by Gene Wolfe
Chapter 20
PICTURES
The question was why Odilo the steward had not taken me there; but I did not pause to think on it while I sprinted along the corridor, and when I arrived the answer was plain enough. That door had been broken long before — not just the socket of the lock, but the entire thing smashed so that only two discolored fragments of wood clinging to the hinges showed there had ever been a door there. The lamp within had gone out, leaving the interior to darkness and spiders.
I had actually turned away from it and taken a step or two before I stopped, under the influence of that consciousness of error that often comes to us before we understand in the least in what the error consists. Jonas and I had been thrust into the antechamber late in the afternoon. That night the young exultants had come with their whips. The next morning Hethor had been taken, and at that time, it seemed, Beuzec had bolted from the praetorians, who had been given keys by the steward so they might search the hypogeum for him. When the same steward, Odilo, had met me a few moments before, and I had told him that Terminus Est had been taken from me by a praetorian, he had assumed I had come during the day, after Beuzec’s escape.
In point of fact, I had not; and therefore, the praetorian who had been carrying Terminus Est could not have put her in the locked closet beneath the second stair.
I went back to the closet with the broken door again. By the scant light that filtered in from the corridor, it was apparent that it had once been lined with shelves like its twin; its interior was bare now, the shelving having been stripped away to serve some new use, leaving the shelf brackets to thrust fruitlessly from the walls. I could see no other object of any kind, but I could also see that no guardsman who had to stand inspection would willingly have set foot among its dust and cobwebs. Without bothering to thrust my own head inside, I reached around the jamb of the broken door, and — with an indescribable mingling of triumph and familiarity — felt my hand close upon the beloved hilt.
I was a whole man again. Or rather, more than a man: a journeyman of the guild. There in the corridor I verified that my letter remained in the pocket of the sheath, then drew the shining blade, wiped it, oiled it, and wiped it again, testing its edges with finger and thumb as I walked along. Now let the hunter in the dark appear.
My next objective was to rejoin Dorcas, but I knew nothing of the location of Dr. Talos’s company except that they were to perform at a thiasus held in a garden — no doubt one of many gardens. If I went outside now, by night, it would perhaps be as difficult for the praetorians to see me in my fuligin as for me to see them. But I was unlikely to find any aid; and when the eastern horizon dropped below the sun, I would no doubt be apprehended as promptly as Jonas and I had been when we rode onto the grounds. If I stayed within the House Absolute itself, my experience with the steward indicated I might well pass unchallenged, and I might even come across someone who would give me information; indeed, I hit upon the plan of telling anyone I met that I had been summoned to the celebration myself (I supposed it was not unlikely that an excruciation would be a part of the festivities) and that I had left the sleeping quarters assigned to me and lost my way. In that fashion, I might discover where Dorcas and the rest were staying.
Thinking upon this plan I mounted the stair, and at the second landing turned off down a corridor I had not seen previously. It was far longer and more sumptuously furnished than the one before the antechamber. Dark pictures in gold frames hung on the walls, and urns and busts and objects for which I knew no names stood on pedestals between them. The doors opening off the corridor were a hundred or more paces apart, indicating huge rooms beyond; but all were locked, and when I tried their handles I found that they were of a form and metal unknown to me, not shaped to be grasped by human fingers.
When I had walked down this corridor for what seemed at least half a league, I saw someone ahead of me sitting (as I first thought) upon a high stool. As I drew nearer, I found that what I had taken to be a stool was a stepladder, and that the old man perched on it was cleaning one of the pictures. “Excuse me,” I said.
He turned and peered down at me in puzzlement. “Know your voice, don’t I?” Then I knew his, and his face as well. It was Rudesind the curator, the old man I had met so long before, when Master Gurloes had first sent me to fetch books for the Chatelaine Thecla.
“While ago you come looking for Ultan. Didn’t you find him?”
“Yes, I found him,” I said. “But it wasn’t a short time ago.”
He seemed to grow angry at that. “I didn’t mean today! But it wasn’t long. Why, I recollect the landscape I was working on, so it couldn’t have been that long.”
“So do I,” I told him. “Brown desert reflected in the gold visor of a man in armor.”
He nodded, and his anger seemed to melt away. Gripping the sides of the ladder, he began to descend, his sponge still in his hand. “Exactly. Exactly the one. Want me to show it to you? It came out very nice.”
“We’re not in the same place, Master Rudesind. That was in the Citadel. This is the House Absolute.”
The old man ignored that. “Come out nice… It’s down here a ways, somewhere. Those old artists — you couldn’t beat ’em for drawing, though their colors has gone off now. And let me tell you, I know art. I’ve seen armigers, and exultants too, that come and look at them and say this and that, but they don’t know a thing. Who’s looked at every little bit of these pictures up close?” He thumped his own bosom with the sponge, then bent close to me, whispering though there was no one but ourselves in the long corridor. “Now I’ll tell you a secret they don’t none of them know — one of these is me!”
To be polite, I said I would like to see it.
