Egert wished the flagstones of the floor would open up and swallow him, hide him from her aloof, only slightly strained gaze. The first time he had met Toria, in Kavarren, she had looked calm and perhaps a bit detached; their second encounter, which had resulted in his duel with the student, had twisted her about in a whirlwind of despair, grief, and loss. The third time they had met—Egert flinched at the memory—she had cast her eyes at him, and he had read there only loathing and cold disgust devoid of malice.
Glorious Heaven! He was the very embodiment of cowardice: the thing he was most frightened of on this earth was to once again meet with her face-to-face!
Toria did not lower her eyes, and no matter how much he wanted to, he could not turn away. He watched as the tense aloofness in her eyes changed into cold amazement, and two vertical lines appeared on her forehead; then Toria nudged the trolley forward a bit and looked at Egert questioningly. He stood as still as a pillar, unable to tear himself from the spot where he was standing. She sighed, and the corner of her mouth twitched in exactly the same way as the dean’s did: it was as if she was slightly annoyed by Egert’s lack of comprehension. Only then did he realize that he had blocked the path of the trolley. He leapt to the side, pressing his back up against the wall. The nape of his neck squeezed against cold stone as he pressed his entire sweaty, shaking body against it. Toria simply walked by, and as she did, he smelled her scent, the intense scent of freshly cut grass.
The sound of the trolley had long since disappeared in the depths of the corridors, but he still stood there, pressing his back against the wall and staring in the direction it had gone.
* * *
She entered her father’s study, silently closing the door behind her. The dean was sitting behind his enormous writing desk; three candles in a tall candelabrum woefully dropped globules of wax onto the dark, pitted surface of the desk. His goose quill scratched softly. Dozens of bookmarks, lovingly prepared by Toria, hung their colored tassels out of the multitude of books.
Toria stood silently behind him as he wrote.
This not entirely decorous habit had been preserved in Toria from her earliest years: to sneak up on her father while he was absorbed in his work and, peering over his shoulder, to watch in fascination as the black tip of his quill danced across a clean sheet of paper. Her mother had scolded her for this habit: snooping was unladylike, and more important, she was disturbing her father’s work. Her father, on the other hand, only chuckled at her when he caught her behind him. It was how she had learned to read, peering over his shoulder.
At the moment, the dean was working on his labor of love: annotation to the latest chapter from his history of mages. Toria understood that he was writing an annotation because she saw two slanting crosses at the head of the page, but the meaning of what he was writing was not immediately clear to her. For a while she merely watched with a certain amount of detached admiration as his pen danced its way across the page; finally, however, the black lines of the letters formed themselves into words for her to read:
… idle speculation. It appears, however, that the less power a mage is allotted, the more avidly he strives to supplement this lack with superficial effects. The author of these lines was once acquainted with an old witch who levied a strange tax upon an entire village: they were required to gather the hearts of all the rats in the village, without exception, and give them to her. Undoubtedly, the old woman would say she had complicated and mysterious reasons for this incredibly strange requirement. It appears to this author, however, that the slaughtered rats served only one true purpose: to cause the hearts of the peasants to tremble with fear at the very mention of the sorceress who ruled over them. History is full of examples like this, some far more serious, and it is not only uneducated peasants who have been mystified by various kinds of cheap tricks, such as the one just mentioned. Recall what Balthazar Est wrote in his Meager Notations, which, by the way, were far from meager: “If black, evil-looking clouds hover over the dwelling of a mage day and night; if the windows of his laboratory glow with a bloodred light; if one meets a chained dragon, uncared for and thus all the more malodorous, in his antechamber instead of servants; and if finally the one who comes to meet you has glowing eyes and carries a ponderous staff in his hand, then you can be quite sure that standing before you is an insignificant dabbler who is ashamed of his own weakness. The most worthless of all the mages I have known never crawled out from under his robe, which was covered in runes. I believe he even slept in it. The most powerful and terrible of my brethren, whose name I am even reluctant to write, preferred to wear spacious, well-worn shirts—”
The dean paused and let his quill drop.
“You’re quoting him from memory?” marveled Toria.
The dean grinned with a certain amount of complacency.
“I saw him,” said Toria quietly.
The dean understood that she was definitely not talking about the archmage, Balthazar Est.
One of the candles started to splutter; Toria drew herself up, took a small pair of scissors from the table, and precisely trimmed the wick. She asked in a soft voice, “By the way, who is this powerful and terrible mage who, according to Master Est, liked old castoffs?”
The dean grinned again. “That was Est’s teacher. He died about a hundred years ago.”
He fell silent and eyed his daughter questioningly. Toria seemed distracted, but the dean saw that all her thoughts were spinning, like a dog on a lead, around one vitally important subject. And in the end her thoughts about this subject found form in words that seemed to escape from her lips, “Egert Soll.”
Toria faltered. Her father benevolently waited for the continuation. She removed a heavy folio from the trolley and put it on a cleared corner of the desk then perched next to it, her feet off the ground.
