(urth) Father Inire

[David Stockhoff]

On 12/3/2011 9:49 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> *From:* Lee Berman <mailto:severiansola at hotmail.com>
>
>
>
> > > Gerry Quinn: Jolenta is a waitress not a witch.
> > Jolenta is an actress. We don't know her name when she was a 
> waitress. The
> > thin girl with straggling hair had only been a waitress for about a 
> month
> > and she recognizes Severian as a carnifex. Is there any evidence she 
> had
> > not previously been a witch but left her guild in symmetry with 
> Severian's
> > story? If not she is a viable candidate for Severa.
> The waitress wasn’t an actress (two statements of hers indicate it) 
> and there’s no indication that she hadn’t worked elsewhere as a 
> waitress before her current employment. However, I think you have 
> inadvertently hit on something that indicates she was never a witch.
> Palaemon: “Nowhere but in Nessus - nowhere but here in the Citadel - 
> is there a chapter of our guild. Lesser places have no more than a 
> carnifex.”
> Severian is still wearing what he wore as a journeyman of the 
> Torturers Guild. A witch would recognise him as a torturer. Jolenta 
> calls him a carnifex, the name used for an executioner/torturer 
> everywhere else.

Good eye.

But a witch who recognizes a torturer outside the Citadel might not say 
so; if Jolenta is some kind of escaped (or even just a failed) witch, 
she may not want to reveal too much knowledge to strangers that she 
would then have to explain. Severian would certainly have noticed had 
she said "torturer" (or Seeker) vs "carnifex."

You'd think it would have come up later, however. Even tangentially or 
cryptically. I don't recall any odd conversations between them. Maybe 
she is just poor and comes from an older part of the city where the 
Citadel is not just a legend.