Gene Wolfe: The Sword of the Lictor

“It is mine,” I told them. “The shore people took it from me by force. May I have it back?”

“If it is yours,” Barbatus said, “where did you get it?”

I began the task of describing my meeting with Agia and the destruction of the altar of the Pelerines, but he cut me short.

“All this is speculation. You did not see this jewel upon the altar, nor did you feel the woman’s hand when she gave it to you, if in fact she did. Where did you get it ?”

“I found it in a compartment of my sabretache.” It seemed that there was nothing else to say.

Barbatus turned away as though disappointed. “And you…” He looked toward Baldanders. “Ossipago has the jewel now, and he got it from you. Where did you get it?”

Baldanders rumbled, “You saw me. From the drawer of that table.”

The cacogen nodded by moving his mask with his hands. “You see then, Severian, his claim has become as good as yours.”

“But the gem is mine and not his.”

“It is not our task to judge between you; you must settle that when we are gone. But out of curiosity, which torments even such strange creatures as you believe us to be — Baldanders, will you keep it?”

The giant shook his head. “I would not have such a monument to superstition in my laboratory.”

“Then there should be little difficulty in effecting a settlement,” Barbatus declared. “Severian, would you like to watch our craft rise? Baldanders always comes to see us off, and though he is not the type to rhapsodize over views artificial or natural, I should think myself that it must be worth seeing.” He turned away, adjusting his white robes.

“Worshipful Hierodules,” I said, “I would very much like to, but I want to ask you something before you go. When I arrived, you said you had no greater joy than seeing me, and you knelt. Did you mean what you said, or anything like it? Were you confusing me with someone else?”

Baldanders and Dr. Talos had risen to their feet when the cacogen first mentioned his departure. Now, though Famulimus remained to listen to my questions, the others had already begun to move away; Barbatus was mounting the stair that led to the level above, with Ossipago, still carrying the Claw, not far behind him.

I began to walk too, because I feared to be separated from it, and Famulimus walked with me. “Though you did not now pass our test, I meant no less than what I said to you.” His voice was like the music of some wonderful bird, bridging the abyss from a wood unattainable. “How often we have taken counsel, Liege. How often we have done each other’s will. You know the water women, I believe. Are Ossipago, brave Barbatus, I, to be so much less sapient than they?”

I drew a deep breath. “I don’t know what you mean. But somehow I feel that though you and your kind are hideous, you are good. And that the undines are not, though they are so lovely, as well as so monstrous, that I can scarcely look at them.”

“Is all the world a war of good and bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?”

I had not, and could only stare.

“And you will kindly tolerate my looks. Without offense may I remove this mask? We both know it for one and it is hot. Baldanders is ahead and will not see.”

“If you wish, Worship,” I said. “But won’t you tell—”

With a quick flick of one hand, as though with relief, Famulimus stripped away the disguise. The face revealed was no face, only eyes in a sheet of putrescence. Then the hand moved again as before, and that too fell away. Beneath it was the strange, calm beauty I had seen carved in the faces of the moving statues in the gardens of the House Absolute, but differing from that as the face of a living woman differs from her own life mask.

“Did you not ever think, Severian,” she said, “that he who wore a mask might wear another? But I who wore the two do not wear three. No more untruths divide us now, I swear. Touch, Liege — your fingers on my face.”

I was afraid, but she took my hand and lifted it to her cheek. It felt cool and yet living, the very opposite of the dry heat of the doctor’s skin.

“All of the monstrous masks you’ve seen us wear are but your fellow citizens of Urth. An insect, lamprey, now a dying leper. All are your brothers, though you may recoil.”

We were already close to the uppermost level of the tower, treading charred wood at times — the ruin left by the conflagration that had driven forth Baldanders and his physician. When I took my hand away, Famulimus put on her mask again. “Why do you do this?” I asked.

“So that your folk will hate and fear us all. How long, Severian, if we did not, would common men abide a reign not ours? We would not rob your race of your own rule; by sheltering your kind from us, does not your Autarch keep the Phoenix Throne?”

I felt as I sometimes had in the mountains on waking from a dream, when I sat up wondering, looked about and saw the green moon pinned to the sky with a pine, and the frowning, solemn faces of the mountains beneath their broken diadems instead of the dreamed-of walls of Master Palaemon’s study, or our refectory, or the corridor of cells where I sat at the guard table outside Thecla’s door. I managed to say, “Then why did you show me?”

And she answered, “Though you see us, we will not see you more. Our friendship here begins and ends, I fear. Call it a gift of welcome from departing friends.”

Then the doctor, ahead of us, threw open a door, and the drumming of the rain became a roaring, and I felt the cold, deathlike air of the tower invaded by icy but living air from outside. Baldanders had to stoop and turn his shoulders to pass the doorway, and I was struck by the realization that in time he would be unable to do so, whatever care he received from Dr. Talos — the door would have to be widened, and the stairs too, perhaps, for if he fell he would surely perish. Then I understood what had puzzled me before: the reason for the huge rooms and high ceilings of this, his tower. And I wondered what the vaults in the rock were like, where he confined his starving prisoners.

THE SHIP, WHICH from below had appeared to rest upon the structure of the tower itself, did not. Rather it seemed to float half a chain or more above us — too high to provide much shelter from the lashing rain that made the smooth curve of its hull gleam like black nacre. As I stared up at it, I could not help but speculate on the sails such a vessel might spread to catch the winds that blow between the worlds; and then, just as I was wondering if the crew did not ever peer down to see us, the mermen, the strange, uncouth beings who for a time walked the bottom below their hull, one of them indeed came down, head foremost like a squirrel, wreathed in orange light and clinging to the hull with hands and feet, though it was wet as any stone in a river and polished like the blade of Terminus Est . He wore such a mask as I have often described, but I now knew it to be one. When he saw Ossipago, Barbatus, and Famulimus below, he descended no farther, and in a moment a slender line, glowing orange too so that it seemed a thread of light, was cast down from somewhere above.

“Now we must go,” Ossipago told Baldanders, and he handed him the Claw. “Think well on all the things we have not told you, and remember what you have not been shown.”

“I will,” Baldanders said, his voice as grim as I was ever to hear it.

Then Ossipago caught the line and slid up it until it bent around the curve of the hull and he disappeared from sight. But it somehow seemed that he did not in fact slide up, but down, as if that ship were a world itself and drew everything belonging to it to itself with a blind hunger, as Urth does; or perhaps it was only that he was become lighter than our air, like a sailor who dives from his ship into the sea, and rose as I had risen after I leaped from the hetman’s boat.