“The impression I get about the scar and all the rest of it is … You can’t even imagine how much he has changed. You didn’t see him before…” She fell silent, swaying her foot in its little slipper. “Soll was a magnificent, puffed-up blowhard. Now there’s nothing left of that, just an empty shell, a vile skin. Really, Father, why would y—?” cutting off the word half-spoken, she eloquently, with exaggerated bewilderment, shrugged her shoulders.
“I understand.” The dean smiled again, but this time sadly. “You’ll never be able to forgive him, of course.”
Toria tossed her head. “That’s beside the point. It’s not a matter of forgiving or not forgiving. What if a tree had fallen on Dinar or a rock from a cliff? Could I really hate a stone?”
The dean whistled under his breath. “So in your opinion, Egert Soll is not responsible for his conduct, like an animal? Or like a tree or a stone, as you said?”
Toria stood up, apparently dissatisfied with her inability to express herself. She crossly ripped off a thread that was dangling from her sleeve. “That’s not what I meant to say. He’s not worthy of my hatred. I neither wish to forgive him nor not to forgive him. He is a void, you understand? He is of absolutely no interest. I have observed him, and not just once or twice.”
Toria bit her lip; she truly had often found it necessary to climb up to the top of the heavy stepladder so that she could peer through the small round window between the library and the Grand Auditorium. Egert always sat in exactly the same place, in a dark corner far from the rostrum. His vain attempts to extract some meaning out of the lectures, his subsequent desperation, and the apathetic indifference that always succeeded it had been quite evident to the observer. Pursing her lips, Toria had tried to suppress the hatred within herself and to observe Egert Soll with the dispassionate gaze of a researcher; sometimes she had even experienced a sort of queasy pity for him. But there were also times when her anger broke through, and then, who knows why, Soll would suddenly raise his head and look at the window, not seeing Toria behind it, even though he seemed to be staring straight into her eyes.
“If you had seen him there, by the well,” said the dean softly. “If you had
seen how the curse worked its will upon him. Believe me, this man suffers deeply.”
Toria clutched the lock of hair that had fallen across her forehead and jerked it painfully. Memories flickered before her eyes, eclipsing one another: memories of things it would be best to forget.
Egert had laughed that day: all too well did Toria remember that laughter and the regard of his narrowed, condescending eyes; all too well did she remember that painfully long, fatal game he had played with Dinar; all too well did she remember the black tip of the blade that stuck out of the back of her beloved, and the pool of blood on the wet sand.
The dean waited patiently while his daughter gathered her thoughts.
“I understand,” said Toria finally, “that he intrigues you as an exhibit or an artifact, as a man who has been marked by the Wanderer and as the bearer of his curse. But for me, he is nothing more than an executioner whose hand has been cut off. And so, the fact that he now lives there, in the annex, and walks along the same corridors as Dinar once did, that, on top of everything else—” She winced, screwing up her face as if she tasted something rotten. She fell silent. She twirled a lock of hair in her fingers then absently pushed it back into the rest of her hair. The lock immediately broke free again.
“It is unpleasant for you, I know,” said her father softly. “It is offensive and painful. But please believe me, it has to be so. Believe me, trust me, and endure it, please.”
Toria tugged pensively at the disobedient curl; then, stretching out her hand, she took a knife from the table and, just as pensively, cut off the annoying lock of hair.
* * *
She was used to trusting her father completely and in everything. People and animals trusted her father; even snakes trusted her father: she had first witnessed this trust as a young girl, when her father had induced an adder to come out of a haystack where the village boys had been playing. The adder itself was quite terrified; Luayan, who at that time was not yet a dean, sharply scolded the peasant who, horror-stricken, wished to kill the adder; then he tucked the snake into one of his large pockets and thus carried it away into the forest. Toria walked alongside him and was not the slightest bit afraid: to her it was clearer than clear that everything her father did was correct and that he could never house danger within himself. Setting the snake down in a swath of grass, her father took a long time roughly explaining something to it: young Toria thought he was probably teaching it that it should not bite people. The snake did not dare to slither away without having received the express permission of her father. When Toria excitedly told her mother about all of this, her mother simply frowned and pursed her lips: her mother, unlike everyone else, did not trust her father completely.
Toria had trouble remembering the vague arguments that occasionally bedeviled the small family. It is possible that her father, looking ahead, tried to ensure that his daughter remembered only what was good about her mother; nevertheless, Toria recalled every detail of the disastrous winter evening that had taken her mother away from her.
It was only much later that she began to understand what was meant by that single word—he—that was uttered by her father first derisively, then furiously, and finally desolately; in the mouth of her mother, that word always sounded the same, like a challenge. That evening, having argued with her husband, Toria’s mother was planning to go to him, but then, for the first time after a long period of dismissive sufferance of his wife’s indiscretion, Luayan rebelled.
That is to say that it appeared that he rebelled: in truth, he felt or simply knew what would happen next. He implored, then threatened, and then locked his wife in a room, but she raged at him and threw such words into his face that Toria, trembling with dread in her bed behind the curtains, was steeped in tears of terror and distress. At some point Luayan’s forbearance broke down, and he allowed his wife to leave; he simply allowed her to leave. The slamming door almost came off its hinges, so powerful was that parting blow.
