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  If only Halder could see me now, he thought; his grandfather had kept on at him to learn the trade (relearn it, rather, since he'd been taught it as a boy and since forgotten it, until after the burning at Ciartanstead, by which point Halder was dead and Poldarn no longer needed the skill). Or Asburn, the real smith at Haldersness, who'd tried to teach him and failed; Asburn could've done four awkward welds one after the other without turning a hair. But Asburn wasn't here, and if he was they'd cut his head off for being a raider. Poldarn took the lid off the flux jar. Just about enough, if he was sparing with it (and that was the wrong approach).

  In spite of the lack of flux, the welds took, rather to his surprise. Oddly enough, it seemed as though he was starting to get good at this, now that he was just an employee of the foundry rather than the master of Haldersness and Ciartanstead. Another slight miscalculation with past and present; story of his life, apparently.

  Once he'd made the basic shape, he stopped. No point going any further until he'd measured up the bell and spoken to Malla Ancola, the chief founder, who'd have worked out how long and heavy the clapper had to be. Annoying; should have done that before he started, because now he'd have to let his fire burn out. Waste of time and good charcoal, and that was what came of not giving your full attention to the job in hand. Never mind the past, or the future; you had to concentrate on the present, and on the work you were supposed to be doing.

  Malla didn't look like a foundryman; he should have been either a prince or a poet, ideally both. He was tall and slim, with long, delicate hands, a smooth round face and, most of the time, a profoundly gormless expression, as if he'd just been interrupted in the middle of composing an ode by a courtier needing something signed.

  'You're back, then,' he said, as Poldarn edged his way past the grinding-house door, which had stuck at slightly ajar since the accession of the dynasty before last. 'Any luck with the charcoal people?'

  (Malla even sounded like a poet; low-voiced, quiet, droopy. The accent wasn't necessarily a problem. Even Tulicers wrote poetry sometimes.)

  'All settled,' Poldarn replied briskly. He knew from experience that getting into any kind of conversation with Malla was a fatal mistake if you ever wanted to get some work done. Malla could talk about anything, indefinitely. 'I'm just doing the clapper now, so I need some measurements.'

  'Ah,' Malla replied. 'Right. She's over here. We'll be making a start on grinding her directly.' Poldarn sighed. Making a start meant that Malla was just beginning to think about it; like a god at the creation of the world, he was opening his mind to the vague, inchoate possibility of the existence of shapes and forms. In other words, he hadn't got round to figuring out the measurements yet. Before he did that, he'd need to prune away the rough, gritty skin of casting waste, which might be anything up to an eighth of an inch deep. Until he knew precisely how thick the walls of the bell would eventually be, he couldn't calculate anything. If this world was going to take a week to create, Malla was still in the mid-afternoon of the second day, turning over in his mind what colour the sky should be.

  'Right,' Poldarn said. 'Well, not to worry. I'll go back and rough out the brackets.'

  Malla shrugged. 'Yes,' he said. 'That'll be all right.'

  'See you later, then.'

  'See you later.'

  Poldarn had managed to get one arm of the bracket drawn down and was making good progress with bending up the scrollwork when Aciava finally showed up. Poldarn had been expecting him all day, and now it was almost noon. There could be some deep significance to that, but it was rather more likely that he'd had a lie-in.

  'Hello there.' He heard Aciava's voice coming from the junction of light and darkness just by the door. 'So this is where you work. Nice set-up you people have got here.'

  Poldarn didn't turn round or look up; he was watching the steel in the fire, waiting for the right colour. He wished the steel was ready and he could start hammering it, so he'd have an excuse for drowning out whatever Aciava said. 'It's all right,' he replied.

  'I should say so.' The voice was getting nearer. 'Biggest foundry this side of the mountains, and the only bell factory in Tulice. Founded, no pun intended, over a century ago, the secret of its success is the unique composition of the mud and sand deposits found in the nearby Green River, which are ideally suited to the extremely specialised business of large-scale deep-core cupola founding.' He stopped, and in spite of the heat of the fire Poldarn could almost feel the glow of his grin. 'I read up on this outfit before I left,' he said. 'Rule number one in the gold-tooth racket: always do your homework before you set out.'

