![]() ![]() As he leaves, his master gifts him with the ancient executioner's sword, Terminus Est, the Line of Division. The young torturer expects to be killed for his crime instead he is exiled from the city to serve as a simple executioner in distant Thrax ,the City of Windowless Rooms. In the great Citadel built of unsmeltable gray metal, young Severian and his fellow apprentices study to achieve the rank of Master Torturer learning the ancient mysteries of the guild, sworn to torture whom the Autarch says to torture, and to kill whom he says to kill.īut with the coming of Thecla, a beautiful and intelligent woman whose indiscretions have lost her her place in the inner circle of concubines of the House Absolute, life changes for Severian, as he disobeys the rules he has been raised to follow. ![]() One is not born into the torturers' guild, one is adopted there from the children of its victims. In a stunning blend of the lyric extravagance of fantasy and the keen edge of science fiction, meeting in a future so distant that it seems like the ancient past, Gene Wolfe begins his chronicle of Severian the Torturer, in this the first volume of The Book of the New Sun. "One expects any book from Gene Wolfe to be a classic - and here it is." - Thomas M. ![]()
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