A tower with grated windows soared up next to the courthouse; some guards drowsed by the entrance to the tower, and a bit farther on three men in gray hooded robes were having a dignified conversation: these were the acolytes of the Sacred Spirit Lash. The sky hung above the square like an enormous blue banner.
Toria breathed blissfully; the sun lay on her face like a warm hand. The cat hopped onto the windowsill and sat next to her. Toria rested her hand on the back of its neck, and suddenly felt an unparalleled sense of her own kinship with this square, with this city, with the books, with the cat, with the university. And then she smiled happily, for perhaps the very first time in this last, black year.
The crowd clamored, the crowd bubbled like a motley stew boiling in a cauldron, and Toria’s gaze nonchalantly slid over the hats and the parasols, over the uniforms, the bouquets, the trays of pies, over the dirty faces and the well-groomed ones, over the pomaded hair, the lace, the patches, the spurs until, amidst this hectic mass of humanity, one exceedingly strange man caught her attention.
Toria narrowed her eyes. The man was hidden from her gaze now and again by the crush of people, but this did not stop her from noticing, however far away she was, a certain incongruity in his bearing. It seemed like he was not walking through a populated square, but cautiously moving from hillock to hillock in a bog full of quicksand.
Astonished, Toria watched him even more attentively. The man was moving through a complicated, predetermined route: having made his way to a lamppost, he caught hold of it with his hands and stood against it for a moment, lowering his head as if he were taking a nap. Then, having determined the next leg of his arduous path, he moved on slowly, as if forcing himself.
He was completely uninterested in what was going on around him, even though, judging from his appearance, he was definitely not a sophisticated city-dweller. If anything, he was a vagrant who had worn out the majority of his clothes walking along the country roads. Catching sight of the red-and-white patrol with their swords and spurs caused him to jump so forcefully that he bumped into a seller of baked apples and nearly knocked him to the ground. Toria could hear shouts and abuse coming from the apple seller as the strange tramp jumped yet again, trying to get out of the way.
However complex, unnatural, and winding the man’s path was, his goal appeared to be the university. Slowly but surely, the stranger came ever closer and closer, until she was finally able to make out his face.
Her heart beat painfully, violently; it stopped, and then it leapt wildly as if it were a hammer muffled in rags, beating against a wooden anvil. Toria did not yet understand what was happening, but the warm, spring day suddenly felt bleakly cold.
She recognized the face of the strange man, or so it seemed to her in that first second. In the next moment, chewing the scar on her lower lip, she was already telling herself silently, It’s not him.
It was not him. He did not have a scar on his cheek, but more important: his eyes could never contain such grief, or such a hunted look. It could not be him: this man was dirty, scruffy, and atrophied, while he shone with self-satisfaction and good fortune; he fairly burst with the sense of his own attractiveness and irresistibility and was, indeed, handsome—Toria twisted her lips in disgust—he was handsome, while this one …
The tramp came even closer. The spring wind tousled his disheveled blond hair. He stood irresolute and tense in front of the university building as if he could not decide whether or not to approach the doors.
It is not him, said Toria to herself. Not him, she repeated fiercely, but her heart was beating ever faster and wilder. That shrunken, sallow face with that horrible scar running along the entire cheek, that uncertainty in every movement, those foul rags …
Toria leaned forward, peering at the stranger intensely, as though desiring to encompass him with just a single look. The stranger sensed her gaze. He shuddered and raised his head.
Egert Soll was standing under the window: in the blink of an eye, no doubt whatsoever remained in Toria. Her fingers gripped the windowsill, driving a splinter under one of her fingernails, but she did not feel the pain. The man standing below the window blanched deathly pale beneath his layer of dust and his sunburn.
It seemed as though nothing could appear more terrible to his eyes than the sight of this young woman in a high window; it was so terrible that it compelled him to shake, as if an abyss had suddenly opened right in front of him, and from that abyss the jaws, dripping with bile, of the mother of all monsters had reached out for him. For several seconds he stood as if frozen in place, and then he suddenly turned and dashed off. Disturbed flower girls yelled after him in the crowd. An instant, and he was no longer even in the square, which continued to spin festively like a carousel.
Toria stood by the window for a long time, thoughtlessly sucking on her wounded finger. Then, abandoning the cart laden with books, she turned around and slowly walked out of the library.
Egert had entered the city at dawn, just as the city gates were being raised. His defensive rituals, invented by him in droves, somehow helped him cope with his terror: gripping a button that had escaped from his shirt in his sweaty fist, he planned out his route in advance, moving from landmark to landmark, from beacon to beacon; by this method, of course, his route was significantly lengthened, but it also secured a hope in his soul that he would manage to avoid any danger.
Kavarren—massive, splendid Kavarren—was, in truth, a tiny, quiet little provincial town: Egert understood this now as he wandered through the noisy streets, dense with people and carts. Egert had been living in solitude for so long that the mass of people caused his head to spin; he kept having to lean against walls and lampposts so that he could rest a bit, squeezing shut his bloodshot eyes.
The hermit showed him the best way to the city, and gave him cheese and griddle cakes for his journey. The road to the city had been long and full of apprehension and fear. The cakes had been finished the day before yesterday, and Egert was now suffering from hunger as well as fear.
The goal of his agonizing pilgrimage was the university: Egert had been told that he could find a genuine archmage there. Unfortunately, Egert had not been able to discover either his name or his title. The kindhearted passersby, whom Egert finally resolved to question, unanimously directed him to the main square: there, they said, was the university and also other curiosities that might appeal to a traveler. Squeezing his button and scurrying from landmark to landmark, Egert moved on.
The main square was like a seething cauldron; trying as hard as he could to fight his dizziness, Egert weaved his way through the crowd. Details detached themselves from the throng and penetrated his eyes: an enormous mouth smeared with cream, a lost horseshoe, the wide-open eyes of a mule, a stunted scrub of grass in the crack between cobblestones … Then he stumbled into a round black pedestal, raised his head, and to his horror discovered that he was standing beneath a miniature gallows, where an executed dummy with glassy eyes was gazing down at him apathetically.
Recoiling, he nearly ran into a man in a gray hood. The man turned around in surprise, but Egert could not make out his face, hidden by the hood. He struggled through the crowd once again, and this time the crooked path from marker to marker deposited Egert in the middle of a patroclass="underline" five well-armed men in red-and-white uniforms, disagreeable and menacing, who were just waiting for the chance to seize a helpless tramp. Egert darted away, his mind full of a vision of prison, the whip, and hard labor.
Five or six men in gray hooded robes were standing in a huddled circle, conversing about something. Egert noticed that the crowd split around them, like a seething river breaks away from a rocky island. The faces of the robed men were lost in the shadows of their hoods, and this gave the gray figures a very sinister appearance. Egert was far more terrified of them than of the guards and adjusted his path so that he stayed at least ten feet away from the group.