“The House Absolute?” the uhlan muttered.
I said, “It's not far from here, I think.”
“I am to be especially vigilant.”
“I feel sure one of your comrades will be along soon.” I caught my mount and clambered onto his lofty back.
“M-m-master, you're not going to l-l-leave us again? Beuzec has seen you perform but twice.” I was about to answer Hethor when I caught sight of a flash of white among the trees across the highway. Something huge was moving there. At once, the thought that the sender of the notules might have other weapons at hand filled my mind, and I dug my heels into the black's flanks. He sprang away. For half a league or more we raced along the narrow strip of ground that separated the road from the river. When at last I saw Jonas, I galloped across to warn him, and told him what I had seen.
While I spoke he seemed lost in reflection. When I had finished, he said, “I know of nothing like the being you describe, but there may be many importations I know nothing of.”
“But surely such a thing wouldn't be wandering free like a strayed cow!” Instead of replying, Jonas pointed toward the ground a few strides ahead. A graveled path hardly more than a cubit wide wound among the trees. It was bordered with more wild flowers than I have ever seen growing naturally in company, and it was of pebbles so uniform in size, and of such shining whiteness, that they must surely have been carried from some secret and far-off beach.
After riding a bit closer to examine it, I asked Jonas what such a path here could possibly mean.
“Only one thing, surely — that we are already on the grounds of the House Absolute.” Quite suddenly, I recalled the spot. “Yes,” I said. “Once Josepha and I, with some others, made up a fishing party and came here. We crossed by the twisted oak...”
Jonas looked at me as though I were mad, and for a moment I felt that I was. I had ridden hunting often before, but this was a charger I sat, and no hunter. My hands raised themselves like spiders to pluck out my eyes — and would have done so if the ragged man beside me had not struck them down with his own hand, which was of steel. “You are not the Chatelaine Thecla,” he said. “You are Severian, a journeyman of the torturers, who was unfortunate enough to love her. See yourself!” He held up the steel hand so that I could see a stranger's face, narrow, ugly, and bewildered, reflected in its work-polished balm.
I remembered our tower then, the curved walls of smooth, dark metal. “I am Severian,” I said.
“That is correct. The Chatelaine Thecla is dead.”
“Jonas...”
“Yes?”
“The uhlan is alive now — you saw him. The Claw gave him life again. I laid it on his forehead, but perhaps it was just that he saw it with his dead eyes. He sat up. He breathed and spoke to me, Jonas.”
“He was not dead.”
“You saw him,” I said again.
“I am much older than you are. Older than you think. If there is one thing I have learned in so many voyages, it is that the dead do not rise, nor the years turn back. What has been and is gone does not come again.”
Thecla's face was before me still, but it was blown by a dark wind until it fluttered and went out. I said, “If I had only used it, called on the power of the Claw when we were at the banquet of the dead...”
“The uhlan had nearly suffocated, but was not quite dead. When I got the notules away from him he was able to breathe, and after a time he regained consciousness. As for your Thecla, no power in the universe could have restored her to life. They must have dug her up while you were still imprisoned in the Citadel and stored her in an ice cave. Before we saw her, they had gutted her like a partridge and roasted her flesh.” He gripped my arm. “Severian, don't be a fool!” At that moment I wanted only to perish. If the notule had reappeared, I would have embraced it. What did appear, far down the path, was a white shape like that I had seen nearer the river. I tore myself away from Jonas and galloped toward it.
The Antechamber
There are beings — and artifacts — against which we batter our intelligence raw, and in the end make peace with reality only by saying, “It was an apparition, a thing of beauty and horror.” Somewhere among the swirling worlds I am so soon to explore, there lives a race like and yet unlike the human. They are no taller than we. Their bodies are like ours save that they are perfect, and that the standard to which they adhere is wholly alien to us. Like us they have eyes, a nose, a mouth; but they use these features (which are, as I have said, perfect) to express emotions we have never felt, so that for us to see their faces is to look upon some ancient and terrible alphabet of feeling, at once supremely important and utterly unintelligible.
Such a race exists, yet I did not encounter it there at the edge of the gardens of the House Absolute. What I had seen moving among the trees, and what I now — until I at last saw it clearly — flung myself toward, was rather the giant image of such a being kindled to life. Its flesh was of white stone, and its eyes had the smoothly rounded blindness (like sections cut from eggshells) we see in our own statues. It moved slowly, like one drugged or sleeping, yet not unsteadily. It seemed sightless, yet it gave the impression of awareness, however slow.
I have just paused to reread what I have written of it, and I see that I have failed utterly to convey the essence of the thing. Its spirit was that of sculpture. If some fallen angel had overheard my conversation with the green man, he might have contrived such an enigma to mock me. In its every movement it carried the serenity and permanency of art and stone; I felt that each gesture, each position of the head and limbs and torso, might be the last. Or that each might be repeated interminably, as the poses of the gnomens of Valeria's many-faceted dial were repeated down the curving corridors of the instants. My initial terror, after the white statue's strangeness had washed away my will toward death, was the instinctive one that it would do me hurt.
My second was that it would not attempt to. To be as frightened of something as I was of that silent, inhuman figure, and then to discover that it meant no harm, would have been unbearably humiliating. Forgetting for a moment the ruin it would bring her blade to strike that living stone, I drew Terminus Est and reined in the black. The breeze itself seemed to pause as we stood there, the black hardly quivering, myself with sword upraised, as still almost ourselves as statues. The real statue came toward us, its three or four times life-size face stamped with inconceivable emotion and its limbs wrapped in terrible and perfect beauty.
