Agia said nothing, and in her silence she might have been the young woman I had seen on the morning of the day after I left our tower unfastening the gratings that had guarded the windows of a dusty shop.
“You two must have lost my trail on the way to Thrax,” I continued, “or been delayed by some accident. Even after you discovered we were in the city, you must not have known that I had charge of the Vincula, because Hethor sent his creature of fire prowling the streets to find me. Then, somehow, you found Dorcas at the Duck’s Nest—”
“We were lodging there ourselves,” Agia said. “We had only arrived a few days before, and we were out looking for you when you came. Afterward when I realized that the woman in the little garret room was the mad girl you had found in the Botanic Gardens, we still didn’t guess it was you who had put her there, because that hag at the inn said the man had worn common clothes. But we thought she might know where you were, and that she would be more apt to talk to Hethor. His name isn’t really Hethor, by the way. He says it’s a much older one, that hardly anyone has heard of now.”
“He told Dorcas about the fire creature,” I said, “and she told me. I had heard of the thing before, but Hethor had a name for it — he called it a salamander. I didn’t think anything of it when Dorcas mentioned it, but later I remembered that Jonas had a name for the black thing that flew after us outside the House Absolute. He called it a notule, and said the people on the ships had named them that because they betrayed themselves with a gust of warmth. If Hethor had a name for the fire creature, it seemed likely that it was a sailor’s name too, and that he had something to do with the creature itself.”
Agia smiled thinly. “So now you know all, and you have me where you want me — provided you can swing that big blade of yours in here.”
“I have you without it. I had you beneath my foot at the mine mouth, for that matter.”
“But I still have my knife.”
At that moment the boy’s mother came through the doorway, and both of us paused. She looked in astonishment from Agia to me; then, as though no surprise could pierce her sorrow or alter what she had to do, she closed the door and lifted the heavy bar into place.
Agia said, “He heard me upstairs, Casdoe, and made me come down. He intends to kill me.”
“And how am I to prevent that?” the woman answered wearily. She turned to me. “I hid her because she said you meant her harm. Will you kill me too?”
“No. Nor will I kill her, as she knows.”
Agia’s face distorted with rage, as the face of another lovely woman, molded by Fechin himself perhaps in colored wax, might have been transformed with a gout of flame, so that it simultaneously melted and burned. “You killed Agilus, and you gloried in it! Aren’t I as fit to die as he was? We were the same flesh!” I had not fully believed her when she said she was armed with a knife, but without my having seen her draw it, it was out now — one of the crooked daggers of Thrax.
For some time the air had been heavy with an impending storm. Now the thunder rolled, booming among the peaks above us. When its echoings and reechoings had almost died away, something answered them. I cannot describe that voice; it was not quite a human shout, nor was it the mere bellow of a beast.
All her weariness left the woman Casdoe, replaced by the most desperate haste. Heavy wooden shutters stood against the wall beneath each of the narrow windows; she seized the nearest, and lifting it as if it weighed no more than a pie pan sent it crashing into place. Outside, the dog barked frantically then fell silent, leaving no sound but the pattering of the first rain.
“So soon,” Casdoe cried. “So soon!” To her son: “Severian, get out of the way.”
Through one of the still open windows, I heard a child’s voice call, “Father, can’t you help me?”
XVI
The Alzabo
I TRIED TO assist Casdoe, and in the process turned my back on Agia and her dagger. It was an error that almost cost me my life, for she was upon me as soon as I was encumbered with a shutter. Women and tailors hold the blade beneath the hand, according to the proverb, but Agia stabbed up to open the tripes and catch the heart from below, like an accomplished assassin. I turned only just in time to block her blade with the shutter, and the point drove through the wood to show a glint of steel.
The very strength of her blow betrayed her. I wrenched the shutter to one side and threw it across the room, and her knife with it. She and Casdoe both leaped for it. I caught Agia by an arm and jerked her back, and Casdoe slammed the shutter into place with the knife out, toward the gathering storm.
“You fool,” Agia said. “Don’t you realize you’re giving a weapon to whomever it is you’re afraid of?” Her voice was calm with defeat.
“It has no need of knives,” Casdoe told her.
The house was dark now except for the ruddy light of the fire. I looked around for candles or lanterns, but there were none in sight; later I learned that the few the family owned had been carried to the loft. Lightning flashed outside, outlining the edges of the shutters and making a broken line of stark light at the bottom of the door — it was a moment before I realized that it had been a broken line, when it should have been a continuous one. “There’s someone outside,” I said. “Standing on the step.”
Casdoe nodded. “I closed the window just in time. It has never come so early before. It may be that the storm wakened it.”
“You don’t think it might be your husband?”
Before she could answer me, a voice higher than the little boy’s called, “Let me in, Mother.”
Even I, who did not know what it was that spoke, sensed a fearful wrongness in the simple words. It was a child’s voice, perhaps, but not a human child’s.
“Mother,” the voice called again. “It is beginning to rain.”
“We had better go up,” Casdoe said. “If we pull the ladder after us, it cannot reach us even if it should get inside.”
I had gone to the door. Without lightning, the feet of whatever it was that stood on the doorstep were invisible; but I could hear a hoarse, slow breathing above the beating of the rain, and once a scraping sound, as though the thing that waited there in the dark had shifted its footing.
“Is this your doing?” I asked Agia. “Some creature of Hethor’s?”
She shook her head; the narrow, brown eyes were dancing. “They roam wild in these mountains, as you should know much better than I.”
“Mother?”
There was a shuffle of feet — with that fretful question, the thing outside had turned from the door. One of the shutters was cracked, and I tried to look through the slit; I could see nothing in the blackness outside, but I heard a soft, heavy tread, precisely the sound that sometimes came through the barred ports of the Tower of the Bear at home.
“It took Severa three days ago,” Casdoe said. She was trying to get the old man to rise; he did so slowly, reluctant to leave the warmth of the fire. “I never let her or Severian go among the trees, but it came into the clearing here, a watch before twilight. Since then it has returned every night. The dog wouldn’t track it, but Becan went to hunt it today.”
I had guessed the beast’s identity by that time, though I had never beheld one of its kind. I said, “It is an alzabo, then? The creature from whose glands the analept is made?”
“It is an alzabo, yes,” Casdoe answered. “I know nothing of any analept.”