The Claw Of The Conciliator (22 page)

“Yes,” I said eagerly.

“Well, we’ve a picture of it right here. Have a look. Then when you see it, you’ll know it.”

He indicated one of the wide, coarse paintings. It was not of a room at all, but seemed to show a garden, a pleasance bordered by high hedges, with a lily pond and some willows swept by the wind. A man in the fantastic costume of a Ilanero played a guitar there, as it appeared for no ear but his own. Behind him, angry clouds raced across a sullen sky.

“After this you can go to the library and see Ultan’s map,” the old man said. The painting was of that irritating kind which dissolves into mere blobs of color unless it can be seen as a whole. I took a step backward to get a better perspective of it, then another.

With the third step, I realized I should have made contact with the wall behind me, and that I had not. I was standing instead inside the picture that had occupied the opposite wall: a dark room of ancient leather chairs and ebony tables. I turned to look at it, and when I turned back, the corridor where I had stood with Rudesind had vanished, and a wall covered with old and faded paper stood in its place.

I had drawn Terminus Est without consciously willing to do so, but there was no enemy to strike. Just as I was on the point of trying the room’s single door, it opened and a figure in a yellow robe entered. Short, white hair was brushed back from his rounded brow, and his face might almost have served a plump woman of forty; about his neck, a phallus-shaped vial I remembered hung on a slender chain.

“Ah,” he said. “I wondered who had come. Welcome, Death.”

With as much composure as I could muster, I said, “I am the Journeyman Severian—of the guild of torturers, as you see. My entrance was entirely involuntary, and to be truthful, I would be very grateful to you if you could explain just how it happened. When I was in the corridor outside, this room appeared to be no more than a painting. But when I took a step or two back to view the one on the other wall, I found myself in here. By what art was that done?”

“No art,” the man in the yellow robe said. “Concealed doors are scarcely an original invention, and the constructor of this room did no more than devise a means of concealing an open door. The room is shallow, as you see; indeed, it is shallower than you perceive even now, unless you’re already aware that the angles of the floor and ceiling converge, and that the wall at the end is not so high as the one through which you came.”

“I see,” I said, and in fact I did. As he spoke that crooked room, which my mind, accustomed always to ordinary ones, had tricked me into believing of normal shape, became itself, with a slanted and trapezoidal ceiling and a trapezoidal floor. The very chairs that faced the wall through which I had come were things of little depth, so that one could hardly have sat on them; the tables were no wider than boards.

“The eye is deceived in a picture by such converging lines,” the man in the yellow robe continued. “So that when it encounters them in reality, with little actual depth and the additional artificiality of monochromatic lighting, it believes it sees another picture—particularly when it has been conditioned by a long succession of true ones. Your entrance with that great weapon caused a real wall to rise behind you to detain you until you had been examined. I need hardly add that the other side of the wall is painted with the picture you believed you saw.”

I was more astounded than ever. “But how could the room know I carried my sword?”

“That is more complex than I can well explain … far more so than this poor room. I can only say that the door is wrapped with metal strands, and that these know when the other metals, their brothers and sisters, pass their circle.”

“Did you do all this?”

“Oh, no. All these things …” He paused. “And a hundred more like them, make up what we call the Second House. They are the work of Father Inire, who was called by the first Autarch to create a secret palace within the walls of the House Absolute. You or I, my son, would no doubt have built a mere suite of concealed rooms. He contrived that the hidden house should be everywhere coextensive with the public one.”

“But you aren’t he,” I said. “Because now I know who you are! Do you recognize me?” I drew off my mask so he could see my face.

He smiled and said, “You came but once. The khaibit did not please you, then.”

“She pleased me less than the woman she counterfeited—or rather, I loved the other more. Tonight I have lost a friend, yet it seems to be a time for meeting old acquaintances. May I ask how you’ve come here from your House Azure? Were you summoned for the thiasus? I saw one of your women earlier tonight.”

