by Gene Wolfe
Whatever he had sought, I had possessed only one treasure: the letter Master Malrubius had given me, identifying me as the legitimate Autarch of Urth. Because I had not expected my stateroom to be robbed, I had not concealed it at all, merely putting it in a drawer with some other papers I had brought from Urth; of course it was gone now.
On leaving my stateroom, the searcher had met the steward, who must have stopped him and attempted to question him. That could not be tolerated, since the steward would have been able to describe him to me later. The searcher had drawn his weapon; the steward had tried to defend himself with a clasp knife, but had been too slow. I had heard his scream as I talked with the Hierodules, and Ossipago had prevented me from leaving so that I would not encounter the searcher. So much seemed clear.
But now came the strangest part of the whole affair. When I found the steward’s body, I had tried to reanimate it, using the thorn in place of the true Claw of the Conciliator. I had failed; but then I had failed also on every previous occasion when I had sought to call upon whatever power I had commanded with the true Claw. (First, I believe, when I had touched the woman in our oubliette who had constructed the furnishings of her room from stolen children.)
Those failures, however, had been no more violent than the failure of a word that is not the word of power: one pronounces the word, but the door does not open. So had I touched with the thorn, but no cure or resuscitation had taken place.
This time had been quite different; I had been stunned in a fashion that had left me sick and weak still, and I had not the least notion what it was. Absurd though it may sound, that gave me hope. Something had happened, at least, though it had nearly cost me my life.
Whatever it had been, it had left me unconscious, and the darkness had come. Emboldened by it, the searcher had returned. Hearing my cry for help (which a well-intentioned person would have answered) he had advanced to kill me.
All these thoughts took much less time than I have taken to write about them. The wind is rising now, blowing our new land, grain by grain, to the sunken Commonwealth; but I will write for a little while more before I go to my bower to sleep: write that the only useful conclusion to which they carried me was that the searcher might be lying wounded in the gangway still. If so, I might induce him to reveal his motive and confederates, assuming that he had either. Snuffing the candle, I opened the door as silently as I could and slipped out, listened for a moment, then risked relighting it.
My enemy had gone, but nothing else had changed. The dead steward remained dead, his clasp knife by his hand. The gangway was empty as far as the wavering yellow light could probe it.
Fearing that I would exhaust the candle or it would betray my location, I extinguished it again. At close quarters, the hunting knife Gunnie had found for me seemed likely to be more useful than a pistol. With the knife in one hand and the other brushing the wall, I went slowly down the gangway in search of the Hierodules’ stateroom.
When Famulimus, Barbatus, Ossipago, and I had gone there, I had paid no heed to either the route or the distance; but I could recall each door we had passed, and almost every step I had taken. Though it took me so much longer to return than it had to go the first time, still I knew (or at least believed I knew) precisely when I had arrived.
I tapped on the door, but there was no response. Pressed to it, my ear detected no sounds from within. I knocked again, more loudly, but with no more result; and at last I pounded on it with the pommel of my knife.
When that too was without result, I crept through the dark to the doors on either side (though each was some distance off, and I was sure both were incorrect) and knocked at them as well. No one answered either.
To return to my stateroom would be to invite assassination, and I congratulated myself heartily on having already secured a second lodging. Unfortunately, to reach it by the only route I knew, I would have to pass the door to my stateroom. When I had studied the history of my predecessors and scanned the memories of those whose persons are merged in mine, I had been struck by the number who had lost their lives in a last repetition of some hazardous action — in leading the last charge of a victory, or by risking incognito a farewell visit to some mistress in the city. Recalling the route as I did, I felt I could guess in which part of the ship my new cabin lay; I decided to proceed down the gangway, turn from it when I could, and double back, and so come eventually to my goal.
I shall pass over my wanderings, which were wearying enough to me and need not weary you, my hypothetical reader. It should be enough to say that I found a stairway to a lower level and a gangway that seemed to run beneath the one I had left, but soon ended in another descending stair leading to a maze of walkways, ladders, and narrow passages as dark as the pit, where the floor moved beneath my feet and the air grew ever warmer and more humid.
At length this sweltering air carried to me an odor pungent and oddly familiar. I followed it as well as I could, I who have so often boasted of my memory now sniffing along for what seemed a league at least like a brachet and ready almost to yelp for joy at the thought of a place I knew, after so much emptiness, silence, and blackness.
Then I yelped indeed, because I saw far off the gleam of some faint light. My eyes had grown so used to the dark in those watches of wandering through the entrails of the ship that, faint though the gleam shone, I could see the renitent surface under my feet and the mossy walls about me; I sheathed my knife then, and ran.
