Wolfe, Gene - New Sun 1- The Shadow of the Torturer

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THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN

BOOK 1 - THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER

Gene Wolfe

01 RESURRECTION AND DEATH

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and

rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes

like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That

is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which

I, the torturer's apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.

"The guard has gone." Thus my friend Roche spoke to Drotte, who had already seen

it for himself.

Doubtfully, the boy Eata suggested that we go around. A lift of his thin,

freckled arm indicated the thousands of paces of wall stretching across the slum

and sweeping up the hill until at last they met the high curtain wall of the

Citadel. It was a walk I would take, much later.

"And try to get through the barbican without a safe-conduct? They'd send to

Master Gurloes."

"But why would the guard leave?"

"It doesn't matter." Drotte rattled the gate. "Eata, see if you can slip between

the bars."

Drotte was our captain, and Eata put an arm and a leg through the iron palings,

but it was immediately clear that there was no hope of his getting his body to

follow.

"Someone's coming," Roche whispered. Drotte jerked Eata out. I looked down the

street. Lanterns swung there among the fog-muffled sounds of feet and voices. I

would have hidden, but Roche held me, saying, "Wait, I see pikes."

"Do you think it's the guard returning?"

He shook his head. "Too many."

"A dozen men at least," Drotte said.

Still wet from Gyoll we waited. In the recesses of my mind we stand shivering

there even now. Just as all that appears imperishable tends toward its own

destruction, those moments that at the time seem the most fleeting recreate

themselves - not only in my memory (which in the final accounting loses nothing)

but in the throbbing of my heart and the prickling of my hair, making themselves

new just as our Commonwealth reconstitutes itself each morning in the shrill

tones of its own clarions.

The men had no armor, as I could soon see by the sickly yellow light of the

lanterns; but they had pikes, as Drotte had said, and staves and hatchets. Their

leader wore a long, double-edged knife in his belt. What interested me more was

the massive key threaded on a cord around his neck; it looked as if it might fit

the lock of the gate.

Little Eata fidgeted with nervousness, and the leader saw us and lifted his

lantern over his head. "We're waiting to get in, good-man," Drotte called. He

was the taller, but he made his dark face humble and respectful.

"Not until dawn," the leader said gruffly. "You young fellows had better get

home."

"Goodman, the guard was supposed to let us in, but he's not here,"

"You won't be getting in tonight." The leader put his hand on the hilt of his

knife before taking a step closer. For a moment I was afraid he knew who we

were.

Drotte moved away, and the rest of us stayed behind him. "Who are you, goodman?

You're not soldiers."

"We're the volunteers," one of the others said. "We come to protect our own

dead."

"Then you can let us in."

The leader had turned away. "We let no one inside but ourselves." His key

squealed in the lock, and the gate creaked back.

Before anyone could stop him Eata darted through. Someone cursed, and the leader

and two others sprinted after Eata, but he was too fleet for them. We saw his

tow-colored hair and patched shirt zigzag among the sunken graves of paupers,

then disappear in the thicket of statuary higher up. Drotte tried to pursue him,

but two men grabbed his arms.

"We have to find him. We won't rob you of your dead."

"Why do you want to go in, then?" one volunteer asked.

"To gather herbs," Drotte told him. "We are physicians' gallipots. Don't you

want the sick healed?"

The volunteer stared at him. The man with the key had dropped his lantern when

he ran after Eata, and there were only two left. In their dim light the

volunteer looked stupid and innccent; I suppose he was a laborer of some kind.

Drotte continued, "You must know that for certain simples to attain their

highest virtues they must be pulled from grave soil by moonlight. It will frost

soon and kill everything, but our masters require supplies for the winter. The

three of them arranged for us to enter tonight, and I borrowed that lad from his

father to help me."

"You don't have anything to put simples in."

I still admire Drotte for what he did next. He said, "We are to bind them in

sheaves to dry," and without the least hesitation drew a length of common string

from his pocket.

"I see," the volunteer said. It was plain he did not. Roche and I edged nearer

the gate.

