The clerk, peering out an entirely different door, beckoned to Egert with a crooked finger. “Come with me, Soll.”
So, submissive as a lost boy, Egert followed the clerk toward his fate. He crossed the path of four of the robed men in the corridor. The familiar, harsh odor wafted toward Egert, and it repulsed him so much, he felt he might vomit; not one of the soldiers of Lash lifted his hood, but Egert felt their cold, intent gazes on his back.
Crooked folds hung over the face of the magistrate, submerging his small eyes, sunken in flesh. Egert glanced into them once and immediately lowered his eyes, examining the smooth floor with marble veins, onto which water flowed from his soaked shoes. The magistrate studied him. Without raising his head, Egert could feel the weighty gaze eating into his skin.
“We expected to see you sooner, Soll.” The strained voice of the magistrate was scarcely audible; it seemed that every word cost him effort. “We expected you. After all, wasn’t it the daughter of Dean Luayan, your wife, who was arrested?”
Egert flinched. The magistrate had to wait quite a long time for his answer.
“Well, we are going to get married. That is, we plan to.” Having whispered this despicable phrase, Egert was pierced by an abhorrence of himself, as if, by informing the magistrate of this simple truth, he had somehow betrayed Toria.
“That’s one and the same,” sighed the magistrate. “Justice is counting on you, Soll. You will appear as the chief witness in court.”
Egert raised his head. “A witness? Of what?”
Brisk voices and the stomping of boots could be heard from beyond the door; then a clerk emerged from behind a curtain and began whispering something quickly into the ear of the magistrate.
“Tell them that the command has been revoked.” The magistrate’s voice soughed like snakeskin on dry stone. “He’s already here.”
Egert’s strained nerves unerringly ascertained that the magistrate was talking about him. He recalled the guards that set out for the university, and he licked parched lips that had lost all sensation.
“You have nothing to be afraid of.” The magistrate smiled, observing him. “You are nothing more than a witness. A valuable witness, inasmuch as you were close to the family of the old necromancer. Isn’t that so?”
Egert felt his ashen cheeks become hot and red. Referring to Dean Luayan as an old necromancer went beyond all bounds of disrespect, but then fear swallowed this spasm of indignation like a bog swallows a stone tossed into the mire.
The magistrate spoke dispassionately. “Just one virtue is required of a witness: to speak the truth. You know how grievously the Plague cost the city. You know that it did not appear on its own.”
Egert’s skin felt stretched.
“The Plague did not appear on its own,” continued the magistrate in his rasping voice. “The old necromancer and his daughter used their magic to summon it from out of the earth, from the gloom where it should have stayed hidden for generations. The Sacred Spirit Lash foretold the End of Time, but his acolytes were able to stop the assault and overwhelm the necromancer with ceaseless prayers and ceremonies. The city has been saved, but there are so many victims, Soll, so many victims. You must agree that the perpetrators of this crime should answer before the law; the families of the slain require it, and justice itself requires it.”
The magistrate’s hoarse voice seemed deafening to Egert, like the bellowing of a herd being led to slaughter.
“That’s not true,” he whispered, for at that moment even the fear in his soul was stunned. “That’s not true. The acolytes of Lash dug up the den of the Plague: it is they who summoned it, and the dean stopped it at the cost of his own life. I saw it, I…”
Fear recovered from its shock and called out. It swept over his mouth and snapped it shut; it poured streams of clammy sweat over his body and flung him into a merciless, fevered trembling.
“Slander against Lash,” observed the magistrate, “is absolutely forbidden, and the first offense is punishable by a public whipping.”
Silence fell and for several long minutes Egert’s inflamed imagination presented him with a picture of the whip, the crowd, and the executioner. Stinging welts seemed to be already burning on his back.
The magistrate sighed. Something caught in his throat then burst forth, as if tearing through a pustule. “However, I understand your situation. You are not completely the master of yourself and are not responsible for your own words; therefore, I will pretend that I did not hear them. It is likely that the trial will take place as soon as the interrogation of the prisoner is finished. As for you, Soll, I do not have any basis for detaining you, but the prosecutor wants to ask you a few questions.”
The magistrate stretched out his hand toward a small bell on the table. Without waiting for the ring, a squat guard appeared from behind a curtain that until this moment had been invisible to Egert. Rubbing at his sore thighs, Egert stepped beyond the concealed portiere.
Wood lice skittered along the damp walls. In the light of torches braced to the walls, the shadow of Egert’s escort thrashed about like an enormous moth. Listening to the sound of his own footsteps, Egert agonized, thinking of Toria.
They interrogated her and will interrogate her again. About what? She … Heaven, would they really dare torture a woman!
Then in the echoing silence of the corridor a distant scream, muffled by stone walls, seemed to hover in the air around him. He could not restrain himself from groaning. The guard escorting him looked back in surprise.
A keyed turned in a concealed door. The guard forced Egert through the door, slightly nudging him in the back. The dark, narrow room looked exactly like a cell, and Egert was sure that he had been brought right into the prison. But then the torch being brought in by the guard illuminated a tall armchair in the corner and a man sitting in that chair. Without surprise and even without an increase in his fear, Egert recognized Fagirra.
Placing the torch in a bracket, the guard bowed low and left. The tramp of his boots receded down the corridor.
Fagirra did not move. His hood rested on his shoulders, and it seemed to Egert that decades had passed since they last met: so much horror had happened since that time. Fagirra had aged suddenly. He no longer possessed his previous youthful appearance. Egert was struck by the thought that the true age of Fagirra was revealed to him only now.
Several minutes passed before the robed man sighed noisily and stood up, ceding the only chair in the room to Egert. “Take a seat, Egert. I can see that you are hardly able to keep on your feet.”
“I’ll stand,” replied Egert dully.
Fagirra shook his head seriously. “No, Egert, you will not stand. You yourself understand this. Your pride and your cowardice will tear you asunder, but something tells me that your cowardice will prove stronger. You can, of course, lament this fact without end, torment and castigate yourself, or you can simply sit down and listen to what a man who sympathizes with you has to say. Because I do sympathize with you, Egert, and I have from the very beginning.”
“You are the prosecutor,” Egert declared at the dark corner; he declared, not asking, but simply expressing his certainty. “The prosecutor in the trial against Toria. I should have expected it.”
“Yes,” Fagirra confirmed dolefully. “I am the prosecutor, and you will be the witness.”
Egert leaned against the wall, feeling how each of his muscles came into contact with the cold stronghold; then he bent his knees and sat, pressing his back against the wall. “Fagirra,” he said wearily, “did you see the Plague? I don’t know what happened there, behind the walls of the Tower, but the city … If only you could have seen…”