by Gene Wolfe
It looked down at me now, blunt-featured yet intelligent, the eyes bright with suppressed excitement. “Someone wishes to see you, Autarch,” he murmured.
I sat up. “Someone you felt you should wake me for?”
“Yes, Autarch.”
“The captain, perhaps.” Was I to be censured for going on deck? The necklace had been provided for emergency use, but it seemed unlikely.
“No, Autarch. Our captain’s seen you, I’m sure. Three Hierodules, Autarch.”
“Yes?” I fenced for time. “Is that the captain’s voice I hear sometimes in the corridors? When did he see me? I don’t recall seeing him.”
“I’ve no idea, Autarch. But our captain’s seen you, I’m sure. Often, probably. Our captain sees people.”
“Indeed.” I was pulling on a clean shirt as I digested the hint that there was a secret ship within this ship, just as the Secret House was within the House Absolute. “It must interfere with his other work.”
“I don’t believe it does, Autarch. They’re waiting outside — could you hurry?”
I dressed more slowly after that, of course. To draw the belt from my dusty trousers, I had to remove my pistol and the knife that Gunnie had found for me. The steward told me I would not need them; so I wore them, feeling absurdly as though I were going to inspect a reconstituted formation of demilances. The knife was nearly long enough to be called a sword.
It had not occurred to me that the three might be Ossipago, Barbatus, and Famulimus. As far as I knew, I had left them far behind on Urth, and they had most certainly not been in the pinnace with me, though of course they possessed their own craft. Now here they were, disguised (and badly) as human beings, just as they had been at our first encounter in Baldanders’s castle.
Ossipago bowed as stiffly as ever, Barbatus and Famulimus as gracefully. I returned their greetings as well I could and suggested that if they wished to speak to me, they were welcome in my stateroom, apologizing in advance for its disorder.
“We cannot come inside,” Famulimus told me. “However much we would. The room to which we bring you is not too far away.” Her voice, as always, was like the speaking of a lark.
Barbatus added, “Cabins like yours are not as safe as we might wish,” in his masculine baritone.
“Then I will go wherever you lead me,” I said. “Do you know, it’s truly cheering to see you three again. Yours are faces from home, even if they are false faces.”
“You know us, I see,” Barbatus said as we started down the corridor. “But the faces beneath these are too horrible for you, I fear.”
The corridor was too narrow for us to go four abreast; he and I walked side by side, Famulimus and Ossipago side by side behind us. It has taken me a long time to lose the despair that seized me at that moment. “This is the first time?” I asked. “You have not met me before?”
Famulimus trilled, “Though we do not know you, yet you know us, Severian. I saw how pleased you looked, when first you came into our sight. Often we have met, and we are friends.”
“But we will not meet again,” I said. “It’s the first time for you, who will travel backward through time when you leave me. And so it’s the last time for me. When we first met, you said, ‘Welcome! There is no greater joy for us than greeting you, Severian,’ and you were saddened at our parting. I remember it very well — I remember everything very well, as you had better know at once — how you leaned over the rail of your ship to wave to me as I stood upon the roof of Baldanders’s tower in the rain.”
“Only Ossipago here has memory like yours,” Famulimus whispered. “But I shall not forget.”
“So it’s my turn to say welcome now, and mine to be sad because we’re parting. I’ve known you three for more than ten years, and I know that the hideous faces beneath those masks are only masks themselves — Famulimus took hers off the first time we met, though I did not understand then that it was because she had done so often before. I know that Ossipago is a machine, although he is not so agile as Sidero, who I am beginning to believe must be a machine too.”
“That name means iron,” Ossipago said, speaking for the first time. “Though I do not know him.”
“And yours means bone-grower. You took care of Barbatus and Famulimus when they were small, saw to it that they were fed and so on, and you’ve remained with them ever since. That’s what Famulimus told me once.”
Barbatus said, “We are come,” and opened the door for me.
