearly because, immature and overconfident, he tried to test his skill against the unwelcome guest.

The vanity and pride of Luayan received a palpable blow on that day: he was forced to throw himself on the mercy of his opponent who was not only far stronger than a fourteen-year-old boy but also than many of the wisest, gray-haired mages. It was not in Lart’s nature to spare an opponent, however young he might be, but the boy capitulated and his reward was a long, initially oppressive, but subsequently fascinating conversation.

Toward the morning of a long night, the archmage Lart Legiar summoned the boy to him: it was a chance to change his fate, a chance to find a new teacher. Luayan did not miss this chance: he simply refused it. He refused it calmly and deliberately. He was not one of those who could easily exchange teachers even if being the pupil of Legiar would be an incredible honor.

Many times after he had grown up, Luayan had asked himself if it was worth it. Such fidelity to the grave of Orlan: did it cost him too dear? Abandoned at the age of fourteen in the company of wise but indifferent books, he had transformed himself into a mage, but he would never become an archmage.

The bitter taste lived within him for many years. Both to his face and behind his back, people called him “master mage,” “great magician,” and “archmage,” but not a one guessed that the already middle-aged Luayan had not progressed much in his magic from the time of his adolescence.

However, he had not wasted a single drop of the knowledge and power that he obtained under the steel wing of Orlan. He was entirely competent in the magical arts, even if he was far from the heights. He immersed himself in academia and became an unparalleled expert on history. However, two morbidly painful flames always smoldered in his soul. The first was Toria’s unhappy mother; the second was the vexing awareness of his own frustrated greatness.

Never before had he so greatly regretted those unachieved heights. Having closed the door of his study, he stood idle under the extended steel wing, trying to gather his thoughts. His reason calmly assured him that there was nothing to worry about: the wearers of the gray robes had always been fond of effects designed for spectators, and the end of time was nothing more than their most recent subterfuge, invoked to rivet the diminishing attentions of the city’s inhabitants on the Tower. Thus insisted his reason, but the presentiment of disaster strengthened, and the dean knew from experience that he should have faith in his presentiments.

He knew this feeling. It had come on especially keenly that night when he had let his dearly beloved and despised, bedeviling wife leave the house: he had let her go, insulted and piqued at her disdain, and she had met her death.

The wing stretched out over his head, commanding him to shun forbidden thoughts. He stood for a time in front of a tall cabinet. The cabinet was barred with both a lock and an enchantment, just to be on the safe side. Luayan breathed a sigh and removed both the lock and the enchantment.

A jasper casket rested on a black satin pillow; it was small, about the size of a snuffbox. The dean placed it on his palm then touched the lid, which surrendered without effort.

A medallion lay on the velvet bottom of the small chest: a delicate disk of pure gold on a gold chain. The dean was unaware that he held his breath as he put the faintly gleaming disk, covered with intricate, ornately carved recesses, on his palm. Nothing could be simpler, one would think, than to peer deep into these recesses, into rays of sunlight, but Luayan was pierced by trepidation at the mere thought of doing so. He was the guardian of this medallion, not its master.…

… When he met Lart Legiar for the second time, Luayan was a respected mage and the dean of the university.

At that time Luayan was already aware that the Third Power had vainly tried to force its way through the Doors of Creation, and that the Doorkeeper had refused to lift the bar and let it through. Whatever role Lart Legiar had played in this affair was hidden from the eyes of men, but the dean had flinched the first time he looked at his guest’s face. The great Legiar had aged, and his face was seamed with scars that had not been there before; one eye was blind and stared blankly past his host, but the other, which had escaped whatever disaster stole the first, was observant and slightly mocking.

“The world remains the same,” Legiar declared in lieu of a greeting.

“But it is we who change,” responded Luayan, trying to divine the intentions of his visitor.

They looked at each other for a long moment. A multitude of questions tormented Luayan: about the strange Third Power that wished to invade the world, about the fate of the Doorkeeper, and about Legiar’s own fate, but he remained silent because he knew that he did not have the right to ask.

“No,” Legiar sighed finally. “You have not changed. You’ve hardly changed at all.”

Luayan understood what his guest meant, but he smiled pleasantly, wishing to hide from the other’s pity.

“Well, the fewer archmages there are in this world and the less frequently they encounter one another, the easier it is for us ordinary mages to live.”

Legiar cast up his eyebrows in astonishment. “You’ve checked your arrogance? The last time we met, I was sure that would be impossible. Or are you acting against your soul’s inclination?”

“It is not given to all to be great,” Luayan observed dispassionately.

“But it was given to you,” objected Legiar.

They both fell silent.

Luayan frowned as he gazed steadily, with barely perceptible reproach, right into Legiar’s undamaged eye. “I remained Orlan’s student. I think he would have understood.”

The one-eyed man sneered. “‘He would have understood.…’ From that I take it that you think I don’t understand?”

It became quiet again. Legiar perused the densely packed shelves, studying the titles with interest. Luayan did not rush him; he waited patiently for the continuation of their conversation.

“You have done well.” Legiar turned back, blowing book dust from his fingers. “You have done well in your studies. But I have come to you, not as a scholar, not as a dean, and not even as a mage: I have come to you as the student of Orlan.”

Luayan gazed, without breaking away, at the intent, narrow pupil that was fixed on him. His guest’s dead eye was like a round piece of ice.

“As the student of Orlan, look.” On Legiar’s palm lay a gold disk with elaborate indentations in the center; a gold chain hung down between his fingers, and a bright yellow arc of light ran across the darkened ceiling.

“This is the Amulet of the Prophet,” Legiar resumed hollowly. “The strength of the Amulet is well known, but no one knows all its properties. Ever since its master, the Prophet Orwin, perished, it has been dormant. It must now search for a new master, a new prophet. The person who puts it on gains the ability to look into the future, but this can happen only if the medallion itself has chosen him. The medallion will simply kill the vainglorious or foolish man who tries to make use of it without the right to do so: gold knows no mercy. I cannot keep it with me; I am not its master. I cannot deliver it into the hands of any of the archmages, for then doubt, suspicion, and envy would gnaw at me until finally … The medallion does not belong in the hands of anyone who is not a mage, however, so what am I to do?”

Legiar narrowed his eyes: the sighted eye collapsed into a slit, but the dead one acquired a strange, almost crafty expression.

“I have brought the medallion to you, Luayan. You are the student of Orlan. Vanity and pride were alien to him. He was wise, far wiser than all who live today. He was only your mentor for a short while, but he is in you; he is, I see it. I would have brought the medallion to him, but he is dead, so you must take it. Treasure and preserve it.”

Luayan took the gold disk in the palm of his hand. The medallion seemed warm, like a living creature. “What should I do with it?”

Legiar smiled slightly. “Nothing. Hide it. Keep it safe. It selects its own master; don’t try to assist it. Glance at it every once in a while to see whether there is any rust on it. Yes, I know, it is gold, not iron. Rust on the Amulet augurs peril for the living world: thus did the First Prophet proclaim, and as Heaven has witnessed, the elder was right.” The corner of Legiar’s long mouth mournfully crooked down.

As he was leaving, he turned on the threshold.

“You see, I am old.… Many of us are now old and those who should have taken our places … did not. You are happy in your university. And somewhere yet another frustrated hope roams the earth: the former Doorkeeper; even I don’t know who or where he is now. Guard the medallion … and farewell.”

He left, and Luayan never saw him again, but his life’s work sprang from this memorable meeting: a history of the deeds of the archmages.

The medallion lay comfortably in his hand. The dean raised it to his eyes, inspecting it as closely as he could: there was no rust. Not a dot, not a speck. However, the presentiment of misfortune ripened and matured like an apple, like an abscess.

Half a week had passed by after the Tower’s declaration of the End of Time. Several times a day the Tower of Lash emitted its howl, which chilled the blood coursing through the veins of the city’s inhabitants; thick smoke reluctantly drifted up into the sky from the grilled windows of the Tower, but not a single robed man appeared on the streets of the city. The townspeople were tormented with anxiety.

The consumption of spirits increased tenfold in the city: the idea that intoxication expels unwelcome thoughts and blunts fear was, apparently, well known to men other than Egert Soll. Wives waited for their husbands in anxiety and alarm, and when their husbands returned home on all fours or creeping on their bellies, their first, slurred words were assurances that time would not end. The neighborhoods of craftsmen and merchants gradually fell under the sway of too much drink, while in the aristocratic areas of the city decorum reigned for the time being. Even there, however, one might encounter a tipsy lackey or a coachman who had gotten so drunk that he toppled from his perch. The high windows of the wealthy houses were thickly curtained, so who knows what really went on behind the cover of those curtains, so dense that they did not even let air through. Many of the inhabitants who had relatives in the villages and outskirts considered it best to pay them a long visit; all day carts and wagons loaded with household goods wheeled out of the city gates one after another.

The taverns flourished: the proprietors of alehouses and pubs passed off swill that had long been stagnating in barrels as first-class wine. But even though people drank nervously in the majority of such establishments, only wishing to drown out their fear, in the student tavern, the One-Eyed Fly, genuine and unconstrained merrymaking prevailed.

Fox was a colossal success: ten times a night he imitated first the hooded acolytes, then the Magister, then the dwarf with the trumpet; in Fox’s performance, the uncanny, prolonged sound that was emitted by this instrument was transformed into a noise of ridiculous lewdness. The students applauded, sprawled out on the benches. Only Egert did not take part in the general merriment.

Hunching, as usual, in a corner, barely able to squeeze his long legs underneath the bench, Egert scratched at the tabletop with the tip of a blunt knife. His lips moved soundlessly, repeating the word “yes” over and over, and the glass of wine that stood in front of him on the table remained almost untouched.

When the path has reached its bitter end. When that which is foremost in your soul becomes last. What, after all, was foremost in his soul? Could it be his perpetual terror? Then in order to dispose of the curse, he must first dispose of his fear, but this was a closed circle: so as not to be afraid, he just had to cease being afraid. But if there were something that stood before all else in his soul, and it was not fear, then what was it?

Egert sighed. He was going around in circles like a horse harnessed to a thresher; the key to his soul was either cowardice or his desire to get rid of it: no third option entered his head.

The long table teetered. Someone sat down next to him. Egert did not raise his head right away; it was probably one of his fellow students who had stepped away from the noisy crowd so that he could drink his wine or have a bite to eat in relative peace. Meanwhile, Fox renewed his prancing jokes. Laughter filled the tavern, but Egert distinguished a quiet snicker coming from the man next to him.

He turned his face and looked at his neighbor. At first glance this strong young man seemed completely unfamiliar to him, but already in the next second Egert, chilled, recognized Fagirra.

Fagirra was sitting in the student tavern. Never in all the times Egert had been there had a single one of the robed men come in. Fagirra was dressed modestly and simply, similarly to any of Egert’s comrades. Freed from the ominous hood, he seemed even younger than his years, perhaps even the same age as Egert. No one was paying Fagirra any special attention. Resembling the others, he casually took a sip of something from a large tankard and amiably glanced at the stupefied Egert. Egert could just see his tattoo peeking out from under his sleeve; that tattoo marked him as a professional blade master.

Egert could think of nothing better to do than to pick up his own glass and also take a sip. Fagirra smiled. “Good health, my friend. On the eve of great trials, I am especially pleased to see you in such good health.”

Egert murmured an inaudible greeting. Fox, who had gathered the entire company of students around the platform, was being far too successful in his mockery: the jokes, each more wicked than the last, were all aimed at the Order of Lash. The students were roaring with laughter.

Fagirra listened attentively, and the somewhat absentminded, benevolent expression disappeared from his face: thus does an elderly teacher attend to the incoherent answer of an indolent student, already counting the number of whippings that he will administer to the schoolboy. Egert was horrified.

“I see that all those hours spent studying do not add to the youths’ wisdom,” breathed Fagirra. “Meanwhile, the time is nigh.”

“Nigh?” The word burst out of Egert, and he panicked immediately. “I mean to say … when…”

Once again, Fagirra smiled softly. “We know when. But this knowledge is intended for those who are with us. Are you with us, Egert?”

He felt a sudden, inexpressible desire to say yes. Not just to appease Fagirra, though he did desire that as well, but because a wild thought flashed through his head. What if this answer proves to be the first in a series of five? What if the Wanderer’s puzzle was connected with the Order of Lash?

“Well, Egert?” Fagirra sighed reproachfully. “Are you hesitating? On the eve of the End of Time, are you wavering?”

Fox had wrapped himself up in a tablecloth. He had fashioned a hood from its edge and was now pacing about the tavern, dismally nodding his head and occasionally mournfully raising his eyes to the soot-stained ceiling. Egert remained silent.

Fagirra shrugged his shoulders as if to say “what a pity.” With a blindingly quick movement, imperceptible to any onlookers, he placed his hand against Egert’s ribs. “Keep your seat, Egert. Hold still, for Heaven’s sake. Be calm.”

Egert tilted his eyes to the side. A slender, elegant stiletto with a tiny, dark drop of some unknown substance glistening on its very tip pressed gently into his side.

Egert could not remember the last time he had been seized by such utter, instinctual terror. The only reason he did not leap up with a howl was that his legs and arms quickly refused to serve him.

“This is not an instantaneous death,” said Fagirra in the same soft, calming tone. “It is lingering, Egert, lingering and hmm … unpleasant, yes? A single prick is sufficient, and the wound will not be large. Do I make myself clear?”

Egert sat still; he was as pale as sun-bleached bone. His blood pumped loudly in his ears.

“Now, pay attention, Egert. Were you with the dean when he heard of the End of Time?”

Egert’s throat had dried up; he could only nod.

“Good. What did Master Luayan say; what did he do?”

Horrified at himself, Egert squeezed out, “He left. He went to his study.”

“And what did he do in his study?”

Egert’s heart suddenly felt lighter: he realized that he did not know anything about this.

“What did he do in his study, Egert?”

Students were dancing around the room; Fox was twirling the pretty Farri, and in the midst of this lighthearted carousal both the murmuring voice of Fagirra and the drop of poison at the end of his elegant stiletto seemed utterly improbable.

“I don’t know,” whispered Egert. “I did not see.”

“You were asked to watch and listen, don’t you remember?” The tip of the stiletto was touching his shirt.

“No one saw. It would have been impossible. He locked the door.”

Fagirra sighed dejectedly. “That’s bad, very bad. But it reminds me: Did Master Luayan ever open his safe in front of you? Is it secured with a lock or with an enchantment?”

Egert’s memory traitorously presented him with a picture of the dean approaching one of the locked cabinets.

“With a lock,” he moaned, in order to have something to say.

“What’s inside? Did you see?”

None of the frolicking youths noticed either the stiletto or Egert’s pallor. Fox announced loud enough for all to hear that the time was approaching, the time when he would have to answer the call of nature. He left.

“No,” Egert gasped. “I don’t know.”

Fagirra suddenly stopped smiling: his face transformed from affectionate to rigid and cruel, like the executioner’s block. “Don’t you dare lie. Be very careful how you answer me: Is the dean planning to take any action in anticipation of the End?”

The heavy outer door flew against the wall with a crash. The scholarly youths all turned toward it in surprise.

First a foot in a jackboot stained with filth barged into the tavern, followed by an enormous gilded sword hilt, and then the rest of Lord Karver Ott entered; behind him tramped in two swords of ominous size, attached to two guards: Bonifor and the nameless one with the tiny mustache.

The One-Eyed Fly had not seen such visitors in quite a long time. All the drinkers eyed them silently, as if trying to determine what they were. Even Fagirra interrupted his interrogation and frowned at them.

Karver examined the students with round, slightly cloudy eyes: the newly minted lieutenant was drunk; however, neither Egert, hunched over in the dark corner, nor Fagirra, sitting very close to him, escaped the notice of his gaze.

“Ah!” exclaimed Karver loudly and joyfully. “Is this your lady friend?”

Everyone was silent; stomping his boots and dragging his heels with each step, Karver walked through the tavern and stopped opposite Egert and Fagirra, whose stiletto was concealed from the others’ eyes behind the massive table.

“There’s something I don’t quite understand,” drawled Karver thoughtfully, switching his gaze from Egert to Fagirra and back again. “Just who is whose girlfriend, eh? Bonifor”—he glanced back at his associate—“take a look at this: They’re sitting here like doves, snuggling up against each other.” He hiccuped and then continued, turning to his second companion, who in this way finally gained a name, “Dirk, make sure to keep an eye on that one. We wouldn’t want to make a widow out of Egert’s girlfriend, now, would we?”

Egert felt the poisoned blade reluctantly move away, and he breathed more freely.

“Hey, swordsmen!” The students had gathered in a dense mass, and the looks they were directing at the newcomers were far from affectionate. “Have you lost something? Do you need help finding it?”

Karver nodded to the unarmed youths and casually spit on the well-used wooden floor. The spittle unfortunately landed on the boot of the mustachioed Dirk; he hurriedly wiped off his offended boot with the side of the other. His spur clanked.

“Get up, Egert,” suggested Bonifor cordially. “Say good night to your sweetheart. It’s time to go.”

Glancing to the side, Egert saw that the venomous barb of the stiletto was concealed in a tiny iron sheath attached to Fagirra’s bootleg. He could have passionately kissed all of them: Karver, Bonifor, and the mustachioed Dirk.

Karver, in the meantime, had stepped forward, and his hand adamantly seized Egert by the collar; some confusion followed because both Dirk and Bonifor simultaneously tried to carry out the exact same action. Fagirra stood up leisurely and retreated to the side.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” several voices yelled in admonishment. The compact group of students surged forward, and the learned youths surrounded the guards and Egert.

“Egert, what’s this about?”

“Oh, their buttons are so shiny! Let’s pluck them off, yeah?”

“Would you look at that, three on one, and they’re still baring their teeth!”

“Give Egert a pair of knives, let him throw them. Their buttons will fall off all on their own.”

Karver smirked scornfully and put his hand on his sword hilt; the wall of students moved slightly, but the scholarly youths did not disperse.

Just then Fox, having answered the call of nature, returned to the tavern in high spirits. Pushing his way through the crowd of his comrades and sweeping his eyes over the three armed newcomers who were looming over a very pallid Egert, Gaetan instantly assessed the situation.

“Papa!” he yelped, flinging himself on Karver’s neck.

Confusion reigned again. Dirk and Bonifor spun away from Egert and gaped in shock at the redheaded lad who was blubbering on the chest of their lieutenant.

“Daddy, why did you forsake Mama!”

Giggles could be heard in the mass of students. Karver was furiously trying to tear Fox’s hands away from his ribbons and epaulets.

“You … You…,” he snorted, unable to add anything further.

Fox wrapped his arms and legs around Karver, who was barely able to keep his feet under him. Gaetan gently clasped his ear and said in a theatrical whisper, “Do you remember how you dragged my mama to a hayloft?”

“Get him off me!” Karver snapped at his companions.

Fox emitted a distressed howl. “What! Are you denying it?” Leaping off the lieutenant, he fixed him with round, shocked, honey-colored eyes. “You’re renouncing your own son? Well, look at me: I might as well be a copy of you! We have the same disgusting snouts!”

The students were falling over themselves with laughter, and even Egert smiled wanly. Dirk was looking around nervously, and Bonifor’s bloodshot eyes darted around the room ever more rapidly.

Suddenly, as if stricken with a thought, Fox screwed up his face suspiciously. “But maybe … Maybe you don’t know how to make babies, after all!”

Finally getting his bearings, Karver drew his sword. The students sprang back, all except for Fox who, with a mournful expression, took a pepper pot from the table and, with a quick toss, emptied it into the lieutenant’s face.

The owner, the cook, and the servants all jumped out of their skins at the wild howl; gasping and coughing, Karver fell down onto the floor, trying to scratch out his own eyes. Dirk and Bonifor both seized their weapons, but their heads were bombarded from all sides by stools, beer mugs, and any cutlery that fell into the furious hands of the students. Showered with taunts and insults, climbing over a mountain of capsized furniture, futilely swinging their blades and promising to return, the gentlemen of the guards disgracefully retired from the field of battle.

On the following day, Toria climbed up her stepladder, peered into the lecture hall through the small round window, and did not see Egert Soll among the students.

Having run her eyes over the rows of students more than once, Toria frowned. The absence of Egert piqued her: after all, her father was on the rostrum! Climbing down, she thought for some time while observing the free and easy games of the library’s mouser; then, feeling querulous, she set off for the annex.

She perfectly remembered the way to this room even though Dinar had not been fond of her visiting there: undoubtedly he was ashamed of the small room. She visited just the same and perched on the edge of his desk while the poor fellow scurried about, gathering up stray items and wiping the dust off the windowsill with his palm.…

Calling Dinar to mind, Toria sighed. She walked up to the familiar door, suddenly unsure of herself. All was quiet beyond the door, and it seemed likely to her that there was no one in the room. How stupid I look, thought Toria, and knocking once, she entered.

Egert was sitting at the desk, his head gravely lowered; Toria noted in passing the sheet of paper lying in front of him and the quill stained with ink. Turning his head around to greet his guest, Egert flinched; the inkpot, grazed by his hand, teetered and overturned.

For a minute or two they were distracted by silently and intently wiping up puddles of ink from the tabletop and floor. Toria’s gaze involuntarily fell on the pages, full of writing, much of it crossed out, and without even realizing what she was doing, she read in Egert’s bloated, clumsy handwriting: and then we shall manage to remember all, and all that was … She hastened to avert her gaze; noticing this, Egert smiled wearily.

“I’ve never been one for writing letters.”

“There is a lecture now,” she remarked dryly.

“Yes,” Egert sighed, “but I really need, especially today, to write a letter to … to a certain woman.”

The autumn wind gathered strength beyond the windows; it howled and slammed into the loose shutters. Toria suddenly realized that it was damp in the room and chilly, and almost completely dark.

Egert turned away from her “Yes. I finally decided to write to my mother.”

The wind tossed a fallen maple leaf—yellow as the sun—against the window; sticking there for a second, the yellow leaf tore away and flew farther on, dancing playfully in the wind.

“I didn’t know that you had a mother,” said Toria quietly and almost immediately became confused. “That is, I didn’t know she was alive.”

Egert cast his eyes to the ground. “Yes.”

“That’s good,” mumbled Toria, unable to think of anything better to say.

Egert smiled, but the smile came out bitter. “Yes. The thing is, I am not a very good son. That’s for sure.”

Beyond the window the wind gusted particularly strenuously. A draft swirled through the room, proprietarily rustling through the papers on the desk.

“Somehow it seems to me…” Toria unexpectedly found herself speaking. “It seems to me that a son, even one who has gotten into trouble, would be loved regardless. Perhaps even more intensely…”

Egert glanced up at her quickly, and his face brightened. “Really?”

For some unknown reason Toria recalled a young boy, a stranger to her, weeping over a dead sparrow: she was fourteen years old, and she went up to him and explained in all seriousness that the bird needed to be left alone, for only then would the Sparrow King appear and bring his loyal subject back to life. Widening his tear-filled eyes, the little boy had asked her then with that same abrupt, sincere hope, “Really?”

Toria smiled at her recollection. “Really.”

Rain started drumming against the hazy window.

Whenever Toria returned home with yet another hole in her stockings, her mother, silently shaking her head, took her wooden needlework box down from a shelf. Toria peered covetously into its mysterious depths: there among a tangle of wool and silk thread, brilliantly lustrous pearl buttons gleamed at her like eyes. Her mother extracted a needle from the box and set to work, occasionally biting off a thread with her sharp, white teeth. Soon in the place where the misshapen little hole had been, a red bug with black spots appeared; after several weeks had passed, Toria’s new stockings were always embroidered with an entire swarm of red bugs, both small and large. She liked to imagine that they would come alive and crawl over her knees, tickling her with their little feelers.

And if her mother were still alive? What if her father had not let her go, what if he had locked her up, locked the door and fastened it with an enchantment?

Father and daughter had lived together for many years, and in all that time she could not remember a single other woman with him. Not one.

The Tower of Lash launched into its mournful howl. Toria winced peevishly and in the same breath frowned, seeing how Egert’s face changed. It must be difficult to live in constant fear.

“It’s nothing,” she said briskly. “Don’t listen to it. Don’t listen. Only undertakers believe in this nonsense about the end of time: they’re hoping to make some money.” She smiled at her awkward joke, but Egert did not stop frowning. A painful-looking fold loomed between his eyebrows.