A moment later circular habitats surrounded me, and a hundred strange beasts. I had returned to the menagerie where the apports were imprisoned — the gleam proceeded from one of their enclosures. I made my way to it and saw that the creature within was none other than the shaggy thing I had helped to capture. He stood upon his hind legs, with his forelegs braced against the invisible wall that contained him, and a phosphorescent glow rippled along his belly and shone strongly from his handlike forepaws. I spoke to him as I might have to some favorite cat upon returning from a journey, and he seemed to welcome me as a cat might, pressing his furry body to the unseen wall and mewing, regarding me with beseeching eyes.
An instant later his little mouth split in a snarl and his eyes glared like a demon’s. I would have started back from him, but an arm circled my neck and a blade flashed toward my chest.
I caught the assassin’s wrist and stopped the knife without a thumb’s width to spare, then struggled to crouch and throw him over my head.
I have been called a strong man, but he was too strong for me. I could lift him readily enough — on that ship I could have lifted a dozen men — but his legs clamped my waist like the jaws of a trap; I bent to throw him, but I succeeded only in throwing us both to the ground. Frantically I twisted to get away from his knife.
Nearly in my ear, he screamed with pain.
Our fall had brought us inside the habitat, and the shaggy animal’s teeth had fastened on his hand.
Chapter VII — A Death in the Light
BY THE time I had recovered myself enough to rise, the assassin was gone. A few bloodstains, nearly black in the light of the golden candle, remained in the circle ruled by my shaggy friend. He himself sat upon his haunches with his hind legs folded in an oddly human way beneath him, his light extinguished, licking his paws and smoothing the silky hair around his mouth with them. “Thank you,” I said, and he cocked his head attentively at the sound.
The assassin’s knife lay not far off, a big, broad-bladed, rather clumsy bob with a worn handle of some dark wood. He had been a common sailor then, in all probability. I kicked it away and called to mind his hand as I had glimpsed it — a man’s hand, large, strong, and rough, but with no identifying marks, so far as I had seen. A missing finger or two would have been convenient, but it was at least possible that he had those now: a sailor with a badly bitten hand.
Had he followed me so far through the dark, down so many stairs and ladders, along so many twisted passages? It seemed unlikely. He had come upon me here by accident then, se
ized his opportunity, and acted — a dangerous man. It seemed better to me to search for him at once than to wait until he had time to recover himself and concoct some tale to explain his injured hand. If I could discover his identity, I would make it known to the officers of the ship; and if there was not time for that or they would take no action, I would kill him myself.
Holding the golden candle high, I started up the stairs to the crew’s quarters, knitting plans much faster than I walked. The officers — the captain the dead steward had mentioned — would refurnish my stateroom or assign another to me. I would have a guard posted outside, not so much to protect me (for I intended to stay there no more than I had to in order to keep up appearances) as to give my enemies something to strike at. Then I…
Between one breath and the next, every light in that part of the ship came on. I could see the unsupported metal stair on which I stood, and through the twining black metal of its treads the pale greens and yellows of the vivarium. To my right, radiance from indistinct lamps lost itself in nacreous mist; the distant wall at my left shone gray-black with damp, a dark tarn turned on edge. Above, there might have been no ship at all, but a clouded sky besieged by a circling sun.
It lasted no longer than a breath. I heard distant shouts as sailors here and there called the attention of their mates to, what could not in any case be missed. Then a darkness fell that seemed more terrible than before. I climbed a hundred steps; light flickered as though every lamp were as tired as I, then went out again. A thousand steps, and the flame of the golden candle shrunk to a dot of blue. I extinguished it to save what little fuel remained and climbed on in the dark.
Perhaps it was only because I was leaving the depths of the ship and ascending toward that uppermost deck which confined our atmosphere, but I felt chilled. I tried to climb more quickly, to warm myself by the exertion, and found I was unable to do so. Haste only made me stumble, and the leg that had been laid open by some Ascian infantryman at the Third Battle of Orithyia drew the rest toward the grave.
For a time I was afraid I would not recognize the tier that held my cabin and Gunnie’s, but I left the stair without thought, kindled the golden candle for an instant only, and heard the creaking of hinges as the door swung open.
I had shut the door and found the bunk before I sensed that I was not alone. I called out, and the voice of Idas, the white-haired sailor, answered me in a tone of mingled fear and interest.
I asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you. I — I hoped you would come. I don’t know why, but I thought you might. You weren’t with the others down there.”
When I said nothing, he added, “Working, I mean. So I slipped away myself and came here.”
“To my cabin. The lock shouldn’t have let you in.”
“But you didn’t tell it not to. I described you, and it knows me, you see. My own cabin’s near here. I told it the truth, that I only wanted to wait for you.”
I said, “I’ll order it to admit no one but myself.”
“It might be wise to make exceptions for your friends.”
I told him I would consider it, actually thinking that he would certainly not be such an exception. Gunnie, perhaps.
“You have a light. Wouldn’t it be nicer if you used it?”
“How do you know I’ve got one?”
“Because when the door opened, there was a light outside for a moment. It was something you were holding, wasn’t it?”
I nodded, then realized he could not see me in the dark and said, “I prefer not to exhaust it.”