Drotte actually stepped back from it. "If you won't let us gather the herbs,

we'd better go. I don't think we could ever find that boy in there now."

"No you don't. We have to get him out."

"All right," Drotte said reluctantly, and we stepped through, the volunteers

following. Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the

human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which

we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for

them. I understood the principle intuitively that night as I heard the last

volunteer swing the gate closed behind us.

A man who had not spoken before said, "I'm going to watch over my mother. We've

wasted too much time already. They could have her a league off by now."

Several of the others muttered agreement, and the group began to scatter, one

lantern moving to the left and the other to the right. We went up the center

path (the one we always took in returning to the fallen section of the Citadel

wall) with the remaining volunteers.

It is my nature, my joy and my curse, to forget nothing. Every rattling chain

and whistling wind, every sight, smell, and taste, remains changeless in my

mind, and though I know it is not so with everyone, I cannot imagine what it can

mean to be otherwise, as if one had slept when in fact an experience is merely

remote. Those few steps we took upon the whited path rise before me now: It was

cold and growing colder; we had no light, and fog had begun to roll in from

Gyoll in earnest. A few birds had come to roost in the pines and cypresses, and

flapped uneasily from tree to tree. I remember the feel of my own hands as I

rubbed my arms, and the lantern bobbing among the steles some distance off, and

how the fog brought out the smell of the river water in my shirt, and the

pungency of the new-turned earth. I had almost died that day, choking in the

netted roots; the night was to mark the beginning of my manhood.

There was a shot, a thing I had never seen before, the bolt of violet energy

splitting the darkness like a wedge, so that it closed with a thunderclap.

Somewhere a monument fell with a crash. Silence then . . . in which everything

around me seemed to dissolve. We began to run. Men were shouting, far off. I

heard the ring of steel on stone, as if someone had struck one of the grave

markers with a badelaire. I dashed along a path that was (or at least then

seemed) completely unfamiliar, a ribbon of broken bone just wide enough for two

to walk abreast that wound down into a little dale. In the fog I could see

nothing but the dark bulk of the memorials to either side. Then, as suddenly as

if it had been snatched away, the path was no longer beneath my feet - I suppose

I must have failed to notice some turning. I swerved to dodge an oblesque that

appeared to shoot up before me, and collided full tilt with a man in a black

coat.

He was solid as a tree; the impact took me off my feet and knocked my breath

away. I heard him muttering execrations, then a whispering sound as he swung

some weapon. Another voice called, "What was that?"

"Somebody ran into me. Gone now, whoever he was."

I lay still.

A woman said, "Open the lamp." Her voice was like a dove's call, but there was

urgency in it.

The man I had run against answered, "They would be on us like a pack of dholes,

Madame."

"They will be soon in any case - Vodalus fired. You must have heard it."

"Be more likely to keep them off."

In an accent I was too inexperienced to recognize as an exultant's, the man who

had spoken first said, "I wish I hadn't brought it. We shouldn't need it against

this sort of people." He was much nearer now, and in a moment I could see him

through the fog, very tall, slender, and hatless, standing near the heavier man

I had run into. Muffled in black, a third figure was apparently the woman. In

losing my wind I had also lost the strength of my limbs, but I managed to roll

behind the base of a statue, and once secure there I peered out at them again.

My eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. I could distinguish the woman's

heart-shaped face and note that she was nearly as tall as the slender man she

had called Vodalus. The heavy man had disappeared, but I heard him say, "More

rope." His voice indicated that he was no more than a step or two away from the

spot where I crouched, but he seemed to have vanished like water cast into a

well. Then I saw something dark (it must have been the crown of his hat) move

near the slender man's feet and understood that that was almost precisely what

had become of him - there was a hole there, and he was in it.

The woman asked, "How is she?"

"Fresh as a flower, Madame. Hardly a breath of stink on her, and nothing to

worry about." More agilely than I would have thought possible, he sprang out.

"Now give me one end and you take the other, Liege, and we'll have her out like

a carrot."