The sound came again, even more plaintive, with a hysterical sob at the end. Toria saw that Egert’s lips were starting to quiver; flinching, he hastily turned his back to her. Egert silently tried to compose himself, and Toria, who was also uncomfortable, had to witness this mute struggle.

For a long moment she considered if she should tactfully retire or if, on the contrary, it would be best to pretend that nothing was happening. The Tower finally fell silent, but Egert was overcome with the shakes and had to hold his twitching jaw with his hand to still it. Without saying a word, Toria went out into the corridor, filled an iron mug from the water fountain, and brought it to Egert.

He gulped it down and started choking. His pale face became engorged with blood; tears welled up in his eyes. Desiring to help, Toria clapped him on the back one or two times. His shirt was as damp as if it had just been pulled out of a laundry basin.

“Everything will be all right,” she mumbled, suddenly overcome with shyness. “Listen to me: There won’t be an ‘end of time.’ Don’t be afraid.”

Then he drew a deep breath and suddenly told her everything: he told her about Fagirra, about the Magister, about the ceremony in the Tower, about their promises and threats and about his secret errand. Toria heard him out without interjecting a single word, but when he got to the last encounter with the disguised acolyte, Egert fell silent.

“That’s all?” Toria looked him in the eyes.

“That’s all.” He averted his eyes.

A few moments passed in silence.

“You don’t trust me?” Toria asked softly.

He laughed: it was a strange question after all that had been said!

“Tell me, right to the end.” Toria drew her eyebrows down.

So he told her about the poisoned stiletto.

The ensuing silence lasted for about ten minutes.

Finally, Toria raised her head. “So, you didn’t tell him anything?”

“I don’t know anything,” Egert explained wearily. “But if I had known, I would have reported it all to that dear soul.”

“No!” said Toria as though she was shocked at the very possibility of such an idea. “No, you wouldn’t have told him.…” But at the end her voice lost its confidence.

“You yourself have seen what I’ve become,” uttered Egert peevishly. “I am no longer myself. I’m a wretched, cowardly animal.”

“But can’t you … try to overcome it?” asked Toria cautiously. “Try to keep yourself from being afraid?”

“Try to keep yourself from blinking,” Egert suggested, shrugging.

Toria tried. For some time she heartily looked out the window with wide-open eyes as if she were engaged in a staring contest, but then her eyelids twitched and, ignoring the command of her reason, fluttered.

“There you have it.” Egert’s gaze was fixed on the floor. “I am a slave. I’m a total slave to the curse. All I think about is what is first in my soul, and what is last, and who will question me five times, so that I might answer ‘yes’ five times.”

Toria rubbed her temple, exactly like her father. “I cannot believe it. What if you were forced to do something completely impossible? Wouldn’t you be able to resist?”

Egert smiled crookedly. “If I had a knife at my throat…”

“But really you … you’re not a bad man…,” she muttered without confidence.

He was silent. An enormous, impudent raven was strutting ceremoniously through the wet university courtyard like a judge.

Egert exhaled deeply, seeing a scaffold in his mind’s eye. Stuttering, he told her about the girl in the carriage and the highwaymen who had intercepted that carriage on the road.

Another long silence followed. Egert expected Toria to simply get to her feet and leave, but she did not.

“And if,” she asked finally, her voice unsteady, “if it had been … there … if that had been me?”

Egert buried his face in his hands.

For a long time Toria looked at the unkempt, disordered waves of his blond hair, at his shoulders, impressively wide but hunched and shaking like a child’s; then she rested her narrow palm on one of them.

Egert froze.

As persuasively as she could, Toria said, “You are not responsible for the deeds of others. You are simply ill and you need to find a cure. And we will find it.”

She spoke reluctantly, like a doctor assuring a patient who is near death and covered in sores of his imminent recovery. The tense shoulder shuddered under her hand as if it was relaxing slightly; the change was barely perceptible, but in the next moment she sensed all the confusion of Egert’s feelings: hope, gratitude, and the desire to believe. Then, still holding her hand against his warm shoulder, she wished with suddenly awakened compassion that her belabored words would prove to be true.

The door swung open with a crash. Holding a pair of dilapidated notebooks at his side, Fox, grinning widely, burst into the room.

His honey-colored eyes dwelled on Egert who sat, hanging his head, on the edge of the bed and on Toria whose hand was resting on his shoulder. For several moments nothing happened, and then in an instant Gaetan’s angular face was pierced with surprise: his eyes became as round as plums, his mouth swept open in a round hole, and muttering an indistinct apology, Fox leapt away without even trying to pick up his books, which had crashed to the floor.

Toria did not remove her hand. Waiting until the Gaetan’s clatter faded in the corridor, she said earnestly, “This is what I think. The curse will be broken if you fall into a hopeless situation and yet somehow overcome it. When the path has been reached its bitter end: don’t you think the Wanderer was speaking of this?”

Egert did not answer.

After a few days the rain changed into clear, fair weather. Squinting in the cool autumn sunlight, the townspeople were somewhat cheered. “Time is not even thinking of ending,” said neighbors to each other, stepping out onto their little porches in the morning, “On the contrary, time is on the loose.…”

The Tower of Lash loomed over the square like an admonitory finger: it even seemed that it had recently shriveled and dried up just like a geriatric digit. It was as if a bald spot had appeared in the square around the Tower: everyone tried to travel around the sinister building, all the more so since smoke rose from the windows ever thicker, the dismal sound rang out ever more often, and passersby who happened to be in the square late at night assured their acquaintances that they heard a dull, subterranean rumble rising up from its depths.

The city authorities were silent and apparently had no plans regarding the Order of Lash. Among the students it was considered good form to address witty remarks and taunts to the Order of Lash: Fox recalled for this purpose his old, foolish nanny, who had frightened four of the apothecary’s sons in sequence with one and the same bogeyman, and yet none of them were ever devoured by him. Lessons continued as if nothing had happened, and only a few bewildered youths, using various excuses, left the university for home.

“Father is worried,” Toria said one day.

They were sitting in the library late one evening. A single candle was guttering on the book cart.

“He tries not to give that impression, but I know him. Lash alarms him.”

The candle was dissolving into droplets of wax.

“Lash,” Egert repeated, barely audibly. “That time, in Kavarren … You were searching for manuscripts. Didn’t you say that the Order of Lash was founded by some lunatic mage?”

“The Sacred Spirit,” whispered Toria. “It is said that that mage became the Sacred Spirit after his death. But it is an absolute mystery. Father asked Dinar to research him, but we found nothing, absolutely nothing. An abyss of time has passed since he died. All the manuscripts that concern the history of Lash have either been lost or ruined, as if someone intentionally destroyed them.”

“They speak of a secret.” Egert smiled bleakly. “They are quite capable of keeping it.”

Toria was silent for a moment. Then she confided reluctantly, “They importuned my father. They offered … I don’t know what they offered. Cooperation? Money? Power? But he was always dismissive of them. And now he is worried. He is expecting … Even he doesn’t know what he is expecting.”

Egert was amazed. “Really? But mages can comprehend, I mean, they should be able to access any secret, even the future, shouldn’t they?”

It seemed to Toria that there was doubt of her father’s magical ability in these words. Nettled, she jerked up her head. “What do you know! Yes, my father sees many things that we would not be able to understand, but he is not a prophet!”

Egert thought it might be best to hold his peace. He did not want to get into an argument and besides, he did not like to display his ignorance. Toria regretted her outburst and apologetically muttered, “You see, the future is open to Prophets. They are mages who have a special gift, and they are also the masters of the Amulet. The Amulet came into the world at the hands of the very first Prophet, and ever since it has passed from master to disciple.” Toria had become agitated and could not find the proper words.

“From father to son?” asked Egert avidly.

“No. The Prophets are not connected by ties of blood. There can be only one Prophet in the world at a time. When he dies, the Amulet itself searches for his successor. Objects also have the ability to search, and the Amulet is much more than a mere object. It is unimaginably ancient. Truthfully speaking, I don’t even know what sort of object it is.” Toria drew a breath.

Egert raised his head; books gazed at him from the shelves, and it seemed to him that a wind from this lurking depository of magic touched his face. He had wanted desperately to speak with Toria about the world of magicians for so long now, and it suddenly seemed all the more risky to scare off this usually forbidden yet terribly interesting topic. He asked cautiously, “So, where is the Prophet right now? The man who carries the Amulet, where is he right now, this second?”

Toria frowned. “There is no Prophet right now. The last one died about fifty years ago, and since then…” She sighed. “That’s how it is. The new Prophet probably hasn’t even been born yet.”

Egert was silent for a moment, not knowing if he had the right to question her further; curiosity, however, proved to be stronger than apprehension and so, just as cautiously, he asked, “And what then does this Amulet do in the meantime? Is it traveling or waiting or hiding from people?”

“It is lying in my father’s safe,” Toria blurted out and in the same breath bit her tongue.

A minute or two passed by. Egert stared at the girl with round, deeply horrified eyes. “Why did you tell me that?”

Toria understood quite well that she had made a mistake, but she attempted to bring the conversation back to idle chatter. “And what of it, really?” she asked, nervously smoothing the folds of her skirt against her knees. “It’s not like you’re planning to announce it to one and all, now, is it?”

Egert turned away. Toria understood full well what he meant, and he knew that she understood.

Adjusting the blazing logs in the fireplace with a poker, Dean Luayan examined them both from the corner of his eye.

Toria’s resemblance to her deceased mother frightened him at times: he was afraid that along with her beauty, the exquisite beauty of a marble statue, Toria might also have inherited the tragic instability and cruel luck of her mother. When he consented to the marriage of his daughter to Dinar, he had sincerely hoped that everything would be different for Toria, but the disaster that followed dispelled his hopes. Toria was far too like her mother to be happy. The dean’s heart contracted whenever he saw that proud, perpetually solitary figure, dressed eternally in black, haunting the twilight of the library.

Now Toria was sitting on a low stool, her knees gathered up under her chin, bristling like a wet sparrow, vexed at her own foolishness: She had said too much, and she was no talker! Her face, even with a grimace of annoyance, was delicate and feminine, and the dean suddenly realized that the changes he had been noticing in his daughter recently were gaining strength.

Egert stood next to her, almost touching her shoulder with his hand, but not quite; Toria had not allowed even Dinar, who had been her fiancé, to stand so close to her. After his death everything had become worse: perpetually shrouded in the transparent shell of her own grief, of her own mysterious internal life, the severe daughter of Luayan had scared off other young people, even from afar. They scattered like a pile of autumn leaves in her wake, taking her detachment and alienation for contempt and pride. Now the murderer of Dinar was standing next to her, and Luayan, peeking over his shoulder at the two of them, was astonished to observe in his daughter an abundance of small, previously inconceivable changes.

She had become more feminine. She had certainly become more feminine, and the lines of her beautiful lips were softer, even now when she was scowling. She seemed profoundly aware that Egert was standing next to her, a man she would have gladly destroyed not all that long ago!

Having caught fire, the dry logs crackled. The dean forced himself to reenter the conversation.

“It’s all my fault,” said Toria in a penitential voice. “Curse my tongue!”

The dean cast a sidelong, censorious glance at her. “Be wary of curses.” Then, having contemplated his next action for a moment, he walked up to one of the tall cabinets and unlocked the door.

“Father…” Toria’s voice faltered.

The dean extracted the jade casket from the safe, flicked open the lid, and took from the black satin pillow an object that quietly jingled on a yellow chain. “Here it is, Egert. Take a look; it’s all right.”

A gold disk with ornate fissures in the center lay on his palm: a medallion on a chain.

“This is the Amulet of the Prophet, an inconceivably valuable object, hidden in secret.”

“You can’t let me leave this room,” said Egert in horror. “I could tell them everything.”

The dean caught the compassionate glance that Toria directed at Egert, thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “It is within my power to make you forget what you have seen. Just as your friend Gaetan forgot about a certain event, to which he was a chance witness. It’s possible, but I will not do it, Egert. You must walk your path until the bitter end. Fight for your liberty.” The dean leaned toward the medallion with these last words, as if invoking it.

“But what if the Order finds out about it?” Toria’s voice was high.

“I do not fear Lash,” replied the dean vaguely.

The flames in the fireplace blazed up even more vigorously, and the medallion in Luayan’s palm cast spots of light onto the ceiling.

“It is completely faultless,” said the dean in an undertone. Both Egert and Toria looked at him in wonder.

“What?”

“It’s clean,” explained the dean. “The gold does not have a spot of rust. Not a speck. If we really were on the eve of great ordeal, then … It senses danger threatening the world, and it rusts as an indicator. So it was half a century ago when the Third Power stood at the Doors. I was a young boy then, but I remember that forebodings tormented me, and the medallion, so they say, was completely covered in rust. Now it is clean, as though there were no threat. But somehow I know that this is not so!” Swallowing a bitter taste that burst forth in his mouth, the dean returned the medallion to the safe in utter silence.

“Do you think Lash is the threat?” Toria asked in a whisper.

The dean tossed another log into the fireplace. Egert jumped back to avoid the scattering sparks.

“I don’t know,” the dean confessed unwillingly. “The Order of Lash undoubtedly has some sort of connection to it, but the thing that threatens us the most, that is something else entirely. Or someone else entirely.”

Winter arrived in the space of a single night.

Upon awaking in the early morning, Egert saw that the gray, damp ceiling of the cramped room had turned as white and frosted as the hem of a wedding gown. Neither the wind, nor footsteps, nor the clamor of wheels could be heard from the square: snow was drifting down to earth in solemn silence.

According to tradition, all lectures were canceled on the day of the first snow. When he learned of this custom, Egert rejoiced far more than he would have otherwise.

Merriment was soon in full swing in the university courtyard. Under the leadership of Fox, the peaceful student body suddenly transformed into a horde of soldiers. A dazzlingly white snow fort was hastily constructed and soon snow battles were raging. Egert entered into the melee with pleasure.

Before long, however, the battle somehow devolved into a fight of the one against the many, with Egert taking the role of lone defender against the horde of students, like some hero of antiquity; it seemed he did not have two hands, but ten, and every snowball he threw hit its mark, dusting an opponent’s flushed face with crumbs of snow. Attacked from all sides, he dived under hostile missiles and they collided over his head, sprinkling his fair hair with snow. Despairing of striking a moving target, especially one that moved the way Egert did, his opponents were about to engage in hand-to-hand combat, planning to tumble their invincible adversary into a snowbank, when Egert suddenly noticed that Toria was observing the skirmish.

Fox and his comrades immediately faded into the background; Toria leisurely bent down, scooped up some snow, and rolled it into a ball. Then, swinging her arm back, she threw it and hit Egert in the forehead.

He walked over to her, wiping slush from his face. Toria looked at his wet face seriously, without the slightest shadow of a smile.

“Today is the first snow. I want to show you something.” Without saying another word, she turned around and walked away. Egert moved off after her, as if he were tethered to her with a leash.

Snow lay everywhere. It covered the university steps, and it had settled on the heads of the iron snake and wooden monkey, creating two large, wintery snowcaps.

“Is it in the city?” Egert asked worriedly. “I wouldn’t want to run into Fagirra.”

“Do you really think he’d come anywhere near you when I’m around?” Toria smiled.

The city was submerged in silence; instead of the thunder of carts, sleighs crept noiselessly through the streets, and the wide tracks left by their runners seemed as brittle as porcelain. Snow tumbled and fell, covering the shoulders of pedestrians, speckling astonished black dogs with white, concealing all refuse and dirt from the eyes.

“The first snow,” said Egert. “It’s a pity that it will melt.”

“Not at all,” replied Toria. “Every thaw is like a short spring. It’d best thaw, or else…”

She wanted to say that the smooth surface of the snow reminded her of the pure, white shrouds used to cover the dead, but she did not. She did not want Egert to think that she was always so gloomy. Winter really was beautiful: it was not to blame for the fact that it was possible to freeze to death in a snowbank, just like her mother.

Red-breasted robins with white snowflakes on their backs were sitting on girders attached to walls, looking like the guards in their bright uniforms; and presently the guards themselves strolled by, with their tall pikes and their red-and-white uniforms, shivering just like the robins.

“Are you cold?” asked Egert.

She tucked her hands deeper into her old muff. “No. Are you?”

He was not wearing a hat. The snow fell right on his hair and did not melt. “I never get cold. My father raised me as a soldier, and soldiers must be able to endure anything, not least of all cold.” Egert grinned.

They passed through the city gates; the wet snow formed grinning jaws on the serpents and dragons that were welded there. Sleds were sweeping along the road. Toria turned confidently and led Egert to the very shore of the river.

Just like frosted glass, the surface of the water was covered in a skin of ice, thick and dull by the shores, thin and latticed toward the center. A narrow stream remained free in the middle; it ran dark and smooth, and on the very edge of the ice stood an unkindness of black ravens, strutting about and displaying their magnificence.

“We’ll walk along the riverbank,” said Toria. “Look around; there should be a footpath.”

The footpath was buried under the snow. Egert walked in front and Toria tried to place her light shoes in the deep tracks of his boots. Thus they walked for quite a long time. The snow finally stopped falling, and the sun began to peek through jagged holes in the clouds.

Toria squinted, blinded: how white, how sparkling the world suddenly seemed! Egert turned his face back to her. Snowflakes gleamed brightly in his hair.

“Is it much farther?”

She smiled, almost not understanding the question. At that moment words seemed to her like an unnecessary addition to the snowy, sun-drenched splendor of this extraordinary day.

Egert understood, and hesitantly, as if asking for permission, he smiled in answer.

They walked on side by side: the footpath had emerged onto a hill where the snow was no longer so deep. Toria held one hand in the warm depths of her muff, and the other leaned on the arm of her companion. Egert pressed his elbow firmly to his side so that her hand, sheltered in the folds of his sleeve, would not freeze.

They paused for a short while, looking back at the river and the city. Wisps of smoke stood over the city walls in dove-colored columns.

“I’ve never been here,” admitted Egert in wonder. “It’s so beautiful.”

Toria smiled briefly. “It is a memorable place. There is an old graveyard here. After the Black Plague, they buried everyone who had died here, in one pit. It is said that the hill became three times taller from all the dead bodies. Since then this place has been considered special: some say it is blessed; some say it is cursed. Children sometimes leave a lock of their hair on the summit so that a wish will come true. Sorcerers from the villages come here in pilgrimage. But in general…” Toria faltered. “Father does not like this place. He says … But what have we to be afraid of? It’s such beautiful white day.”

They stood on the summit of the hill for almost an hour and Toria, pointing with her frozen hand first at the river, then at a snow-covered ribbon of road, then at the close gray horizon, spoke of the centuries that had passed over the earth; of the belligerent hordes that had descended on the city all at once from three sides; of the deep moat, of which now only a small furrow, invisible under the snow, remained; of the unassailable defenses, erected at the cost of many lives. The hill, upon which Egert and Toria were now standing, was a remainder of a fortification that had been worn away by time. Egert, listening attentively, suggested that the enemy hordes were all cavalry, and furthermore that they were extremely numerous.

“How do you know that?” wondered Toria. “Did you read it?”

Egert, ducking his head, confessed his complete and utter ignorance: no, he had not read it, but from the placement of the defenses, as Toria had described them, it should be clear to anyone that they were not built to defend against foot soldiers, but against a vast quantity of mounted enemies.

For some time Toria was silent, wondering. Egert stood next to her, also silent, and their long blue shadows merged on the lustrous mantle of snow.

“If you watch the horizon for a while,” Toria suddenly said quietly, “if you do not take your eyes from it for a very long time, then you begin to imagine that the sea is beneath us. The blue sea surges beneath us, and we are standing on the shore, on a cliff.…”

Egert started. “Have you seen the sea?”

Toria began to laugh merrily. “Oh, yes. I was quite young, but I remember it well. I was—” She suddenly became sad and lowered her eyes. “—I was eight years old. My father and I traveled all over the world so as not to grieve too hard over Mama.”

The wind swept over the snow, picked up a handful of scintillating white powder, and played with it, strewing it about before letting it drop and moving on to pick up another handful. Egert did not know if his distressing ability to sense others’ pain had returned or not, but the instantaneous desire to protect and comfort Toria deprived him of both his reason and his reticence: Toria’s shoulders drooped, and then for the first time his hands dared to sink down onto them.

She was a head shorter than him. Next to him she seemed like an adolescent, almost a child; through her warm shawl and thin coat he felt how her narrow shoulders flinched under his touch and then froze. Then, desiring for all he was worth to console her and yet mortally afraid of offending her, he cautiously drew Toria toward himself.

Their blue shadows paused on the snow, merged into one; both were afraid to move, lest they startle the other. The city beyond the walls remained impassive, and the frozen river gleamed coldly. Only the wind showed any sign of impatience; it hovered like a dog around their legs, foundered in the hem of Toria’s skirt, and sprinkled Egert’s boots with sprays of snow.

“You will see the sea,” said Toria in a whisper.

Egert was silent. He had known scores of different women in his brief life so far, but he suddenly felt himself inexperienced, a clueless boy, a silly puppy: thus does the apprentice of a jeweler tout his own skill while polishing glass, and thus does he sweat from fear the first time he receives in his hand a precious stone of unheard-of rarity.

“On the shore of the southern sea there is never any snow. There is warm sand there, and white surf.…” Toria spoke as if in a dream.

Glorious Heaven, he was afraid to let go of her; he was afraid that all this was an illusion; he was so afraid to lose her. And truly, he had no right to her. Can you really lose that which does not belong to you? And did not the shadow of Dinar stand between them?

Toria shivered, as if sensing his thought, but she did not move away.

Over their heads the cloud patterns changed, twisted, their sides burned by the sun like loaves in an oven. Hearing how Egert’s distraught heart beat under his jacket, Toria, with almost superstitious horror, suddenly realized that she was happy. She very rarely managed to catch herself in this feeling; her nostrils flared, breathing in the smell of the snow, the fresh wind, and Egert’s skin, and they wanted to raise her up on her toes so that they could reach Egert’s face.

She had never caught the scent of Dinar. It was unthinkable, but she had no memory of how his heart beat. Embracing him, she had experienced a companionable tenderness, but what was that childish fondness compared to this delightful stupor, when the very thought of moving was terrible, when she hardly dared to breathe?

What is this? she thought, panicking. Betrayal? Betrayal of the memory of Dinar?

Their dark blue shadow slowly crawled across the snow like the hand of an enormous clock. A snowflake, round and flat as a grindstone, settled on Egert’s shoulder right in front of Toria’s nose. The sun hid behind a cloud, and the shadow on the snow faded.

“We should go,” whispered Toria. “We need to—I promised to show you.”

They descended the slope in silence. The river here was twisting, skirting around a small spit of land that resembled a peninsula. The earth here apparently found tall pine trees entirely to its liking: they grew in great, massed circles, and their boughs, weighed down with snow, looked like old, sagging mustaches.

They walked, wending their way through tree trunks, now and again brushing the snow from a branch: then the magnificent boughs, liberated, would rush upward, violating the consistency of the winter landscape. Finally Toria stopped and glanced back at Egert as if inviting him to look.

Right in front of them towered a stone structure, like the remnant of an ancient foundation, covered with snow. Yellow, porous stone intertwined with gray, smooth stone: Egert had never before seen anything like it. Most extraordinary was the stunted, thin-trunked tree, which was clinging to the stonework by its roots as if growing right out of the stone. Even though it was the middle of winter, the tree remained green; not a single snowflake fell on the narrow leaves, and here and there between them, round petals glowed a pale red, seeming unreal, as if they had been cut from cloth. But they were real: Egert assured himself of this when he touched one and it left a small amount of black pollen on the tip of his finger.

“This is a tomb,” said Toria, trying to conceal the storm raging in her soul behind a businesslike tone. “It’s several thousand years old. An ancient mage rests here, perhaps the First Prophet himself. But then again, perhaps not. This tree blossoms year-round, but never bears even a single fruit. It is rumored that it too is several millennia old. It’s miraculous, isn’t it?”

The magical tree was not more miraculous than the strange connection that was now invisibly growing between Toria and Egert. He wanted to ask her about it, but he did not. They both stood, gazing at the ancient sepulcher, which in turn was a witness to their silence. The snow-covered pine trees also remained silent: austerely, but without condemnation.

Dusk was falling as they returned home. The cold had intensified and near the city gates they found it necessary to stop for a while to warm their hands over a fire. The guard, with a face that was copper from the flames and shining with sweat, threw more firewood and kindling, collected that day from peasants entering the city, onto the blaze: in winter it was the custom to collect the toll in kind.

