Toria would have been quite shocked if, the evening before, someone had told her that she would recall this unlooked-for encounter often, but she did recall it, feeling annoyed and astonished at her own idiocy. Likely, she was irritated by Egert Soll’s choice: such vulgar, trashy girls! However, the students always were somewhat indiscriminate. But, Soll! Glorious Heaven, why was Soll supposed to be any better or worse than the others?
Running into him the next day, Toria could not restrain herself from pricking him. “By the way, your lady friends were looking for you. It seems you completely forgot about them, Soll.”
For a long moment he looked at her, uncomprehending; she had time to see that his eyelids were red and his eyes were tired, as happens after a long night of reading. “Who?” he finally asked.
Toria searched her memory. “Ora and Rosalind. What taste you have, Soll!”
“I don’t know who they are,” he said indifferently. “Are you sure that they asked for me specifically?”
Toria again could not restrain herself. “And who else do we have here who is ‘tall, blond, with a scar’?”
Egert smiled bitterly, touching his cheek with his hand as was his wont; for some reason Toria became embarrassed. Muttering something indistinct, she rushed off.
* * *
A little while later she saw him in a group of students, led by the redheaded Gaetan; Egert Soll stood head and shoulders above all his companions. The group was, of course, heading out into the city; the students were making a joyful racket. Soll was silent, holding himself aloof, but the regard that the other students showed toward him was not concealed from Toria’s eyes. Next to Soll they all seemed a bit gawky, a bit rustic, a bit simple, while Soll, in whose every movement danced an instinctual, martial grace, seemed like a pedigreed horse lost in a herd of pleasant, merrily stomping mules.
With displeasure, Toria caught herself feeling something akin to interest. Of course Ora and Rosalind were inspired by him, and indeed how many more young fillies were champing at the bit, desiring to get their hands on such a pretty man?
A few days later, Egert unexpectedly received a package from Kavarren. The wheezing messenger brought a voluminous parcel, covered in wax seals, and a small, crumpled letter addressed to Egert into the university chancellery. The messenger would not leave until he received a silver coin for his troubles. The sack was full of home-cooked food and the letter, written on yellowing stationery, smelled of heartfelt, bitter tears.
Egert did not recognize the handwriting. His mother wrote rarely and unwillingly, and never had a single one of her missives been intended for her son, but he recognized the smell immediately, and his agitation threw him into a fit of shakes.
The letter was strange: the lines curved downward and the thoughts broke off again and again. There was not a single word in it about Egert’s flight or current life in Kavarren. The entire letter was dedicated to fragmentary recollections of Egert as a child and as an adolescent, except that he himself could remember almost nothing of them. His mother had held in her memory the color of the tablecloth in which her young son had tied up a bowl of hot soup for himself, and the beetle, whose severed leg he cheerfully and persistently tried to glue back on, and some impudence for which his father wanted to punish him, but she intervened, inventing an excuse for her son. Egert could hardly read to the end of the letter: he was overwhelmed by an incomprehensible, pinching, sickly sensation.
Hoping to stifle it, Egert bade Fox to invite anyone and everyone who could possibly fit into their tiny, arched room to a feast. The students, companionable and always ravenous, did not make him wait long; soon the beds were groaning under the weight of the feasters, and the windowsill was threatening to collapse, and the table, intended to serve as a base of academic inquiries and not as a throne for robust young backsides, was rattling indignantly. The parcel full of food, which would have been enough to last Egert an entire month, was demolished, as is proper, within a few hours. Everyone was heartily satisfied, including Egert, who in the noise and intoxication of the revelry was able to smother both bitterness and grief, as well as his fears for the future.
* * *
The Day of Jubilation was just around the corner. First Egert wanted it to arrive as quickly as possible, then to extend the time by any means he could. More and more frequently, Fox anxiously asked him if everything was all right: at times Egert lapsed into a causeless, overwrought mirth and at other times into a deep, depressed trance, sitting for hours by the window, senselessly leafing through the pages of the book on curses and eating almost nothing. At other times he was agitated and sleepless, and he kept getting up in the middle of the night to drink from the iron cistern in the corridor; the clamor of the iron chains on which this drinking fountain hung woke his neighbors and they complained.
A week remained until that fateful day, when Dean Luayan asked Egert to visit his study.
Egert expected to see Toria there, sitting as usual on the edge of the desk and swinging her feet, but it was only the strict, focused dean and his fidgety, nervous guest who met face-to-face in the heavily curtained study.
Having installed Egert in a tall armchair, the dean remained silent for a long time. A candle burned away inside the glass sphere with the outline of continents etched on it, and in its light the steel wing hovering over the table seemed alive and ready to take flight.
“In a day or two he’ll be in the city,” the dean said quietly.
Egert’s palms, which were gripping the wooden armrests, instantly became as clammy as frogs’ feet.
“Listen to me,” said the dean just as quietly, but the sound of his voice caused goose bumps to creep along Egert’s skin. “I know that you have lived for the sake of this encounter. Now I ask you a final time: Do you really want to speak with the Wanderer? Are you sure that this is the only path you can take?”
