THE INTERFERENCE

The commission was a doorbell.

It is important to begin there, and the Magister himself would insist on it, because the whole of what follows has been told wrongly in this castle for years by people who prefer a story with a bang in the first line — and there was no bang. There was a doorbell, in the third week of Rainmelt, ordered by the Under-Housekeeper, for the tradesman's door on the north side, which had for eleven years been served by a bell-pull attached to nothing.

Fee: two sacks.

Magister Fizzle, of House Fizzle, alchemist and theoretician, took the commission because it was two sacks, and because the tower's roof had recently become generous, and because a man does not eat on theory.

He built it in four days. It was, by any standard the realm possesses, a good doorbell. It hung by the north door on a bracket he made himself. It had a small brass tongue and a housing of glazed earthenware and a working of eleven words, of which nine were structural and two were only good manners, and when a hand approached the bracket it rang: once, politely, indoors, in the passage outside the Under-Housekeeper's room, where a bell is of some use.

He tested it forty times.

He tested it forty times because he is not a fool, whatever the castle has decided, and because he has been doing this for thirty-one years and knows precisely what is said about him in the servants' hall, and he had made up his mind that this doorbell — a doorbell, two sacks, the smallest commission in the tower's book that season — was going to be so completely and boringly correct that not one soul in this castle would have a word to say about it.

Forty tests. Forty rings. He wrote every one of them down.

Then he went to bed, and at some point in the night the doorbell began to ring backwards.

Now. It is necessary to be exact here, because "backwards" is the sort of word that gets a thing laughed out of a hall, and the Magister's own account — which he wrote up at four in the morning by a lamp, in a hand that is perfectly steady for the first two pages — is exact:

> The bell does not ring when a hand approaches the bracket. It rings when a hand LEAVES it. > > Further, and I record this without comment: it rings in the passage as designed, and it also rings > in the passage at the hour at which a person WOULD have come to the door, on days when no person > comes at all. It is not ringing for people. It is ringing for the absence of them. I have observed > this at six, at nine, and at half past one. > > I have taken the working apart and read it back word by word, twice, aloud, to myself, and once > more with the tongs. There is nothing wrong with the working. The working is the same working I have > laid on nine bells in this castle, four of which are still ringing correctly after twenty years. > > I have tested the bracket. I have tested the tongue. I have tested the door. > > The fault is not in the device.

He crossed that last line out.

Then he wrote it again underneath, which is the first thing in this book worth stopping on, because it tells you everything about the man: Magister Fizzle crossed out the only sentence in his own private notebook that let him off, and then he put it back, because it was true, and because he does not falsify a record — not for a rival, not for a Lord, and not, at four o'clock in the morning, for himself.

The Under-Housekeeper's view of the matter was expressed in the passage the following afternoon, at volume, in front of two under-footmen and a girl with a mop, and was this:

"It rings when they've gone, Magister."

"It does."

"What's the use of a bell that rings when they've gone?"

"None whatsoever," said Fizzle. "It is a completely useless bell. That is not in dispute and I would not attempt to dispute it. What is in dispute — and I would ask you to hear the distinction, because it is the entire distinction — is whether it is a badly made bell."

The girl with the mop laughed.

She did not mean anything by it. She was fifteen and it had been a long morning and a wizard had just said a funny thing in a passage, and she laughed the way anybody would, and she was sorry about it afterwards, and told her mother so.

And Magister Fizzle heard it, and stopped, and stood in that passage with his hands full of a doorbell that worked flawlessly in the wrong direction, and did not say anything at all for a moment.

Because that is the sound. That is the whole sound of his professional life, and he has been hearing it since he was twenty-two, and he has never once got used to it, and he never will.

"Two sacks," said the Under-Housekeeper, not unkindly. "I'll say one, for the bracket. The bracket's lovely."

The tower is up eighty-one steps and the armchair hops, and there is a smell in it that Old Mother Stilton has described, in writing, as "a decision somebody made once."

And in the middle of the working bench, on a stand he built for it, sits the orb.

ORB, GAZING, DOMESTIC, MK II, with the ominous swirl. Warranty expired 1478, some years before the device was manufactured, which the Aetheric Supply & Sundries Board has confirmed in writing is a known issue and not a fault.

Three of its keys are dead. They have been dead for eleven years. They are A, L and N, and Magister Fizzle can conduct no correspondence containing the word complaint, the word replacement, the word alchemical, the word normal, the word anomalous, the word explanation, or his own name.

He came up the eighty-one steps that evening with one sack instead of two, and sat down in front of the orb, and put his hands on either side of it, and typed the only kind of sentence he is permitted:

> IT IS THE SIXTH TIME THIS YE□R. > > I DID IT RIGHT.

He sat and looked at that for some while.

Then he opened the great ledger — the one he has kept since he was twenty-two, the one the castle believes is a book of jokes because the castle has only ever seen the funny bits — and he ruled a fresh row, and entered it properly, in four columns, as he has entered every one of them:

THE WORKING (AS INTENDED) · THE RESULT (AS OCCURRED) · CONDITIONS · IN MY DEFENCE.

Under In My Defence he wrote nothing at all, which he does about one time in nine, and which means rather more than the funny entries do.

Here is what the castle knows about Magister Fizzle, and it is all true, and it is not the shape of the man.

It knows that his fertility charm took on a chaise longue, and that there are now more chaises longues, and that he does not wish to discuss the others. It knows about the frogs. It knows about Great-Great-Grandfather's bust, which talks, constantly, with opinions, and locks the ancestor-door out of spite. It knows about the cheese, which is fresh for ever and aware, and about which Old Mother Stilton has views.

It knows he is the man whose spells do the opposite, and it finds this hilarious, and it is right to, because it is hilarious, and the entries are funny because he wrote them funny, on purpose, for thirty years, because a man who is going to be laughed at every day of his life may as well be the one holding the pen.

What the castle has never once considered — not the Under-Housekeeper, not Lord Bastable, not the Quill nuns, not one of the four hundred souls under that roof — is the thing that is obvious the moment you put it in words, and which Fizzle himself put in words in the ledger that night, in the margin, small, where nobody was meant to see it:

> A man whose workings did nothing would be an incompetent. > > A man whose workings did the WRONG thing, at random, would be an incompetent. > > My workings do the OPPOSITE. Precisely. Every time. In thirty-one years I have not once had a > result that was merely wrong. They are all exactly, symmetrically, reliably inverted, and you cannot > invert a thing that was not correct to begin with. > > You cannot get the opposite of a mistake.

He looked at that for a long time too.

