The Shadow of the Torturer botns-1

by Gene Wolfe

  “So someone wrote it there,” she said pensively. “Probably one of the inn servants, because he called the ostler by name. But what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can tell you why it was put where it was. I sat there, on that horn settee, before you sat down. It made me happy, I recall, because you sat beside me. Do you remember if the waiter—he must have carried the note, whether he wrote it or not—put the tray there before I got up to bathe?”

  “I can remember everything,” I said, “except last night. Agia sat in a folding canvas chair, you sat on the couch, that’s right, and I sat down beside you. I had been carying the avern on the pole as well as my sword, and I laid the avern flat behind the couch. The kitchen girl came in with water and towels for you, then she went out and got oil and rags for me.”

  Dorcas said, “We ought to have given her something.”

  “I gave her an orichalk to bring the screen. That’s probably as much as she’s paid for a week. Anyway, you went behind it, and a moment later the host led the waiter in with the tray and wine.

  “That’s why I didn’t see it, then. But the waiter must have known where I was sitting, because there was no place else. So he left it under the tray, hoping I’d see it when I came out. What was the first part again?”

  “ ‘The woman with you has been here before. Do not trust her.’ “ “It must have been for me. If it had been for you, it would have distinguished between Agia and me, probably by hair color. And if it had been meant for Agia, it would have been out on the other side of the table where she would have seen it instead.”

  “So you reminded someone of his mother.”

  “Yes.” Once more there were tears in her eyes.

  “You’re not old enough to have had a child who could have written that note.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, and buried her face in the loose folds of the brown mantle.

  29. AGILUS

  When the physician in charge had examined me and found I had no need of treatment, he asked us to leave the lazaret, where my cloak and sword were, as he said, upsetting to his patients.

  On the opposite side of the building in which I had eaten with the troopers, we found a shop that catered to their needs. Together with false jewelry and trinkets of the sort such men give their paramours, it carried a certain amount of women’s clothing; and though my money had been much depleted by the dinner we had never returned to the Inn of Lost Loves to enjoy, I was able to buy Dorcas a simar.

  The entrance to the Hall of Justice was not far from this shop. A crowd of a hundred or so was milling before it, and since the people pointed and elbowed one another when they caught sight of my fuligin, we retreated again to the courtyard where the destriers were tethered. A portreeve from the Hall of Justice found us there—an imposing man with a high, white forehead like the belly of a pitcher. “You are the carnifex,” he said. “I was told you are well enough to perform your office.”

  I told him I could do whatever was necessary today, if his master required it. “Today? No, no, that’s not possible. The trial won’t be over until this afternoon.”

  I remarked that since he had come to make certain I was well enough to carry out the execution, he must have felt certain the prisoner would be found guilty. “Oh, there’s no question of that—not the least. Nine persons died, after all, and the man was apprehended on the spot. He’s of no consequence, so ther’s no possibility of pardon or appeal. The tribunal will reconvene at midmorning, but you won’t be required until noon.”

  Because I had had no direct experience with judges or courts (at the Citadel, our clients had always been sent to us, and Master Gurloes deal; with those officials who occasionally came to inquire about the disposition of some case or other), and because I was eager to actually perform the act in which I had been drilled for so long, I suggested that the chiliarch might wish to consider a torchlight ceremony that same night.

  “That would be impossible. He must meditate his decision. How would it look? A great many people feel already that the military rnagistrates are hasty and even capricious. And to be frank, a civil judge would probably have waited a week, and the case would be all the better for it, since there would have been ample time, then, for someone to come forward with fresh evidence, which of course no one will actually do.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon then,” I said. “We’ll require quarters for the night. Also I’ll want to examine the scaffold and block, and ready my client. “Will I need a pass to see him?”

