“I’d rather you took me to someone who could guide me there.”

“I can do that too. Old Ultan has a map somewhere in his Library. That boy of his will get it for you.”

“This isn’t the Citadel,” I reminded him again. “How did you come to be here, anyway? Did they bring you here to clean these?”

“That’s right. That’s right.” He leaned on my arm. “There’s a logical explanation for everything, and don’t you forget it. That must have been the way. Father Inire wanted me to clean his, so here I am.” He paused, considering. “Wait a bit, I’ve got it wrong. I had talent as a boy, that’s what I’m supposed to say. My parents, you know, always encouraged me, and I’d draw for hours. I recollect one time I spent all one sunny day sketching in chalk on the back of our house.”

A narrower corridor had opened to our left, and he pulled me down it. Though it was less well-lit (nearly dark, in fact) and so cramped that one could not stand at anything like the proper distance from them, it was lined with pictures much larger than those in the main corridor, pictures that stretched from floor to ceiling, and that were far wider than my outstretched arms. From what I could see of them, they appeared very bad — mere daubs. I asked Rudesind who it was who had told him he must tell me about his childhood.

“Why, Father Inire,” he said, cocking his head up to look at me. “Who do you suppose?” He dropped his voice. “Senile. That’s what they say. Been vizier to I don’t know how many autarchs since Ymar. Now you be quiet and let me talk. I’ll find old Ultan for you.”

“An artist — a real one — came by where we lived. My mother, being so proud of me, showed him some of the things I’d done. It was Fechin, Fechin himself, and the portrait he made of me hangs here to this day, looking out at you with my brown eyes. I’m at a table with some brushes and a tangerine on it. I’d been promised them when I was through sitting.”

I said, “I don’t think I have time to look at it right now.”

“So I became an artist myself. Pretty soon, I took to cleaning and restoring the works of the great ones. Twice I’ve cleaned my own picture. It’s strange, I tell you, for me to wash my own little face like that. I keep wishing somebody would wash mine now, make the dirt of the years come off with his sponge. But that’s not what I’m taking you to see — it’s the Green Room you’re after, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” I said eagerly.

“Well, we’ve a picture of it right here. Have a look. Then when you see it, you’ll know it.”

He indicated one of the wide, coarse paintings. It was not of a room at all, but seemed to show a garden, a pleasance bordered by high hedges, with a lily pond and some willows swept by the wind. A man in the fantastic costume of a Ilanero played a guitar there, as it appeared for no ear but his own. Behind him, angry clouds raced across a sullen sky.

“After this you can go to the library and see Ultan’s map,” the old man said. The painting was of that irritating kind which dissolves into mere blobs of color unless it can be seen as a whole. I took a step backward to get a better perspective of it, then another.

With the third step, I realized I should have made contact with the wall behind me, and that I had not. I was standing instead inside the picture that had occupied the opposite wall: a dark room of ancient leather chairs and ebony tables. I turned to look at it, and when I turned back, the corridor where I had stood with Rudesind had vanished, and a wall covered with old and faded paper stood in its place.

I had drawn Terminus Est without consciously willing to do so, but there was no enemy to strike. Just as I was on the point of trying the room’s single door, it opened and a figure in a yellow robe entered. Short, white hair was brushed back from his rounded brow, and his face might almost have served a plump woman of forty; about his neck, a phallus-shaped vial I remembered hung on a slender chain.

“Ah,” he said. “I wondered who had come. Welcome, Death.”

With as much composure as I could muster, I said, “I am the Journeyman Severian — of the guild of torturers, as you see. My entrance was entirely involuntary, and to be truthful, I would be very grateful to you if you could explain just how it happened. When I was in the corridor outside, this room appeared to be no more than a painting. But when I took a step or two back to view the one on the other wall, I found myself in here. By what art was that done?”

“No art,” the man in the yellow robe said. “Concealed doors are scarcely an original invention, and the constructor of this room did no more than devise a means of concealing an open door. The room is shallow, as you see; indeed, it is shallower than you perceive even now, unless you’re already aware that the angles of the floor and ceiling converge, and that the wall at the end is not so high as the one through which you came.”

“I see,” I said, and in fact I did. As he spoke that crooked room, which my mind, accustomed always to ordinary ones, had tricked me into believing of normal shape, became itself, with a slanted and trapezoidal ceiling and a trapezoidal floor. The very chairs that faced the wall through which I had come were things of little depth, so that one could hardly have sat on them; the tables were no wider than boards.

“The eye is deceived in a picture by such converging lines,” the man in the yellow robe continued. “So that when it encounters them in reality, with little actual depth and the additional artificiality of monochromatic lighting, it believes it sees another picture — particularly when it has been conditioned by a long succession of true ones. Your entrance with that great weapon caused a real wall to rise behind you to detain you until you had been examined. I need hardly add that the other side of the wall is painted with the picture you believed you saw.”

I was more astounded than ever. “But how could the room know I carried my sword?”

“That is more complex than I can well explain… far more so than this poor room. I can only say that the door is wrapped with metal strands, and that these know when the other metals, their brothers and sisters, pass their circle.”

“Did you do all this?”

“Oh, no. All these things…” He paused. “And a hundred more like them, make up what we call the Second House. They are the work of Father Inire, who was called by the first Autarch to create a secret palace within the walls of the House Absolute. You or I, my son, would no doubt have built a mere suite of concealed rooms. He contrived that the hidden house should be everywhere coextensive with the public one.”

“But you aren’t he,” I said. “Because now I know who you are! Do you recognize me?” I drew off my mask so he could see my face.

He smiled and said, “You came but once. The khaibit did not please you, then.”

“She pleased me less than the woman she counterfeited — or rather, I loved the other more. Tonight I have lost a friend, yet it seems to be a time for meeting old acquaintances. May I ask how you’ve come here from your House Azure? Were you summoned for the thiasus? I saw one of your women earlier tonight.”

He nodded absently. An oddly angled mirror set above a trumean at one side of the strange, shallow room caught his profile, delicate as a cameo, and I decided he must be an androgyne. Pity welled up in me, with a sense of helplessness, as I thought of him opening the door to men, night after night, at his establishment in the Algedonic Quarter. “Yes,” he said. “I will remain here for the celebration, then go.”

My mind was full of the picture old Rudesind had shown me in the corridor outside, and I said, “Then you can show me where the garden is.”

I sensed at once that he had been caught off-guard, possibly for the first time in many years. There was pain in his eyes, and his left hand moved (though only slightly) toward the vial at his throat. “So you have heard of that…” he said. “Even supposing that I knew the way, why should I reveal it to you? Many will seek to flee by that road if the pelagic argosy sights land.”