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The Autarch said, “You were taken by certain officers, who had learned that you were conveying information to your half sister’s lover. Taken secretly, because your family has so much influence in the north, and conveyed to an almost forgotten prison. By the time I learned what had occurred, you were dead. Should I have punished those officers for acting in my absence? They are patriots, and you were a traitor.”
“I, Severian, am a traitor too.” I said, and I told him, then for the first time in detail, how I had once saved Vodalus, and of the banquet I had later shared with him.
When I had concluded, he nodded to himself. “Much of the loyalty you felt for Vodalus comes, surely, from the Chatelaine. Some she imparted to you while she was yet living, more after her death.
Naive though you have been, I am certain you are not so naive as to think it a coincidence that it was she whose flesh was served to you by the corpse-eaters.”
I protested, “Even if he had known of my co
The Autarch smiled. “Have you forgotten that you told me a moment ago that when, you had saved him, he fled in such a craft as this? From that forest, hardly a dozen leagues outside the City Wall, he could have flown to the centre of Nessus, unearthed a corpse preserved by the chill soil of early spring, and returned in less than a watch. Actually, he need not have known so much or moved so swiftly. While you were imprisoned by your guild, he may have learned that the Chatelaine Thecla, who had been loyal to him even to death, was no more. By serving her flesh to his followers, he would strengthen them in his cause. He would require no additional motive to take her body, and no doubt he reinterred her in hoarded snow in some cellar, or in one of the abandoned mines with which that region abounds. You arrived, and wishing to bind you to him, he ordered her brought out”
Something passed too swiftly to be seen—an instant later The fier rocked with the violence of its motion. Sparks maneuvered on the screen.
Before the Autarch could take the controls again, we were scudding backward. There was a detonation so loud it seemed to paralyse me, and the reverberating sky opened in a blossom of yellow fire. I have seen a sparrow, struck by a stone from Eata’s sling, reel in the air just as we did, and fall, like us, fluttering to one side.
I woke to darkness, pungent smoke, and the smell of fresh earth. For a moment or a watch I forgot my rescue and believed I lay on the field where Daria and I, with Guasacht, Erblon, and the rest, had fought the Ascians.
Someone lay near me—I heard the sigh of his breath, and the creakings and scrapings that betray movement—but at first I paid no heed to them, and later I came to believe that these sounds were made by foraging animals, and grew afraid; later still, I recalled what had happened and knew they were surely made by the Autarch, who must have survived the crash with me, and I called to him.
“So you still live, then.” His voice was very weak. “I feared you would die ... though I should have known better. I could not revive you, and your pulse was but faint.”
“I have forgotten! Do you remember when we flew over the armies? For a time I forgot it! I know now what it is to forget.”
There was pale laughter in his voice. “Which you will now remember always.”
“I hope so, but it fades even as we speak. It vanishes like mist, which must itself be a forgetting.
What was that weapon that brought us down?”
“I do not know. But listen. These are the most important words of my life. Listen. You have served Vodalus, and his dream of renewed empire. You still wish, do you not, that humankind should go again to the stars?”
I recalled something Vodalus had told me in the wood and said, “Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun.”
“They were so once ....and brought all the old wars of Urth with them, and in the young suns kindled new ones. Even they,” (I could not see him, yet I knew by his tone that he had indicated the Ascians)
“understand it must not be so again. They wish the race to become a single individual ... the same, duplicated to the end of number. We wish each to carry all the race and its longings within himself. Have you noticed the phial I wear at my neck?”
“Yes, often.”
“It contains a pharmacon like alzabo, already mixed and held in suspension. I am cold already below the waist. I will die soon. Before I die ... you must use it.”
“I ca
“Nevertheless, you will find a way. You remember everything, and so you must recall the night you came to my House Azure. That night someone else came to me. I was a servant once, in the House Absolute.... That is why they hate me. As they will hate you, for what you once were. Paeon, who trained me, who was honey-steward fifty years gone by. I knew what he was in truth, for I had met him before. He told me you were the one .. , the next. I did not think it would be quite so soon....”
His voice fell away, and I began to grope for him, pulling myself along. My hand found his, and he whispered, “Use the knife. We are behind the Ascian line, but I have called upon Vodalus to rescue you.... I hear the hoofs of his destriers.”
The words were so faint I could hardly hear, though my ear was within a span of his mouth. “Rest,” I said. Knowing that Vodalus hated him and sought to destroy him, I thought him delirious.
“I am his spy. That is another of my offices. He draws the traitors.... I learn who they are and what they do, what they think. That is one of his. Now I have told him the Autarch is trapped in this flier and given him our location. He has served me ... as my bodyguard ... before this.”
Now even I could hear the sound of feet on the ground outside. I reached up, searching for some means by which to signal; my hand touched fur, and I knew the flier had overturned, leaving us like hidden toads beneath it.
There was a snap and the scream of tearing metal. Moonlight, seeming bright as day but green as willow leaves, came flooding through a rent in the hull that gaped as I watched. I saw the Autarch, his thin white hair darkened with dried blood.
And above him silhouettes, green shades looking down upon us. Their faces were invisible; but I knew those gleaming eyes and narrow heads belonged to no followers of Vodalus. Frantically, I searched for the Autarch’s pistol. My hands were seized. I was drawn up, and as I emerged I could not help thinking of the dead woman I had seen pulled from her grave in the necropolis, for the flier had fallen on soft ground and half buried itself. Where the Ascian bolt had struck it, its side was torn away, leaving a tangle of ruined wiring. The metal was twisted and burned.
I did not have much time to look at it My captors turned me around and around as one after another took my face in his hands. My cloak was fingered as though they had never seen cloth. With their large eyes and hollow cheeks, these evzones seemed to me much like the infantry we had fought against, but though there were women among them, there were no old people and no children. They wore silvery caps and shirts in place of armour, and carried strangely shaped jezails, so long barrelled that when their butt plates rested on the ground their muzzles were higher than their owners’ heads. As I saw the Autarch lifted from the flier, I said, “Your message was intercepted, Sieur, I think.”
“Nevertheless, it arrived.” He was too weak to point, but I followed the direction of his eyes, and after a moment I saw flying shapes against the moon.
It almost seemed they slid down the beams to us, they came so quickly and so straight. Their heads were like the skulls of women, round and white, capped with miters of bone and stretched at the jaws into curved bills lined with pointed teeth. They were winged, the pinions so great they seemed to have no bodies at all Twenty cubits at least these pinions stretched from tip to tip, when they beat they made no sound, but far below I felt the rush of air.