BY THE FIRST light of morning we entered the mountain jungle as one enters a house. Behind us the sunlight played on grass and bushes and stones; we passed through a curtain of tangled vines so thick I had to cut it with my sword and saw before us only shadow and the towering boles of the trees. No insect buzzed within, and no bird chirped. No wind stirred. At first the. bare soil we trod was almost as stony as the mountain slopes, but before we had walked a league it grew smoother, and at last we came to a short stair that had surely been carved with the spade. “Look,” said the boy, and he pointed to something red and strangely shaped that lay upon the uppermost step.

I stopped to look at it. It was a cock’s head; needles of some dark metal had been run through its eyes, and it held a strip of cast snakeskin in its bill. “What is it?” The boy’s eyes were wide. “A charm, I think.”

“Left here by a witch? What does it mean?” I tried to recall what little I knew of the false art. As a child, Thecla had been in the care of a nursemaid who tied and untied knots to speed childbirth and claimed to see the face of Thecla’s future husband (was it mine,, I wonder?) at midnight, reflected in a platter that had held bridal cake. “The cock,” I told the boy, “is the herald of day, and in a magical sense his crow at dawn can be said to bring the sun. He has been blinded, perhaps, so that he will not know when dawn appears. A snake’s casting of his skin means cleansing or rejuvenation. The blinded cock holds onto the old skin.”

“But what does it mean?” the boy asked again.

I said I did not know; but in my heart I felt sure it was a charm against the coming of the New Sun, and it somehow pained me to find that renewal, for which I had hoped so fervently when I was a boy myself, but in which I hardly believed, should be opposed by anyone. At the same time, I was conscious that I bore the Claw. Enemies of the New Sun would surely destroy the Claw, should it fall into their hands.

Before we had gone another hundred paces, there were strips of red cloth suspended from the trees; some of these were plain, but others had been written over in black in a character I did not understand — or as seemed more likely, with symbols and ideographs of the sort those who pretend to more knowledge than they possess use in imitation of the writing of the astronomers.

“We had better go back,” I said. “Or go around.”

I had no sooner spoken than I heard a rustling behind me. For a moment I truly thought the figures that stepped onto the path were devils, huge-eyed and striped with black, white, and scarlet; then I saw that they were only naked men with painted bodies. Their hands were fitted with steel talons, which they held up to show me. I drew Terminus Est.

“We will not hinder you,” one said. “Go. Leave us, if you wish.” It seemed to me that beneath the paint he had the pale skin and fair hair of the south.

“You would be well advised not to. With this long blade I could kill you both before you touched me.”

“Go, then,” the blond man told me. “If you have no objection to leaving the child with us.”

At that I looked around for little Severian. He had somehow vanished from my side.

“If you wish him returned to you, however, you will surrender your sword to me and come with us.” Showing no sign of fear, the painted man walked up to me and extended his hands. The steel talons emerged from between his fingers, being fastened to a narrow bar of iron he held in his palm. “I will not ask again,” he said.

I sheathed the blade, then took off the baldric that held the sheath and handed the whole to him.

He closed his eyes. Their lids had been painted with dark dots rimmed with white, like the markings of certain caterpillars that would have the birds think them snakes. “This has drunk much blood.”

“Yes,” I said.

His eyes opened again, and he regarded me with an unblinking stare. His painted face-like that of the other, who stood just behind him — was as expressionless as a mask. “A newly forged sword would have little power here, but this might do harm.”

“I trust it will be returned to me when my son and I leave. What have you done with him?”

There was no reply. The two walked around me, one to either side, and went down the path in the direction the boy and I had been going. After a moment I followed them.

I might call the place to which they led me a village, but it was not a village in the ordinary sense, not such a village as Saltus, or even a place like the clusters of autochthon huts that are sometimes called villages. Here the trees were greater, and farther separated, than I had ever seen forest trees before, and the canopy of their leaves formed an impenetrable roof several hundred cubits overhead. So great indeed were these trees that they seemed to have been growing for whole ages; a stair led to a door in the trunk of one, which had been pierced for windows. There was a house of several stories built upon the branches of another, and a thing like a great oriole’s nest swung from the limbs of a third. Open hatches showed that the ground at our feet was mined.

I was taken to one of these hatches and told to descend a crude ladder that led into darkness. For a moment (I do not know why) I feared that it might go very far, into such deep caverns as lay beneath the man-apes’ nighted treasure house. It was not so. After descending what was surely not more than four times my height and clambering through what then seemed to be ruined matting, I found myself in a subterranean room.

The hatch had been shut over my head, leaving everything dark. Groping, I explored the place and found it to be about three paces by four. The floor and walls were of earth, and the ceiling of unpeeled logs; there were no furnishings whatsoever.

We had been taken at about mid morning. In seven watches more, it would be dark. Before that time it might be that I would find myself led into the presence of someone in authority. If so, I would do what I could to persuade him that the child and I were harmless and should be let go in peace. If not, then I would climb the ladder again and see if I could not break out of the hatch. I sat down to wait.

I am certain I did not sleep; but I used the facility I have for calling forth past time, and so, at least in spirit, left that dark place. For a time I watched the animals in the necropolis beyond the Citadel wall, as I had as a boy. I saw the geese shape arrowheads against the sky, and the comings and goings of fox and rabbit. They raced across the grass for me once more, and in time left their tracks in snow. Triskele lay dead, as it seemed, on the refuse behind the Bear Tower; I went to him, saw him shudder and lift his head to lick my hand. I sat with Thecla in her narrow cell, where we read aloud to each other and stopped to argue what we had read. “The world runs down like a clock,” she said. “The Increate is dead, and who will recreate him? Who could?”

“Surely clocks are supposed to stop when their owners die.”

“That’s superstition.” She took the book from my hands so she could hold them in her own, which were long-fingered and very cold. “When the owner is on his deathbed, no one pours in fresh water. He dies, and his nurses look at the dial to note the time. Later they find it stopped, and the time is the same.”

I told her, “You’re saying that it stops before the owner; so if the universe is running down now, that does not mean that the Increate is dead — only that he never existed.”

“But he is ill. Look around you. See this place, and the towers above you. Do you know, Severian, that you never have?”

“He could still tell someone else to fill the mechanism again,” I suggested, and then, realizing what I had said, blushed.