“Perhaps now that I am here with you again, these dreams will end.”

“And then I sleep, or at least fall into blackness. If I do not wake then, there is a second dream. I am in a boat poled across a spectral lake—”

“There is no mystery in that, at least,” I said. “You rode in such a boat with Agia and me. It belonged to a man named Hildegrin. Surely you must remember that trip.”

Dorcas shook her head. “It is not that boat but a much smaller one. An old man poles it, and I lie at his feet. I am awake, but I cannot move. My arm trails in the black water. Just as we are about to touch shore, I fall from the boat, but the old man does not see me, and as I sink through the water I know that he has never known I was there at all. Soon the light is gone, and I am very cold. Far above me, I hear a voice I love calling my name, but I cannot remember whose voice it is.”

“It’s my voice, calling to wake you.”

“Perhaps.” The whip mark Dorcas had carried from the Piteous Gate burned on her cheek like a brand.

For a while we sat without speaking. The nightingales were silent now, but linnets were singing in all the trees, and I saw a parrot, clad in scarlet and green like a little messenger in livery, flash among the branches.

At last Dorcas said, “What a frightful thing water is. I should not have brought you here, but it was the only place nearby where I could think to go. I wish we had sat on the grass under those trees.”

“Why do you hate it? It seems beautiful to me.”

“Because it is here in the sunshine, but by its own nature it runs down and down forever, away from the light.”

“But it rises again,” I said. “The rain we see in spring is the same water we saw running the gutters the year before. Or so Master Malrubius taught us.”

Dorcas’s smile flashed like a star. “That is good to believe, whether it’s true or not. Severian, it’s silly for me to say you’re the best person I know, because you’re the only good person I know. But I think if I met a thousand others, you would still be the best. That was what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“If you need my protection, you have it. You know that.”

“It isn’t that at all,” Dorcas said. “In a way I want to give you mine. Now that sounds silly, doesn’t it? I have no family, I have no one except you, and yet I think I can protect you.”

“You know Jolenta, and Dr. Talos and Baldanders.”

“They are no one. Don’t you feel that, Severian? Even I am no one, but they are less than I. The five of us were in the tent last night, and yet you were alone. You told me once that you don’t have much imagination, but you must have sensed that.”

“Is that what you want to protect me from — loneliness? I would welcome such protection.”

“Then I will give you all I can, for as long as I can. But most of all, I want to protect you from the opinion of the world. Severian, do you remember what I told you of my dream? How all the people in the shops, and on the street, believed that I was only some hideous ghost? They may be right.” She was shaking, and I held her.

“That is part of the reason the dream is so painful. The other part comes from knowing that in some other way they are wrong. The foul specter is in me. It is me. But there are other things in me too, and they are what I am as much as it is.”

“You could never be a foul specter, or anything foul.”

“Oh, yes,” she said seriously, and looked up at me. Her small, tilted face was never more beautiful than it was then in the sunlight, or more pure. “Oh, yes I could, Severian. Just as you can be what they call you. What you sometimes are. Do you remember how we saw the cathedral leap into the sky and burn away in an instant? And how we went walking down a road between trees until we saw a light ahead, and it was Dr. Talos and Baldanders, ready to put on their show with Jolenta?”

“You held my hand,” I said. “And we talked about philosophy. How could I forget?”

“When we came to the light and Dr. Talos saw us — do you remember what he said?”

I cast my mind back to that evening, the end of the day on which I had executed Agilus. In memory I heard the roar of the crowd, Agia’s scream, and then the roll of Baldanders’s drum. “He said that everyone had come now, and that you were Innocence, and I was Death.”

Dorcas nodded solemnly. “That’s right. But you’re not really Death, you know, no matter how often he calls you that. You’re no more Death than a butcher is because he cuts the throats of steers all day. To me you’re Life, and you’re a young man named Severian, and if you wanted to put on different clothes and become a carpenter or a fisherman, no one could stop you.”

“I have no desire to leave my guild.”

“But you could. Today. That’s the thing to remember. People don’t want other people to be people. They throw names over them and lock them in, but I don’t want you to let them lock you in. Dr. Talos is worse than most. In his own way, he’s a liar…”

She left the accusation unfinished, and I ventured, “I once heard Baldanders say he seldom lied.”

“In his own way, I said. Baldanders is right, Dr. Talos doesn’t lie the way other people understand lying. Calling you Death wasn’t a lie, it was a… a…”

“Metaphor,” I suggested.

“But it was a dangerous, bad metaphor and it was aimed at you like a lie.”

“Do you think Dr. Talos hates me, then? I would have said he was one of the few people who’ve showed me real kindness since I left the Citadel. You, Jonas — who’s gone now — an old woman I met while I was imprisoned, a man in a yellow robe — who also called me Death, by the way — and Dr. Talos. It’s a short list, actually.”

“I don’t think he hates in the way we understand it,” Dorcas replied softly. “Or for that matter, that he loves. He wants to manipulate everything he comes upon, to change it with his will. And since tearing down is easier than building, that’s what he does most often.”

“Baldanders seems to love him, though,” I said. “I used to have a crippled dog, and I’ve seen Baldanders look at the doctor the way Triskele used to look at me.”

“I understand you, but it doesn’t strike me that way. Have you ever thought of how you must have looked, when you looked at your dog? Do you know anything about their past?”

“Only that they lived together near Lake Diuturna. The people there appear to have set fire to their house to drive them away.”

“Do you think Dr. Talos could be Baldanders’s son?”

The idea was so absurd that I laughed, happy to have the release from tension. “Just the same,” Dorcas said, “that’s how they act. Like a slow-thinking, hardworking father with a brilliant, erratic son. At least so it seems to me.” It was not until we had left the bench and were walking back to the Green Room (which no more resembled the picture Rudesind had shown me than any other garden would have) that it occurred to me to wonder whether Dr. Talos’s calling Dorcas “Innocence” had not been a metaphor of the same kind.