His gaze left me, and I followed it to the aisle behind me, where I saw the man who had brought us from the ship. The sailors were rising and drawing their knives, yet I scarcely noticed them. The center places that had been theirs the day before held others now, figures no longer shadowed. Sweat sprang from my forehead as blood had when I had first seen Tzadkiel, and I turned to cry out to him.
He was gone.
Lame leg or not I ran, hobbling as swiftly as I could around the Seat of Justice in search of the stair by which I had been led away the night before. I think it only fair to myself to say that I fled not so much from the sailors as from the faces of the others I had seen in the Chamber.
However that may be, the stair was gone too; I found only a smooth floor of stone slabs there, one of which was, no doubt, raised by some concealed mechanism.
Now another such mechanism acted. Swiftly and smoothly, Tzadkiel’s throne sank, as a whale that has surfaced to bask in the sun sinks back into the ice-choked Southern Sea. At one moment the great stone seat stood between me and the larger part of the Chamber, as solid as a wall; at the next the floor was closing over its back, and a fantastic battle spread before me.
The Hierarch whom Tzadkiel had called his son lay sprawled in the aisle. Over him surged the sailors, their knives flashing and many bloodied. Against them stood a score or so who seemed at first as weak as children — and indeed I saw at least one child among them — but held their ground like heroes and, when they had only their hands to fight with, fought weaponless. Because their backs were toward me, I told myself I did not know them; but I knew it for a lie.
With a roar that echoed from the walls, the alzabo burst from this encircled band. The sailors fell back, and in an instant it was crushing a man in its jaws. I saw Agia with her poisoned sword, and Agilus too, swinging a crimsoned avern like a mace, and Baldanders, unarmed until he seized a sailor and smashed another to the floor with her.
And Dorcas, Morwenna, Cyriaca, and Casdoe. Thecla, already down, the blood that trickled from her throat stanched by a ragged apprentice. Guasacht and Erblon slashed with their spathae as though they fought from the saddle. Dana wielded a slender saber in either hand. Somehow chained again, Pia throttled a sailor with her chain.
I dashed past Merryn and found myself between Gunnie and Dr. Tabs, whose flickering blade felled a man at my feet. A raging sailor charged me, and I — I swear it — welcomed him for his weapon, seizing his wrist, breaking his arm, and wrenching his knife away all in a single motion. I had no time to wonder at the ease of it before I saw that Gunnie had stabbed him in the neck.
It seemed that I had no sooner joined the battle than it was over. A few sailors fled from the Chamber; twenty or thirty bodies lay upon the floor or over the benches. Most of the women were dead, though I saw one of the women-cats licking blood from her stubby fingers. Old Winnoc leaned wearily on one of the scimitars used by the Pelerines’ slaves. Dr. Tabs cut a dead man’s robe to wipe the blade of his cane sword, and I saw that the dead man was Master Ash.
“Who are they?” Gunnie asked.
I shook my head, feeling I scarcely knew myself. Dr. Tabs seized her hand and brushed its fingers with his lips. “Allow me. I am Tabs, physician, playwright, and impresario. I’m—”
I no longer listened. Triskele had bounded up to me with blood-smeared flews, hindquarters quivering with joy. Master Malrubius, resplendent in the fur-trimmed cloak of the guild, followed him. When I saw Master Malrubius I knew, and he, seeing me, knew I did.
At once he — with Triskele, Dr. Tabs, the dead Master Ash, Dorcas, and the rest — fell to silver shards of nothingness, just as he had that night on the beach after he had rescued me from the dying jungle of the north. Gunnie and I were left alone with the bodies of the sailors.
Not all were corpses. One stirred and groaned. We tried to bind the wound in his chest (it was from the doctor’s narrow blade, I think) with rags ripped from the dead, though blood bubbled from his mouth. After a time the Hierarchs came with medicine and proper bandages, and took him away.
The lady Apheta had come with them, but she remained with us.
“You said that I would not see you again,” I reminded her.
“I said that you might not,” she corrected me. “Had things fallen out otherwise here, you would not have.”
In the stillness of that chamber of death, her voice was scarcely a whisper.
Chapter XXII — Descent
“THERE MUST be many questions you want to ask,” Apheta whispered. “Let us go out into the portico, and I will answer them all.”
I shook my head, for I heard the water-music of rain through the open doorway.
Gunnie touched my arm. “Is somebody spying on us?”
“No,” Apheta told her. “But let us go out. It should be pleasant there, and we have only a short time now, we three.”
“I can understand you well enough,” I told her. “I’ll stay here. Perhaps some others among these many dead will begin to moan. That would make a fit voice for you.”
She nodded. “It would indeed.” I had seated myself where Tzadkiel had crouched on the first day; she sat down beside me, no doubt so that I might hear her better.
In a moment Gunnie sat too and sheathed her dagger, having cleaned the blade on her thigh. “I’m sorry,” Gunnie said.
“Sorry for what? Because you fought for me? I don’t blame you.”
“Sorry the others didn’t, that the magic people had to defend you against us. Against all of us but me. Who were they? Did you whistle them up?”
“No,” I said. Apheta, “Yes.”
“They were people I’d known, that’s all. Some were women I’d loved. Many are dead — Thecla, Agilus, Casdoe… Perhaps they’re all dead now, all ghosts, though I didn’t know it.”
“They are unborn. Surely you know that time runs backward when the ship sails swiftly. I told you myself. They are unborn, as you are.”
She spoke to Gunnie. “I said he had called them because it was from his mind that we drew them, seeking those who hated him, or at least had reason to. The giant you saw might have mastered the Commonwealth, had Severian not defeated him. The blond woman could not forgive him for bringing her back from death.”
I said, “I can’t stop you from explaining all this, but do it elsewhere. Or let me go where I need not hear it.”
Apheta asked, “It gave you no joy?”
“To see them all again, tricked into defending me? No. Why should it?”
“Because they were not tricked, no more than Master Malrubius was on any of the occasions when you saw him after his death. We found them among your memories and let them judge. Everyone in this Chamber, save yourself, saw the same things. Has it not struck you as odd that I can scarcely speak here?”
I turned to stare at her, feeling I had been away and come back to hear her talk when it was of some other matter.
“Our rooms are always filled with the sound of water and the sighing of the wind. This was built for you and your kind.”
Gunnie said, “Before you came in, he — Zak — showed us that Urth had two futures. It could die and be born new. Or it could go on living for a long time before it died forever.”
“I’ve known that since I was a boy.”
She nodded to herself, and for a moment I seemed to see the child she had been instead of the woman she had become. “But we haven’t. We hadn’t.” Her gaze left my face, and I saw her looking from corpse to corpse. “In religion, but sailors never pay much attention to that.”
For want of something better to say, I said, “I suppose not.”
“My mother did, and it was like she was crazy, someplace in a corner of her mind. You know what I mean? And I think that was all it was.”