The flier righted itself like a child's boat in a puddle, bobbing.
'Because it will soon be necessary for you to know that others have felt what you will feel.'
I could not frame a question I dared to ask. At last I ventured, 'You said you'd tell me here why you killed Thecla.'
'Does she not live in Severian?'
A windowless wall in my mind fell to ruins. I shouted: 'I died!' Not realizing what I had said until the words were past my lips.
The Autarch took a pistol from beneath the control panel, letting it lie across his thighs as he turned to face me.
'You won't need that, Sieur,' I said. 'I'm too weak.'
'You have remarkable powers of recovery I have seen them already. Yes, the Chatelaine Thecla is gone, save as she endures in you, and though the two of you are always together, you are both lonely. Do you still seek for Dorcas? You told me of her, you remember, when we met in the Secret House.'
'Why did you kill Thecla?'
'I did not. Your error lies in thinking I am at the bottom of everything. No one is Not I, or Erebus, or any other. As to the Chatelaine, you are she. Were you arrested openly?'
The memory came more vividly than I would have thought possible. I walked down a corridor whose walls were lined with sad masks of silver and entered one of the abandoned rooms, high-ceilinged and musty with ancient hangings. The courier I was to meet had not yet come. Because I knew the dusty divans would soil my gown, I took a chair, a spindly thing of gilt and ivory. The tapestry spilled from the wall behind me; I recalled looking up and seeing Destiny crowned in chains and Discontent with her staff and glass, all worked in colored wool, descending upon me.
The Autarch said, 'You were taken by certain officers, who had learned that you were conveying information to your half sister's lover. Taken secretly, because your family has so much influence in the north, and conveyed to an almost forgotten prison. By the time I learned what had occurred, you were dead. Should I have punished those officers for acting in my absence? They are patriots, and you were a traitor.'
'I, Severian, am a traitor too,' I said, and I told him, then for the first time in detail, how I had once saved Vodalus, and of the banquet I had later shared with him.
When I had concluded, he nodded to himself. 'Much of the loyalty you felt for Vodalus comes, surely, from the Chatelaine. Some she imparted to you while she was yet living, more after her death. Naive though you have been, I am certain you are not so naive as to think it a coincidence that it was she whose flesh was served to you by the corpse-eaters.'
I protested, 'Even if he had known of my connection with her, there was no time to bring her body from Nessus.'
The Autarch smiled. 'Have you forgotten that you told me a moment ago that when you had saved him, he fled in such a craft as this? From that forest, hardly a dozen leagues outside the City Wall, he could have flown to the center of Nessus, unearthed a corpse preserved by the chill soil of early spring, and returned in less than a watch. Actually, he need not have known so much or moved so swiftly. While you were imprisoned by your guild, he may have learned that the Chatelaine Thecla, who had been loyal to him even to death, was no more. By serving her flesh to his followers, he would strengthen them in his cause. He would require no additional motive to take her body, and no doubt he reinterred her in hoarded snow in some cellar, or in one of the abandoned mines with which that region abounds. You arrived, and wishing to bind you to him, he ordered her brought out.'
Something passed too swiftly to be seen an instant later the flier rocked with the violence of its motion. Sparks maneuvered on the screen.
Before the Autarch could take the controls again, we were scudding backward.
There was a detonation so loud it seemed to paralyze me, and the reverberating sky opened in a blossom of yellow fire. I have seen a sparrow, struck by a stone from Eata's sling, reel in the air just as we did, and fall, like us, fluttering to one side.
I woke to darkness, pungent smoke, and the smell of fresh earth. For a moment or a watch I forgot my rescue and believed I lay on the field where Daria and I, with Guasacht, Erblon, and the rest, had fought the Ascians.
Someone lay near me I heard the sigh of his breath, and the creakings and scrapings that betray movement but at first I paid no heed to them, and later I came to believe that these sounds were made by foraging animals, and grew afraid; later still, I recalled what had happened and knew they were surely made by the Autarch, who must have survived the crash with me, and I called to him.
'So you still live, then.' His voice was very weak. 'I feared you would die though I should have known better. I could not revive you, and your pulse was but faint.'
'I have forgotten! Do you remember when we flew over the armies? For a time I forgot it! I know now what it is to forget.'
There was pale laughter in his voice. 'Which you will now remember always.'
'I hope so, but it fades even as we speak. It vanishes like mist, which must itself be a forgetting. What was that weapon that brought us down?'
'I do not know. But listen. These are the most important words of my life.
Listen. You have served Vodalus, and his dream of renewed empire. You still wish, do you not, that humankind should go again to the stars?'
I recalled something Vodalus had told me in the wood and said, 'Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun.'
'They were so once and brought all the old wars of Urth with them, and in the young suns kindled new ones. Even they,' (I could not see him, yet I knew by his tone that he had indicated the Ascians) 'understand it must not be so again.
They wish the race to become a single individual the same, duplicated to the end of number. We wish each to