  Poldarn nodded. 'I'd sort of got the impression you like knowing more than everybody else,' he said. 'Gives you the edge, I suppose.'

  'Of course.' Aciava chuckled. 'Going in somewhere without knowing all about it'd be like walking into a pitch-dark room where there's an enemy waiting for you.'

  Poldarn was, of course, standing next to the fire, plainly visible. 'Well,' he said, 'this is it. But I don't suppose you're here to order a bell.'

  'Nice idea. Out of my price range, though. Talking of which, did you know the bell in the cloister tower at Deymeson originally came from here?'

  Disconcerting. The man sounded like a tour guide. 'Really,' Poldarn said. 'Sorry, don't remember it.'

  'Don't you? We all cursed it often enough for dragging us out of bed in the wee small hours. Anyway, here's where it was made. Clapper forged on that very anvil, I dare say. It's a small world, isn't it?'

  'So you say,' Poldarn answered. 'Only got your word for that, though.'

  'Ah.' Aciava sounded pleased. 'So you've had enough of bland assertions, and want some hard evidence. I think we can manage that.'

  Frowning, Poldarn laid down his hammer. The work would go cold and the fire would probably go out, but he wasn't too bothered about that. 'Go on, then,' he said.

  'Fine.' Aciava took a step forward, and broke into the circle of firelight. As if to greet him, the fire flared up (or else it was just poor-quality charcoal). Poldarn felt a sharp tug in the tendons of his right arm. 'Let's see,' he said. 'What would you like me to prove first?'

  Put like that-good question; and he hadn't given it any thought. 'My name,' he said. 'Prove to me that I used to be called Poldarn.'

  'All right.' First, Aciava held up his hands, like a conjuror demonstrating that he had nothing palmed or up his sleeve. Then he drew his coat open and reached for his sash. As he did so, he took a step forward. Maybe it was the way Aciava did it, or else at the back of his mind Poldarn was thinking about the sword he'd seen there the previous evening; he skipped back two steps, and seized the hammer. At once, Aciava raised his hands again.

  'Reflex,' he said. 'Something you'll never be rid of, no matter how hard you try. You were trained to do that from third grade onwards. I made it look like I was drawing my sword, so you took two steps back, left leg first, and grabbed for the nearest weapon. Conclusion: you used to be a sword-monk.'

  'Maybe,' Poldarn conceded. 'But I'd sort of figured that out before you showed up. And if you do that again, don't blame me if I bash your head in.'

  Aciava grinned. 'You can try,' he said. 'Actually, that's just the first stage of the proof, to establish that you were once a member of the order. Now, take a look at this.' Very slowly, he dipped his fingers into an inside pocket and fished out a scrap of paper. 'Nothing very exciting,' he said, 'just a twenty-year-old class timetable. See for yourself.'

  He looked round, picked up a fairly clean piece of rag from the floor, and spread it rather ostentatiously on the anvil; then he put the paper on it and stood back.

  It was just a list of names; twenty of them, divided into four unequal groups. One of them read; Elaos Tanwar Xipho Dorunoxy Monachus Ciartan Monachus Cordomine Gain Aciava Monachus Poldarn Poldarn took a closer look, trying to force himself to be calm, analytical. The paper could easily have been twenty years old; it was yellow and frayed across two folds, and the ink was greyish-brown. The letters-well,
he could read them without thinking, but it wasn't the same alphabet that they used in Tulice. There weren't any names in the other groups that he recognised, though several of them started with Monachus; he remembered what Aciava had said the previous evening, and guessed that those were names-in-religion. There were four little pinholes, one in each corner, as you'd expect on a notice put up on a door or a notice-board.

  'That's not proof,' he said. 'The most it could mean is that there was once a class with people with those names in it. Or this could just be something you wrote yourself, and dipped in vegetable stock to make it turn yellow.'

  'Very good,' Aciava said. 'And if I showed you my business seal, with Gain Aciava engraved on it, you'd tell me I murdered someone with that name and took his seal before I wrote the paper. Fair enough. I said I'd show you some evidence. I didn't say it was irrefutable. But now you've got to tell me why I'd go to so much trouble.'

  It was Poldarn's turn to grin. 'I can't,' he said. 'Not without knowing who you really are, and what you're really up to.'

