The Shadow of the Torturer

The Shadow of the Torturer is the first of the four volumes of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, and it is narrated by Severian, an apprentice in the guild of torturers, on Urth, a far future Earth under a dying sun. Severian grows up in the Citadel of Nessus, a vast decaying city whose guilds tend machines left by a legendary interstellar civilization. As an apprentice he survives a swim in the river Gyoll and, in a necropolis, saves the life of Vodalus, a rebel against the Autarch. Later he falls in love with Thecla, a noble prisoner of the guild, and when she is to be tortured he gives her a knife so she can kill herself. That breach of his oath should cost him his life. Instead the guild sends him away to be executioner in the distant city of Thrax, carrying the great sword Terminus Est.

The rest of the book is his journey out through Nessus. He shares lodgings with the giant Baldanders and his companion Dr. Talos, a charlatan. He meets Agia, who draws him into a duel fought with the poisonous leaves of the avern, which he survives against all expectation. He falls into a lake of the dead in the Botanic Gardens and climbs out beside Dorcas, a mysterious young woman, and finds among his things the Claw of the Conciliator, a jewel Agia planted on him. The volume ends in the middle of things, as the company reaches the city's great gate and a commotion breaks out.

Nothing about this is easy. Severian's narration cannot always be trusted, and Wolfe fills the prose with rare and archaic words from Latin and Greek, so that the familiar is made strange. The book rewards slow reading and rereading, and it does not stand alone: readers who start it should plan on all four volumes.