The woman said something I could not hear, and the slender man told her, "You

didn't have to come, Thea. How would it look to the others if I took none of the

risks?" He and the heavy man grunted as they pulled, and I saw something white

appear at their feet. They bent to lift it. As though an amschaspand had touched

them with his radiant wand, the fog swirled and parted to let a beam of green

moonlight fall. They had the corpse of a woman. Her hair, which had been dark,

was in some disorder now about her livid face; she wore a long gown of some pale

fabric.

"You see," the heavy man said, "just as I told you, Liege, Madame, nineteen

times of a score there's nothin' to it. We've only to get her over the wall

now."

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than I heard someone shout. Three of

the volunteers were coming down the path over the rim of the dale. "Hold them

off, Liege," the heavy man growled, shouldering the corpse. "I'll take care of

this, and get Madame to safety."

"Take it," Vodalus said. The pistol he handed over caught the moonlight like a

mirror.

The heavy man gaped at it. "I've never used one, Liege . . ."

"Take it, you may need it." Vodalus stooped, then rose holding what appeared to

be a dark stick. There was a rattle of metal on wood, and in place of the stick

a bright and narrow blade. He called, "Guard yourselves! "

As if a dove had momentarily commanded an arctother, the woman took the shining

pistol from the heavy man's hand, and together they backed into the fog.

The three volunteers had hesitated. Now one moved to the right and another to

the left, so as to attack from three sides. The man in the center (still on the

white path of broken bones) had a pike, and one of the others an ax.

The third was the leader Drotte had spoken with outside the gate. "Who are you?"

he called to Vodalus, "and what power of Erebus's gives you the right to come

here and do something like this?"

Vodalus did not reply, but the point of his sword looked from one to another

like an eye.

The leader grated, "All together now and we'll have him." But they advanced

hesitantly, and before they could close Vodalus sprang forward. I saw his blade

flash in the faint light and heard it scrape the head of the pike - a metallic

slithering, as though a steel serpent glided across a log of iron. The pikeman

yelled and jumped back; Vodalus leaped backward too (I think for fear the other

two would get behind him), then seemed to lose his balance and fell.

All this took place in dark and fog. I saw it, but for the most part the men

were no more than ambient shadows - as the woman with the heart-shaped face had

been. Yet something touched me. Perhaps it was Vodalus's willingness to die to

protect her that made the woman seem precious to me; certainly it was that

willingness that kindled my admiration for him. Many times since then, when I

have stood upon a shaky platform in some market-town square with Terminus Est at

rest before me and a miserable vagrant kneeling at my feet, when I have heard in

hissing whispers the hate of the crowd and sensed what was far less welcome, the

admiration of those who find an unclean joy in pains and deaths not their own, I

have recalled Vodalus at the graveside, and raised my own blade half pretending

that when it fell I would be striking for him.

He stumbled, as I have said. In that instant I believe my whole life teetered in

the scales with his.

The flanking volunteers ran toward him, but he had held onto his weapon. I saw

the bright blade flash up, though its owner was still on the ground. I remember

thinking what a fine thing it would have been to have had such a sword on the

day Drotte became captain of apprentices, and then likening Vodalus to myself.

The axman, toward whom he had thrust, drew back; the other drove forward with

his long knife. I was on my feet by then, watching the fight over the shoulder

of a chalcedony angel, and I saw the knife come down, missing Vodalus by a

thumb's width as he writhed away and burying itself to the hilt in the ground.

Vodalus slashed at the leader then, but he was too near for the length of his

blade. The leader, instead of backing off, released his weapon and clutched him

like a wrestler. They were at the veryedge of the opened grave - I suppose

Vodalus had tripped over the soil excavated from it.

The second volunteer raised his ax, then hesitated. His leader was nearest him;

he circled to get a clear stroke until he was less than a pace from where I hid.

While he shifted his ground I saw Vodalus wrench the knife free and drive it

into the leader's throat. The ax rose to strike; I grasped the helve just below

the head almost by reflex, and found myself at once in the struggle, kicking,

then striking.

