Marina Dyachenko - The Scar

“Do not be afraid.” The robed man removed the hood, revealing a bright, honest face. “I must have frightened them off. Robbers are afraid of Lash and those who serve him.”

“Th-thanks,” answered the young man, stepping back. Both his knees and elbows were shaking.

“There is nothing to worry about,” the man spoke softly but persistently. “Let’s get away from here. How did you find yourself in this dangerous alley? Let’s go, let’s go…”

The young man did not intend to go anywhere with the man in the hooded robe. Yet somehow he decided to follow him. His feet started to move and, step by step, they walked along uninhabited side streets. Soon they were seated on the rear porch of a small bakery at a secluded table.

“Well, sir, I am a student. No, sir, I only recently began studies at the university. My father works as a public notary, he is an educated man, it goes without saying, and he decided that I should also study science. I was a good student.… Actually, I still am.”

The young man with fat cheeks was deceiving. His father was a modest clerk, and his sisters wore secondhand dresses one after another, because there was never enough money in their family. There was even less hope.

“Dean Luayan? Yes, he is a great mage, great scientist.… Yes, it goes without saying, we are close friends!”

The man in the robe shook his head sadly. The son of the clerk suddenly felt shriveled.

“I mean … I wanted to say … I attend the dean’s lectures every week.”

And I understand nothing, the young student thought.

The robed man put his white hands on the edge of the table—the tattoo on his wrist was visible—and he started to speak. Each of his words was as cold and sharp as an icy asterisk. Each word scolded his listener to the bones.

The fat-cheeked son of a clerk sat leaning on the tabletop. His blue eyes were rounded and resembled the peas on the dress of a fashion-model.

“The end is coming … very soon,” the man in the gray robe said.

“Why?” said the student. “The End of Time … Indeed this has no…” He met the glance of his interlocutor and finished his sentence in a whisper: “… scientific explanation.”

“No one in the world can understand all the sciences.” The man in the hooded robe sounded as if he regretted it. “Even Dean Luayan … by the way, don’t tell him anything about our conversation.”

“But why not?”

The man in the gray robe glared angrily. Soon the table began to tremble, shaking the beer in their mugs. The confusion on the young man’s face was replaced by panic.

“But you do not have to fear.” The man with the tattoo raised the corners of his lips. “If you do everything as it needs to be done, Lash will protect you. Everybody who has faith in us will be saved.”

“I will do everything which has to be done. What about others? Those the Order will not save?”

“The Order will save the ones who deserve it,” the man in the hooded robe responded dryly. “The others will cry bitterly until they die.”

Days passed by. From time to time, a messenger would come from the captain, always carrying the same question: How did Lieutenant Soll feel and was he able to take up his duties once more? The messenger would return, always carrying the same answer: The lieutenant was feeling better, but he could not yet resume his duties.

Karver also came to the house a few times. Each time he was forced to listen to the same excuse, delivered through a servant: The young gentleman, alas, was too weak and could not meet with his old friend.

Kavarren’s guards gradually became accustomed to having their carousals without Egert; at first they were all excited by the tale of his fateful love, but the subject soon withered away of its own accord. The serving girl Feta, who worked in the tavern by the town gates, sighed secretly and wiped her little eyes, but she was soon comforted, for even without the glorious Egert Soll, there were enough splendid gentlemen with epaulets on their shoulders to go around.

Finally, the messenger from the captain asked his eternal question slightly differently: Would Lieutenant Soll ever resume his duties? After hesitating, Egert answered in the affirmative.

He was told to report to a unit that was engaged in mock battles the next day. These engagements, which were of necessity undertaken with blunt weapons, had always seemed ridiculous to Egert: How could one get a taste of danger while holding in one’s hand blunt, toothless steel? Now, just the thought of having to stand face-to-face with an armed opponent was enough to cast Egert into a fit of trembling.

In the morning, after a sleepless night, he sent a servant to the regiment with a message that the illness of Lieutenant Soll had returned, worse than before. The courier was just about to leave the house, but he never managed to pass the threshold, because Egert’s father, stern and full of indignation, ruthlessly intercepted his son’s message.

“My son!” Veins bulged on the temples of the elder Soll as he stood, glowering like a storm cloud, at the entrance to Egert’s room. “My son, the time has come for you to explain.” He took a breath. “I always saw in my son, above all else, a man. What is the meaning of your strange illness? Are you intentionally abandoning your regiment, service in which is the duty of all young men of noble birth? If this is not the case, and I truly hope it is not, then how do you explain your reluctance to appear at training?”

Egert looked at his father, no longer so young or so healthy; he saw the tendons that were drawn tight across his wrinkled neck, the deep creases between the imperiously drawn brows and the indignantly glittering eyes. His father continued, “Glorious Heaven! I’ve been watching you the last few weeks. And if you were not my son, if I hadn’t known you before, I swear to Khars, I’d think that the name of your affliction was cowardice!”

Egert jerked back, as though he had been slapped in the face. His entire existence cried out from grief and insult, but the word had been spoken, and deep in his heart Egert knew that what his father said was true.

“There has never been a coward in the Soll family,” said his father in a constrained whisper. “You must take yourself in hand, otherwise…”

The eldest Soll wanted to say something far too terrible, so terrible that his lips trembled with ire and the vein on his temple throbbed even more vigorously: he wanted to offer the prospect of a paternal curse and expulsion from the family home. However, he decided not to issue this threat and instead repeated meaningfully, “There has never been a coward in the Soll family!”

“Leave him alone.” The words came from behind the enormous back of the elder Soll.

Egert’s mother, a pale woman with perpetually hunched shoulders, did not often take the liberty of interrupting the conversations of men.

“Leave him alone. Whatever may have happened to our son, for the first time in years—”

She stopped short. She wanted to say that for the first time in years, she did not sense in her son the harsh and predatory tendency that frightened her and transformed her own child into something foreign and offensive, but she too decided not to say this aloud and only looked at Egert longingly and sympathetically.

Egert grabbed his sword and left the house in haste.

That day, the mock swordfights went on without Lieutenant Soll because, after exiting the gates of his house, he did not make his way to the regiment. Instead, he wandered the empty streets in the direction of the city gates.

He stopped in front of the tavern; there is no telling what compelled him to turn toward the wide, well-known door.