mystery of the guild

Jeff Wilson · 11 Feb 2009, 08:39 · from 2009-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:39:23 -0600
Subject: (urth) mystery of the guild
In-Reply-To: <63FB9AC7E0AEC7459DBCC99DC44247CA01F6B76D at BOSIDEXDB.Bankofscotland.ie>
References: <63FB9AC7E0AEC7459DBCC99DC44247CA01F6B76D at BOSIDEXDB.Bankofscotland.ie>
Message-ID: <49928EBB.9080303 at io.com>

O'Donnell, Tim (BOSI) wrote:
> However, I seem to recall that Severian mentions that his Guild had two 
> secrets and that he would betray both over his narrative.  One is 
> certainly "We obey" but I don't think the other one is mentioned directly.

That's not much of a secret, is it? Their showmanship at public 
excruciations seems to include a bit of put-on bloodthirstiness, but 
they perform as ordered anyway.

At times I have speculated "the secret is only that we torturers obey" 
means the object of their obedience is a secret, not the obedience itself.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net