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.
Fox did not return in the morning. The fog that had thickened in the night did not disperse with the sun, but instead it congealed like jelly; even the wind got stuck in its clinging, damp wisps. The door of the dean’s study remained firmly shut, and Toria began roaming the stacks of the library as if she were lost, muttering responses to her own thoughts as she compulsively rubbed a velvety-smooth rag over the spines, slipcovers, and gilded edges of the books.
Egert did not tell her where he was going. He did not want to worry her.
The chill dampness and his own terror caused him to tremble as, his teeth clenched, he stepped out onto the deserted square. There were no merchants; there were no shoppers: there was only the deaf, muffled silence, the gray silhouettes of the houses, and the merciful fog that covered the city like a shroud covers the face of the deceased.
Egert soon realized that he would not find Fox. He encountered dead bodies along his path. Egert averted his eyes, but just the same his gaze found first a woman’s hand, stretched out convulsively, clinging onto a jewel; then hair spread out over the cobblestones; then the rakish boot of a guard, wet from the sagging droplets of fog and therefore gleaming as if it had just been polished for a parade. The smell of smoke mixed with the scent of decay. Egert walked on, but then he stopped, flinching, scenting the familiar aroma of a bitterish perfume in the still, dead air.
The Tower of Lash, having accomplished its dreadful business, continued to smoke slightly. Egert approached it, strangely impassive; by the entrance to the Tower a completely gray man in a laborer’s coveralls was flailing his fists against the stone masonry.
“Open up! Open up! Open up!”
Several apathetic people were crouched nearby on the pavement. A pretty woman in a nightcap that had slipped off her hair was absentmindedly stroking a dead boy lying in her lap.
“Open up!” spat the gray man. His knuckles were completely devoid of skin from punching at the stone. Beads of blood dropped down onto the pavement. Nearby a broken pickax wallowed in the dirt.