by K. J. Parker
Faced with such a level of competition, Ciartan decided he couldn’t really be bothered. Once you’ve seen one pretty girl, he told himself, you’ve seen them all, and the best of them wasn’t worth the risk of getting on the wrong side of the prefects. There was also a very palpable fringe benefit to be considered—
‘Hello,’ Xipho said. ‘What’re you doing here?’
‘Me?’ Ciartan shrugged. They were the only two living souls in the library, usually crowded at this time of day. ‘Reading up for the Theory presentation, of course.’
She looked at him. ‘Oh,’ she said.
He yawned. ‘Where is everybody, anyway?’
‘Them.’ A look of contempt crossed her face. ‘Buzzing round the honeypot, of course, trying to get a look at Turvo’s stupid sisters. Why aren’t you out there with them?’
Ciartan shrugged. ‘Can’t be bothered,’ he said. ‘Can’t see what all the fuss is about, really.’
Xipho didn’t comment on that, but he could sense a slight relaxation of her legendary guard. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
He sighed. ‘No, I haven’t gone blind. And yes,’ he added with a very mild leer, ‘I do like girls. But—’ He judged the hesitation nicely; that hint of a busy, mysterious past, enough to intrigue without involving him in telling outright lies or, even worse, the truth. ‘Well, I’ve been around a little bit, and you know what? Half the human race is girls; so if I don’t see these particular specimens, chances are I’ll run into some others before I die. You never know.’
Maybe he’d overdone it, he thought, because Xipho was frowning slightly. Nevertheless. There was an old saying back home, about the fox knowing many tricks whereas the hedgehog knows one bloody good one. His bloody good trick was dropping veiled hints about his past, but never actually letting slip anything outright, concrete. He knew perfectly well that if he told them he’d grown up on a big farm in a valley but had had to leave in a hurry because of trouble over another man’s wife, he’d have committed his reserve and be left with nothing in hand except the rather inadequate resources that made up his personality. Leading them to believe that his history was as rich, dark and exotic as the Empire’s was a game he could play easily, and although he was sure they’d figured out by now that there was considerably less to him than met the eye, they still couldn’t quite resist the lure, like cats who know it’s just the end of a piece of string but can’t help lunging after it when it twitches. How long he could keep up this man-ofmystery pose he had no idea, but while it lasted he was determined to make the most of it.
‘Well,’ Xipho said eventually, ‘maybe you’re not as shallow as a pauper’s grave after all. Did you come here to do some work, or just to be annoying?’
He smiled on the inside. A compliment, even a back-handed one, from Xipho Dorunoxy happened about as often as a dry summer in Tulice; and although it was murderously difficult to impress her, once you’d managed it she generally stayed impressed. On balance, therefore, well worth the effort. (Besides, if Turvo’s sisters were anything like their brother, you’d pay an extortionate price in excruciating boredom for their good looks. Also, Turvo loved garlic; if he’d picked up the taste for it at home, Ciartan was in no hurry to meet other members of his family.)
He spent a couple of hours reading Zephanes on Deception (he was actually enjoying Expediencies this term) while basking in the unshared proximity of Xipho – the line of her neck and shoulders silhouetted against the high west window was enough to boil your brain out through your ears, but he’d just about mastered the art of ignoring it. Then she closed her book with a snap, called out, ‘See you tomorrow, then,’ as she stood up to leave, and actually smiled. It was faster than the draw, one of those moments-in-religion that are over so quick that they never actually happened; but if you’re lucky enough to survive them, you carry the scars for life.
Fuck, he said to himself, just when I thought I was being so cool and smart; but there it is, it’s happened and I can’t ignore it, any more than I could ignore nine inches of steel poked in my ear. I really am in love with her; not just a fancy or the intellectual interest of long-term flirtation, not just the fascinating challenge of the vain quest to get into her pants. That flash of the eyes, too quick for me; past my guard like it wasn’t there, sidestepping my wards, a moment of true religion. And he thought, so it does exist after all, that moment (he’d never stumbled across it in the draw, though he was faster than any of those who reckoned they’d found it there), that less-than-a-heartbeat that changes everything, because suddenly between you and the other there’s a third presence, that of the divine. He’d never been there before, but he’d seen the place from a distance; years ago, in a muddy ditch beside a stream, where he’d crouched waiting for the crows to pitch and then found himself ducking down again, with the memory of a stone in his hand and a death in mid-air. On that occasion he’d fancied he’d talked with a stranger for a minute or so, an older man who reminded him of himself, but with someone else forge-welded into him, layer and fold and layer, fire and hammer; and he’d wondered, in his immature faith, whether he’d possibly had a vision of the great god of his people, the divine Poldarn, who lived under the hot springs on the high slopes of the mountain.
And this was the divine, the moment of religion, which he’d found in Xipho’s tense little smile. He compared the two, and found the similarities were too many and too great to be mere coincidence; in which case, he decided, he must have seen the god of the forge there that day, when he slaughtered the crows over the spring peas. Somehow, that was a comforting thought (because he’d always worried about it, at the back of his mind; if it hadn’t been the god, was there something wrong with him, because normal adolescents don’t chat with imaginary friends?); in a way, oddly enough, it felt like coming home.