Watching the flames dance in Toria’s motionless pupils, Egert found within himself the courage to bend toward her ear. “I will break the curse. I will recover my courage. I will do it for the sake of … you know. I swear.”

She slowly lowered her eyelids, cloaking the sparks that danced in her eyes.

The first snow melted, covering the streets, porches, and intersections with shining filth; a cold wind howled through the days, and worry crawled back into the hearts of the townsfolk who had been slightly calmed by the snow. The Tower of Lash ominously elevated its fragrant smoke up to the sky: “Soon!” A few more students disappeared from the university, and the rowdy evenings at the One-Eyed Fly ended of their own accord. Dean Luayan became the focal point of a universal gravitation, as it were: people sidled up to him, hoping to gain some measure of composure. Complete strangers from the city came to see him. They stood for hours on the grand porch of the university, hoping to see the archmage, seeking his help and reassurance. Luayan avoided long conversations, but he never rewarded the petitioners with anger or annoyance. His conscience would not allow him to appease them, and his reason would not let him frighten them, so he regaled his visitors with monotonous, philosophical parables that did not relate in any way to the reason they had come.

The frightened people still came and went, regardless of the dean’s efforts to put them off. Egert was not the least bit surprised to see a worn-out old man with an extremely straight back and spurs on his boots standing one morning on the steps between the serpent and the monkey. Nodding his head in welcome, he was about to walk by, but the old man smiled painfully and stepped forward to intercept him.

Egert recognized his father only after several seconds. The elder Soll had miraculously begun to resemble the portrait that hung in his study in Kavarren: a portrait of Egert’s grandfather, painted when he was already quite advanced in years, gray haired, with a drooping mustache and rugged wrinkles on his face. Recalling the portrait, Egert recognized his father, and he was astounded at how quickly old age had descended upon him.

Silently, accompanied only by the dull jingling of spurs, father and son walked to the small hotel where the elder Soll was staying. The old man hammered with his flint and stone for a long time before lighting the candles in the candelabrum. A servant brought in wine and glasses. Sitting in a creaking armchair, Egert watched with pain in his heart as his father tried to gather his thoughts. But he could not gather them; he wanted to start a conversation but could not find the words. Egert would have happily helped him, but his own tongue was also helpless and mute.

“I … I brought money,” said the elder Soll finally.

“Thank you,” mumbled Egert and finally put the question that had tormented him the entire walk here into words. “How is Mother?”

His father smoothed out the threadbare velvet tablecloth on the small round table.

“She is ill, extremely ill.” He lifted his haggard, watery eyes to his son. “Egert, they are saying here that time is coming to an end. If time is at an end then to hell with them, with the regiment; to hell with them and their uniform. What a regiment they are, when they … Egert, my son … My father had five sons. We only have you. You are the only one that lived. It’s already difficult for me to get up into the saddle. Getting up on the roof is also difficult. Why did you leave us? There are no grandchildren.…”

Feeling how his throat had dried up, Egert muttered into a dark corner, “I know.”

The old man sighed loudly. He bit his upper lip, chewing on his mustache. “Egert, your mother begs you. Pay your last respects, that’s all. Your mother entreats you. Let’s go home. To hell with them, with all of them. Let’s go to Kavarren. I even brought you a horse. A mare, she’s a marvel.” His father’s gaze brightened somewhat. “Raven black, very high spirited. She’s the daughter of our Tika. You loved Tika, remember?”

Egert silently passed his fingers through the flame of a candle.

“Son, let’s go today. The horses are frisky and well rested. I, of course, will get tired, but not before … Well, we could try it anyway. We could be home within a week. What do you say, Egert?”

“I can’t.” Egert would have rather damned the whole earth than to speak those words. “I cannot. How can I return like this?” His hand touched the scar.

“You think about it,” sighed his father gravely. “You think about it. You can’t ignore your mother, Egert. What kind of a son are you?”

It seemed to him that there would now be no rendezvous with Toria, and that something would fracture, would give way, would tear apart his innards. Happily, she met him on the steps as if she had been waiting for him there.

“Egert?”

He told her how his father’s hands shook when, as they said their good-byes, Egert had shifted his eyes to the side and mumbled an assurance that he would come home soon.

Mud squelched under their feet. The city had quieted; it felt as if it were abandoned. Without picking any particular route, they roamed through the streets and alleyways, and Egert talked without ceasing.

His mother was very ill. His mother was waiting for him, but how could he return bearing this curse? How could he crawl back to his father’s house bearing this cowardly brute in his soul, a brute that at any minute could turn him into the basest scoundrel? He had made a promise to himself; he had made a promise to Toria. Perhaps he was wrong? Perhaps for the sake of his mother’s serenity he should swallow yet another humiliation and return defeated, a coward? Should he fetch his shadow to her feet and burden her with another woe?

He had tried, as far as he could, to explain this to his father. He had foundered in the words, had sunk into them like an amateur fisherman in his own net, but the old man could not understand him, and Egert, exhausted, had finally said to him, “I am ill. I have to find the cure, and then…” His father was silent, and for the first time in his son’s memory, his eternally straight back slumped wearily.

Now Toria listened to all of this. Dusk was thickening; here and there the streetlamps smoked, and every shutter was shut tight. It seemed as though the houses had obstinately closed their eyes against the night, against the filth, against the foul weather. At one point it seemed to Toria that dim shadows were following them at a distance, but Egert noticed nothing. He talked and talked, and appealed to Toria as a witness: Was it possible that he really was wrong?

Trying to escape the wind, they turned into some gates and found themselves in a deserted courtyard, full of refuse. A cook stalked through the yard from a storehouse and cast them a look that was somewhat unfriendly, but more indifferent than anything else. The door slammed shut, ruthlessly grinding down clouds of steam that were breaking loose from inside. A streetlight dimly illuminated a small sign by the door: THE GOAT’S MILK. The scruffy goats stood listlessly in a narrow enclosure beneath an awning.

The streetlamp weaved in the wind, and Toria shivered, only now feeling both the wind and the damp.

“Come on, let’s go. Why are we here?”

Egert opened his mouth to repeat all his reasoning from the beginning, but he found he could say nothing. In the wan light of the streetlamp, Lieutenant Karver Ott towered before him like a dripping wet ghost.

The lieutenant looked unimpressive: during his time spent in the city his uniform had been worn constantly, and since his purse had been depleted by all the taverns he had visited, it had not been cleaned. It showed. The appearance of Bonifor and Dirk, who were standing behind him, was also not very decent. Instead of gentlemen of the guards, they now resembled bandits or highwaymen, an impression that was heightened by the fact that both rested their palms on the hilts of their swords.

Toria did not understand what was happening. She did not recognize Karver, so she thought that she and Egert had been tracked down by common thieves. She had no intention of waiting for them to demand their purses. She smiled scornfully and was about to say something scathing, but Karver forestalled her.

He recognized her, even in the muddy light of the swinging street lantern, and he could hardly keep his eyes in their sockets. “Lady! We are acquainted!” he drawled with an expression of sheer amazement. “For shame!”

Bonifor and Dirk leaned forward to see Toria a little better.

“Oh yes, Egert,” continued Karver. “You seem to have attained your goal. But what is the meaning of this, my lady?” He turned to Toria with a perfectly polite demeanor. “Have you so easily forgiven him for the base murder of your studious fiancé?”

“Who are you?” asked Toria in an icy tone. The iron undertones in her voice caused Dirk and Bonifor to wince slightly, but Karver was not the slightest bit put off.

“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Karver Ott, Lieutenant of the Guards of the city of Kavarren, sent here with a special commission: to bring the deserter Egert Soll back to the regiment. These are my fellow guardsmen, remarkably worthy young men. That, my lady, is who we are, definitely not the thieves of the night you seem to think us! And now allow me to ask you, just who do you think that man is, the one who is now hiding behind your back?”

Egert was not at all hiding behind Toria’s back, but he had instinctively retreated, horrified as a tenacious wave of his eternal companion, animal fear, arose in his chest. Karver’s words lashed him like a whip.

“This man,” responded Toria, undaunted, “is under the protection of the university and of my father, Dean Luayan. And Master Luayan is a mage, as you should have heard by now. And now, be so kind as to clear the way. We are leaving.”

“But, lady!” cried Karver in bewilderment, either real or feigned. “I cannot believe this. You are such a distinguished individual, how could you be involved with this, this…” The lieutenant’s lips involuntarily curled in a grimace of aversion when he glanced at Egert. “I repeat, he murdered your fiancé. I think that even then in the depths of his soul he was already the thing he became just a bit later. Do you know what he became!”

“Allow us to pass.” Toria stepped forward, and Karver slowly stepped to the side.

“Please. We have no desire to bring even the slightest shadow of insult to the beautiful daughter of the dean, the gentleman mage. But this man, lady … Wouldn’t you be interested to find out what Egert Soll really is?”

Egert was silent. Gradually, he began to understand that what was happening now was, if anything, more terrible than Fagirra’s poisoned stiletto. There was nothing he could do to stop this dreadful game from playing out; Egert would have to drink this cup to its dregs.

As if responding to his thought, Karver pulled his sword out of its sheath with a subtle movement. In the light of the lantern, Egert saw the silver ribbon of the blade and his knees began buckle.

“You’ll answer for this,” spat Toria.

Karver raised his eyebrows. “For what! Am I doing something improper to the lady? My lady may stay or she may go. In the second instance she will finally see the true face of her, hmm, friend.” The tip of the impossibly long Kavarrenian sword touched Egert under the chin.

Egert felt faint. Karver’s voice continued to reach him, but it was as if it came through the roaring of a waterfall; the sound of his own blood in his ears deafened him. Vainly trying to overcome his horror, he suddenly recalled the words Toria had once spoken. The curse will be broken if you fall into a hopeless situation and yet somehow overcome it. When the path has reached its bitter end: don’t you think the Wanderer was speaking of this?

“I feel pity for you, lady,” said Karver in the meantime. “Cruel fate brought you into contact with a man who is, to put it mildly, entirely unworthy. On your knees, Egert!”

Egert reeled, and Toria caught his gaze. The curse will be broken if you fall into a hopeless situation and yet somehow overcome it. Heaven, how could he be victorious over a rock, a landslide, an avalanche that was careening down a mountainside? Egert’s soul was wailing and thrashing about. The pitiful coward died a thousand deaths, and Egert knew that within a second the vile beast would completely subdue him.

“Did you hear me, Egert?” repeated Karver calmly. “On your knees.”

Toria is here. Toria will see, then she’ll really think …

Without following the thought to its conclusion, he sank down into the slimy muck below. His knees buckled against his will, and now Karver’s frayed belt and sleek riding breeches were right in front of his eyes.

“Do you see, lady?” Karver’s reproachful voice rang out above Egert’s head. “Demand something of him now; demand anything you like. He will answer.”

Egert could not see Toria, but he felt her next to him. He sensed her pain and her striving and her rage and her confusion, and her hope.

She hopes. She does not understand that it is impossible. Impossible to overcome the strength of the curse laid on me by the Wanderer. Never.

The sword jerked in Karver’s impatient hand. “Say ‘I am the nastiest wretch in creation.’”

“Egert,” sighed Toria, and his name seemed to echo from the distance, from the bright winter day when he stood with her by the eternally blooming tree on the tomb of the First Prophet.

“I am the nastiest wretch in creation,” he gasped through parched lips.

Karver chuckled contentedly. “Do you hear that! Repeat after me, ‘I am a lady’s cowardly lapdog.’”

“Egert,” repeated Toria under her breath.

“I am a lady’s cowardly lapdog,” his lips murmured of their own accord.

Dirk and Bonifor, who had been silent until now, burst out into merry laughter.

“Repeat, Egert, ‘I am a creeping piece of shit and a sodomite.’”

“Leave him alone!” shrieked Toria, beside herself.

Karver was amazed. “Why are you so bothered? Is it because he’s a lover of men? He is definitely a bugger, we found him with his boyfriend in some tavern. But you did not know, of course?”

Her silent entreaty reached Egert. Stop this, Egert. Stop it. Break the curse.

A door slammed open wildly. The morose cook walked to the storehouse, casting a glance, as oppressively indifferent as before, at the people by the fence.

Fiddling with his blade, Karver waited until she hobbled back and slammed the heavy door; then he spun his sword right in front of the face of his victim. “Answer, scum. Are you Egert Soll?”

“Yes,” wheezed Egert.

“Are you a deserter?”

“Yes.” And then he broke out into a sweat, but no longer from fear. All he had to do to break the curse was say yes five times.

“Did you, scoundrel, murder the fiancé of this beautiful lady?”

“Yes.”

Toria was shaking. She also understood. Through his slumped back, Egert felt her feverish, frustrated anticipation.

Karver smiled expansively. “You love this lady, don’t you, Egert?”

“Yes,” he screamed out for the fourth time, feeling how hard his maddened heart was beating.

It seemed to him that he could hear Toria breathing. Glorious Heaven, help me! But the chance would come only once, and that which was foremost in his soul must become last. Did that mean that he must cast off his fear?

He jerked up his head, awaiting the fifth question; meeting his eyes, Karver involuntarily flinched, as if seeing a phantom of the former, domineering Egert Soll. Falling back a step, he searchingly examined his victim. An enormous shiver struck Egert.

Karver smiled contentedly. “Are you shivering?”

“Yes!”

He rose from his knees in a single, fluid motion. He noticed the confusion in Karver’s eyes; he felt Toria moving behind his back; he took a step forward, intending to grab the lieutenant by his skinny throat; Karver hastily raised his sword out in front of him; Egert extended his arm to turn the sharp tip aside; and in that moment an attack of nauseating, detestable terror turned his heart into a pathetic, fluttering lump.

His legs gave out, and he once again sagged to the ground. He touched his cheek with a shaking hand. The scar was still there; the rough, hardened seam was still on his cheek. The scar was in its place, as was the fear that harried his soul.

The streetlamp swayed, shrieking in its bracket. Egert felt like his knees were frozen in icy slush. From somewhere on the roof, water was dripping, drip, drip. Toria whispered something helplessly.

Karver, recovering himself, hostilely peered at him through slit eyes. “So then, that’s how it is. You will now display your love for the lady.” He abruptly turned toward his companions, “Bonifor. There is a nice little she-goat in that enclosure over there, do you see her? Her owner won’t mind if we borrow her for a little while.”

Still hoping, Egert moved his lips, repeating “yes” over and over, but Bonifor was already opening the enclosure, and Toria, not yet believing in their defeat, stared at Bonifor, Karver, and the mustachioed Dirk without understanding. The black surface of a greasy puddle gleamed like slate.

Hope twitched in his soul for the last time, and then it faded, leaving in its place a desolate, hopeless melancholy. Toria realized this and instantly lost her strength to fight back. Their eyes met.

“Leave,” he whispered. “Please leave.”

Toria remained where she was. Either she had not heard him or she had not understood or she no longer had the strength to move from the spot. Karver chuckled.

The goat, skinny and filthy, was accustomed to brutal treatment. She did not even begin to bleat when Bonifor, cursing under his breath, flipped her from his back to the ground at Karver’s feet. He proprietarily fastened a rope on the neck of the miserable animal then glanced ruefully at the bewildered Toria.

“So, he loves you, you heard?”

Egert looked at the gray, twitching tail of the goat. There would be no miracle. There would be no miracle. Fear had already conquered both his will and his reason, he had lost himself, and he would lose Toria. The Wanderer had left no way out.

Karver seized the goat by the muzzle and turned it toward Egert. “Well, here is a partner worthy of you; here is your love. Kiss her, go on then!”

Why doesn’t Toria understand that she must leave? Everything is over; does she need to be tormented by this abhorrent scene?

The swords of Bonifor and Dirk threatened him from either side.

“Look how nice she is! A lovely creature. So kiss her!”

The stench of unwashed animal assaulted Egert’s nostrils.

“You heard him. He loves you?” Karver’s low voice reached him from a distance. “And you believed him? Look at him; he’s ready to exchange you for the first goat that comes along!”

“What do you mean for the first one that comes along?” Bonifor flared up theatrically. “She’s a charming goat, best in the pen, right, Egert?”

“You should be ashamed.” Egert hardly recognized Toria’s voice.

“We should be ashamed!” Karver, unlike Bonifor, flared up in truth. “We, and not him?”

“Leave,” implored Egert. Toria stood still. Heaven, could her legs have grown numb? The cold edge of a blade once again touched his neck.

“Come on now, Egert! I declare you man and wife, you and your darling goat. Let’s skip straight to the wedding night!”

Dirk and Bonifor, stunned by Karver’s inventiveness, turned the goat around so that her tail faced Egert.

“Get to it! It will take all of five minutes. Have at it and all will be well; you can escort your lady home. Yes, lady, are you really still reluctant to return alone?”

It started raining. The water was rippled through the matted hair of the goat. His knees were frozen solid, and Egert suddenly imagined that he was a boy, standing up to his knees in the Kava river in spring, and on the near bank unbearably yellow flowers were blooming. He stretched out, trying to pluck one.…

He winced from pain. Karver had put his blade to Egert’s ear. “What are you thinking about? A sharp sword can cut off an ear, a finger, whatever is desired. Or has it happened already! It is true that students are castrated, isn’t it, lady?”

Fear had taken away from Egert the ability to think or feel. From Karver’s words he understood only that Toria was still here, and reproachfully, with almost childish hurt, he thought, Why?

The shrieking, black streetlamp swung in the wind. The night seemed to Toria like a viscous wad of tar. The sticky air blocked her larynx and it was impossible to draw in the breath for words or a shout. Undoubtedly, she should call for help, drub her fists on doors and shutters, run to her father in the end, but shock deprived her of the ability to struggle; it turned her into a mute, impotent witness.

The goat moved hesitantly. Bonifor cut short her attempt to escape, squeezing her head between his knees.

Karver brought his sword up under the chin of his victim. “Well, Egert? Unfasten your belt!”

Then the darkness thickened, compressed Egert from all sides, squeezed his head and chest, filled his ears like a cork and plugged his throat, not letting the tiniest bubble of air into his lungs. For a second it seemed to him that he was buried alive, that there was neither top nor bottom, that the earth was pressing, pressing …

Then everything became lighter, and with his last glimmer of consciousness, Egert understood that he was dying. Thank Heaven. He was simply dying, gently and without torments. The damned Wanderer had overlooked something; there was something he had not taken into account! Egert could not conquer his fear, but he also could not transgress this boundary. He could not, and so here was death. Thank Heaven.

He smoothly keeled over. His face crashed into the dirt, which turned out to be as warm and soft as a feather bed. How easy. The black lantern keeled over, the black sky keeled over, and Karver yelled and waved his little sword. Let him: Egert was not here, he was no longer here. Finally.

The three guards leaned over the prostrate man. The miserable goat, bounding away, began to bleat keenly and mournfully.

“Egert! Hey, Egert! Quit pretending. Hey!”

Toria darted forward, hurling first Dirk to one side and then Bonifor to the other with a glance. Egert was lying on his side. His face, detached and stiff, now fell into shadow, now again was snatched from the darkness by the light of the swaying streetlamp.

“And now you will answer for this,” Toria said with surprising calmness. “You will answer for everything. You have murdered him, you scum!”

“But lady,” mumbled Bonifor in confusion. Dirk moved backwards, and Karver thrust his sword into its sheath.

“We didn’t even lay a finger on him. What is it that you think we are guilty of!”

“You will answer,” promised Toria through her teeth. “My father will hunt you down and put you in the ground far from your wretched Kavarren, at the world’s edge.”

Dirk kept stepping back farther and farther. Bonifor, looking sideways first at the lifeless Egert, then at Toria, followed his example. Karver, it seemed, had lost his courage.

“You have never seen a real mage before,” continued Toria in a voice that was not her own, but somehow strange and metallic. “But you will instantly recognize my father when he appears before you!”

Karver raised his face to her, and in the dim light she saw in his eyes common fear, aroused not by the curse of the Wanderer, but by an innate cowardice, concealed in vain.

Unable to restrain herself, she spit at the ground near his feet. Within a minute the courtyard was empty except for the body lying prostrate on the ground and the petrified woman wringing her hands.

Once already she had wept over the lifeless body of a man lying on the ground. Now it seemed to her that this terrible nightmare was fated to repeat itself. Once again she had been left alone, completely alone. The rain drizzled, and drops rolled down the severe, frozen face of Egert. She had so hoped that the curse would not hold, that it would fail in the struggle with his nobility, but the curse proved stronger than its bearer. Egert fell first.

She sat in the cold dirt, and a lingering convulsion shackled her arms, her tongue, and her head. She did not try to bring Egert back to life; she did not feel for his pulse; she did not chafe his temples: unable to squeeze out any more tears, she sat helplessly, slumping her shoulders, dropping her numb hands to the ground.

They could bring him to his knees, but it was not within their power to turn him into an animal. Cowards in their souls, they elevated themselves in their own eyes by debasing a man they considered weaker. The Wanderer did not have enough curses for all scoundrels, but Egert lay there with his scar in the dirt, and no amount of yes could abolish the horror he had already lived through.

Finally, she began to cry.

A homeless dog appeared from out of the darkness. It sniffed sympathetically at the man lying on the ground and peered into Toria’s eyes. Toria cried, lifting her face to the sky. The rain on her cheeks mixed with her tears. The dog sighed; its gaunt, ribbed sides rose and fell, and then, having scratched itself, it trotted back into the darkness.

Many years had passed since they buried her mother, and the grass had twice grown up and withered on the grave of Dinar. The rain, it seemed, would fall forever, and the eternally blooming tree on the tomb of the First Prophet would fade, and Egert would be cursed forever. Why? Why had she, Toria, forgiven him for the death of Dinar, but the Wanderer had not? Why did the curse not have inverse force; why did anyone besides herself have the right to judge Egert?

It seemed to her that his eyelashes moved slightly, or perhaps it was just the swaying of the false lamplight. She leaned forward, and Egert responded to her cautious touch; he shifted and raised his eyelashes with difficulty.

“Are you here?”

She winced. How dull and unfamiliar his voice sounded! He looked at her, and she suddenly realized that his eyes were the eyes of a hundred-year-old wise man.

“Are you crying? Don’t. Everything will be all right. I now know how to die. It’s not frightening. Everything will be all right now. Please.” He attempted to get up, and with the third attempt he sat, and she nestled close to his chest without restraining herself.

“I’m such a,” he said drearily, “such a … Why didn’t you leave? Why did you stay with me? Why do I deserve that?”

“You swore,” she whispered, “that you would cast it off.”

“Yes,” he muttered, stroking her hair. “Yes, I will cast it off. Without fail. Only, I may not be able to do it in this life, Tor. If I don’t succeed, you’ll kill me, won’t you? Death wouldn’t be terrible then. It’s awkward for me to ask this of you, but who else can I ask? Never mind, forget what I said. I’ll think of something, you’ll see. Everything will be all right now, don’t cry.”

The stray dog with the thin sides compassionately watched them from a gateway as they stumbled away.

Several hours later Toria came down with a fever.

Her bed seemed hot to her, like a tin roof glowing red from the sun. Egert was allowed in her small room for the first time. He sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand in his. Without saying a single word, the dean brought in a flask of smoking, sharp-smelling potion and placed it on the side table.

Toria was lying on her back. The white pillow disappeared beneath piles of her disheveled locks, and the haggard face of his daughter, blemished by a sickly flush, again struck Luayan with the similarity it shared with a long-dead woman.

Back when he was traveling about the world, he had stopped once for a night’s lodging in a small snow-covered village. The goodwife who gave him shelter did not know any more than that he was a mage. She informed him of a misfortune: Next door the daughter of the town elder, an unearthly beauty, was dying of an unknown ailment. Then he saw his future wife for the first time. Her head wallowed in the pillow in just the same way, her black hair snaked out over the white linens, and her face, haggard and feverish, already held the seal of her approaching death.

He cured her and left the house. Sudden happiness followed like a whirlpool in a calm and sleepy river, then the fear of losing everything, then happiness again: the birth of his daughter. Then there were five painful years, years that tossed Luayan from fever to chill, that taught him to forgive despite his pride: terrible years; his best years. He remembered them with a shudder, and would have given anything in the world to go back and live them again.

It is unlikely that she was meant to have a long life. One day, already saved by Luayan once, she passionately went out in search of her own death and found it, leaving him as mementos an unceasing sense of his own guilt and the young Toria.