Quite suddenly it was over. The volunteer whose bloodied weapon I held was dead.

The leader of the volunteers was writhing at our feet. The pikeman was gone; his

pike lay harmlessly across the path. Vodalus retrieved a black wand from the

grass nearby and sheathed his sword in it. "Who are you?"

"Severian. I am a torturer. Or rather, I am an apprentice of the torturers,

Liege. Of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence." I drew a deep

breath. "I am a Vodalarius. One of the thousands of Vodalani of whose existence

you are unaware." It was a term I had scarcely heard.

"Here." He laid something in my palm: a small coin so smooth it seemed greased.

I remained clutching it beside the violated grave and watched him stride away.

The fog swallowed him long before he reached the rim, and a few moments later a

silver flier as sharp as a dart screamed overhead.

The knife had somehow fallen from the dead man's neck. Perhaps he had pulled it

out in his agony. When I bent to pick it up, I discovered that the coin was

still in my hand and thrust it into my pocket.

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are

their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their

oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch.

Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and

burdens of military life - they are soldiers from that moment, though they may

know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a

profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by

them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and

superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the

efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves

or not at all.

Thus I knew nothing, as the coin dropped into my pocket, of the dogmas of the

movement Vodalus led, but I soon learned them all, for they were in the air.

With him I hated the Autarchy, though I had no notion of what might replace it.

With him I despised the exultants who failed to rise against the Autarch and

bound the fairest of their daughters to him in ceremonial concubinage. With him

I detested the people for their lack of discipline and a common purpose. Of

those values that Master Malrubins (who had been master of apprentices when I

was a boy) had tried to teach me, and that Master Palaemon still tried to

impart, I accepted only one: loyalty to the guild. In that I was quite correct -

it was, as I sensed, perfectly feasible for me to serve Vodalus and remain a

torturer. It was in this fashion that I began the long journey by which I have

backed into the throne.

02 SEVERIAN

Memory oppresses me. Having been reared among the torturers, I have never known

my father or my mother. No more did my brother apprentices know theirs. From

time to time, but most particularly when winter draws on, poor wretches come

clamoring to the Corpse Door, hoping to be admitted to our ancient guild. Often

they regale Brother Porter with accounts of the torments they will willingly

inflict in payment for warmth and food; occasionally they fetch animals as

samples of their work.

All are turned away. Traditions from our days of glory, antedating the present

degenerate age, and the one before it, and the one before that, an age whose

name is hardly remembered now by scholars, forbid recruitment from such as they.

Even at the time I write of, when the guild had shrunk to two masters and less

than a score of journeymen, those traditions were honored.

From my earliest memory I remember all. That first recollection is of piling

pebbles in the Old Yard. It lies south and west of the Witches' Keep, and is

separated from the Grand Court. The curtain wall our guild was to help defend

was ruinous even then, with a wide gap between the Red Tower and the Bear, where

I used to climb the fallen slabs of unsmeltable gray metal to look out over the

necropolis that descends that side of Citadel Hill.

When I was older, it became my playground. The winding paths were patrolled

during daylight hours, but the sentries were largely concerned for the fresher

graves on the lower ground, and knowing us to belong to the torturers, they

seldom had much stomach for expelling us from our lurking places in the cypress

groves.

Our necropolis is said to be the oldest in Nessus. That is certainly false, but

the very existence of the error testifies to a real antiquity, though the

autarchs were not buried there even when the Citadel was their stronghold, and

the great families - then as now - preferred to inter their long-limbed dead in

vaults on their own estates. But the armigers and optimates of the city favored

the highest slopes, near the Citadel wall; and the poorer commons lay below them

until the farthest reaches of the bottom lands, pressing against the tenements

that came to line Gyoll, held potter's fields. As a boy I seldom went so far

alone, or half so far.