Egert thought of Fagirra and of the girl in the carriage who had been made into a plaything for a gang of robbers, and only then did he think of Karver. “I am sure,” he responded dully.
For a long moment the dean pierced him with his eyes. Egert did not move a muscle and managed to outlast that gaze. “Good,” rejoined Luayan finally. “Then I will tell you everything that I know. But what I know is, unfortunately, not very much.”
He walked over to the window, pulled back the edge of the curtain and thus, with his back to Egert, he began.
“I already told you about the man who was deprived of the gift of magic and who had to travel the path of experience. I talked to you about the Doors, seen by me in the Mirror of Waters: I was then a youth, my teacher had died, and I was alone.… A man stood before the Doors in my vision, and the bolt was halfway removed. You did not understand then why I recalled all of this, but now you should understand: listen well. The Wanderer walks the earth. No one calls him by his name and no one knows exactly why the abyss cast him out; he bears a power that no one, whether a mage or not, can penetrate. Not once, no matter how hard I tried, have I been able to see him in the Mirror of Waters, and I am quite skilled, Egert: any man who possesses the gift of magic is reflected in my Mirror sooner or later, but the Wanderer is inaccessible to my gaze. Moreover, every time I have tried to find him, it was as if I ran up against a blank wall. The inexplicable frightens me, Egert. The Wanderer frightens me, and I am no little boy. I cannot be sure; he may be an embodiment of evil, he may not, but who on this earth truly knows what is good and what is evil?”
The dean fell silent and Egert, pressing his palm against his scarred cheek, surprised himself by saying, “The curse is evil.”
“And murder?” The dean turned his head around in wonder.
“Murder is also evil,” replied Egert dully.
“And what about killing a murderer?”
The candle inside the glass sphere guttered.
“Let’s move on,” sighed the dean. “I’ll tell you more. Half a century ago the world stood on the brink of a precipice. The majority of the living did
not realize this. Something tried to enter the world from the outside. Manuscripts call it the Third Power. It desired to come into the world and rule over it. In order to pass through the Doors of Creation, the Third Power needed a Doorkeeper. That very same man, deprived of his gift, abused by the people he knew, blinded by his pride, decided to become the Doorkeeper. He would have received unprecedented power for opening the Doors, but the bolt was not removed. For some reason he decided at the final moment to abandon his task. It is unknown what happened next, but the man who dared to refuse the Third Power returned to the world of the living. He had been seared by the Power, but from that trial he received not damnation, as one would expect, but an inheritance of sorts.… It is said that ever since, he has roamed the world he saved, known from that time forward as the Wanderer. Does this seem like truth?”
Egert was silent.
“I too do not know.” The dean smiled slightly. “Perhaps it was an entirely different man, and the nature of the Wanderer’s power is altogether stranger.… Before, I desired to meet him, but now … now I do not wish it. Who knows … He is alien, he flees from encounters, and only from time to time do I hear chance tales of him.”
“And I’m a thread,” said Egert.
The dean stared at him. “What?”
“A thread, connecting you to the Wanderer. That is why I interest you, isn’t it?”
The dean frowned. “Yes … You have accurately calculated that there is a certain pragmatism in my treatment of you. You are a thread to the Wanderer, Soll, and you are also the murderer of my favorite student, the fiancé of my daughter. You are the victim of a grim curse. And you are a man who is on the path of experience. You are all these things.” The dean once again turned back to the window.
The candle in the glass sphere burned down and extinguished. The room became darker.
“What should I say to him?” asked Egert.
The dean shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever you like. You’ve altered enough that you can decide for yourself. Don’t try to move him to pity: it will do no good. Don’t abase yourself with pleading, but don’t even think of being rude. That could only make it worse. And the most important thing, Egert, and you should think well on this, is that you will be under his power yet again should you find him. He may decide to award your persistence with something else, with something that would make the previous curse seem like a joke.”
The dean searchingly inclined his head to his shoulder. Barely audibly, Egert whispered, “I’m afraid, of course. But, after all, I’ve already met him once. Maybe I’ll find the words. Maybe I’ll find…”
* * *
Egert was listening to the headmaster’s lecture while a note, flitting through the rows like a butterfly, passed along from hand to hand, making its way through the hall. Egert was not paying attention to this, and thus a hissing whisper caused him to spring up nearly out of his seat.
“Hey! Egert!”
The note was concealed within a tube, and the inscription on it left no doubt that this missive was addressed specifically to Egert. Unfolding the rough paper, Egert read the short sentence in the middle of the clean sheet: He is in the city.
The rasping voice of the headmaster burst into his ears like shattered glass; then it receded, muted, and melded with the buzzing of a fly that was toiling against the glass of the round window.
* * *
Three days remained until the holiday. Red-cheeked serving girls wore themselves out hauling overcrowded baskets of food here and there. Butchers gathered from the surrounding villages, and right on the street they sold bloody animal carcasses, the heads of both pigs and cows, rabbit haunches and braces of dead quail. Egert was troubled when his gaze accidentally fell on an insensate, eyeless head, skewered on a pole for sale.
The human sea bore him farther and farther through the streets. Feverishly peering at all the faces turned toward him, several times he flinched, broke out in a sweat, and flung himself forward, but every time he found he was mistaken, and so he halted to catch his breath and calm his wildly beating heart.