  The portreeve asked if we could not stay in the lazaret, and when I shook my head, we—the pcrtreeve, Dorcas, and I—went there to permit him to argue with the physician in charge, who, as I had predicted, refused to have us. That was followed by a lengthy discussion with a noncommissioned officer of the xenagie, who explained that it was impossible for us to stay in the barracks with the troopers, and that if we were to use one of the rooms set aside for the higher ranks, no one would want to occupy it in the future. In the end a little, windowless storeroom was cleared out for us, and two beds and some other furniture (all of which had seen hard use) brought in. I left Dorcas there, and after assuring myself that I was unlikely to step through a rotten board at the critical moment, or to have to saw the client’s head off while I held him across my knee, I went to the cells to make the call that our traditions demand. Subjectively at least, there is a great difference between detention facilities to which one has become accustomed and those to which one has not. If I had been entering our own oubliette, I would have felt I was, quite literally, coming home—perhaps coming home to die, but coming home nevertheless. Although I would have realized in the abstract that our winding metal corridors and narrow gray doors might hold horror for the men and women confined there, I would have felt nothing of that horror myself, and if one of them had suggested I should, I would have been quick to point out their various comforts—clean sheets and ample blankets, regular meals, adequate light, privacy that was scarcely ever interrupted, and so on.

  Now, going down a narrow and twisted stone stair into a facility a hundredth the size of ours, my feelings were precisely the reverse of what I would have felt there. I was oppressed by the darkness and stench as if by a weight. The thought that I might myself be confined there by some accident (a misunderstood order, for example, or some unsuspected malice on the part of the portreeve) recurred no matter how often I pushed it aside.

  I heard the sobbing of a woman, and because the portreeve had spoken of a man, assumed that it came from a cell other than the one that held my client. That, I had been told, was the third from the right. I counted: one, two, and three. The door was merely wood bound with iron, but the locks (such is military efficiency!) had been oiled. Within, the sobbing hesitated and almost ceased as the bolt fell back.

  Inside a naked man lay upon straw. A chain ran from the iron collar about his neck to the wall. A woman, naked too, bent over him, her long, brown hair falling past her face and his so that it seemed to unite them. She turned to look at me, and I saw that it was Agia.

  She hissed, “Agilus!” and the man sat up. Their faces were so nearly alike that Agia might have been holding a mirror to her own. “It was you,” I said. “But that isn’t possible.” Even while I spoke, I was recalling the way Agia had behaved at the Sanguinary Field, and the strip of black I had seen by the hipparch’s ear.

  “You,” Agia said. “Because you lived, he has to die.”

  I could only answer, “Is it really Agilus?”

  “Of course.” My client’s voice was an octave lower than his twin’s, though less steady. “You still don’t understand, do you?”

  I could only shake my bead.

  “It was Agia in the shop. In the Septentrion costume. She came in through the rear entrance while I was speaking to you, and I made a sign to her when you wouldn’t even talk of selling the sword.”

  Agia said, “I couldn’t speak—you would have known it for a woman’s voice—
but the cuirass hid my breasts and the gauntlets my hands. Walking like a man isn’t as hard as men think.”

  “Have you ever looked at that sword? The tang should be signed.” Agilus’s hands lifted for a moment, as though he would have taken it still if he could. Agia added in a toneless voice, “It is. By Jovinian. I saw it in the inn.” There was a tiny window high up in the wall behind them and from it, suddenly, as though the ridge of a roof, or a cloud, had now fallen below the sun, a beam of light came to bathe them both. I looked from one aureate face to the other. “You tried to kill me. Just for my sword.”

  Agilus said, “I hoped you would leave it—don’t you remember? I tried to persuade you to leave, to flee in disguise. I would have given the clothes to you, and as much money as I could.”

  “Severian, don’t you understand? It was worth ten times more than our shop, and the shop was all we had.”

  “You’ve done this before. You must have. Everything went too smoothly. A legal murder, with no body to weight for Gyoll.”

  “You’re going to kill Agilus, aren’t you? That must be why vou’re here—but you didn’t know it was us until you opened the door. What have we done that you’re not going to do?”

  Less stridently her brother’s voice followed Agia’s. “It was a fair combat. We were equally armed, and you agreed to the conditions. Will you give me such a fight tomorrow?”

  “You knew that when evening came the warmth of my hands would stimulate the avern, and that it would strike at my face. You wore gloves and you only had to wait. In reality, you didn’t even have to do that, because you had thrown the leaves often be-fore.”

