by Gene Wolfe
The woman seemed still unaware of it. She said, “It burned three last night near the harena, and one tonight, they said, close by the Vincula. And now Jurmin. It’s looking for somebody — that’s what they say.”
I recalled the notules and the thing that had snuffled along the walls of the antechamber of the House Absolute, and I said, “I think it has found him.”
I let her go and turned, then turned again, trying to discover where it was. The heat grew, but no light showed. I was tempted to take out the Claw so as to see by its glow; then I recalled how it had waked whatever slept beneath the mine of the man-apes, and I feared the light would only permit this thing — whatever it might be — to locate me. I was not sure my sword would be more effective against it than it had been against the notules when Jonas and I had fled them through the cedar wood; nevertheless, I drew it.
Almost at once there was a clatter of hooves and a yell as two dimarchi thundered round a corner no more than a hundred strides away. Had there been more time I would have smiled to see how closely they corresponded to the figures I had imagined. As it was, the firework glare of their lances outlined something dark and crooked and stooped that stood between us.
It turned toward the light, whatever it was, and seemed to open as a flower might, growing tall more swiftly, almost, than the eye could follow it, thinning until it had become a creature of glowing gauze, hot yet somehow reptilian, as those many-colored serpents we see brought from the jungles of the north are reptilian still, though they seem works of colored enamel. The mounts of the soldiers reared and screamed, but one of the men, with more presence of mind than I would have shown, fired his lance into the heart of the thing that faced him. There was a flare of light.
The hostess of the Duck’s Nest slumped against me, and I, not wishing to lose her, supported her with my free arm. “I think it’s seeking living heat,” I told her. “It should go for the destriers. We’ll get away.”
Just as I spoke, it turned toward us.
I have already said that from behind, when it opened itself toward the dimarchi, it seemed a reptilian flower. That impression persisted now when we saw it in its full terror and glory, but it was joined by two others. The first was the sensation of intense and otherworldly heat; it seemed a reptile still, but a reptile that burned in a way never known on Urth, as though some desert asp had dropped into a sphere of snow. The second was of raggedness fluttering in a wind that was not of air. It seemed a blossom still, but it was a blossom whose petals of white and pale yellow and flame had been tattered by some monstrous tempest born in its own heart.
In all these impressions, surrounding them and infusing them, was a horror I cannot describe. It drew all resolution and strength from me, so that for that moment I could neither flee nor attack it. The creature and I seemed fixed in a matrix of time that had nothing to do with anything that had gone before or since, and that, since it held us who were its only occupants immobile, could be altered by nothing.
A shout broke the spell. A second party of dimarchi had galloped into the street behind us, and seeing the creature were lashing their mounts to the charge. In less than the space of a breath they were boiling around us, and it was only by the intercession of Holy Katharine that we were not ridden down. If I had ever doubted the courage of the Autarch’s soldiery I lost those doubts then, for both parties hurled themselves upon the monster like hounds upon a stag.
It was useless. There came a blinding flash and the sensation of fearful heat. Still holding the half-unconscious woman, I sprinted down the street.
I meant to turn where the dimarchi had entered it, but in my panic (and it was panic, not only my own, but that of Thecla screaming in my mind) I rounded the corner too late or too soon. Instead of the steep descent to the lower city I expected, I found myself in a little, stub-end court built on a spur of rock jutting from the cliff. By the time I realized what was wrong, the creature, now again a twisted, dwarfish thing but radiating a terrible and invisible energy, was at the mouth of the court. ,
In the starlight it might have been only an old, hunched man in a black coat, but I have never felt more terror than I did at the sight of it. There was a jacal at the back of the court: a larger structure than the hovel in which the sick girl and her brother had suffered, but built of sticks and mud in the same fashion. I kicked its door in and ran into a little warren of odious rooms, bolting through the first and into another, through that into a third where a half dozen men and women lay sleeping, through that into a fourth — only to see a window that looked out over the city much as my own embrasure in the Vincula did. It was the end, the farthest room of the house, hanging like a swallow’s nest over a drop that seemed at that moment to go down forever.
From the room we had just left I could hear the angry voices of the people I had wakened. The door flew open, but whoever had come to expel the intruder must have seen the gleam of Terminus Est; he stopped short, swore, and turned away. A moment later someone screamed and I knew the creature of fire was in the jacal.
I tried to set the woman upright, but she fell in a heap at my feet. Outside the window there was nothing — the wattled wall ended a few cubits down, and the supports of the floor did not extend beyond it. Above, an overhanging roof of rotten thatch offered no more purchase to my hand than gossamer. As I struggled to grasp it, there came a flood of light that destroyed all color and cast shadows as dark as fuligin itself, shadows like fissures in the cosmos. I knew then that I must fight and die as the dimarchi had, or jump, and I swung about to face the thing that had come to kill me.