He reproached himself for thinking that way. Being in love with Xipho wasn’t something to be pleased or happy about. Rather, it was as good a definition of being in deep, deep trouble as any conscientious lexicographer could ever hope to find. Being in love with the only girl in a class of nineteen monks – He wondered if there was still time to drop by the Infirmary and have his head pumped out, but probably not. Too late. He was stuck with it.
Pity about that: it complicated things horribly. For one thing (he realised, as he put Zephanes back on his proper shelf, and headed for the door) there was the small matter of end-of-grade tests. Deymeson didn’t encourage friendships among the students; love was out of the question, when you had no way of knowing who you’d be facing down the narrow steel road, which led half of the class to the next grade and the other half to the closely planted plot of ground outside the back gates. Of course, love wouldn’t get in Xipho’s way, even if she was capable of it, which everybody was inclined to doubt: she’d cut her lover down for religion’s sake as cheerfully as slicing through the neck of a rose. But if he, on the other hand, ended up facing her at year’s end, he’d be dead. Consideration; was Deymeson the only place on earth where the lover’s traditional promise to love until death was a practical proposition? Discuss, with examples.
Yes, but it wouldn’t come to that; and she could kill whoever she liked out of the others and bloody good luck to her. But what if she didn’t make it to fifth grade; suppose someone else got put up instead of her, and—? That wasn’t going to happen either, he reassured himself. In sparring, the only ones who’d ever outdrawn her were himself and the absurd Earwig, who’d had a crush on her long before his voice broke. Pointless worrying about that.
Pointless, all of it; pointless as a man with no hands buying nail scissors. Nothing good could come of being in love with Xipho Dorunoxy; even a sublimely gifted chancer like himself didn’t have a hope. It was just bad luck: infuriating, meanly capricious on the part of Destiny, who could so easily have paired him off with somebody else – Turvo’s kid sister, for example, hotter than a stove-pipe and rich as egg soup into the bargain. (What an amazing career move that’d
be, though, a real coup for an ambitious young man of the cloth. They reckoned that Tazencius was a man to watch, that his son-in-law was practically guaranteed a top-drawer chaplaincy, and after that, the gods only knew. And if anything – heaven forbid – ever happened to good solid old Turvo, such as coming second out of two at year’s end—)
He strolled across the yard, nothing to hurry for, his mind bent on long, improbable thoughts; accordingly, he was almost back at the entrance to Morevich House when a voice called out to him.
He looked round.
Now, for some reason, he had no idea what it could be, Turvo (Depater Turvonianus, only son and heir of Depater Tazencius, prince and hereditary marshal of all sorts of obscure places) had taken a liking to Ciartan the outlander, farm boy and general outcast. The liking wasn’t reciprocated. On the rare occasions when Turvo wasn’t painfully boring, it was because he was being objectionable enough to court serious injury. But the fact remained: Turvo was always pleased to see Ciartan whenever Ciartan hadn’t seen him first.
‘There you are,’ the idiot was saying. ‘Come over here a minute. I’d like you to meet my sisters.’
Not now, Turvo, you arsehole; not now. If you make me do this, then so help me but I’ll find some way to rig the ballot for who fights who at year’s end. ‘Actually—’ he started to say; but what excuse could he possibly make for ducking out of what the whole Upper School had been desperately trying to achieve all day? I’ve got an essay to finish, I have to go and polish my boots. Whatever he said, it’d be perceived as a mortal insult, not just to the moron Turvo but to his great and influential family.
Praying to the god (if any) who lived under the hot springs of Poldarn’s Forge that Xipho wouldn’t choose this particular moment to stick her head out of a window and see him, he crossed the yard—
He was woken up by a scream.
Not often you hear a man screaming, Poldarn thought, as he opened his eyes. Extreme pain will do it sometimes, but usually only when there’s extreme terror as well. He stuffed his feet into his boots and stumbled out through the door.
It was as dark as fifty feet down a well outside, but he could see fast-moving lights, which he assumed were lamps and torches in the hands of running men. There hadn’t been a second scream; bad for somebody. The lights were all headed in the same direction. He consulted his mental plan of the foundry: the casting yard. Hellfire, he thought (and he was surprised at his own reaction). The thoughtless bastards have started the pour without me, and some careless bugger’s got himself burned.
Not that he cared an offcomer’s damn about the Poldarn’s Flute project; it was all a load of nonsense and nothing was going to come of it, that was an article of faith among the entire foundry crew. But not to be there when they did the first pour – he remembered the scream, which meant somebody badly hurt, probably dead, and felt ashamed of himself.
‘Who the hell’s making that bloody awful noise?’ someone shouted. Nobody answered. People were gathering from all over the site, some running, some walking at the weary, reluctant pace of men going to a funeral. They were lighting the big lanterns in the casting yard, the ones that gave enough light to work by. One or two of the hands were running up with ropes, ladders, poles, then suddenly stopping, not doing anything – implying that there was nothing they could do.