He nodded absently. An oddly angled mirror set above a trumean at one side of the strange, shallow room caught his profile, delicate as a cameo, and I decided he must be an androgyne. Pity welled up in me, with a sense of helplessness, as I thought of him opening the door to men, night after night, at his establishment in the Algedonic Quarter. “Yes,” he said. “I will remain here for the celebration, then go.”

My mind was full of the picture old Rudesind had shown me in the corridor outside, and I said, “Then you can show me where the garden is.”

I sensed at once that he had been caught off-guard, possibly for the first time in many years. There was pain in his eyes, and his left hand moved (though only slightly) toward the vial at his throat. “So you have heard of that …” he said. “Even supposing that I knew the way, why should I reveal it to you? Many will seek to flee by that road if the pelagic argosy sights land.”

Several seconds passed before I rightly understood what it was the androgyne had said. Then the remembered scent of Thecla’s roasted flesh rose sickening-sweet in my nostrils, and I seemed to feel the unquiet of the leaves. Forgetting in the stress of the moment how futile such precautions must be in that deception-filled room, I looked about, seeking to assure myself that no one could overhear us, then found that without my having willed it (consciously, I had intended to question him before betraying my connection with Vodalus) my hand had taken the knife-shaped steel from the innermost compartment of my sabretache.

The androgyne smiled. “I felt you might be the one. For days now I have been expecting you, and I have kept the old man outside and many others under instructions to bring promising strangers to me.”

“I was imprisoned in the antechamber,” I said. “And so lost time.”

“But you escaped, I see. It isn’t likely you’d be released before my man came to search it. It’s well you did—there isn’t much time left … the three days of the thiasus, then I must go. Come, and I will show you the way to the Garden, though I am by no means sure you will be permitted to enter.” He opened the door by which he had come in, and this time I saw that it was not truly rectangular. The room beyond was hardly larger than the one we had left; but its angles seemed normal, and it was richly furnished.

“You came to the correct part of the Secret House at least,” the androgyne said. “Otherwise we would have had to walk a weary way. Your pardon, while I read the message you brought.”

He crossed to what I at first supposed was a glass-topped table, and put the steel under it on a shelf. At once a light kindled, shining down from the glass, though there was no light above it. The steel grew until it seemed a sword, and its striations, in place of mere teeth on which to strike sparks from a flint, I saw to be lines of flowing script.

“Stand back,” the androgyne said. “If you have not read this before, you must not read it now.”

I did as he bid, and for some time watched him bending over the little object I had carried away from Vodalus’s glade. At last he said, “There is no help for it then … we must fight on two flanks. But this is none of your affair. Do you see that cabinet with the eclipse carved in its door? Open it and lift down the book you find there. Here, you may put it on this stand.”

Although I feared some trap, I opened the door of the cabinet he had indicated. It held one monstrous book—a thing nearly as tall as I and a good two cubits wide—that stood with its cover of mottled blue-green leather facing me much as a corpse might had I opened the lid of an upright casket. Sheathing my sword, I gripped this great volume with both hands and placed it on the stand. The androgyne asked if I had seen it previously, and I told him I had not.

“You looked fearful of it, and tried … as it appeared to me—to keep your face from it when you carried it.” He threw back the cover as he spoke. The first page, thus revealed, was written in red in a character I did not know.

“This is a warning to the seekers of the path,” he said. “Shall I read it to you?”

I blurted, “It seemed to me that I saw a dead man in the leather, and that he was myself.”

He closed the cover again and ran his hand over it. “These pavonine dyeings are but the work of craftsmen long gone—the lines and swirls beneath them, only the scars of the suffering animals’ backs, the marks of ticks and whips. But if you are fearful, you need not go.”

“Open it,” I said. “Show me the map.”

“There is no map. This is the thing itself,” he said, and with that he threw back the cover and the first page as well.

I was blinded, almost, as I have been on dark nights by a discharge of lightning. The inner pages seemed of pure silver, beaten and polished, that caught every wisp of illumination in the room and flung it back amplified a hundred times. “They’re mirrors,” I said, and in saying it realized that they were not, but those things for which we have no word but mirrors, those things that less than a watch before had returned Jonas to the stars. “But how can they have power, when they do not face each other?”