Toria turned her heavy head, and her father looked into her eyes. Instantly, the dean shifted his gaze to Egert; Egert winced and thought the dean wanted him to release Toria’s hand, but he kept it pressed between his own.

Glorious Heaven, she resembles her mother too much. She is too like her mother to be happy. When he had given his blessing to her marriage with Dinar, he at least had known what it would entail: solace and security; friendly affection and shared labor in the ancient walls of the university would have firmly united his daughter and his favorite pupil. Egert had put an end to these hopes, and here Egert sat, on the edge of her bed, tormented by the gaze of the dean, realizing that he should leave, but unable to release her hand. Luayan could clearly see how well Toria’s palm nestled in his.

In his life there was nothing more precious than his daughter.

Two years ago her engagement had seemed to him a natural, inevitable part of a tranquil, measured life, but today a vague shadow hovered over the city, over the university, over these two who now held each other by the hand. Even though he was a mage, he could not determine what this threat was, but its presence could be felt more distinctly with each passing day. How should a person act today, if he did not know what might happen to him tomorrow?

Egert sighed brokenly. From the corner of his eye, Luayan saw how he tried to count her pulse, how he worried over her, how he was annoyed at him, Luayan, for his apparent inaction: If he truly were a mage, why didn’t he use his magic to cure her?

Egert was marked. He would bring misfortune to all who had the imprudence to be near him. So the Wanderer judged. But who knows what the Wanderer is or what would happen if his curse were reversed?

Toria stirred. The dean once again looked into her eyes, and it seemed to him that her eyelids lowered by a hair, as if Toria wished to nod to him.

The dean hesitated then nodded to her in answer. He delayed for a second, once more sweeping his gaze over Egert, who was enshrouded in silence, and then he stepped out of the room, firmly closing the door behind him.

The two who remained were silent for a long time. An expiring log crackled, softly and delicately, in the fireplace.

Finally, Toria smiled with obvious effort. “Your shirt is too small.”

Egert had borrowed the shirt from Fox because his own clothing was in need of washing. Gaetan’s shirt threatened to rip with every movement Egert made. His hair, freshly washed and not yet fully dry, seemed darker than usual. The light from the fireplace gleamed directly behind his back, and Toria’s burning fever created the illusion that Egert had bronzed shoulders.

Bending over her, he repeated the same questions several times; concentrating, she finally understood. “How can I help you? What do you need me to do?”

Even after they returned from the dank, raw night, she could not stop crying for a long time. She had radiated tears; she had drowned in their salty water like a dying sailor in the bosom of the sea. Egert, who had experienced a far greater shock that evening, held up better. He carried the shivering Toria for the last block before the university: her legs failed her and no longer desired to work. In her whole life only her father had ever carried her, and only in her remote childhood. She quieted and went limp, not helping Egert support her weight, but he stepped lightly as if he really were carrying a child or a small animal, as light as a feather, that had come to grief.

As he carried her, he felt each strained nerve, each quivering muscle, the beating of her heart, her fatigue and her distress. Then he pressed her more firmly to himself; he wanted to enfold her, to swath her in his own tenderness, to shelter, to warm, to protect.

The encounter with the dean, of which he was so afraid, passed without a single word. Submitting to Luayan, Egert helped Toria get into bed; a wailing old serving woman already waited nearby. The dean intently examined the guilt-ridden, tense Egert, but he never opened his mouth.

An ember prowled about the coals in the fireplace. Toria smiled faintly. The worst was far, far behind her; her present health, feverish and weakened, did not oppress her. On the contrary, she wished to dwell forever in this burning cloud, relishing her own frailty, serenity, and security.

“Tor. What can I do to help?”

Egert’s concern and anxiety pleased her. But her father … her father was always aware of everything.

The potion prepared by the dean steamed on the bedside table.

“It’s not all that serious,” whispered Toria, softly squeezing Egert’s hand. “There’s nothing to worry about. The medicine will help.”

He withdrew for a second to stoke the fireplace. The light flared up more brightly, and it seemed to Toria that Egert was now surrounded by copper tongues.

Laboriously, she sat up in her bed, holding the coverlet to her chest. “Give me the flask.”

Scooping the potion from his hands, she kneaded it into her temples for quite a long time. Soon she no longer had the strength to continue, but she did not think to summon the elderly nurse. Seeing that she was wearied, Egert offered yet again to help. Cautiously, overcoming his clumsiness, he proceeded to rub the ointment into the skin of her face and neck. The medicine smelled even more strong and bitter than wormwood warmed by the sun.

Her fever fell almost instantaneously, but instead of relief she again felt grief, and covered in sweat, she at first gave a short sob, then losing control over herself, she commenced to shake violently as tears streamed down her face.

Egert was at a loss. He considered running for the dean, but he could not release her quaking, moist hands. Egert leaned over the invalid, and his dry lips found first one tear-filled eye and then the other. Savoring the bitter taste in his mouth, he smoothed her disheveled, dark hair and drew his cheek against her cheek, scraping his scar along her skin. “Tor, look at me. Don’t cry.”

The fireplace burned evenly, and the warm potion smoked, having not yet cooled off completely. Murmuring something vague, tender, and soothing, Egert fondly stroked her neck, tracing the pattern of beauty marks with his finger, that memorable constellation that decorated the heavens of his disastrous dreams. Then he began to rub the ointment into her shoulders and slender arms, freed one after the other from beneath the coverlet. The room was warm, even sultry. Toria’s shaking gradually subsided, and she sobbed less frequently. Her breast, damp from sweat, still heaved under her thin chemise, forcing air in her lungs.

“Thank Heaven,” he whispered, feeling the sickly trembling leave her. “Thank Heaven. Everything will be all right. You really are better, aren’t you?”

Toria’s eyes seemed impenetrably black; her pupils were wide, like an animal’s at night. She stared at Egert, and her hands convulsively clenched the ends of the pulled-down coverlet. The fire burned down. It needed to be stoked again, but Egert did not have the will to leave her, not even for a second. It became dusky in the little room. Shadows danced, scattering ruddy light along the walls. Toria let out a lengthy sob and drew Egert to herself.

They curled into each other. Egert inhaled the bitter, unexpectedly pleasant odor of the medicine and held her lightly, fearing to squeeze her shoulders too intensely and thus inflict pain. Toria, blithely closing her eyes, nestled her nose into his shoulder. The fireplace died out and the darkness deepened.

Then his hand, tormented by its own audacity, reached under her chemise to her feverish breast, quaking from the beating of her heart.

It seemed to Toria that she was lying at the bottom of a reddish black, incandescent sea, and that tongues of flame were dancing over her head. She lost herself in the flames, refusing to think about anything else, and she ceased struggling against her mounting dizziness. Egert’s hand was transformed into a distinct living creature, which roamed along her body, and Toria experienced an ardent gratitude toward this affectionate creature, completely her own.

They dissolved into each other in a dreamy delirium. As they lay in the darkness, Egert realized suddenly that, even though he was a highly experienced lover, not once in his riotous youth had he experienced any feelings that even vaguely resembled this urgent desire to touch, to give warmth, to envelop.

The coverlet slipped off toward the wall. The gossamer fabric of her chemise became superfluous; Egert sheltered Toria from the outside world with his own body.

She abruptly awoke from her fantastic euphoria. Her physical relations with Dinar had gone no further than a few prudent kisses. Recognizing what was happening, she became frightened and froze under Egert’s caresses.

Instantly perceiving this, Egert pressed his lips to her ear. “What?”

She did not know how to explain. Distressed at her awkwardness, she artlessly ran her hand over his face. “I…”

He waited, gently placing her head on his shoulder. Fearing to insult him or surprise him, she could not find the words. She felt bashful and out of place.

Then, guessing what troubled her, he embraced her as firmly and as tenderly as he had never before embraced her or anyone else. Still full of fear and apprehension, she sobbed, grateful that there was no need to explain.

“Tor,” he whispered soothingly. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

She was indeed afraid. The night floated through the room, warmth radiated from the just-extinguished fireplace, and from Toria’s soul radiated a fondness and an almost childlike gratitude toward the man who understood everything without words.

He drew her to himself tenderly. “Don’t worry. Everything will be just as you wish, just as you say. Tor, what is it, why are you crying again?”

She suddenly recalled a dragonfly that had flown into her room when she was a child. Heavy and green, with dark eyes like round teardrops, it had rustled in the corner, chafing against the wall with its lacy wings. It flew up to the ceiling and fell almost to the very floor. “Beyond stupid,” her mother said with a laugh. “Catch it and let it loose outside.”

Where does this memory come from, and why?

Toria caught the dragonfly. Carefully, afraid to clench her hand too tight, she carried the poor thing out into the yard and let it go, following its flight with her gaze. For a long time afterwards she still felt the light tickling of the dragonfly’s wings and tiny feet on her palm.

She breathed nervously. This is happening today; this is happening right now. So many fears and hopes, so many dreams … This stood before her, waiting, and she would change; she would become a different person; she was afraid, but how could she be otherwise: this was inevitable, like the rising of the sun.

Egert again understood her without words. His joy communicated itself to her, drowning out her fear. From out of the darkness she heard her own happy laughter, which was immediately followed by a confused thought: Was it appropriate to laugh? Images of the dragonfly’s wings, lights beyond the river, snow sparkling in the sun all flashed before her eyes, and just as she lost herself in a new delirium, she had time to think, Now.

8

On a black, winter evening, Dean Luayan interrupted his usual work.

Ink was drying on an unfinished page, and a quill was poised in the dean’s motionless hand, but he sat, frozen behind his desk, unable to tear his gaze from a candle that was guttering in a candelabrum.

Beyond the window, the wet wind of a protracted thaw raged; in the fireplace, the fire burned in an even, hospitable manner. The dean sat, widening his eyes that were watery from strain. An impenetrable, nocturnal horror watched him from the flame, and the same horror rose to meet the dean from the depths of his soul.

The presentiment of a mage, even one who has not achieved the level of archmage, does not occur without reason. Now disaster was approaching so near that the dean’s hair stirred from its breath. Right now, already now perhaps, it was too late to salvage anything.

The Amulet!

He jumped up. The incantation that secured the safe released immediately, but the lock resisted for a long time, disobeying his shaking hands. Finally opening the jasper casket, Luayan, who had never been shortsighted, squinted his eyes.

The medallion was uncorrupted. Not a single spot of rust disfigured the gold disk. The medallion was clean, but the dean still gasped from the stench of impending doom.

Not trusting himself, he once again examined the medallion. Then he hid it, and lurching, he rushed to the door.

“Toria! Tor!”

He knew that she was nearby in her room because he had called upon her earlier for help, but now she appeared almost instantly, and she was almost as pale as he was himself: evidently, something in his voice had terrified her. “Father?”

Behind her he could distinguish the silhouette of Egert Soll. In the last few days the two of them had become inseparable. Heaven help them.

“Toria, and you, Egert, get me water from five sources. I will tell you which, and where they are. Take my lantern; it will not go out even under the strongest wind. You, Toria, put on your cloak. Quickly.”

If they wanted to ask him what was going on, they either could not or decided not to. The dean did not seem himself; Toria flinched upon meeting his gaze. Without saying a word, she took the five vials, which were attached to a belt. Egert swept her cloak over her shoulders, and as he did so she felt the affectionate, encouraging touch of his palm. A rotten winter without frost howled beyond the walls. Egert raised the burning lantern up high, Toria took hold of his arm, and they set out into the winter night.

As in a ritual, they crept from source to source: in all there were five. Thrice they had to gather the water from a pipe walled in stone, once from a small well in a courtyard, and once from the iron muzzle of a snake in an abandoned fountain. The five vials were full, the belt they were in weighed down Egert’s shoulder, and Toria’s cloak was soaked through when, staggering from exhaustion, they stepped back over the threshold of the dean’s study. Usually gloomy, on this night it was full of light. Rows of candles crowded on the desk, on the floor, were molded to the walls; the tongues of flame jumped and waved when the door opened, as if greeting the two who entered.

In the middle of the room stood a strangely shaped object with birdlike claws at the bottom; on top, three more claws supported a round, silver basin.

Obeying the impatient gesture of the dean, Egert retreated into the farthest corner and sat there, right on the floor. Toria arranged herself nearby on a low taboret.

The tongues of flame elongated more and more; their length was unnatural, strange to the eyes. The dean stood over the silver basin and poured each of the vials into it. His hands moved slowly upward; his lips, firmly set, did not move, but to Egert it seemed—though perhaps it was his fear that made it so—that in the stillness of the study, in the howling of the wind beyond the windows he heard sharp words that clawed at his hearing. The ceiling, on which patterns of shadows fused and then decayed, seemed choked with swarms of insects.

Something knocked against the window from outside. Egert, taut as a bowstring, shook convulsively. Toria rested her hand on his shoulder without looking at him.

The dean’s lips twisted, as if from strain. The flames of the candles stretched painfully and then diminished, regaining their usual shape. Standing motionless for a second longer, the dean whispered under his breath, “Draw near.”

It was as if the waters in the basin had never existed. There, where their surface should have been, rested a mirror, as silver and vivid as mercury. The Mirror of Waters, thought Egert as he stood transfixed.

“Why can’t we see anything?” Toria asked in a whisper.

Egert was almost resentful. For him, the mirror itself seemed miracle enough. However, at that very moment the silver haze shimmered, darkened, and then it was no longer a haze, but night, and a wind, the same wind that blew beyond the windows, whipped the branches of naked trees, and drew sparks torches, first one, then two, then three. Without trying to decipher the image, Egert marveled only that here in this small circular mirror something strange and secret was being reflected, something that was taking place who knows where. Entranced by the magic and by his own participation in the secret, he came to his senses only when he heard Toria cry out in a resonant voice, “Lash!”

That single, short word sobered Egert like a slap in the face. Obscure figures prowled in the mirror, and even in the meager light of the few torches, it was possible to distinguish hoods, some pulled low over the eyes and some flung down onto the shoulders. An entire troop of soldiers of Lash was for some reason swarming about in the night, permitting the wind to torment and harass the hems of their long robes.

“Where is that?” Toria asked, fearful.

“Silence!” Luayan gasped through clenched teeth. “It will be lost!”

The image faded, crusted over by a dirty, milky-white film, then turned back into the silver, waxen haze, and only in the extreme depths of that haze did a muted spark continue to gleam.

“What an evil day,” muttered Luayan, as if marveling to himself. “What a wicked night.”

Stretching out his hands, he spread his palms over the mirror and Egert, unable to move, saw how the web of his veins, his tendons and his blood vessels protruded through his skin.

The mirror wavered and darkened again. The dean withdrew his hands as if they were burned, and Egert was once again able to make out the night, the men, and the torches. The flames had become larger, and they all moved in a strange procession; the hooded men stood in a circle, rhythmically and regularly bending their backs as though bowing. Were they counting off the bows?

“Egert,” asked Toria in a low voice, “are they performing some kind of ritual? Do you know which?”

Egert silently shook his head; this allusion to his old complicity with Lash, however unwitting, however invalid, felt like a severe rebuke. Toria realized she had hurt him and guiltily squeezed his hand. The dean cast a swift sidelong glance at them both and again bent over the basin.

At times the figures disappeared into the darkness, at times they loomed close, but the image was never completely clear; it comprised fragments, wisps, separate details: a boot in wet clay, the soggy hem of a robe. Once Egert flinched, recognizing the disheveled silver mane of the Magister. Now and then the silver, waxen mist rose up, and then the dean gritted his teeth and extended his palms over the mirror, but the haze never dissipated immediately: it was as if it was reluctant to depart, as though it was in collusion with the hooded men.

“Where are they, Father?” Toria kept asking. “Where is that? What are they doing?”

The dean only gnawed at his lips, time after time recovering the elusive, faithless image.

Toward dawn all three were exhausted, then the mirror, exhausted as well, finally submitted entirely, bowing to the will of the dean, and the silver fog receded. The night that was concealed in the silver basin also receded; the image grayed, the flames of the reflected torches faded, and all three of them, bending over the mirror, simultaneously unraveled the riddle of the seemingly ceremonial bows.

Drawn up around a tall hill—Egert recognized it as the place from which he and Toria had admired the river and the city—the hooded men, armed with spades, were tirelessly digging into the ground. Black piles of earth towered here and there, as though marking the path of an enormous mole, and in places yellow objects showed through the dirt. Egert leaned forward, unconsciously widening his eyes: the objects were yellowed bones and skulls, undoubtedly human, undoubtedly old, and the earth was creeping out of their vacant sockets.

“That’s,” Toria exclaimed panicked voice, “that’s that hill! That’s—”

The mirror shattered. Water surged up in all directions. Dean Luayan, always imperturbable and unemotional, beat at the water with his palm, churning it up into splashes with all his might.

“Ah! I overlooked it! Damn it! I let it pass by! I ignored it!”

The candles, which had burned all night without guttering even once, were extinguished as if by a gust of wind. Blinking his half-blinded eyes, Egert could not immediately discern the grief-twisted face of Luayan in the dawn’s pale light.

“I overlooked it. It’s my fault. They are lunatics, scum; they are not waiting for the end of time: they are summoning it! They have already summoned it.”

“That hill,” Toria repeated in horror. The dean grabbed his head with his hands, which were still dripping water.

“That hill, Egert … That is where the victims of that monstrosity, the Black Plague, were buried; there is its lair, smothered by dirt, kept concealed from the people. The Black Plague once ravaged the city and provinces, and it will devastate the earth, if it is not stopped. Lart Legiar stopped the Black Plague before. Lart Legiar did it, but that was many decades ago. Now there is no one. Now…”

The dean groaned through clenched teeth. He gasped, turned his back on them, and walked to the window.

“But, Dean Luayan,” whispered Egert, barely coping with his trembling. “Dean Luayan, you are an archmage. You will protect the city and…”

The dean turned around. His expression caused Egert to bite his tongue.

“I am a historian,” said the dean desolately. “I am a scholar. But I have never been an archmage and I never will become one. I’ve remained a pupil, an apprentice. I’m not an archmage! Don’t be shocked, Toria. And don’t look so mournful, Egert. I have made do with what I have: intellect and knowledge have made me worthy of the title of mage, but I am no archmage!”

For some time quiet enveloped the study; then, nearer and farther, quieter and louder, one after the other, catching fear from one another, dogs began to howl around the city.

Who could have guessed that so many rats huddled underneath the city?

The streets teemed with their grayish brown backs; the dogs fled upon hearing the drumming patter of their tiny paws and the rustle of hundreds of leathery tails. The rats rushed about; they squeaked and ground their sharp teeth; they crowded in doorways until heavy stones crashed into the walls next to them, thrown by hands made inaccurate by trembling. Especially brave men armed with heavy canes went out into the streets and beat them, pummeled them, whaling away at their pink, whiskered snouts that bristled with yellow teeth.

On that day the shops did not open and the factories did not produce. A universal terror hung over the city like an oppressive curtain, and the rats ruled the streets. Cowering in their homes with the shutters tightly fastened, the people feared to speak aloud: many that day had the feeling that an intent, glacial, scrutinizing gaze prowled through the streets of the city, peering under the cracks of doors.

The Plague watched the city for two more days, and on the third day it showed itself.

The calm of the vacant streets ceased. Within a few hours the exhalation of the Plague tore open useless shutters and doors, releasing lamentations to Heaven, moans and wailing. The first to fall sick that morning were the first to die that night, and those who had brought them water soon took to their beds, suffering from thirst and lacerated by boils, without any hope of salvation.

The quarantine cordon that was set up at the city gates did not last long. People, seeing hope only in escape, knocked it down, throwing themselves on pikes and swords, sobbing, pleading, hectoring; a portion of the guards drew back in the wake of the fugitives, and before long the Plague descended upon the outskirts, the surrounding towns, the villages, the lonely farmsteads. Astonished wolves found easy meat lying amid the fields and then died in agony because the Plague would not spare even wolves.

Complying with the disordered commands of the mayor, the guards patrolled the streets, remaining loyal to their duty. Bundled up in layers of sackcloth garments, armed with curved pitchforks that resembled malformed bird claws, they moved steadily from house to house, and high wagons sided with wooden slats rattled through the streets behind them, weighed down by the multitude of bodies. The next day they no longer gathered the corpses, and entire homes were transformed into charnel houses, waiting for a merciful hand to throw a lit torch into an open window.

The Tower of Lash shut itself off from the Plague in a thick cloud of fragrant smoke. A horde of people, awaiting salvation, besieged the tabernacle of the Sacred Spirit day and night, but the windows and doors were secured from within and the thinnest cracks, where even the blade of a knife could not enter, were meticulously sealed up and closed. But the strange smoke still rose inexplicably, and people inhaled it in the hope that the sharp, harsh odor of it would defend them against death.

“Idiots,” the dean said bitterly. “Imbeciles. They think to hide themselves and thereby save themselves; they hope the smoke will keep it at bay! They are obstinate, spiteful children, setting fire to their home, sure in their faith that the blaze they play with will not harm them. The end of time for the world, but not for Lash … They are fools. Wicked fools.”

The first wave of the Plague ebbed after three days. Many of those who survived imagined that they were marked by a special good fortune and, possibly, that they abided under the protection of Lash. The deserted streets were subjected to the efficient incursion of looters. Ravaging the wine cellars and household stores of their neighbors, the enterprising family men boasted of their loot to their wives and children, and young lads gave their surviving girlfriends bracelets plucked from dead wrists. They all intended to live for a long time, but the Black Plague began its second feast, starting with them and with their kinsmen.

The dean forbade the students to leave the university, but the power of his prohibition proved insufficient to hold within the thick walls young men, each of whom had family or fiancées somewhere in the city, the outskirts, or some distant town. At the beginning the students rushed to Luayan for help and salvation, but he locked himself in his study and did not wish to see anyone. The hopes of the youths gave way to bewilderment, then to resentment, then to despair: they left the university one after another, complaining bitterly about mages who shirked mere mortals at the very time when their help was most needed. Egert gritted his teeth when he overheard curses addressed toward the dean who had left the students to the mercy of fate. It was difficult for him to wrap his mind around the thought that Luayan was not all-powerful, but it was even more difficult to perceive that the dean’s behavior looked like betrayal.

It was no easier for Toria. For the first time in her life her father was not by her side as they faced hard times, but by himself, in solitude, and her awareness of this was for her far more onerous than all the troubles of the epidemic. Egert kept close to her at all times; fear, obtrusive as a toothache, his chronic fear for his own hide paled now before the thought of what fate might bring to Toria, recently discovered by him as if by a miracle, and what it might bring to her father, the university, the city—and to the city of Kavarren.

Kavarren was far away. Kavarren, hopefully, would remain unharmed. Kavarren would have time to set up cordons, to institute a strict quarantine. Kavarren would defend itself. But in a dream that recurred every night, Egert saw the same thing: howling dogs in front of the Noble Sword, smoke ranging along the deserted streets, mountains of corpses on the embankment, the barred gates with their emblem grown dim from soot …

The dean had said that the Black Plague would lay waste to the world if it were not stopped. There were many hundreds of Kavarrens on the earth. What was some small, albeit ancient and proud, provincial town to the Plague?

The remaining students at the university kept close together, like sheep in a harassed herd. Neither hide nor hair was seen of the headmaster, the servants ran away, the teachers failed to appear, and the youths, who had until recently considered themselves to be solid, respectable, learned men, turned out to be feckless boys. One day the walls of the Grand Auditorium resounded with the most sincere weeping. One of the Inquirers was sobbing on his rough bench like a small boy; he was just a village lad, for whom the first year of his studies had turned into a nightmare. The others averted their eyes, not wanting to look at the pale faces and quivering lips of their comrades, and then Fox suddenly grew savage, boiling up into a white-hot fury.

No one had ever heard such scathing speech from him before. He proffered a thimble to each and every one of them so that they could gather up their snot; he suggested that the wide skirts of their mothers might be very warm to hide under and called for a chamber pot to be brought into the hall in the event of sudden need. He strode up to the rostrum and rained insults down on his classmates: they were slack-mouthed, snot-nosed, scruffy little shits, receptacles for spit and piss, and limp-dicked mama’s boys. The weeping lad sobbed one last time then opened his mouth wide and blushed a deep red color, as if his cheeks had been brushed by a lady’s cosmetics.