In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated. When I was only a boy, the doorway of a certain mausoleum had been a portal of wonder to me; and when I had crossed its threshold, I was not disappointed. On this ship I was a child again, knowing no more of the world around me than a child does.
The chamber into which Barbatus ushered me was as marvelous to Severian the man — to the Autarch Severian, who had Thecla’s life, and the old Autarch’s, and a hundred more to draw upon — as the mausoleum had been to the child. I am tempted to write that it appeared to be underwater, but it did not. Rather we seemed immersed in some fluid that was not water, but was to some other world what water was to Urth; or perhaps that we were underwater indeed, but water so cold it would have been frozen in any lake of the Commonwealth.
All this was merely am effect of the light, I believe — of the freezing wind that wandered, nearly stagnating, through the chamber, and of the colors, tintings of green shaded with blue and black: viridian, berylline, and aquamarine, with tarnished gold and yellowed ivory here and there shining sullenly.
The furnishings were not of furniture as we understand it. Mottled slabs of seeming stone that yielded to my touch leaned crookedly against two walls and were scattered across the floor. Tattered streamers hung suspended from the ceiling and, because they were so light and the attraction of our ship hardly felt, seemed in need of no suspension. So far as I could judge, the air was as dry here as in the corridor; yet the ghost of an icy spray beat against my face.
“Is this strange place your stateroom?” I asked Barbatus.
He nodded as he removed his masks, revealing a face that was at once handsome, inhuman, and familiar. “We have seen the chambers your kind makes. They are as disturbing to us as this must be to you, and since there are three of us—”
“Two,” Ossipago said. “It does not matter to me.”
“I’m not offended, I’m delighted! It’s the greatest of privileges for me to see how you live when you live as you wish.”
Famulimus’s falsely human face was gone, revealing some huge-eyed horror with needle teeth; she pulled that away as well, and I saw (for one last time, as I then believed) the beauty of a goddess not born of woman. “How fast we learn, Barbatus, that these poor folk we’ll meet, who hardly know what we know best, know courtesy as guests.”
If I had attended to what she said, it would have made me smile. As it was, I was far too busy still in looking about that strange cabin. At last I said, “I know your race was formed by the Hierogrammates to resemble those who once formed them. Now I see, or think I see, that you were once inhabitants of lakes and pools, kelpies such as our country folk talk of.”
“On our home, as on yours,” Barbatus said, “life rose from the sea. But this chamber has no more received its impression from that dim beginning than your own have received theirs from the trees where your forebears capered.”
Ossipago rumbled, “It is early to begin a quarrel.” He had not removed his disguise, I suppose because it did not render him less comfortable; and in fact I have never seen him do so.
“Barbatus, he speaks well,” Famulimus sang. Then to me, “You leave your world, Severian. Like you, we three leave ours. We climb the stream of time — you are swept down that stream. This ship thus
bears us both. For you the years are gone, when we will counsel you. For us they now begin. We greet you now, Autarch, with counsel we have brought. To save your race’s sun, one thing is needful only: that you must serve Tzadkiel.”
“Who is that?” I asked. “And how do I serve him? I’ve never heard of him.”
Barbatus snorted. “Which is less than surprising, since Famulimus was not supposed to give you that name. We will not use it again. But he — the person Famulimus mentioned — is the judge appointed to your case. He is a Hierogrammate, as is to be expected. What do you know of them?”
“Very little, beyond the fact that they are your masters.”
“Then you know very little indeed; even that is wrong. You call us Hierodules, and that is your word and not ours, just as Barhatus, Famulimus, and Ossipago are your words, words we have chosen because they are not common and describe us better than your other words would. Do you know what Hierodule means, this word of your own tongue?”
“I know that you are creatures of this universe, shaped by those of the next to serve them here. And that the service they desire of you is the shaping of our race, of humanity, because we are the cognates of those who shaped them in the ages of the previous creation.”
