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“That’s true,” I said. “But how can you know?”
“That wound in your thigh came from one of their spears. I’ve seen enough to recognize them. The beam flashed up through the muscle, reflected by the bone. You might have been up a tree and been stuck by a hastarus on the ground, I suppose, but the most likely thing is that you were mounted and charging infantry. Not a cataphract, or they wouldn’t have got you so easily. The demilances?”
“Only the light irregulars.”
“You’ll have to tell me about that later, because you’re a city man from your accent, and they’re eclectics and suchlike for the most part. You have a double scar on your foot too, white and clean, with the marks half a span apart. That was a blood bat’s bite, and they don’t come that large except in the true jungle at the waist of the world. How did you get there?”
“Our flier crashed. I was taken prisoner.”
“And escaped?”
In a moment more I would have been forced to talk of Agia and the green man, and of my journey from the jungle to the mouth of Gyoll, and those were high matters which I did not wish to disclose thus casually. Instead of an answer, I pronounced the words of authority applicable to the Citadel and its castellan.
Because he was lame, I would have had him remain seated if I could; but he sprang to his feet and saluted, then dropped to his knees to kiss my hand. He was thus, though he could not have known it, the first to pay me homage, a distinction that entitles him to a private audience once a year—an audience he has not yet requested and perhaps never will.
For me to proceed now, clothed as I was, was impossible. The old castellan would have died of a stroke had I demanded it, and he was so concerned for my safety that any incognito would have been accompanied by at least a platoon of lurking halberdiers. I soon found myself arrayed in lapis lazuli jazerant, cothurni, and a stephane, the whole set off by an ebony baculus and a voluminous damassin cape embroidered with rotting pearls. All these things were indescribably ancient, having been taken from a store preserved from the period when the Citadel was the residence of the autarchs.
Thus in place of entering our tower, as I had intended, in the same cloak in which I had left it, I returned as an unrecognizable being in ceremonial fancy dress, skeletally thin, lame, and hideously scarred. It was with this appearance that I entered Master Palaemon’s study, and I am certain I must almost have frightened him to death, since he had been told only a few moments before that the Autarch was in the Citadel and wished to converse with him.
He seemed to me to have aged a great deal while I was gone. Perhaps it was simply that I recalled him pot as he was when I was exiled, but as I had seen him in our little classroom when I was a boy. Still, I like to think he was concerned for me, and it is not really so unlikely that he was: I had always been his best pupil and his favourite; it was his vote, beyond doubt, that had countered Master Gurloes’s and saved my life; he had given me his sword.
But whether he had worried much or little, his face seemed more deeply lined than it had been; and his scant hair, which I had thought grey, was now of that yellow hue seen in old ivory. He knelt and kissed my fingers, and was more than a little surprised when I helped him to rise and told him to seat himself behind his table again.
“You are too kind. Autarch,” he said. Then, using an old formula, “Your mercy extends from sun to Sun.”
“Do you not recall us?”
“Were you confined here?” He peered at me through the curious arrangement of lenses that alone permitted him to see at all, and I decided that his vision, exhausted long before I was born on the faded ink of the records of the guild, must have deteriorated further. “You have suffered torment, I see. But it is too crude, I hope, for our work.”
“It was not your doing,” I said, touching the scars on my cheek. “Nevertheless, we were confined for a time in the oubliette beneath this tower.”
He sighed—an old man’s shallow breath—and looked down at the grey litter of his papers. When he spoke I could not hear the words, and had to ask him to repeat them.
“It has come,” he said. “I knew it would, but I hoped to be dead and forgotten. Will you dismiss us.
Autarch? Or put us to some other task?” .
“We have not yet decided what we will do with you and the guild you serve.”
“It will not avail. If I offend you. Autarch, I ask your indulgence for my age ... but still it will not avail.
You will find in the end that you require men to do what we do. You may call it healing, if you wish. That has been done often. Or ritual, that has been done too. But you will find the thing itself grows more terrible in its disguise. Will you imprison those undeserving of death? You will find them a mighty army in chains. You will discover that you hold prisoners whose escape would be a catastrophe, and that you need servants who will wreak justice on those who have caused scores to die in agony. Who else will do that?”
“No one will wreak such justice as you. You say our mercy extends from sun to Sun, and we hope it is so. By our mercy we will grant even the foulest a quick death. Not because we pity them, but because it is intolerable that good men should spend a lifetime dispensing pain.”
His head came up and the lenses flashed. For the only time in all the years I had known him, I was able to see the youth he had been. “It must be done by good men. You are badly advised, Autarch!
What is intolerable is that it should be done by bad men.”
I smiled. His face, as I had seen it then, had recalled something I had thrust from my mind months before. It was that this guild was my family, and all the home I should ever have. I would never find a friend in the world if I could not find friends here. “Between us. Master,” I told him, “we have decided it should not be done at all.”
He did not reply, and I saw from his expression that he had not even heard what I had said. He had been listening instead to my voice, and doubt and joy flickered over his worn, old face like shadow and firelight.
“Yes,” I said. “It is Severian,” and while he was struggling to regain possession of himself, I went to the door and got my sabretache, which I had ordered one of the officers of my guard to bring. I had wrapped it in what had been my fuligin guild cloak, now faded to mere rusty black. Spreading the cloak over Master Palaemon’s table, I opened the sabretache and poured out its contents. “This is all we have brought back,” I said. He smiled as he used to in the schoolroom when he had caught me out in some minor matter. “That and the throne? Will you tell me about it?”
And so I did. It took a long while, and more than once my protectors rapped at the door to ascertain that I was unharmed, and at last I had a meal brought in to us; and when the pheasant was mere bones and the cakes were eaten and the wine drunk, we were still talking. It was then that I conceived the idea that has at last borne fruit in this record of my life. I had originally intended to begin it at the day I left our tower and to end it when I returned. But I soon saw that though such a construction would indeed supply the symmetry so valued by artists, it would be impossible for anyone to understand my adventures without knowing something of my adolescence. In the same way, some elements of my story would remain incomplete if I did not extend it (as I propose to do) a few days beyond my return. Perhaps I have contrived for someone The Book of Gold. Indeed, it may be that all my wanderings have been no more than a contrivance of the librarians to recruit their numbers; but perhaps even that is too much to hope.
XXXIV. The Key to the Universe
WHEN HE HAD HEARD everything. Master Palaemon went to my little heap of possessions and took up the grip, pommel, and silver guard that were all that remained of Terminus Est. “She was a good sword,” he said. “Nearly I gave you your death, but she was a good sword.”