The incident ended in a boozer. Fox appointed himself supply officer, broke into the university’s wine cellar, and uncorked many ancient bottles of wine. They drank right there in the lecture hall; they drank and sang and reminisced about the Old-Eyed Fly. Fox roared with laughter as if he were rabid then started a game: Everyone without exception must relate their first sexual experience, and those who did not have one would be obliged to make up for their neglect the very next day. Already drunk voices heckled each other, interweaving hysterical laughter with outbursts. Egert watched this carousal from the round window that adjoined the lecture hall to the library, and the discordant sounds of a song wafted to his ears. “Oh, oh, oh! Do not speak, my dear, don’t say a word! Oh, my soul is fire, but the door is squeaking: it hasn’t been oiled.”

He turned back to Toria and entertained her for a while with anecdotes about Fox’s previous pranks, some of which he had seen, some of which he had only heard of, and several of which he thought up while he was telling her the stories. Listening to his deliberately cheerful chatter, Toria at first smiled palely and then to please him she even burst out laughing, though with obvious effort.

After midnight the cries and shouts in the Grand Auditorium ceased and Toria fell asleep. Sitting next to her for a while then carefully smoothing back her hair, Egert departed below.

The students were sleeping side by side, some on the benches, some on the tables, and some simply on the chilly stone floor. Fox was nowhere to be found; Egert realized this from the very first glance, and for some unknown reason his heart shrank into his chest.

Gaetan was not in their room, and his worn cloak was not hanging from the iron hook. Egert stood on the university steps for a long time, peering out into the murky night. Windows gleamed faintly in the courthouse, the executed doll on its circular pedestal weaved in the rain, and the Tower of Lash soared overhead, mute, sealed like a crypt, indifferent to the city dying at its feet.

Fox did not return in the morning. The fog that had thickened in the night did not disperse with the sun, but instead it congealed like jelly; even the wind got stuck in its clinging, damp wisps. The door of the dean’s study remained firmly shut, and Toria began roaming the stacks of the library as if she were lost, muttering responses to her own thoughts as she compulsively rubbed a velvety-smooth rag over the spines, slipcovers, and gilded edges of the books.

Egert did not tell her where he was going. He did not want to worry her.

The chill dampness and his own terror caused him to tremble as, his teeth clenched, he stepped out onto the deserted square. There were no merchants; there were no shoppers: there was only the deaf, muffled silence, the gray silhouettes of the houses, and the merciful fog that covered the city like a shroud covers the face of the deceased.

Egert soon realized that he would not find Fox. He encountered dead bodies along his path. Egert averted his eyes, but just the same his gaze found first a woman’s hand, stretched out convulsively, clinging onto a jewel; then hair spread out over the cobblestones; then the rakish boot of a guard, wet from the sagging droplets of fog and therefore gleaming as if it had just been polished for a parade. The smell of smoke mixed with the scent of decay. Egert walked on, but then he stopped, flinching, scenting the familiar aroma of a bitterish perfume in the still, dead air.

The Tower of Lash, having accomplished its dreadful business, continued to smoke slightly. Egert approached it, strangely impassive; by the entrance to the Tower a completely gray man in a laborer’s coveralls was flailing his fists against the stone masonry.

“Open up! Open up! Open up!”

Several apathetic people were crouched nearby on the pavement. A pretty woman in a nightcap that had slipped off her hair was absentmindedly stroking a dead boy lying in her lap.

“Open up!” spat the gray man. His knuckles were completely devoid of skin from punching at the stone. Beads of blood dropped down onto the pavement. Nearby a broken pickax wallowed in the dirt.

“We must pray,” someone whispered. “We must pray. Oh, Spirit of Lash…”

The gray man in the overalls pounded at the sealed door with a renewed frenzy. “Open up! Ah! Scum! Undertakers! Open up! You can’t hide! Open up!”

Egert turned and stumbled away.

Fox would not be found. He had gone missing; he had disappeared somewhere in this pestilent cauldron; no one could help; nothing would make it better; and Egert would die as well. At this thought the animal fear raged in his soul, but with his heart and his mind he understood clearly that the most important thing left to him in his shortened life was Toria. Her final days must not be darkened with horror and grief. Egert would not allow himself the luxury of dying first: only once he had made sure that nothing could ever threaten Toria again would he close his own eyes.

Egert saw a collapsed boy on the pavement in front of him, and he was about to make his way around it, keeping it as far away as possible, when the man moved, and Egert heard the faint scratching of iron against stone. A sword rested in the hand of the dying man; Egert could see beads of moisture on the costly sheath, on the heavy monogrammed hilt, on the baldric decorated with semiprecious stones. Then he shifted his gaze to the face of the man lying in the pavement.

Karver said nothing. His chest was rising rapidly, trying to suck in the wet air; his lips were parched and his eyelids were swollen. One hand, clad in a thin glove, clawed at the stones of the pavement, while the other squeezed the handle of his sword as if the weapon could defend its master even from the Plague. Karver stared at Egert, unwilling to move his eyes away.

The plaintive whickering of a horse, muted by the fog, could be heard in the distance.

Karver gasped fitfully. His lips jerked and Egert heard, as quietly as the rustle of falling sand, “Egert…”

Egert said nothing because there was nothing to say.

“Egert … Kavarren … What is happening in Kavarren right now?”

Such a keen, imploring note slithered through Karver’s voice that Egert momentarily remembered that shy, thin-lipped boy who had been the friend of his childhood.

“This … this death … will it reach Kavarren?”

“Of course not,” Egert said with certainty. “It’s too far. And they will have set up a quarantine, and patrols.…”

Karver breathed deeply; it seemed he was relieved. He threw back his head and shaded his eyes with his hand. He whispered with a half smile, “Sand … Den, tracks … Cold … water … They laughed.…”

Egert was silent, taking these incoherent words for raving.

Karver did not tear his gaze away; it was an oddly vacant gaze that seeped out from under his heavy eyelids. “Sand … The Kava river … You remember?”

For a second Egert saw a sun-drenched bank, white on yellow like sponge cake covered with icing, green isles of grass, a group of boys, raising fountains of spray up to the heavens.…

“You always … threw sand in my eyes … remember?”

He tried as hard as he could to summon such a recollection, but there was only the wet, shiny pavement before his eyes. Could it have been so? Yes, it could. Karver had never complained; he had submissively washed all the sand from his inflamed eyes.

“I didn’t mean to,” Egert said for some reason.

“Yes, you did,” Karver objected quietly.

They were silent for a while. The fog did not wish to disperse, and smoke and decay and death approached from every side.

“Kavarren,” whispered Karver almost inaudibly.

“Nothing will happen to it,” Egert replied.

Searchingly gazing at Egert, Karver tried to raise himself up onto his elbow. “Are you sure?”

The smooth surface of the Kava river gleamed in Egert’s mind’s eye; sunlight flared up and died out on the water, where the quivering copper green of Kavarren’s roofs, turrets, and weathervanes was reflected.

Knowing that he lied, he smiled widely and tranquilly. “Of course I’m sure. Kavarren is safe.”

Karver sighed deeply and lowered himself back onto the pavement. His eyes closed halfway. “Thank … Heaven…”

No one would ever hear him say another word.

The fog dispersed, and the square appeared before Egert’s gaze. It looked like a field of battle. Here would be enough food for a thousand ravens, but there was not a single bird in the city; nothing disturbed the dead, as though the scavengers of the world were obeying a taboo.

However, that was not entirely true. Egert looked around; a boy ran from corpse to corpse with his back bent low. He was about eighteen years old, medium height, scrawny, with a canvas sack over his shoulder. Beggars gathered their alms in such sacks, and Egert guessed what the youngster was gathering in his. Stooping over a corpse, he dexterously fished out a purse or a snuffbox or whatever finery caught his eye from the dead person; rings were a bother: they did not wish to slip off the swollen fingers. The lad sniffed the air, keeping a wary eye on Egert, but he continued his business, scrubbing at dead hands with a piece of soap he had saved specially for this occasion.

Egert wanted to scream, but his fear proved stronger than his fury and disgust. Spitting on his soap, the looter skirted around Egert in a wide arc and then took to his heels at the sound of a shrill whistle.

Egert, struck dumb, watched as the lad fled. On the very edge of the square he was overtaken by two broad-shouldered figures, one in the white-and-red uniform of the guards, the other in a slovenly black smock. The lad screamed like a rabbit, tried to dart away, cowered in their arms, then thrust the sack away from himself as if trying to pay them off. Egert did not want to watch, but watch he did as the man in guard’s uniform beat the lad over the head with his sack. He heard the next words, painfully strained, carry throughout the entire square.

“No! I’m not! They don’t need it! They don’t need it! The dead don’t need—ah!”

Passing into an inarticulate shriek, the screaming died out. The scrawny body crumpled to the ground in the glow of the streetlamps with the canvas sack on its chest.

Fox returned late that evening. Egert, whose intuition that day had become as sharp as a spear, found him before anyone else.

Gaetan stood by the entrance, on the stone porch of the university; he stood embracing the wooden monkey by the shoulders. His tricornered hat, crumpled out of shape, slid down his forehead. He was, of course, blindly, staggeringly drunk. Egert, who experienced colossal relief at the sight of his friend, wanted to lead him in out of the cold and put him to bed. Hearing Egert’s footsteps behind him, Fox shivered and turned around. The light of the lantern in the doorway fell on his face. Gaetan was sober, as sober as the day of the exam, but his honey-colored eyes now seemed dark, almost black.

“Egert?”

Egert did not understand what had frightened his friend so. He took another step forward, extending his hand. “Let’s go.”

Gaetan recoiled. His gaze compelled Egert to come to a dead halt; not once in their long acquaintance had he seen in the eyes of his friend such a strange expression. What was it? Loathing? Scorn?

“Fox?” he muttered uneasily.

“Don’t come near me,” Fox replied desolately. “Don’t come near me, Egert. Don’t you come near me, I beg you. Go away. Go back.” He staggered, and Egert suddenly realized that the sober Gaetan could barely stand on his own two legs: he was being dragged to the ground. He was being dragged into the ground.

He understood now what that expression was that had frozen in Fox’s eyes. It was fear of approaching death and fear of carrying away with him another person, his friend, Egert.

“Gaetan!” groaned Egert through his teeth.

Fox hugged the monkey tighter. “Don’t … You know, Farri died yesterday. Do you remember Farri?”

“Gaetan…”

“Go back. I’ll just take a little … stroll. Maybe I’ll make my way to the One-Eyed Fly. If the innkeep is still alive, he’ll give me a drink. On credit.” Fox laughed, arduously stretched out his hand and, barely reaching it, patted the monkey on his shiny wooden bottom.

Egert stood on the steps and watched him walk away. Fox staggered as he walked, sometimes falling, just as he had so many times when returning from a night out; his cap with the silver fringe lay like a parting gift at the feet of the wooden monkey. The sightless sky, full of dark clouds, brooded over the city, and the Tower of Lash, mute, sealed shut, mantled in smoke, brooded over the square.

For a whole long day and night they thrashed about like two fish at the bottom of Toria’s reddish black incandescent ocean.

Coming to her senses, Toria felt echoes of shame: never in her life would she have imagined that within herself she carried this covetous, insatiable, inexhaustible beast, ready to tear off not just clothing, but skin. Panicking, she tried not to look at Egert, who was lying next to her; she did not dare touch his skin, not even with her breath, but the ardent beast quickened and upended all her notions of dignity and decency, and afflicted by passion, she responded to the similarly grasping, indefatigable passion of Egert.

Heaven, it can’t really be like this for everyone, can it? Toria thought, because then life was completely foreign, completely different than she had ever thought it was, because there seemed to be powers that controlled her, forces that overrode all her preconceptions, and she could finally understand dark, shadowy forces that had beguiled her mother. Mother? But why dark and shadowy? Why beguiling? This is happiness; this is joy. Egert! Egert, I could have died a remote old crone, never knowing the world of truth! But could I be wrong? What if this is not truth, but obsession, delirium, deceit!

Swallowing, her throat husky from groans, her cheeks stained with tears that she did not bother to wipe away, she relaxed, abated, melted into Egert’s embracing arms as if burrowing into a warm, secure den. Closing her eyes, she lazily sorted through the fragmentary images that rushed through her brain, and from time to time plucked from the stream one that seemed to contain unmistakable truths.

It was a truth that if had she become the wife of Dinar, she would never have known of any other love besides friendly, brotherly love. It was a truth that the loss of Dinar had blessed her. Heaven, this is monstrous, this is impossible. Dinar, forgive me! Toria began to weep silently, without tears, and in his sleep Egert embraced her more tightly. She dozed off, and she saw Dinar nearby, sitting on the couch opposite the bed as he usually had when he came to her room. Serene and earnest, he looked at Toria without reproach, but also without indulgence, as though desiring to say that he was done, that he would never come back, but don’t cry, he loves you so …

Then the vision of Dinar faded away, disappeared in succession of others. Toria dreamed of her mother, frozen in a cold bank of snow, and of her father, forever weighed down by a sense of guilt. But where is the guilt of a woman, whose passions overwhelm her own identity, like a wave washing over the deck of a fragile ship? And if it was true that in her face she duplicated her mother, then did she not also inherit her passions?

However, right now it no longer mattered. Now they were all standing on the threshold of death, on the threshold beyond which Dinar had already stepped. She and Egert were a couple, even if they did not live to see their wedding, but her father was alone, alone in his study. If she feared, it was only for her father. Have I forsaken him for the sake of my own happiness? Could it be true that I have abandoned him? Could it be true?

Toria began to cry again. Egert kissed her glistening eyes and mumbled something tender; she could not make out a single word of what he said, and that was good: words were unnecessary.

Then she fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of a green mountain.

The mountain was covered with short, smooth grass. She hovered over it, occupying half the sky, and the second half was a deep blue. Toria recalled that the windows of their home were painted with this blue. The mountain was an emerald on blue. Toria inhaled, ascending even higher, and it was a good thing she did because there, on the summit of the mountain, stood her mother, wearing a dazzlingly white head scarf, laughing and stretching out her palms, which held a scarlet handful of strawberries, the first strawberries, and how long will it be until this winter is ended? There is still half a year until the next strawberries, there is still half a year, there is still time …

She awoke because Egert, groaning in his sleep, had firmly squeezed her shoulder.

They slept in the predawn hour; they both slept peacefully, deeply, without dreams, and therefore could not hear how, scraping softly, the door of the dean’s study opened, the door that had for many days been locked from the inside. In the recesses of the dark room the last flames of the candles were dying down, and the unbearably stuffy, smoky, thick air rushed to freedom. Books lay on the desk, on the floor, on all the shelves: laid bare, spread out, helpless as jellyfish driven to shore. The taxidermied rat shackled to its chain grinned evilly, the glass globe with the candle inside was covered with dust, but the steel wing spread out just as confidently and potently, and underneath it on the dean’s desk gleamed the faultless gold of the Amulet of the Prophet.

The dean stood for a long time in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb. Then he straightened up and firmly closed the door behind himself.

The corridors of the university were familiar to him down to the last crack in the arched ceilings. He walked and listened to the sound of his own footsteps, rushing through the empty passageways. He stopped in front of his daughter’s room, pressing his cheek to the heavy door.

For the time being they were happy. The dean did not need to open the door to see the hazy morning light pouring over two heads on one pillow; the entwined arms, hair, knees, and thighs; the entwined breath, dreams, and fate. It seemed that there, in that room, a single blissful, calm, weary creature, who knew nothing of death, slept sweetly.

The dean absentmindedly stroked the door. The ancient wood seemed warm, like the skin of a living organism. He stood there for a bit longer, not wanting to intrude on their bliss, and then Luayan walked on.

He could not count the number of times he had walked out onto the university steps and paused between the iron snake, the incarnation of wisdom, and the wooden monkey that symbolized the thirst for knowledge. Ravaged corpses now met the dawn on the formerly busy square, above them the abode of Lash towered, like a curse, grimy with smoke, and the university behind the dean held its peace, strangely defenseless before the gaze of the Tower.

The Plague would devastate the earth if it was not stopped. Luayan had been fourteen years old when Lart Legiar appeared in his deserted home. Lart was at the peak of his power; Luayan knew much about him, but there was only one thing he wanted to ask: Is it true that you stopped the pestilence?

Decades ago the Black Plague had devoured entire cities far from the coast, but the sea had overflowed its shores from all the corpses that congested it. Luayan had an indistinct memory of spurts of flame scurrying across the faces of motionless people; a palm covering his eyes; the weight of sackcloth, flung over his head and shoulders; and a distant howl, not of a wolf, but of a woman. The Plague had deprived Luayan of his home, of his parents, of his memories of the past. That Plague had spared him; breaking suddenly like rotten rope, it had spared him and, an orphan, he had set out on the road with a crowd of other orphans, and had wandered until either a merciful chance or cruel fate led him to the house of Orlan.

Later, he found out that the Plague never departs on its own. That time it had been stopped by an archmage called Lart Legiar.

Luayan raised his face to the gray, impenetrable sky. For his entire long life he had fallen short of greatness.

He looked back over his shoulder at the university, then at the Tower. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his habitual gesture. Heaven, how strong he had seemed to himself at the age of fourteen, and how weak he had been in actual fact. His world had been so hot then, in the foothills, the sun had beat down so brightly, the stones had been so incandescent, and the weather-beaten face of Orlan had been so obscure.

Wet snow, fine as milled grain, started to fall.

The city had gone dumb with horror. It had been stunned. Those who were still living cowered in deep shelters, and only the dead no longer feared anything. Luayan walked by them without averting his eyes. A looted shop slammed its door, which was hanging from one hinge; its owner, long dead and therefore indifferent to the ruin, lay huddled in the doorway. He squinted up at the mage with a single, withered eye: a mass of maggots swarmed in place of the other. Luayan kept walking. In a wide entryway an urchin was swinging on a swing; two sections of thick rope were attached to an overhead gantry. The boy held on to them with his hands, pumping his legs with abandon, accompanying himself with indistinct muttering, first flying into the darkness of the deserted house then flying out, passing over a dead woman in a black dress who was staring up at the sky. A rabbit hutch stood nearby and a rabbit, alive and starving, followed Luayan with its gaze. The boy did not even so much as glance at Luayan as he walked by.

The closer he came to the city gates, the more often he came across burnt-out and half-burnt-out houses. Black as if they were dressed in mourning, they gazed at Luayan with the rectangles of their windows, and on one sill he saw a sooty flowerpot with dead twigs hunkered over.

The stench of smoke and decay pulled at him from every side. He walked, stepping over bodies, swerving around capsized carriages, bundles of collected belongings, piles of purses, and the corpses of animals. The water of a narrow canal had acquired a thin film of ice overnight, and through the ice a yellow, lipless face stared up at Luayan from the bottom.

Sometimes darting, living eyes peered out of dark recesses at the sound of his footsteps and then immediately disappeared. Luayan never managed to meet these gazes. But the dead did not shield their eyes, and he honorably looked back at them, not once averting his eyes, as if he knew neither fear nor revulsion.

Lart Legiar was an archmage. Orlan was an archmage. But he, Luayan, was nothing more than a scholar; he was weak, heavens, how weak he was.

He took the wrong road, got lost on familiar streets, and twice he returned to the same place. On a tin beard—the sign of a barber’s shop—swayed a lynched looter. A weathervane that had wrenched free of its socket screeched like a hacking cough.

Lart had invited him to study under his tutelage. The boy should have leapt toward that fate, but now he was gray, and he was old, irredeemably old.

A wing of the gate was swaying back and forth, shrieking stridently. Someone moved near the gates. Luayan stopped, looked, approached.

A man was dying on his back in a cold puddle; once he had been young and strong, but now he was frightful, like a half-rotten corpse. Twisting, he tried to drink some of the icy water; he sipped at it, coughed, squinted at Luayan, and tried again. His parched lips sought after every muddy drop that cost him such backbreaking labor.

Not knowing why, Luayan bent over him, but he recoiled immediately; for the first time in his present journey, he recoiled.

The Plague showed itself to him, opening its eyes, gaining a face and a form. The dying man was being smothered, ensnared, fondled by loathsome fingers; they petted, rubbed, and stroked, and they moved in that same elaborate pattern with which the numerous legs of a spider trap a fly.

The dean stumbled backwards, retreating. The yards and streets, every house was filled with the Plague, with black clots and twitching growths; pale eyes watched from every crevice, full of heaving, pus-filled hatred, indifferent yet at the same time ravenous, gluttonous. Black fingers caressed the dead, palpating distorted faces, slipping into half-open mouths, shamelessly examining the prone bodies of men and women. It seemed to Luayan that he could hear the rustle of parting clothing and slit skin, that the air around him coagulated, filled with an overwhelming desire for death and the yearning to kill.

Staggering as if drunk, he made his way to the city gates. The dead here lay in a heap, and the fingers of the Plague waved over them like grass in a wind.

The gates, the heavy city gates, were smashed in, swept from their hinges. Beyond them he could see the road and a field, flat and bleak, where shapeless piles of rags stirred in the wind.

Luayan turned his face back to the city.

Glorious Heaven! Orlan, my teacher, help me. Lart Legiar, you were once successful, I preserved your medallion, help me. Wanderer, wherever you may be, whoever you may be, if you can, help me. You have seen for yourself how weak I am.

He closed his eyes. Then he jerked up his head, lifted up his hands, and stared at the city, at the new dwelling place of the Black Plague.

… Why is it so hot? Well, it is noon, the sun is at its zenith, and the stones are as white as sugar. Coolness rises from the well, and there in its humid, dusky depths yet another boy lives, a boy reflected in the round surface of the water. Oh, how his teeth ache from the first swallow, but the bucket is already splashing back into the water with all its tin flesh, and the sound intensifies the boy’s thirst.…

By whatever power is given to me, I order and invoke, I draw from the living, I draw from the dead, from their gaping mouths, from the emptiness of their eyes, from their nostrils, from their veins, from their flesh and blood, from their bone and hair. I draw as roots are drawn from the earth with a hoe, as an arrow, nestled in flesh, is drawn. By whatever power is given me, I command …

… The bucket plunges down, sinking ever deeper. Its slightly corroded interior floods with water, and now it can be pulled up, but the pulley is stuck, it is so difficult, as never before. His hands grow numb, his teeth clench, but the bucket scarcely pries itself away from the water, and drops, shed from its edge, echoes down into the water.…

I command and exhort, I expel you from the streets, I expel you from the water, I expel you from the wind, from the hearths, from the holes and crevices. Let it be done. By whatever power is given me, I bind you.

… And now the bucket comes ever higher, but he does not know if he will have enough strength. The sun scorches and so wants to drink the well dry. The bucket swings heavily, and the echo of falling drops becomes ever more subtle.…

Pale eyes, glossy fingers caress the dead. Dark coils and clots stir. The hill, the disinterred hill.

… to drink, I want to drink. Heaven, do not allow my hands to let go of the pulley, do not let the bucket spill over, I am so tired …

I drive you back from whence you came; I drive you deep down into the earth, into the upended depths, where neither spade nor another’s strange purpose may reach you. I drive you back, I exhort you, I seal you in. You have no place on the surface of the earth; you have no power over the living. I myself lock you away and will remain here, as a sentinel. Forever.

… What hot stones, what turbulent grass, and in my ears rings the sound of the cicada, but the water proves sweet, sweet and thick, like honey, and it flows down my chin, down my chest, down my legs, spilling onto the parched earth. And the sun is at its zenith … The sun.

That evening, when all those living in the city timidly began to move about, peering from their shelters and asking themselves if this indulgence would last; when the sick began to feel so much better that their loving attendants with haggard eyes finally let loose their tears; when dogs appeared from out of nowhere; when ravens beat their wings over the streets, belatedly gathering to their feast; then Egert and Toria found the dean.

Luayan lay on the summit of the unearthed burial mound, as if covering it with his body. Egert looked once at his face, and would not let Toria even glance at it.

9

But on the next day the cold returned, and it was necessary to hurry before the earth froze over.

Egert and Toria buried Luayan on a hill not far from the tomb of the First Prophet. Egert wanted to put the gold medallion in with him, but Toria, who had in the course of one day forgotten how to cry, stopped him: leaving the Amulet in his grave would afflict that grave. The two of them performed all the necessary rites over the body, and no one interfered with them, even though the mayor, who turned up out of the blue, had strictly ordered that all the victims of the Plague be buried in the same place, in the unearthed burial mound.

Toria, who did not have the strength to credit her loss, could not enter her father’s study. Egert went in. Among the open books and burnt-out candles only the dean’s manuscript appeared to be in full order: his heavy, voluminous, unfinished manuscript, to which had been appended a legible catalog of prepared sections, fragments, and drafts, and a detailed plan of the as-yet-unwritten chapters. There were no letters, no notes, only the manuscript, as if it was his last will and testament, and the Amulet of the Prophet, as if it was a bequest.

