Edan Rill

Pell got the plane on Thursday and they did the window that evening, badly, with Ansel holding a candle stub in his teeth because the lamp oil had run out.

It took them until the second bell. When they finally let the frame down, it sat flush in the sill and stayed there.

Pell sat back on his heels.

"Say something."

"It's two degrees out of true."

"Ansel."

"It'll hold."

In the morning the room was warm enough that Ansel woke late, which had not happened since he came.

There was hot bread in the lower hall. Pell had put two pieces aside under an upturned bowl and was guarding them with the sort of attention he did not give to his key ring.

"They only do it on the sixth," he said. "Eat it now. It's nothing by noon."

Ansel ate it now. It was very good. He thought about it for most of the way down the service stairs.

Haddon opened the drawer before Ansel had hung his coat.

He set out the lifting bracket, the cracked basin from yesterday, and two more pieces Ansel had never seen, and he laid the three drawings beside them in the order they had been made.

"Tell me which of these you can do and which you can't."

Ansel worked through them. He was right about the bracket and right about a shutter arm he recognised from Bren's. He could find nothing in the basin or in a length of lamp conduit whose construction he had never learned.

Haddon wrote each result down without comment, then drew a line under the lot.

"Four out of six. All four you'd seen the inside of before."

"Yes."

Haddon put his spectacles away.

"Then that's a skill and not a gift, and skills can be taught to, which is convenient, because I can't teach you a gift." He pushed a thin grey book across the bench. "Construction plates. Common assemblies, in section. You may take it upstairs. It does not leave the building."

Ansel put his hand on it and did not pick it up straight away.

"I'm not signing you into anything," Haddon said. "You'll still do your trays."

"Yes."

"And you'll still bring me the piece before you bring me the conclusion."

"Yes."

Ansel had a whole morning in front of him and a book on the bench, and he thought, with some surprise, that he was happy.

It lasted until the middle bell.

Pell came down the service stairs too fast and stopped in the doorway with his hand still on the rail.

The woman with the bandaged finger looked up first.

"They want the Salvage in the north practice hall," Pell said. "Not now. When they're finished."

Haddon set down what he was holding.

"Finished with what?"

"There's a student in there."

"Is he hurt?"

Pell said nothing for a moment, which was answer enough for everyone in the room except Ansel, who was still holding a tray of fittings and waiting for the sentence to arrive.

"They've sent for Magister Ost's people," Pell said. "And the Provost's up there."

Haddon crossed to the cupboard and took down the heavy canvas rolls.

"Name?"

"Third year. Rill."

Ansel put the tray down on the bench.

He put it down very carefully, because his hands had understood before the rest of him had, and he did not want to drop it.

They were not allowed past the corridor.

Haddon went in twice with one of the canvas rolls and came out both times without it. Ansel stood where he had been told to stand, beside a stack of chairs someone had cleared out of the way, and watched the door.

Students came up the north stairs, were turned back, and came up again in twos to stand at the far end where they could see the corridor without being in it. Their voices carried the way voices do when people are trying to be quiet.

"He was on his own in there. That's the whole of it."

"After supper. He was always in there after supper."

"Then he was pushing it for the river board. You can't do loaded work alone, everyone knows—"

"Did it burn him, or—"

"Stop."

The girl who said it had come out of the hall and was still pulling off a pair of thin grey gloves, one finger at a time, and she did not raise her voice at all.

"You weren't in the room. You don't know what you're describing and you're describing it anyway."

"I only meant—"

"I know what you meant." She got the second glove off and folded them both into her palm. "Go down to the second floor. All of you. They'll put a notice out when there's something to put out."

They went. She stood for a moment with her back to the wall and her eyes closed, and then opened them and saw Ansel.

"You're the Salvage."

"Yes."

"How long have you been standing there?"

"A while."

She looked at his apron, and at the corridor, and made some decision he was not party to.

"Deyra Ost. Third year, healer track." She nodded at the door. "They'll release the assembly to you eventually. Not the rest of it."

"Was he—"

"No," she said. "Don't ask me that in a corridor."

The door opened once more while he was waiting, and stayed open long enough for Ansel to see across the hall to the far basin.

The weighted arm was down. The iron was still on its chain.

