I opened my mouth to cry for help, then closed it again, thinking I might call upon myself something more terrible than that I had once waked in the mine of the man-apes. You wouldn't think the thing beneath the Saltus mines was a war machine, but the connection is made even more explicit only a page or so later: This seems to be a war machine, as it is encountered during the war against the Ascians. The only other reference I can find to 'walking towers' is this much later one, in the fourth part, The Citadel of the Autarch:įar behind it loomed a machine that flashed fire, a machine that was like a tower walking. What is this creature, and when does Severian learn what (he thinks) it is? I only knew that there was something far beneath us before which the man-apes, with all the terror of their appearance and their numbers, scattered like sparks before a wind. But I did not know then, and I did not know whether it was the roaring of the man-apes, or the light of the Claw, or some other cause that had waked it. What creature it was we had called from the roots of the continent I think I now know. Just a couple of paragraphs below:Ī fourth step sounded and I turned and fled, groping before me with the blade. I don't think we ever learn explicitly what this creature was (not uncommon with Gene Wolfe), but Severian seems to know it at the time he's writing down his memoirs. From far below I heard a step that might have been the walking of a tower on the Final Day, when it is said all the cities of Urth will stride forth to meet the dawn of the New Sun. The bed of the stream (where I still stood) trembled under me, and the water, which had been so clear, received a fine burden of silt, so that it looked as though a ribbon of smoke wound through it. If an ogre were to eat at the very legs of the world, the grinding of his teeth would make just such a noise. Here, Severian somehow wakes a giant being, which he never sees, just hears: In Gene Wolfe's The Claw of the Conciliator, part two of The Book of the New Sun, the protagonist Severian is tricked into entering a network of subterranean mines (where he encounters the 'man-apes', possibly zoanthropes?).

Wolfe book of the new sun