  'Quite.' Aciava dipped his head to acknowledge the point. 'As I recall, you weren't at all bad at analytical reasoning when we did it in fifth grade. Better than me, anyhow. Mind you, I did miss a lot of classes, because of them clashing with archery practice. I was on the archery team, you see.'

  'I'm impressed,' Poldarn yawned. 'So this is your proof, is it? Just this little bit of old paper.'

  'Allegedly old paper-you missed an opportunity. Come on, it was twenty years ago, what do you expect? I was damned lucky to have found that; I mean, who keeps old school notices?'

  'Good question, who does? Why would you hang on to something like that?'

  'Look on the back,' Aciava replied. Poldarn did so. He saw a sketch: a diagram of an eight-pointed figure, drawn in charcoal, and below it a childish doodle of a vaguely heraldic-looking crow.

  'The diagram,' Aciava said, 'is the eight principal wards. Lecture notes. The crow was just me being bored during lessons, though I probably chose to draw it because the crow was our team mascot. I was never very imaginative, even then. Innovation's always struck me as being somehow disrespectful. Result of a religious upbringing, I suppose, the tendency to couple together the words original and sin. Anyhow, to answer your question: I kept the paper for the sketch, and it was sheer accident, coming across it the other day. I'd used it to mark the place in an old textbook. Satisfied?'

  Poldarn shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'There's still nothing linking that name on that bit of paper to me. If you can do that-'

  'Can't, sorry.' Aciava scratched his ear. 'And I haven't brought anything else with me, because-well, to be honest, I wasn't expecting this kind of attitude, all this suspicion and hostility. I thought that maybe you'd be in two minds about whether you'd want me to tell you about the past and all, but I didn't anticipate that you wouldn't believe me. It's like I'd given you a cute little carved ivory box for your birthday and you're demanding to see a receipt.'

  'Really?' Poldarn raised an eyebrow. 'You told me you knew about what happened when I went to Deymeson. Didn't it occur to you that after that I wasn't likely to be in a hurry to believe anything a sword-monk tells me?'

  'Now you put it like that,' Aciava conceded, 'I can see your point, sort of. But all right, then. You tell me what'd make you believe, and I'll see what I can do.'

  Poldarn turned away and started raking out the hearth. 'Why should I?' he said. 'If you're lying, I'd be telling you how to deceive me.'

  'Fine.' Was there just a hint of impatience in Aciava's voice? Or was that just play-acting too?

  'I'll tell you what I think, shall I? I think you still don't want to know the truth about yourself, and not believing me's the only way you can do it. If you can persuade yourself I'm lying, you can chicken out of learning who you used to be. Am I getting warm?'

  Poldarn frowned; any warmer, and he wouldn't have to bother lighting the fire. 'You can think what you like,' he said. 'But maybe you should go and do it somewhere else. This is tricky work, and I need to concentrate.'

  Aciava yawned. 'Not all that tricky,' he said. 'You've done the drawing down, so now all you need to do is bend the angles on a bick stake and punch the holes. Like I said,' he added cheerfully, 'I do my homework.'

  That, or he can read minds. 'If you're so smart, you do it.'

  'Not likely. I'd get my hands dirty. Besides, my idea of research is looking stuff up in books. Except for sword drill, I'm what you might call physically inept. And I'm not here to do your work for you. I don't think your outfit could afford me, for one thing.'

  Maybe it was the residue of a religious upbringing, Poldarn thought; this compulsion to fence, shadow-box, score points, even at the risk of seriously pissing off the person you were talking to. If so, it was the most convincing thing about Aciava. Unless it too was fake (homework, and attention to detail). 'I see,' he said. 'So, what are you here for? We've established that it's not just for a class reunion.'

  Aciava sighed. 'Not just that, no. I need your help. Or-' He hesitated, as if he was trying to figure out how to put it tactfully. 'I thought I could use your help. Now, no offence, but I'm not so sure. You've changed, you know. Hardly surprising, after all these years, and the stuff you've been through. I suppose I have, too. But you're-'

  'I'm what?'

