Gene Wolfe: The Sword of the Lictor

Dr. Talos emerged again from the stairwell, clapping slowly and derisively.

I asked, “You have left them these machines, then?” I was acutely conscious, as I spoke, of the eviscerated woman mumbling beneath her glass somewhere behind me, a thing that once would not have bothered the torturer Severian in the least.

Barbatus said, “No. Those he found, or constructed for himself. Famulimus said that he wished to learn, and that we saw to it that he did, not that we taught him. We teach no one anything, and only trade such devices as are too complex for your people to duplicate.”

Dr. Talos said, “These monsters, these horrors, do nothing for us. You’ve seen them — you know what they are. When my poor patient ran wild through them in the theater of the House Absolute, they nearly killed him with their pistols.”

The giant shifted in his great chair. “You need not feign sympathy, Doctor. It suits you badly. Playing the fool while they looked on…” His immense shoulders rose and fell. “I shouldn’t have let it overcome me. They’ve agreed now to forget.”

Barbatus said, “We could have killed your creator easily that night, as you know. We burned him only enough to turn aside his charges.”

I recalled then what the giant had told me when we parted in the forest beyond the Autarch’s gardens — that he was the doctor’s master. Now, before I had time to consider what I was doing, I seized the doctor’s hand. Its skin seemed as warm and living as my own, though curiously dry. After a moment he jerked away.

“What are you?” I demanded, and when he did not answer, I turned to the beings who called themselves Famulimus and Barbatus. “Once, sieurs, I knew a man who was only partly human flesh…”

They looked toward the giant instead of replying, and though I knew their faces were only masks, I felt the force of their demand.

“A homunculus,” Baldanders rumbled.

THE RAIN CAME as he spoke, a cold rain that struck the rude, gray stones of the castle with a million icy fists. I sat down, clamping Terminus Est between my knees to keep them from shaking.

“I had already concluded,” I said with as much self-possession as I could summon, “that when the islanders told me of a small man who paid for the building of this place, they were speaking of the doctor. But they said that you, the giant, had come afterward.”

“I was the small man. The doctor came afterward.”

A cacogen showed a dripping, nightmare face at the window, then vanished. Possibly he had conveyed some message to Ossipago, though I heard nothing. Ossipago spoke without turning. “Growth has its disadvantages, though for your species it is the only method by which youth can be reinstated.”

Dr. Talos sprang to his feet. “We will overcome them! He has put himself in my hands.”

Baldanders said, “I was forced to. There was no one else. I created my own physician.”

I was still attempting to regain my mental balance as I looked from one to the other; there was no change in the appearance or manner of either. “But he beats you,” I said. “I have seen him.”

“Once I overheard you while you confided in the smaller woman. You destroyed another woman, whom you loved. Yet you were her slave.”

Dr. Talos said, “I must get him up, you see. He must exercise, and it is a part of what I do for him. I’m told that the Autarch — whose health is the happiness of his subjects — has an isochronon in his sleeping chamber, a gift from another autarch from beyond the edge of the world. Perhaps it is the master of these gentlemen here. I don’t know. Anyway, he fears a dagger at his throat and will let no one near him when he sleeps, so this device tells the watches of his night. When dawn comes, it rouses him. How then should he, the master of the Commonwealth, permit his sleep to be disturbed by a mere machine? Baldanders created me as his physician, as he told you. Severian, you’ve known me some time. Would you say I was much afflicted with the infamous vice of false modesty?”

I managed a smile as I shook my head.

“Then I must tell you that I am not responsible for my virtues, such as they are. Baldanders wisely made me all that he is not, so that I might counterweight his deficiencies. I am not fond of money, for example. That’s an excellent thing for the patient, in a personal physician. And I am loyal, to my friends, because he is the first of them.”

“Still,” I said, “I have always been astounded that he did not slay you.” It was so cold in the room that I drew my cloak closer about me, though I felt sure that the present deceptive calm could not long endure.

The giant said, “You must know why I keep my temper in check. You have seen me lose it. To have them sitting there, watching me, as though I were a bear on a chain—”

Dr. Talos touched his hand; there was something womanly in the gesture. “It’s his glands, Severian. The endocrine system and the thyroid. Everything must be managed so carefully, otherwise he would grow too fast. And then I must see that his weight doesn’t break his bones, and a thousand other things.”

“The brain,” the giant rumbled. “The brain is the worst of all, and the best.”

I said, “Did the Claw help you? If not, perhaps it will, in my hands. It has performed more for me in a short time than it did for the Pelerines in many years.”

When Baldanders’s face showed no sign of comprehension, Dr. Talos said, “He means the gem the fishermen sent. It is supposed to perform miraculous cures.”

At that Ossipago turned to face us at last. “How interesting. You have it here? May we see it?”

The doctor looked anxiously from the cacogen’s expressionless mask to Baldanders’s face and back again as he said, “Please, Your Worships, it is nothing. A fragment of corundum.”

In all the time since I had entered this level of the tower, none of the cacogens had shifted his place by more than a cubit; now Ossipago crossed to my chair with short, waddling steps. I must have recoiled from him, for he said, “You need not fear me, though we do your kind much hurt. I want to hear about this Claw, which the homunculus tells us is only a mineral specimen.”

When I heard him say that, I was afraid that he and his companions would take the Claw from Baldanders and carry it to their own home beyond the void, but I reasoned that they could not do so unless they forced him to produce it, and that if they did that, it might be possible for me to gain possession of it, which I might fail to do otherwise. So I told Ossipago all the things the Claw had accomplished while it had been in my keeping — about the uhlan on the highway, and the man-apes, and all the other instances of its power that I have already recorded here. As I spoke, the giant’s face grew harder, and the doctor’s, I thought, more anxious.

When I had finished, Ossipago said, “And now we must see the wonder itself. Bring it out, please,” and Baldanders rose and stalked across the wide room, making all his machines appear mere toys by his size, and at last pulled out the drawer of a little, white-topped table and took out the gem. It was more dull in his hand than I had ever seen it; it might have been a bit of blue glass.

The cacogen took it from him and held it up in his painted glove, though he did not turn up his face to look at it as a man would. There it seemed to catch the light from the yellow lamps that sprouted downward from above, and in that light it flashed a clear azure. “Very beautiful,” he said. “And most interesting, though it cannot have performed the feats ascribed to it.”

“Obviously,” Famulimus sang, and made another of those gestures that so recalled to me the statues in the gardens of the Autarch.