“All right. I was surprised, though, when you didn’t use it to find that bed.”
“I remembered where it was well enough.”
The fact was that I had refrained from lighting the golden candle as a matter of self-discipline. I was tempted to use it to see whether Idas had been burned or bitten. But reason told me the assassin who had been burned would be in no condition to make a second attempt on my life, and that the one who had been bitten could hardly have reached the iron stair in the airshaft far enough ahead of me to have climbed it unheard.
“Would you mind if I talked to you? When we met earlier and you spoke of your home world, I wanted to very much.”
“I’d like to,” I told him, “if you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions.” What I would really have liked was a chance to rest. I was still far from recovered, but an opportunity to gain information was not to be squandered.
“No,” Idas said. “Not a bit — I’d very much enjoy answering your questions, if you’ll answer mine.”
Seeking an innocuous way to begin, I took off my boots and stretched myself upon the bunk, which complained of me softly. “Then what do you call the tongue we’re speaking?” I began.
“The way we’re talking now? Why, Ship, of course.”
“Do you know any other languages, Idas?”
“No, not I. I was born on board, you see. That was one of the things I wanted to ask you about — how life is different for someone from a real world. I’ve heard a lot of stories from the crew, but they’re just ignorant seamen. I can tell that you’re a person who thinks.”
“Thank you. Having been born here, you’ve had a lot of chances to visit real worlds. Have you found many where they spoke Ship?”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t taken shore leave as often as I could have. My appearance…you’ve probably noticed—”
“Answer my question, please.”
“They speak Ship on most worlds, I suppose.” Idas’s voice sounded a trifle nearer than it had, I thought.
“I see. On Urth, what you call Ship is spoken only in our Commonwealth. We hold it a more ancient tongue than the others, but up until now I’ve never been sure that was true.” I decided to steer the talk to whatever had plunged everything in darkness: “This would be a great deal more satisfying if we could see each other, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, yes! Won’t you use your light?”
“In a moment, perhaps. Do you think they’ll get the ship’s lights working again soon?”
“They’re trying to fix it so the most important parts have lights now,” Idas said. “But this isn’t an important part.”
“What went wrong?”
I could practically see his shrug. “Something conductive must have fallen across the terminals of one of the big cells, but no one can find out what it was. Anyway, the plates burned through. Some cables too, and that shouldn’t have happened.”
“And all the other sailors are working there?”
“Most of my gang.”
I was certain he was nearer now, no more than an ell from the bunk.
“A few got off for other things. That was how I got away. Severian, your home world…is it beautiful there?”
“Very beautiful, but terrible too. Possibly the loveliest things of all are the ice isles that sail up like argosies from the south. They’re white and pale green, and they sparkle like diamonds or emeralds when the sun strikes them. The sea around them looks black, but it’s so clear you can see their hulls far down in the pelagic deeps—”
Idas’s breath hissed ever so faintly. Hearing it, I drew my knife as quietly as I could.
“—and each rears like a mountain against a royal-blue sky dusted with stars. But nothing can live on those ice isles…nothing human. Idas, I’m getting sleepy. Perhaps you’d better go.”
“I’d like to ask you much, much more.”
“And so you will, another time.”
“Severian, do men touch each other sometimes on your world? Clasp hands as a sign of friendship? They do that on a lot of worlds.”
“And on mine, too,” I said, and shifted the knife to my left hand.
“Let’s clasp hands then, and I’ll go.”
“All right,” I told him.
Our fingertips touched, and at that moment the cabin light came on.
He was holding a bob, its blade below his hand. He drove it down with all his weight be
hind it. My right hand flew up. I could never have stopped that blow, but I managed to deflect it; the broad point went through my shirt and plunged into the mattress so near my skin that I felt the chill of the steel.
He tried to jerk the bob back, but I got his wrist, and he could not pull free of my grip. I could have killed him easily, but I ran my blade through his forearm instead, to make him let go of the hilt.
He screamed — not so much from pain, I think, as from the sight of my blade thrusting from his flesh. I threw him down, and a moment later had the point of my knife at his throat.
“Quiet,” I told him, “or I’ll kill you on the spot. How thick are these walls?”
“My arm—”
“Forget your arm. There’ll be time enough to lick your blood. Answer me!”
“Not thick at all. The walls and floors are just sheets of metal.”
“Good. That means there’s no one about. I was listening while I lay on the bunk, and I didn’t hear a single step. You may wail all you want. Now stand up.”
The hunting knife had a good edge: I slit Idas’s shirt down the back and pulled it off, revealing the budding breasts I had half suspected.
“Who put you on this ship, girl? Abaia?”
“You knew!” Idas stared at me, her pale eyes wide.
I shook my head and cut a strip from the shirt. “Here, wind your arm with this.”
“Thank you, but it doesn’t matter. My life’s over anyway.”
“I said to wind it. When I go to work on you, I don’t want to get any more blood on these clothes than I have already.”