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…”
    I found I could not say what it was I understood; that it was in fact on the level of meaning above language, a level we like to believe scarcely exists, though if it were not for the constant discipline we have learned to exercise upon our thoughts, they would always be climbing to it unaware.
    â€œGo on.”
    â€œI didn’t really understand, of course. I still think about it, and I still don’t. But I know somehow that she was bringing him back, and he was bringing the stone town back with him, as a setting for himself. Sometimes I have thought that perhaps it had never had any reality apart from him, so that when we rode over its pavements and the rubble of its walls, we were actually riding among his bones.”
    â€œAnd did he come?” she asked. “Tell me!”
    â€œYes, he returned. And then the client was dead, and the sick woman who had been with us also. And Apu-Punchau—that was the dead man’s name—was gone again. The witches ran away, I think, though perhaps they flew. But what I wanted to say was that we went on the next day on foot, and stayed the next night in the hut of a poor family. And that night while the woman who was with me slept, I talked to the man, who seemed to know a great deal about the stone town, though he did not know its original name. And I spoke with his mother, who I think knew something more than he, though she would not tell me as much.”
    I hesitated, finding it hard to speak of such things to this woman. “At first I supposed their ancestors might have come from that town, but they said it had been destroyed long before the coming of their race. Still, they knew much lore of it, because the man had sought for treasures there since he had been a boy, though he had never found anything, he said, save for broken stones and broken pots, and the tracks of other searchers who had been there long before him.
    â€œâ€˜In ancient days,’ his mother told me, ‘they believed that you could draw buried gold by putting a few coins of your own in the ground, with this spell or that. Many a one did it, and some forgot the place, or were kept from digging their own up again. That’s what my son finds. That is the bread we eat.’”
    I remembered her as she had been that night, old and stooped as she warmed her hands at a little fire of turf. Perhaps she resembled one of Thecla’s old nurses, for something about her brought Thecla closer to the surface of my mind than she had been since Jonas and I had been imprisoned in the House Absolute, so that once or twice when I caught sight of my hands, I was startled to see the thickness of the fingers, and their brown color, and to see them bare of rings.
    â€œGo on, Severian,” Cyriaca said again.
    â€œThen the old woman told me there was something in the stone town that truly drew its like to it. ‘You have heard tales of necromancers,’ she said, ‘who fish for the spirits of the dead. Do you know there are vivimancers
among the dead, who call to them those who can make them live again? There is such a one in the stone town, and once or twice in each saros one of those he has called to him will sup with us.’ And then she said to her son, ‘You will recall the silent man who slept beside his staff. You were only a child, but you will remember him, I think. He was the last until now.’ Then I knew that I, too, had been drawn by the vivimancer Apu-Punchau, though I had felt nothing.”
    Cyriaca gave me a sidelong look. “Am I dead then? Is that what you’re saying? You told me there was a witch who was the necromancer, and that you only stumbled upon her fire. I think that you yourself were the witch you spoke of, and no doubt the sick person you mentioned was your client, and the woman your servant.”
    â€œThat’s because I have neglected to tell you all the parts of the story that have any importance,” I said. I