The Shadow of the Torturer

18. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ALTAR

The hush of early morning had vanished while I was in the rag shop. Wains and drays rumbled by in an avalanche of beasts, wood, and iron; the shopkeeper’s sister and I had no more than stepped out of the door than I heard a flier skimming among the towers of the city. I looked up in time to see it, sleek as a raindrop on a windowpane.

“That’s probably the officer who called you out,” she remarked. “He’ll be on his way back to the House Absolute. A hipparch of the Septentrion Guard—isn’t that what Agilus said?”

“Is that your brother? Yes, something like that. What is your own name?”

“Agia. And you know nothing of monomachy? And have me for an instructor? Well, high Hypogeon help you. We’ll have to go to the Botanic Gardens to begin with and cut you an avern. Fortunately they’re not too far from here. Do you have enough money for us to take a fiacre?”

“I suppose so. If it is necessary.”

“Then you’re really not an armiger in costume. You’re a—whatever you are.”

“A torturer. Yes. When am I supposed to meet the hipparch?”

“Not until late afternoon, when the fighting begins at the Sanguinary Field and the avern opens its flower. We’ve plenty of time, but I think we’d better use it in getting you one and teaching you how to fight with it.” A fiacre drawn by a pair of onegars was dodging toward us, and she waved to it. “You’re going to be killed, you know.”

“From what you say, it seems very likely.”

“It’s practically certain, so don’t worry about your money.” Agia stepped out into the traffic, looking for a moment (so finely chiseled was that delicate face, so graceful the curve of her body as she lifted an arm) like a memorial statue to the unknown woman on foot. I thought she was certain to be killed herself. The fiacre drew up to her with the skittish animals dancing to one side as though she were a thyacine, and she vaulted in. Light as she was, her weight made the little vehicle rock. I climbed in beside her, where we sat with our hips pressed together. The driver glanced back at us, Agia said, “The landing for the Botanic Gardens,” and we jolted off. “So dying doesn’t bother you—that’s refreshing.”

I braced myself with a hand on the back of the driver’s bench. “Surely that’s not unusual. There must be thousands, and perhaps millions of people like me. People accustomed to death, who feel that the only part of their lives that really mattered is over.”

The sun was now just above the tallest spires, and the flooding light that turned the dusty pavement to red gold made me feel philosophical. In the brown book in my sabretache there was the tale of an angel (perhaps actually one of the winged women warriors who are said to serve the Autarch) who, coming to Urth on some petty mission or other, was struck by a child’s arrow and died. With her gleaming robes all dyed by her heart’s blood even as the boulevards were stained by the expiring life of the sun, she encountered Gabriel himself. His sword blazed in one hand, his great two-headed ax swung in the other, and across his back, suspended on the rainbow, hung the very battle horn of Heaven. “Where wend you, little one,” asked Gabriel, “with your breast more scarlet than the robin’s?”

“I am killed,” the angel said, “and I return to merge my substance once more with the Pancreator.”

“Do not be absurd. You are an angel, a pure spirit, and cannot die.”

“But I am dead,” said the angel, “nevertheless. You have observed the wasting of my blood—do you not observe also that it no longer issues in straining spurtings, but only seeps sluggishly? Note the pallor of my countenance. Is not the touch of an angel warm and bright? Take my hand and you will imagine you hold a horror new dragged from some stagnant pool. Taste my breath—is it not fetid, foul, and nidorous?” Gabriel answered nothing, and at last the angel said, “Brother and better, even if I have not convinced you with all my proofs, I pray you stand aside. I would rid the universe of my presence.”

“I am convinced indeed,” Gabriel said, stepping ftom the other’s way. “It is only that I was thinking that had I known we might perish, I would not at all times have been so bold.”

To Agia I said, “I feel like the archangel in the story—if I had known I could spend my life so easily and so soon, I would not—probably—have done it. Do you know the legend? But I have made my decisions now, and there’s nothing more to say or do. This afternoon the Septentrion will kill me with what? A plant? A flower? In some way I don’t understand. A short time ago, I thought I could go to a place called Thrax and live there whatever life there was to be lived. Well, last night I roomed with a giant. One is not more fantastical than the other.”

She did not reply, and after a time I asked, “What is that building over there? The one with the vermilion roof and the forked columns? I think there’s allspice pounded in the mortar. At least, I smell something of that sort from it.”

“The mensal of the monachs. Do you know you are a frightening man? When you entered our shop, I thought you only another young armiger in motley. Then when I found you really were a torturer, I thought it couldn’t really be so bad after all—that you were only a young man like other young men.”