“I’m looking for it, and when I find it I’ll tell you where. They don’t know, but that’s why I clean them all the time. Why, I could have retired. But I’m still here, and I work longer than any, except maybe Ultan. He can’t see the watchglass.” The old man gave a long, cracked laugh.
“I wonder if you could help me. There are performers here who have been summoned for the thiasus. Do you know where they’re quartered?”
“I’ve heard tell of it,” he said doubtfully. “The Green Room is what they call it.”
“Can you take me there?”
He shook his head. “There’s no pictures there, so I’ve never been, though there’s a picture of it. Come and walk a ways with me. I’ll find the picture and point it out to you.”
He pulled the edge of my cloak, and I followed him.
“I’d rather you took me to someone who could guide me there.”
“I can do that too. Old Ultan has a map somewhere in his Library. That boy of his will get it for you.”
“This isn’t the Citadel,” I reminded him again. “How did you come to be here, anyway? Did they bring you here to clean these?”
“That’s right. That’s right.” He leaned on my arm. “There’s a logical explanation for everything, and don’t you forget it. That must have been the way. Father Inire wanted me to clean his, so here I am.” He paused, considering. “Wait a bit, I’ve got it wrong. I had talent as a boy, that’s what I’m supposed to say. My parents, you know, always encouraged me, and I’d draw for hours. I recollect one time I spent all one sunny day sketching in chalk on the back of our house.”
A narrower corridor had opened to our left, and he pulled me down it. Though it was less well-lit (nearly dark, in fact) and so cramped that one could not stand at anything like the proper distance from them, it was lined with pictures much larger than those in the main corridor, pictures that stretched from floor to ceiling, and that were far wider than my outstretched arms. From what I could see of them, they appeared very bad — mere daubs. I asked Rudesind who it was who had told him he must tell me about his childhood.
“Why, Father Inire,” he said, cocking his head up to look at me. “Who do you suppose?” He dropped his voice. “Senile. That’s what they say. Been vizier to I don’t know
how many autarchs since Ymar. Now you be quiet and let me talk. I’ll find old Ultan for you.”
“An artist — a real one — came by where we lived. My mother, being so proud of me, showed him some of the things I’d done. It was Fechin, Fechin himself, and the portrait he made of me hangs here to this day, looking out at you with my brown eyes. I’m at a table with some brushes and a tangerine on it. I’d been promised them when I was through sitting.”
I said, “I don’t think I have time to look at it right now.”
“So I became an artist myself. Pretty soon, I took to cleaning and restoring the works of the great ones. Twice I’ve cleaned my own picture. It’s strange, I tell you, for me to wash my own little face like that. I keep wishing somebody would wash mine now, make the dirt of the years come off with his sponge. But that’s not what I’m taking you to see — it’s the Green Room you’re after, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” I said eagerly.
“Well, we’ve a picture of it right here. Have a look. Then when you see it, you’ll know it.”
He indicated one of the wide, coarse paintings. It was not of a room at all, but seemed to show a garden, a pleasance bordered by high hedges, with a lily pond and some willows swept by the wind. A man in the fantastic costume of a Ilanero played a guitar there, as it appeared for no ear but his own. Behind him, angry clouds raced across a sullen sky.
“After this you can go to the library and see Ultan’s map,” the old man said. The painting was of that irritating kind which dissolves into mere blobs of color unless it can be seen as a whole. I took a step backward to get a better perspective of it, then another.
With the third step, I realized I should have made contact with the wall behind me, and that I had not. I was standing instead inside the picture that had occupied the opposite wall: a dark room of ancient leather chairs and ebony tables. I turned to look at it, and when I turned back, the corridor where I had stood with Rudesind had vanished, and a wall covered with old and faded paper stood in its place.
I had drawn Terminus Est without consciously willing to do so, but there was no enemy to strike. Just as I was on the point of trying the room’s single door, it opened and a figure in a yellow robe entered. Short, white hair was brushed back from his rounded brow, and his face might almost have served a plump woman of forty; about his neck, a phallus-shaped vial I remembered hung on a slender chain.
“Ah,” he said. “I wondered who had come. Welcome, Death.”
With as much composure as I could muster, I said, “I am the Journeyman Severian — of the guild of torturers, as you see. My entrance was entirely involuntary, and to be truthful, I would be very grateful to you if you could explain just how it happened. When I was in the corridor outside, this room appeared to be no more than a painting. But when I took a step or two back to view the one on the other wall, I found myself in here. By what art was that done?”
“No art,” the man in the yellow robe said. “Concealed doors are scarcely an original invention, and the constructor of this room did no more than devise a means of concealing an open door. The room is shallow, as you see; indeed, it is shallower than you perceive even now, unless you’re already aware that the angles of the floor and ceiling converge, and that the wall at the end is not so high as the one through which you came.”
“I see,” I said, and in fact I did. As he spoke that crooked room, which my mind, accustomed always to ordinary ones, had tricked me into believing of normal shape, became itself, with a slanted and trapezoidal ceiling and a trapezoidal floor. The very chairs that faced the wall through which I had come were things of little depth, so that one could hardly have sat on them; the tables were no wider than boards.