Hearing Egert enumerate the contents of his study, Toria tried to smile. “He did become an archmage, didn’t he? In this manuscript, there should now be a chapter on him. Don’t you think? We must finish it.”

And immediately, without transition, she said, “Egert, promise me you’ll never die.”

The city did not believe its good fortune right away. Grave-digging teams hastily committed the dead to the earth, while the afflicted started to recover. The casualties were enormous, but it turned out that a great many had been spared as well. Still sheltering in their recesses, they anxiously repeated variations of a single question to one another: What about time, had it ended or not?

A day passed without any new victims, then another day, then another; people who were fatally ill began to get to their feet, and for an entire week not one person died in the city. Mountains of earth, brought to the disturbed hill, separated the living from the dead, and on that day it became taller, full of hundreds of bodies. The streets, freed from corpses, remained desolate and frightening, but the surviving townspeople already assumed that the Plague had finally passed.

Not yet had all of the deceased been transported from deserted houses and alleyways into the trench intended for them, when the city broke out into explosions of fireworks.

Not one of those who then spilled out onto the streets and squares had ever seen a festival like it. Strangers embraced and cried on each other’s shoulders; they cried from the joy of suddenly granted life, such sweet life, to which many of them had already said their good-byes. Yesterday they were the dead, but today they were drunk on the awareness that tomorrow would bring a new day, and beyond that there would be another one, and spring would come, and children would be born. Laughing women in bedraggled clothing joyfully bestowed their favors on those whom they loved, and they loved everyone, even the cripples and the beggars and the tramps, and the guards, youths, and elders. Fourteen-year-old boys became men right on the street, but then lost their happy ladies as they disappeared into the crowd, shrieking with laughter. The frantic, insane festival of people driven mad with joy led to a few fatalities—someone drowned in a canal, someone was trampled by the crowd—but the deaths passed unheeded because on that day in the streets of the city, the people believed in eternal life.

The Tower of Lash indifferently beheld the frantic dancing of the survivors. As before, its doors and walls were sealed tight, and not a single wisp of smoke rose over the gabled roof. The hysterical merrymaking gradually abated, and then whispers began to crawl throughout the city.

The End of Time: Would it happen or had it already been prevented? Where had the Plague come from? Why had it come? Why had it left? What did the sealed walls of the abode of Lash withhold? Why did the robe-wearers not partake in the common doom, skulking behind their walls, and what would happen now? People whispered to one another, looking at the Tower, some warily, some balefully; sometimes voices would rise up, asserting that it was the acolytes of Lash who had invited this disaster with all their talk of the End of Time. It was even whispered that they had loosed the Plague on the city and then sheltered behind strong walls; it was said that the archmage, the former dean of the university, had disappeared to parts unknown on the very day the Plague ended, and that now his daughter accused the robe-wearers of all the deaths. The townsfolk were agitated; they exchanged glances with one another, not wanting to believe. The Tower did not rush to contradict the rumors that were stirring up the city, and the glances that were cast toward it became ever more sullen. Contrary to the remonstrances of the mayor, an assault with crowbars and pickaxes was already planned when the stone works that barred the doors crashed down, broken through from the inside.

Egert, who at that moment was in the library, flinched, feeling a solid thud that shook the earth. From the window he could see quite clearly how the crowd besieging the Tower fell back as if repelled by a gust of wind.

In the black breach stood a hunched gray figure with disheveled hair as white as the moon.

Less than half the soldiers of Lash remained among the living. The bodies of the deceased robe-wearers lay in front of the Tower; they lay in long rows, and wide hoods concealed the dead faces to their chins. The living acolytes stood just as motionless as their dead comrades, and their hoods fell over their faces just as low, and the wind pulled at the clothing of both the living and the dead with the same sluggishness.

Egert did not hear the Magister’s speech; fear kept him from approaching. The crowd listened in silence. In the flood of the Magister’s voice, in the most passionate section of his speech, Egert did hear a brief “Lash!” The people shuddered, involuntarily lowering their heads. Then the Magister fell silent, and the crowd slowly dispersed, docile and hushed, as if lost in solving the riddle presented by the Magister.

Several weeks passed. The surviving students rejoiced when they met one another on the steps of the university, but after boisterous embraces and greetings an uneasy silence usually followed: inquiring about the fate of their friends, far too often they received the most grievous of all possible news. However that may be, the university soon came back to life. The news of the dean’s death was transmitted in a whisper, and many shuddered at hearing it, but many also grieved, and therefore reached out to Toria, wishing to share her grief.

The headmaster expressed his condolences to Toria. She accepted them with reserved dignity. Her father’s study became her own, and she spent many hours under the steel wing, reviewing Luayan’s papers, especially his manuscript. The Amulet of the Prophet, at the request of Egert, was hidden in a place known only to her: Egert did not want to know the secret, and Toria, biting her lips, respected his wish.

Meeting Toria in the corridors, the students greeted her with almost the same respect with which they had previously greeted the dean. Egert always trailed behind her, and everyone already knew that immediately after the period of mourning he would become her husband. No one took it into his head to be astonished at her choice; they all silently recognized that Egert had the right to this distinction.

One day the heiress of Luayan gathered the students in the Grand Auditorium. After an hour, the university turned into a seething cauldron because Toria, ascending to the rostrum for the first time, calmly and simply informed them all of the truth about the crimes of the acolytes of Lash.

Tempers inflamed and boiled over; one suggested they take to the streets, one called for the destruction of Lash, and one brought Fox to mind: he was right, the poor fellow; he had no love for the robed men; he would have shown them! The headmaster, blanching to the top of his shiny bald head, was scarcely able to keep his pupils from revolt.

Toria was called to the headmaster’s study, and the conversation went on for a long time. Egert saw how bewildered the headmaster seemed when, standing in the doorway to his office, he shook his bald head at Toria.

“I don’t think … I don’t think, my child, that what you said should become public knowledge. And then there really is no proof, and … I should hardly think … Desist, I beg you, from untimely accusations. It’s not worth it. That is…”

The headmaster talked and talked, but Toria had already left, holding her head unusually low.

“He’s afraid,” she said with bitterness, closing the door of her father’s study behind herself and Egert. “He doesn’t want to believe. No, he doesn’t believe, when all’s said and done. He thinks I’m frantic with grief. And in the city people now think that the acolytes of Lash stopped the End of Time with their incessant ceremonies, rituals, and prayers to their Spirit. They are already gathering money for a new memorial to Lash. How can this be?”

“I don’t understand,” Egert said helplessly. “There were so many corpses among their soldiers. What did they hope to accomplish?”

Toria smiled dismally. “Do you remember what my father said? ‘They are obstinate, spiteful children, setting fire to their home, sure in their faith that the blaze they play with will not harm them.’”

She abruptly stopped short, as if her throat were compressed by a grasping claw of a bird. Recollections about her father were beyond her strength. Turning her back on Egert, she was silent for a long time, and her trembling palm absently stroked the pages of the open manuscript.

Egert could hardly restrain himself from rushing to her with consolation, but right now that might be inopportune. He simply watched her silently, and together with compassion for Toria’s grief and his habitual fear for his own hide, another, stronger feeling grew in his soul.

“Tor,” he said as carefully as he could. “I know that you will not like what I am about to say, but I agree with the words of our headmaster: it is not worth it, and there is no point in getting mixed up with the acolytes of Lash. They are very dangerous. That’s all there is to it, now you can berate me.”

She turned around slowly. Her lips, squeezed tight, paled, and the look in her narrowed eyes forced Egert to step back.

He wanted to explain that he was motivated not only by his fear, that the memory of Luayan was as priceless to him as it was to Toria, that his murderers were no less abhorrent to him, but the Order of Lash was full of madmen who would stop at nothing, and in resolving to be in conflict with them, Toria was standing on the razor’s edge, and for him, Egert, there was nothing more valuable in the world than her life. But as Toria seethed silently, her eyes conveyed a chilly reproach, and beneath that gaze Egert could not gather all his disordered thoughts into a coherent speech.

“I will not berate you,” she said so distantly that Egert became frightened. “The curse is speaking for you. But since when has its cowardly voice become so similar to your own?”

A pause hung, long and painful, and Egert recalled that day when the heavy book in the hands of Toria beat at his face.

“I had so hoped for the support of the headmaster,” Toria finally said, and her voice shook. “The support of only the students is too little.… But how can it be—” She considered something and did not continue right away. “—that although I find support, it is not from you!”

Egert wanted to get down on his knees before her, but instead he walked up to her and said directly into her unrelenting dry eyes, “Think of me what you will. Judge me how you wish, but the curse is not the cause here; no one cursed me to be afraid for you! But I…” And again he faltered, although he very much needed to tell her how frightful and monstrous the thought of losing her was, losing her now, when it was just the two of them amid a hostile world; and how painful it was to be aware that he was in no condition to protect the most precious, most beloved thing he had. He needed to clothe all this in words, but his pitiful efforts were futile.

She turned her back, not even waiting for him to continue. Looking at her unnaturally straight spine, he feared that a rift had opened up between them, that this conversation could never be forgotten, and that he needed to save Toria and save himself. He realized this last and as before remained silent because she was right, because he was a coward, not a man, and therefore not her equal.

Steps sounded in the corridor, not normal, measured steps, but strange and hasty. Egert heard the incoherent voice of the headmaster and raised his head in surprise. Toria turned around slowly; someone knocked on the door, at first hesitantly, as if frightened, then sharply and demandingly, even rudely. Egert was sure that never in the entire time of its existence had the door to the dean’s study received such treatment.

Toria raised her eyebrows coolly. “What’s this all about?”

“In the name of the law!” dryly carried from beyond the door.

And immediately the voice of the headmaster, nervous and muddled, rang out, “Gentlemen, there has been some kind of misunderstanding. This is a cathedral of academia! You cannot come in here with weapons, gentlemen!”

The door shook with new blows, and with each of them Egert’s soul felt as if it were being hammered out on an anvil. He clenched his jaw, silently praying, Heaven help me conduct myself with dignity!

Toria sneered disdainfully. She threw up the hook that latched the door and rose to her full height in the doorway. Cursing himself, Egert retreated to a dark corner. Invisible from without, he spied from behind Toria’s back the red-and-white uniforms, the bloodless pate of the headmaster, the crowd of nervous students, and the angular, composed face of an officer with a ceremonial whip clutched in his fist: the sign that at the present moment he was fulfilling the will of the law.

“This is my father’s study,” Toria said coldly. “No one is allowed to break down this door, and no one is allowed to enter here without my permission. Is that acceptable to you, gentlemen?”

The officer raised his whip. “Then you acknowledge that you are the daughter of Dean Luayan?”

“I will say it a thousand times, and a thousand times know that it is an honor.”

The officer nodded, as if Toria’s answer gave him pleasure. “In that case, we invite the lady to come with us.”

Egert felt streams of cold sweat running down his back. Why did the most horrible, most incredible things, appropriate only in nightmares, always happen in his life?

Toria pulled her head up even higher, even though it seemed impossible that it could go any higher. “You invite me? Why on earth should I go, and what if I refuse?”

The officer again nodded, again contentedly, as if he had only been waiting for a similar question. “We are acting on the behalf of the city magistrate.” In support of his words he shook his ornamental whip. “We are empowered to compel the lady if she refuses to come with us of her own free will.”

Egert wanted Toria to look to him, even though it was inconceivable.

What could be simpler than for her to look back in search of help, support, protection? But from the very first he knew that she would not turn to him, because there was no point in awaiting protection from Egert, and if she looked into his suffering, guilt-ridden, haggard eyes, she would experience neither comfort nor hope. He knew this and all the same he silently implored her to turn to him, and it actually seemed that she was about to do so, but then she froze, having turned only halfway.

“Gentlemen,” interrupted the headmaster, and Egert saw now how his utterly ancient head wobbled on his thin neck. “Gentlemen, this is unbelievable. Never before has anyone been arrested within these walls. This is a sanctuary! This is a refuge for the spirit. Gentlemen, you are committing a sacrilege! I will go to the mayor!”

“Don’t worry, headmaster,” said Toria, as if pondering. “I am of the opinion that this misunderstanding will soon be worked out and—”

Breaking off, she turned to the officer.

“Well, I understand that you will not stop short of force, gentlemen, and I do not desire that these hallowed halls should be further desecrated by violence. I will go.” She stepped forward and quickly shut the door to the study behind her, as if wishing by this last action to shield Egert from outside eyes.

The door was shut. Egert stood in his corner, clawing his fingernails into his palms, listening as the clatter of boots, the whispering of the distraught students, and the lamentations of the headmaster receded along the corridor.

The courthouse was a very grave, very ponderous, very awkward structure that stood on the square. Egert had accustomed himself to avoid the iron doors, carved with the inscription DREAD JUSTICE! He knew at least ten paths that bypassed them because the round black pedestal with the small gibbet, where a manikin dangled in a noose, seemed frightful and loathsome to him.

A wet snow was falling. It seemed dirty gray to Egert, like cotton packed in a wound. His overshoes stuck in the slush, and water trickled in streams past the lamppost that Egert was using as a refuge. Trembling from head to toe, shifting from foot to foot, he stared at the closed doors until his eyes hurt, initially deceiving himself with a foolish hope: that the iron maw would spring open and release Toria.

The flock of students, which had at first gathered around him in a crowd, gradually dispersed; downcast, subdued, they wandered off without looking at one another. Various people went in and out of the courthouse: bureaucrats, haughty and self-important or solicitous and preoccupied; guards with javelins; petitioners with their heads drawn down to their shoulders. Blowing on his cold fingers, he wondered, Had they accused Toria of anything? What might they accuse her of? Who could help them now if even a visit from the headmaster to the mayor came to naught?

He spent a long night full of fear on the square, illuminated by the barely gleaming light of the streetlamp and by the ominous reflections in the windows of the cheerless building. Dawn broke late, and in the pale morning Egert saw acolytes of Lash entering the iron doors.

There were four of them, and all of them looked like Fagirra. The doors closed behind them, and Egert hunkered down by his post, wearied from fear, anxiety, and despair.

The accusation, of course, originated with the acolytes. Fagirra’s words spilled out of Egert’s distant memory, “The city magistrate heeds the advice of the Magister.” Yes, but the Order of Lash is not the court! Perhaps I’ll be able to explain to the magistrate, to open his eyes. It is likely that the Black Plague has also robbed him of those close to him, for the Plague respected neither rank nor office.

A group of guards hurriedly exited the iron doors. Egert thought he recognized the officer who arrested Toria among them. Pitilessly tramping down the slushy snow with their boots, the guards rushed away, and Egert berated himself for his foolish suspicion: that they once again headed for the university.

If only the dean were alive. If only you were alive, Luayan. How can they dare? And now Toria has no one to turn to except for …

He pressed his cheek to the cold, wet lamppost, waiting for the whip of fear at the idea of going up to those iron doors, of passing by that executed manikin, of stepping over that threshold. But then, Toria had already stepped over it.

He spent a long time convincing himself that there was nothing frightening in what he planned to do. He simply had to enter the courthouse, and then he would leave right after he had seen the magistrate. He needed to convince him. The magistrate was not Lash. But Toria was already there, and Egert might get to see her.

This thought decided him. Immediately recalling his protective rituals, interweaving the fingers of one hand and clutching a button in the other, he moved toward the iron doors following an intricate, winding route.

He would never have summoned the courage to seize hold of the door handle, but fortunately or unfortunately the door opened in front of him, producing a scribe with a bland expression. There was nothing else for Egert to do but step forward into the unknown.

The unknown turned out to be a low semicircular room with many doors, empty desks in the middle, and a bored guard by the entryway. The guard did not so much as glance at Egert as he entered, but a flabby young clerk, who was absentmindedly tracing the point of his rusty penknife along the tabletop, nodded inquiringly but without any special interest.

“Shut the door behind you.”

The door swung shut firmly without Egert’s help, like the door of a cage. The chain attached to the dead bolt clanged.

“What’s your business?” the clerk asked. His expression, sleepy and entirely ordinary, comforted Egert slightly. The first person he encountered in this formidable institution seemed no more sinister than a shopkeeper. Gathering up his courage, squeezing his button for all he was worth, Egert forced out, “The daughter of Dean Luayan, of the university, was arrested yesterday. I…” He faltered, not knowing what to say further.

The clerk, in the meantime, had brightened. “Name?”

“Whose?” Egert asked foolishly.

“Yours.” The clerk, evidently, had long ago become accustomed to the obtuseness of petitioners.

“Egert Soll,” said Egert after a pause.

The cloudy eyes of the clerk flashed. “Soll? The auditor?”

Unpleasantly startled by the clerk’s knowledge of him, Egert nodded reluctantly.

The clerk scratched his cheek with the tip of his knife. “I think … yes. Wait just a moment, Soll. I will announce you.” And sliding out from behind his desk, the bureaucrat dived into one of the side corridors.

Instead of being glad, once again Egert became frightened, more intensely than before, so that his knees were shaking. His legs took a step toward the doors. The somnolent guard looked at him, and his hand settled absently onto his pikestaff. Egert froze. A second guard, who unhurriedly walked out of the very corridor down which the clerk had disappeared, examined Egert critically, like a cook examines a carcass that has just been brought back from market.

The clerk, peering out an entirely different door, beckoned to Egert with a crooked finger. “Come with me, Soll.”

So, submissive as a lost boy, Egert followed the clerk toward his fate. He crossed the path of four of the robed men in the corridor. The familiar, harsh odor wafted toward Egert, and it repulsed him so much, he felt he might vomit; not one of the soldiers of Lash lifted his hood, but Egert felt their cold, intent gazes on his back.

Crooked folds hung over the face of the magistrate, submerging his small eyes, sunken in flesh. Egert glanced into them once and immediately lowered his eyes, examining the smooth floor with marble veins, onto which water flowed from his soaked shoes. The magistrate studied him. Without raising his head, Egert could feel the weighty gaze eating into his skin.

“We expected to see you sooner, Soll.” The strained voice of the magistrate was scarcely audible; it seemed that every word cost him effort. “We expected you. After all, wasn’t it the daughter of Dean Luayan, your wife, who was arrested?”

Egert flinched. The magistrate had to wait quite a long time for his answer.

“Well, we are going to get married. That is, we plan to.” Having whispered this despicable phrase, Egert was pierced by an abhorrence of himself, as if, by informing the magistrate of this simple truth, he had somehow betrayed Toria.

“That’s one and the same,” sighed the magistrate. “Justice is counting on you, Soll. You will appear as the chief witness in court.”

Egert raised his head. “A witness? Of what?”

Brisk voices and the stomping of boots could be heard from beyond the door; then a clerk emerged from behind a curtain and began whispering something quickly into the ear of the magistrate.

“Tell them that the command has been revoked.” The magistrate’s voice soughed like snakeskin on dry stone. “He’s already here.”

Egert’s strained nerves unerringly ascertained that the magistrate was talking about him. He recalled the guards that set out for the university, and he licked parched lips that had lost all sensation.

“You have nothing to be afraid of.” The magistrate smiled, observing him. “You are nothing more than a witness. A valuable witness, inasmuch as you were close to the family of the old necromancer. Isn’t that so?”

Egert felt his ashen cheeks become hot and red. Referring to Dean Luayan as an old necromancer went beyond all bounds of disrespect, but then fear swallowed this spasm of indignation like a bog swallows a stone tossed into the mire.

The magistrate spoke dispassionately. “Just one virtue is required of a witness: to speak the truth. You know how grievously the Plague cost the city. You know that it did not appear on its own.”

Egert’s skin felt stretched.

“The Plague did not appear on its own,” continued the magistrate in his rasping voice. “The old necromancer and his daughter used their magic to summon it from out of the earth, from the gloom where it should have stayed hidden for generations. The Sacred Spirit Lash foretold the End of Time, but his acolytes were able to stop the assault and overwhelm the necromancer with ceaseless prayers and ceremonies. The city has been saved, but there are so many victims, Soll, so many victims. You must agree that the perpetrators of this crime should answer before the law; the families of the slain require it, and justice itself requires it.”

The magistrate’s hoarse voice seemed deafening to Egert, like the bellowing of a herd being led to slaughter.

“That’s not true,” he whispered, for at that moment even the fear in his soul was stunned. “That’s not true. The acolytes of Lash dug up the den of the Plague: it is they who summoned it, and the dean stopped it at the cost of his own life. I saw it, I…”

Fear recovered from its shock and called out. It swept over his mouth and snapped it shut; it poured streams of clammy sweat over his body and flung him into a merciless, fevered trembling.

“Slander against Lash,” observed the magistrate, “is absolutely forbidden, and the first offense is punishable by a public whipping.”

Silence fell and for several long minutes Egert’s inflamed imagination presented him with a picture of the whip, the crowd, and the executioner. Stinging welts seemed to be already burning on his back.

The magistrate sighed. Something caught in his throat then burst forth, as if tearing through a pustule. “However, I understand your situation. You are not completely the master of yourself and are not responsible for your own words; therefore, I will pretend that I did not hear them. It is likely that the trial will take place as soon as the interrogation of the prisoner is finished. As for you, Soll, I do not have any basis for detaining you, but the prosecutor wants to ask you a few questions.”

The magistrate stretched out his hand toward a small bell on the table. Without waiting for the ring, a squat guard appeared from behind a curtain that until this moment had been invisible to Egert. Rubbing at his sore thighs, Egert stepped beyond the concealed portiere.

Wood lice skittered along the damp walls. In the light of torches braced to the walls, the shadow of Egert’s escort thrashed about like an enormous moth. Listening to the sound of his own footsteps, Egert agonized, thinking of Toria.

They interrogated her and will interrogate her again. About what? She … Heaven, would they really dare torture a woman!

Then in the echoing silence of the corridor a distant scream, muffled by stone walls, seemed to hover in the air around him. He could not restrain himself from groaning. The guard escorting him looked back in surprise.

A keyed turned in a concealed door. The guard forced Egert through the door, slightly nudging him in the back. The dark, narrow room looked exactly like a cell, and Egert was sure that he had been brought right into the prison. But then the torch being brought in by the guard illuminated a tall armchair in the corner and a man sitting in that chair. Without surprise and even without an increase in his fear, Egert recognized Fagirra.

Placing the torch in a bracket, the guard bowed low and left. The tramp of his boots receded down the corridor.

Fagirra did not move. His hood rested on his shoulders, and it seemed to Egert that decades had passed since they last met: so much horror had happened since that time. Fagirra had aged suddenly. He no longer possessed his previous youthful appearance. Egert was struck by the thought that the true age of Fagirra was revealed to him only now.

Several minutes passed before the robed man sighed noisily and stood up, ceding the only chair in the room to Egert. “Take a seat, Egert. I can see that you are hardly able to keep on your feet.”

“I’ll stand,” replied Egert dully.

Fagirra shook his head seriously. “No, Egert, you will not stand. You yourself understand this. Your pride and your cowardice will tear you asunder, but something tells me that your cowardice will prove stronger. You can, of course, lament this fact without end, torment and castigate yourself, or you can simply sit down and listen to what a man who sympathizes with you has to say. Because I do sympathize with you, Egert, and I have from the very beginning.”

“You are the prosecutor,” Egert declared at the dark corner; he declared, not asking, but simply expressing his certainty. “The prosecutor in the trial against Toria. I should have expected it.”

“Yes,” Fagirra confirmed dolefully. “I am the prosecutor, and you will be the witness.”

Egert leaned against the wall, feeling how each of his muscles came into contact with the cold stronghold; then he bent his knees and sat, pressing his back against the wall. “Fagirra,” he said wearily, “did you see the Plague? I don’t know what happened there, behind the walls of the Tower, but the city … If only you could have seen…”

Fagirra paced around the narrow room. Egert watched as his well-made boots, hidden down to their ankles by his robe, stepped across the floor.

“Egert.” Fagirra stopped. “Did anyone you know die?”

“A friend of mine died,” responded Egert desolately. “And my teacher perished.”

“Yes.” Fagirra resumed his pacing. “I understand. As for me, Egert, six members of my family died: my mother, my brother, my sisters, and my nieces. They lived in the outskirts and all died in the course of one day.”

Egert was silent. He understood immediately that Fagirra was not lying; the robed man’s voice had shifted in an unnatural and strange way.

“I didn’t know that acolytes of Lash had families,” he said hoarsely.

