The first thing I saw was the muzzle of a trilhoen with a dark, bulging lens the size of a dinner plate. It was fitted with a seat for the operator, but no one sat there. The gunner had come down and stood upon the mammoth’s neck as a sailor might upon the deck of a ship, with one hand on the barrel for balance.

For a moment a light shone in my face, blinding me.

“It’s you. Miracles converge on us.” The voice was not truly either a man’s or a woman’s; it might almost have been a boy’s. I was laid at the speaker’s feet, and he said, “You’re hurt. Can you stand on that leg?”

I managed to say I did not think I could.

“This is a poor place to lie, but a good one to fall from. There’s a gondola farther back, but I’m afraid Mamillian can’t reach it with his trunk. You’ll have to sit up here, with your back against the swivel.”

I felt his hands, small, soft, and moist, beneath my arms. Perhaps it was their touch that told me who he was: The androgyne I had met in the snow-covered House Azure, and later in that artfully foreshortened room that posed as a painting hanging in a corridor of the House Absolute.

The Autarch.

In Thecla’s memories I saw him robed in jewels. Although he had said he recognized me, I could not believe in my dazed state that it was so, and I gave him the code phrase he had once given me, saying,

“The pelagic argosy sights land.”

“It does. It does indeed. Yet if you fall overboard now, I’m afraid Mamillian’s not quite quick enough to catch you ... despite his undoubted wisdom. Give him as much help as you can. I’m not as strong as I look.”

I got some part of the trilhoen’s mount in one hand and was able to pull myself around on the musty-smelling mat that was the mammoth’s hide. “To speak the truth,” I said, “you’ve never looked strong to me.”

“You have the professional eye and ought to know, but I’m not even as strong as that. You, on the other hand have always seemed to me a construction of horn and boiled leather. And you must be, or you’d be dead by now. What happened to your leg?”

“Burned, I think.”

“Well have to get you something for it.” He raised his voice slightly. “Home! Back home, Mamillian!”

“May I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Having a look at the field of battle. You fought here today, I take it.”

I nodded, though I felt my head would tumble from my shoulders.

“I didn’t... or rather, I did, but not personally. I ordered certain bodies of light auxiliaries into action, with a legion of peltasts in support. I suppose you must have been one of the auxiliaries. Were any of your friends killed?”

“I only had one. She was all right the last time I saw her.”

His teeth flashed in the moonlight. “You maintain your interest in women. Was it the Dorcas you told me of?”

“No. It doesn’t matter.” I did not quite know how to phrase what I was about to say. (It is the worst of bad manners to state openly that one has penetrated an incognito.) At last I managed, “I can see you hold high rank in our Commonwealth. If it won’t get me pushed from the back of this animal, can you tell me what someone who commands legions was doing conducting that place in the Algedonic Quarter?”

While I spoke, the night had grown rapidly darker, the stars winking out one after another like the tapers in a hall when the ball is over and footmen walk among them with snuffers like mitres of gold dangling from spidery rods. At a great distance I heard the androgyne say, “You know who we are. We are the thing itself, the self-ruler, the Autarch. We know more. We know who you are.”

Master Malrubius was, as I realize now, a very sick man before he died. At the time I did not know it, because the thought of sickness was foreign to me. At least half our apprentices, and perhaps more than half, died before they were raised to journeyman; but it never occurred to me that our tower might be an unhealthy place, or that the lower reaches of Gyoll, where we so often swam, were little purer than a cesspool. Apprentices had always died, and when we living apprentices dug their graves we turned up small pelvises and skulls, which we, the succeeding generation, reburied again and again until they were so much injured by the spade that their chalky particles were lost in the tar like soil. I, however, never suffered more than a sore throat and a running nose, forms of sickness that serve only to deceive healthy people into the belief that they know in what disease consists. Master Malrubius suffered real illness, which is to see death in shadows.

As he stood at his little table, one. felt that he was conscious of someone standing behind him. He looked straight to the front, never turning his head and hardly moving a shoulder, and he Spoke as much for that unknown listener as for us.

“I have done my best to teach you boys the rudiments of learning. They are the seeds of trees that should grow and blossom in your minds. Severian, look to your Q. It should be round and full like the face of a happy boy, but one of its cheeks is as fallen-in as your own. You have all, all you boys, seen how the spinal cord, lifting itself toward its culmination, expands and at last blossoms in the myriad pathways of the brain. And this one, one cheek round, the other seared and shrivelled.”

His trembling hand reached for the slate pencil, but it escaped his fingers and rolled over the edge of the table to clatter on the floor. He did not stoop to pick it up, fearful, I think, that in. stooping he might glimpse the invisible presence.

“I have spent much of my life, boys, in trying to implant those seeds in the apprentices of our guild. I have had a few successes, but not many. There was a boy, but he—”

He went to the port and spat, and because I was sitting near it I saw the twisted shapes formed by the seeping blood and knew that the reason I could not see the dark figure (for death is of the colour that is darker than fuligin) that accompanied him was that it stood within him.