The Claw of the Conciliator

There could be no question here of ca

As I drew Terminus Est for the final time that night, I called, “Over here, Agia.”

I had guessed earlier that it was she, but as she turned (more swiftly than either of the men with her) I glimpsed her face in the moonlight. It was a terrible face to me (though for all her self-depreciation so lovely) because the sight of it meant that Thecla was surely dead.

The man nearest me was fool enough to try to bring his arbalest to his shoulder before he pulled the trigger. I ducked and cut his legs from under him, while the other’s quarrel whizzed over my head like a meteor.

By the time I had straightened up again, the second man had dropped his arbalest and was drawing his hanger. Agia was quicker, making a cut at my neck with an athame before his weapon was free of the scabbard. I dodged her first stroke and parried her second, though Terminus Est’s blade was not made for fencing. My own attack made her bound back.

“Get behind him,” she called to the second arbalestier. “I can front him.”

He did not answer. Instead, his mouth swung open and his point swung wide.

Before I realized that it was not at me that he was looking, something feverishly gleaming bounded past me. I heard the ugly sound of a breaking skull.

Agia turned as gracefully as any cat and would have spitted the man-ape, but I struck the poisoned blade from her hand and sent it skittering into the pool.

She tried to flee then; I caught her by the hair and jerked her off her feet.

The man-ape was mumbling over the body of the arbalestier he had killed — whether he sought to loot it or was merely curious about its appearance I have never known. I set my foot on Agia’s neck, and the man-ape straightened and turned to face me, then dropped in the crouching posture I had seen in the mine and held up his arms. One hand was gone; I recognized the clean cut of Terminus Est. The man-ape mumbled something I could not understand.

I tried to reply. “Yes, I did that. I am sorry. We are at peace now.”

The beseeching look remained, and he spoke again. Blood still seeped from the stump, though his kind must possess a mechanism for pinching shut the veins, as thylacodons are said to do; without the attentions of a surgeon, a man would have bled to death from that wound.

“I cut it,” I said. “But it was while we were still fighting, before you people saw the Claw of the Conciliator.” Then it came to me that he must have followed me outside for another glimpse of the gem, braving the fear engendered by whatever we had waked below the hill. I thrust my hand into the top of my boot and pulled out the Claw, and the instant I had done so realized what a fool I had been to put the boot and its precious cargo so close to Agia’s reach, for her eyes went wide with cupidity at the moment that the man-ape abased himself further and stretched forth his piteous stump.

For a moment we were posed, all three, and a strange group we must have looked in that eerie light. An astonished voice — Jonas’s — called “Severian!” from the heights above. Like the trumpet note in a shadow play that dissolves all feigning, that shout ended our tableau. I lowered the Claw and concealed it in my palm. The man-ape bolted for the rock face, and Agia began to struggle and curse beneath my foot.

A rap with the flat of my blade quieted her, but I kept my boot on her until Jonas had joined me and there were two of us to prevent her escape.

“I thought you might need help,” he said. “I perceive I was mistaken.” He was looking at the corpses of the men who had been with Agia.

I said, “This wasn’t the real fight.”

Agia was sitting up, rubbing her neck and shoulders. “There were four, and we would have had you, but the bodies of those things, those firefly tiger-men, started pitching out of the hole, and two were afraid and slipped away.”

Jonas scratched his head with his steel hand, a sound like the currying of a charger. “I saw what I thought I saw, then. I had begun to wonder.”

I asked what he thought he had seen.

“A glowing being in a fur robe making an obeisance to you. You were holding up a cup of burning brandy, I think. Or was it incense? What’s this?” He bent and picked up something from the edge of the bank, where the man-ape had crouched.

“A bludgeon.”

“Yes, I see that.” There was a loop of sinew at the end of the bone handle, and Jonas slipped it over his wrist. “Who are these people who tried to kill you?”

“We would have,” Agia said, “if it hadn’t been for that cloak. We saw him coming out of the hole, but it covered him when he started to climb down, and my men couldn’t see the target, only the skin of his arms.”

I explained as briefly as I could how I had become involved with Agia and her twin, and described the death of Agilus.

“So now she’s come to join him.” Jonas looked from her to the crimson length of Terminus Est and gave a little shrug. “I left my merychip up there, and perhaps I ought to go and look after her. That way I can say afterward that I saw nothing. Was this woman the one who sent the letter?”

“I should have known. I had told her about Thecla. You don’t know about Thecla, but she did, and that was what the letter was about. I told her while we were going through the Botanic Gardens in Nessus. There were mistakes in the letter and things Thecla would never have said, but I didn’t stop to think of them when I read it.”

I stepped away and replaced the Claw in my boot, thrusting it deep. “Maybe you had better attend to your animal, as you say. My own seems to have broken loose, and we may have to take turns riding yours.”

Jonas nodded and began to climb back the way he had come. “You were waiting for me, weren’t you?” I asked Agia. “I heard something, and the destrier cocked his ears at the sound. That was you. Why didn’t you kill me then?”

“We were up there.” She gestured toward the heights. “And I wanted the men I’d hired to shoot you when you came wading up the brook. They were stupid and stubborn as men always are, and said they wouldn’t waste their quarrels — that the creatures inside would kill you. I rolled down a stone, the biggest I could move, but by then it was too late.”

“They had told you about the mine?”

Agia shrugged, and the moonlight turned her bare shoulders to something more precious and more beautiful than flesh. “You’re going to kill me now, so what does it matter? All the local people tell stories about this place. They say those things come out at night during storms and take animals from the cowsheds, and sometimes break into the houses for children. There’s also a legend that they guard treasure inside, so I put that in the letter too. I thought if you wouldn’t come for your Thecla, you might for that. Can I stand with my back to you, Severian? If it’s all the same, I don’t want to see it coming.”

When she said that, I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my heart: I had not been certain I could strike her if I had to look into her face. I raised my own iron phallus, and as I did so felt there was one more thing I wanted to ask Agia; but I could not recall what it might be.

“Strike,” she said. “I am ready.”

I sought good footing, and my fingers found the woman’s head at one end of the guard, the head that marked the female edge. And a little later, again, “Strike!” But by that time I had climbed out of the vale.