Then he closed the ledger, because it was late, and because there was nothing in it he could do anything with, and because in the morning he had to go down eighty-one steps and take one sack for a bracket.

The letter came four days later, on paper of a quality that had never been in that tower.

It was addressed, correctly and in full, to Magister Fizzle — which is worth noting, because the castle's own steward had been writing to him as Fizzle, tower for nine years — and it was brief, and it was signed in a hand like a well-made fence.

> Magister, > > I am given to understand that you recently constructed a bell for the north door which rings upon > the departure of a caller rather than upon his arrival, and which further announces callers who do > not come at all. > > I should like to buy it. > > I will give you forty sacks for it, in coin if you prefer coin, and I will collect it myself on > Thursday if that is convenient, and I am aware that this is a great deal of money for a doorbell and > I would be obliged if you did not raise the point, as I have thought about it more carefully than you > have and I am content. > > A. Crale.

Fizzle read it four times.

Then he turned it over, in case there was more of it, and there was not; and he held it up to the lamp, which is a thing he does; and he read it a fifth time.

Forty sacks. Twenty times what the working had been commissioned for. Forty sacks for a thing that had been valued, three days earlier, in a passage, at one sack and that only for the bracket.

And Magister Fizzle — thirty-one years a professional, six failures that season, one laugh from a girl with a mop still sitting in him like a swallowed pin — sat down at the orb and typed, with three keys dead, the shortest possible answer he was capable of spelling:

> THURSD□Y IS GOOD.

Mr Ambrose Crale came up eighty-one steps without stopping and without breathing hard, which nobody does, and arrived in the tower on Thursday at the hour he had said he would.

He was perhaps fifty. He had a coat of the sort that is not remarked upon because it is beyond remark, and gloves he did not remove, and a manner of standing in a room that made the room appear to have been arranged for him some while ago.

He looked at the armchair, which hopped.

"How long has it done that?"

"Nine years."

"Does it hop toward things or away from them?"

"Toward," said Fizzle, "which is worse."

"It would be," said Mr Crale, and sat down in it, and stayed sat down in it for the whole of the interview while it hopped, which no visitor to that tower had ever done in nine years, and which did more to secure Magister Fizzle's good opinion than the forty sacks.

He paid first. That is worth setting down. He did not ask to see the bell, or test it, or haggle; he put the money on the bench in a bag before he had taken his gloves off, and then said, "Now. May I see it?"

Fizzle brought it out.

And Mr Ambrose Crale held that doorbell in his two hands and looked at it for rather a long time, turning it over — the glazed housing, the small brass tongue, the bracket, which was lovely — and said, absently, the way a man says a thing he is not thinking about:

"Forty tests."

Fizzle stopped where he stood.

"Forty," he said. "How do you know that?"

"You said so."

"I said so in my ledger, sir, in this room, at four in the morning, and I have not said it anywhere else in the world."

Mr Crale looked up, and appeared genuinely to consider this, and then smiled — and here it must be said, because everything in this book turns on it, that it was a very good smile and it reached his eyes and there was nothing whatever the matter with it.

"Then I have guessed," he said. "Forgive me. You have the look of a forty-tests man. I meant it as a compliment and I am told I deliver those badly."

And he went back to the bell, and the moment closed, and Fizzle let it close — and would think about it a great deal, later, in a chapter some way from this one, and would still let it close, because he was being paid twenty times his fee by the first person in eleven years who had used his full title in writing.

"Now," said Mr Crale. "Have you others?"

"Others."

"Failures, Magister. Have you others?"

Fizzle laughed — one syllable, no humour in it at all.

"Sir. I have thirty-one years of others. I have a cheese that resents me. I have a bust in the west range that has been talking since before you were forty and will not stop and has opinions about the tapestries. I have — briefly, and I will not be drawn on it — more chaises longues than this castle has any use for. I have a compass upstairs that points reliably at whatever the holder is trying to avoid, which is not useless, exactly, but which no one will carry twice." He spread his hands. "You have arrived at the largest collection of professional catastrophe in the eastern realm and you have paid forty sacks for the doorbell."

"I should like to buy all of it."

There was a pause of some length.

"All of it."

"All of it that you can stand over," said Mr Crale.

And he leaned forward in the hopping armchair, and it was the only moment in that entire interview when he was not perfectly relaxed, and it lasted about two seconds.

"I want the ones you did right, Magister. Only those. Not the ones you rushed, or attempted when tired, or built for a fool who changed the brief. Not the near-misses and not the honest botches — every practitioner in this realm has a shelf of those and I have no interest in any of them and I would know, because I have looked."

He sat back. The chair hopped.

"I want the workings that were correct, and were tested, and were witnessed if you can manage witnessed, and that then did the exact opposite of what they were told. And I want them with the records."

Understand what that did, because it is the hinge of this whole book and it is not a sinister thing at all. It is much worse than sinister. It is nice.

For thirty-one years Magister Fizzle had been the funny one. He had been the man in the tower, the bang in the night, the story you tell a visitor at dinner while the man himself is at the end of the table eating his soup and laughing along, which he always did, every single time, because the alternative is to be the man who cannot take a joke about himself, and he had made his choice about that at twenty-six and had kept to it for three decades.

And a gentleman had come up eighty-one steps and sat in the hopping chair and said, in effect:

I do not think you are a joke. I think you are meticulous. I think the interesting thing about your work is not that it goes wrong but that it goes wrong exactly, and I will pay you real money, today, in a bag, for the proof that you did it properly.

Nobody had said the word properly to Fizzle since 1849.

He gave Crale the ledger for two hours. He stood over him while he read it, and answered questions, and the questions were good — they were the questions of a man who understood a control, who asked twice about the four bells that still rang correctly after twenty years, who wanted to know whether the frogs had been counted (they had; three hundred and eleven; the count is in the ledger and nobody in thirty-one years had asked to see it).

At the end of two hours Mr Ambrose Crale closed the book and said:

"You have never once falsified an entry."

"No, sir."

"Not even the cheese."

"Especially not the cheese," said Fizzle, with feeling.

"No," said Crale. "No, I can see that." He put his hand flat on the cover for a moment, which is a thing people do with books that have cost somebody something. "Magister, you are going to find what I say next offensive and I would ask you to sit with it for a week before you reply. Your successes are worth nothing to me. Four bells ringing correctly for twenty years is four bells. Any competent practitioner in this realm produces those and most of them produce nothing else, and I would not cross a road for it."

"I am aware," said Fizzle, "of what my successes are worth. I have been informed of it in a passage."

