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.