Sect Year 7 · tenth month · night of day 3 · the sixty-fourth life: Tavrin, his eleventh year
At eleven Coll was trusted with the glaze-fire. It was the hardest firing of the year, and his father stood him at the kiln mouth beside the iron door and gave him the one rule he needed. “A hand’s width,” Hod said. “Not a finger more. Watch the cones through the eye-hole, and tell me the moment the sheen goes flat.”
The heat came out of the mouth in a steady pressure against Coll’s face, and the light inside was the colour of a ripe peach. The fire roared low under the floor, like the river under a plank. He kept his eyes to the hole and his left hand on the iron bar, and he counted the cones as they slumped, slowly, so that nothing was missed.
Near the end of the second watch, a cup in the back of the firing cracked. It made a short clean sound, bright and stopped. Coll heard it through the heat, and he knew it. He had heard it before, in a place with no kiln in it, and the knowing came up through him slowly, like cold water through a floor.