"Your failures I will pay for at forty sacks apiece, sight unseen, with the records, in perpetuity."

Fizzle did not sit with it for a week. He sat with it for about eleven seconds, and then he asked the only question he was ever going to ask, and it was not why.

It was:

"Does this mean I was right?"

Mr Crale considered him with real kindness.

"It means somebody has paid you forty sacks," he said. "Which in my experience is the nearest thing to being right that anybody in this realm gets, and it spends better."

"That is not an answer, sir."

"No," agreed Mr Crale, pleasantly, "it is not," and stood up out of the chair, and the interview was over.

He came back a fortnight later with a cart and two silent men and took away the doorbell, the compass that points at what you are avoiding, an alembic that cools things by heating them, and a lantern of Fizzle's own design which — correctly, repeatably, and to the Magister's continuing professional distress — makes a lit room dark and a dark room worse.

He did not take the cheese. He was invited to and declined, at some length, having met it.

He paid a hundred and sixty sacks, and a retainer on top of it, and the terms of the retainer were the strangest document ever signed in that tower and Fizzle signed it, and here they are entire:

> Mr A. Crale will pay Magister Fizzle forty (40) sacks for each working which the Magister can show > was performed correctly and which produced the opposite of its intent. > > The Magister is not to alter his practice in any way. He is not to attempt failures. He is not to > select his commissions. He is to work exactly as he has worked for thirty-one years and to write it > down exactly as he has written it down. > > The Magister is not to be told the purpose of this arrangement, and undertakes not to ask, and is > not being deceived: there is a purpose, it is not to his disadvantage, and it will not be explained. > > A. Crale.

Fizzle read that third clause four times, and held it up to the lamp, which is a thing he does, and found nothing in it but paper.

Then he signed it — and he would like it recorded, and it is recorded, in his own hand, in the ledger, that same night, and it is the most honest sentence in this book:

> I have signed it because I have wanted, for thirty-one years, for one single person in this realm to > look at my work and say the word "correct" — and a man has now done that, and paid for the privilege, > and if the price of it is that I am not told why, then I find on inspection that I do not care why. > > I am fifty-four. I have had six failures this year. My roof is generous. > > He said properly.

That night Magister Fizzle went to the orb and tried to write to his sister Hester at Nettlewick, whom he had not written to in some years, to tell her that his professional position had materially improved.

He got as far as:

> DE□R HESTER. I HOPE YOU □RE WE□□. > > THE WORK GOES BETTER. □ GE□T□EM□□ H□S BOUGHT MY —

and stopped, because the word he wanted was anomalies, and then tried errors, which has no dead letters in it and which he sat looking at for some while and then struck out, because it was not the word and he does not falsify a record.

He typed instead:

> □ GE□T□EM□□ H□S BOUGHT MY WORK.

Which was true, and was the first time in thirty-one years he had been able to write that sentence without a qualifier, and he sat with it for a good while before he sent it.

The invitation was the second piece of good paper to enter that tower in a month, and Magister Fizzle made a small ceremony of opening it, alone, at the bench, with a knife, which he would not have admitted to.

> Lady Rowena Fenn requests the pleasure of the company of Magister Fizzle at dinner, on the > 14th, and would be most particularly grateful if he would bring something.

He read that last clause eleven times over two days.

Bring something. A man may bring wine. A man may bring a book, or a bottle of the good stuff from the Coast, or his sister if he has one to hand.

Magister Fizzle, who had not been asked to a table above stairs in nineteen years, decided after two days of genuine anguish that a woman of Lady Fenn's standing would not write most particularly about a bottle, and that what was being asked for — delicately, in the way of that class, in a manner designed to spare him having to be told — was a demonstration of his professional work.

He was right about this. It is the only thing in this chapter he was right about, and it did him no good at all.

He brought the lantern.

Lady Rowena Fenn was sixty-one and had the best table within thirty miles and a laugh you could hear through two doors, and she came the length of her own hall to meet him, which she did for nobody, and took both his hands.

"Magister. You came. I have been trying to get you for four years and Bastable keeps telling me you're busy."

"I have not been —" said Fizzle, and stopped, and rearranged it. "I have been at work, madam."

"Of course you have." She had already turned. "Now come and see the sideboard, because I warn you I shall be insufferable about it."

It ran the whole of the long wall. It was walnut, and it was crowded, and there were, Fizzle counted later in the ledger, forty-one objects on it.

"The Fenn Collection," said Lady Fenn, with enormous relish. "Nine years. Everything on that board is broken and everything on it is broken interestingly, and I have never in my life bought one — they are given to me, all of them, because the whole realm knows I want them, and I have never once had to ask twice."

She went along it for him like a woman showing off children.

A tea urn that heats a room and cools its own contents. A pair of spectacles you can only read through if you already know what the page says. A bell — not his — that will ring for anybody in the house except its owner. A music box, silver, exquisite, which plays perfectly and inaudibly, and which two guests a year insist they can hear, and which Lady Fenn says is the finest test of character she possesses.

A weathervane that indicates, with total reliability, the direction the wind will not be coming from.

And, at the end, under a small glass dome, on a stand: a doorbell with a glazed housing and a lovely bracket.

Fizzle stood very still.

"That one," said Lady Fenn happily, "came to me a fortnight ago, from a friend, and it is the joy of my life. It rings when they have gone away. Can you imagine anything more useless? I have had it put on the north porch and the household is in uproar."

"Madam," said Magister Fizzle, "I made that."

"No."

"I made it in the third week of Rainmelt. It took four days and I tested it forty times."

And Lady Rowena Fenn put her hand on his arm and said, with total and shining sincerity, the sentence that Fizzle carried about with him for the rest of that year:

"My dear man. How wonderful. You must be terribly clever to get a thing that wrong."

Dinner was eleven at table and the lantern was a triumph.

It was brought out with the fruit. Fizzle explained the working — briefly, and rather well, and to a room that was already laughing before he had finished the second sentence — and then lit it, and the room went dark, and eleven people screamed and then roared, and a Bastable cousin had to be taken out and sat down.

They made him do it four times.

By the fourth he had stopped explaining the working, because the explaining was slowing it down, and he found he could get a better laugh by simply lighting the thing and saying nothing at all, which he did, and which brought the house down; and he sat at that table with the good glass in his hand and eleven people helpless around him and understood, with perfect clarity, somewhere around the middle of the third laugh, that he had accepted an invitation to dinner and had arrived as the turn.

He was not angry. That is worth saying. He had been the turn at his own dinner table for thirty-one years and had made his choice about it at twenty-six.