  Agilus smiled. “So the business of the gauntlets was a side issue after all.” He spread his hands. “I won. But in reality you won, by some concealed art neither my sister nor I understand. I have been wronged by you three times now, and the old law said that a man three times wronged might claim any boon of his oppressor. I grant that the old law is no longer in force, but my darling tells me you have an attachment to times past, when your guild was great and your fortress the center of the Commonwealth. I claim the boon. Set me free.” Agia rose, brushing the straw from her knees and rounded thighs. As though she realized only now that she was naked, she picked up the blue-green brocade gown I remembered so well and clasped it to her.

  I said, “How have I wronged you, Agilus? It seems to me that you have wronged me, or tried to.”

  “First by entrapment. You carried an heirloom worth a villa about the city without knowing what it was you had. As owner it was your duty to know, and your ignorance threatens to cost me my life tomorrow unless you free me tonight. Secondly, by refusing to entertain any offer to buy. In our commercial society, one may set one’s price as high as one wishes, but to refuse to sell at any price is treason. Agia and I wore the gaudy armor of a barbarian—you wore his heart. Thirdly, by the sleight with which you won our combat. Unlike you, I found myself contesting powers greater than I could comprehend. I lost my nerve, as any man would, and here I am. I call on you to free me.” Laughter came unwished-for, carrying with it the taste of gall. “You’re asking me to do for you, whom I have every reason to despise, what I wouldn’t do for Thecla, whom I loved almost more than my own life. No. I’m a fool, and if I was not one before, surely your darling sister has made one of me. But not such a fool as that.”

  Agia dropped her gown and threw herself toward me with such violence that I thought for an instant she was attacking me. Instead she covered my mouth with kisses, and seizing my hands put one on her breast and the other upon her velvet hip. There were bits of rotten straw there still, and on her back, to which I shifted both hands a moment later.

  “Severian, I love you! I longed for you when we were together, and tried to give myself to you a score of times. Don’t you remember the Garden of Delectation? How much I wanted to take you there? It would have been rapture for us both, but you wouldn’t go. For once be honest.” (She spoke as if honesty were an abnormality like mania.) “Don’t you love me? Take me now… here. Agilus will turn his face away, I promise you.” Her fingers had slid between my waistband and my belly, and I was not aware that her other hand had lifted the flap of my sabretache until I heard the rustle of paper there.

  I slapped her wrist, perhaps harder than I should, and she flew at me, clawing for my eyes as Thecla used sometimes to do when she could no longer bear the thoughts of imprisonment and pain. I pushed her away—not into a chair this time but against the wall. Her head struck the stone, and though it must have been padded by her abundant hair, the sound was as sharp as the tap of a mason’s hammer. All the strength seemed to leave her knees; she slid down until she was sitting on the straw. I would never have guessed that Agia was capable of weeping, but she wept.

  Agilus asked, “What did she do?” There was no emotion beyond curiosity in the question.

  “You must have seen her. She tried to reach into my sabretache.” I scooped what coins I possessed out of their compartment: two brass orichalks and seven copper aes. “Or perhaps she wanted to steal the letter I have to the archon of Thrax. I told her about that once, but I don’t carry it in here.”

  “She wanted the coins, I am sure. They’ve fed me, but she must be dreadfully hungry.”

  I picked Agia up and thrust her torn gown into her arms, then opened the door and led her out. She was still dazed, but when I gave her an orichalk she threw it down and spat at it.

  When I reentered the cell, Agilus was sitting cross-legged, his back propped by the wall. “Don’t ask me about Agia,” be said. “Everything you suspect is true—is that enough? I will be dead tomorrow, and she will wed the old man who dotes on her, or someone else. I wanted her to do it sooner. He couldn’t have prevented her from seeing me, her brother. Now I will be gone, and she won’t have even that to worry about.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you will die tomorrow. That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about. Do you care how you look on the scaffold?” He stared at his hands, slender and rather soft, where they lay in the narrow beam of sunlight that had given his head, and Agia’s, an aureole a few moments before. “Yes,” he said. “She may come. I hope she won’t, but yes, I care.” I told him then (as I had been taught) to eat little in the morning so that he would not be ill when the time came, and cautioned him to empty his bladder, which relaxes at the stroke. I drilled him too in that false routine we teach to all who must die, so they will think the moment is not quite come when in fact it has come, the false routine that lets them die with something less of fear. I do not know if he believed me, though I hope he did; if ever a lie is justified in the sight of the Pancreator, it is that one.

