ON THE previous day, the sailors had been seated in the front of the Examination Chamber. The first thing I noticed when I entered it again was that they were not there. Those who had those places were wrapped in a darkness that seemed to emanate from them, and the sailors were by the door and toward the sides of the room.

Looking past the dark figures and down the long aisle that led to Tzadkiel’s Seat of Justice, I saw Zak. He was seated upon that throne. Over the walls of white stone on each side of it, there spread what seemed tapestries of the finest tissue, worked in a pattern of eyes in gorgeous colors. It was not until they moved that I realized they were his wings.

Apheta had left me at the foot of the steps, and from that time I had been unguarded; as I stood staring at Zak, two sailors appeared to take my arms and lead me to him.

They left me, and I stood before him with head bowed. No speech of the old Autarch’s came unbidden to my mind this time; there was only confusion. At last I stammered, “Zak, I’ve come to plead for Urth.”

“I know,” he said. “Welcome.” His voice was deep and clear, like the blowing of a golden horn far away, so that I recalled a certain foolish tale of Gabriel, who wore the war horn of Heaven across his back, suspended on the rainbow. It suggested Thecla’s book, in which I had read it; and that, in turn, the great volume of pavonine leather the old Autarch had shown me when I had asked him the way to the garden, when he, having been told of me, supposed that I had arrived to replace him and would go to plead for Urth at once.

I knew then that I had seen Tzadkiel before I helped Sidero and the rest catch him as Zak, and that the male form I saw was no more true (though no less) than the winged woman whose glance had stunned me then, and that neither was more true, or less, than the animal shape that had saved me when Purn had tried to kill me outside his cage.

And I said, “Sieur — Zak — Tzadkiel, mighty Hierogrammate — I don’t understand.”

“Do you mean that you do not understand me? And why should you? I do not understand myself, Severian, or you. Yet I am as I am, your own race having made us so before the apocatastasis. Were you not told that they had shaped us in their image?”

I tried to speak, but I could not. At last I nodded.

“The form you have now was their first, the shape they bore when they were newly sprung from the beasts. All races change, shaped by time. Are you aware of it?”

I recalled the man-apes of the mine, and said, “Not always for the better.”

“Indeed. But the Hieros grasped their own shaping, and that we might follow them, ours as well.”

“Sieur—”

“Ask. Your final trial comes soon, and it cannot be just. Whatever reparation we can make, we will make. Now or after.”

My heart froze at those words; behind me all those who sat upon the benches whispered, so that I heard their voices like the soughing of leaves in a forest, though I did not know who they were.

When I could speak again, I said, “Sieur, it is a foolish question. But once I heard two tales of shape-changers, and in one an angel — and I think that you, sieur, are such an angel — tore open his breast and gave the power he had to change his shape to a barnyard goose. And the goose used it at once, becoming a swift salt goose forever. Last night, the lady Apheta said I might not go lame always. Sieur, was he — was Melito — instructed to tell me that story?”

A little smile played at the corners of Tzadkiel’s lips, recalling the way Zak used to grin at me. “Who can say? Not by me. You must understand that when a truth is known, as that has been known by so many for so many aeons, it spreads abroad and changes its own shape, taking many forms. But if you are asking that I give my ability to you, I cannot. If we could bestow it at will, we would give it to our children. You have met them, and they are imprisoned still in the form you wear now. Have you another question before we proceed?”

“Yes, sieur. A thousand. But if I am permitted only one, why did you come aboard the ship as you did?”

“Because I wished to know you. When you were a boy on your own world, did you never bend the knee to the Conciliator?”

“On Holy Katharine’s Day, sieur.”

“And did you believe in him? Did you believe with all your being?”

“No, sieur.” I felt I was about to be punished for my unbelief, and to this day I cannot say whether I was or not.

“Suppose you had. Did you never know of one of your own age who did?”

“The acolytes, sieur. Or at least, so it was said among us, who were the torturers’ apprentices.”

“Would they not have wished to walk with him, if they could? Stand beside him when he was in danger? Care for him, perhaps, when he was ill? I have been such an acolyte, in a creation now vanished. In that too there was a Conciliator and a New Sun, though we did not use those names.

“But now we must talk of something else, and quickly. I have many duties, some more demanding than this. Let me say plainly that we have tricked you, Severian. You have come to stand our examination, and thus we have talked of it to you, and even told you this building is our Hall of Justice. None of it is so.”

I could only stare at him.

“Or if you wish it put in another way, you have already passed our testing, which was an examination of the future you will create. You are the New Sun. You will be returned to your Urth, and the White Fountain will go with you. The death agonies of the world you know will be offered to the Increate. And they will be indescribable — continents will founder, as has been said. Much that is beautiful will perish, and with it most of your race; but your home will be reborn.”

Although I can, as I do, write the words he used, I cannot convey his tone or even hint at the conviction it carried. His thoughts seemed to thunder forth, raising pictures in the mind more real than any reality, so that while I imagined I saw the continents perish, I heard the crashing of great buildings and smelled Urth’s bitter sea wind.

An angry murmur rose behind me.

“Sieur,” I said, “I can remember the examination of my predecessor.” I felt as I had when I was the youngest of our apprentices.

Tzadkiel nodded. “It was necessary that you recall it; it was for that reason he was examined.”

“And unmanned?” The old Autarch trembled in me, and I felt my own hands shake.

“Yes. Otherwise a child would have stood between you and the throne, and your Urth would have perished forever. The alternative was the death of the child. Would that have been better?”

I could not speak, but his dark eyes seemed to bore into every heart that beat in mine, and at last I shook my head.

“Now I must go. My son will see that you are returned to Briah and Urth, which will be destroyed at your order.”

His gaze left me, and I followed it to the aisle behind me, where I saw the man who had brought us from the ship. The sailors were rising and drawing their knives, yet I scarcely noticed them. The center places that had been theirs the day before held others now, figures no longer shadowed. Sweat sprang from my forehead as blood had when I had first seen Tzadkiel, and I turned to cry out to him.

He was gone.

Lame leg or not I ran, hobbling as swiftly as I could around the Seat of Justice in search of the stair by which I had been led away the night before. I think it only fair to myself to say that I fled not so much from the sailors as from the faces of the others I had seen in the Chamber.

However that may be, the stair was gone too; I found only a smooth floor of stone slabs there, one of which was, no doubt, raised by some concealed mechanism.

Now another such mechanism acted. Swiftly and smoothly, Tzadkiel’s throne sank, as a whale that has surfaced to bask in the sun sinks back into the ice-choked Southern Sea. At one moment the great stone seat stood between me and the larger part of the Chamber, as solid as a wall; at the next the floor was closing over its back, and a fantastic battle spread before me.