He simply put it in a small compartment, the way he had learned to, and got on with being funny, and was extremely funny, and was told twice that evening that he was the most amusing man in the eastern realm, and did not once let anything show — until the ladies had moved and the port had gone round and a hard-faced woman of business at the far end, who had said perhaps nine words all evening, said the tenth.

"Magister. That lantern was correct."

Fizzle looked up.

"I beg your pardon, madam?"

"The working. You gave it out at speed and half of it was for the room, but the bones of it were correct. I have heard a great deal of nonsense at this table over the years and that was not any of it." She turned her glass. "Mrs Doon. I am in salt, and one or two other things. I shall write to you."

And she said nothing else for the rest of the evening.

Now, the sideboard.

He went back to it at the end, alone, while the carriages were being called, and he stood in front of forty-one objects with a glass he had not drunk, and did the sum.

Eleven of them were his. He knew every one, and could have given the date and the fee.

Thirty were not.

He knew four of the makers by name. Two he knew by hand alone — you know a colleague's hand the way you know a voice down a passage. One of them, the spectacles, was the work of a woman at Murkminster he had corresponded with for six years and had never met, who was, in his considered professional judgement, better at this than he was.

And Magister Fizzle stood in a rich woman's hall in front of thirty objects that were not his and had the single largest emotional experience of his adult life, and it was not wonder, and it was not fear, and it had nothing whatever to do with what might be causing anything.

It was relief.

It is not me.

Thirty-one years. Thirty-one years of the passage, and the girl with the mop, and the soup at the end of the table, and you must be terribly clever to get a thing that wrong — and here was a walnut sideboard in a house he would never be invited to again, with thirty objects on it made by careful people he had never met, all of them exactly as wrong as his own, all of them wrong in the same particular manner, which is to say precisely, and in the opposite direction.

He did not ask himself what was doing it.

The thought did not occur to him. It genuinely did not occur to him, and anybody who has ever been publicly bad at their job for three decades will understand exactly why: when you have spent thirty-one years being told that the fault is you, the discovery that it is not you does not make you curious. It makes you want it in writing.

"Madam," said Magister Fizzle, at the door, with his hat in his hand and his heart going like a bird, "might I ask you for something?"

"Anything, Magister, you have been a delight."

"A statement. In your hand, over your name. Setting out the objects on that board, and their makers, and the dates on which they came to you, and — " he had rehearsed this on the stairs and it came out badly anyway — "and the particular manner in which each of them fails. That they do not merely fail. That they fail by inversion. That the tea urn does not cease to heat but heats the wrong thing, and the vane does not cease to point but points the wrong way about, and that this is the same in all forty-one."

Lady Rowena Fenn looked at him.

And it must be understood that she was not being unkind, and that she liked him, and that she thought she was giving him a marvellous present — because she was a great hostess, and a great hostess deals all day in the currency of what people will say about you, and she gave him, generously, extravagantly and at once, the most valuable thing she had.

"My dear man," she said. "I shall write you the most glowing testimonial in the county."

And she did. It came on the Tuesday, on the good paper, over her name, and it is in the ledger, pasted in, and it reads:

> Magister Fizzle is the most amusing man in the eastern realm. His lantern is the making of any > dinner and I would not be without my doorbell for a hundred sacks. Everybody must have him. — R. Fenn.

Not one date. Not one maker. Not one word about inversion.

He read it four times, and held it up to the lamp, which is a thing he does.

Then he pasted it into the ledger, because it was a record and he does not discard records, and under it he entered the evening in his four columns, and in the last column — In My Defence — he wrote nothing at all, for the second time that season.

And then, because the tower was cold and the hour was bad and there was nobody up eighty-one steps to see it, Magister Fizzle went to the orb and typed the sentence he had been carrying home in a coach for two hours, and it is the closest this book will come to letting him say what it costs:

> THERE □RE THIRTY OTHERS. > > IT IS □OT ME. IT W□S □EVER ME. > > □ WOM□□ WITH □ SIDEBO□RD H□S KEPT BETTER RECORDS TH□□ THIS PROFESSIO□ H□S KEPT I□ FOUR HU□DRED > YE□RS □□D SHE DOES □OT K□OW IT, □□D I C□□□OT GET HER TO WRITE DOW□ WH□T SHE H□S.

He looked at that last line for some time.

Then he found the pen, and struck out DOW□, and wrote down above it by hand, because his hand is still the better of the two devices in that tower, and because he does not falsify a record even when the record is a complaint he cannot spell.

He spent four days on the design before he cast anything, which is four days longer than he had ever spent on a design in his life, and which is the difference between a man doing his work and a man defending it.

The problem, stated plainly in the ledger:

> I am asked to believe — and the castle is asked to believe — that I am incompetent. Very well. That > is a hypothesis and it is a perfectly respectable one and it has thirty-one years of evidence behind > it. > > What has never been done, by me or by anybody, is the other half. Nobody has ever set up the > comparison that would show it up. Not once. In thirty-one years no living soul has thought it worth > the trouble, INCLUDING ME, because when everyone agrees the fault is you, you spend your evenings > apologising instead of measuring. > > I intend to measure.

The design he arrived at is the reason Professor Clank, two towers over, eventually did what he did, and it is worth setting out, because it is not a wizard's design. It is a surveyor's.

One. The same working, cast by four different practitioners. Himself; a journeyman of no particular gift called Barrow; the woman at Murkminster who made the spectacles, by post, with instructions; and — this took a bottle and a great deal of asking — one of the Quill nuns, who are the most careful hands in the realm and who do not hold with any of it.

Two. Four different workings, all cast by himself. One of his own. One out of a book so old that nobody could accuse him of having written it. One dictated to him line by line by a colleague who would not tell him what it was for. And one — this is the entry Clank underlined — a working he was given deliberately wrong, altered in a way he was not told about, so that a correct casting of it ought to produce nothing at all.

Three. Controls. Nine sound bells, four of them his own twenty-year-old ones, left absolutely alone and observed daily by a person with no interest in the outcome.

Four. Witnesses at every casting, named, signing the sheet, with two of them chosen specifically because they thought he was a fool.

Five. Everything written down before it happened. Every expected result entered and signed off in advance, so that nobody could say afterwards that he had decided what he meant to find once he had found it.

Pettifer carried the boxes. Pettifer was an under-footman of nineteen with a long neck and no conversation, lent by the household because somebody had to fetch, and he was there at every one of the eleven castings, setting the trestles out and putting the lamps where he was told and taking them away again after.

The results took five weeks and they are in the ledger in a hand that gets steadier as it goes.

