“His next thought — which had better been his first, sieur, as he often owned to my mother and me as we sat by the fireside — was that this carnifex had set out upon some sinister mission, supposing himself apt to pass unobserved. It was vital, sieur, as my father understood at once, to learn if his errand served Father Inire or some other. My father therefore approached him as boldly as if he’d a cohort of hastarii at his back and asked his business straight out.”

Thais murmured, “If he had been set upon some evil errand, he would have owned it, no doubt.”

Odilo said, “My dear lady, I don’t know whom you may be, as you have refrained from informing us even when our exalted guest obligingly made us privy to his own patrician identity. But you obviously know nothing of artifice, nor of the intrigues carried out daily — and nightly! — among the myriad hallways of our House Absolute. My father was well aware that no agent entrusted with an irrevealable commission would disclose it, however abrupt the demand. He hazarded that some involuntary gesture or fleeting expression might betray treachery, were such intended.”

“Wasn’t that Severian masked?” I asked. “You said he was dressed as a torturer.”

“I’m quite certain he wasn’t, sieur, as my father described him often — a most savage countenance, sieur, severely scarred on one cheek.”

“I know!” Pega broke in. “I’ve seen his portrait and his bust. They’re in the Hypogeum Abscititious, where the Autarch put them when she married again. He looked like he’d cut your throat whistling.”

I felt that someone had cut my own.

“Quite apropos!” Odilo approved. “My father said much the same, though he never put it so succinctly that I can recall.”

Pega was examining me. “He never had children, did he?”

Odilo smiled. “One would have heard of that, I imagine.”

“Legitimate children. But he could have covered any woman in the House Absolute, just by cocking an eyebrow. Exultants, all of them.”

Odilo told her to hold her tongue and said, “I do hope you will forgive Pega, sieur. After all, it’s rather a compliment.”

“To be told I look like a cutthroat? Yes, it’s the kind I’m always getting.” I spoke without reflection and continued in the same way, seeking at once to turn the talk to Valeria’s remarriage and to conceal the grief I felt. “But wouldn’t the cutthroat have to be my grandfather? Severian the Great would be eighty or more if he were alive, surely. Whom should I ask about him, Pega? My mother or my father? And don’t you think there must have been something about him after all, for him to command so many fine chatelaines when he’d been a torturer in his youth, even if the Autarch took a new husband?”

To fill the silence that followed my little speech, Odilo said, “That guild is abolished, sieur, I believe.”

“Of course you do. That’s what people always believe.” The whole of the east was black already, and the motion of our improvised raft had grown perceptibly more lively.

Pega whispered, “I didn’t mean to offend, Hipparch. It’s just that…” Whatever it was, was lost in the breaking of a wave.

“No,” I told her. “You’re right. He was a hard man from all I know of him; and a cruel one too, at least by reputation, though perhaps he wouldn’t have owned to that. Quite possibly Valeria wed him for his throne, though I believe she’s sometimes said otherwise. Her second husband made her happy, at least.”

Odilo chortled. “Well put, sieur. A distinct hit. You must take care, Pega, when you cross swords with a soldier.”

Thais stood, grasping a table leg with one hand and pointing with the other. “Look!”

Chapter XLV — The Boat

IT WAS a sail, lifted at times so high that we could glimpse the dark hull under it — at others nearly lost, dipping and spinning down the trenches of the flood. We shouted till we were hoarse, all of us, and capered and waved our arms, and at last I lifted Pega onto my shoulder, balancing as precariously as I had in the tossing howdah of Vodalus’s baluchither.

The wind spilled from the gaff-rigged sail. Pega groaned. “They’re sinking!”

“No,” I told her, “they’re coming about.”

The little jib emptied and flapped in its turn, then filled again. I cannot say just how many breaths or how many beatings of my heart passed before we saw the sharp jibboom stabbing the sky like a flagstaff set on a green hill. Time has seldom gone more slowly for me, and I feel they might have numbered several thousands.

A moment more, and the boat lay within long bowshot of us, with a rope trailing in the water. I plunged in, not sure that the others would follow me, but feeling I would be better able to help them on board than on the raft.

At once it seemed I had plunged into another world, more outlandish than the Brook Madregot. The unresting waves and clouded sky vanished as if they had never existed. I sensed a mighty current, yet I could not have said by what means I knew of it; for although the drowned pastures of my drowned nation slipped under me and its trees gestured to me with supplicating limbs, the water itself seemed at rest. It was as if I watched the slow rolling of Urth across the void.

At length I saw a cottage with its walls and stone chimney still standing; its open door appeared to beckon me. I felt a sudden terror and swam upward toward the light as desperately as when I had been drowning in Gyoll.

My head broke the surface; water streamed from my nostrils. For a moment it seemed that both raft and boat were gone, but a wave lifted the boat so that I glimpsed its weather-stained sail. I knew I had been underwater a long time, even though it had not seemed so. I swam as fast as I could, but I was careful to keep my face in air as much as possible, and I closed my eyes when it was not.

Odilo stood in the stern with a hand on the tiller; when he saw me, he waved and shouted some encouragement I could not hear. In a moment or two, Pega’s round face appeared above the gunnel, then another face, one I did not know, brown and wrinkled.

A wave picked me up as a cat does her kittens, and I dove headfirst down its farther side and found the floating rope in the trough. Odilo abandoned the tiller (which was held with a loop of cordage in any case, as I saw when I got on board) and joined in hauling me in. The little boat had only a couple of cubits of freeboard, and it was not difficult to brace my foot on the rudder and vault over the stern.

Although Pega had first seen me less than a watch before, she hugged me like a stuffed toy.

Odilo bowed as though we were being presented to each other in the Hypogeum Amaranthine. “Sieur, I feared that you had lost your life among these raging seas!” Odilo bowed again. “Sieur, it is exceeding pleasant as well as quite astonishing, sieur, if I may say so, sieur, to see you once again, sieur!”

Pega was more straightforward. “All of us thought you were dead, Severian!”

I asked him where the other woman was, then caught sight of her as a bucketful of water flew over the side and back into the flood. Like a sensible woman, she was bailing; and like a woman of sense, bailing downwind.

“She’s here, sieur. We are all here, all here now, sieur. I myself was the first to reach this craft.” Odilo inflated his chest with pardonable pride. “I was able to assist the females a bit, sieur. But no one had seen you at all, sieur, not since we cast our lots with the waves, if I may phrase it thus, sieur. We are most happy, sieur, indeed we are quite delighted—” He recollected himself. “Not that a young officer of your physique and undoubted prowess could be in much danger, sieur, where such humble persons as we had come safely through, sieur. Though but narrowly, sieur. Very narrowly, sieur. And yet the young women were concerned for you, sieur, for which I hope and trust you’ll forgive them.”