I nodded and promised I would.

“The drug will be stronger than any you have known, and though all but mine will be faint, there will be hundreds of personalities.... We are many lives.”

“I understand,” I said.

“The Ascians march at dawn. Can there be more than a single watch remaining of the night?”

“I hope that you will live it out, Sieur, and many more. That you’ll recover.”

“You must kill me now, before Urth turns to face the sun. Then I will live in you ... never die, I live by mere volition now. I am relinquishing my life as I speak.”

To my utter surprise, my eyes were streaming with tears. “I’ve hated you since I was a boy, Sieur.

I’ve done you no harm, but I would have harmed you if I could, and now I’m sorry.”

His voice had faded until it was softer than the chirping of a cricket. “You were right to hate me, Severian. I stand ... as you will stand ...for so much that is wrong.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why?” I was on my knees beside him.

“Because all else is worse. Until the New Sun comes, we have but a choice of evils. All have been tried, and all have failed. Goods in common, the rule of the people ... everything. You wish for progress?

The Ascians have it. They are deafened by it, crazed by the death of Nature till they are ready to accept Erebus and the rest as gods. We hold human kind stationary ... in barbarism. The Autarch protects the people from the exultants, and the exultants... shelter them from the Autarch. The religious comfort them.

We have closed the roads to paralyse the social order....”

His eyes fell shut. I put my hand upon his chest to feel the faint stirring of his heart.

“Until the New Sun ...”

This was what I had sought to escape, not Agia or Vodalus or the Ascians. As gently as I could, I lifted the chain from his neck, unstoppered the vial and swallowed the drug. Then with that short, stiff blade I did what had to be done.

When it was over, I covered him from head to toe with his own saffron robe and hung the empty vial about my own neck. The effect of the drug was as violent as he had warned me it would be. You that read this, who have never, perhaps, possessed more than a single consciousness, cannot know what it is to have two or three, much less hundreds. They lived in me and were joyful, each in his own way, to find they had new life. The dead Autarch, whose face I had seen in scarlet ruin a few moments before, now lived again. My eye and hands were his, I knew the work of the hives of the bee of the House Absolute and the sacredness of them, who steer by the sun and fetch gold of Urth’s fertility. I knew his course to the Phoenix Throne, and to the stars, and back. His mind was mine and filled mine with lore whose existence I had never suspected and with the knowledge other minds had brought to his. The phenomenal world seemed dim and vague as a picture sketched in sand over which an errant wind veered and moaned. I could not have concentrated on it if I had wished to, and I had no such wish.

The black fabric of our prison tent faded to a pale dovegrey, and the angles of its top whirled like the prisms of kaleidoscope. I had fallen without being aware of it and lay near the body of my predecessor, where my attempts to rise resulted in nothing more than the beating of my hands upon the ground.

How long I lay there I do not know. I had wiped the knife now, still, my knife—and concealed it as he had. I could vividly picture a self of dozens of superposed images slitting the wall and slipping out into the night. Severian, Thecla, myriad others all escaping. So real was the thought that I often believed I had done it; but always, when I ought to have been running between the trees, avoiding the exhausted sleepers of the army of the Ascians, I found myself instead in the familiar tent, with the draped body not far from my own.

Hands clasped mine. I supposed that the officers had returned with their lashes, and tried to see and to rise so I would not be struck. But a hundred random memories intruded themselves like the pictures the owner holds up to us in rapid succession in a cheap gallery: a footrace, the towering pipes of an organ, a diagram with labelled angles, a woman riding in a cart.

Someone said, “Are you all right? What’s happened to you?” I felt the spittle dribbling from my lips, but no words came.

XXX. The Corridors of Time

SOMETHING STRUCK MY FACE a tingling blow.

“What’s happened? He’s dead. Are you drugged?”

“Yes. Drugged.” Someone else was speaking, and after a moment I knew who it was: Severian, the young torturer.

But who was I?

“Get up. We’ve got to get out.”

“Sentry.”

“Sentries,” the voice corrected us. “There were three of them. We killed them.”

I was walking down a stair white as salt, down to nenuphars and stagnant water. Beside me walked a suntanned girl with long and slanting eyes. Over her shoulder peered the sculptured face of one of the eponyms. The carver had worked in jade; the effect was that of a face of grass.

“Is he dying?”

“He sees us now. See his eyes.”

I knew where I was. Soon the pitchman would thrust his head through the doorway of the tent to tell me to be gone. “Above ground,” I said. “You told me I would see her above ground. But that was easy.

She is here.”

“We must go.” The green man took my left arm and Agia my right, and they led me out.

We walked a long way, just as I had envisioned myself running; stepping sometimes over sleeping Ascians.

“They keep little guard,” Agia whispered. “Vodalus told me their leaders are so well obeyed they can scarcely conceive of treacherous attack, In the war, our soldiers surprise them often.”