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‘If Poison Had a Face’
Impressions of Chapter 28 of Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer
© 2019 James LaFond
JUN/3/19
Reading from pages 169-173 of Shadow & Claw
Carnifex
Severian has miraculously survived a duel that had been arranged as an execution and awakens in the rest area of a military hospital and is asked to leave as soon as able to avoid upsetting the ordinary patients. He is soon set up with work by a ranking military justice official, who is in need of an executioner to carry out the sentence upon a mass murderer. He finds casual conversation with the soldiery problematic:
“…I felt, as we always feel when there is a whole sector or our lives that cannot bear the light, that no matter how far the last question had been from one of the forbidden subjects, the next would pierce to the heart of it.”
The conduct of his duel is fleshed out for him by Dorcas, who he also questions about the obviously duplicitous Agia, providing some keen insights into aggressively manipulative women, that is the surest sign that Dorcas is a resurrected soul and not simply a kind and loyal girl—though her actual living memories remain lost to her.
Diction of note
-destrier, war steed
-cynocephalus, a dog-headed ape [perhaps a baboon]
Ire and Ice: Winter and A White Christmas
‘The Sanguinary Field’
before the rising sun
‘In the Sight of the Pancreator’
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beasts of aryas
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book of nightmares
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hate
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z-pill forever
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time & cosmos
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wife—
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the combat space
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into leviathan’s maw
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on the overton railroad
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logic of steel
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dark, distant futures
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solo boxing
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night city
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honor among men
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let the world fend for itself
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orphan nation
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the fighting edge
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the greatest lie ever sold
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the greatest boxer
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winter of a fighting life
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advent america
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by the wine dark sea
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son of a lesser god
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all-power-fighting
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the lesser angels of our nature
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predation
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triumph
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masculine axis
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the sunset saga complete
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the year the world took the z-pill
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thriving in bad places
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ranger?
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taboo you
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the gods of boxing
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fanatic
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song of the secret gardener
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logic of force
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on combat
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your trojan whorse
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cracker-boy
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fate
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sorcerer!
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when you're food
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menthol rampage
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songs of aryas
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the first boxers
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barbarism versus civilization
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broken dance
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sons of aryas
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fiction anthology one
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uncle satan
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america the brutal
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within leviathan’s craw
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under the god of things
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blue eyed daughter of zeus
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