Subject: (urth) Re: Lives and Times of the Master Torturers

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 02:35:23 +0000

Here is another important datum which must be factored into your
chronology, as it relates to Gurloes' age and informs us approximately how
long he has been a master. In chapter VII of CLAW, we learn:

    "During the period when Drotte was captain of apprentices..." (1-3
years? before Sev became captain), Sev waited on Gurloes one night. While
drinking, Gurloes mentioned that he had been "A master of the guild for
twenty years...".

    I believe Sev to be a couple of years younger than does mantis*, but
even using mantis's estimate, that means Sev would have been 16-18 years old
on that occasion, and that Gurloes became a master two to four years before
Sev was born. If Palaemon was still "...a wanderer, then, perhaps ten tears
before I was born. And yet he had returned to the Citadel to become a master
of the guild.", as Sev believes, then _both_ Palaemon and Gurloes became
masters during the decade before Sev's birth. Unless someone is lying,
there's no way around that fact.

    And if Palaemon was a master when he taught the apprentice Gurloes, then
Gurloes must have been a natural-born torturin' fool, because he had to have
made master before the age of thirty.

    *One of the reasons I believe Sev to be younger than that comes from
that same passage (II, VII), the one where Gurloes is talking about an
armiger's daughter who is to be "abused". Sev is young enough then that
Gurloes can taunt him about whether he has reached puberty: "Don't tell me
you're not hairy yet."

Roy

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/