It was still in the room beyond, but I could see it through the doorway, opened again now as it had been in the street. The half-consumed corpse of some wretched crone lay before it on the stone floor, and while I watched, it seemed to bend over her in what was, I would almost swear, an attitude of inquiry. Her flesh blistered and cracked like the fat of a roast, then fell away. In a moment even her bones were no more than pale ashes the creature scattered as it advanced.
Terminus Est I believe to have been the best blade ever forged, but I knew she could accomplish nothing against the power that had routed so many cavalrymen; I cast her to one side in the vague hope that she might be found and eventually returned to Master Palaemon, and took the Claw from its little bag at my throat.
It was my last, faint chance, and I saw at once that it had failed me. However the creature sensed the world about it (and I had guessed from its movements that it was nearly blind on our Urth), it could make out the gem clearly, and it did not fear it. Its slow advance became a rapid and purposeful flowing forward. It reached the doorway — there was a burst of smoke, a crash, and it was gone. Light from below flashed through the hole it had burned in the flimsy floor that began where the stone of the outcrop ended; at first it was the colorless light of the creature, then a rapid alternation of chatoyant pastels-peacock blue, lilac, and rose. Then only the faint, reddish light of leaping flames.
X
Lead
THERE WAS A moment when I thought I would fall into the gaping hole in the center of the little room before I could regain Terminus Est and carry the mistress of the Duck’s Nest to safety, and another when I was certain everything was going to fall — the trembling structure of the room itself and us together.
Yet in the end we escaped. When we reached the street, it was clear of dimarchi and townsfolk alike, the soldiers no doubt having been drawn to the fire below, and the people frightened indoors. I propped the woman with my arm, and though she was still too terrified to answer my questions intelligibly, I let her choose our way; as I had supposed she would, she led us unerringly to her inn.
Dorcas was asleep. I did not wake her, but sat down in the dark on a stool near the bed where there was now also a little table sufficient to hold the glass and bottle I had taken from the common room below. Whatever the wine was, it seemed strong in my mouth and yet no more than water after I had swallowed it; by the time Dorcas woke, I had dr
unk half the bottle and felt no more effect from it than I would have if I had swallowed so much sherbet.
She started up, then let her head fall upon the pillow again. “Severian. I should have known it was you.”
“I’m sorry if I frightened you,” I said. “I came to see how you were.”
“That’s very kind. It always seems, though, that when I wake up you’re bending over me.” For a moment she closed her eyes again. “You walk so very quietly in those thick-soled boots of yours, do you know that? It’s one reason people are afraid of you.”
“You said I reminded you of a vampire once, because I had been eating a pomegranate and my lips were stained with red. We laughed about it. Do you remember?” (It had been in a field within the Wall of Nessus, when we had slept beside Dr. Talos’s theater and awakened to feast on fruit dropped the night before by our fleeing audience.)
“Yes,” Dorcas said. “You want me to laugh again, don’t you? But I’m afraid I can’t ever laugh anymore.”
“Would you like some wine? It was free, and it’s not as bad as I expected.”
“To cheer me? No. One ought to drink, I think, when one is cheerful already. Otherwise nothing but more sorrow is poured into the cup.”
“At least have a swallow. The hostess here says you’ve been ill and haven’t eaten all day.”
I saw Dorcas’s golden head move on the pillow then as she turned it to look at me; and since she seemed fully awake, I ventured to light the candle.
She said, “You’re wearing your habit. You must have frightened her out of her wits.”
“No, she wasn’t afraid of me. She’s pouring into her cup whatever she finds in the bottle.”
“She’s been good to me — she’s very kind. Don’t be hard on her if she chooses to drink so late at night.”
“I wasn’t being hard on her. But won’t you have something? There must be food in the kitchen here, and I’ll bring you up whatever you want.”
My choice of phrase made Dorcas smile faintly. “I’ve been bringing up my own food all day. That was what she meant when she told you I’d been ill. Or did she tell you? Spewing. I should think you could smell it yet, though the poor woman did what she could to clean up after me.”
Dorcas paused and sniffed. “What is it I do smell? Scorched cloth? It must be the candle, but I don’t suppose you can trim the wick with that great blade of yours.”
I said, “It’s my cloak, I think. I’ve been standing too near a fire.”
“I’d ask you to open the window, but I see it’s open already. I’m afraid it’s bothering you. It does blow the candle about. Do the flickering shadows make you dizzy?”
“No,” I said. “It’s all right as long as I don’t actually look at the flame.”
“From your expression, you feel the way I always do around water.”
“This afternoon I found you sitting at the very edge of the river.”
“I know,” Dorcas said, and fell silent. It was a silence that lasted so long that I was afraid she was not going to speak again at all, that the pathological silence (as I now was sure it had been) that had seized her then had returned.
At last I said, “I was surprised to see you there — I remember that I looked several times before I was sure it was you, although I had been searching for you.”
“I spewed, Severian. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you told me.”
“Do you know what I brought up?”
She was staring at the low ceiling, and I had the feeling that there was another Severian there, the kind and even noble Severian who existed only in Dorcas’s mind. All of us, I suppose, when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak. But this seemed more than that; I felt that Dorcas would go on talking if I left the room. “No,” I answered. “Water, perhaps?”