The same working cast by four practitioners inverted for all four. Barrow's inverted. The nun's inverted, which caused a certain amount of difficulty and one letter. The spectacles-woman's inverted at Murkminster, forty miles off, by post, and she wrote back three pages that Fizzle has kept.

Four different workings cast by Fizzle inverted, all four — including the one out of the old book, which had not been cast by anybody for two hundred years and which inverted so neatly that he had to sit down.

The one he had been given deliberately wrong did not invert. It did nothing whatever, which is what a correct casting of a broken working ought to do, and Fizzle — who had not been told it was broken, and who spent an entire evening going over it looking for his own error before the colleague confessed — entered "nil result, as expected of a defective working; I am satisfied the defect was not mine, though I was some hours arriving at it" and then wrote underneath, in a smaller hand, "this is the only night in five weeks I have been happy."

And the four twenty-year-old bells rang correctly every single day for five weeks.

He put that last one in the ledger in the same size hand as everything else, and did not bury it, and did not explain it away, and entered beneath it:

> I cannot account for the nine sound workings. They are mine, they were cast by me, they are of the > same kind as those that invert, and they have never inverted in twenty years. > > This is the strongest evidence against everything else in these five weeks and I record it in the > same book, on the same page, in the same ink, because a man who prints only the sheets that suit him > is not keeping a record, he is writing a letter about himself.

And then, on the last page of that section, Magister Fizzle wrote out the thing his whole trade had been standing on top of for thirty-one years without once looking down at it.

It is not long. He rewrote it eleven times to get it that short.

> A man whose workings do nothing is unskilled. > > A man whose workings do a DIFFERENT thing each time is unskilled, and dangerous, and should be > stopped. > > But a result that comes out inverted, in the same direction, to the same degree, in every one of > ninety-four recorded castings over thirty-one years, is not an absence of skill. It is the most > reliable outcome in this profession. I can tell you what my bell will do to a hundredth part. There > is not a practitioner in this realm who can say as much of a bell that works. > > Reliability is the whole of method. It is the ONLY thing that separates a trade from a mess. And on > that measure — the only measure my profession has ever agreed on — I am, and have been for three > decades, the most precise man in it. > > I get the wrong answer. I get it PERFECTLY. And there is no procedure anywhere in this trade for a > man who is exact and wrong, and so they have put me down as sloppy, because sloppy is a thing the > trade has a drawer for.

He looked at that for a long while.

Then, underneath, because he is who he is:

> I am aware this is the sort of thing a bad practitioner says. > > That is the difficulty. It is EXACTLY the sort of thing a bad practitioner says. There is no > sentence I could write in this book tonight that a genuinely incompetent man would not also write, > and there is no way out of that from in here, and I have been going round it since Tuesday. > > The only road out is somebody else. It has to be somebody who has no reason to be kind to me and > every reason not to be, or it is worth nothing. > > Which means Clank. > > God help me. It means Clank.

Professor Clank, of the Clock Tower and the Forge, had been Magister Fizzle's rival, burden and near neighbour for twenty-six years, and their relations may be summarised by the fact that each of them had, independently and unknown to the other, kept every letter the other had ever sent.

Clank's position on Fizzle is a matter of record and is printed in his own Register of Corrigible Errors, where Fizzle appears in the foreword as "my rival, my burden, my near neighbour in the tower — who sees magic, which is his word for a mess he has not yet apologised for."

Fizzle sent him the whole of it. Five weeks. Eleven castings. Every sheet, every witness signature, the four sound bells, the nil result, and the deliberately broken working — and, because he is not a fool, he sent it with no covering argument at all. Four words on the front:

> You will find errors.

Clank's reply came back in two days, by hand, brought over by a boy, and it is pasted into the ledger and it is the shortest letter Professor Clank ever wrote to anybody.

Here it is entire.

> Fizzle. > > I have found four errors. Your third witness sheet is unsigned. Your temperatures are taken at the > bench and not at the working, which is worthless, and I am astonished at you. You have used the word > "invert" in two senses on page nine and must choose one. And your control period is five weeks > where it ought to be a year, and you know it, and you did five because you could not afford a year, > which is a reason and not an excuse. > > Correct these and send it again. > > I make no other comment at this time. > > — CLANK.

Fizzle read it four times.

It was, on any fair reading, a thoroughly unpleasant letter from a man who had spent twenty-six years being unpleasant to him, and it corrected him on four points, and it was right on all four, and he was particularly humiliated about the temperatures.

And Magister Fizzle sat down in the hopping armchair at half past one in the morning with that letter in his hand and found himself entirely unable to breathe properly for a moment.

Because he had known Clank for twenty-six years.

And in twenty-six years, presented with a sheaf of Fizzle's results — presented with anything of Fizzle's, a working, a theory, a doorbell, a bang in the night, a chaise longue — Professor Clank had never once, on any occasion, in writing or in company or across a table or through a wall, failed to say something extremely funny about it.

He had corrected four errors, all real, in his usual manner.

He had not made a single joke.

She did not write. She came.

She came on a Tuesday without notice, up the eighty-one steps, in a coat that had been made for somebody who walks in weather, and she stood in the middle of the tower and looked round it once — the bench, the ledger, the orb on its stand, the armchair — and said:

"Does the chair hop at people or away from them?"

"At."

"I'd have it out," said Mrs Doon, and did not sit down, and did not sit down at any point during the forty minutes that followed, which Fizzle came to understand was because she conducted business on her feet and had done for thirty years.

"I'll be quick, Magister, because I've a cart at Mucklecombe at four. I'm in salt. I'm also in hides, and in a small way in shipping out of Saltgate, and I have eleven people's wages on me every Friday and I have never missed one. I say that so you know what sort of a person is talking to you."

"Madam."

"I've read your lantern." She said it exactly like that. "You gave the working out at Fenn's between the fruit and the port to a room that wanted a laugh, and it was correct, and I went home and wrote down as much of it as I'd caught and I've had a man look at it. And what I want to say to you first, before any of the rest of it, is this."

She took her gloves off, which she had not done for Lady Fenn.

"I do not think you are funny."

Now. He had been waiting thirty-one years to hear a sentence in that neighbourhood, and it did not land at all the way he had spent thirty-one years imagining, and he never afterwards worked out whether that was her fault or his.

"Here's my proposition," said Mrs Doon. "I want you to hear the whole of it before you say anything, because it'll sound worse in pieces than it is entire, and it's bad enough entire.

