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.
Thecla laughed. “I haven’t seen you do that since I took off my gown for you the first time. I laid your hands on my breasts, and you went red as a berry. Do you remember? Tell somebody to fill it? Where is the young atheist now?”
I put my hand upon her thigh. “Confused, as he was then, by the presence of divinity.”
“You don’t believe in me then? I think you’re right. I must be what you young torturers dream of — a beautiful prisoner, as yet unmutilated, who calls on you to slake her lust.”
Trying to be gallant I said, “Such dreams as you lie beyond my power.”
“Surely not, since I am in your power now.”
Something was in the cell with us. I looked at the barred door and Thecla’s lamp with its silver reflector, then into all the corners. The cell grew darker, and Thecla and even I myself vanished with the light, but the thing that had intruded upon my memory of us did not.
“Who are you,” I asked, “and what do you wish with us?”
“You know well who we are, and we know who you are.” The voice was cool and, I think, perhaps the most authoritative I have ever heard. The Autarch himself did not speak so.
“Who am I, then?”
“Severian of Nessus, the lictor of Thrax.”
“I am Severian of Nessus,” I said. “But I am no longer lictor of Thrax.”
“So you would have us believe.”
There was silence again, and after a time I understood that my interrogator would not question me, but rather would force me, if I desired my freedom, to explain myself to him. I wanted greatly to seize him — he could not have been more than a few cubits away — but I knew that in all likelihood he was armed with the steel talons the guards on the path had shown me. I wanted also, as I had for some time, to draw the Claw from its leathern sack, though nothing could have been more foolish. I said, “The archon of Thrax wished me to kill a certain woman. I freed her instead, and had to flee the city.”
“By magic passing the posts of the soldiers.”
I had always believed all self-proclaimed wonder-workers to be frauds; now something in my interrogator’s voice suggested that even as they attempted to deceive others, so they might deceive themselves. There was mockery in it, but it was mockery of me, not of magic. “Perhaps,” I said. “What do you know of my powers?”
“That they are insufficient to free you from this place.”
“I have not attempted to free myself, and yet I have already been free.”
That disturbed him. “You were not free. You merely brought the woman here in spirit!”
I let my breath out, trying to keep the sigh inaudible. In the antechamber of the House Absolute, a little girl had once mistaken me for a tall woman, when Thecla had for a time displaced my own personality. Now, it seemed, the remembered Thecla must have spoken through my mouth. I said, “Surely I am a necromancer then, who can command the spirits of the dead. For that woman is dead.”
“You told us you freed her.”
“Another woman, who only slightly resembled that one. What have you done to my son?”
“He does not call you his father.”
“He suffers fancies,” I said.
There was no reply. After a time I rose and ran my hands once more over the walls of my underground prison; they were of plain earth, as before. I had seen no light and heard no sound, but it seemed to me that it would have been possible to cover the hatch with some portable structure to exclude the day, and if the hatch were skillfully constructed, it might be lifted silently. I mounted the first rung of the ladder; it creaked beneath my weight.
I climbed a step up, and another, and it creaked at each. I tried to rise to the fourth rung, and felt my scalp and shoulders prodded as though with the points of daggers. A trickle of blood from my right ear wet my neck.
I retreated to the third rung and groped overhead. The thing that had seemed like a torn mat when I entered the underground chamber proved to be a score or more of sharp bamboo splittings, anchored somehow in the shaft with their points directed down. I had descended with ease because my body had forced them to one side; now they prevented me from ascending much as the barbs on a fish spear prevent the fish from getting away. I took hold of one and tried to break it, but though I might have done so with both hands, it was impossible with one. Given light and time I might have worked my way through them; light perhaps I might have had, but I did not dare to take the risk. I jumped to the floor again.
Another circuit of the room told me no more than I had known before, yet it seemed beyond credence that my questioner had climbed the ladder without making a sound, though he might perhaps possess some special knowledge that would permit him to pass through the bamboo. I went about the floor on my hands and knees, and learned no more than before.
I attempted to move the ladder, but it was fixed in position; so beginning at the corner nearest the shaft, I jumped and touched the wall at a point as high as I could reach, then moved half a step to one side and jumped again. When I had arrived at a place that must have been more or less opposite the spot where I had been sitting, I found it: a rectangular hole perhaps a cubit high and two across, with its lower edge slightly higher than my head. My interrogator might have climbed from it silently, perhaps with the aid of a rope, and returned the same way; but it seemed more likely that he had merely thrust his head and shoulders through, so that his voice had sounded as if he were truly in the room with me. I gripped the edge of the hole as well as I could, jumped, and pulled myself up.