“We must pray,” someone whispered. “We must pray. Oh, Spirit of Lash…”
The gray man in the overalls pounded at the sealed door with a renewed frenzy. “Open up! Ah! Scum! Undertakers! Open up! You can’t hide! Open up!”
Egert turned and stumbled away.
Fox would not be found. He had gone missing; he had disappeared somewhere in this pestilent cauldron; no one could help; nothing would make it better; and Egert would die as well. At this thought the animal fear raged in his soul, but with his heart and his mind he understood clearly that the most important thing left to him in his shortened life was Toria. Her final days must not be darkened with horror and grief. Egert would not allow himself the luxury of dying first: only once he had made sure that nothing could ever threaten Toria again would he close his own eyes.
Egert saw a collapsed boy on the pavement in front of him, and he was about to make his way around it, keeping it as far away as possible, when the man moved, and Egert heard the faint scratching of iron against stone. A sword rested in the hand of the dying man; Egert could see beads of moisture on the costly sheath, on the heavy monogrammed hilt, on the baldric decorated with semiprecious stones. Then he shifted his gaze to the face of the man lying in the pavement.
Karver said nothing. His chest was rising rapidly, trying to suck in the wet air; his lips were parched and his eyelids were swollen. One hand, clad in a thin glove, clawed at the stones of the pavement, while the other squeezed the handle of his sword as if the weapon could defend its master even from the Plague. Karver stared at Egert, unwilling to move his eyes away.
The plaintive whickering of a horse, muted by the fog, could be heard in the distance.
Karver gasped fitfully. His lips jerked and Egert heard, as quietly as the rustle of falling sand, “Egert…”
Egert said nothing because there was nothing to say.
“Egert … Kavarren … What is happening in Kavarren right now?”
Such a keen, imploring note slithered through Karver’s voice that Egert momentarily remembered that shy, thin-lipped boy who had been the friend of his childhood.
“This … this death … will it reach Kavarren?”
“Of course not,” Egert said with certainty. “It’s too far. And they will have set up a quarantine, and patrols.…”
Karver breathed deeply; it seemed he was relieved. He threw back his head and shaded his eyes with his hand. He whispered with a half smile, “Sand … Den, tracks … Cold … water … They laughed.…”
Egert was silent, taking these incoherent words for raving.
Karver did not tear his gaze away; it was an oddly vacant gaze that seeped out from under his heavy eyelids. “Sand … The Kava river … You remember?”
For a second Egert saw a sun-drenched bank, white on yellow like sponge cake covered with icing, green isles of grass, a group of boys, raising fountains of spray up to the heavens.…
“You always … threw sand in my eyes … remember?”
He tried as hard as he could to summon such a recollection, but there was only the wet, shiny pavement before his eyes. Could it have been so? Yes, it could. Karver had never complained; he had submissively washed all the sand from his inflamed eyes.
“I didn’t mean to,” Egert said for some reason.
“Yes, you did,” Karver objected quietly.
They were silent for a while. The fog did not wish to disperse, and smoke and decay and death approached from every side.
“Kavarren,” whispered Karver almost inaudibly.
“Nothing will happen to it,” Egert replied.
Searchingly gazing at Egert, Karver tried to raise himself up onto his elbow. “Are you sure?”
The smooth surface of the Kava river gleamed in Egert’s mind’s eye; sunlight flared up and died out on the water, where the quivering copper green of Kavarren’s roofs, turrets, and weathervanes was reflected.
Knowing that he lied, he smiled widely and tranquilly. “Of course I’m sure. Kavarren is safe.”
Karver sighed deeply and lowered himself back onto the pavement. His eyes closed halfway. “Thank … Heaven…”
No one would ever hear him say another word.
The fog dispersed, and the square appeared before Egert’s gaze. It looked like a field of battle. Here would be enough food for a thousand ravens, but there was not a single bird in the city; nothing disturbed the dead, as though the scavengers of the world were obeying a taboo.
However, that was not entirely true. Egert looked around; a boy ran from corpse to corpse with his back bent low. He was about eighteen years old, medium height, scrawny, with a canvas sack over his shoulder. Beggars gathered their alms in such sacks, and Egert guessed what the youngster was gathering in his. Stooping over a corpse, he dexterously fished out a purse or a snuffbox or whatever finery caught his eye from the dead person; rings were a bother: they did not wish to slip off the swollen fingers. The lad sniffed the air, keeping a wary eye on Egert, but he continued his business, scrubbing at dead hands with a piece of soap he had saved specially for this occasion.
Egert wanted to scream, but his fear proved stronger than his fury and disgust. Spitting on his soap, the looter skirted around Egert in a wide arc and then took to his heels at the sound of a shrill whistle.
Egert, struck dumb, watched as the lad fled. On the very edge of the square he was overtaken by two broad-shouldered figures, one in the white-and-red uniform of the guards, the other in a slovenly black smock. The lad screamed like a rabbit, tried to dart away, cowered in their arms, then thrust the sack away from himself as if trying to pay them off. Egert did not want to watch, but watch he did as the man in guard’s uniform beat the lad over the head with his sack. He heard the next words, painfully strained, carry throughout the entire square.
“No! I’m not! They don’t need it! They don’t need it! The dead don’t need—ah!”
Passing into an inarticulate shriek, the screaming died out. The scrawny body crumpled to the ground in the glow of the streetlamps with the canvas sack on its chest.
Fox returned late that evening. Egert, whose intuition that day had become as sharp as a spear, found him before anyone else.
Gaetan stood by the entrance, on the stone porch of the university; he stood embracing the wooden monkey by the shoulders. His tricornered hat, crumpled out of shape, slid down his forehead. He was, of course, blindly, staggeringly drunk. Egert, who experienced colossal relief at the sight of his friend, wanted to lead him in out of the cold and put him to bed. Hearing Egert’s footsteps behind him, Fox shivered and turned around. The light of the lantern in the doorway fell on his face. Gaetan was sober, as sober as the day of the exam, but his honey-colored eyes now seemed dark, almost black.
“Egert?”
Egert did not understand what had frightened his friend so. He took another step forward, extending his hand. “Let’s go.”
Gaetan recoiled. His gaze compelled Egert to come to a dead halt; not once in their long acquaintance had he seen in the eyes of his friend such a strange expression. What was it? Loathing? Scorn?
“Fox?” he muttered uneasily.
“Don’t come near me,” Fox replied desolately. “Don’t come near me, Egert. Don’t you come near me, I beg you. Go away. Go back.” He staggered, and Egert suddenly realized that the sober Gaetan could barely stand on his own two legs: he was being dragged to the ground. He was being dragged into the ground.
He understood now what that expression was that had frozen in Fox’s eyes. It was fear of approaching death and fear of carrying away with him another person, his friend, Egert.