"I'm in salt. Salt is a preserving trade and preserving is the whole of it — I lose more to spoilage in a wet autumn than I lose to competitors in a decade, and every soul in my line has been trying to buy a preserving charm since before my grandmother, and there isn't one that works, and there never has been, and you know that better than I do."

"There is not," agreed Fizzle. "I have attempted four. One of them is a cheese and it is aware."

"I've heard about the cheese," said Mrs Doon. "Now."

And she set it out, and she set it out in about ninety seconds, and it was the single cleverest piece of commercial thinking Magister Fizzle heard in his life.

"I don't want you to make me a preserving charm. I've no use for one; they don't work, and yours would work backwards, and I'd have eleven tons of salt beef gone off in a week and I'd be finished.

"I want to commission a spoiling charm.

"I want you to build me a working whose honest and stated purpose is to rot my stock. Rot it fast, rot it thoroughly, rot it to the bottom of the barrel. I want it correct — properly correct, the way you do it, tested and witnessed and written up, so it goes in your book with the rest.

"And then I want it cast over my stores.

"And by everything in five weeks of your own results, Magister, what I shall get is the opposite of rot, which is the thing my trade has wanted for four hundred years, and which no one has ever been able to buy, because everyone has been asking for it directly, which is the one way it cannot be had."

There was a very long silence in that tower.

"I'll give you two hundred sacks to build it," said Mrs Doon, "and forty a year after, and I'll put my name to any statement of your competence you care to write and I'll swear to it anywhere you like, including in front of Clank, who I gather is the one that matters to you. And I want an answer today because I'm at Mucklecombe at four."

He did not answer for some while.

It should be said, because this book is not interested in pretending its man is better than he is, that Magister Fizzle's first three thoughts were, in order: two hundred sacks; she will swear it in front of Clank; and it would work.

It was his fourth thought that saved him, and it was not a noble one.

It was: it would go in the ledger.

"Madam," he said. "There is a difficulty and it is not the one you are expecting."

"Go on."

"You require the working to be correct."

"I do. That's the whole —"

"You require it to be correct, madam, which means it must be meant." He had got up. He did not know he had got up. "A working is not a recipe. It does not go off because the words are in the right order; it goes off because a practitioner intends a result and reaches for it, with everything he has, in good faith. That is what casting is. It is the only part of this trade that cannot be faked and it is the reason a man who does not believe in it cannot do it however carefully he reads.

"You are asking me to stand over your barrels and, honestly and with my whole professional attention, try to rot eleven tons of another person's food."

"And fail," said Mrs Doon.

"And fail ninety-four times out of ninety-four," said Fizzle. "Which is my record, and which is the best record in this profession, and which is not the same as never."

She did not blink. He gave her that, always, in every later telling: she did not blink, and she did not pretend not to have understood, and she did not do him the discourtesy of arguing.

"Once in ninety-five," she said.

"I do not know the number, madam. Nobody knows the number. There is no number. There are four bells on the north range of this castle that have rung correctly every morning for twenty years and I cannot tell you why they are not inverted, and I have put that in my own book in my own hand where it does me the most harm, and until I can tell you why those four bells work I will not stand over your stores and sincerely attempt to destroy them."

"And that's your objection," said Mrs Doon.

"That is my first objection."

"What's the second? Say it plain, we're neither of us at our best being delicate."

So he said it plain.

"The second is that if I sign your paper I shall spend the rest of my working life casting things I hope will not happen. And a man who hopes his working fails is not conducting an experiment, madam — he is conducting a prayer, and his record is worthless from the first line, and everything I have written down in thirty-one years is worthless with it, because there will be no way for anybody ever after to tell which of my entries were honest attempts and which were made by a man being paid to be wrong."

He put his hand on the ledger, flat, the way Crale had.

"I have been laughed at in every passage of this castle for three decades and I have not got one thing out of it. I have got this. Every entry in it is true and every one of them cost me something and there is not a falsified line in it anywhere.

"You are offering me two hundred sacks for the only thing I own."

Mrs Doon put her gloves back on.

"That's a straight no, then."

"It is a straight no."

"Right," she said, and there was no more heat in it than that; and then she stood in the doorway of that tower with her hand on the frame and did the thing that made her the character she is, which is that she declined, absolutely, to let him enjoy it.

"I'll say one thing and then I'm away to Mucklecombe.

"You've had three of us at you this season. Fenn thinks you're a marvellous evening and she'll say so to anybody, and it's worth nothing and you know it's worth nothing, and you pasted it in your book anyway because you'd nothing else to paste.

"Then there's your gentleman. Crale." She let the name sit. "Pays forty sacks a piece, doesn't he. Won't say what for. Won't say what he does with them, nor where they go, nor why a man of that sort wants a broken doorbell under a dome. And you signed a paper agreeing not to ask."

"The terms were —"

"I've read the terms, Magister. Half the county's read the terms; he's not shy of them." Mrs Doon shrugged. "I'm not saying he means you harm. I'd not know. What I'm saying is that of the three of us he's the one you've thanked.

"And me — I've come up eighty-one steps and told you what I want, and what it's for, and what I'll pay, and what it does to your soul, and I answered every question you put me straight, and you've said no to the only one of the three who told you the truth."

She got the door open.

"Which is the right answer," said Mrs Doon, "and I'd think less of you if you'd said different, and I'll not be back. Good day to you."

He sat in the hopping chair for a long time after the sound of her had gone off down the steps.

Then he went to the ledger and entered the interview in his four columns, which took him an hour, and he put down her proposition in full and in her own words, because it was a record and he does not edit records, and under In My Defence he wrote — for the third time that season, and this time because he genuinely did not know what he ought to have said —

nothing at all.

And then, very late, he went to the orb, and typed one line, and did not send it anywhere, and it is still on the tape:

> SHE IS RIGHT □BOUT CR□□E □□D I □M □OT GOI□G TO DO □□YTHI□G □BOUT IT.

He corrected all four of Clank's errors inside a month.

He got the third witness sheet signed. He moved the thermometers off the bench and onto the working itself, which was fiddly and which he should have done in 1851 and which he was still cross about. He went through page nine and made invert mean one thing throughout, and it cost him two days and made the argument better.

And he could not afford a year, so he wrote to Crale, and Crale sent the year, by return, with no questions and a note reading only "For the control period. Do not thank me. — A.C."

So the second series ran fifty-one weeks with nine controls and eighteen castings and four practitioners and a witness list as long as a wedding, and it was, Clank later wrote, "the most carefully-conducted programme of work performed in this castle in my lifetime, by a considerable margin, and it was conducted by the man this castle laughs at, which is a thing I invite the reader to sit with for a moment as I have had to."