There were always the three of us - Drotte, Roche, and I. Later Eata, the next

oldest among the apprentices. None of us were born among the torturers, for none

are. It is said that in ancient times there were both men and women in the

guild, and that sons and daughters were born to them and brought up in the

mystery, as is now the ease among the lamp-makers and the goldsmiths and many

other guilds. But Ymar the Almost Just, observing how cruel the women were and

how often they exceeded the punishments he had decreed, ordered that there

should be women among the torturers no more.

Since that time our numbers have been repaired solely from the children of those

who fall into our hands. In our Matachin Tower, a certain bar of iron thrusts

from a bulkhead at the height of a man's groin. Male children small enough to

stand upright beneath it are nurtured as our own; and when a woman big with

child is sent to us we open her and if the babe draws breath engage a wet-nurse

if it be a boy. The females are rendered to the witches. So it has been since

the days of Ymar, and those days are now by many hundreds of years forgotten.

Thus none of us knows our descent. Each would be an exultant if he could, and it

is a fact that many persons of high lineage are given over to us. As boys each

of us formed his own conjectures, and each attempted to question the older

brothers among the journeymen, though they were locked in their own bitternesses

and told us little. Eata, believing himself descended of that family, drew the

arms of one of the great northern clans on the ceiling above his cot in the year

of which I speak.

For my part, I had already adopted as my own the device graved in bronze above

the door of a certain mausoleum. They were a fountain rising above waters, and a

ship volant, and below these a rose. The door itself had been sprung long ago;

two empty coffins lay on the floor. Three more, too heavy for me to shift and

still intact, waited on the shelves along one wall. Neither the closed coffins

nor the open ones constituted the attraction of the place, though I sometimes

rested on what remained of the soft, faded padding of the latter. Rather, it was

the smallness of the room, the thick walls of masonry, and the single, narrow

window with its one bar, together with the faithless door (so massively heavy)

that remained eternally ajar.

Through window and door I could look out unseen on all the bright life of tree

and shrub and grass outside. The linnets and rabbits that fled when I approached

could neither hear nor scent me there. I watched the storm crow build her nest

and rear her young two cubits from my face. I saw the fox trot by with upraised

brush; and once that giant fox, taller than all but the tallest hounds, that men

call the maned wolf, loped by at dusk on some unguessable errand from the ruined

quarters of the south. The caracara coursed vipers for me, and the hawk lifted

his wings to the wind from the top of a pine.

A moment suffices to describe these things, for which I watched so long. The

decades of a saros would not be long enough for me to write all they meant to

the ragged apprentice boy I was. Two thoughts (that were nearly dreams) obsessed

me and made them infinitely precious. The first was that at some not-distant

time, time itself would stop . . . the colored days that had so long been drawn

forth like a chain of conjuror's scarves come to an end, the sullen sun wink out

at last. The second was that there existed somewhere a miraculous light-which I

sometimes conceived of as a candle, sometimes as a flambeau - that engendered

life in whatever objects it fell upon, so that a leaf plucked from a bush grew

slender legs and waving feelers, and a rough brown brush opened black eyes and

scurried up a tree.

Yet sometimes, particularly in the sleepy hours around noon, there was little to

watch. Then I turned again to the blazon over the door and wondered what a ship,

a rose, and a fountain had to do with me, and stared at the funeral bronze I had

found and cleaned and set up in a corner. The dead man lay at full length, his

heavy-lidded eyes closed. In the light that pierced the little window I examined

his face and meditated on my own as I saw it in the polished metal. My straight

nose, deep-set eyes, and sunken cheeks were much like his, and I longed to know

if he too had dark hair.

In the winter I seldom came to the necropolis, but in summer that violated

mausoleum and others provided me with places of observation and cool repose.

Drotte and Roche and Eata came too, though I never guided them to my favorite

retreat, and they, I knew, had secret places of their own. When we were together

we seldom crept into tombs at all. Instead we made swords of sticks and held

running battles, or threw pinecones at the soldiers, or scratched boards on the

soil of new graves and played draughts with stones, and ropes and snails, and

high-toss-cockle.

