The Shadow of the Torturer: Chapters IV & V

Triskele & The Picture-Cleaner and Others

Severian uses words that seem to be used the way we’d expect but are revealed to be different. We see this clearly in Triskele when he calls Triskele a dog.

Because of the coming of ageness of the novel up to this point, a young boy finding a dog feels like it fits neatly inside our expectations for this genre. We set aside the dark strangeness of the novel and we grasp onto a boy and his dog. A boy nursing his dog back to health.

But is Triskele a dog?

And is Severian still a boy?

There’s no reason to doubt Severian at first because he just says that he found a dog, almost dead, and decides to save its life. It’s not until a few pages later that we get a description of what Triskele looks like.

He drops details slowly, folding them inside expectation.

Triskele’s leg is mangled, his ears missing, his tail chopped short. Severian, using his skills as a torturer, treats Triskele’s wounds. This is a moment worth lingering on. Even as an apprentice, Severian knows how to sew up open wounds and tie off arteries. In the previous chapter, we were told that the skin from mid-calf to toes was removed from a client by the torturers in a single sheet.

If you bothered to hold such a gruesome image in your mind, you may have marveled at the skill required to do that. And so, piece by piece, we learn just how skilled the torturers are in their ability, but also how the tools to inflict immense hurt upon someone are closely related to the ability to heals those wounds.

Back to Triskele.

Here are a few curious descriptions of what he looks like:

• His jaws were as big as an arctother

• canines long as Severian’s index finger

• “mouth so wide it appeared his head might fall in two halves”

• “his enormous chest as wide as a man’s”

An arctother, if you look it up, is an extinct type of bear within the size range of modern bears. So first we need to understand that Triskele is fucking huge. This isn’t rottweiler big or even great dane big, but the size of a black bear.

Further, his head appears monstrous! Almost alligatorlike jaws, his head seeming to split in half as he opens his mouth.

Is Triskele a dog?

I suppose the question may become: what is a dog?

I labor this point because, as we continue, Severian will use common words to describe things that are very uncommon. So when Severian says something is a dog, we all believe we know exactly what he means. We picture it so clearly in our heads. But then, as details are revealed, we think to ourselves, Wait…what the fuck? Then we turn back the pages to try to pinpoint where we got it so wrong.

But we didn’t. You didn’t get it wrong.

Wolfe is playing with us. With you.

Consider Severian.

Severian, who we may have seen as a youth in the first few chapters, is now large enough to carry Triskele. He’s taller than most of the Journeyman torturers. He’s even strong enough to carry Triskele under the torturer’s cloak (put a pin in this, we’ll come back to it).

As you may have noticed, too, Severian mentions several extinct creatures as if they’re still alive and doesn’t bother to elaborate (as we discussed before: why would he explain the commonplace?). And there are many things you could do when you encounter this.

You could furiously google around or consult a Book of the New Sun wiki, but what I think you should do is just take it as local color, to put it a certain way.

This world is strange. Severian’s use of words is peculiar to us and often misleading. But what I believe you should take from the smilodons, the arctothers, is to simply accept that these animals—or animals like them—exist here in Severians world.

Now I have traveled much farther from our tower, but I have found always that the pattern of our guild is repeated mindlessly (like the repetitions of Father Inire’s mirrors in the House Absolute) in the societies of every trade, so that they are all of them torturers, just as we. His quarry stands to the hunter as our clients to us; those who buy to the tradesman; the enemies of the Commonwealth to the soldier; the governed to the governors; men to women. All love that which they destroy.

This is how Severian makes sense of the world, which is quite normal. The more he learns of the other guilds or even of the world at large, he finds that it mirrors the guild he grew up in. Which is pretty normal! But because he’s a torturer, it gives it all a bit of a grisly and uncanny feeling.

It also presents an interesting perspective into how he sees the torturers.

They love their clients?

And perhaps one must love their own topic of study. You could not devote your life to something without loving it. And perhaps, rather than the clients themselves, they love the mechanisms of biology, of anatomy.

Over these two chapters, we’re introduced to a lot of concepts. And by introduced I mean that Severian flings out their names.