And in the last month of it, on an ordinary Thursday, in front of six witnesses, the whole eastern third of it fell over.

Clank came to see the apparatus because Clank had asked to and Fizzle had said yes, which is the bravest thing in this chapter and passes almost unremarked.

He came at nine in the morning with a case of instruments, and he did not look at the workings at all. He looked at the equipment — which is what a man of brass does, and which is why the trade needed him and hated him — and he was eleven minutes in the tower before he stopped in front of the shelf where the housings were kept and said:

"Fizzle. Where does that come in?"

"Where does what come in."

"The water."

There was a pause of the kind that happens in a room where six people have all understood something at slightly different speeds.

"The roof is generous," said Magister Fizzle.

"How generous?"

"…It is a matter of some standing between myself and the household."

Professor Clank took a brass instrument out of his case, and put it against the wall behind the housing shelf, and looked at it, and made a small noise, and then went and got a second instrument because he did not believe the first, which is the correct behaviour and which Fizzle would have admired in almost any other circumstances.

Then he turned round.

"Your earthenware is wet."

It took the rest of the morning to establish and it is not complicated and there is no trick in it.

The glazed housings came in batches of a dozen from a pottery at Drudgeford. They were stored on that shelf. That shelf is under the leak — not directly, but eleven inches to the left of directly, and the wall behind it wicks, and glazed earthenware that has stood against a wicking wall for six weeks holds water in the body of it that you cannot see, cannot feel, and cannot get out except by firing it again.

A damp housing does not hold a working properly. Everybody in the trade knows this. It is in the first book anybody reads. It is the reason potters at Drudgeford charge extra for a dry-stored batch, and Fizzle had paid that extra for thirty-one years, and had then brought them up eighty-one steps and put them on the wrong shelf.

Eleven of the eighteen castings in the second series had used housings off that shelf.

Nobody could say which eleven.

Because — and here is the part that took the rest of the morning, and that had to be got out of a boy in front of six witnesses, which was the worst hour of that boy's life —

Pettifer had been drying them.

He had been drying them since about the fourth week. He had noticed the housings were sweating; he had noticed the Magister putting them straight onto the trestle; and he had done what a good under-footman of nineteen does, which is take a problem quietly out of the way of his betters without troubling them about it. He put them by the fire in the small room for an hour or two before each casting. Not all of them — only the ones that felt cold to him, on the days he had the time, when he was not wanted elsewhere.

He had never mentioned it. It had not occurred to him that it was worth mentioning, because it was not his place to mention things, and because in four years in that household nobody had ever once asked Pettifer his opinion about anything.

"How many did you dry?" said Clank.

"I couldn't say, sir."

"Half? More than half?"

"I couldn't say, sir." The boy's neck had gone the colour of a brick. "Some weeks I'd do the lot and some weeks I'd be at the yard and I'd not get to none of them, and I never wrote it down, sir, I'd no call to write it down —"

And Professor Clank, who was a fair man and a precise one and had no unkindness in him at all on that particular subject, said: "No. You had not," and shut his case, and said, to the room, in the flat voice of a man reading a verdict:

"The eleven are unusable. There is no way to reconstruct which housings were dry and which were not, and therefore no way to say of any single result whether it was governed by the working or by the weather. I would not accept them from a first-year apprentice."

Fizzle struck them out that afternoon.

He did it himself, at the bench, with the six witnesses still in the room, and he did it properly — not scratched over, which destroys a record, but ruled through with one line each so the entry stays readable, and dated, and initialled, with a note against every one:

> VOID. Housing damp or of unknown state. Struck by me, on Prof. Clank's finding, this day.

Eleven entries. Eleven castings. Fourteen weeks of his own work and a great deal of somebody else's money, and about a fifth of everything he had to stand on.

He was very calm about it. Two of the witnesses said afterwards that they had expected him to shout, and that not shouting was somehow much worse to watch, and one of them — a Bastable cousin who had laughed at the lantern until he had to be taken out and sat down — went away from that tower a different man about Magister Fizzle and stayed different for the rest of his life.

When it was done he closed the ledger and looked up and said, to nobody in particular:

"Well. That is the method working."

"It is," said Clank.

"It is supposed to feel like this."

"It is."

"I should like it recorded," said Magister Fizzle, "that it is a filthy way to spend an afternoon."

They were left alone at about four, and Clank stayed, which he had never done, and it was then that Professor Clank said the thing he had not said in front of witnesses, which is the only untidy act of his life.

"Fizzle. Your damp accounts for the eleven being unreliable."

"It does."

"It does not account for the direction."

Fizzle did not look up.

"A wet housing gives you a weak working, or a working that will not take, or one that fires and dies, or nothing whatever. I have made four hundred of them wet on purpose over the years to see what happens, because I am that sort of man, and I have the results and I will show you them." Clank stood in the middle of that tower with his hat in his hand. "In four hundred wet castings I have never once had an inverted result. Not one. Damp does not invert. Damp degrades.

"Every one of your eleven inverted. All eleven. In the same direction. To the same degree. Like the other seven, and like the ninety-four before them."

He put his hat on.

"I am telling you that because it is true and because you will not have seen it, being underneath it. I am not putting it in writing, because I have not tested your eleven and cannot, and I do not sign things I have not tested."

And Magister Fizzle, who had been given, by his rival of twenty-six years, in his own tower, on the worst afternoon of his professional life, the exact rope he needed —

— said:

"No. They are out."

"Fizzle —"

"They are out, Clank." He put his hand flat on the closed ledger. "You are right and I think you are right and if you were right in writing I could have a fifth of my life back this evening. And they are still out, because they are contaminated, and a contaminated result that happens to agree with me is the most dangerous object in this room.

"If I keep those eleven because they suit me, then every single one of the other ninety-four is worth nothing, because I will have shown, in front of six witnesses, that I keep the ones I like.

"I have one thing. I have had one thing for thirty-one years." He looked up. "You will not get me to sell it on a Thursday."

Professor Clank stood in the doorway for what the household afterwards agreed was an unusually long time for a man who walked as fast as he did.

Then he said, "Get the housings off that shelf," and went down the eighty-one steps.

Pettifer was found at nine that evening in the small room, not crying, standing up, being extremely busy with something that did not need doing.

"Pettifer."

"Sir. I'll go, sir. I've spoke to Mr Hance and he says it's the Magister's word and I've said I'd not argue it —"

"Pettifer, do sit down."

The boy sat down like a man who had been shot.

