* * *
The candle on the bedside snuffed out. Naomi started and fell against the bedstead with a gasp, her large eyes brimming with tears.
At that moment, the door opened. The hermit stopped on the threshold.
“What’s wrong, child?”
“S-s-something h-happened to him,” Naomi stuttered, sobbing in spams. “S-something bad.” She buried her eyes in her hands and wept.
The hermit slowly lowered onto the bed beside her.
“You are thinking too much,” he said. “You should rest now.”
“No. No, I can feel it. I can feel it.”
“What do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” She shook away the horrid vision. “I don’t know … It hurts,” she cried. “It hurts.”
The hermit kept his gaze on her and waited for her cries to quell before he wiped away the tears with his sleeve.
“He’s not coming back.”
“He promised you.”
The little head sniffled, gulped and nodded.
“You must believe,” said the hermit. “Even when we are utterly powerless, we will always have the power to believe.”
“But…” she sobbed. “It… doesn’t…”
“You’re wrong,” the hermit rumbled. “If you feel his pain, it means he is still fighting. His faith in you keeps him alive, but your faith – that is the only thing that will bring him back.”
She sniffled and wiped away her tears.
“You must have faith, for his sake and ours,” the hermit whispered. “Without it, we…”
They were interrupted by a knocking at the door at the bottom of the stairs. The hermit turned to face the source and Naomi raised her head at once.
A pause.
“Is it…”
“No,” the hermit interrupted immediately.
The knocks came in a straight sequence of four.
“You wait here,” he said to the girl.
The hermit descended the candlelit stairs. As he slowly approached the door and the knocks came.
The door opened.
In the dark doorway, there stood a black-suited, synthetic-faced man – a man whom the hermit knew well.
“Martial…”
“Never say that name.”
The dark coat over Eastman’s suit was drizzled with fresh snow as he stood before the threshold.
The hermit’s omniscient eyes lowered to the floor and rose again. He drew the door open and led the way down the narrow corridor without a word and not a word was uttered until the two dark figures were seated across from one another and, the candlelight illumined their interlocking gazes.
In the midst of the long and austere silence, a soundless dialogue seemed to be going on between them.
“Where is Vartanian?” The hermit’s voice was something between a rumble and a whisper.
The elusive flickers of conceit shone Eastman’s dark eyes.
Next moment, with almost mechanical deliberation, the commissioner’s hands rose off the armrests, and when his eight fingertips settled on the top of the thin briefcase, the locks clicked open.
He took out a large, black envelope. On the front, the martial insignia – the three-horned, three-headed beast – was marked in platinum. The briefcase closed and Eastman placed the black envelope lightly beside the candle on the table-top.
The hermit’s gaze roamed from the commissioner to the thin file lying on the table between them.
“A decree from the Martial High Court,” Eastman answered. “Approved by the First Region Senior Commissioner of the Martial Bureau himself.”
After a momentary delay, a white hand emerged from under the sleeve of the hermit’s cassock, slipped the fold out of the throat and removed two secured sheets of paper. True to the commissioner’s words, the platinum seal of the Senior Commission of the regions was at the bottom, along with a series of other marks and autographs.
“It is the first of its kind,” said Eastman, as the hermit scanned the first page. “Given your exceptional circumstances I imagine it will also be the last.”
A brief reading of the first page yielded its purpose, summed up in the three bold words at the end of the first line:
“DECREE OF EMANCIPATION”
The hermit’s eyes rose and peered over the top of the page at the commissioner.
“The arrangements for your retransfer to civil jurisdiction have already been made. After twenty-five long years, your wish has finally come true…”
“You did not answer my question,” the hermit interrupted with a stern glare.
The commissioner tilted his gaze slightly to one side.
“I assumed it was no longer relevant.”
“The fact that you’re here attests that it is.” The hermit laid the decree on the table and sat back, laying down his arms and fastening his grip on the rests. “You don’t expect me to believe you went through the trouble of lobbying for all this just to gratify the lost hope of an old dreg?” He paused and hummed. “Why are you here?”
The beginnings of a synthetic smile flashed upon the commissioner’s face.
“You know the answer to your own irrelevant question.”
“The girl…” The flaming wick stirred with the hermit’s breath.