We amused ourselves in the maze that was the Citadel too, and swam in the great

cistern under the Bell Keep. It was cold and damp there even in summer, under

its vaulted ceiling beside the circular pool of endlessly deep, dark water. But

it was hardly worse in winter, and it had the supreme advantage of being

forbidden, so we could slip down to it with delicious stealth when we were

assumed to be elsewhere, and not kindle our torches until we had closed the

barred hatch behind us. Then, when the flames shot up from the burning pitch,

how our shadows danced up those clammy walls!

As I have already mentioned, our other swimming place was in Gyoll, which winds

through Nessus like a great, weary snake. When warm weather came, we trooped

through the necropolis on our way there - first past the old exalted sepulchers

nearest the Citadel wall, then between the vainglorious death houses of the

optimates, then through the stony forest of common monuments (we trying to

appear highly respectable when we had to pass the burly guards leaning on their

polearms). And at last across the plain, bare mounds that marked the interments

of the poor, mounds that sank to puddles after the first rain.

At the lowest margin of the necropolis stood the iron gate I have already

described. Through it the bodies intended for the potter's field were borne.

When we passed those rusting portals we felt we were for the first time truly

outside the Citadel, and thus in undeniable disobedience of the rules that were

supposed to govern our comings and goings. We believed (or pretended to believe)

we would be tortured if our older brothers discovered the violation; in

actuality, we would have suffered nothing worse than a beating - such is the

kindness of the torturers, whom I was subsequently to betray.

We were in greater danger from the inhabitants of the many-storied tenements

that lined the filthy street down which we walked. I sometimes think the reason

the guild has endured so long is that it serves as a focus for the hatred of the

people, drawing it from the Autarch, the exultants, and the army, and even in

some degree from the pale cacogens who sometirnes visit Urth from the farther

stars.

The same presentment that told the guards our identity often seemed to inform

the residents of the tenements; slops were thrown at us from upper windows

occasionally, and an angry mutter followed us. But the fear that engendered this

hatred also protected us. No real violence was done to us, and once or twice,

when it was known that some tyrannical wildgrave or venal burgess had been

delivered to the mercy of the guild, we received shouted suggestions as to his

disposal - most of them obscene and many impossible.

At the place where we swam, Gyoll had lost its natural banks hundreds of years

ago. Here it was a two-chain-wide expanse of blue nenuphars penned between walls

of stone. Steps intended for boat landings led down into the river at several

points; on a warm day each flight would be held by a gang of ten or fifteen

brawling youths. The four of us lacked the strength to displace these groups,

but they could not (or at least would not) deny us admission, though whichever

we chose to join would threaten us as we approached and taunt us when we were in

their midst. Soon, however, all would drift away, leaving us in sole possession

until the next swimming day.

I have chosen to describe all this now because I never went again after the day

on which I saved Vodalus. Drotte and Roche believed it was because I was afraid

we would be locked out. Eata guessed, I think - before they come too near to

being men, boys often have an almost female insight. It was because of the

nenuphars.

The necropolis has never seemed a city of death to me; I know its purple roses

(which other people think so hideous) shelter hundreds of small animals and

birds. The executions I have seen performed and have performed myself so often

are no more than a trade, a butchery of human beings who are for the most part

less innocent and less valuable than cattle. When I think of my own death, or of

the death of someone who has been kind to me, or even of the death of the sun,

the image that comes to my mind is that of the nenuphar, with its glossy, pale

leaves and azure flower. Under flower and leaves are black roots as fine and

strong as hair, reaching down into the dark waters.

As young men we thought nothing of these plants. We splashed and floated among

them, pushed them aside, and ignored them. Their perfume countered to some

degree the foul odor of the water. On the day I was to save Vodalus I dove

beneath their crowded pads as I had done a thousand times.