Famulimus trilled, “Hierodule is ‘holy slave.’ How could Hierodules be holy, did we not serve the Increate? Our master is he, and he only.”
Barbatus added, “You’ve commanded armies, Severian. You’re a king and a hero, or at least you were up until you left your world. Then too, you may rule again, should you fail. You must know that a soldier doesn’t serve his officer, or at least, that he shouldn’t. He serves his tribe, and receives instructions from his officer.”
I nodded. “The Hierogrammates are your officers, then. I understand. I possess my predecessor’s memories, as you perhaps do not yet realize; so I know that he was tried as I will be and that he failed. And it’s always seemed to me that what was done to him, returning him unmanned to watch our Urth grow worse and worse, to take responsibility for everything, and yet know that he had failed in the one attempt that might have set everything right, was cruel indeed.”
Famulimus’s face was almost always serious; now it seemed more serious than ever. “His memories, Severian? Have you no more than memories?”
For the first time in many years, I felt the blood rise in my cheeks. “I lied,” I said. “I am he, just as I am Thecla. You three have been my friends when I had few, and I should not lie to you, though so often I must lie to myself.”
Famulimus sang, “Then you must know that all are scourged alike. And yet the nearer to success, the worse the pain each feels. That is a law we cannot change.”
Outside in the gangway, not far distant, someone screamed. I started toward the door, and the scream ended on the gurgling note that signals that the throat has filled with blood.
Barbatus snapped, “Wait, Severian!” and Ossipago moved to block the door.
Famulimus chanted urgently, “I have but one thing more to tell. Tzadkiel is just and kind. Though you may suffer much, remember so.”
I turned on her; I could not help it. “I remember this — the old Autarch never saw his judge! I didn’t recall the name because he had striven so to forget it; but we recall everything now, and it was Tzadkiel. He was a kinder man than Severian, a more just person than Thecla. What chance does Urth stand now?”
Though I do not know whose hand it was — Thecla’s, perhaps, or one of the dim figures behind the old Autarch — a hand was on my pistol; no more do I know whom it would have shot, unless it was myself. It never left the holster, for Ossipago seized me from behind, pinning my arms in a grip of steel.
“It is Tzadkiel who will decide,” Famulimus told me. “Urth stands such chance as you provide.”
Somehow Ossipago opened the door without releasing me, or it may be that it opened itself at some command I did not hear. He whirled me around and thrust me out into the gangway.
Chapter VI — A Death and the Dark
IT WAS the steward. He lay face down in the gangway the worn soles of his carefully polished boots not three cubits from my door. His neck had been nearly severed. A clasp knife, still closed, lay beside his right hand.
For ten years I had worn the black claw I had pulled from my arm beside Ocean. When first I ascended to the autarchy I had often tried to use it, always without result: for the past eight years, I had scarcely given it a thought. Now I took it from the little leathern sack Dorcas had sewn for me in Thrax, touched the steward’s forehead with it, and sought to do again whatever it had been that I had done for the girl in the jacal, the man-ape beside the falls, and the dead uhlan.
Although I have no wish to do so. I will try to describe what happened then: Once when I was a prisoner of Vodalus, I was bitten by a blood bat. There was very little pain, but a sensation of lassitude that grew more seductive every moment. When I moved my foot and startled the bat from its feast, the wind of its dark wings had seemed the very exhalation of Death. That was but the shadow, the foretaste, of what I felt then in the gangway. I was the core of the universe, as we always are to ourselves; and the universe tore like a client’s rotten rags and fell in soft gray dust to nothing.
For a long time I lay trembling in the dark. Perhaps I was conscious. Surely I was not aware of it, nor of anything except red pain everywhere and such weakness as the dead must feel. At last I saw a spark of light; it came to me that I must be blind, and yet if I saw that spark there was some hope, however slight. I sat up, though I was so shaken and weak that it was agony.
The spark appeared again, an infinitesimal flash, less than the gleam that sunlight summons from the point of a needle. It lay in my hand, but was extinct before I realized it, long gone before I could move my stiff fingers and discover them slippery with my blood.