“And you have known a great many young men, I imagine.” The truth was that I was hoping she had. I wanted her to be more experienced than I; and though I did not for an instant think myself pure, I wished to think her less pure still. “But there is something more to you after all. You have the face of someone who stands to inherit two palatinates and an isle somewhere I never heard of, and the manners of a shoemaker, and when you say you’re not afraid to die, you think you mean it, and under that you believe you don’t. But you do, at the very bottom. It wouldn’t bother you a bit to chop off my head either, would it?” Around us swirled traffic of every sort: machines, wheeled and wheelless vehicles pulled by animals and slaves, walkers, and riders on the backs of dromedaries, oxen, metamynodons, and hackneys. Now an open fiacre like our own drew up beside us. Agia leaned toward the couple it carried and shouted, “We’ll distance you!”

“Where bound?” the man called back, and I recognized Sieur Racho, whom I had once met when I had been sent to Master Ultan for books. I gripped Agia by the arm. “Are you mad, or is he?”

“The Garden Landing, for a chrisos!”

The other vehicle tore away with ours behind it. “Faster!” Agia shouted to our driver. Then to me: “Have you a dagger? It’s best to put the point to his back, so he can say he drove under threat of annihilation if we’re stopped.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“As a test. No one will believe your disguise. But everyone will believe you’re an armiger in fancy dress. I’ve just proved it.” (We careened about a dray loaded with sand.) “Besides, we’ll win. I know this driver and his team’s fresh. The other’s been carting that whore for half the night.” I realized then that I would be expected to give Agia the money if we won, and that the other woman would claim my (nonexis tent) chrisos from Racho if they did. Yet how sweet to humble him! Speed and the nearness of death (for I felt certain I would indeed be slain by the hipparch) made me more reckless than I had ever been in my life. I drew Terminus Est, and thanks to the length of her blade I could reach the onegars easily. Their flanks were already soaked with sweat, and the shallow cuts I made there must have burned like flames. “That’s better than any dagger,” I told Agia.

The crowd parted like water before the drivers’ whips, mothers clasping their children as they fled, soldiers vaulting on their spears to the safety of windowsills. The conditions of the race favored us: the fiacre ahead to some extent cleared our path, and it was more impeded by other vehicles than we. Still we gained only slowly, and to get a few ells’ advantage, our driver, who no doubt anticipated a rich tip if he won, sent the onegars hurtling up a flight of broad chalcedony steps. Marbles and monuments, pillars and pilasters, seemed thrown at our faces. We crashed through the green wall of a hedge as high as a house, overturned a cartload of comfits, dove through an arch and down a stair wound in a half turn, and were in the street again without ever knowing whose patio we had violated.

A baker’s barrow drawn by sheep ambled into the narrow space between our vehicle and the other, and our big rear wheel jolted it, sending a shower of fresh bread into the street and throwing Agia’s slight body against mine so pleasantly that I put an arm about it and held it there. I had clasped women so before—Thecla often, and hired bodies in the town. There was new bitter-sweetness in this, born of the cruel attraction Agia held for me. “I’m glad you did that,” she said in my ear. “I hate men who grab me,” and covered my face with kisses. The driver looked back with a grin of triumph, letting the maddened team choose its own path. “Gone down the Twisted Way—got them now—across the common and reach them by a hundred ells.”

The fiacre reeled and plunged into a narrow gateway in a barrier of shrubbery. An immense building loomed before us. The driver tried to turn his animals, but it was too late. We hit its side; it gave like the fabric of a dream, and we were in a cavernous space, dimly lit and smelling of hay. Ahead was a stepped altar as large as a cottage and dotted with blue lights. I saw it and realized I was seeing it too well—our driver had been swept out of his seat or had jumped clear. Agia shrieked.

We crashed into the altar. There was a confusion of flying objects impossible to describe, the sense of everything whirling and tumbling and never colliding, as in the chaos before creation. The ground seemed to leap at me; it struck with an impact that set my ears humming.

I had been holding Terminus Est, I think, while I flew through the air, but she was no longer in my hand. When I tried to get up to look for her, I had no breath and no strength. Somewhere far off, a man shouted. I rolled on my side, then managed to get my lifeless legs beneath me.

We seemed to be near the center of the building, which was as big around as the Great Keep and yet completely empty: without interior walls, stairs, or furniture of any kind. Through the golden, dusty air I could see crooked pillars that seemed of painted wood. Lamps, mere points of light, hung a chain or more overhead. Far above them, a many-colored roof rippled and snapped in a wind I could not feel.