“I couldn’t bear listening to her,” the dean bitterly said to his grown daughter many years later. “I couldn’t bear…”
Toria, aware of the pain and guilt her father felt, firmly pressed her face to his chest.
Luayan did not sleep that entire night: young Toria, awakening from time to time, saw the lamp burning on the table and her father pacing around the room. Toward morning, without saying a word, he dressed and rushed outside as if he was hurrying to help someone, but it was too late. Even mages cannot quicken the dead, and Toria’s mother was already dead when her husband freed her from a high snowdrift on the forest road.
“I couldn’t bear listening to her. I was blinded by pride and resentment, but what was the use of taking offense at that woman?”
“You are not responsible,” insisted Toria.
But her father averted his face. “I am responsible.”
* * *
Fox returned after midnight.
At first muted giggles and unintelligible chatter could be heard below the window; then someone began to sing a mournful song, which was almost immediately cut short by a gasp, as if the singer had received a friendly punch on the back.
A brief silence followed, which was then exchanged for rustles in the corridor; the door squeaked open, and Fox stumbled into the room in complete darkness.
The wooden bed groaned under the weight of his gaunt body. Fabric rustled, and first one boot and then the other fell onto the floor. Fox stretched and yawned contentedly, recalling, apparently, tonight’s adventure and the complete success of his gigantic cucumber. Already drifting off into sleep, he suddenly heard Egert say softly, “Gaetan.”
Fox’s bed squeaked. Surprised, he turned over onto his side. “And why is it that you’re not sleeping, eh?” The diffuse good-natured quality of his voice betrayed just how much wine he had drunk.
“Gaetan,” Egert repeated with a sigh. “Tell me what you know about the dean.”
The room became quiet, very quiet; somewhere in the distance a cricket chirped. A shutter banged, and once again there was silence.
“You’re such an idiot, Egert,” said Fox, his voice already different, more sober. “You’ve found a wonderful topic for the early hours of the morning.” He paused, sniffed angrily, and then added testily, “And anyway, you’d know better. After all, it seems you know each other.”
“So it seems,” whispered Egert.
“Well, there you go. Now sleep.” The bed under Fox fairly screamed, so adamantly did he turn his face to the wall.
A moth was fluttering against the glass; the drumming of its tiny wings broke off and then came to life with renewed vigor. It did not matter if he closed his eyes or kept them wide open: the pervasive dark was as thick as wax, and it seemed to crawl over his eyes. Egert quieted, but as always in the dark, he felt very ill at ease.
Gaetan’s bed came alive again, but the squeak was cut short as it reached its highest pitch. “And what are you to the dean, anyway?” Fox asked the darkness in a hissing whisper. “What does he have to do with you? And what do you have to do with him? Well?”
Egert pulled his blanket up to his chin. Addressing himself to the invisible ceiling, he said, “He promised to help me. And I … I don’t know. I’m afraid of him. And then, she still…”
“She? Who’s she?” promptly asked the darkness.
“She is Toria.” Egert’s lips unwillingly formed the name.
“Toria?” asked Fox apprehensively and yet at the same time wistfully. He sighed loudly and sorrowfully said, “Forget about it.”
The night watchmen called to one another far away in the city.
“Does he teach her sorcery?” Egert asked, his heart fluttering.
Fox once again crossly turned over in bed. “You were born a fool, and you’ll die a fool. He doesn’t teach magic to anyone! It’s not arithmetic or shoe-making.”
The silence settled in once again, broken only by the rustle of the moth and the angry huffing of Fox.
“But he is a mage, r
ight?” asked Egert, overcoming his involuntary timidity. “He’s an archmage, right? That’s why I…”
He wanted to say that that was why he came to the city, to meet the archmage, about whom he had heard on the roads and in the inns along the way; he wanted to say this, but he faltered, afraid to betray himself more than he should. Fortunately, Fox did not notice. His bed gave yet another squeak.
“I—,” began Egert again, but Fox unexpectedly interrupted him.
The voice of the freckled boy sounded unusually serious, even a bit emotional. “This is my second year in the university. And all I can tell you is that Dean Luayan, he’s … it’s possible that he’s not entirely human.” He took a breath. “But he’s never worked evil on anyone. No one in the world knows history better than he does, that’s for sure. Only, you’re right to fear him, Egert. One day—you can’t go gossiping about this to anyone—I saw it myself, Egert! An old crone with a drum came to the square. She was a beggar; she drummed and asked for alms. People talked about her, said it was better to keep your distance. But I decided to go take a look at her. I was curious. I was near her when I saw the dean coming. He caught up to the crone, and she suddenly turned around and glared. I was standing to the side, I tell you, but that glare nearly killed me. But the crone stopped drumming; it just spluttered out. She whispered something, and even though I couldn’t make out the exact words, they scraped like nails against a chalkboard. Well, then the dean also said something to her.… It was such a word.… It resounded in my ears for three days. Then he dragged her away, not with his hands, but as if with an invisible rope. And I, a fool, dragged myself after him, although my knees were shaking. They turned into a breezeway and the crone … There, where the crone had stood, I swear, was a viper, a heavy, slimy viper, coiled, its jaws open wide toward the dean, and then he raised his hand and from that hand…”