Briefly the moon shone again, crossed by the black silhouettes of a flight of storks. I could see the shoreline as a band of denser night on the horizon. A new mass of cloud cut off the light, and a drop of water struck my face, It made me feel suddenly cheerful without knowing why — no doubt the reason was that I unconsciously recalled the rain outside on the night when I stood off the alzabo. Perhaps I was thinking too of the icy waters that spewed from the mouth of the mine of the man-apes.
Yet leaving aside all these chance associations, the rain might be a blessing indeed. We had no bows, and if it wet our opponents’ bowstrings, so much the better. Certainly it would be impossible to use the bullets of power the hetman’s archer had fired. Besides, rain would favor an attack by stealth, and I had long ago decided that it was only by stealth that our attack could hope to succeed.
I was deep in plans when the cloud broke again, and I saw that we were on a course parallel to the shore, which rose in cliffs to our right. Ahead, a peninsula of rock higher still jutted into the lake, and I walked to the point of the island to ask the man stationed there if the castle was situated on it. He shook his head and said, “We will go about.”
So we did. The clews of all the sails were loosed, and retied on new limbs. Leeboards weighted with stones were lowered into the water on one side of the island while three men strained at the tiller bar to bring the rudder around. I was struck by the thought that Llibio must have ordered our present landfall, wisely enough, to escape the notice of any lookouts who might keep watch over the waters of the lake. If that were the case, we would still be in danger of being seen when we no longer had the peninsula between the castle and our little fleet. It also occurred to me that since the builder of the castle had not chosen to put it on the high spur of rock we were skirting now, which looked very nearly invulnerable, it was perhaps because he had found a place yet more secure.
Then we rounded the point and sighted our destination no more than four chains down the coast — an outthrust of rock higher still and more abrupt, with a wall at its summit and a keep that seemed to have the impossible shape of an immense toadstool.
I could not believe my eyes. From the great, tapering central column, which I had no doubt was a round tower of native stone, spread a lens-shaped structure of metal ten times its diameter and apparently as solid as the tower itself.
All about our island, the men in the boats and on the other islands were whispering to one another and pointing. It seemed that this incredible sight was as novel to them as to me.
The misty light of the moon, the younger sister’s kiss upon the face of her dying elder, shone on the upper surface of that huge disk. Beneath it, in its thick shadow, gleamed sparks of ■ orange light. They moved, gliding up or down, though their movement was so slow that I had watched them for some time before I was conscious of it. Eventually, one rose until it appeared to be immediately under the disk and vanished, and just before we came to shore, two more appeared in the same spot.
A tiny beach lay in the shadow of the cliff. Llibio’s island ran aground before we reached it, however; I had to jump into the water once more, this time holding Terminus Est above my head. Fortunately there was no surf, and though rain still threatened, it had not yet come. I helped some of the lake men drag their boats onto the shingle while others moored islands to boulders with sinew hawsers.
After my trip through the mountains, the narrow, treacherous path would have been easy if I had not had to climb it in the dark. As it was, I would rather have made the descent past the buried city to Casdoe’s house, though that had been five times farther.
When we reached the top we were still some distance from the wall, which was screened from us by a grove of straggling firs. I gathered the islanders about me and asked — a rhetorical question — if they knew from where the sky ship above the castle had come. And when they assured me they did not, I explained that I did (and so I did, Dorcas having warned me of them, though I had never seen such a thing before), and that because of its presence here it would be better if I were to reconnoiter the situation before we proceeded with the assault.
No one spoke, but I could sense their feeling of helplessness. They had believed they had found a hero to lead them, and now they were going to lose him before the battle was joined.
“I am going inside if I can,” I told them. “I will come back to you if that is possible, and I will leave such doors as I may open for you.”
Llibio asked, “But suppose you cannot come back. How shall we know when the moment to draw our knives has come?”
“I will make some signal,” I said, and strained my wits to ink what signal I might make if I we’re pent in that black think tower. “They must have fires on such a night as this. I’ll show a brand at a window, and drop it if I can so that you’ll see the streak of fire. If I make no signal and cannot return to you, you may assume they have taken me prisoner — attack when the first light touches the mountains.”
A short time later I stood at the gate of the castle, banging a great iron knocker shaped (so far as I could determine with my fingers) like the head of a man against a plate of the same metal set in oak.
There was no response. After I had waited for the space of a score of breaths, I knocked again. I could hear the echoes waked inside, an empty reverberation like the throbbing of a heart, but there was no sound of voices. The hideous faces I had glimpsed in the Autarch’s garden filled my mind and I waited in dread for the noise of a shot, though I knew that if the Hierodules chose to shoot me — and all energy weapons came ultimately from them — I would probably never hear it. The air was so still it seemed the atmosphere waited with me. Thunder rolled to the east.
At last there were footsteps, so quick and light I could have thought them the steps of a child. A vaguely familiar voice called, “Who’s there? What do you want?”
And I answered, “Master Severian of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence — I come as the arm of the Autarch, whose justice is the bread of his subjects.”
“Do you indeed!” exclaimed Dr. Talos, and threw open the gate.
For a moment I could only stare at him.
“Tell me, what does the Autarch want with us? The last time I saw you, you were on your way to the City of Crooked Knives. Did you ever get there?”
“The Autarch wanted to know why your vassals laid hold of one of his servants,” I said. “That is to say, myself. This puts a slightly different light on the matter.”
“It does! It does! From our point of view too, you understand. I didn’t know you were the mysterious visitor at Murene. And I’m sure poor old Baldanders didn’t either. Come in and we’ll talk about it.”
I stepped through the gateway in the wall, and the doctor pushed the heavy gate closed behind me and fitted an iron bar into place.
I said, “There really isn’t much to talk about, but we might begin with a valuable gem that was taken from me by force, and as I have been informed, sent to you.”
Even while I spoke, however, my attention was drawn from the words I pronounced to the vast bulk of the ship of the Hierodules, which was directly overhead now that I was past the wall. Staring up at it gave me the same feeling of dislocation I have sometimes had on looking down through the double curve of a magnifying glass; the convex underside of that ship had the look of something alien not only to the world of human beings, but to all the visible world.