I did not come up. Somehow I had entered a region where the roots seemed far

thicker than I had ever encountered them before. I was caught in a hundred nets

at once. My eyes were open, but I could see nothing - only the black web of the

roots. I swam, and could feel that though my arms and legs moved among their

millions of fine tendrils, my body did not. I grasped them by the handful and

tore them apart, but when I had torn them I was immobilized as ever. My lungs

seemed to rise in my throat to choke me, as if they would burst of themselves

out into the water. The desire to draw breath, to suck in the dark, cold fluid

around me, was overwhelming.

I no longer knew in what direction the surface lay, and I was no longer

conscious of the water as water. The strength had left my limbs. I was no longer

afraid, though I knew I was dying, or perhaps already dead. There was a loud and

very unpleasant ringing in my ears, and I began to see visions.

Master Malrubius, who had died several years before, was waking us by drumming

on the bulkhead with a spoon: that was the metallic din I heard. I lay in my cot

unable to rise, though Drotte and Roche and the younger boys were all up,

yawning and fumbling for their clothes. Master Malrubius's cloak was thrown

back; I could see the loose skin of his chest and belly where the muscle and fat

had been destroyed by time. There was a triangle of hair there, and it was as

gray as mildew. I tried to call to him to tell him I was awake, but I could make

no sound. He began to walk along the bulkhead, still striking it with his spoon.

After what seemed a very long time he reached the port, stopped and leaned out.

I knew he was looking for me in the Old Yard below.

Yet he could not see far enough. I was in one of the cells below the examination

room. I lay there on my back, looking up at the gray ceiling. A woman cried but

I could not see her, and I was less conscious of her sobs than of the ringing,

ringing, ringing of the spoon. Darkness closed over me, but out of the darkness

came the face of a woman, as immense as the green face of the moon. It was not

she who wept - I could hear the sobs still, and this face was untroubled, and

indeed filled with that kind of beauty that hardly admits of expression. Her

hands reached toward me, and I at once became a fledgling I had taken from its

nest the year before in the hope of taming it to perch on my finger, for her

hands were each as long as the coffins in which I sometimes rested in my secret

mausoleum. They grasped me, pulled me up, then flung me down, away from her face

and from the sound of sobbing, down into the blackness until at last I struck

what I took to be the bottom mud and burst through it into a world of light

rimmed with black.

Still I could not breathe. I no longer wished to, and my chest no longer moved

of itself. I was sliding through the water, though I did not know how. (Later I

learned that Drotte had seized me by the hair.) At once I lay on the cold, slimy

stones with Roche, then Drotte, then Roche again, breathing into my mouth. I was

enveloped in eyes as one is enveloped in the repetitious patterns of a

kaleidoscope, and thought that some defect in my own vision was multiplying

Eata's eyes.

At last I pulled away from Roche and vomited great quantities of black water.

After that I was better. I could sit up, and breathe again in a crippled way,

and though I had no strength and my hands shook, I could move my arms. The eyes

around me belonged to real people, the denizens of the riverside tenements. A

woman brought a bowl of some hot drink - I could not be sure if it was soup or

tea, only that it was scalding and somewhat salty, and smelled of smoke. I

pretended to drink it, and afterward found that I had slight burns on my lips

and tongue.

"Were you trying to do that?" Drotte asked. "How did you come up?"

I shook my head.

Someone in the crowd said, "He shot right out of the water!"

Roche helped me steady my hand. "We thought you'd come up somewhere else. That

you were playing a joke on us."

I said, "I saw Malrubius."

An old man, a boatman from his tar-stained clothes, took Roche by the shoulder.

"Who's that?"

"Used to be Master of Apprentices. He's dead."

"Not a woman?" The old man was holding Roche but looking at me.

"No, no," Roche told him. "There are no women in our guild."

Despite the hot drink and the warmth of the day, I was cold. One of the youths

we sometimes fought brought a dusty blanket, and I wrapped myself in it; but it

was so long before I was strong enough to walk again that by the time we reached

the gate of the necropolis, the statue of Night atop the khan on the opposite

bank was a minute scratch of black against the sun's field of flame, and the

gate itself stood closed and locked.

