dream, and we were in a cavernous space, dimly lit and smelling of hay. Ahead was a stepped altar as large as a cottage and dotted with blue lights. I saw it and realized I was seeing it too well — our driver had been swept out of his seat or had jumped clear. Agia shrieked.
We crashed into the altar. There was a confusion of flying objects impossible to describe, the sense of everything whirling and tumbling and never colliding, as in the chaos before creation. The ground seemed to leap at me; it struck with an impact that set my ears humming.
I had been holding Terminus Est, I think, while I flew through the air, but she was no longer in my hand. When I tried to get up to look for her, I had no breath and no strength. Somewhere far off, a man shouted. I rolled on my side, then managed to get my lifeless legs beneath me.
We seemed to be near the center of the building, which was as big around as the Great Keep and yet completely empty: without interior walls, stairs, or furniture of any kind. Through the golden, dusty air I could see crooked pillars that seemed of painted wood. Lamps, mere points of light, hung a chain or more overhead. Far above them, a many-colored roof rippled and snapped in a wind I could not feel.
I stood on straw, and straw was spread everywhere in an endless yellow carpet, like the field of a titan after harvest. All about me were the battens of which the altar had been constructed: fragments of thin wood braved with gold leaf and set with turquoises and violet amethysts. With some vague idea of finding my sword, I began to walk, stumbling almost at once over the smashed body of the fiacre. One onegar lay not far from it; I recall thinking it must have broken its neck. Someone called, “Torturer!” and I looked around and saw Agia standing erect, though shakily. I asked if she were all right.
“Alive, anyway, but we must leave this place at once. Is that animal dead?” I nodded.
“I could have ridden on it. Now you'll have to carry me if you can. I don't think my right leg will bear my weight.” She tottered as she spoke, and I had to spring to her and catch her to keep her from falling. “Now we have to go,” she said. “Look around... can you see a door? Quickly!” I could not. “Why is it so urgent that we leave?”
“Use your nose if you can't use your eyes to see this floor.” I sniffed. The odor in the air was no longer straw, but straw burning; at almost the same instant I saw the flames, bright in the gloom, but still so small that a few moments before they must have been mere sparks. I tried to run, but could manage nothing better than a limping walk. “Where are we?”
“It's the Cathedral of the Pelerines — some call it the Cathedral of the Claw. The Pelerines are a band of priestesses who travel the continent. They never —” Agia broke off because we were approaching a cluster of scarlet-clad people. Or perhaps they were approaching us, for they seemed to me to have appeared in the middle distance without warning. The men had shaven heads and held gleaming scimitars curved like the young moon and blazing with gilding; a woman with the towering height of an exultant cradled a sheathed twohanded sword: my own Terminus Est. She wore a hood and a narrow cape that trailed long tassels. Agia began, “Our animals ran wild, Holy Domnicellae...”
“That is of no moment,” the woman who held my sword said. There was much beauty in her, but it was not the beauty of women who quench desire. “This belongs to the man carrying you. Tell him to set you on your feet and take it. You can walk.”
“A little. Do as she says, Torturer.”
“Don't you know his name?”
“He told me, but I've forgotten.”
I said, “Severian,” and steadied her with one hand while I accepted Terminus Est with the other.
“Use it to end quarrels,” the woman in scarlet said. “Not to begin them.”
“The straw floor of this great tent is on fire, Chatelaine. Do you know it?”
“It will be extinguished. The sisters and our servants are crushing the embers now.” She paused, her gaze flickering from Agia to me and back to Agia again.
“In the remains of our high altar, which your vehicle destroyed, we found only one thing that seemed yours, and likely to be of value to you — that sword. We have returned it. Will you now also return to us anything of value to us you may have found?”
I remembered the amethysts. “I found nothing of value, Chatelaine.” Agia shook her head, and I continued, “There were splinters of wood set with precious stones, but I left them where they had fallen.”
The men shifted the hilts of their weapons in the hands and sought good footing, but the tall woman stood motionless, staring at me, then at Agia, then at me once more. “Come to me, Severian.”
I came forward, a matter of three or four paces. It was a great temptation to draw Terminus Est as a defense against the men's blades, but I resisted it. Their mistress took my wrists in her hands and looked into my eyes. Her own were calm, and in the strange light seemed hard as beryls. “There is no guilt in him,” she said.
One of the men muttered, “You are mistaken, Domnicellae.”
“No guilt, I say. Step back, Severian, and let the woman come forward.” I did as she told me, and Agia limped to within a long pace of her. When she would not come nearer, the tall woman came to her and took her wrists as she had mine. After a moment, she glanced toward the other women who had waited behind the swordsmen. Before I realized what was happening, two of them seized Agia's gown and drew it over her head and away. One said, “Nothing, Mother.”
“I think this the day foretold.”
Her hands crossed over her breasts, Agia whispered to me, “These Pelerines are insane. Everyone knows it, and if I had had more time I would have told you so.” The tall woman said, “Return her rags. The Claw has not vanished in living memory, but it does so at will and it would be neither possible nor permissible for us to stop it.”
One of the women murmured, “We may find it in the wreckage still, Mother.” A second added, “Should they not be made to pay?”
“Let us kill them,” a man said.
The tall woman gave no indication that she had heard any of them. She was already leaving us, seeming to glide across the straw. The women followed her, looking at one another, and the men lowered their gleaming