“According to you,” Fagirra laughed bitterly, “the acolytes of Lash grow off trees, like pears?”

For some time the only sounds in the room were the crackling of the torch and the soft tread of Fagirra’s boots along the stone floor.

“I apologize,” Egert said finally.

Fagirra smirked without stopping his pacing. “You weren’t there in the Tower when all the entrances were sealed, when the Plague began, and there was nowhere to put the corpses.”

“You yourselves…,” Egert said in a whisper. “You yourselves willed it.”

Fagirra broke into a rough grin. “It is not for you to judge our designs.”

“But it was madness!”

“Yes, because the Magister is a madman!” Fagirra emitted a dry, sharp laugh. “He is a madman, but the Order, well, the Order is not composed of only the Magister. The Magister’s time is passing, but the Order remains, the Secret remains.” Here Fagirra’s voice slid into overt sarcasm. “And the Power that is bound to it also remains.” He became serious again. “You can’t understand, Egert. You are not a lover of power.”

“It is you who is a lover of power,” clarified Egert under his breath.

Fagirra nodded. “Yes. Do you know who will be the next Magister?”

“I know,” Egert replied dully, and it was quiet again for some time. Then somewhere in the dungeons below, iron rattled, and it seemed to Egert that once again he heard vague, distant screams. He felt chilled to the bone, but quiet reigned throughout the courthouse as before. It was possible that the terrible sounds were born from Egert’s afflicted imagination.

“Listen to me,” he said in despair. “Power is all well and good, but you know the truth no less than I do. You know where the Plague came from, and who defeated it. We owe our lives to Dean Luayan: you and I, the magistrate, the guards, the mayor, the townsfolk. The man gave us back our lives. Why do you wish to punish his innocent daughter?”

“Luayan was even stronger than I thought.” Fagirra stopped, squinting in the light of the torch. “He truly was an archmage.”

These words, spoken so simply and without reservation, compelled Egert to lean forward. “So you admit it?”

Fagirra shrugged his shoulders. “Only a madman, like the Magister, would wish to deny it.”

Egert clasped his sweaty palms together in desperation. “For Heaven’s sake, tell me what you want to accuse Toria of?”

Fagirra looked into Egert’s beseeching face, sighed, and sat down next to him on the stone floor, leaning his back against the wall. Somewhere in the distance, in the bowels of the building, an iron door clanged.

“You’ll return home,” said Fagirra without any expression on his face. “You have a decrepit father and an ill mother in a little town called Kavarren.”

“What do you want to accuse Toria of?” Egert repeated, almost soundlessly.

“Yes, she is beautiful. She is too beautiful, Egert. She will bring you misery. She was the reason, albeit indirectly, for the death of her first fiancé, that man you—”

“How do you—?”

“—that man you killed. She is not like other women; there is something in her.… A gift, I would call it a gift, Egert. An exceptional woman. I understand what you are feeling right now.”

“She is innocent,” Egert spoke into Fagirra’s eyes, which were twinkling in the gloom. “What do you accuse her of?”

Fagirra averted his eyes. “Of necromantic acts that resulted in the Plague.”

The walls did not collapse, and the earth did not tremble. The flame continued to wreath the resinous top of the torch, and the silver threads that adorned the empty armchair in the corner gleamed.

“I don’t understand,” Egert said helplessly. But he had understood, and immediately.

Fagirra sighed. “So try to understand. There are some things that are more valuable than mere life and simple, worldly justice. A sacrifice is always innocent, otherwise how is he or she a sacrifice? A sacrifice is always better than the crowd surrounding the altar.”

“Fagirra,” said Egert in a whisper. “Don’t do this.”

His companion shook his head dejectedly. “I understand. But I have no other alternative. Someone must carry the punishment for the Plague.”

“The guilty should.”

“Toria is guilty. She is a malevolent sorceress, the daughter of Dean Luayan,” Fagirra responded levelly. “And think on this, Egert. It is within my power to make you an accomplice, but you are no more than a witness. Do you realize how close you’ve come to the abyss in these last few days?”

Egert clenched his teeth, waiting for a dreary wave of fear.

Fagirra touched his knee with his hand. “But you are just a witness, Egert. And your testimony will carry weight because you love the defendant, but for the sake of truth you must repudiate your love.”

“For the sake of truth?”

Fagirra stood; a long, dark shadow grew on the wall. He walked over to the armchair and leaned his elbows on the backrest. In the torchlight he seemed like an old man.

“What awaits her?” Egert’s unruly lips asked.

Fagirra raised his eyes. “Why do you want to know how she will die? Return to your Kavarren immediately after the judgment. I don’t think you’ll be all that happy, but time draws in even such wounds.”

“I will not be a witness against Toria!” bellowed Egert before the fear had a chance to squeeze shut his jaw.

Fagirra shook his head. He shook his head, thinking about something, then nodded to Egert. “Get up. Come with me.”

At first his numbed legs refused to work; Egert stood on the second attempt. Fagirra drew a jangling ring of keys from the depths of his robe. A narrow iron door stood in a dark corner, and beyond it a steep, winding staircase led below.

A short, broad-shouldered man in baggy clothes was picking his teeth with a lath. The appearance of Fagirra and Egert caught him unawares, and he almost swallowed his toothpick as he sprang forward to meet the robed man. Taking the torch from Fagirra’s hand, he walked in front of them, cringing, while Egert tried to remember where he had seen him before. Egert’s speculations came to an end when their escort obsequiously flung open a squat door with a meshed window.

Two or three torches burned here already, and in their light Egert could see ugly torture devices, which could only have been conceived by a fiend of hell, staring at him from their places on the stone walls.

He halted, instantly feeling weak. Fagirra supported him with an exact, efficient movement, firmly taking his arm just above the elbow. Instruments untouched by rust, kept in full readiness, hung on hooks and lay on shelves in heaps: pliers and drills, knee splitters and thumbscrews, boards studded with spikes, cat o’ nine tails, and other abominable things, from which Egert quickly averted his eyes. Among the instruments of torture crouched a brazier, full of banked coals. Nearby stood a three-legged stool and an armchair with a high back, exactly the same as the one left behind in that small, empty cell. Egert’s darting eyes discerned a worn wooden trundle with dangling loops of chain that rested on a short raised platform.

He now remembered where he had seen the broad-shouldered master of the torture devices. On the Day of Jubilation he had ascended the scaffold together with the magistrate and the convicted men. Then, an ax had been in his hand, and he had held it just as unpretentiously as he now routinely and expertly blew on the coals in the brazier.

“Egert,” Fagirra asked quietly, still holding him by his arm, “where is that gold bauble located: the medallion that belongs to the dean?”

The coals changed from black to crimson; the executioner would have made an excellent fire-stoker. Egert began to wheeze, trying to utter even one word.

“You remember, I once asked you about his safe. Our people searched the dean’s study and found nothing. Where is the medallion now, do you know?”

Egert said nothing, but on the edges of his consciousness, befuddled by terror, thoughts smoldered. Sacrilege. The study, the steel wing … they profaned it. Dean Luayan, where are you?

“Egert.” Fagirra peered into his eyes. “I am very interested in the answer to this question. Believe me, the screams of the tortured afford me no pleasure. Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Egert soundlessly, but the robed man read his words from his lips.

He slowly and eloquently shifted his gaze from Egert to the executioner and from the executioner to the brazier. Then he sighed, rubbing the corner of his mouth. “You’re not lying to me, Egert, are you? I would not believe any other man, but you, well … It’s too bad, but if you really don’t know.” Fagirra lowered his hand. “Toria knows, doesn’t she?”

Egert nearly fell. Not knowing what he was doing, he tried to sit down on the trundle with the chains and staggered back. Fagirra gently pushed him into the armchair, and Egert, unable to keep his feet, slammed the back of his head against its high wooden back. His hands clawed at the armrests with a deathlike grip.

The executioner looked inquiringly at Fagirra, who snapped at him wearily, “Wait a minute!”

He pulled the three-legged stool over in front of Egert and sat down, carpeting the floor with the folds of his robe.

“I repeat: I sympathize with you, Egert. I’ll keep no secrets from you. The law describes a punishment for the refusal to testify or for false witness: Those who commit this crime are immediately chastened by having their lying tongues ripped out. Show him the pliers.” He turned to the executioner.

Measuring Egert with the gaze of an experienced tailor, the executioner darted to a corner and pulled from a clattering pile an instrument that, in his opinion, would do the trick. Grease glistened on the curved blades of the pliers. The executioner was masterful and precise in his work, and he had even adapted the long handles of the pliers for a special use: they were as sharp as two enormous awls.

Egert squeezed his eyes and lips shut.

“That won’t help,” sighed Fagirra in the darkness that was closing in around Egert. “It will do you no good to be childish. This is life, Egert. All sorts of things happen, regardless of whether or not you shut your eyes. Fine, don’t look. It isn’t really necessary. The trial will convene, in all likelihood, the day after tomorrow. We will keep an eye on you, and make sure you come to it. I don’t have to tell you that it is not a good idea to run away, do I? No, you understand. And after this is all over, if you need some money for the road to Kavarren, I will lend it to you. You can return it to me when you get there. Are we clear?”

Egert tried to remember Toria’s laughing face, but he could not.

The city, crippled by the Plague, once again wanted to live.

Heirs appeared from both far and near, laying claim to the deserted and properly ransacked houses, factories, and shops. Quarrels and lawsuits sprang up like mushrooms. The guilds, substantially thinned out, retreated from their time-honored rules and admitted apprentices who had not yet completed their studies into their ranks. Both cheerful and spiteful provincials flooded the city gates from dawn till dusk. They were generally ambitious youths who desired to rise quickly above the crowd: that is, to get rich and marry an aristocrat. The aristocrats also returned; once again the clatter of hooves and wheels resounded along the cobblestones, sedans carried by liveried servants swayed through the streets, and children reappeared. Both rosy-cheeked babes in the arms of wet nurses and dirty gutter trash exulted in the clean, white snow that finally fell.

Liveliness reigned in the city during the day, but not one night passed by without the moans and tears of nightmares and sorrowful memories. Madmen, who had lost their reason in the days of the Plague, roamed around the burned houses. They were pitied and feared even by the homeless dogs. Families had been culled, and their losses were unbearable; therefore the city rioted when the voice of the town crier, hoarse from the cold, informed them of the upcoming trial.

After a single night not one window remained intact in the entire university. Those townspeople who did not believe in the heinous crime of the dean and his daughter scolded their neighbors and family members under their breath, alleging their innocence with a single damning argument: It could not be! The majority doubted the logic of this argument, twisted their lips, and shrugged their shoulders: Mages, who knows what they are capable of? Common folk could never understand these mages, and after all, the Plague had to have come from somewhere. Let all sorcerers be damned.

Fighting broke out in the square: a small group of students grappled tooth and nail with a mass of embittered craftsmen. Blood was shed, and only the rough intervention of the guards put an end to the brawl. The students, bloodied and baring their teeth, retreated behind the walls of the university, chased by flying stones.

“You said Lash would protect us!”

Once the clerk’s son had had round and fat cheeks like a roll. Now his cheeks were deep, sunken, and circles lay around the eyes.

“You said Lash would protect us, but instead…”

“You are alive,” said Fagirra tiredly.

“Yes, but all of them…”

“You are alive. But do not think that the tests have ended.”

The clerk’s son shrank into himself. His blue eyes were enlarged, but they did not look more bright.

“The Order is on the threshold of supreme power,” Fagirra said. “But do not think that the tests are over.”

“I…”

“Keep silent.” Fagirra did not raise his voice, but the son of the clerk wanted to become a wood louse on the wall.

Fagirra looked around him. He smiled rigidly.

“The End of Times will come eventually. Possibly not tomorrow. But it will arrive. And think about whose side you are on.… Go!”

The former student, and now the servant of Lash, slipped from the room, happy that he had been permitted to leave.

Fagirra looked at the wall in front of him for several seconds. The Order might be on the threshold of power, but this was not enough. Sooner or later the monstrous Third Power would enter the Doors of Creation again, and the new Doorkeeper would meet it at the threshold. The Amulet of the Prophet would rust and this little toy was the key to the End of Time.…

But where is it? And why, until now, did the girl keep silent? She will talk. Before or after the trial she will start talking.

The evening before the trial, the first spectators appeared in front of the courthouse. At dawn the square was so congested with people that the guards had to set their whips in motion to clear a path to the building. People gave way without the benefit of whips, groaning and pressing against one another, before a procession of the acolytes of Lash that made its way to the court. The university gaped with broken windows, but a crowd of students, forcing a path through the shouts and insults, also came. Four sturdy guards with pikes held across their bodies conducted one of them into the courthouse: a tall fair-haired man with a scar on his cheek. A rumor that he was the chief witness went the rounds.

There was far from enough room in the court to let everyone in, but bearing in mind the importance of the trial, the magistrate graciously allowed the townspeople to occupy the space between the doors, as well as the corridor leading outside and the steps of the building, and in the end the spacious courtroom was connected to the square by a wide ribbon of humanity. People reported what they heard from ear to ear like water is delivered from hand to hand during a fire, and everything that was said in the court became the talk of the square within a matter of minutes. The beginning of the hearing kept being delayed; sitting on a long, rickety bench, Egert watched impassively as the acolytes of Lash talked behind the empty judgment seat, as a clerk sharpened his quills, as the bench opposite him was slowly filled with frightened shopkeepers: they were also witness, witnesses of the Plague. Everything must go according to the rules. What a pity that it was impossible to summon to court those unfortunates whose bodies reposed under the hill; what a pity that it was impossible to summon Dean Luayan. He could not rise to his feet from under the earth, not even to help his beloved daughter.

Turning his head toward the hall, Egert saw the fringed caps of the students and instantly averted his eyes.

Two scribes were fidgeting behind a long table. Egert overheard one of them ask the other in a low voice, “Do you have a nail file? My nail broke, damn it!”

The crowd fidgeted, jostled one another, whispered to one another, and examined with equal curiosity the somber decorations of the hall, the scribes, Egert, the guards, the judgment seat, and the toylike gibbet on the table in front of it. It was an exact copy of the one that overlooked the entrance. The prisoner’s dock was empty, but right next to it, perched on a stool, was the short man of unprepossessing appearance dressed in a shapeless smock. A canvas bag rested on his knees, and by its contours Egert’s eyes effortlessly divined the nature of the object concealed inside.

The long-handled pliers.

Ten minutes passed, then another ten. The spectators finally began to look around excitedly, and Egert saw the magistrate striding toward the dais. A man in a hood accompanied him; Egert knew who he was. Treading with difficulty, the magistrate climbed the velvet-pleated steps and sat down heavily in the judgment seat. Fagirra stood next to him without raising his hood, but Egert still felt his observant gaze rest on him. The magistrate sighed something in a strained voice, and the clerk took up his words like a resonant echo.

“Bring in the accused!”

Egert mired his head deep into his shoulders, riveting his eyes to the gray fissures in the stone floor. The noise in the hall dimmed, steel clanged, and then Egert’s ability to feel others’ suffering returned to him.

His head still lowered, Egert’s skin sensed Toria entering the court. She was a solid lump of pain and fear, constricted by her obstinate will. He felt how with her very first glance, covetous, full of hope, she searched the hall for him and how that glance warmed as it settled on him. He realized that she already knew everything. She knew about the role that had been prepared for Egert, but all the same she rejoiced at the opportunity of seeing him; all the same she hoped as devoutly as a child. She placed her hope in this man, most precious to her.

Then he raised his head.

The days of interrogation had not been kind to her. Meeting Egert’s eyes, she tried to smile: almost guiltily because her bitten lips had no desire to obey her. Her black hair was pulled back with unusual precision; it was smoother than usual. Her bloodshot eyes were dry. The guard sat Toria down in the prisoner’s dock. With an obvious display of disgust, she moved away from the touch of his hand and once again looked at Egert. He tried to answer her look with a small smile of his own, but he could not bear it and turned his eyes away, right into the gaze of Fagirra.

The executioner sighed loudly, and his sigh echoed over the entire hall because just at that moment a breathless hush had settled over the crowd. The prosecutor stood up and flung off his hood with an abrupt movement.

Egert felt Toria’s horror. She even flinched when Fagirra looked at her. At the thought that the man had tortured her with his own hand, Egert’s jaw clenched with the desire to kill him, but fear soon overrode that desire and returned everything in his soul to its accustomed place.

Fagirra began to recite the prosecution’s charges, and from the very first word Egert understood that it was hopeless, that Toria was doomed and that no mercy would be given.

Fagirra spoke simply and plainly. The people listened to him with bated breath, and only in the back rows was there any whispering: the words of the prosecutor were being transmitted along the chain to the square. From his words, as considered and precise as the work of a jeweler, it incontestably followed that the dean had long planned to blight the city and that his daughter, of course, helped him. Fagirra mentioned such details and produced such proofs that Egert’s heart began to ache: either a spy of the Order had been hidden in the university for a long time or Toria, under torture, had told Fagirra about the most private, most secret details of her father’s life. The crowd became indignant; Egert felt how their righteous anger spread along the chain beyond the walls of the court, how the human sea on the square was filled with wild rancor and the thirst for retribution.

Toria listened, cringing internally. Egert felt how she tried to gather together her scattered thoughts, how she flinched from the accusation as if from blows. Her hope, which had flared up at the sight of Egert, now gradually faded like a smoldering coal.

Glancing intently at Egert, Fagirra finished his speech, flipped his hood back over his head, and approached the judgment seat. One by one the witnesses were called to the stand at a sign from the magistrate.

The first, a fleshy merchant, had the most difficulty: he did not know what to say, and so he simply lamented his losses, somewhat inarticulately. He was listened to with sympathy, for every man in the crowd could say the exact same words in his place. Everyone who was called up to the witness stand after the merchant behaved similarly; the lamentations were repeated; women cried, enumerating their losses. The crowd hushed, borne away into grief.

Finally the flood of witnesses of the Plague dried up. Some lad from the crowd started yelling out his own experiences, but he was quickly admonished to keep quiet. As if it were a single entity, the gaze of the crowd, stern and sour, lunged at the accused. Egert felt a slap of hatred strike Toria. Groaning noiselessly, he jerked on his bench, wishing to shelter and defend her, but he remained seated while the magistrate coughed something and the clerk repeated that now the prosecutor would question the defendant.

Toria stood up, and that single movement cost her agonizing effort. Egert felt how every nerve, every sore muscle quaked. Taking the stand, she quickly glanced at Egert, who leaned forward, silently supporting, embracing, and reassuring her. Fagirra walked close to the stand. A convulsion passed over Toria’s entire body, as if the intimate presence of the robed man was unbearable to her.

“Is it true that Dean Luayan was your father?” Fagirra asked loudly.

Toria—Egert knew what effort it cost her—turned her head and looked him straight in the eye. “Dean Luayan is my father,” she replied brusquely, but loudly and steadily. “He is dead, but he still exists in the memory of the thousands who knew him.”

The hall, which had been silent, broke out into whispers.

Fagirra’s lips quivered slightly. It seemed to Egert that he was about to smile. “Well. Daughterly affections are commendable, but they do not justify the deaths of hundreds of people!”

Egert felt Toria flinch as she tried to overcome her pain and fear.

“Those people were killed by you. You hooded executioners! And now you weep over your victims?! On the night the Plague appeared”—Toria turned toward the hall—“on that very night—”

“Save your breath! Answer the questions without superfluous words,” Fagirra interrupted her. “On that very night, you and your father performed certain magics in his locked study. Yes or no?”

Egert realized how terrified she was. Fagirra stood next to her, piercing her bloodshot eyes with his gaze.

Toria staggered under his aggression. “Yes. But…”

With a sweeping, eloquent gesture, Fagirra turned to the magistrate, then to the hall. “Hundreds of candles burned all night in the dean’s study. Your loved ones were still alive. In the morning, dogs howled throughout the entire city, and your loved ones were still alive, but then the Plague descended, called forth by these conjurers.”

“A lie!” Toria wanted to shout, but her voice broke. She glanced at Egert, pleading for help, and he saw how her hope died.

“A lie…,” echoed from the corner where the students lurked. The crowd grumbled so loudly that the clerk banged on his table and the guards held up their pikes.

Encouraged by this unexpected support, Toria regained control of her temper. Egert felt how a desire broke through the black pall that shrouded her mind: a furious desire to resist, to denounce.

“It’s a lie that the Plague came through the will of my father. It was the Order of Lash that summoned death to us. They went to the hill where the victims of the plague were buried and dug it up! They let death go free!”

The crowd hummed loudly. Egert held his breath: he thought that the truth said loud enough was capable of changing the court’s direction.

“Did you see this yourself?” asked Fagirra.

“Yes!”

“But where?”

“In the enchanted—” Toria stopped and then ended the sentence in a hoarse voice. “—in the enchanted mirror … in the water…”

“In the water,” repeated Fagirra turning to the crowd, chuckling. “I’m sure that that’s not the only thing the mage can show ‘in the water.’”

There was an nervous laugh in the hall.

“Listen!” Toria gathered the last bits of her strength. “The Order of Lash is strong where everyone is afraid! Where people wait for the End of Time! The Order of Lash committed a crime to regain its former power! Has anyone ever seen the Lash facilitators bring people anything but fear? Who among you knows what the Order of Lash really is? Who among you knows what plans they nurture under their hoods? And who among you would not affirm that my father never brought evil to anyone in his whole life? Can even one of you ever recall him harming so much as a dog? With the help of magic or without it, he served at the university for decades. He worked for the good, and he is the one who saved all of you from the Plague. He sheltered us with his own body. He gave up his life, and now—”

Toria reeled from a sudden, resurgent pain; the tortures she had endured had left a multitude of agonizing marks on her body. Egert bit his hand, drawing blood. The crowd buzzed deafeningly. Astonished people repeated to each other the words of the accused, conveying them to the square, and it is possible that her words sowed doubt in some souls. The students stood strong, a fortress, a citadel of support for Toria. From the corner of his eye, Egert noticed the headmaster being buffeted toward the exit, holding on to his heart.

Fagirra was unfazed. With the corners of his pale mouth slightly raised, he uttered in a low voice, “You aggravate your guilt by slandering Lash.”

It was agonizingly hard for Toria to start speaking again. “You have not brought one piece of hard evidence of the guilt of my father. Everything you’ve said means nothing. You have neither evidence, nor … witnesses.”

She spoke ever softer and softer. Trying to make out her words, the crowd hushed, and only the scraping of soles along the floor and the breath of hundreds of people could be heard in the sultry air of the hall.

Fagirra smiled slightly. “There is a witness.”

Toria wanted to say something. She jerked her head up, ready to vent all her wrath and disdain on Fagirra, but then she stopped short and said nothing. Egert felt how all her strength and all her will dissolved, receding like water through open fingers. Hope, which had lingered on until this moment and which had helped her to struggle, shimmered one last time and then died. In the growing silence Toria turned her head and met Egert’s eyes.

He sat alone on an infinitely long bench, hunched over, doomed to betray. A wistful question stood in Toria’s eyes, but Egert could not answer it. They looked at each other for several seconds, and he felt how pity, despair, and contempt for his weakness struggled in her soul, but then these feeling gave way to a deathly exhaustion. Toria’s shoulders slowly slumped and, dragging her feet, she returned to the dock without a single word.

The silence in the hall lasted for a few more seconds; then a roaring quickly surged, flying up toward the ceiling. The clerk was about to pound on his table, but with a scarcely noticeable gesture Fagirra stopped him, and the hall, unrepressed, was free to express its astonishment, its indignation and its rage toward the sorceress who had capitulated in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Finally, Fagirra snapped his fingers, the clerk banged away at the tabletop, and the guards slammed the ends of their pikes on the floor. The crowd quieted, though not immediately. The magistrate said something Egert could not hear. The clerk loudly repeated his words, but these words did not reach Egert, who had settled into a dreary stupor, until a guard standing behind him firmly seized him by the elbow and lifted him up off the bench.

He looked around like a frightened dog. Fagirra watched him from under his hood, and in his eyes stood a benevolent and at the same time imperious command.

Egert did not remember how he got to the stand.

There, beyond the walls, the sun was shining, and two of its rays fell in through the two tall grilled windows. In their corner the students, who had grown despondent, brightened. Egert heard his name repeated many times: it was repeated excitedly, loudly, and softly; it was repeated indifferently, with surprise, with joy and hope. Those who had shared room and board with Egert for many days, those who had sat next to him in lectures and had drunk wine with him in merry taverns, those who knew of the planned wedding were justified in expecting from him words appropriate to an honest man.

