'Put him down, I said!'
'They have not so much as grazed my skin, Sieur,' I told him.
With the woman-cats' support I was able to walk. It was morning, when all shadows flee the first sight of the sun; the light that had wakened me had been the earliest of the new day. Its freshness filled my lungs now, and the coarse grass over which we walked darkened my scuffed old boots with its dew; a breeze faint as the dim stars stirred my hair.
The Autarch's pavilion stood on the summit of a hill. All around lay the main bivouac of his army tents of black and gray, and others like dead leaves; huts of turf and pits that led to shelters underground, from which streams of soldiers issued now like silver ants.
'We must be careful, you see,' he said. 'Though we are some distance behind the lines here, if this place were plainer it would invite attack from above.'
'I used to wonder why your House Absolute lay beneath its own gardens, Sieur.'
'The need has long passed now, but there was a time when they laid waste to Nessus.'
Below us and all around us, the silver lips of trumpets sounded.
'Was it only the night?' I asked. 'Or have I slept a whole day away?'
'No. Only the night. I gave you medicines to ease your pain and keep infection from your wound. I would not have roused you this morning, but I saw you were awake when I came in and there is no more time.'
I was not certain what he meant by that. Before I could ask, I caught sight of six nearly naked men hauling at a rope. My first impression was that they were bringing down some huge balloon, but it was a flier, and the sight of its black hull brought vivid memories of the Autarch's court.
'I was expecting what was its name? Mamillian.'
'No pets today. Mamillian is an excellent comrade, silent and wise and able to fight with a mind independent of my own, but when all is said and done, I ride him for pleasure. We will thieve a string from the Ascians' bow and use a mechanism today. They steal many from us.'
'Is it true that it consumes their power to land? I think one of your aeronauts once told me that.'
'When you were the Chatelaine Thecla, you mean. Thecla purely.'
'Yes, of course. Would it be impolitic, Autarch, to ask why you had me killed?
And how you know me now?'
'I know you because I see your face in the face of my young friend and hear your voice in his. Your nurses know you too. Look at them.'
I did, and saw the woman-cats' faces twisted in snarls of fear and amazement.
'As to why you died, I will speak of that to him on board the flier have we time. Now, go back. You find it easy to manifest yourself because he is weak and ill, but I must have him now, not you. If you will not go, there are means.'
'Sieur '
'Yes, Severian? Are you afraid? Have you entered such a contrivance before?'
'No,' I said. 'But I am not afraid.'
'Do you recall your question about their power? It is true, in a sense. Their lift is supplied by the antimaterial equivalent of iron, held in a penning trap by magnetic fields. Since the anti-iron has a reversed magnetic structure, it is repelled by promagnetism. The builders of this flier have surrounded it with magnets, so that when it drifts from its position at the center it enters a stronger field and is forced back. On an antimaterial world, that iron would weigh as much as a boulder, but here on Urth it counters the weight of the promatter used in the construction of the flier. Do you follow me?'
'I believe so, Sieur.'
'The trouble is that it is beyond our technology to seal the chamber hermetically. Some atmosphere a few molecules-is always creeping in through porosities in the welds, or by penetrating the insulation of the magnetic wires.
Each such molecule neutralizes its equivalent in anti-iron and produces heat, and each time one does so, the flier loses an infinitesimal amount of lift. The only solution anyone has found is to keep fliers as high as possible, where there is effectively no air pressure.'
The flier was nosing down now, near enough for me to appreciate the beautiful sleekness of its lines. It had precisely the shape of a cherry leaf.
'I didn't understand all of that,' I said. 'But I would think the ropes would have to be immensely long to allow the fliers to float high enough to do any good, and that if the Ascian pentadactyls came over by night they would cut them and let the fliers drift away.'
The woman-cats smiled at that with tiny, secretive twitch-ings of their lips.
'The rope is only for landing. Without it, our flier would require sufficient distance for its forward speed to drive it down. Now, knowing we're below, it drops its cable just as a man in a pond might extend his hand to someone who would pull him out. It has a mind of its own, you see. Not like Mamillian's a mind we have made for it, but enough of a mind to permit it to stay out of difficulties and come down when it receives our signal.'
The lower half of the flier was of opaque black metal, the upper half a dome so clear as to be nearly invisible the same substance, I suppose, as the roof of the Botanic Gardens. A gun like the one the mammoth had carried thrust out from the stern, and another twice as large protruded from the bow.
The Autarch lifted one hand to his mouth and seemed to whisper into his palm. An aperture appeared in the dome (it was as if a hole had opened in a soap bubble) and a flight of silver steps, as thin and insubstantial looking as the web ladder of a spider, descended to us. The bare-chested men had left off pulling.
