“We will kill her then, when we are out of your sight.”

“That is a matter between you and her,” I said, and started after Dorcas. I had hardly caught up with her before we heard Jolenta’s screams. Dorcas halted and grasped my hand more tightly, asking what the sound was; I told her of the doctor’s threat.

“And you let her go?”

“I didn’t believe he meant it.”

As I said that, we had turned and were already retracing our way. We had not gone a dozen strides before the screams were succeeded by a silence so profound we could hear the rustling of a dying leaf. We hurried on; but by the time we reached the crossing, I felt certain we were too late, and so I was, if the truth be known, only hurrying because I knew Dorcas would be disappointed in me if I did not.

I was wrong in thinking Jolenta dead. As we rounded a turn in the path we saw her running toward us, her knees together as if her legs were hampered by her generous thighs, her arms crossed over her breasts to steady them. Her glorious red-gold hair fell across her eyes, and the thin organza shift she wore had been slashed to tatters. She fainted when Dorcas embraced her. “Those devils, they’ve beaten her,” Dorcas said.

“A moment ago we were afraid they would kill her.” I looked at the welts on the beautiful woman’s back. “These are the marks of the doctor’s cane, I think. She’s lucky he didn’t set Baldanders on her.”

“But what can we do?”

“We can try this.” I fished the Claw from my boot-top and showed it to her. “Do you remember the thing we found in my sabretache? That you said was no true gem? This is what it was, and it seems to help injured people, sometimes. I wanted to use it on Baldanders, but he wouldn’t let me.”

I held the Claw over Jolenta’s head, then ran it along the bruises on her back, but it flamed no brighter and she seemed no better. “It isn’t working,” I said. “I’ll have to carry her.”

“Put her over your shoulder, or you’ll be holding her just where she’s been hurt worst.”

Dorcas carried Terminus Est, and I did as she suggested, finding Jolenta nearly as heavy as a man. For a long while we trudged thus beneath the pale green canopy of the leaves before Jolenta’s eyes opened. Even then she could hardly walk or stand without help, however, or so much as comb back that extraordinary hair with her fingers to let us better see the tear-stained oval of her face. “The doctor won’t let me come with him,” she said.

Dorcas nodded. “It seems not.” She might have been talking to someone far younger than herself.

“I will be destroyed.”

I asked why she said that, but she only shook her head. After a time she said, “May I go with you, Severian? I don’t have any money. Baldanders took away what the doctor had given me.” She shot a sidelong glance at Dorcas. “She has money too — more than I got. As much as the doctor gave you.”

“He knows that,” Dorcas said. “And he knows any money I have is his, if he wants it.”

I changed the subject. “Perhaps both of you should know that I may not be going to Thrax, or at least, not directly. Not if I can discover the whereabouts of the order of Pelerines.”

Jolenta looked at me as if I were mad. “I’ve heard they roam the whole world. Besides, they accept only women.”

“I don’t want to join them, only to find them. The last news I had was that they were on the way north. But if I can find out where they are, I’ll have to go there — even if it means turning south again.”

“I’m going where you go,” Dorcas declared. “Not to Thrax.”

“And I’m going nowhere,” Jolenta sighed.

As soon as we no longer had to support Jolenta, Dorcas and I drew somewhat ahead of her. When we had been walking for some time, I turned to look back at her. She was no longer weeping, but I hardly recognized the beauty who had once accompanied Dr. Talos. She had held her head proudly, and even arrogantly. Her shoulders had been thrown back and her magnificent eyes had flashed like emeralds. Now her shoulders drooped with weariness and she looked at the ground.

“What was it you spoke of with the doctor and the giant?” Dorcas asked as we walked.

“I’ve already told you,” I said.

“Once you called out so loudly that I could hear what you said. It was ‘Do you know who the Conciliator was?’ But I couldn’t tell if you didn’t know yourself, or were only seeking to discover if they knew.”

“I know very little — nothing, really. I’ve seen pictures that are supposed to be of him, but they differ so much they can hardly be of the same man.”

“There are legends.”

“Most of them I’ve heard sound very foolish. I wish Jonas were here; he would take care of Jolenta, and he would know about the Conciliator. Jonas was the man we met at the Piteous Gate, the man who rode the merychip. For a time he was a good friend to me.”

“Where is he now?”

“That’s what Dr. Talos wanted to know. I don’t know, and I don’t wish to speak of it. Tell me about the Conciliator, if you want to talk.”

No doubt it was foolish, but as soon as I mentioned that name, I felt the silence of the forest like a weight. The sighing of a little wind somewhere among the uppermost branches might have been the sigh from a sickbed; the pale green of the light-starved leaves suggested the pallid faces of starved children.

“No one knows much about him,” Dorcas began, “and I probably know less than you do. I don’t even remember now how I learned what I know. Anyway some people say he was hardly more than a boy. Some say he was not a human being at all — not a cacogen, but the thought, tangible to us, of some vast intelligence to whom our actuality is no more real than the paper theaters of the toy sellers. The story goes that he once took a dying woman by the hand and a star by the other, and from that time forward he had the power to reconcile the universe with humanity, and humanity with the universe, ending the old breach. He had a way of vanishing, then reappearing when everyone thought he was dead — reappearing sometimes after he had been buried. He might be encountered as an animal, speaking the human tongue, and he appeared to some pious woman or other in the form of roses.”

I recalled my masking. “Holy Katharine, I suppose, at her execution.”

“There are darker legends, too.”

“Tell them to me.”

“They frightened me,” Dorcas said. “Now I don’t even remember them. Doesn’t that brown book you carry with you make any mention of him?”

I drew it out and saw that it did, and then, since I could not comfortably read while we walked, I thrust it back in my sabretache again, resolving to read that section when we camped, as we would have to soon.

Chapter 27

TOWARD THRAX

Our path ran through the stricken forest for as long as the light lasted; a watch after dark we reached the edge of a river smaller and swifter than Gyoll, where by moonlight we could see broad cane fields on the farther side waving in the night wind. Jolenta had been sobbing with weariness for some distance, and Dorcas and I agreed to halt. Since I would never have risked Terminus Est’s honed blade on the heavy limbs of the forest trees, we would have had little firewood there; such dead branches as we had come across had been soaked with moisture and were already spongy with decay. The riverbank provided an abundance of twisted, weathered sticks, hard and light and dry.

We had broken a good many and laid our fire before I remembered I no longer had my striker, having left it with the Autarch, who must also, I felt certain, have been the “Highly placed servant” who had filled Dr. Talos’s hands with chrisos. Dorcas had flint, steel, and tinder among her scant baggage, however, and we were soon comforted by a roaring blaze. Jolenta was fearful of wild beasts, though I labored to explain to her how unlikely it was that the soldiers would permit anything dangerous to live in a forest that ran up to the gardens of the House Absolute. For her sake we burned three thick brands at one end only, so that if need arose we could snatch them from the fire and threaten the creatures she dreaded.