THE STEWARD had brought my meal and, finding me not in my stateroom, had left it on the table. The meat was still warm under its bell; I ate it ravenously, and with it new bread and salt butter, celeriac and salsify, and red wine. Afterward I undressed, washed myself, and slept.

He woke me, shaking me by my shoulder. It was odd, but when I — the Autarch of Urth — had boarded the ship, I had scarcely noticed him, though he brought my meals and willingly saw to various little wants; no doubt it was that very willingness which had unjustly wiped him from my attention. Now that I myself had been a member of the crew, it was as though he had turned to show another face.

It looked down at me now, blunt-featured yet intelligent, the eyes bright with suppressed excitement. “Someone wishes to see you, Autarch,” he murmured.

I sat up. “Someone you felt you should wake me for?”

“Yes, Autarch.”

“The captain, perhaps.” Was I to be censured for going on deck? The necklace had been provided for emergency use, but it seemed unlikely.

“No, Autarch. Our captain’s seen you, I’m sure. Three Hierodules, Autarch.”

“Yes?” I fenced for time. “Is that the captain’s voice I hear sometimes in the corridors? When did he see me? I don’t recall seeing him.”

“I’ve no idea, Autarch. But our captain’s seen you, I’m sure. Often, probably. Our captain sees people.”

“Indeed.” I was pulling on a clean shirt as I digested the hint that there was a secret ship within this ship, just as the Secret House was within the House Absolute. “It must interfere with his other work.”

“I don’t believe it does, Autarch. They’re waiting outside — could you hurry?”

I dressed more slowly after that, of course. To draw the belt from my dusty trousers, I had to remove my pistol and the knife that Gunnie had found for me. The steward told me I would not need them; so I wore them, feeling absurdly as though I were going to inspect a reconstituted formation of demilances. The knife was nearly long enough to be called a sword.

It had not occurred to me that the three might be Ossipago, Barbatus, and Famulimus. As far as I knew, I had left them far behind on Urth, and they had most certainly not been in the pinnace with me, though of course they possessed their own craft. Now here they were, disguised (and badly) as human beings, just as they had been at our first encounter in Baldanders’s castle.

Ossipago bowed as stiffly as ever, Barbatus and Famulimus as gracefully. I returned their greetings as well I could and suggested that if they wished to speak to me, they were welcome in my stateroom, apologizing in advance for its disorder.

“We cannot come inside,” Famulimus told me. “However much we would. The room to which we bring you is not too far away.” Her voice, as always, was like the speaking of a lark.

Barbatus added, “Cabins like yours are not as safe as we might wish,” in his masculine baritone.

“Then I will go wherever you lead me,” I said. “Do you know, it’s truly cheering to see you three again. Yours are faces from home, even if they are false faces.”

“You know us, I see,” Barbatus said as we started down the corridor. “But the faces beneath these are too horrible for you, I fear.”

The corridor was too narrow for us to go four abreast; he and I walked side by side, Famulimus and Ossipago side by side behind us. It has taken me a long time to lose the despair that seized me at that moment. “This is the first time?” I asked. “You have not met me before?”

Famulimus trilled, “Though we do not know you, yet you know us, Severian. I saw how pleased you looked, when first you came into our sight. Often we have met, and we are friends.”

“But we will not meet again,” I said. “It’s the first time for you, who will travel backward through time when you leave me. And so it’s the last time for me. When we first met, you said, ‘Welcome! There is no greater joy for us than greeting you, Severian,’ and you were saddened at our parting. I remember it very well — I remember everything very well, as you had better know at once — how you leaned over the rail of your ship to wave to me as I stood upon the roof of Baldanders’s tower in the rain.”

“Only Ossipago here has memory like yours,” Famulimus whispered. “But I shall not forget.”

“So it’s my turn to say welcome now, and mine to be sad because we’re parting. I’ve known you three for more than ten years, and I know that the hideous faces beneath those masks are only masks themselves — Famulimus took hers off the first time we met, though I did not understand then that it was because she had done so often before. I know that Ossipago is a machine, although he is not so agile as Sidero, who I am beginning to believe must be a machine too.”

“That name means iron,” Ossipago said, speaking for the first time. “Though I do not know him.”

“And yours means bone-grower. You took care of Barbatus and Famulimus when they were small, saw to it that they were fed and so on, and you’ve remained with them ever since. That’s what Famulimus told me once.”

Barbatus said, “We are come,” and opened the door for me.

In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated. When I was only a boy, the doorway of a certain mausoleum had been a portal of wonder to me; and when I had crossed its threshold, I was not disappointed. On this ship I was a child again, knowing no more of the world around me than a child does.

The chamber into which Barbatus ushered me was as marvelous to Severian the man — to the Autarch Severian, who had Thecla’s life, and the old Autarch’s, and a hundred more to draw upon — as the mausoleum had been to the child. I am tempted to write that it appeared to be underwater, but it did not. Rather we seemed immersed in some fluid that was not water, but was to some other world what water was to Urth; or perhaps that we were underwater indeed, but water so cold it would have been frozen in any lake of the Commonwealth.

All this was merely am effect of the light, I believe — of the freezing wind that wandered, nearly stagnating, through the chamber, and of the colors, tintings of green shaded with blue and black: viridian, berylline, and aquamarine, with tarnished gold and yellowed ivory here and there shining sullenly.

The furnishings were not of furniture as we understand it. Mottled slabs of seeming stone that yielded to my touch leaned crookedly against two walls and were scattered across the floor. Tattered streamers hung suspended from the ceiling and, because they were so light and the attraction of our ship hardly felt, seemed in need of no suspension. So far as I could judge, the air was as dry here as in the corridor; yet the ghost of an icy spray beat against my face.

“Is this strange place your stateroom?” I asked Barbatus.

He nodded as he removed his masks, revealing a face that was at once handsome, inhuman, and familiar. “We have seen the chambers your kind makes. They are as disturbing to us as this must be to you, and since there are three of us—”

“Two,” Ossipago said. “It does not matter to me.”

“I’m not offended, I’m delighted! It’s the greatest of privileges for me to see how you live when you live as you wish.”

Famulimus’s falsely human face was gone, revealing some huge-eyed horror with needle teeth; she pulled that away as well, and I saw (for one last time, as I then believed) the beauty of a goddess not born of woman. “How fast we learn, Barbatus, that these poor folk we’ll meet, who hardly know what we know best, know courtesy as guests.”