“I am disappointed, my brother. You failed to persuade him.”
“This mage is a proud man. Money is not important to him—perhaps he is well-to-do. He does not need power, and he did not want to be introduced to our Secret. He did not believe us.”
“You failed me, my brother.”
“We tried … we did everything we could … but … but we failed, Your Lordship,” the younger man replied, and his voice audibly cracked. “But we will find another way. We will manage without the mage.”
The old man kept silent for a long while. The gray mane of his hair hid his face; clever, sharp eyes looked from under the white eyebrows.
“I rely on you, my brother,” he said finally, and his thin fingers were bound into the locks of his hair. “We cannot be delayed any longer. The world gets older; people become impudent. Our brotherhood is losing influence.”
“Fragile peace will be changed by a new one,” the young man said confidently.
“Fragile peace will be changed by a new one,” echoed the old man. “You have to hurry, Fagirra. The End of Time is on the threshold.”
After leaving the room, the man with the tattoo walked along the rock terrace and stood for some time, inhaling the smoky air the city. Then he pulled the gray hood onto his head, nodded to the guards at the gate, and found his way to a bustling street via a dark lane. Two women with baskets, returning from the market, bowed stiffly to him and hurried to the other side of the street.
He walked, wrapped in his hooded robe with his face covered. When he stared at someone’s back the person would shudder, look back, bow, or dive into the crowd. But people seemed to bow with less respect than before, and some people did not bow at all—they looked at him sullenly, and the young ones—some of them even glared at him with naked challenge. The lesson will have to be severe, he thought with a sigh. Cruelty will be necessary. He walked on.
He came to a small river shining in the sun under the humpbacked bridge in a deserted section of the city. A poor man, still as a statue, sat close by. His dry hand projected like a dead branch, vainly expecting alms.
The man in the hooded robe slowed his steps, almost completely hidden in the shade.
A passerby emerged at the opposite end of the lane. How could this village fellow have strayed there—perhaps he was lost, perhaps someone gave him bad directions? He looked every inch a young merchant from the suburbs who had sold off his goods and was so happy with life that he glanced kindly at the poor man.
“Take a coin, drink to my luck.…”
“Thank you,” answered the poor man slowly.
Suddenly the beggar’s hand gripped the wrist of the merchant with surprising force. A broad-shouldered, red-faced confederate emerged from an alleyway and caught the purse, which was snatched from the passerby’s waist seconds earlier by the poor man. The merchant tried to shout, but the bulky fellow threw a rope around his neck.
Everything ended very rapidly. The body of the unlucky merchant, “relieved” of purse, tobacco pouch, and thin neckkerchief, was packed into a bag—not to be distinguished from hundreds of other bags, which were in abundance in the commercial streets. The bulky fellow and beggar, breathing heavily, finished their job when a shadow appeared on the road.
Both raised their eyes and started back in horror.
The gray-robed man smiled from under the hood. In his hand—with the tattoo on the wrist—coins tinkled.
“Tail, Nutty, be moderately greedy,” said the man in a soft voice that made the killers tremble. “I require your assistance.”
A week went by, and the city thankfully forgot about the tragic incident associated with the name of Egert Soll. Grass began to grow on the student’s grave, it was announced that a new arena for the boar fights would be erected on the shore of the Kava river, and the captain of the guards, the husband of the beautiful Dilia, proclaimed that there would be a parade before the guards set out into the countryside for their upcoming drills, which were pompously termed military field maneuvers.
The maneuvers took place every year. They were implemented to remind the gentlemen of the guards that they were not simply a riotous assembly of carousers and duelists, but a military unit. Egert loved these drills because they naturally afforded him the chance to boast of his prowess, and he always looked forward to their approach.
This time he was not looking forward to them.
His wound had scabbed over; it almost did not hurt anymore. His manservant had caught the trick of shaving Egert with special care: hair on one’s cheeks and chin was considered incompatible with aristocratic birth, so Egert did not consider, even for a moment, hiding his wound with a beard. Little by little, those around him became accustomed to his new appearance, and he himself often forgot to think about his wound, but with every passing day the strange anxiety, which had taken up residence in his soul, grew steadily, until it began to turn into a flurry of alarm.
During the day he felt tolerably well, but as soon as darkness settled in, the alarm unaccountably crept out of shadowy corners and chased him home, where at the command of the young master, his servant brought almost all the candles in the house into his rooms. However, even though Egert’s rooms blazed with light like a ballroom, at times it still seemed to him that the boars, their eyes full of blood, might trot right out of the tapestries.
One evening he found a means of combating this strange affliction: He ordered his servant to turn down the bed before sunset. He lay down, and although he did not succeed in falling asleep right away, Egert stubbornly refused to open his clenched eyes. Finally, he slid into slumber and then into a dream.
Glorious Heaven, it would have been better to stand on guard the whole night.
In the desolate predawn hour a dream came to him. He had already had many dreams that night, simple, ordinary, more or less pleasant dreams: women, horses, acquaintances, cockroaches. Waking up, he forgot his dreams sooner than he realized he had dreamed; this time he awoke in the middle of the night, his sweaty nightshirt molded to his body, shaking like a puppy left out in the rain.
It was likely influenced by some long-forgotten tale about the incursion of the black plague that arose from the furthest reaches of his memory, one of those horrible tales of the elders, about which he had laughed when he was still an adolescent. In his dream he saw a strange creature in a blackened, shapeless garment mounting the terraced steps of his house, its face muffled with rags blackened with pitch. In the hands of this visitant there was a tool that resembled a pitchfork, with extremely long, inverted tines; it was like an enormous bird claw, clutched tight with spasms. The manor was empty. The visitant climbed to the drawing room, where the lid of the harpsichord was thrown up, the candles were burnt down to their stubs, and Egert’s mother sat with her hands resting on the keys: yellow, desiccated, dead hands. The visitant lifted up his pitchfork, and Mother toppled to the side like a wooden figurine. The pitch-covered creature raked the dead body with his tool like a gardener rakes up last year’s leaves.
Egert could not remain in the dark for a second longer: Don’t remember that dream, forget, forget! He lit a candle; then, burning himself, he lit another. The portrait gathered shape out of the darkness: a blond boy in the lap of a woman. Egert froze for a second, peering into the face of his young mother, as if begging for protection like a child. A cricket sang somewhere nearby; the dead hours of night stood beyond the window. Egert clutched the candelabrum to his chest and stepped closer to the portrait, and in the twinkling of an eye, the face of the woman in the portrait twitched with a dreadful malice, turned blue, broke into a grin.…