Free The Claw Of The Conciliator by Gene Wolfe

without the attentions of a surgeon, a man would have bled to death from that wound.
    “I cut it,” I said. “But it was while we were still fighting, before you people saw the Claw of the Conciliator.” Then it came to me that he must have followed me outside for another glimpse of the gem, braving the fear engendered by whatever we had waked below the hill. I thrust my hand into the top of my boot and pulled out the Claw, and the instant I had done so realized what a fool I had been to put the boot and its precious cargo so close to Agia’s reach, for her eyes went wide with cupidity at the moment that the man-ape abased himself further and stretched forth his piteous stump.
    For a moment we were posed, all three, and a strange group we must have looked in that eerie light. An astonished voice—Jonas’s—called “Severian!” from the heights above. Like the trumpet note in a shadow play that dissolves all feigning, that shout ended our tableau. I lowered the Claw and concealed it in my palm. The man-ape bolted for the rock face, and Agia began to struggle and curse beneath my foot.
    A rap with the flat of my blade quieted her, but I kept my boot on her until Jonas had joined me and there were two of us to prevent her escape.
    “I thought you might need help,” he said. “I perceive I was mistaken.” He was looking at the corpses of the men who had been with Agia.
    I said, “This wasn’t the real fight.”
    Agia was sitting up, rubbing her neck and shoulders. “There were four, and we would have had you, but the bodies of those things, those firefly tiger-men, started pitching out of the hole, and two were afraid and slipped away.”
    Jonas scratched his head with his steel hand, a sound like the currying of a charger. “I saw what I thought I saw, then. I had begun to wonder.”
    I asked what he thought he had seen.
    “A glowing being in a fur robe making an obeisance to you. You were holding up a cup of burning brandy, I think. Or was it incense? What’s this?” He bent and picked up something from the edge of the bank, where the man-ape had crouched.
    “A bludgeon.”
    “Yes, I see that.” There was a loop of sinew at the end of the bone handle, and Jonas slipped it over his wrist. “Who are these people who tried to kill you?”
    “We would have,” Agia said, “if it hadn’t been for that cloak. We saw him coming out of the hole, but it covered him when he started to climb down, and my men couldn’t see the target, only the skin of his arms.”
    I explained as briefly as I could how I had become involved with Agia and her twin, and described the death of Agilus.
    “So now she’s come to join him.” Jonas looked from her to the crimson length of Terminus Est and gave a little shrug. “I left my merychip up there, and perhaps I ought to go and look after her. That way I can say afterward that I saw nothing. Was this woman the one who sent the letter?”
    “I should have known. I had told her about Thecla. You don’t know about Thecla, but she did, and that was what the letter was about. I told her while we were going through the Botanic Gardens in Nessus. There were mistakes in the letter and things Thecla would never have said, but I didn’t stop to think of them when I read it.”
    I stepped away and replaced the Claw in my boot, thrusting it deep. “Maybe you had better attend to your animal, as you say. My own seems to have broken loose, and we may have to take turns riding yours.”
    Jonas nodded and began to climb back the way he had come. “You were waiting for me, weren’t you?” I asked Agia. “I heard something, and the destrier cocked his ears at the sound. That was you. Why didn’t you kill me then?”
    “We were up there.” She gestured toward the heights. “And I wanted the men I’d hired to shoot you when you came wading up the brook. They were stupid and stubborn as men always are, and said they wouldn’t waste their quarrels—that the creatures inside would