Sect Year 7 · tenth month · night of day 3 · the sixty-fourth life: Tavrin, his thirty-third year
The drying shed smelled of wet clay and cold smoke. In the first light after dawn the sun came through its slatted walls in pale bars across the boards, and Coll walked between the rows with one knuckle raised. Each bowl stood on its own board, leather-hard and grey-white, and he tapped the rim of each in turn and listened.
A sound bowl gave a clear note, short and high, and the note stayed in the ear a moment after the knuckle had lifted. A bowl with a fault in its wall gave back something nearly right. Coll listened for the nearly. He had taught Mird to hear it in his second year at the wheel. Mird had hated the lesson, and then somewhere in his twenties he had grown good at it, and now he could pick a bad bowl out of a row of twenty with his eyes shut.
“Thirty behind,” said Mird from the far bench. He was twenty-six, a broad and quiet man with clay in the creases of his wrists, and he had come up from the orphan yard with a basket on his back and never gone back down. He didn’t look up from the coil he was rolling. “The Ferry House cart comes on the ninth day. If the seams stay open, they all go into the second firing, the slow cool. We lose…