The scene reminded Poldarn of something. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what had happened. On Galand Dev’s orders, and flying in the face of the very clear instructions set out in Concerning Various Matters, the cupola furnace had been built on top of a mound of earth and clay, to provide the necessary height above the mould to allow the molten bronze to flow easily. What they should have done was dig a deep pit for the moulds, and run the melt down a channel from a furnace built at ground level; but Galand Dev had reckoned to save two or three days by having the mould on the surface and elevating the furnace, with the fire chamber directly underneath it. But the heat of the fire had dried out the mound, shrinking the platform on which the furnace rested. Result: the crucible, holding three hundredweight of very hot molten metal, had leant sideways, to the point where it had tipped over, pouring the melt down on the poor fools who’d been scraping the dried clay of the model off the inner wall of the mould. It must’ve happened quite suddenly, but it appeared as though there’d been a second or so for the men to get clear, because nearly all of them had made it. All, in fact, save one.
And even he’d been lucky, in a sense. Because the crucible had toppled before the molten bronze had reached flowing heat, the melt hadn’t been hot enough to pour like water. When the mound collapsed and one of the heavy props had toppled over, pinning the unfortunate mould-fettler by the knee, the escaped melt had flooded out down the mound slope straight at him; but before it could actually reach him and reduce him to cinders, it’d cooled down enough to stop moving. This was good, up to a point. True, the wedged man wasn’t going to be burnt to death by a lava flow from the crucible; but the metal was still hot enough to strip skin and muscle down to bone on contact, and if the mound dried out and shifted any more, as it was almost certain to do, a hundredweight blob of searingly hot bronze flash would go slithering down the slope directly on top of him; and by the time it had cooled enough for anybody to go in close, there wouldn’t be enough remaining of the trapped fettler to be worth burying. Of course, only a lunatic would risk getting in close enough to pull him out, when the slightest movement could disturb the mound enough to get the hot flash moving.
The man pinned under the prop was Gain Aciava.
Even so, Poldarn told himself firmly; even so. This was the man who claimed to have all Poldarn’s lost memories packed and slotted away in his own memory, like tools in a cabinetmaker’s chest. If he died, all that would be lost (because heat draws the temper, relaxes memory; the symbolism was right bang on the nail, but Poldarn wasn’t in the mood) and quite possibly he’d never know—
He was shocked.
Ordinary fear he could’ve forgiven himself for; and anybody with enough sense to breathe would have every right to be scared out of his wits at the mere thought of trying to get down there, heave a huge log out of the way, drag a helpless man up a muddy, slippery slope with that enormous glowing chunk of death poised to slither down on top of him; and all of it to be done in the face of excruciating heat. Perfectly valid reason, perfectly acceptable excuse for not getting involved, even if the man being cooked alive down there was an old, old friend (and he only had Gain Aciava’s word for that, and maybe he hadn’t been telling the truth). But that wasn’t what was keeping him back; because wasn’t he the man who’d tricked and beaten the fire-stream on the slopes of Poldarn’s Forge, duping, conning the mountain into vomiting its burning puke on his best friend’s house instead of his own? He knew fire, he had its number and its measure; fire was his pet, it gambolled alongside him like a big, happy dog being taken for a walk. He’d thrown sticks for it to fetch, sent it running down the mountainside onto Eyvind’s wood, set it on Eyvind’s roof and walls and doors. He was its master, made it work for him, softening steel, obliterating memory in the wrought object, wiping out past deeds and making new ones—
—And if he let it, fire was here now, ready to do his a favour by crisping another old friend, leaching out more memory, dissolving the past and all the horrors that might be trapped there, like flies in amber. If he let Gain Aciava die, he might never know who he’d been.
Fire, crouching in the cherry-red glow of the flash bronze, grinned at him, wagged its tail. Let him burn, it urged him, just like Eyvind, just like the men you fed me on the mountainside, Scerry and Hending and Barn; just like the crow you burned on the forge in Asburn’s smithy. Burn the crow, burn the memory, and be free of them all for ever.
‘Shit,’ Poldarn muttered, and looked round for the men he’d seen earlier, the ones who’d brought rope. It took a while for him to explain what he wanted, longer to persuade them to cooperate (but Gain was still there, and the glowing hot
metal, waiting for him; it’d have been too easy if the mud had given way while he’d been talking); and then he was gingerly picking his way down the face of the slope, edging by the heat – he could smell his own hair singeing as he passed it – digging his heels in to stop himself slipping forwards or losing his footing and sliding the rest of the way on his bum. I must be crazy, he told himself a dozen times, but he knew it wasn’t true; I must be out of my tiny mind, all this to rescue some chancer who’s probably just trying to use me in some godawful plot or scheme.
‘Gain,’ he heard himself whisper (as if he was worried he’d wake the fire; stupid). ‘You all right?’
‘Get this fucking log off me,’ Gain Aciava replied graciously. ‘And watch out, for crying out loud, you’ll have the whole lot down on us.’