The Shadow of the Torturer: Chapters VI & VII
The Master of the Curators & The Traitress
“Whose apprentice are you?” Again I seemed to hear bronze, and quite suddenly I felt that he and I were dead, and that the darkness surrounding us was grave soul pressing in about our eyes, grave soil through which the bell called us to worship at whatever shrines may exit below ground. The livid woman I had seen dragged from her grave rose before me so vividly that I seemed to see her face in the almost luminous whiteness of the figure who spoke. “Whose apprentice?” he asked again.
I just love this paragraph. Love to savor it. Love the way it feels on my tongue and teeth, the way it bathes my eyes in darkness. A bright blackness that shimmers and shines and opens worlds within this constructed world.
There’s a texture and atmosphere to this paragraph, to these sentences, and while their importance is slight, they sing within me with many voices.
And I suppose that same description could be used for this chapter.
At its core, what is the purpose of Chapter VI?
Wolfe isn’t a worldbuilder in the traditional sense. He doesn’t just lay out the rules of this world or its lore. Rather, he brings you deep down to the stacks of a seemingly Borgesian infinite library and then has an old blind man whisper secrets of this world, of his fading memories.
How much of this information references and alluded to is necessary to understand the novel?
Perhaps none.
But it fills out the world and the texture of this place. This is a world so distant in our future that humanity has gone to the stars and fallen apart and the sun itself grows fat and red and dull. Books are bound in extinct flesh and unknown alloys. And some of these extinct creatures are extinct to us here in the 21st Century and some never existed, which means that, at some point, humanity brought these creatures back to life—or some approximation of them (remember, we cannot trust the naming)—and they have once more gone extinct.
There are books unreadable on Urth for they were written on distant worlds in a language so divorced from the languages of Urth that they’re incomprehensible.
All of this suggests age. Time. Eons of it. Anyone who has read Chaucer or looked at Beowulf’s Old English will know the changes possible in a language in 600-1,200 years. Even so, you could eventually come to know Beowulf if you worked at it enough.
And so how long did this ex-Urth language exist for it to diverge so profoundly from any language known?
It’s suggested that the Autarch (or at least an Autarch) has been gone from the Citadel for 300 years. We’ve seen and come to understand how the Citadel is a society and culture in waiting, and this is reflected in Master Ultan’s own story of his waiting to become a Master and how he waited so long that waiting was all he knew or understood, and so he had to dig through the layers of his own past in order to understand what must be done for the future.
Perhaps this is a key.
Perhaps not.
Severian takes note of a few peculiarities.
Master Ultan is a true exultant, and this is known because of his height. He stands a head and a half taller than Severian, and Severian is already taller than most.
Fuligin. Darker than black. The color of his guild. It bleeds into darkness, hiding all folds (as mentioned in Chapter IV) and even movement, allowing the torturers to nearly disappear into shadow.
Corpse-eaters. People who consume the flesh of the dead to take their memories.
Master Ultan calls Severian a philosopher. He’s also the first who allows some recognition of kinship between his own guild and the torturers.
Finally, the Chatelaine Thecla desires some books.
Why does Severian bring us down to the stacks and into the archive?
The archive and the library can be seen, I think, as the world in miniature. It expands beyond itself and contains all things, but is itself forgotten, falling into ruin. There are artifacts from the distant past that are unknowable but also artifacts from distant worlds that are incomprehensible. The library stretches and consumes and contains but remains itself unknowable, even to a man who has spent a lifetime in its study.
Thoughts churn in Severian’s head, then, as he returns to his own guild, the sensation of time passing telling him that he is no longer a child for whom time means nothing.
She was taller even than I had expected, nearly too tall to stand upright in the cell. Her face, though it was triangular rather than heart-shaped, reminded me of the woman who had been with Vodalus in the necropolis. Perhaps it was her great violet eyes, with their lids shaded with blue, and the black hair that, forming a V far down her forehead, suggested the hood of a cloak. Whatever the reason, I loved her at once—loved her, at least, insofar as a stupid boy can love. But being only a stupid boy, I did not know it.
Have we not all been such fools? We see someone from across a room and are stunned to silence. Our entire lives twisting in the wind as we cling to that branch of reality in the gorgeous gale.
Here he meets Thecla, who flirts with him. She does this, perhaps, because everyone else but Severian has ignored her. All these masked torturers wearing their darker than black cloaks.
And we learn that she may be there for months or years or decades.
And is that not a torture in itself? To be surrounded by torturers, held in their torturing tower, but never tortured. I mean, I suppose it’s better than literally being tortured! But the anticipation, the waiting—there’s that word again!—becomes its own form of torture.
Severian assures her that she will be tortured, trying to kill her hope before it, too, become a tool of her own torture.
And the torture itself is bad. It’s why Severian was able to meet her at all. Drotte is stitching someone back together who tried to kill herself by undoing the bandages the torturers gave her to prolong her pain.
They butcher you and put you back together to butcher you once more.
She requests that Severian become her companion and Master Gurloes allows this, telling Severian of his fate. And also instructing him that she may want him in her bed but that he cannot because the pregnancy may interfere with the torture.
Such sentimentality!
As we learned previously, the noble families have daughters held by the Autarch at the House Absolute essentially as hostages. This is how Thecla ends up at the Matachin Tower.
“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.”
Thea, who we saw in the first chapter, has condemned her own sister to the torturer’s. Thus and so, Severian meets one of the most noble women in this world. One of the primary consorts of the Autarch, though this Autarch shuns all his women and concubines, allegedly.
This chapter ends with what I consider a sort of raising of the curtain. A looking at the audience and revealing something true and unvarnished.
He speaks of Master Gurloes. And while it’s not overly emotional or obviously sentimental, it also speaks, to me, of his affection for his former master. A man of complexity, of contradiction. And we get this big chunk of character portrait for no real purpose.
I don’t believe this is part of Severian’s own mythologizing or mythmaking, but, in a sense, a way to preserve someone who was important to him.
Because Severian is using this book as a probable tool of propaganda, of legendarium, his inclusion of Gurloes in this way feels almost like he’s sneaking someone he loves into the consciousness of the broader world, despite it serving no real purpose.
I find this, perhaps, more interesting than all the rest. Of course, I say this as someone who is reading this for the third time.
My first time and even my second time, I breezed past this without thinking anything of it.
But I consider it now and I wonder.
Is the mask falling?
Perhaps not. I don’t know.
So far, Severian has largely been building a world and an atmosphere and revealing his childhood to us. In the next few chapters, this foundation leads to forward momentum.
Next week, we’ll do Chapters VIII, IX, and X.
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.
House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King