Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer

“Severian, push up your handle there until this needle’s here.” A coil that had been as cold as a snake when I had touched it a moment before was warm now. “What does it do?”

“I couldn’t describe it, Chatelaine. Anyway, I’ve never had it done, you see.” Gurloes’s hand touched a knob on the control panel and Thecla was bathed in white light that stole the color from all it fell upon. She screamed; I have heard screaming all my life, but that was the worst, though not the loudest; it seemed to go on and on like the shrieking of a cartwheel. She was not unconscious when the white light died. Her eyes were open, staring upward; but she did not appear to see my hand, or to feel it when I touched her. Her breathing was shallow and rapid.

Roche asked, “Shall we wait until she can walk?” I could see he was thinking how awkward so tall a woman would be to carry.

“Take her now,” Master Gurloes said. We got out the travail. When all my other work was complete, I came into her cell to see her. She was fully aware by then, though she could not stand. “I ought to hate you,” she said. I had to lean over her to catch the words. “It’s all right,” I said. “But I don’t. Not for your sake… if I hate my last friend, what would be left?”

There was nothing to say to that, so I said nothing.

“Do you know what it was like? It was a long time before I could think of it.” Her right hand was creeping upward, toward her eyes. I caught it and forced it back.

“I thought I saw my worst enemy, a kind of demon. And it was me.” Her scalp was bleeding. I put clean lint there and taped it down, though I knew it would soon be gone. Curling, dark hairs were entangled in her fingers. “Since then, I can’t control my hands… I can if I think about it, if I know what they’re doing. But it is so hard, and I’m getting tired.” She rolled her head away and spat blood. “I bite myself. Bite the lining of my cheeks, and my tongue and lips. Once my hands tried to strangle me, and I thought oh good, I will die now. But I only lost consciousness, and they must have lost their strength, because I woke. It’s like that machine, isn’t it?” I said, “Allowin’s necklace.”

“But worse. My hands are trying to blind me now, to tear my eyelids away. Will I be blind?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How long before I die?”

“A month, perhaps. The thing in you that hates you will weaken as you weaken. The revolutionary brought it to life, but its energy is your energy, and in the end you will die together.”

“Severian…”

“Yes?”

“I see,” she said. And then, “It is a thing from Erebus, from Abaia, a fit companion for me. Vodalus…”

I leaned closer, but I could not hear. At last I said, “I tried to save you. I wanted to. I stole a knife, and spent the night watching for a chance. But only a master can take a prisoner from a cell, and I would have had to kill—”

“Your friends.”

“Yes, my friends.”

Her hands were moving again, and blood trickled from her mouth. “Will you bring me the knife?”

“I have it here,” I said, and drew it from under my cloak. It was a common cook’s knife with a span or so of blade.

“It looks sharp.”

“It is,” I said. “I know how to treat an edge, and I sharpened it carefully.” That was the last thing I said to her. I put the knife into her right hand and went out.

For a time, I knew, her will would hold it back. A thousand times one thought recurred: I could reenter her cell, take back the knife, and no one would know. I would be able to live out my life in the guild.

If her throat rattled, I did not hear it; but after I had stared at the door of her cell for a long while, a little crimson rivulet crept from under it. I went to Master Gurloes then, and told him what I had done.

For the next ten days I lived the life of a client, in a cell of the topmost level (not far, in fact, from that which had been Thecla’s). In order that the guild should not be accused of having detained me without legal process, the door was left unlocked; but there were two journeymen with swords outside my door, and I never stepped from it save for a brief time on the second day when I was brought to Master Palaemon to tell my story again. That was my trial, if you like. For the remainder of the time, the guild pondered my sentence. It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true. So it was with me. I had lied in saying that I loved the guild—that I desired nothing but to remain in its embrace. Now I found those lies become truths. The life of a journeyman and even that of an apprentice seemed infinitely attractive. Not only because I was certain I was to die, but truly attractive in themselves, because I had lost them. I saw the brothers now from the viewpoint of a client, and so I saw them as powerful, the active principles of an inimical and nearly perfect machine. Knowing that my case was hopeless, I learned in my own person what Master Malrubius had once impressed on me when I was a child: that hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities. I was young and adequately fed; I was permitted to sleep and therefore I hoped. Again and again, waking and sleeping, I dreamed that just as I was to die Vodalus would come. Not alone as I had seen him fight in the necropolis, but at the head of an army that would sweep the decay of centuries away and make us once more the masters of the stars. Often I thought to hear tread of that army ringing in the corridors; sometimes I carried my candle to the little slot in the door because I thought I had seen the face of Vodalus outside in the dark.

As I have said, I supposed I would be killed. The question that occupied my mind most during those slow days was that of means. I had learned all the arts of the torturer; now I thought of them—sometimes one by one, as we had been taught them, sometimes all together in a revelation of pain. To live day after day in a cell below ground, thinking of torment, is torment itself. On the eleventh day I was summoned by Master Palaemon. I saw the red light of the sun again, and breathed that wet wind that tells in winter that spring is almost come. But, oh, how much it cost me to walk past the open tower door and looking out see the corpse door in the curtain wall, and old Brother Porter lounging there.

Master Palaemon’s study seemed very large when I entered it and yet very precious to me—as though the dusty books and papers were my own. He asked me to sit. He was not masked and seemed older than I remembered him. “We have discussed your case,” he said. “Master Gurloes and I. We have had to take the other journeymen into our confidence, and even the apprentices. It is better that they know the truth. Most agree that you are deserving of death.” He waited for me to comment, but I did not.

“And yet there was much said in your defense. Several of the journeymen urged in private meetings, to me and to Master Curloes as well, that you be permitted to die without pain.”

I cannot say why, but it became of central importance to me to know how many of these friends I had, and I asked.

“More than two, and more than three. The exact number does not matter. Do you not believe that you deserve to die painfully?”

“By the revolutionary,” I said, hoping that if I asked that death as a favor it would not be granted.

“Yes, that would be fitting. But…”

And here he paused. The moment passed, then two. The first brass-backed fly of the new summer buzzed against the port. I wanted to crush it, to catch and release it, to shout at Master Palaemon to speak, to flee from the room; but I could do none of these things. I sat, instead, in the old wooden chair beside his table, feeling that I was already dead but still must die. “We cannot kill you, you see. I have had a most difficult time convincing Gurloes of that, yet it is so. If we slay you without judicial order, we are no better than you: you have been false to us, but we will have been false to the law. Furthermore, we would be putting the guild in jeopardy forever—an Inquisitor would call it murder.”