It had come from the claw, that hard, sharp, black thorn that had pricked my arm so long ago. I must have clenched my fist; I had driven the claw into the second joint of the first finger until its point had pierced the skin a second time from within, impaling it like a fishhook. I jerked it out, hardly conscious of the pain, and pushed it back into its sack still wet with my blood.
By then I was sure again that I was blind. The smooth surface on which I lay seemed no more than the floor of the gangway; the paneled wall that my groping fingers discovered once I clambered to my feet might easily have been its wall. Yet the gangway had been well lit. Who would have carried me elsewhere, to this dark place, and made my whole body an agony to me? I heard the moaning of a human voice. It was my own, and I clamped my jaw to silence it.
In my youth, when I had traveled from Nessus to Thrax with Dorcas, and from Thrax to Orithyia largely alone, I had carried flint and steel to kindle fires. Now I had none. I searched my mind and my pockets for something that would give light, but I could hit on nothing better than my pistol. Drawing it, I drew breath too, to shout a warning; and only then thought to cry out for help.
There was no reply. I listened, but could hear no footfall. After making certain the pistol was still at its lowest setting, I resolved to use it.
I would fire a single shot. If I could not see its violet flame, I would know that I had lost my sight. I would consider then whether I wished to lose my life as well while I retained the necessary desperation, or whether I would seek out whatever treatment the ship might offer. (And yet I knew even then that although I — although we — might choose to perish, we could not. What other hope had Urth?)
With my left hand, I touched the wall so that I might align the barrel with the gangway. With the other, I raised my pistol to shoulder height, as a marksman does who shoots at a distance.
A pinprick of light shone before me, like red Verthandi seen through clouds. The sight startled me so much that though it was my injured finger that jerked back the trigger, I was hardly aware of it.
Energy split the dark. In the violet glare, I saw the steward’s body, the half-open door of my stateroom beyond it, a writ
hing shape, and the flash of steel.
Darkness returned instantly, but I was not blind. Sick, yes; aching in every limb — I felt I had been spun about by a whirlwind and dashed against some pillar — but not blind. Not blind!
Rather, the ship was plunged in darkness as if in night. Again I heard the groan of a human voice, but this voice was not my own. Someone had been in the corridor after all; someone who had meant to take my life, since what I had glimpsed had surely been the blade of some weapon. The diminished beam had seared him as the diminished beams of the Hierodules’ pistols had once seared Baldanders. This had been no giant, I thought, but he still lived as Baldanders had lived; and it might be that he was not alone. Stooping, I groped with my free hand until I found the body of the steward, climbed over it like a crippled spider, and at last managed to creep through the door of my stateroom and bolt it behind me.
The lamp by whose light I had recopied my manuscript was as dark as the gangway lights, but as I fumbled the escritoire to find it, I touched a stick of wax and remembered there was a golden candle too for melting the wax, a candle that lit itself at the pressing of a stud. This ingenious device had been stored with the wax in a pigeonhole, so that to think of it should have been to lay my hand upon it. It was not there, but I soon found it among the litter on the writing board.
Its clear yellow flame shot up at once. By its light I saw the ruin of my stateroom. My clothes had been strewn across the floor, and every seam of every garment ripped out. A sharp blade had opened my mattress from end to end. The drawers of the escritoire had been turned out, my books strewn over the room, the very bags in which my belongings had been carried on board had been slashed.
My first thought was that all this had been mere vandalism; that someone who hated me (and on Urth there had been many such) had vented his fury at not finding me asleep. A little reflection convinced me the destruction had been too thorough for that. Almost at the instant I had left it, someone had entered the stateroom. Doubtless the Hierodules, whose time ran counter to the time we know, had foreseen his arrival and sent the steward for me largely to snatch me from him. Finding me gone, he had searched my belongings for something so small it might have been concealed in the collar of a shirt.