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urSu would not have liked to hear.

    How long he stood there he did not know, but eventually he turned and walked to stand in the mouth of the cave, looking out over the valley. The storm had cleared away, leaving behind it a sky scrubbed clean and blue. The creatures of the valley were running around, sniffing the sunshine. Down below, in the thalweg, the bottom of the valley, he could see the urRu, gathering around the Standing Stones that formed a triangle there.

    Directed by urZah, they set out what was necessary for a funeral. Down the spiral path, from urSu’s cave, they had carried his coat, which the process of de-materialization had now reduced to a cobwebby thing, frail and dry, an abandoned chrysalis. This, together with his few other personal belongings, they placed at the foot of the tallest of the stones. On another stone, which lay flat in the center of the triangle, they laid his walking stick, the Master’s staff of office, totemically carved from one thick branch of hard nutwood. At the upper end of it was inset a small, perfectly formed rock crystal.

    For hours they calculated the precise positions of the remaining objects that were needed to furnish the funeral ceremony: small fetishes, prayer sticks, stones, feathers, and pots. Watching them make the arrangements, Jen finally became impatient, in spite of his grief over the occasion. Throughout his life among the urRu, at the edge of his gratitude for their kindness to an orphan he had felt himself quietly chafing at their immensely patient attention to detail. What they called their “work” seemed to him to consist almost entirely of interminable attempts to connect one thing to another. Sometimes it was quite literal. He had seen urNol, with his eye-patch and splintered finger, spend days on end with a pebble and four blue feathers, seeking to discover all the permutations that could result from binding the objects together with a length of string.

    Other connections the urRu made were figurative. When the wind was in a certain quarter, it blew down the spiral path; and filling tunnels and passing the mouths of caves, it resounded through the valley like a reed pipe. At such times, the urRu never tired of arranging their own bodies to stop some of the cave mouths so that the pitch of the wind would be modulated. Why bother? Jen wondered. On his own little bifurcated flute he could demonstrate the same effect and play a melody at the same time.

    In their collective obsession with rituals there was something slavish about the urRu. It affected everything in their lives, even the ordinary business of a day – sleeping, eating, walking, talking. It was always too slow for Jen, this labored, mannered, painstaking connection of things. What was the point? Turned inward, away from the world, they were, Jen thought, collectors of knowledge for its own sake. Why did they never do anything with it? Why could they not make the only connection that seemed to him useful: applying all their knowledge to change the world?

    As he had grown older, he had tried, politely, to press his Master for the answers. UrSu, however, had simply traded concepts. One’s body was a rehearsal of the history of the world. What one ate and thought was one’s future. “The better you know me,” urSu had said, “the better you will know the world as it will be without me.”

    And now Jen faced a world without urSu.

    The new spark of confidence he had, to his surprise, found in himself at his Master’s death was still there within him. But confidence to what end? “To forge a fate,” urSu had said as he lay dying. “To heal the wound. To make it whole.” What fate? What wound? What was expected of him? He had never been able to envision a future for himself except one in which his infant memories – his mother, father, other Gelfling – would become realities again. But whenever he had wished for that to happen – lying in bed at night, closing his eyes, pressing