If I had attended to what she said, it would have made me smile. As it was, I was far too busy still in looking about that strange cabin. At last I said, “I know your race was formed by the Hierogrammates to resemble those who once formed them. Now I see, or think I see, that you were once inhabitants of lakes and pools, kelpies such as our country folk talk of.”

“On our home, as on yours,” Barbatus said, “life rose from the sea. But this chamber has no more received its impression from that dim beginning than your own have received theirs from the trees where your forebears capered.”

Ossipago rumbled, “It is early to begin a quarrel.” He had not removed his disguise, I suppose because it did not render him less comfortable; and in fact I have never seen him do so.

“Barbatus, he speaks well,” Famulimus sang. Then to me, “You leave your world, Severian. Like you, we three leave ours. We climb the stream of time — you are swept down that stream. This ship thus bears us both. For you the years are gone, when we will counsel you. For us they now begin. We greet you now, Autarch, with counsel we have brought. To save your race’s sun, one thing is needful only: that you must serve Tzadkiel.”

“Who is that?” I asked. “And how do I serve him? I’ve never heard of him.”

Barbatus snorted. “Which is less than surprising, since Famulimus was not supposed to give you that name. We will not use it again. But he — the person Famulimus mentioned — is the judge appointed to your case. He is a Hierogrammate, as is to be expected. What do you know of them?”

“Very little, beyond the fact that they are your masters.”

“Then you know very little indeed; even that is wrong. You call us Hierodules, and that is your word and not ours, just as Barhatus, Famulimus, and Ossipago are your words, words we have chosen because they are not common and describe us better than your other words would. Do you know what Hierodule means, this word of your own tongue?”

“I know that you are creatures of this universe, shaped by those of the next to serve them here. And that the service they desire of you is the shaping of our race, of humanity, because we are the cognates of those who shaped them in the ages of the previous creation.”

Famulimus trilled, “Hierodule is ‘holy slave.’ How could Hierodules be holy, did we not serve the Increate? Our master is he, and he only.”

Barbatus added, “You’ve commanded armies, Severian. You’re a king and a hero, or at least you were up until you left your world. Then too, you may rule again, should you fail. You must know that a soldier doesn’t serve his officer, or at least, that he shouldn’t. He serves his tribe, and receives instructions from his officer.”

I nodded. “The Hierogrammates are your officers, then. I understand. I possess my predecessor’s memories, as you perhaps do not yet realize; so I know that he was tried as I will be and that he failed. And it’s always seemed to me that what was done to him, returning him unmanned to watch our Urth grow worse and worse, to take responsibility for everything, and yet know that he had failed in the one attempt that might have set everything right, was cruel indeed.”

Famulimus’s face was almost always serious; now it seemed more serious than ever. “His memories, Severian? Have you no more than memories?”

For the first time in many years, I felt the blood rise in my cheeks. “I lied,” I said. “I am he, just as I am Thecla. You three have been my friends when I had few, and I should not lie to you, though so often I must lie to myself.”

Famulimus sang, “Then you must know that all are scourged alike. And yet the nearer to success, the worse the pain each feels. That is a law we cannot change.”

Outside in the gangway, not far distant, someone screamed. I started toward the door, and the scream ended on the gurgling note that signals that the throat has filled with blood.

Barbatus snapped, “Wait, Severian!” and Ossipago moved to block the door.

Famulimus chanted urgently, “I have but one thing more to tell. Tzadkiel is just and kind. Though you may suffer much, remember so.”

I turned on her; I could not help it. “I remember this — the old Autarch never saw his judge! I didn’t recall the name because he had striven so to forget it; but we recall everything now, and it was Tzadkiel. He was a kinder man than Severian, a more just person than Thecla. What chance does Urth stand now?”

Though I do not know whose hand it was — Thecla’s, perhaps, or one of the dim figures behind the old Autarch — a hand was on my pistol; no more do I know whom it would have shot, unless it was myself. It never left the holster, for Ossipago seized me from behind, pinning my arms in a grip of steel.

“It is Tzadkiel who will decide,” Famulimus told me. “Urth stands such chance as you provide.”

Somehow Ossipago opened the door without releasing me, or it may be that it opened itself at some command I did not hear. He whirled me around and thrust me out into the gangway.

IT WAS the steward. He lay face down in the gangway the worn soles of his carefully polished boots not three cubits from my door. His neck had been nearly severed. A clasp knife, still closed, lay beside his right hand.

For ten years I had worn the black claw I had pulled from my arm beside Ocean. When first I ascended to the autarchy I had often tried to use it, always without result: for the past eight years, I had scarcely given it a thought. Now I took it from the little leathern sack Dorcas had sewn for me in Thrax, touched the steward’s forehead with it, and sought to do again whatever it had been that I had done for the girl in the jacal, the man-ape beside the falls, and the dead uhlan.

Although I have no wish to do so. I will try to describe what happened then: Once when I was a prisoner of Vodalus, I was bitten by a blood bat. There was very little pain, but a sensation of lassitude that grew more seductive every moment. When I moved my foot and startled the bat from its feast, the wind of its dark wings had seemed the very exhalation of Death. That was but the shadow, the foretaste, of what I felt then in the gangway. I was the core of the universe, as we always are to ourselves; and the universe tore like a client’s rotten rags and fell in soft gray dust to nothing.

For a long time I lay trembling in the dark. Perhaps I was conscious. Surely I was not aware of it, nor of anything except red pain everywhere and such weakness as the dead must feel. At last I saw a spark of light; it came to me that I must be blind, and yet if I saw that spark there was some hope, however slight. I sat up, though I was so shaken and weak that it was agony.

The spark appeared again, an infinitesimal flash, less than the gleam that sunlight summons from the point of a needle. It lay in my hand, but was extinct before I realized it, long gone before I could move my stiff fingers and discover them slippery with my blood.

It had come from the claw, that hard, sharp, black thorn that had pricked my arm so long ago. I must have clenched my fist; I had driven the claw into the second joint of the first finger until its point had pierced the skin a second time from within, impaling it like a fishhook. I jerked it out, hardly conscious of the pain, and pushed it back into its sack still wet with my blood.

By then I was sure again that I was blind. The smooth surface on which I lay seemed no more than the floor of the gangway; the paneled wall that my groping fingers discovered once I clambered to my feet might easily have been its wall. Yet the gangway had been well lit. Who would have carried me elsewhere, to this dark place, and made my whole body an agony to me? I heard the moaning of a human voice. It was my own, and I clamped my jaw to silence it.