I stood on straw, and straw was spread everywhere in an endless yellow carpet, like the field of a titan after harvest. All about me were the battens of which the altar had been constructed: fragments of thin wood braved with gold leaf and set with turquoises and violet amethysts. With some vague idea of finding my sword, I began to walk, stumbling almost at once over the smashed body of the fiacre. One onegar lay not far from it; I recall thinking it must have broken its neck. Someone called, “Torturer!” and I looked around and saw Agia—standing erect, though shakily. I asked if she were all right. “Alive, anyway, but we must leave this place at once. Is that animal dead?”

I nodded.

“I could have ridden on it. Now you’ll have to carry me if you can. I don’t think my right leg will bear my weight.” She tottered as she spoke, and I had to spring to her and catch her to keep her from falling. “Now we have to go,” she said. “Look around… can you see a door? Quickly!” I could not. “Why is it so urgent that we leave?”

“Use your nose if you can’t use your eyes to see this floor.” I sniffed. The odor in the air was no longer straw, but straw burning; at almost the same instant I saw the flames, bright in the gloom, but still so small that a few moments before they must have been mere sparks. I tried to run, but could manage nothing better than a limping walk. “Where are we?”

“It’s the Cathedral of the Pelerines—some call it the Cathedral of the Claw. The Pelerines are a band of priestesses who travel the continent. They never—” Agia broke off because we were approaching a cluster of scarlet-clad people. Or perhaps they were approaching us, for they seemed to me to have appeared in the middle distance without warning. The men had shaven heads and held gleaming scimitars curved like the young moon and blazing with gilding; a woman with the towering height of an exultant cradled a sheathed twohanded sword: my own Terminus Est. She wore a hood and a narrow cape that trailed long tassels. Agia began, “Our animals ran wild, Holy Domnicellae…”

“That is of no moment,” the woman who held my sword said. There was much beauty in her, but it was not the beauty of women who quench desire. “This belongs to the man carrying you. Tell him to set you on your feet and take it. You can walk.”

“A little. Do as she says, Torturer.”

“Don’t you know his name?”

“He told me, but I’ve forgotten.”

I said, “Severian,” and steadied her with one hand while I accepted Terminus Est with the other.

“Use it to end quarrels,” the woman in scarlet said. “Not to begin them.”

“The straw floor of this great tent is on fire, Chatelaine. Do you know it?”

“It will be extinguished. The sisters and our servants are crushing the embers now.” She paused, her gaze flickering from Agia to me and back to Agia again. “In the remains of our high altar, which your vehicle destroyed, we found only one thing that seemed yours, and likely to be of value to you—that sword. We have returned it. Will you now also return to us anything of value to us you may have found?”

I remembered the amethysts. “I found nothing of value, Chatelaine.” Agia shook her head, and I continued, “There were splinters of wood set with precious stones, but I left them where they had fallen.”

The men shifted the hilts of their weapons in the hands and sought good footing, but the tall woman stood motionless, staring at me, then at Agia, then at me once more. “Come to me, Severian.”

I came forward, a matter of three or four paces. It was a great temptation to draw Terminus Est as a defense against the men’s blades, but I resisted it. Their mistress took my wrists in her hands and looked into my eyes. Her own were calm, and in the strange light seemed hard as beryls. “There is no guilt in him,” she said.

One of the men muttered, “You are mistaken, Domnicellae.”

“No guilt, I say. Step back, Severian, and let the woman come forward.” I did as she told me, and Agia limped to within a long pace of her. When she would not come nearer, the tall woman came to her and took her wrists as she had mine. After a moment, she glanced toward the other women who had waited behind the swordsmen. Before I realized what was happening, two of them seized Agia’s gown and drew it over her head and away. One said, “Nothing, Mother.”

“I think this the day foretold.”

Her hands crossed over her breasts, Agia whispered to me, “These Pelerines are insane. Everyone knows it, and if I had had more time I would have told you so.” The tall woman said, “Return her rags. The Claw has not vanished in living memory, but it does so at will and it would be neither possible nor permissible for us to stop it.”

One of the women murmured, “We may find it in the wreckage still, Mother.” A second added, “Should they not be made to pay?”

“Let us kill them,” a man said.

The tall woman gave no indication that she had heard any of them. She was already leaving us, seeming to glide across the straw. The women followed her, looking at one another, and the men lowered their gleaming blades and backed away.

Agia was struggling into her gown. I asked her what she knew of the Claw, and who these Pelerines were.

“Get me out of here, Severian, and I’ll tell you. It isn’t lucky to talk of them in their own place. Is that a tear in the wall over there?” We walked in the direction she had indicated, stumbling sometimes in the soft straw. There was no opening, but I was able to lift the edge of the silken wall enough for us to slip under.