03 THE AUTARCH'S FACE

It was midmorning of the next day before I thought to look at the coin Vodalus

had given me. After serving the journeymen in the refectory we had breakfasted

as usual, met Master Palaemon in our classroom, and after a brief preparatory

lecture followed him to the lower levels to view the work of the preceding

night.

But perhaps before I write further I should explain something more of the nature

of our Matachin Tower. It is situated toward the back of the Citadel, upon the

western side. At ground level are the studies of our masters, where

consultations with the officers of justice and the heads of other guilds are

conducted. Our common room is above them, with its back to the kitchen. Above

that is the refectory, which serves us as an assembly hall as well as an eating

place. Above it are the private cabins of the masters, in better days much more

numerous. Above these are the journeymen's cabins, and above them the

apprentices' dormitory and classroom, and a series of attics and abandoned

cubicles. Near the very top is the gun room, whose remaining pieces we of the

guild are charged with serving should the Citadel suffer attack.

The real work of our guild is carried out below all this. Just underground lies

the examination room; beneath it, and thus outside the tower proper (for the

examination room was the propulsion chamber of the original structure) stretches

the labyrinth of the oubliette. There are three usable levels, reached by a

central stairwell. The cells are plain, dry, and clean, equipped with a small

table, a chair, and narrow bed fixed in the center of the floor.

The lights of the oubliette are of that ancient kind that is said to burn

forever, though some have now gone out. In the gloom of those corridors, my

feelings that morning were not gloomy but joyous - here I would labor when I

became a journeyman, here I would practice the ancient art and raise myself to

the rank of master, here I would lay the foundation for the restoration of our

guild to its former glory. The very air of the place seemed to wrap me like a

blanket that had been warmed before some clean-scented fire.

We halted before the door of a cell, and the journeyman on duty rattled his key

in the lock. Inside, the client lifted her head, opening dark eyes very wide.

Master Palaemon wore the sable-trimmed cloak and velvet mask of his rank; I

suppose that these, or the protruding optical device that permitted him to see,

must have frightened her. She did not speak, and of course none of us spoke to

her.

"Here," Master Palaemon began in his driest tone, "we have something outside the

routine of judicial punishment and well illustrative of modern technique. The

client was put to the question last night - perhaps some of you heard her.

Twenty minims of tincture were given before the excruciation, and ten after. The

dose was only partially effective in preventing shock and loss of consciousness,

so the proceedings were terminated after flaying the right leg, as you will

see." He gestured to Drotte, who began nnwrapping the bandages.

"Half boot?" Roche asked.

"No, full boot. She has been a maidservant, and Master Gurloes says he has found

them strong-skinned. In this instance he was proved correct. A simple circular

incision was made below the knee, and its edge taken with eight clamps. Careful

work by Master Gurloes, Odo, Mennas, and Eigil permitted the removal of

everything between the knee and the toes without further help from the knife."

We gathered around Drotte, the younger boys pushing in as they pretended they

knew the points to look for. The arteries and major veins were all intact, but

there was a slow, generalized welling of blood. I helped Drotte apply fresh

dressings.

Just as we were about to leave the woman said, "I don't know. Only, oh, can't

you believe I wouldn't tell you if I did? She's gone with Vodalus of the Wood, I

don't know where." Outside, feigning ignorance, I asked Master Palaemon who

Vodalus of the Wood was.

"How often have I explained that nothing said by a client under questioning is

heard by you?"

"Many times, Master."

"But to no effect. Soon it will be masking day, and Drotte and Roche will be

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THEBOOKOFTHENEWSUNBOOK1-THESHADOWOFTHETORTURERGeneWolfe01RESURRECTIONANDDEATHItispossibleIalreadyhadsomepresentimentofmyfuture.Thelockedandrustedgatethatstoodbeforeus,withwispsofriverfogthreadingitsspikeslikethemountainpaths,remainsinmymindnowasthesymbolofmyexile.ThatiswhyIhavebegunthisaccountofitwi...

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Wolfe, Gene - New Sun 1- The Shadow of the Torturer

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