Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer

Relief flooded my heart. “I never knew that. It’s very interesting, Master.” Master Gurloes inclined his head to acknowledge that it was indeed, and laced his fingers over his belly. “Someday you may have the ordering of the guild yourself. You’ll need to know these things. When I was your age—or a trifle younger, I suppose—I used to fancy I was of exulted blood. Some have been, you know.”

It struck me, and not for the first time, that Master Gurloes and Master Palaemon too must have known whence all the apprentices and younger journeymen had come, having approved their admissions originally. “Whether I am or no, I cannot say. I have the physique of a rider, I think, and I am somewhat over the average in height despite a hard boyhood. For it was harder, much harder, forty years ago, I’ll tell you.”

“So I have been told, Master.”

He sighed, the kind of wheezing noise a leather pillow sometimes makes when one sits on it. “But with the passage of time I have come to understand that the Increate, in choosing for me a career in our guild, was acting for my benefit. Doubtless I had acquired merit in a previous life, as I hope I have in this one.”

Master Gurloes fell silent, looking (it seemed to me) at the jumble of papers on his table, the instructions of jurists and the dossiers of clients. At last, when I was about to ask if he had anything further to tell me, he said, “In all my years, I have never known of a member of the guild put to torment. Of them, several hundred, I suppose.”

I ventured the commonplace saying that it was better to be a toad hidden under a stone than a butterfly crushed beneath it.

“We of the guild are more than toads, I think. But I should have added that though I have seen five hundred or more exultants in our cells, I have never, until now, had charge of a member of that inner circle of concubines closest to the Autarch.”

“The Chatelaine Thecla belonged to it? You implied that a mcment ago, Master.” He nodded gloomily. “It wouldn’t be so bad if she were to be put to torment at once, but that isn’t to be. It may be years. It may be never.”

“You believe she may be released, Master?”

“She’s a pawn in the Autarch’s game with Vodalus—even I know that much. Her sister, the Chatelaine Thea, has fled the House Absolute to become his leman. They will bargain with Thecla for a time at least, and while they do, we must give her good fare. Yet not too good.”

“I see,” I said. I was acutely uncomfortable not knowing what the Chatelaine Thecla had told Drotte, and what Drotte had told Master Gurloes. “She’s asked for better food, and I’ve made arrangements to supply it. She’s asked for company as well, and when we told her visitors would not be permitted, she urged that one of us, at least, should keep her company sometimes.” Master Gurloes paused to wipe his shining face with the edge of his cloak. I said, “I understand.” I was fairly certain that I indeed understood what was to come next.

“Because she had seen your face, she asked for you. I told her you’ll sit with her while she eats. I don’t ask your agreement—not only because you’re subject to my instructions, but because I know you’re loyal. What I do ask is that you be careful not to displease her, and not to please her too much.”

“I will do my best.” I was surprised to hear my own steady voice. Master Gurloes smiled as if I had eased him. “You’ve a good head, Severian, though it’s a young one yet. Have you been with a woman?” When we apprentices talked, it was the custom to invent fables on this topic, but I was not among apprentices now, and I shook my head. “You’ve never been to the witches? That may be for the best. They supplied my own instruction in the warm commerce, but I’m not sure I’d send them another such as I was. It’s likely, though, that the Chatelaine wants her bed warmed. You’re not to do it for her. Her pregnancy would be no ordinary one—it might force a delay in her torment and bring disgrace on the guild. You follow me?” I nodded.

“Boys your age are troubled. I’ll have somebody take you where such ills are speedily cured.”

“As you wish, Master.”

“What? You don’t thank me?”

“Thank you, Master,” I said.

Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but a complex man’s idea of simplicity. Just as a courtier forms himself into something brilliant and involved, midway between a dancing master and a diplomacist, with a touch of assassin if needed, so Master Gurloes had shaped himself to be the dull creature a pursuivant or bailiff expected to see when he summoned the head of our guild, and that is the only thing a real torturer cannot be. The strain showed; though every part of Gurloes was as it should have been, none of the parts fit. He drank heavily and suffered from nightmares, but he had the nightmares when he had been drinking, as if the wine, instead of bolting the doors of his mind, threw them open and left him staggering about in the last hours of the night, trying to catch a glimpse of a sun that had not yet appeared, a sun that would banish the phantoms from his big cabin and permit him to dress and send the journeymen to their business. Sometimes he went to the top of our tower, above the guns, and waited there talking to himself, peering through glass said to be harder than flint for the first beams. He was the only one in our guild—Master Palaemon not excepted—who was unafraid of the energies there and the unseen mouths that spoke sometimes to human beings and sometimes to other mouths in other towers and keeps. He loved music, but he thumped the arm of his chair to it and tapped his foot, and did so most vigorously to the kind he liked best, whose rhythms were too subtle for any regular cadence. He ate too much and too seldom, read when he thought no one knew of it, and visited certain of our clients, including one on the third level, to talk of things none of us eaves-dropping in the corridor outside could understand. His eyes were refulgent, brighter than any woman’s. He mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau. I cannot well tell you how bad he looked when I returned to the Citadel recently, how bad he looks now.

Next day, for the first time, I carried Thecla’s supper to her. For a watch I remained with her, frequently observed through the slot in the cell door by Drotte. We played word games, at which she was far better than I, and after a while talked of those things those who have returned are said to say lie beyond death, she recounting what she had read in the smallest of the books I had brought her—not only the accepted views of the hierophants, but various eccentric and heretic theories.

“When I am free,” she said, “I shall found my own sect. I will tell everyone that its wisdom was revealed to me during my sojourn among the torturers. They’ll listen to that.”

I asked what her teachings would be.

“That there is no agathodaemon or afterlife. That the mind is extinguished in death as in sleep, yet more so.”

“But who will you say revealed that to you?”

She shook her head, then rested her pointed chin upon one hand, a pose that showed off the graceful line of her neck admirably. “I haven’t decided yet. An angel of ice, perhaps. Or a ghost. Which do you think best?”

“Isn’t there a contradiction in that?”

“Precisely.” Her voice was rich with the pleasure the question gave her. “In that contradiction will reside the appeal of this new belief. One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past—they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”