The Shadow of the Torturer botns-1

by Gene Wolfe

  “Only an apprentice, sieur.”

  “I don’t wonder then that my friend wants you out of his sight. Follow the gallery to the third door, make your turn and continue about a hundred paces, climb the stair to the second landing and take the corridor south to the double doors at the end.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and took a step in the direction he had indicated.

  “Wait a bit. If you go now, we’ll have to look at you.”

  Racho said, “I’d as soon have him ahead of us as behind us.” I waited nonetheless, with one hand resting on the leg of the ladder, for the two of them to turn a corner.

  Like one of those half-spiritual friends who in dreams address us from the clouds, the old man said, “So you’re a torturer, are you? Do you know, I’ve never been to your place.” He had a weak glance, reminding me of the turtles we sometimes frightened on the banks of Gyoll, and a nose and chin that nearly met. “Grant I never see you there,” I said politely.

  “Nothing to fear now. What could you do with a man like me? My heart would stop like that!” He dropped his sponge into his bucket and attempted to snap his wet fingers, though no sound came. “Know where it is, though. Behind the Witches’ Keep. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” I said, a trifle surprised that the witches were better known than we. “Thought so. Nobody never talks about it, though. You’re angry about those armigers and I don’t blame you. But you ought to know how it is with them. They’re supposed to be like exultants, only they’re not. They’re afraid to die, afraid to hurt, and afraid to act like it. It’s hard on them.”

  “They should be done away with,” I said. “Vodalus would set them quarrying. They’re only a carryover from some past age—what possible help can they give the world?”

  The old man cocked his head. “Why, what help was they to begin? Do you know?” When I admitted I did not, he scrambled down from the ladder like an aged monkey, seeming all arms and legs and wrinkled neck; his hands were as long as my feet, the crooked fingers laced with blue veins. “I’m Rudesind the curator. You know old Ultan, I take it? No, course not. If you did, you’d know the way to the Iibrary.”

  I said, “I’ve never been in this part of the Citadel before.”

  “Never been here? 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! Or you take this one now. Like it?”

  It seemed safe to say I did.

  “Third time for it. When I was new come, I was old Branwallader’s apprentice and he taught me how to clean. This was the one he used, because he said it wasn’t worth nothing. He begun down here in this corner. When he’d dine about as much as you could cover with one hand, he turned it over to me and I did the rest. Back when my wife still lived I cleaned it again. That would be after our second girl was born. It wasn’t all that dark, but I had things on my mind and wanted something to do. Today I took the notion to clean it again. And it needs it—see how nice it’s brightening up? There’s your blue Urth coming over his shoulder again, fresh as the Autarch’s fish.”

  All this time the name of Vodalus was echoing in my mind. I felt certain the old man had come down from his ladder only because I had mentioned it, and I wanted to ask him about it. But try as I might, I could find no way to bring the conversation around to it. When I had been silent a moment too long and was afraid he was about to mount his ladder and begin cleaning again, I managed to say, “Is that the moon? I have been told it’s more fertile.”

  “Now it is, yes. This was done before they got it irrigated. See that gray-brown? In those times, that’s what you’d see if you looked up at her. Not green like she is now. Didn’t seem so big either, because it wasn’t so close in—that’s what old Branwallader used to say. Now there’s trees enough on it to hide Nilammon, as the saw goes.”

  I seized my opportunity. “Or Vodalus.”

  Rudesind cackled. “Or him, that’s right enough. Your bunch must be rubbing their hands waiting to have him. Got something special planned?” If the guild had particular excruciations reserved for specific individuals, I knew nothing of it; but I endeavored to look wise and said, “We’ll think of something.”

  “I suppose you will. A bit ago, though, I thought you was for him. Still you’ll have to wait if he’s hiding in the Forests of Lune.” Rudesind looked up at the picture with obvious appreciation before turning back to me. “I’m forgetting. You want to visit our Master Ultan. Go back to that arch you just come by—”

  “I know the way,” I said. “The armiger told me.”

  The old curator blew those directions to the winds with a puff of sour breath. “What he laid down would only get you to the Reading Room. From there it’d take you a watch to get to Ultan, if ever you did. No, step back to that arch. Go through and all the way to the end of the big room there, and down the stair. You’ll come to a locked door—pound till somebody lets you in. That’s the bottom of the stacks, and that’s where Ultan has his study.” Since Rudesind was watching I followed his directions, though I had not liked the part about the locked door, and steps downward suggested I might be nearing those ancient tunnels where I had wandered looking for Triskele. On the whole I felt far less confident than when I was in those parts of the Citadel that I knew. I have learned since that strangers who visit it are awed by its size; but it is only a mote in the city spread about it, and we who grew up within the gray curtain wall, and have learned the names and relationships of the hundred or so landmarks necessary to those who would find their way in it, are by that very knowledge discomfited when we find ourselves away from the familiar regions.