The second ring had gone, in the way things go when they have taken too much at once — the ceramic in pieces across half the floor, the copper rim buckled outward and lying against a table leg. That was what an overload looked like. He had cleaned up three of them in four years at Bren's.

The copper tongue was still attached to the rim.

Ansel looked at it for as long as the door was open, which was not long.

It was straight. Not sprung, not bent back, not blackened at the root. It lay along the buckled rim exactly as it had been made to lie, as if the ring had gone to pieces around it without ever asking it to do anything.

Then a porter moved across the gap and the door closed.

The recovered property came down at four in a slat crate, and Ansel had to sign it in, because that was the job and there was nobody else at the bench.

A coat. Two notebooks. A tin with a broken hinge. Four manuals from the common collection, to go back to the library. A pair of boots with the laces still tied.

And a wooden box with a brass grille in one end and a carrying strap mended with several untidy turns of blue thread.

Ansel lifted it out and set it on the bench.

It was cold. There was ceramic dust across the top of the case, and a long scrape down one side that had not been there on Tuesday.

He opened the repair book to the current page and wrote out the entry for recovered property, the date, the crate number, the contents, one line each.

Then he turned back three leaves.

Foot warmer, cased. One copper if no new connection. Two if required. Parts separately.

Edan Rill.

It was his own handwriting. It was not very good handwriting. Beneath it, in Haddon's hand, was the inspection mark and the note shorter screw, contacts reseated, and beside that, in the collection column, a set of initials that were not Ansel's because Ansel had been upstairs in the practical hall when Edan came to fetch it.

He turned the page back and finished the entry.

Then he counted the contents of the crate again, because he had already counted them, and got the same number, and counted them a third time and got the same number again.

The preliminary finding went up on the board outside the refectory before supper.

Overreach during unsupervised practice. No fault found in the apparatus. Hall closed pending examination.

Two lines. Ansel read them, and then read them a second time looking for the third line, and there wasn't one.

It was not an unreasonable finding.

That was the difficulty with it. Edan had been working alone, after hours, on loaded technique, eleven days before a qualifying board that took three from Halvern and sometimes four. Everyone who read the notice would know a third-year who did that. Half of them were doing it themselves. The finding explained the room, the hour, the state of the ring, and the fact that nobody had heard anything until the morning round.

It explained everything except a copper tongue that had never opened.

And Ansel had seen that through a doorway, for perhaps four seconds, from thirty feet away, across a floor covered in pieces.

Haddon was still at his bench at seven, which he never was.

"The hall clearance," Ansel said.

"What about it?"

"I'd like the shift."

Haddon did not look up from what he was writing.

"It's four days of sorting somebody's death into bins. There's a man on the north stair who does that work and has done it for eleven years, and he is very good at it, and he will take the hours because he needs them."

"I'll take it without the hours."

That did make Haddon look up.

"No," he said. "You'll take it with the hours, because you'll have earned them, and because I'm not having it said that I let the new boy work for nothing."

He put the pen down.

"Why do you want it?"

Ansel had several answers ready. He had been assembling them since four o'clock, on and off, in between counting a crate three times.

"Because I fixed his warmer," he said. "And I want to know what happened in that room."

"Those are two different reasons."

"Yes."

Haddon looked at him.

"The first one isn't a reason to take a shift. It's a reason to sit down somewhere and be miserable for an evening, and you're allowed to do that, and I'd think better of you if you did." He drew the incident sheet from the practical hall out from under his ledger and squared it with the edge of the bench. "The second one I'll take. Conditionally."

"Conditionally."

"You don't touch anything before I've seen it. You don't tell anyone upstairs what you think you're looking at. And when you find something you can't explain, you bring it to me before you bring it to Magister Vale, Magister Ost, or a girl in a corridor with a ring signed out for private practice."

Ansel said nothing.

"She asked me about you at noon," Haddon said. "Before any of this. Sit down."

Ansel sat on the stool by the sink.

"One more thing, and then go and eat something." Haddon turned the ledger round so Ansel could see the entry he had been making. "The north hall isn't ours."

"It's damaged equipment."

"It's damaged equipment in a room that was signed over to the Provost's office at two o'clock this afternoon for examination." He tapped the line. "We'll get what they release. When they release it. In whatever condition it reaches the bottom of the stairs."

Ansel read the line again.

"How much do they usually release?"

"I've been here nineteen years," Haddon said, "and I've never had a hall signed over before."