He nodded. “We have driven them half as far to the north As they once drove us south, we autarchs.

Who they are you will discover in due time.... What matters is that you wish to know.” paused. “Both could be ours. Both armies, not just the one to the south.... Would you advise me to take both?” As he spoke, he manipulated some control and the flier canted forward, its stern pointing at the sky and its bow to the green earth, as though he meant to pour us out upon the disputed ground.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I told him.

“Half what you said of them was incorrect. They do not come from the hot countries of the north, but from the continent that lies across the equator. But you were right when you called them the slaves of Erebus. They think themselves the allies of those who wait in the deep. In truth, Erebus and his allies would give them to me if I would give our south to them. Give you and all the rest.”

I had to grip the back of the seat to keep from falling toward him. “Why are you telling me this?”

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 fumed 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 hanging. 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 coloured 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 centre 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 fier 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 paralyse 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.