The Shadow of the Torturer

5. THE PICTURE-CLEANER AND OTHERS

The Feast of Holy Katharine is the greatest of days for our guild, the festival by which we are recalled to our heritage, the time when journeymen become masters (if they ever do) and apprentices become journeymen. I will leave my description of the ceremonies of that day until I have occasion to tell of my own elevation; but in the year I am recounting, the year of the fight by the graveside, Drotte and Roche were elevated, leaving me captain of apprentices. The full weight of that office did not impress itself on me until the ritual was nearly over. I was sitting in the ruined chapel enjoying the pageantry and only just conscious (in the same pleasant way I was anticipating the feast) that I would be senior to all the rest when the last of it was done. By slow degrees, however, a feeling of disquiet seized me. I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy, and bowed with responsibility when I did not yet fully understand I held it. I remembered how much difficulty Drotte had encountered in keeping us in order. I would have to do it now without his strength, and with no one to be to me what Roche had been to him—a lieutenant of his own age. When the final chant crashed to a close and Master Gurloes and Master Palaemon in their gold-traced masks had slow-stepped through the door, and the old journeymen had hoisted Drotte and Roche, the new journeymen, on their shoulders (already fumbling in the sabretaches at their belts for the fireworks they would set off outside), I had steeled myself and even formed a rudimentary plan.

We apprentices were to serve the feast, and before we did so were to doff the relatively new and clean clothes we had been given for the ceremony. After the last cracker had popped and the matrosses, in their annual gesture of amity, had torn the sky with the largest piece of ordinance in the Great Keep, I hustled my charges—already, or so I thought, beginning to look at me resentfully—back to our dormitory, closed the door, and pushed a cot against it. Eata was the oldest except for myself, and fortunately for me I had been friendly enough in the past that he suspected nothing until it was too late to make effective resistance. I got him by the throat and banged his head half a dozen times against the bulkhead, then kicked his feet from under him. “Now,” I said, “are you going to be my second? Answer!”

He could not speak, but he nodded.

“Good. I’ll get Timon. You take the next biggest.”

In the space of a hundred breaths (and very quick breaths they were) the boys had been kicked into submission. It was three weeks before any of them dared to disobey me, and then there was no mass rebellion, only individual malingering.

As captain of apprentices I had new functions, as well as more freedom than I had ever enjoyed before. It was I who saw that the journeymen on duty got their meals hot, and who supervised the boys who toiled under the stacks of trays intended for our clients. In the kitchen I drove my charges to their tasks, and in the classroom I coached them in their studies; I was employed to a much greater degree than previously in carrying messages to distant parts of the Citadel, and even in a small way in conducting the guild’s business. Thus I became acquainted with all the thoroughfares and with many an unfrequented corner-granaries with lofty bins and demonic cats; wind-swept ramparts overlooking gangrenous slums; and the pinakotheken, with their great hallway topped by a vaulted roof of window-pierced brick, floored with flagstones strewn with carpets, and bound by walls from which dark arches opened to strings of chambers lined—as the hallway itself was—with innumerable pictures. Many of these were so old and smoke-grimed that I could not discern their subjects, and there were others whose meaning I could not guess—a dancer whose wings seemed leeches, a silent-looking woman who gripped a double-bladed dagger and sat beneath a mortuary mask. After I had walked at least a league among these enigmatic paintings one day, I came upon an old man perched on a high ladder. I wanted to ask my way, but he seemed so absorbed in his work that I hesitated to disturb him.

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 this 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.

This warrior of a dead world affected me deeply, though I could not say why or even just what emotion it was I felt. In some obscure way, I wanted to take down the picture and carry it—not into our necropolis but into one of those mountain forests of which our necropolis was (as I understood even then) an idealized but vitiated image. It should have stood among trees, the edge of its frame resting on young grass.

“-and so,” a voice behind me said, “they all escaped. Vodalus had what he had come for, you see.”

“You,” snapped the other. “What are you doing here?” I turned and saw two armigers dressed in bright clothes that came as near to exultants’ as they dared have them. I said, “I have a communication for the archivist,” and held up the envelope.

‘Very well,” said the armiger who had spoken to me. “Do you know the location of the archives?”

“I was about to ask, sieur.”

“Then you are not the proper messenger to take the letter, are you? Give it to me and I’ll give it to a page.”

“I can’t, sieur. It is my task to deliver it.”

The other armiger said, “You needn’t be so hard on this young man, Racho.”

“You don’t know what he is, do you?”

“And you do?”

The one called Racho nodded. “From what part of this Citadel are you, messenger?”

“From the Matachin Tower. Master Gurloes sends me to the archivist.”

The other armiger’s face tightened. “You are a torturer, then.”

“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.