  When I left him, the orichalk was gone. In its place—and no doubt with its edge—a design had been scratched on the filthy stones. It might have been the snarling face of Jurupari, or perhaps a map, and it was wreathed with letters I did not know. I rubbed it away with my foot.

  30. NIGHT

  There were five of them, three men and two women. They waited outside the door, in a sense, but not near it, grouped a dozen strides away. Waiting, they talked among themselves, two or three talking together, almost shouting, laughing, waving arms, nudging one another. I watched them from the shadows for a time. They could not see me there, or did not, wrapped as I was in my fuligin cloak, and I was able to pretend I did not know what they were; they might have been at a party, all a little drunk.

  They came eagerly yet hesitantly, afraid of being repulsed and determined to make the advance. One man was taller than I, surely the illegitimate son of some exultant, fifty or more, and nearly as fat as the host at the Inn of Lost Loves. A thin woman of twenty or so walked beside him, almost pressing against him; she had the hungriest eyes I have ever seen. When the fat man stepped in front of me, blocking my way with his bulk, she nearly (yet not quite) embraced me, coming so close it seemed almost magical that we did not touch, her long-fingered hands moving at the opening of my cloak with the desire to stroke my chest
, but never quite doing so, so that I felt I was about to fall prey to some blood-drinking ghost, a succubus or lamia. The others crowded around me, hemming me against the building.

  “It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? How does it feel?”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “He’s a bad one, isn’t he? A monster?” None of them waited for answers to their questions, or, so far as I could see, expected or wanted any. They sought propinquity, and the experience of having spoken to me. “Will you break him first? Will there be a branding?”

  “Have you ever killed a woman?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I did, once.”

  One of the men, short and slight, with the high, bumpy forehead of an intellectual, was putting an asimi into my hand. “I know you fellows don’t get much, and I hear he’s a pauper, can’t tip.” A woman, gray hair straggling over her face, tried to make me take a lace-trimmed handkerchief. “Get blood on it. As much as you want, or even only a little. I’ll pay you afterward.” All of them stirred me to pity even as they revolted me; but one man most of all. He was even smaller than the one who had given me the money, grayer than the gray-haired woman; and there was a madness in his dull eyes, a shadow of some half-suppressed concern that had worn itself out in the prison of his mind until all its eagerness was gone and only its energy remained. He seemed to be waiting until the other four had finished speaking, and since that time clearly would never come, I quieted them with a gesture and asked him what he wanted. “M-m-master, when I was on the Quasar I had a paracoita, a doll, you see, a genicon, so beautiful with her great pupils as dark as wells, her i-irises purple like asters or pansies blooming in summer, Master, whole beds of them, I thought, had b-been gathered to make those eyes, that flesh that always felt sun-warmed. Wh-wh-where is she now, my own scopolagna, my poppet? Let h-h-hooks be buried in the hands that took her! Crush them, Master, beneath stones. Where has she gone from the lemon-wood box I made for her, where she never slept at all, for she lay with me all night, not in the box, the lemon-wood box where she waited all day, watch-and-watch, Master, smiling when I laid her in so she might smile when I drew her out. How soft her hands were, her little hands. Like d-d-doves. She might have flown with them about the cabin had she not chosen instead to lie with me. W-w-wind their guts about your w-windlass, stuff their eyes into their mouths. Unman them, shave them clean below so their doxies may not know them, their lemans may rebuke them, leave them to the brazen laughter of the brazen mouths of st-st-strumpets. Work your will upon those guilty. Where was their mercy on the innocent? When did they tremble, when weep? What kind of men could do as they have done—thieves, false friends, betrayers, bad shipmates, no shipmates, murderers and kidnappers. W-without you, where are their nightmares, where are their restitutions, so long promised? Where are their chains, fetters, manacles, and cangues? Where are their abacinations, that shall leave them blind? Where are the defenestrations that shall break their bones, where is the estrapade that shall grind their joints? Where is she, the beloved whom I lost?”