  So it was with me as I walked through the arch the old man had indicated. Like the rest of that vaulted hall it was of dull, reddish brick, but it was upheld by two pillars whose capitals bore the faces of sleepers, and I found the silent lips and pale, closed eyes more terrible than the agonized masks painted on the metal of our own tower.

  Each picture in the room beyond contained a book. Sometimes they were many, or prominent; some I had to study for some time before I saw the corner of a binding thrusting from the pocket of a woman’s skirt or realized that some strangely wrought spool held words spun like thread. The steps were narrow and steep and without railings; they twisted as they descended, so that I had not gone down more than thirty before the light of the room above was nearly cut off. At last I was forced to put my hands before me and feel my way for fear I would break my head on the door. My questing fingers never encountered it. Instead the steps ended (and I nearly fell in stepping off a step that was not there), and I was left to grope across an uneven floor in total darkness.

  “Who’s there?” a voice called. It was a strangely resonant one, like the sound of a bell tolled inside a cave.

  6. THE MASTER OF THE CURATORS

  “Who’s there?” echoed in the dark. As boldly as I could, I said, “Someone with a message.”

  “Let me hear it then.”

  My eyes were growing used to the dark at last, and I could just make out a dim and very lofty shape moving among dark, ragged shapes that were taller still. “It is a letter, sieur,” I answered. “Are you Master Ultan the curator?”

  “None other.” He was standing before me now. What I had at first thought was a whitish garment now appeared to be a beard reaching nearly to his waist. I was as tall already as many men who are called so, but he was a head and a half taller than I, a true exultant.

  “Then here you are, sieur,”
I said, and held out the letter. He did not take it. “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 soil pressing in about our eyes, grave soil through which the bell called us to worship at whatever shrines may exist 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.

  “No one’s. That is, I am an apprentice of our guild. Master Gurloes sent me, sieur. Master Palaemon teaches us apprentices, mostly.”

  “But not grammar.” Very slowly the tall man’s hand groped toward the letter. “Oh yes, grammar too.” I felt like a child talking to this man, who had already been old when I was bom. “Master Palaemon says we must be able to read and write and calculate, because when we are masters in our time, we’ll have to send letters and receive the instructions of the courts, and keep records and accounts.”

  “Like this,” the dim figure before me intoned. “Letters such as this.”

  “Yes, sieur. Just so.”

  “And what does this say?”

  “I don’t know. It’s sealed, sieur.”

  “If I open it—” (I heard the brittle wax snap under the pressure of his fingers)

  “-will you read it to me?”

  “It’s dark in here, sieur,” I said doubtfully.

  “Then we’ll have to have Cyby. Excuse me.” In the gloom I could barely see him turn away and raise his hands to form a trumpet. “Cy-by! Cy-by!” The name rang through the dark corridors I sensed all about me as the iron tongue struck the echoing bronze on one side, then the other.

  There was an answering call from far off. For some time we waited in silence. At last I saw light down a narrow alley bordered (as it seemed) by precipitous walls of uneven stone. It came nearer—a five-branched candlestick carried by a stocky, very erect man of forty or so with a flat, pale face. The bearded man beside me said, “There you are at last, Cyby. Have you brought a light?”

  “Yes, Master. Who is this?”

  “A messenger with a letter.” In a more ceremonious tone, Master Ultan said to me, “This is my own apprentice, Cyby. We have a guild too, we curators, of whom the librarians are a division. I am the only master librarian here, and it is our custom to assign our apprentices to our senior members. Cyby has been mine for some years now.”

  I told Cyby that I was honored to meet him, and asked, somewhat timidly, what the feast day of the curators was—a question that must have been suggested by the thought that a great many of them must have gone by without Cyby’s being elevated to journeyman.

  “It is now passed,” Master Ultan said. He looked toward me as he spoke, and in the candlelight I could see that his eyes were the color of watered milk. “In early spring. It is a beautiful day. The trees put out their new leaves then, in most years.”

  There were no trees in the Grand Court, but I nodded; then, realizing he could not see me, I said, “Yes, beautiful with soft breezes.”

  “Precisely. You are a young man after my own heart.” He put his hand on my shoulder—I could not help noticing that his fingers were dark with dust. “Cyby, too, is a young man after my heart. He will be chief librarian here when I am gone. We have a procession, you know, we curators. Down Iubar Street. He walks beside me then, the two of us robed in gray. What is the tinct of your own guild?”

  “Fuligin,” I told him. “The color that is darker than black.”

