Like David Ben-Ami, I, too, have just finished reading Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer and I am not inspired to continue with the series. In all fairness, I must say I do not care for fantasy but after hearing/reading so much high praise for Gene Wolfe's stuff I decided to give it a try. Further, I resent authors (publishers?) who put out what Donald Lindsay calls "multivolume book plus a sequel." Most of the trilogies I read at least are quasi-complete within each volume (especially the first) Big exception: Hyperion. I, for some reason, did not resent the two-volume treatment as much with these two. Back to SotT, however, here we are simply left hanging without even having received the quality of writing that Simmons gave us in Hyperion. As for the attempts to increase our vocabularies via archaic and/or made-up terms, I find this irritating if not presumptious; however, to each his or her own.
Cal Hylton