He brushed my acquiescence aside with an elegant motion of one hand. 'You think you can stalemate me with your willingness to die. Actually you're offering me an easy exit from a dilemma. Your Agia came to me with a very valuable thaumaturgist in her train, and asked as the price of his service and her own only that you, Severian of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, should be put into her hands. Now you say you are that Severian the Torturer and no one else, and it is with great embarrassment that I resist her demands.'
'And whom do you wish me to be?' I asked.
'I have, or I should say I had, a most excellent servant in the House Absolute.
You know him, of course, since it was to him that you gave my message.' Vodalus paused and smiled again. 'A week or so ago we received one from him. It was not, to be sure, openly addressed to me, but I had seen to it not long before that he was aware of our location, and we were not far from him. Do you know what he said?'
I shook my head.
'That's odd, because you must have been with him at the time. He said he was in a wrecked flier and that the Autarch was in the flier with him. He would have been an idiot to have sent such a message in the ordinary course of things, because he gave his location and he was behind our lines, as he must have known.'
'You are a part of the Ascian army, then?'
'We serve them in certain scouting capacities, yes. I see you are troubled by the knowledge that Agia and the thaumaturgist killed a few of their soldiers to take you. You need not be. Their masters value them even less than I do, and it was not a time for negotiation.'
'But they did not capture the Autarch.' I am not a good liar, but I was too exhausted, I think, for Vodalus to read my face easily.
He leaned forward, and for a moment his eyes glowed as though candles burned in their depths. 'He was there, then. How wonderful. You have seen him. You have ridden in the royal flier with him.'
I nodded once more.
'You see, ridiculous though it sounds, I feared you were he. One never knows. An Autarch dies and another takes his place, and the new Autarch may be there for half a century or a fortnight. There were three of you then? No more?'
'No.'
'What did the Autarch look like? Let me have every detail.'
I did as he asked, describing Dr. Talos as he had appeared in the part.
'Did he escape both the thaumaturgist's creatures and the Ascians? Or do the Ascians have him? Perhaps the woman and her paramour are holding him for themselves.'
'I told you the Ascians did not take him.'
Vodalus smiled again, but beneath his glowing eyes his twisted mouth suggested only pain. 'You see,' he repeated, 'for a time I thought you might be the one.
We have my servant, but he has suffered a head injury and is never conscious for more than a few moments. He will die very shortly, I'm afraid. But he has always told me the truth, and Agia says that you were the only one with him.'
'You think that I am the Autarch? No.'
'Yet you are changed from the man I met before.'
'You yourself gave me the alzabo, and the life of the Chatelaine Thecla. I loved her. Did you think that to thus ingest her essence would leave me unaffected?
She is with me always, so that I am two, in this single body. Yet I am not the Autarch, who in one body is a thousand.'
Vodalus answered nothing, but half closed his eyes as though he were afraid I would see their fire. There was no sound but the lapping of the river water and the much-muted voices of the little knot of armed men and women, who talked among themselves a hundred paces off and glanced from time to time at us. A macaw shrieked, fluttering from one tree to another.
'I would still serve you,' I told Vodalus, 'if you would permit it.' I was not certain it was a lie until the words had left my lips, and then I was bewildered in mind, seeking to understand how those words, which would have been true in the past for Thecla and for Severian too, were now false for me.
' 'The Autarch, who in one body is a thousand,' ' Vodalus quoted me. 'That is correct, but how few of us know it.'
XXVIII
On the March
Today, this being the last before I am to leave the House Absolute, I participated in a solemn religious ceremony. Such rituals are divided into seven orders according to their importance, or as the heptarchs say, their
'transcendence' something I was quite ignorant of at the time of which I was writing a moment ago. At the lowest level, that of Aspiration, are the private pieties, including prayers pronounced privately, the casting of a stone upon a cairn, and so forth. The gatherings and public petitionings that I, as a boy, thought constituted the whole of organized religion, are actually at the second level, which is that of Integration. What we did today belonged to the seventh and highest, the level of Assimilation.
In accordance with the principle of circularity, most of the accretions gathered in the progression through the first six were now dispensed with. There was no music, and the rich vestments of Assurance were replaced by starched robes whose sculptural folds gave all of us something of the air of icons. It is no longer possible for us to carry out the ceremony, as once we did, wrapped in the shining belt of the galaxy; but to achieve the effect as nearly as possible, Urth's attractive field was excluded from the basilica It was a novel sensation for me, and though I was unafraid, I was reminded again of that night I spent among the mountains when I felt myself on the point of falling off the world-something I will undergo in sober earnest tomorrow. At times the ceiling seemed a floor, or (what was to me far more disturbing) a wall became the ceiling, so that one looked upward through its open windows to see a mountainside of grass that lifted itself forever into the sky. Startling as it was, this vision was no less true than that we commonly see.
