The old woman, Nicarete, interrupted him. “Look!” she exclaimed. “He knows her.” And so I did. A chamber of pink and ivory had risen in my mind, a room of which two walls were clear glass exquisitely framed. Fires burned there on marble hearths, dimmed by the sunbeams streaming through the glass but filling the room with a dry heat and the odor of sandalwood. An old woman wrapped in many shawls sat in a chair that was like a throne; a decanter of cut crystal and several brown phials stood on an inlaid table at her side.

“An elderly woman with a hooked nose,” I said. “The Dowager of Fors.”

“You do know her then.” Lomer’s head nodded slowly, as though it were answering the question put by its own mouth. “You are the first in many years.”

“Let us say that I remember her.”

“Yes.” The old man nodded. “They say she is dead now. But in my day she was a fine, healthy young woman. The Chatelaine Leocadia persuaded her to it, then caused us to be discovered, as Sancha knew she would. She was but fourteen, and no crime was charged to her. We had done nothing in any case; she had only begun to undress me.”

I said, “You must have been quite a young man yourself.”

He did not answer, so Nicarete replied for him. “He was twenty-eight.”

“And you,” I asked. “Why are you here?”

“I am a volunteer.”

I looked at her in some surprise.

“Someone must make amends for the evil of Urth, or the New Sun will never come. And someone must call attention to this place and the others like it. I am of an armiger family that may yet remember me, and so the guards must be careful of me, and of all the others while I remain here.”

“Do you mean that you can leave, and will not?”

“No,” she said, and shook her head. Her hair was white, but she wore it flowing about her shoulders as young women do. “I will leave, but only on my own terms, which are that all those who have been here so long that they have forgotten their crimes be set free as well.”

I remembered the kitchen knife I had stolen for Thecla, and the ribbon of crimson that had crept from under the door of her cell in our oubliette, and I said, “Is it true that prisoners really forget their crimes here?”

Lomer looked up at that. “Unfair! Question for question — that’s the rule, the old rule. We still keep the old rules here. We’re the last of the old crop, Nicarete and me, but while we last, the old rules still stand. Question for question. Have you friends who may strive for your release?”

Dorcas would, surely, if she knew where I was. Dr. Talos was as unpredictable as the figures seen in clouds, and for that very reason might seek to have me freed, though he had no real motive for doing so. Most importantly, perhaps, I was Vodalus’s messenger, and Vodalus had at least one agent in the House Absolute — him to whom I was supposed to deliver his message. I had tried to cast away the steel twice while Jonas and I were riding north, but had found that I could not; the alzabo, it seemed, had laid yet another spell upon my mind. Now I was glad of that.

“Have you friends? Relations? If you have, you may be able to do something for the rest of us.”

“Friends, possibly,” I said. “They may try to help me if they ever learn what has happened to me. Is it likely they may succeed?”

In that way we talked for a long time; if I were to write it all here, there would be no end to this history. In that room, there is nothing to do but talk and play a few simple games, and the prisoners do those things until all the savor has gone out of them, and they are left like gristle a starving man has chewed all day. In many respects, these prisoners are better off than the clients beneath our own tower; by day they have no fear of pain, and none is alone. But because most of them have been there so long, and few of our clients had been long confirmed, ours were, for the most part, filled with hope, while those in the House Absolute are despairing.

After what must have been ten watches or more, the glowing lamps in the ceiling began to fade, and I told Lomer and Nicarete I could remain awake no longer. They led me to a spot far from the door, where it was very dark, and explained that it would be mine until one of the other prisoners died and I succeeded to a better position.

As they left, I heard Nicarete say, “Will they come tonight?” Lomer made some reply, but I could not say what that reply was, and I was too fatigued to ask. My feet told me there was a thin pallet on the floor; I sat down and had begun to stretch myself full-length when my hand touched a living body.

Jonas’s voice said, “You needn’t jerk back. It’s only me.”

“Why didn’t you say something? I saw you walking about, but I couldn’t break away from the two old people. Why didn’t you come over?”

“I didn’t say anything because I was thinking. And I didn’t come over because I couldn’t break away from the women who had me, at first. Afterward, those people couldn’t break away from me. Severian, I must escape from here.”

“Everyone wants to, I suppose,” I told him. “Certainly I do.”

“But I must.” His thin, hard hand — his left hand of flesh — gripped mine. “If I don’t, I will kill myself or lose my reason. I’ve been your friend, haven’t I?” His voice dropped to the faintest of whispers. “Will the talisman you carry… the blue gem… set us free? I know the praetorians didn’t find it; I watched while they searched you.”

“I don’t want to take it out,” I said. “It gleams so in the dark.”

“I’ll turn one of these mats on its side and hold it to shield us.” I waited until I could feel the pallet in position, then drew out the Claw. Its light was so faint I might have shaded it with my hand.

“Is it dying?” Jonas asked.

“No, it’s often like this. But when it is active — when it transmuted the water in our carafe and when it awed the man-apes — it shines brightly. If it can procure our escape at all, I don’t believe it will do so now.”

“We must take it to the door. It might spring the lock.” His voice was shaking.

“Later, when the others are all asleep. I’ll free them if we can get free ourselves; but if the door doesn’t open — and I don’t think it will — I don’t want them to know I have the Claw. Now tell me why you must escape at once.”

“While you were talking to the old people I was being questioned by a whole family,” Jonas began. “There were several old women, a man of about fifty, another about thirty, three other women, and a flock of children. They had carried me to their own little niche in the wall, you see, and the other prisoners couldn’t come there unless they were invited, which they weren’t. I expected that they’d ask me about friends on the outside, or politics, or the fighting in the mountains. Instead I seemed to be only a kind of amusement for them. They wanted to hear about the river, and where I had been, and how many people dressed the way I did. And the food outside — there were a great many questions about food, some of them quite ludicrous. Had I ever seen butchering? And did the animals plead for their lives? And was it true that the ones who make sugar carried poisoned swords and would fight to defend it?”

“They had never seen bees, and seemed to think they were about the size of rabbits.”

“After a time I began to ask questions of my own and found that none of them, not even the oldest woman, had ever been free. Men and women are put into this room alike, it seems, and in the course of nature they produce children. And though some are taken away, most remain here throughout their lives. They have no possessions and no hope of release. Actually, they don’t know what freedom is, and although the older man and one girl told me seriously that they would like to go outside, I don’t think they meant to stay. The old women are seventh-generation prisoners, so they said — but one let it slip that her mother had been a seventh-generation prisoner as well.”