The Shadow of the Torturer

Severian is an apprentice in the ancient Guild of Torturers, raised inside the Citadel of the city of Nessus on Urth, a world so far in the future that its sun has begun to fade. When he shows forbidden mercy to a prisoner, the guild exiles him, and he sets out toward a distant city with a great executioner's sword, meeting strangers, rivals and mysteries along the way. Told by Severian himself years later, the story moves through a strange, decaying world where science has become indistinguishable from magic. The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun and won the World Fantasy Award in 1981.