"Gene Wolfe - New Sun 1- The Shadow of the Torturer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the
efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves
or not at all.
Thus I knew nothing, as the coin dropped into my pocket, of the dogmas of the
movement Vodalus led, but I soon learned them all, for they were in the air.
With him I hated the Autarchy, though I had no notion of what might replace it.
With him I despised the exultants who failed to rise against the Autarch and
bound the fairest of their daughters to him in ceremonial concubinage. With him
I detested the people for their lack of discipline and a common purpose. Of
those values that Master Malrubins (who had been master of apprentices when I
was a boy) had tried to teach me, and that Master Palaemon still tried to
impart, I accepted only one: loyalty to the guild. In that I was quite correct -
it was, as I sensed, perfectly feasible for me to serve Vodalus and remain a
torturer. It was in this fashion that I began the long journey by which I have
backed into the throne.


02 SEVERIAN


Memory oppresses me. Having been reared among the torturers, I have never known
my father or my mother. No more did my brother apprentices know theirs. From
time to time, but most particularly when winter draws on, poor wretches come
clamoring to the Corpse Door, hoping to be admitted to our ancient guild. Often
they regale Brother Porter with accounts of the torments they will willingly
inflict in payment for warmth and food; occasionally they fetch animals as
samples of their work.
All are turned away. Traditions from our days of glory, antedating the present
degenerate age, and the one before it, and the one before that, an age whose
name is hardly remembered now by scholars, forbid recruitment from such as they.
Even at the time I write of, when the guild had shrunk to two masters and less
than a score of journeymen, those traditions were honored.
From my earliest memory I remember all. That first recollection is of piling
pebbles in the Old Yard. It lies south and west of the Witches' Keep, and is
separated from the Grand Court. The curtain wall our guild was to help defend
was ruinous even then, with a wide gap between the Red Tower and the Bear, where
I used to climb the fallen slabs of unsmeltable gray metal to look out over the
necropolis that descends that side of Citadel Hill.
When I was older, it became my playground. The winding paths were patrolled
during daylight hours, but the sentries were largely concerned for the fresher
graves on the lower ground, and knowing us to belong to the torturers, they
seldom had much stomach for expelling us from our lurking places in the cypress
groves.
Our necropolis is said to be the oldest in Nessus. That is certainly false, but
the very existence of the error testifies to a real antiquity, though the
autarchs were not buried there even when the Citadel was their stronghold, and
the great families - then as now - preferred to inter their long-limbed dead in
vaults on their own estates. But the armigers and optimates of the city favored
the highest slopes, near the Citadel wall; and the poorer commons lay below them
until the farthest reaches of the bottom lands, pressing against the tenements