The androgyne answered, “Consider how long they faced each other when the book was closed. Now the field will withstand the tension we put on it for some time. Go, if you dare.”

I did not dare. As he spoke, something shaped itself in shining air above the open pages. It was neither a woman nor a butterfly, but it partook of both, and just as we know when we look at the painted figure of a mountain in the background of some picture that it is in reality as huge as an island, so I knew that I saw the thing only from far off—its wings beat, I think, against the proton winds of space, and all Urth might have been a mote disturbed by their motion. Then as I had seen it, so it saw me, much as the androgyne a moment before had seen the swirls and loops of writing on the steel through his glass. It paused and turned to me and opened its wings that I might observe them. They were marked with eyes.

The androgyne closed the book with a crash, like a door slammed shut. “What did you see?” he asked.

I could think only that I no longer had to look into the pages, and said, “Thank you, sieur. Whoever you may be, I am your servant from this time forward.”

He nodded. “Perhaps sometime I may remind you of that. But I will not ask you again what it was you saw. Here, wipe your forehead. The sight has marked you.” He handed me a clean cloth as he spoke, and I wiped my brow with it as he told me, because I could feel the moisture running down my face. When I looked at the cloth, it was crimson with blood.

As though he had read my thoughts, he said, “You are not wounded. The physicians’ term is haematidrosis, I believe. Under the stress of strong emotion, minute veins in the skin of the afflicted part … of the skin everywhere, sometimes … rupture during a profuse sweating. You will have a nasty bruise there, I’m afraid.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “I thought you were going to show me a map. I only want to find the Green Room, as old Rudesind out there says it’s called, where the players are quartered. Did Vodalus’s message say you were to kill the bearer?” I was fumbling for my sword as I spoke, but when my hands gripped the familiar hilt, I found I was too weak to draw the blade.

The androgyne laughed. It was pleasant laughter at first, wavering somewhere between a woman’s and a boy’s, but it trailed off into tittering, as a drunken man’s sometimes does. Thecla’s memories stirred in me; almost, they woke. “Was that all you wished?” he said when he had control of himself again. “You asked me for a light for your candle, and I tried to give you the sun, and now you are burned. The fault was mine … I sought, perhaps, to postpone my time, yet even so I would not have let you travel so far had I not read in the message that you have carried the Claw. And now I am most truly sorry, but I cannot help but laugh. Where will you go, when you have found the Green Room, Severian?”

“Where you send me. As you remind me, I have sworn service to Vodalus.” (In fact, I feared him, and feared that the androgyne would inform him if I professed disobedience.)

“But if I have no orders for you? Have you already disposed of the Claw?”

“I could not,” I said.

There was a pause. He did not speak.

“I’ll go to Thrax,” I said. “I have a letter to the archon there; he’s supposed to have work for me. For the honor of my guild, I would like to go.”

“That is well. How great, in truth, is your love of Vodalus?”

Again I felt the haft of the ax in my hand. For you others, as I am told, memory dies; mine scarcely dims. The mist that shrouded the necropolis that night blew against my face again, and everything I had felt when I received the coin from Vodalus and watched him walk away to a place where I could not follow returned to me. “I saved him once,” I said.

The androgyne added. “Then here is what you are to do. You must go to Thrax as you planned, telling everyone … even yourself … that you are going to fill the position that waits you there. The Claw is perilous. Are you aware of it?”

“Yes. Vodalus told me that if it became known we possess it, we might lose the support of the populace.”

For a moment the androgyne stood silent again. Then he said, “The Pelerines are in the north. If you are given the opportunity, you must restore the Claw to them.”

“That is what I had hoped to do.”

“Good. There is something else you must do as well. The Autarch is here, but long before you reach Thrax he will be in the north too, with the army. If he comes near Thrax, you are able to go to him. In time you will discover the way in which you must take his life.”