The Scar (44 page)

“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.