  “There are trees—sycamores and oaks, rock maples and duck-foot trees said to be the oldest on Urth. The trees spread their shade on either side of Iubar Street, and there are more on the esplanades down the center. Shopkeepers come to their doors to see the quaint curators, you know, and of course the booksellers and antique dealers cheer us. I suppose we are one of the spring sights of Nessus, in our little way.”

  “It must be very impressive,” I said.

  “It is, it is. The cathedral is very fine too, once we reach it. There are banks of tapers, as though the sun were shining on the night sea. And candles in blue glass to symbolize the Claw. Enfolded in light, we conduct our ceremonies before the high altar. Tell me, does your own guild go to the cathedral?” I explained that we used the chapel here in the Citadel, and expressed surprise that the librarians and other curators left its walls.

  “We are entitled to, you see. The library itself does—doesn’t it, Cyby?”

  “Indeed it does, Master.” Cyby had a high, square forehead, from which his graying hair was in retreat. It made his face seem small and a trifle babyish; I could understand how Ultan, who must occasionally have run his fingers over it as Master Palaemon sometimes ran his over mine, could think him still almost a boy.

  “You are in close contact, then, with your opposite numbers in the city,” I said.

  The old man stroked his beard. “The closest, for we are they. This library is the city library, and the library of the House Absolute too, for that matter. And many others.”

  “Do you mean that the rabble of the city is permitted to enter the Citadel to use your library?”

  “No,” said Ultan. “I mean that the library itself extends beyond the walls of the Citadel. Nor, I think, is it the only institution here that does so. It is thus that the contents of our fortress are so much larger than their container.” He took me by the shoulder as he spoke, and we began to walk down one of the long, narrow paths between the towering book-cases. Cyby followed us holding up his candelabrum—I suppose more for his benefit than mine, but it permitted me to see well enough to keep from colliding with the dark oak shelves we passed. “Your eyes have not yet failed you,” Master Ultan said after a time. “Do you apprehend any termination to this aisle?”

  “No, sieur,” I said, and in fact I did not. As far as the candlelight flew there was only row upon row of books stretching from the floor to the high ceiling. Some of the shelves were disordered, some straight; once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.

  But always there were books and more books: rows of spines in calf, morocco, binder’s cloth, paper, and a hundred other substances I could not identify, some flashing with gilt, many lettered in black, a few with paper labels so old and yellowed that they were as brown as dead leaves.

  “ ‘Of the trail of ink there is no end,’ “ Master Ultan told me. “Or so a wise man said. He lived long ago—what would he say if he could see us now? Another said, ‘A man will give his life to the turning over of a collection of books,’ but I would like to meet the man who could turn over this one, on any topic.”

  “I was looking at the bindings,” I answered, feeling rather foolish. “How fortunate for you. Yet I am glad. I can no longer see them, but I remember the pleasure I once had in doing it. That would be just after I had become master librarian. I suppose I was about fifty. I had, you know, been an apprentice for many, many years.”

  “Is that so, sieur?”

  “Indeed it is. My master was Gerbold, and for decades it appeared that he would never die. Year followed straggling year for me, and all that time I read—I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure, in time, until I spent most of my hours searching for such books. Then I devised a plan of study for myself, tracing obscure sciences, one after another, from the dawn of knowledge to the present. Eventually I exhausted even that, and beginning at the great ebony case that stands in the center of the room we of the library have maintained for three hundred years against the return of the Autarch Sulpicius (and into which, in consequence, no one ever comes) I read outward for a period of fifteen years, often finishing two books in one day.” Behind us, Cyby murmured, “Marvelous, sieur.” I suspected that he had heard the story
many times.

  “Then the unlooked-for seized me by the coat. Master Gerbold died. Thirty years before I had been ideally suited by reason of predilection, education, experience, youth, family connections, and ambition to succeed him. At the time I actually did so, no one could have been less fit. I had waited so long that waiting was all I understood, and I possessed a mind suffocated beneath the weight of inutile facts. But I forced myself to take charge, and spent more hours than I could expect you to believe now in attempting to recall the plans and maxims I had laid down so many years ago for my eventual succession. He paused, and I knew he was delving again in a mind larger and darker than even his great library. “But my old habit of reading dogged me still. I lost to books days and even weeks, during which I should have been considering the operations of the establishment that looked to me for leadership. Then, as suddenly as the striking of a clock, a new passion came to me, displacing the old. You will already have guessed what it was.”

  I told him I had not.

  “I was reading—or so I thought—on the seat of that bow window on the forty-ninth floor that overlooks—I have forgotten, Cyby. What is it that it overlooks?”

  “The upholsterers’ garden, sieur.”

  “Yes, I recall it now—that little square of green and brown. I believe they dry rosemary there to put in pillows. I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when it came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper on which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still bearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, that I began to understand their care.”