I heard the prophetess mumble some prayer that ended with mention of the Conciliator and the New Sun. It is strange to hear yourself prayed to; and stranger still to realize that the supplicant has forgotten you are present.
A gasp then, and not just from Valeria but from us all, I believe, save Baldanders. The undine’s face appeared with her other hand, and although they did not in reality fill all that wide door, so large were they, and the mass of brilliant green hair, that they appeared to. I have sometimes heard it said in hyperbole that eyes are as big as platters. Of her eyes it was so; they wept tears of blood, and more blood trickled from her nostrils.
I knew she must have followed Gyoll from the sea, and from Gyoll traced its tributary, which wandered through the gardens where Jolenta and I had once floated upon it. I called to her, “How were you caught and driven from your element?”
Perhaps because she was a woman, her voice was not so deep as I anticipated, though it was deeper even than Baldander’s. Yet there was a lilt to it, as though she who struggled to pass the doorway even as she spoke and was so clearly dying had yet some vast joy that owed nothing to her own life or the sun’s. She said, “Because I would save you…”
With those words her mouth filled with blood; she spat it out, and it seemed some drain had opened from an abattoir.
I asked, “From the storms and fires that the New Sun will bring? We thank you, but we have been warned already. Are you not a creature of Abaia’s?”
“Even so.” She had dragged herself through the doorway to the waist. Now her flesh seemed so heavy it must be torn from her bones by its own weight; her breasts hung like the haycocks a child sees, who stands upon his head. I understood that it would never be possible to return her to her water — that she would die here in the Hypogeum Amaranthine, and a hundred men would be needed to dismember her corpse, and a hundred more to bury it.
The chiliarch demanded, “Then why shouldn’t we kill you? You’re an enemy of our Commonwealth.”
“Because I came to warn you.” She had allowed her head to sink to the terrazzo, where it lay at so unnatural an angle that her neck might have been broken; yet she still spoke.
“I can give you a more forcible reason, chiliarch,” I said. “Because I forbid it. She saved me once when I was a boy, and I remember her face as I remember everything. I would save her now if I could.” Looking at her face, a face of supernal beauty made hideous by its own weight, I asked, “Do you remember that?”
“No. It hasn’t yet occurred. It will, because you spoke.”
“What’s your name? I’ve never known it.”
“Juturna. I want to save you…not earlier. Save all of you.”
Valeria hissed, “When has Abaia sought our good?”
“Always. He might have destroyed you…”
For the space of six breaths she could not continue, but I motioned Valeria and the rest to silence.
“Ask your husband. In a day, or a few days. He’s tried to tame you instead. Catch Catodon…cast out his conation. What good? Abaia would make of us a great people.”
I was reminded then of what Famulimus had asked me when I met her first: “Is all the world a war of good and bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?” And I felt myself upon the marches of a nobler world, where I should know what it might be. Master Malrubius had led me from the jungles of the north to Ocean speaking of hammer and anvil, and it seemed to me also that I sensed an anvil here. He had been an aquastor, like those who had fought for me in Yesod, created from my mind; thus he had believed, as I had, that the undine had saved me because I would be a torturer and an Autarch. It might be that neither he nor the undine were wholly wrong.
While I hesitated, lost among such thoughts, Valeria, the prophetess, and the chiliarch had whispered among themselves; but soon the undine spoke again. “Your day fades. A New Sun…and you are shadows.”
“Yes!” The prophetess seemed ready to leap for joy. “We are the shadows cast by his coming. What more can we be?”
“Another comes,” I said, for I thought I heard the patter of hurrying feet. Even the undine lifted her head to listen.
The sound, whatever it was, grew louder and louder still. A strange wind whistled down that long chamber, fluttering its antique hangings so that they strewed the floor with dust and pearls. Roaring like the thunder it flung back the double doors that had been propped open by the undine’s waist, and it carried that perfume — wild and saline, as fetid and fecund as a woman’s groin, that once met can never be forgotten; so that at that instant I would not have been surprised to hear the crash of surf or the mewing of gulls.
“It’s the sea!” I called to the others. Then, as I tried to adjust my mind with what must surely have occurred, “Nessus must be under water.”
Valeria gasped, “Nessus drowned two days ago.”
As she spoke, I snatched her up; her frail body seemed lighter than a child’s.
The waves came then, the uncountable white-maned destriers of Ocean, foaming across the undine’s shoulders so that for a breath I saw her as though I saw two worlds together, at once a woman and a rock. She lifted her heavy head higher at their coming and cried out in triumph and despair. It was the wail a storm gives as it sweeps over the sea, and a cry I hope never to hear again.
The Praetorians were clattering up the steps of the dais to escape the water, the young officer who had seemed so frightened and feeble before taking Jader’s sister (a prophetess no longer, for she had no more to prophesy) by the hand and drawing her up with him.
“I will not drown,” Baldanders rumbled. “And the rest do not matter. Save yourself if you can.”
I nodded without thinking and with my free arm jerked aside the arras. The Praetorians crowded forward, so that the bells that had pealed three times for me jangled madly and broke their cracked, dry straps, falling clangorously.
Not whispering but shouting, for the word would never be of use again, I commanded the sealed door through which I had come. It flew open, and through it came the assassin, mute still, half-unknowing, numbed by the memory of the ashen plains of death. I called to him to halt, but he had caught sight of the crown and Valeria’s poor, ravaged face beneath it.
He must have been a swordsman of renown; no master-at-arms could have struck more quickly. I saw the flash of the poisoned blade, then felt the fiery pain of its thrust through my wife’s poor, raddled body into my own, where it reopened the wound that Agilus’s avern leaf had made so many years before.
Chapter XLIV — The Morning Tide
THERE WAS a shimmering azure light. The Claw had returned — not the Claw destroyed by Ascian artillery, nor even the Claw I had given the chiliarch of Typhon’s Praetorians, but the Claw of the Conciliator, the gem I had found in my sabretache as Dorcas and I walked down a dark road beside the Wall of Nessus. I tried to tell someone; but my mouth was sealed, and I could not find the word. Perhaps I was too distant from myself, from the Severian of bone and flesh borne by Catherine in a cell of the oubliette under the Matachin Tower . The Claw endured, shining and swaying against the dark void.
No, it was not the Claw that swayed but I, swaying gently, gently while the sun caressed my back.
The sunlight must have brought me to myself, as it would have raised me from my deathbed. The New Sun must come; and I was the New Sun. I lifted my head, opened my eyes, and spat a stream of crystal fluid like no water of Urth’s; it seemed not water at all, but a richer atmosphere, corroborant as the winds of Yesod.