“The eye is deceived in a picture by such converging lines,” the man in the yellow robe continued. “So that when it encounters them in reality, with little actual depth and the additional artificiality of monochromatic lighting, it believes it sees another picture — particularly when it has been conditioned by a long succession of true ones. Your entrance with that great weapon caused a real wall to rise behind you to detain you until you had been examined. I need hardly add that the other side of the wall is painted with the picture you believed you saw.”
I was more astounded than ever. “But how could the room know I carried my sword?”
“That is more complex than I can well explain… far more so than this poor room. I can only say that the door is wrapped with metal strands, and that these know when the other metals, their brothers and sisters, pass their circle.”
“Did you do all this?”
“Oh, no. All these things…” He paused. “And a hundred more like them, make up what we call the Second House. They are the work of Father Inire, who was called by the first Autarch to create a secret palace within the walls of the House Absolute. You or I, my son, would no doubt have built a mere suite of concealed rooms. He contrived that the hidden house should be everywhere coextensive with the public one.”
“But you aren’t he,” I said. “Because now I know who you are! Do you recognize me?” I drew off my mask so he could see my face.
He smiled and said, “You came but once. The khaibit did not please you, then.”
“She pleased me less than the woman she counterfeited — or rather, I loved the other more. Tonight I have lost a friend, yet it seems to be a time for meeting old acquaintances. May I ask how you’ve come here from your House Azure? Were you summoned for the thiasus? I saw one of your women earlier tonight.”
He nodded absently. An oddly angled mirror set above a trumean at one side of the strange, shallow room caught his profile, delicate as a cameo, and I decided he must be an androgyne. Pity welled up in me, with a sense of helplessness, as I thought of him opening the door to men, night after night, at his establishment in the Algedonic Quarter. “Yes,” he said. “I will remain here for the celebration, then go.”
My mind was full of the picture old Rudesind had shown me in the corridor outside, and I said, “Then you can show me where the garden is.”
I sensed at once that he had been caught off-guard, possibly for the first time in many years. There was pain in his eyes, and his left hand moved (though only slightly) toward the vial at his throat. “So you have heard of that…” he said. “Even supposing that I knew the way, why should I reveal it to you? Many will seek to flee by that road if the pelagic argosy sights land.”
Chapter 21
HYDROMANCY
Several seconds passed before I rightly understood what it was the androgyne had said. Then the remembered scent of Thecla’s roasted flesh rose sickening-sweet in my nostrils, and I seemed to feel the unquiet of the leaves. Forgetting in the stress of the moment how futile such precautions must be in that deception-filled room, I looked about, seeking to assure myself that no one could overhear us, then found that without my having willed it (consciously, I had intended to question him before betraying my connection with Vodalus) my hand had taken the knife-shaped steel from the innermost compartment of my sabretache.
The androgyne smiled. “I felt you might be the one. For days now I have been expecting you, and I have kept the old man outside and many others under instructions to bring promising strangers to me.”
“I was imprisoned in the antechamber,” I said. “And so lost time.”
“But you escaped, I see. It isn’t likely you’d be released before my man came to search it. It’s well you did — there isn’t much time left… the three days of the thiasus, then I must go. Come, and I will show you the way to the Garden, though I am by no means sure you will be permitted to enter.” He opened the door by which he had come in, and this time I saw that it was not truly rectangular. The room beyond was hardly larger than the one we had left; but its angles seemed normal, and it was richly furnished.
“You came to the correct part of the Secret House at least,” the androgyne said. “Otherwise we would have had to walk a weary way. Your pardon, while I read the message you brought.”
He crossed to what I at first supposed was a glass-topped table, and put the steel under it on a shelf. At once a light kindled, shining down from the glass, though there was no light above it. The steel grew until it seemed a sword, and its striations, in place of mere teeth on which to strike sparks from a flint, I saw to be lines of flowing script.
“Stand back,” the androgyne said. “If you have not read this before, you must not read it now.”
I did as he bid, and for some time watched him bending over the little object I had carried away from Vodalus’s glade. At last he said, “There is no help for it then… we must fight on two flanks. But this is none of your affair. Do you see that cabinet with the eclipse carved in its door? Open it and lift down the book you find there. Here, you may put it on this stand.”
Although I feared some trap, I opened the door of the cabinet he had indicated. It held one monstrous book — a thing nearly as tall as I and a good two cubits wide — that stood with its cover of mottled blue-green leather facing me much as a corpse might had I opened the lid of an upright casket. Sheathing my sword, I gripped this great volume with both hands and placed it on the stand. The androgyne asked if I had seen it previously, and I told him I had not.
“You looked fearful of it, and tried… as it appeared to me — to keep your face from it when you carried it.” He threw back the cover as he spoke. The first page, thus revealed, was written in red in a character I did not know.
“This is a warning to the seekers of the path,” he said. “Shall I read it to you?”
I blurted, “It seemed to me that I saw a dead man in the leather, and that he was myself.”
He closed the cover again and ran his hand over it. “These pavonine dyeings are but the work of craftsmen long gone — the lines and swirls beneath them, only the scars of the suffering animals’ backs, the marks of ticks and whips. But if you are fearful, you need not go.”