  'Smaller.' There was a faint, sad smile on Aciava's face. 'You've lost something, you know? That hardened edge, that touch of devilment-' He walked past Poldarn and sat on the small anvil. 'It's only a slight change, but it makes all the difference. Pity.'

  If Aciava was trying to be annoying, he certainly had the knack for it. 'I've got no idea what you mean,' Poldarn said.

  'Don't suppose you have.' Aciava pulled a stick of dried meat out of his pocket, bit off the end and started to chew. 'It's all part of the tragedy, I guess. Not only have you lost that extra something that made you special, you don't know you ever had it. Now that's sad.'

  Lying. Of course. But 'Explain,' Poldarn said.

  'All right, then,' Aciava replied, spitting something out. 'Here's a little story for you. Back in fourth grade-I think; not totally sure. Anyhow, it was our first lesson in full-contact sparring. Wooden swords, no worries. Anyhow, Father Tutor calls for a volunteer. All the volunteer's got to do is knock the sword out of Father Tutor's hand, and he'll be let off the ten-mile cross-country run scheduled for that evening. Now you never could abide running, you'd rather stand and fight a herd of stampeding cattle. So up you go; you both stand on the mat, bow and draw, Father Tutor swats the wooden sword out of your hand and cracks you across the cheekbone, hard enough to draw blood. You take a step back, ask-well, demand's more like it, you demand to be given another shot at it. So you try again, same result, only he bloodies your other cheek. Never mind, he says, you've shown character and there was no way you'd ever have been able to win, you're let off the run. But no, you say, give me another chance. Father Tutor grins, and this time, instead of bashing you, he kicks your knee out from under you before you've even reached for the hilt. You go down on your bum, everybody laughs like mad, Father Tutor says, right, back to your place. But you won't go. You're hopping mad, and you demand another try. No, says Father Tutor, now sit down. But you won't sit down. You shout; one more try, just one. Now, instead of punishing you, like we all thought he would, for not showing respect and doing as you're told, Father Tutor nods and says, all right, but if you fail this time, you run fifteen miles, carrying a sack of stones. Fine, you say, and you both stand on the mat; but before he can go for his sword, you drop down on one knee, grab the edge of the mat and give it an almighty tug. Polished floor, of course; you pull the mat out from under him and Father Tutor goes down flat on his back. He's up again like a flash, into position, hand on sash ready for the draw, but you look him in the eye and just stand there. Draw, he says. No, you say, and you fold your arms and grin. I said draw, he says; but you shake your head again and say, No, I won't; precepts of religion-like you've scored a point
or something. And he scowls at you and says, What do you mean, precepts of religion? And that's when you grab an inkwell off the lectern and throw it in his face. He's not expecting that; and while he's staggering back with ink in his eyes, you reach forward, cool as ice, pull the wooden sword out of his sash and throw it across the room. Never heard such silence in all my life. We were sure he was going to kill you, or at least kick your arse clean over to Torcea; but all he does is stand there, dripping ink, and finally he says, Yes, I see what you mean, well done. And then he lets you off the run, class dismissed, and we're all out in the fresh air half an hour early.'

  Poldarn waited to see if there was any more, but apparently not. 'I don't understand,' he said.

  'Oh.' Aciava looked disappointed. 'Precepts of religion,' he said. 'The best fight is not to fight. And you didn't-fight him, I mean. Beating you wasn't enough for him, he wanted a proper drawing match, to prove his point. He wanted to fight. You didn't. All you wanted to do was win. Your best fight was not to fight at all. So you won.'

  Poldarn thought about that for a little while. It sounded too romantic to be true; it sounded like something you'd be taught in school, as an example. 'That doesn't sound like me,' he said.

  'Of course not.' Aciava stood up. 'You'd never do anything like that now-proves my point. You've changed. Back then, you cared about winning. Now, you don't care about anything.' He took a couple of steps toward the door, then turned round. 'If you want to me to go away and never come back, just say so. I can still help you, but you're no earthly good to me any more. It's like with you and Xipho. You finally got her, but it doesn't count, because it wasn't really you. The real you just wasn't there.'

  'Fine,' Poldarn said. 'The real me sounds like a menace.'

  Aciava looked at him. 'What do you want?' he said. 'Most of all, in all the world?'

  Poldarn thought. 'I don't know,' he said.