The executioner sighed again, trying to wipe a dark spot from his bag; the pliers clinked softly and Egert felt the first jolt of eternal, animal fear.

Toria was looking to the side, as before slumped over, harassed and passionless.

“Here is the prosecutor’s main witness,” said Fagirra pompously. “This man’s name is Egert Soll. Lately he has been received in the dean’s study and he has been close to the dean’s daughter, which is why his testimony is so important to us. On that fateful night he was present during the accursed sorceries. We are listening to you, Soll.”

A deadly, unnatural silence spread over the entire world. The two windows watched Egert, like two empty, perfectly clear eyes. He remained silent. Dust motes danced in the columns of light, and Toria, frozen on her own bench, suddenly raised her head.

It is likely that his pain and grief had been communicated to her, but in that very second he suddenly sensed how, perceiving the horror and despair of her beloved, she searched for his gaze.

He was silent, unable to force out a sound.

Fagirra sneered. “All right. I will ask the questions and you will answer. Is it true that your name is Egert Soll?”

“Yes,” his lips spoke instinctively. A sigh passed through the crowd.

“Is it true that you came here from the town of Kavarren about a year ago?”

Egert saw the towers and weathervanes reflected in the water of the spring Kava; the pavement bathed by rain; a pony under an elegant, child’s saddle; shutters closing with a bang; and his laughing mother with her palm shading her eyes.

“Yes,” he replied distantly.

“Good. Is it true that all this time you lived at the university, keeping close company with the dean and his daughter, and that she almost became your wife?”

He finally succumbed to the silent entreaty of Toria and decided to look at her.

She sat, leaning forward and not taking her eyes off him. Egert felt how she relaxed slightly as soon as she caught his gaze. Her face warmed and her gnawed lips tried to form a smile. She was happy to see him, even now, on the brink of betrayal, and she rushed to pour into him all her frantic, almost maternal tenderness, unextinguished by torture, for surely they were also torturing him, they would continue to torture him, perhaps more roughly and painfully, in front of the whole city, in front of the woman he loved; she understood how it was with him, what ailed him now and what would happen later: she understood everything.

It would have been easier for him to survive disdain than compassion. He turned his troubled gaze, full of hate, to Fagirra.

“Yes!”

At that moment something shivered in Toria’s eyes. Egert returned her gaze, and his hair stood up on his head because he too understood.

His trembling hand lay on his scar. On one day only, and only one chance. Please do not let me err in answering.

“Is it true that on the eve of the Plague you were in the dean’s study, and that you saw what happened there?”

The path must reach its bitter end.

“Yes,” he said for the fourth time.

The executioner scratched his nose. He was bored.

Fagirra smiled victoriously. “Is it true that the magical acts of the dean and his daughter called forth the Plague upon the city?”

The steel blade had ripped through his cheek, and the curse had broken his life in two. He had been self-assured on that morning; the spring had broken out cold and lingering, and dewdrops had slithered down the tree trunks, as if weeping for someone. He had not shut his eyes when the Wanderer’s sword sank into his face; there was pain, but there was no fear even then.

He felt the scar on his cheek come to life; it throbbed, full of fire. Still pressing his palm to his cheek, he looked down into the hall and met the gaze of perfectly clear eyes without eyelashes.

The Wanderer stood by a wall in the crowd, but seperate from all. Among the crowd of curious, overwrought, scowling, and tense faces, his long face, notched with vertical wrinkles, seemed as detached as a lock hanging off a door. When that which is foremost in your soul becomes last. When five questions are asked and you answer yes.

My fate steers me along a precisely designed line.

He shivered. At that very moment Toria also recognized the Wanderer. Without turning around, Egert saw how her swollen lips at first tentatively, then more boldly and joyfully, slipped into a smile.

Smiling, she would go to a horrible death. For it appeared that pardon for Egert sounded the death knell for Toria. She knew this and still smiled because in her life there had been the eternally green tree over the tomb of the First Prophet and those nights spent by the light of the fireplace and his promise to shed the curse for her sake.

The foremost in his soul must become the last. For her sake, for the sake of fulfilling his promise, he had to denounce and betray her; he had to let her be judged. Who had woven this web?

Heaven, he had paused for too long: already the hall was agitated and Fagirra was frowning, and the executioner was looking on with interest, casually lowering his sack to the floor.

He squeezed his eyes shut, but his imagination could spit on him for all it cared whether his eyes were open or not; his imagination obligingly pushed on him a vivid, meticulously detailed picture of the torture chamber. Chains dig into his flesh, holding him down, the executioner methodically bends over him; he is unassuming and repulsive in his shapeless sack, and in his hands he holds the pliers. Egert’s clenched jaws are pried open with an enormous bar, the pliers come ever closer, the iron beak opens as if about to feast, Egert fitfully tries to turn his head away, somewhere in the darkness a placid voice utters the words “false witness,” and Egert feels the icy pinch of steel at the root of his tongue.…

A man should not fear so. Thus do animals fear who have fallen into a trap, thus do cattle fear who are being driven to the gates of the slaughterhouse. By some miracle, Egert’s legs did not fall out from under him.

Fagirra’s gaze lay on him like a gravestone; Fagirra’s gaze squeezed him, mastering his soul, disordering his thoughts. The fifth question had been asked.

He must answer now, while the pliers were still in the sack, while the Wanderer looked on, aware of everything in advance. He would answer, and the fear would cease tormenting him: for why else would the scar ache so? It throbbed and fretted as if it were a living creature, as if it were a leech that had sucked his blood for so many days and now, right now, it was fated to die.

“Egert.” The sound of the word barely carried from the prisoner’s dock. It is possible that Toria had not uttered it aloud, but he understood that she was giving her blessing to his fifth yes.

… Fire in the fireplace, dark hair on the pillow, childlike fear and faith, also childlike, trusting. The high window of the library, a wet bird on the path, and the sun, the sun beats at the window. A basket in his arms, green onions tickling his hand, a warm roll from her hand, and the sun again. The print of a heel in soft, warm earth, her palms over his eyes, and the sun shines in through her fingers. The scent of wet grass, snow melting on hair …

Toria quietly scraped her bench along the floor. “Egert.”

How afraid she was for him. She wanted for this all to end as quickly as possible, for him to finally say the word.

His hesitation would gain him nothing. His fear would speak on its own, and his lips would be unable to form any word other than the magical fifth yes. His vocal cords would refuse to work, should he wish to step away from the designated path.

“Enough, Egert!” Fagirra glanced eloquently at the executioner. “I’ll ask you one last time: Is it true that the magical acts of the dean and his daughter called forth the Plague?”

The Wanderer’s lipless mouth quivered slightly. It is quite easy to err, and a mistake will cost you much.… This moment will occur just once in your life, and if you let it slip away, all hope will be forever lost.

So much pain in this hall! So much pain has settled into Toria’s small body! Oh, how the scar aches.

Silence.

He raised his eyes. Two windows watched him from the indifferent eyes of the Wanderer.

“N…”

The fear bellowed at him. It roared and jerked about, lacerating his throat, paralyzing his tongue. All his vast, overwhelming, omnivorous fear, which had for so long been building its fetid lair in Egert’s soul, howled and whirled like a raging monster.

“… o.”

The word broke free from his mouth and, nearly broken from exhaustion, he closed his eyes with a clear conscience, giving himself over to the lacerations of his fear.

The word boomed out in the silent hall like an explosion from a gun turret.

The students screamed victoriously, the crowd began to clamor, Fagirra snapped something sharply, and Toria, sitting stunned on her bench, exuded horror at the thought that the curse on Egert was now eternal and unbreakable. He perceived this and shuddered, his hands stretched out toward his mouth as if wishing to beat back the word that had just flown out, but he realized with relief that it was impossible to withdraw what had been said, however much the fear tried to turn him inside out. Reeling, he looked out into the hall, at the Wanderer, and his look contained something akin to a challenge.

And then the Wanderer, who alone had remained impassive in the excited crowd, permitted himself to smile.

The world lurched in front of Egert’s eyes; it swam, it faded as if it were being burned away. He felt a pure, placid calm. He wanted to close his eyes and bask in the incredible tranquillity, but then the world returned; it collapsed in on him with the noise of the crowd and the shouts of the guards. Colors returned to it, and never in his life had Egert Soll seen such vivid colors.

… Who are all these people? Who is that man, hiding his face under a hood? How dare they restrain that woman … Toria!

The dais quivered. Egert realized that he was already running; someone in red and white flew off to the side in fear, sheltering behind a pike. The executioner’s stool fell on its side awkwardly, like a dead rat, and the iron pliers tumbled out of the sack.

It seemed to Egert that he was moving slowly, like a fly bogged down in honey. Distorted faces flickered on the edge of his vision, shouts clamored on the edge of his hearing. Someone shouted, “Seize him!” Someone shouted, “Leave him be!” The students bellowed and the clerk hammered on his table, and the pale face of Toria moved ever closer. Ever closer were her eyes, flung open so wide that her curved eyelashes dented the skin of her eyelids and her enlarged pupils absorbed the light without sparkling; ever closer were her half-open, dry lips, her bitten, swollen lips. Egert ran for an eternity. The dais shuddered under his boots; someone stood in his path, but he flew off, swept away. Egert ran, and blood flowed over his cheek, over his lips, over his chin, dripping down onto his shirt: in the place of the scar now blazed an open wound.

And then his feet tripped over an outstretched sword sheath and he fell, losing sight of Toria’s face, splaying out his elbows. The edge of the dais flashed before his eyes, then the high, dark ceiling, and from somewhere above him boomed the words, “Do you remember the punishment for false witness?”

He saw veins pounding in a temple; twitching, bloodless lips; and dark fissures in the corner of a mouth: it was the face of the man who had tortured Toria. In Fagirra’s hands was a short sword, the weapon of the guards, and its tip was pointed directly at Egert’s stomach.

Toria. He felt her weaken from intolerable terror; he felt the adamant arms of the executioner wrapped around her. A reddish black mist condensed in his eyes.

Dive. Flip. His body had not known battle for two years, and he waited for it to disobey him, but he felt only ecstatic joy from his muscles, like the joy of a dog freed from its chain.

Toria is struggling in someone’s arms! Who would dare touch her?

He struck out, almost without looking, and the guard who had run up to him doubled over. His sword was about to fall out of his hands, but it did not fall, because Egert intercepted the heavy hilt. It was a short sword, an unfamiliar weapon, but his hand flew up, and to Egert’s amazement he heard the clash of metal on metal and saw sparks fly. Fagirra’s rabid, crazed eyes were right in front of him.

Toria jerked in her captor’s hands. She was so close. Egert felt how the hands restraining her barbarically reopened the wounds left behind by torture, but she did not notice the pain. She emanated waves of fear for him, for Egert.

The swords crossed again. Fagirra opened his mouth halfway, his weapon again darted up, and then Egert, despising the barrier separating him from Toria, lunged into a counterattack.

It seems he yelled something. It seems someone in a gray robe dared to approach him from behind, Toria’s fear surged, and in the next second a bloodied thing fell heavily onto the dais, a thing that looked like a hand clutching a dagger. The tiny gibbet was swept away from the table, and the manikin slid out of the noose for the first time in many years. Then Fagirra’s sword flew out into the howling crowd, and Fagirra himself stumbled and fell; for a split second Egert looked down into his clouding eyes.

“Egert!”

Grubby hands were ruthlessly dragging her away. Egert bellowed indignantly and the short sword, won from an unknown guard, was already in flight.

The life of the city’s executioner, his gray, dull life, ended in an instant. Clutching at the hilt that protruded from his back, the poor soul lay down on the dais at the feet of his recent victim. Toria stepped backwards and Egert met her eyes.

Why has this happened to her? Blood, terror: why this? Poor girl.

He ran again, and she darted forward to meet him. He was already stretching out his hand when he saw that she was staring at something behind his back. He turned just in time: Fagirra was already there, his teeth bared in his crooked mouth and his stiletto raised high.

No, Toria, don’t be afraid. Never be afraid.

He managed to avoid the first attack, but the fencing master was strong and tenacious.

The stiletto almost grazed Egert’s hand a second time.

A weapon! Heaven, send me a sword, even a kitchen knife!

He stumbled and barely managed to keep to his feet. He could not let the stiletto get near Toria. One scratch would be enough; one scratch from the sharp tip, gleaming with a dark drop of poison, would be sufficient to kill her.

The pliers clanked under his feet. He felt their weight in his hands as he flung them up in front of his body to defend himself and Toria. Just as he heaved them up, Fagirra launched into a violent, frantic attack.

Egert did not want Toria to see this. He took a step back and put his arm around her shoulders and his palm over her eyes.

Fagirra was still standing. The pliers protruded from his chest, and the wide-open iron beak snarled at Egert with impotent menace. Egert knew that the bloodstained handles peered out of Fagirra’s back. The death agony of the robed man was terrible, and Egert pressed Toria into his arms, striving not to touch her painful welts.

Her face, half-hidden by his hand, seemed mysterious, as if it were under a mask. Her lips quivered like they were about to smile, her eyelashes fluttered against his palm, and for some reason he recalled the touch of a dragonfly’s wings.

It felt like the passage of time altered; his hand tentatively raised itself to his face, and his fingers wonderingly explored his cheek. They did not find the scar.

Incredible things were happening in the hall. The students were fighting and denouncing the robed men, tearing off their hoods.

Egert did not notice. The roar of the crowd receded then disappeared completely, as if he had gone deaf. His vision split in some strange manner; casting his eyes over the pandemonium, he saw only the tall old man with his wrinkled face.

The Wanderer slowly turned and walked toward the exit, slicing through the crowd the way a knife slices through water. He turned slightly at the threshold, and Egert saw his crystal-clear eyes close slightly, as if saying farewell.

The world is dissected by the horizon, and all roads rush toward its edge. They scatter beneath your legs like mice, and it is difficult to know if you are setting off on your path or if you have already returned.…

The crowd roared.

Outside, people rushed into the courthouse from the square, desiring to see the witness with their own eyes and to understand what had happened. Inside the courtroom, tensions were very high.

“Silence!” shouted the judge, and suddenly he dived under the table. The man in the gray hooded robe roared in horror, forcing the bloodstained stump of a hand against his chest. The students, overwhelmed by their own courage, pressed on the barrier of guards.

“I am the witness!” Egert shouted, his voice ringing over the noise in the courtroom. “Did you hear that? I am the witness, and I am telling you: The servants of Lash caused the Plague! Toria is innocent, she told the truth! Dean Luayan saved us all! Do not dare to accuse his daughter!”

The ring of guards pressed on the platform. People in red-and-white uniforms watched what was happening: The witness just killed two people in front of the court and the public.

Meanwhile the fight continued out in the hall, but the hooded disciples of Lash, used to discipline, became an army within few seconds. Daggers and stilettos arose from under the sleeves of gray robes. The students still screamed out threats and curses—but they retreated, pressed by a powerful gray wall. They were unarmed—only the boldest managed to snatch a candlestick or a fragment of a bench.

“Here are the criminals!” Egert moved forward. “Hold the Servants of Lash!”

People crowded around the platform, and the guards were unable to push them away. The people saw what happened, just as the guards did, and if no one felt sorry about the city executor, the terrible loss of Lash’s servant shocked and frightened everyone.

Egert tried to protect Toria: “She is innocent! Step back, everybody!”

An officer who survived the Plague and whose hair had become gray overnight moved forward, holding his naked sword: “Surrender, you murderer. The court will announce the verdict.”

The students were encircled by exposed blades like cattle in a slaughterhouse. The citizens, who only yesterday threw stones at the university, did not hurry to help them.

“Surrender,” the officer repeated grimly.

“You are not my enemy.” Egert looked into his eyes. “The Servants of Lash are the murderers! Here they are, arrest them in the name of the city!”

The officer ignored Soll: “Arrest him.”

The guards started to move in from three sides. For a second, Soll thought that he was observing the world with his ears, his skin, with the entire surface of his body; he saw Toria, frozen in horror, the corpse of Fagirra on the floor, the robed men with stilettos, students with broken noses, the judge on his knees crawling to the curtain. He saw the narrow door, behind which the sky turned blue and the crowd was roiling. He saw fear in the eyes of the guards approaching him … fear … but mixed with hope.

The guards moved toward him with ropes.

Egert smiled gently and took a step forward. He dived under their arms, tripping somebody’s foot, gripping sombody’s wrist wrapped in a leather glove, and pulled it over. He dropped this yielding body under the feet of his pursuers. Without looking, he struck the face of the guard who approached him from the rear with his elbow and managed to catch the sword of another guard after butting him with the top of his head. Someone in a red-and-white uniform tried to stop him—to his own dismay; Egert got hold of a second sword and jumped away.

The crowd in the courtroom made way for him in panic as he rushed toward the wall of gray robes.

The Servants of Lash backed up for a split second as death rushed upon them, death with a bloodred face and wild, fair hair. One of Lash’s men moved too slowly and Egert stabbed him in the face. The others inched forward, short blades glimmering, their eyes swollen and insane.

Their enemy, enormous and bleeding, with two swords in his muscled hands, faced them unafraid.

“What did the Magister promise you? That you would remain alive, even after the city was destroyed by the Plague?”

And both his blades started to move like fish thrown out of the water onto the ground. The two swords looked like human creatures; they were extremely angry, they wanted fire and blood. But the Servants of Lash overcame their initial confusion. Two swords were confronted by two dozen blades, with many more behind those.

The whole scene was sparkling. Two acolytes leapt forward to attack and one of Egert’s swords knocked away a dagger; with the other hand he repulsed the other’s strike. And Egert, swift as a lion, swung his claws, one after the other, and there were two howling bodies on the floor.

“Did you hope to hide yourself behind your walls?”

The fighters in gray robes scattered in a semicircle. Soll was in the center of their ring and he was swinging as a reckless wasp with two stings. The air was howling, and the courtroom hadn’t witnessed such a scene for centuries.

“When you were digging into the hill…”

Strikes, sparks, howls.

“… did the Magister tell you that Lash would protect you?”

Strike. Gnashing. Ringing.

A dagger whizzed by his ear like a bullet. From the corner of his eye Egert noticed another one flying toward him—and at the last moment he bent down and let the death pass him. A follower of Lash behind him groaned—the knife deep into his shoulder.

Egert bellowed: “So let Lash protect you now!”

And he rushed into the attack, one man against dozens of skilled soldiers.

“For Luayan!” A heavy-built man in a gray robe fell, gripping his chest. “For Toria!” Another was skewered and fell down to the feet of his fellows. “Let’s punish them!” A chopped-off hand flew in the air. “Let’s punish them!”

“For Fox!” young voices chanted like a choir. The judge’s heavy armchair, raised by three students, fell on the gray-robed heads.

“For the city! For the suburbs! For what you have done! You wanted power? You wanted worship? You shall have it!”

Encircled and forced to defend himself, Soll managed to force Lash’s soldiers back. And then a strange thing happened: Lash’s army, which had always seemed to be solid, unbreakable, and faceless, hesitated, their confidence broken. The hoods of many of them had been swept off their heads during the frantic battle … and now their faces appeared; the faceless robes of Lash turned into people.

Frightened. Embittered … even ashamed. For years they had inhaled the heavy incense of their rituals. They had admired Fagirra, thought him to be eternal … and now he was dead. They had idealized their Magister and now they were doubtful about him. Young, old, bald, mustachioed, squint-eyed, pale, it seemed they saw one another for the first time. It seemed they saw the people around them for the first time.

One of Lash’s followers screamed, “We cannot abandon the Magister! We must do what Lash wills!”

“The will of Lash!” chanted the frenzied voices.

“The End of Times will come!” A plump fellow with sagging cheeks shouted at the top of his voice, and Egert suddenly recognized him: the clerk’s shy son only recently was a student. “Lash will hide the believers!”

“His will…”

With renewed energy, they rushed into the attack again.

“Lash!”

“Lash!”

“This is the will of Lash!”

But their will and their confidence had been broken, and the students beat them down everywhere, with Egert Soll, once a coward, at the forefront of the fighting.

“Watch out, Soll!” someone shouted from the crowd.

Egert ducked, and a knife whistled above his head; he moved to the right, and another slashed down where he’d just been standing. Twirling around, as if in a dance, he repulsed two blades at a time—from the top and from the bottom, he struck the young servant’s chest with his foot, forcing him to drop his weapon, he twisted around and saw his other adversary running away. It was the clerk’s son running out of the courtroom—limping and trying to strip off his robe and hood.

“Hold him!”

Two or three students started to chase him. Soll realized that the ring of enemies around him was gone: someone motionlessly lay on the floor, someone turned moaning, someone stepped back, someone tried to hide. The battle was over.

Egert found Toria with his eyes. She remained standing where he’d left her—motionless, frozen, her face white. He nodded to her, encouraging and calming. He looked around; the room was still crowded, and strangely quiet. The city dwellers stood shoulder to shoulder—the ones who cursed Toria and her father, those who broke windows at the university. There were many strong men among them; Lash’s servants were mixed in this crowd. The silence was more terrible than any roar: only puffing, moans, and rare curses, and shoe soles on the worn stones.

Students supported their wounded fellows. Almost all of them were covered in blood.

Suddenly a commotion started at the doors. All heads turned simultaneously. The guards were marching in, swords raised. There was a great number of them, all heavily armed; the crowd made room for them.

The gray-haired officer who had tried to arrest Egert stopped. Egert silently waited; would the guards dare to wound or even to kill random witnesses? His heart worked as a metronome, pacing the rhyme and time of the forthcoming fight.

Even the wounded ceased to moan. Egert looked into the eyes of the officer; strange, now there was no fear in the eyes of the guard. There was something new, what Egert did not understand. The officer straightened up and slowly raised his blade, saluting. The other guards repeated his motion like shadows. For several seconds none said a word.

Egert could hardly stand on his feet. He crossed the room, and the crowd respectfully made way for him; he went up to Toria, and took her tightly under her arm, letting his swords drop.

She leaned on him, pressing him but holding her back upright. People silently looked at them; the guards in red-and-white uniforms stood several steps away, as if expecting something.

“Arrest the servants of Lash,” Egert said in a hoarse voice. “Don’t let anyone in a hood leave. Gather them here for questioning. Do not use force: let them talk. Don’t let anyone out, but the main thing is to find the Magister!”

The crowd stirred. The officer of the guards nodded to his people and he looked again into Soll’s eyes: “Yes, Captain.”

Spring came.

Climbing up the hill would have cost Toria too much effort; she was weakened from her lingering wounds. He carried her, treading firmly across the dampened loam, and not once did his legs slip.

On the summit of the hill was a grave, covered by the unfolded steel wing as by a hand. They stood, bowing their heads. Clouds shifted above, white on blue. Neither Egert nor Toria needed to speak about the man who now slept forever beneath the wing: even without that, he abided with them.

They stood, nestled against each other, just as they had on that distant winter day, except that their entwined shadow lay not on sparkling, clean snow, but on moist, black earth, overgrown with the first grass of spring. Egert flared his nostrils, catching the strong smell of green life, and he could not decide if it was the scent of Toria or the aroma of bulbs fighting their way to the surface.

A bright, gold disk on a chain hung from her hand as if Toria wanted to show her father that his bequest was intact.

Far, far away, in Kavarren, an old man read a letter to his wife, and the old woman listened to him, having sat up in bed for the first time in many days. The letter was signed by the burgomaster and the Guard’s chief; in it Egert Soll was called a hero and a savior of the city. The elderly man cried, tears fell from his chin, and the woman understood that she wouldn’t die soon.

Egert and Toria stood on a hill. Far below lay the black, swollen river, and from out the city gates wound the road, empty except for a single black speck slowly moving toward the horizon. They felt no need to talk about the man who was traveling away from them either; both held him in their memory, and so they simply gazed at the distance into which the Wanderer disappeared.

The world is preserved by the mother of all roads. She looks after the faithful traveler, relieving his solitude. The dust of the road covers the hem of a cloak, the dust of the constellations covers the curtain of the night sky, and the wind blows both the clouds toward first light and sheets hung up to dry with the same eagerness.

It is no misfortune if the soul is scorched by the sun; it is far more disastrous if a raging fire devastates the soul. It is no misfortune if you do not know where you are going; it is far worse when there is no longer anywhere to go. He who stands on the path of experience cannot step away from it, even when it has come to its end.

For the path is without end.