1 rest is what the pilgrim needs.
2
PILGRIM WILL REST WHEN HE'S DEAD
If the pilgrim rests, he might as well be dead.
2
2
Pilgrim had enough boozing and whoring.
2 for me.
This place feels creepy. Like a false sense of safety. Shit is gonna go down if we stay any longer.
enjoy your last night
It takes a few moments for me to notice the scars: Old and faded, large ugly gouges of pale flesh running down the length of his back and across his chest and belly, a myriad of them, some jagged and short, some round and smooth. Raw and red there’s a Y-shaped scar that extends from the nape of his neck to his sternum, as if he’d been opened by a careless chirurgeon and closed back up. I am immediately reminded of practices of the mortification of flesh, though these scars seem too haphazard to be a result of that.
Vyck's face is that of a chameleon at the best of times. As he stares at the remains of his prized goblet, I get the impression that, this time, it is not because of his carefully-practiced switching of roles, his ability to be anything to any man; he has simply been taken by surprise and is trying to judge what to do, and perhaps what impression he wants to leave me with. The girl's hand is at her mouth, undoubtedly realizing that her life is in his hands. Fire dances on the walls, reflecting brilliantly off every shard on the floor.
...
“What will happen to her?”
Vyck shrugs lazily and sprawls backwards, beckoning for another cup. “I don't know. I don't really care, pilgrim. It was a pretty trinket, but hardly dear to me. I'm a practical man.”
I raise an eyebrow at this declaration, remembering the ornate and heavy robes he was wearing before he we came here, but decide it wisest to say nothing.
I notice little more than bottles of water and packages of dried food in them, normal supplies, though here and there are strange devices packed with care inside soft paper, like those I had seen the Legate holding the last night when he confronted the Second Sister
...
All communication stopped five years back, I think, and despite the blackout from the Mirthwater Optikos, it would have been hubris to suspect anything.
“You can stay if you like. He usually prefers not to have people around after he’s had one of his rows with the bosses, and in the unlikely case he asks for you I’ll tell him you had a bad case of food poisoning” He snorts “I’ll have a message delivered here when everything’s sorted out so you can come.”
Kurze: Whatever gave you that impression? If he was, you certainly know nothing about it, nor have vyck/severian alluded to that.
Kurze hired the two of them to keep him safe as he tried to convert the local population to the Faith, many years ago, but grew both frustrated with the troglodytes’ idiocy and pleased with their adulation of him. Guardedly at first, he started to accept the troglodytes’ worship of him, viewing it as a way of bringing them in closer contact with the Flame.
[Intelligence] Severian is a lying bastard and Issus just a harmless old man wracked by grief, and the Quaestor is insinuating this stuff to poison you against Issus from the start so you won't hesitate when the time comes to hunt down that heretical scumsuckers and put him dead to rights by putting him dead in the ground.
You know nothing about this shady organization you're in apart that it exists, and that it has something called a Quaestor, which in your mind roughly translates as a '[he] who inquires'. Severian did refer to Issus as a Lord (as noted above), and Issus undisputably had knowledge of the Godsblood Pit, while Severian doesn't (or claims he doesn't), so we can conclude there is an upper hierarchy that is in overall charge of each Optikos, and they're (supposedly) the only ones to have this knowledge, which Severian implied not even the Ashguard's Grandmaster (the Khedive) or the Church's upper echelons (The Hierarchs) possess.
Well, and you. And Elim. Again, presumably. If anything, Severian strikes you as far, far more deliberately untrustworthy than Vyck could ever hope to be (who seems shifty more by nature than by design, and apparently revels in it somewhat). Such are the burdens of command. Of course, that's you using [intellection], since unlike colorful vyck, the Quaestor's range so far has only consisted of dumb peasant and deadpan scary scarred man.