Like Father Inire or the Claw of the Conciliator, or the Bear Tower, or the fact that humanity once traveled to new suns, to new planets, that, perhaps, humanity delved deep into the earth as well. We see a painting of Neil Armstrong standing on the moon but described in such a way that you may have taken it for a fantastical image.

The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of the figure’s helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection and nothing more.

We learn, too, that the Citadel is ancient but also cloistered. Severian meets a girl who doesn’t recognize the name of the Matachin Tower but asks him if it’s true that a Tower of Torment exists, because to her it’s only a legend. She lives in the Atrium of Time, which is so old that none know why it was named so, but they decorate it with immense dials (sundials?) because of its name. She speaks Latin (more on this when we get to the Appendix) and Severian knows nothing of this language.

Her family occupied these towers. They had waited, at first, to leave Urth with the autarch of the era, then had waited because there was nothing left for them but waiting. They had given many castellans to the Citadel but the last had died generations ago; they were poor now, and their towers were in ruins.

This and what we learn in Chapter V reveal a world in decline. Even artistically, at least according to the Picture-Cleaner, has been in decline. Of course, this also matches the way all older people feel about developments in art.

Why, this is the best part. Art, music, and books. We’ve a Fechin here that shows three girls dressing another one with flowers that’s so real you expect the bees to come out of it. A Quartillosa, too. Not popular anymore, Quartillosa isn’t, or we wouldn’t have him here. But the day he was born he was a better draughtsman than the drippers and spitters they’re wild for today. We get what the House Absolute don’t want, you see. That means we get the old ones, and they’re the best, mostly. Come in here dirty from having hung so long, and I clean them up. Sometimes I clean them again, after they’ve hung here a time. We’ve got a Fechin here. It’s the truth!

What was great has already come and gone. What comes next is decadence and decline.

In just this chapter, too, we experience different registers of speech. The Picture-Cleaner has a blue collar manner of speech, you could say, to contrast with the armigers.

We meet armigers, who despise Severian for being a torturer, and they are described as almost exultants.

What does this mean?

We continue.

Vodalus comes up in this chapter again, though we learn little to nothing more of him.

But Severian clearly lives in an emptying world, one where they live among things they don’t understand. Even the Citadel is a mystery to most who live in it. Just getting from one place to another is difficult and mysterious.

These first five chapters are full of breadcrumbs, of teases, for what may or may not eventually be relevant. Wolfe creates an atmosphere and a sensation for inhabiting this place. Death is everywhere. The world seems to be falling apart. Generations of people wait for…something. Their world shrinks and they become strangers even to their neighbors, constructing unique lore and arcane rituals and beliefs to justify their existence, their practices.

And so my recommendation for the book as we continue is to accept what you don’t know. Embrace it. Take it for what it feels like it means.

Triskele is not a dog as we understand it but there’s a reason that Severian describes him as a dog. Severian, even as a youth, believed his own world was in decline. Let your brain connect this to the autarch and Vodalus’ rebellion. Consider that humanity has gone to the stars, left earth behind, that the moon is a verdant forest, that Nessus is a desolate place of decline and death that seems almost in stasis as it waits for the autarch to return.

I also want to take a moment to discuss Severian’s first acts as Captain of the Apprentices. The first thing he considers is how to put down any rebellion or roadblocks to obedience.

Severian, despite all his seeming introspection, is a man who does things. He is not a deep thinker but someone who acts and takes control of situations. I believe this is a key to understanding him.

We saw it in the graveyard with Vodalus.

He did not consider, before the moment, what it would mean to devote himself to Vodalus. He simply saved his life and then, in the moment, declared himself as someone already devoted to the cause.

So here does Severian make his path of control as Captain of the apprentices. He doesn’t try to create a system of control or power or make inroads to pacify his subordinates or even to come to know them better. Rather, he finds the next oldest and biggest apprentice and beats and threatens him. Then he has him do that to the next biggest and on and on, creating a chain of fear and violence.

It’s quite clever, as it turns out, as it keeps distrust between all the other apprentices, keeping them from rising as one against him.

Most important about this sequence of events: consider why Severian chose to tell this to us.

Next week, we’re onto Chapters VI and VII.

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• 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