“Sling-stones.”
I thought she was speaking metaphorically, and only ventured, “That must have been very unpleasant.”
Her head rolled on the pillow again, and now I could see her blue eyes with their wide pupils. In their emptiness they might have been two little ghosts. “Sling-stones, Severian my darling. Heavy little slugs of metal, each about as big around as a nut and not quite so long as my thumb and stamped with the word strike. They came rattling out of my throat into the bucket, and I reached down — put my hand down into the filth that came up with them and pulled them up to see. The woman who owns this inn came and took the bucket away, but I had wiped them off and saved them. There are two, and they’re in the drawer of that table now. She brought it to put my dinner on. Do you want to see them? Open it.”
I could not imagine what she was talking about, and asked if she thought someone was trying to poison her.
“No, not at all. Aren’t you going to open the drawer? You’re so brave. Don’t you want to look?”
“I trust you. If you say there are sling-stones in the table, I’m sure they’re there.”
“But you don’t believe I coughed them up. I don’t blame you. Isn’t there a story about a hunter’s daughter who was blessed by a pardal, so that beads of jet fell from her mouth when she spoke? And then her brother’s wife stole the blessing, and when she spoke toads hopped from her lips? I remember hearing it, but I never believed it.”
“How could anyone cough up lead?”
Dorcas laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “Easily. So very easily. Do you know what I saw today? Do you know why I couldn’t talk to you when you found me? And I couldn’t, Severian, I swear it. I know you thought I was just angry and being stubborn. But I wasn’t — I had become like a stone, wordless, because nothing seemed to matter, and I’m still not sure anything does. I’m sorry, though, for what I said about your not being brave. You are brave, I know that. It’s only that it seems not brave when you’re doing things to the poor prisoners here. You were so brave when you fought Agilus, and later when you would have fought with Baldanders because we thought he was going to kill Jolenta…”
She fell silent again, then sighed. “Oh, Severian, I’m so tired.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” I said. “About the prisoners. I want you to understand, even if you can’t forgive me. It was my profession, the thing I was trained to do from boyhood.” I leaned forward and took her hand; it seemed as frail as a songbird.
“You’ve said something like this before. Truly, I understand.”
“And I could do it well. Dorcas, that’s what you don’t understand. Excruciation and execution are arts, and I have the feel, the gift, the blessing. This sword — all the tools we use live when they’re in my hands. If I had remained at the Citadel, I might have been a master. Dorcas, are you listening? Does this mean anything at all to you?”
“Yes,” she said., “A bit, yes. I’m thirsty, though. If you’re through drinking, pour me a little of that wine now, please.”
I did as she asked, filling the glass no more than a quarter full because I was afraid she might spill it on her bedclothes.
She sat up to drink, something I had not been certain until then that she was capable of, and when she had swallowed the last scarlet drop hurled the glass out the window. I heard it shatter on the street below.
“I don’t want you to drink after me,” she told me. “And I knew that if I didn’t do that you would.”
“You think whatever is wrong with you is contagious, then?”
She laughed again. “Yes, but you have it already. You caught it from your mother. Death. Severian, you never asked me what it was I saw today.”
XI
The Hand of the Past
AS SOON AS Dorcas said, “You never asked me what I saw today,” I realized that I had been trying to steer the conversation away from it. I had a premonition that it would be something quite meaningless to me, to which Dorcas would attach great meaning, as madmen do who believe the tracks of worms beneath the bark of fallen trees to be
a supernatural script. I said, “I thought it might be better to keep your mind off it, whatever it was.”
“No doubt it would, if only we could do it. It was a chair.”
“A chair?”
“An old chair. And a table, and several other things. It seems that there is a shop in the Turners’ Street that sells old furniture to the eclectics, and to those among the autochthons who have absorbed enough of our culture to want it. There is no source here to supply the demand, and so two or three times a year the owner and his sons go to Nessus — to the abandoned quarters of the south — and fill their boat. I talked to him, you see; I know all about it. There are tens of thousands of empty houses there. Some have fallen in long ago, but some are still standing as their owners left them. Most have been looted, yet they still find silver and bits of jewelry now and then. And though most have lost most of their furniture, the owners who moved almost always left some things behind.”
I felt that she was about to weep, and I leaned forward to stroke her forehead. She showed me by a glance that she did not wish me to, and laid herself on the bed again as she had been before.
“In some of those houses, all the furnishings are still there. Those are the best, he said. He thinks that a few families, or perhaps only a few people living alone, remained behind when the quarter died. They were too old to move, or too stubborn. I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure some of them must have had something there they could not bear to leave. A grave, perhaps. They boarded their windows against the marauders, and they kept dogs, and worse things, to protect them. Eventually they left — or they came to the end of life, and their animals devoured their bodies and broke free; but by that time there was no one there, not even looters or scavengers, not until this man and his sons.”