“Our reasons stem only from our purpose,” said Eastman.
“Vartanian,” the hermit nodded. “You are trying to break him.”
“NO.” Eastman’s voice suddenly deepened to a frightening baritone.
After a long silence, he spoke again, and his voice softened back to its former pitch.
“We are trying to cure him.”
“Of course,” hummed the hermit. “A matter of perspective … But I wonder why is he so valuable to you.”
“Martial Vartanian’s value extends as far as his caste, no different than anyone else,” the commissioner replied, frankly. “We take as much trouble with our martials as their value merits. No more. No less. We all have our purpose. We are all elements in the pattern.”
“You see nothing wrong with the pattern?”
“Wrong…?” At this Eastman paused. “I am not sure I understand your question.”
Silence fell again.
The hermit bided his time. His dark eyes were intense and burning with the flaming wick, unravelling the hidden schemes out of those quasi-imperceptible tells in the commissioner’s blank stare. The unassailable, dead logicality that permeated his every word and gesture mirrored the very system that gave him and everyone else their purpose; a being without cause above his function, a figure of dead neutrality, a machine. And the mechanicalness of his scope was clear enough, but the method raised a few questions – one in particular. Seeing as how they had already had the opportunity to expel the girl…
“Why now?”
Eastman was slow with his answer.
“Everything happens when, and as, it is supposed to.”
“Indeed.”
And that could only mean one thing. Vartanian was alive, and very probably on the brink of being broken. Every measured step had been designed to the point of choreography, specifically to bring him to this moment.
“Why not simply take her away?” he asked.
“There are rules to what we do. We are here to serve and abet the will, not defy it.”
“But I can.”
Eastman bowed his head.
“Freedom demands it,” he said.
“So, you are leaving his fate to me.”
“All we are offering you is a choice. His fate, like yours, is determined either way. It is written in nature. No one can change it.”
“I see…” hummed the hermit. A subtle smile emerged across the rucked and ashen feature.
“Then we understand each another.”
“I think we do. There is, however just one problem.
Eastman’s beady eyes inclined with an air of curiosity.
“The choice is not mine to make.” The hermit’s smile faded from him and there w
as another long silence, after which he spoke again, in a raised voice, keeping his eyes fixed on the commissioner with consistent intensity.
“I hear you there, child.”
There was a brief pause.
Eastman turned toward the open doorway.
A few tentative seconds after the hermit spoke, Naomi peeped out from behind the door, where she had been standing, listening. She came forward with an anxious sigh and the hermit rotated his greying old head over his shoulder.
“Come here,” he said.
Naomi obeyed without a word, and the commissioner’s eyes followed her closely as she came toward them. The old hermit lifted her up and settled her upon his lap and the gleaming eyes turned up searchingly at the grizzled old head.
“Do you know this man?” he asked, looking down at her.
She turned and set her wide-eyed stare upon the commissioner, and something in him seemed to writhe with unease the instant their eyes met.
“Why is he here?” she asked.
“He says he wants to set you free,” said the hermit.
“… Free?” The girl looked back up at the old hermit with a searching gaze. “What about Saul?”
The hermit looked away and was silent.
The girl lowered her eyes as though she would break into tears again at any moment.
“Faith,” she whispered, simply.
There was silence again, and in the midst of the silence, Naomi turned her eyes back toward Eastman.
“Saul promised he’ll back,” she said. “I promised I’d wait for him.”
She lingered a little while before turning her bidding eyes back up to the old hermit, who lowered her back to the floor, and the moment her feet touched the ground she toddled out of the room and the silence between the two dark figures continued until the sound of the little footsteps climbing the stairs ended with the shutting of a door.
“It appears you have your answer,” spoke the hermit.
Eastman bowed his head with seeming approval, checked the time on his watch and, apparently seeing that he had expended about as much time as the reason for his visit warranted, rose from his seat and took up his coat.
“I needn’t tell you,” said the commissioner, “that this is highly irrational,”
“Reason is sordidly overrated.”
“You know this will change nothing.”
“Yes … and no.” The hermit slowly rose from his chair and regarded the commissioner with a look of premonition. “Perhaps not soon, Mr. Eastman,” he said, his voice ominous, “but, in time, I think you will find it will change … just about everything.”
Day 0