In the aristocratic quarters it was a bit calmer. Laughing and calling out to one another, chambermaids were stringing garlands from window to window, hanging ribbons and flags in the wind, displaying songbirds in cages on the windowsills, and scrubbing the pavement until it glistened. Catching sight of a gray hooded robe at the end of the street, Egert dived into an alley and pressed himself up against a wall.
In the middle of the day the fine weather broke; rain set in, autumn rain. Soaked to the bone, hungry and tired, Egert decided he was attacking the problem incorrectly: he would not find the Wanderer by simply roaming the streets. He needed to collect his thoughts and try to imagine where the man, who had appeared in the city the day before, would most likely be.
He hit upon the idea of visiting hotels and inns. At some he was merely looked at askance, and at others he was chased off immediately. Fearful, he took coins out of his pocket and forced himself to ask servants and lodgers about a tall middle-aged guest with intensely clear eyes and no eyelashes.
His purse was soon empty. In two or three hotels he was even shown the room in which, according to the parlor maids and servants, the tall old man he was looking for was staying. Each time feeling as though he was going to faint, Egert knocked on the hotels doors and received an invitation to enter and, entering, instantly apologized, admitted he had made a mistake and took his leave.
Hardly able to drag his feet, constantly running the risk of bumping into Fagirra or some other acolyte of Lash, Egert returned to the main square. There axes and saws were rattling away with all their might: opposite the city courthouse with its own executed manikin by the entrance, a vast scaffold was being raised.
Egert squirmed, recalling Toria’s words about the compulsory executions that opened the Day of Jubilation. The gang of professional carpenters was surrounded by street urchins: they were insanely curious. Vying with each other, they rushed to the aid of the carpenters, and when one of them was entrusted with holding a hammer, the pride of the fortunate boy was boundless.
Clenching his teeth, Egert assured himself that by the time of the executions he would already be free from the curse and thus he would be brave and unflappable. Dusk was setting in, and the rain, which had lightened for a while, returned again, and Egert, whose strength suddenly and completely ran dry, dragged himself toward the university.
The next morning he went out onto the streets at the crack of dawn and almost immediately saw a tall elderly man in a jacket that had seen better times, wearing a sword at his waist. Having settled accounts with a merchant who sold him a buckle for his baldric, the tall man slowly walked down the street, and Egert, afraid of being mistaken, afraid of losing the old man from sight, afraid of delaying and being too late, dashed after him.
Despite the early hour, the streets were teeming with people. Egert was pushed, scolded, and shouldered aside but, trying not to lose the wide-brimmed hat of the tall man from his sight, he tore after him with the perseverance of a maniac.
The tall man swerved onto a side street where there were fewer people. Having almost caught up with him, with his last strength Egert gasped, “Sir!”
The stranger did not turn around; panting, Egert ran closer to him and wanted to grab the sleeve of his leather jacket, but he did not dare. Instead he wheezed beseechingly, “Sir…”
The stranger looked back in surprise and took a small step backwards, seeing at his side a strong young man with a pale, drawn face.
Egert also stepped back: the passerby only resembled the Wanderer from afar. This was an ordinary, decent townsman who certainly wore a sword only out of respect for generations of distinguished forefathers.
“Excuse me,” whispered Egert, retreating. “I mistook you for someone else.”
The stranger shrugged his shoulders.
Melancholy at his failure, Egert meandered through populated areas, peering into back streets and slums. Ravenous old crones
darted toward him as if he were a tasty morsel, and Egert barely broke free from their grasping, pleading hands.
Egert visited taverns as well. Looking around the rooms from the doorway and ascertaining that the Wanderer was not there, he overcame the desire to sit down and have a meal—he did not have any money left—and instead hastened on his way. In a small tavern called the Steel Raven, he happened upon a group of the acolytes of Lash, drinking and conversing.
Egert did not know if it just seemed to him that their attentive gazes focused on him from under the three lowered hoods, but when he came to his senses he was already on the street, and he vowed to himself that from now on he would be more careful.
The second day of searching yielded no results. Despairing, Egert appealed to the dean, asking him if there was any way he could accurately determine the whereabouts of the Wanderer.
The dean sighed. “Soll, if this were any other man, I could arrange an interview with him. But I have absolutely no power over the Wanderer; I cannot find him unless he himself wants to be found. He is still in the city; this at least, I can say accurately, and he will be here for the entire day of the holiday, but probably not longer. Hurry, Soll, hurry. I cannot help you.”
On the eve of the Day of Jubilation the city was buzzing like a beehive. Dragging his feet like a sick, old man, Egert plodded along from house to house, searching the faces of the passersby. Toward evening, the first drunks were already sprawled against the walls in blissful poses, and beggars draped in rags sidled up to them furtively, like jackals to carrion, wishing to extract from the pockets of the drunkards their last remaining money.
It had not yet grown dark. Egert stood, leaning against a wall, and dully watched a street urchin who was pensively winding a ribbon around the tail of a dead rat. The rat was obviously being decorated with the dark blue ribbon in honor of the holiday.