# Lives and Times of the Master Torturers *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 20 Aug 2000* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Roy C. Lackey *20 Aug 2000, 02:35* Talarican: 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 ---