Severian the Apprentice

At last I called out to the crouching men, "My sword . . . Where is my sword? Did one of you take her?"

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"He-he-hethor am I, come to serve you, to scrape the mud from your cloak, whet the great sword, c-c-carry the basket with the eyes of your victims looking up at me, Master, eyes like the dead moons of Verthandi when the sun has gone out."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"As for the beaten cocks, my family and I can eat them. There's no capon so tender as a cock that has been fought to death, just as the best beef comes from a bull that has died in the bull ring and the best venison from a stag the hounds have run all day."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"Is all the world a war of good and bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?"

I had not, and could only stare.

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

Love and desire are said to be no more than cousins

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"Long I signed on the silver-sailed ships, the hundred-masted whose masts reached out to touch the st-st-stars, I, floating among their shining jibs with the Pleiades burning beyond the top-royal sp-sp-spar, hilt never have I seen ought like you! "

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"The best and cockiest cock will win, and he is the one who will sire many more chicks to swell my flock."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"When I arrived, you said you had no greater joy than seeing me, and you knelt. Did you mean what you said, or anything like it? Were you confusing me with someone else?"

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"I don't think I have ever heard you talk so much about your past life before. Do you remember your father now, and the house where the bat was killed?"

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"And my master, dark master, death's victory, viceroy over the n-night!"

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"The Conciliator was a man, Severian the Lictor, and not a cat or a bird."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"Severian, would you like to watch our craft rise? Baldanders always comes to see us off, and though he is not the type to rhapsodize over views artificial or natural, I should think myself that it must be worth seeing."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"Severian, I remember being told that there were blood bats farther north. When I was just a child, someone used to frighten me by telling me about them."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"O lords and mistresses of creation, silkencapped, silken-haired women, and man commanding empires and the armies of the F-f-foemen of our Ph-ph-photosphere!"

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

If, as we hope, it still exists and has not been cut to make smaller gems, the Claw of the Conciliator is the last relic we possess of the greatest of good men, and we treasured it because we still treasure his memory."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

So I told Ossipago all the things the Claw had accomplished while it had been in my keeping—about the uhlan on the highway, and the man-apes, and all the other instances of its power that I have already recorded here.

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there we must be."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

I do not know why it should be humiliating to receive a stranger while sitting on the ground, but it is so.

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"I saw the Claw of the Conciliator when it was elevated for our adoration. It was a great sapphire, as big around as an orichalk. It must have been worth more than many villas, and no doubt it was for that reason that the thieves took it."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"It's his glands, Severian. The endocrine system and the thyroid. Everything must be managed so carefully, otherwise he would grow too fast. And then I must see that his weight doesn't break his bones, and a thousand other things."

[Severian the Apprentice @UrthScroll]

"And if she doesn't swim between stars what a useless thing to say."