"You dried the housings," said Fizzle, "because they were cold and wet and about to be used for delicate work, and because it was obvious to you that this was wrong, and because you were correct."

"…Sir?"

"You were correct. You were the only person in that room across fourteen weeks who noticed the single most important defect in the whole apparatus, including two Magisters, and you noticed it in your fourth week, and you fixed it, quietly, on your own time, without being asked and without being thanked." Fizzle sat down opposite him on a crate. "And then you did not write it down. Which is the only error, and it is not your error, because nobody in your life has ever told you that what you notice is worth ink."

He put a notebook on the boy's knee. It was a good one. It had come with the year's money.

"You will attend every casting from now on. You will write down everything you do to my equipment and everything you observe about it, including the things you think are too small to matter, especially those. You will be a named witness on the sheets, with your signature, and you will be paid for it, and if you ever again quietly correct a fault of mine without telling me I shall be extremely angry with you and it will be the only time."

Pettifer looked at the notebook for a while.

"Sir," he said, "I've a very bad hand."

"Mine," said Magister Fizzle, "is better than my orb, and that is the whole of my equipment, and we shall manage."

The trade came because Clank asked them.

That is worth being clear about, because Fizzle sent forty-one invitations and had nine acceptances, and Professor Clank sent eleven letters and got eleven, and by the morning of the demonstration there were sixty-eight people in the Great Hall including four from Murkminster and one from the Coast who had travelled two days.

Clank never told him he had done it. Fizzle found out eleven years later from somebody's widow.

Lord Bastable presided, having been told he was presiding, and sat in the big chair with the expression of a man waiting for a thing to be over so that a different thing might begin.

Lady Rowena Fenn came, and brought four, and was in tremendous form.

Mrs Doon came, stood at the back by the door with her gloves on, spoke to nobody, and left before the end, and this book is not going to tell you what she thought about any of it, because she never said.

And Mr Ambrose Crale came, and sat halfway down on the left, and put his hat on his knees.

Magister Fizzle had spent eleven days on the design of the demonstration and it was, as Clank wrote afterwards, "not a display. It was a trap, built by a careful man, and every one of us walked into it and came out the other side laughing, which is the part I cannot get over."

He explained it in four minutes, from a paper, without jokes.

One. He would cast a working before them: a simple levitation, the one every apprentice does in his first year, on an object chosen by the audience from three he had brought and prepared identically.

Two. The working's intent was to raise the object three feet and hold it there for one minute.

Three. He had written down, in advance, what would actually occur. Not "it will fail" — anybody may write that. The precise result: direction, magnitude, duration and time of onset. The paper was sealed, and had been sealed for six days, and had been in Professor Clank's own keeping for five of them, and Clank confirmed it aloud, twice, in his own voice, to a hall that went noticeably quieter when he did.

Four. The measuring would not be done by him. Two rods, held by two men he had never met, one of them from Murkminster; the timing by a watch held by Clank and a second watch held by a Quill nun; and the record kept by his own witness, a household under-footman named Pettifer, whose notebook had been examined by Professor Clank on the previous evening and pronounced — the word is in Clank's account, and there is no irony anywhere near it — "exemplary."

"You may choose the object," said Fizzle.

They chose the bust.

Of course they chose the bust. Sixty-eight people in a hall with three objects on a table, one of which is a marble likeness of Great-Great-Grandfather Bastable that has been talking since 1841 and has opinions about the tapestries and locks the ancestor-door out of spite — they were never going to choose the pewter jug. Lady Fenn proposed it and the hall carried it by acclamation and the bust itself, who was consulted as a courtesy, said that it was about time somebody in this family took an interest in him and that the lighting in the Great Hall was a disgrace and always had been.

He cast it at eleven minutes past two.

He cast it perfectly. There is no dispute about this from any quarter; there were four professionals in that hall competent to judge and all four have said so, including one who disliked him. It was a clean, unhurried, slightly old-fashioned casting of a first-year working by a man who had done it ten thousand times, and it took nine seconds.

For four seconds nothing whatever happened.

And then, at eleven minutes and thirteen seconds past two, Great-Great-Grandfather Bastable went down.

Not fast. That is the detail everybody who was there brings up first, and it is the reason it is funny rather than frightening: he went down gently, at the stately pace of a gentleman descending a staircase he has descended every day of his life, straight through the table, and then straight through the floor of the Great Hall, and out of sight — talking the entire way.

He was, at the time, in the middle of a sentence about the lighting.

The last four words of it were audible to the whole hall, muffled, from beneath the boards, as they receded:

> "— and I have SAID —"

He came to rest three feet below the floor of the Great Hall, which is to say in the airspace of the Lesser Pantry, three feet above a table on which the Under-Housekeeper had that morning set out forty-one clean dishes, in front of the girl who does the mop, who had been fifteen when this book began and was seventeen now.

He remained there, unsupported, for one minute exactly.

Then he dropped the last three feet onto the dishes.

The Great Hall of Castle Bastable has stood for four hundred years and it has heard some noises, and the people who were present that afternoon are agreed that it has never heard anything like the noise it made between two-twelve and two-nineteen.

Sixty-eight people. A hole. Forty-one dishes. A marble ancestor upside down in the crockery in the room below, still going, now audibly furious, demanding to know who was responsible and announcing that he had said.

Lady Rowena Fenn had to be assisted from the room and was heard in the passage, and she is sixty-one, and she said afterwards it was the finest afternoon of her life and she has never been persuaded out of it.

Lord Bastable laughed until he was frightening.

A man from Murkminster who had travelled two days sat down on the floor.

And the Under-Housekeeper came up out of the Lesser Pantry by the back stair with a piece of dish in her hand and stood in the doorway of the Great Hall and said, into a room of sixty-eight helpless people, in the flat exhausted voice of a woman who had been having this conversation for eleven years:

"MAGISTER."

Professor Clank did not laugh.

He waited. He waited about four minutes, with his watch still in his hand and his thumb still on the stop, and he did not once look at the hole; and when it had come down enough that a voice could be heard, he stood up and said, "Gentlemen. The paper."

It took another minute to get quiet. He broke the seal in front of them and held it up and read it out, and this is what it said, in Magister Fizzle's hand, dated six days earlier, witnessed by two:

> The working will be correct. > > The object will not rise. It will descend, on the vertical, at a slow and even rate, without > tumbling. > > It will descend three feet, being the exact magnitude of the intended rise. > > It will hold at that depth for one minute, being the exact duration intended. > > It will then be released and will fall as any object falls. > > Onset will be between three and five seconds after the casting, this being the interval I have > recorded in ninety-four previous castings, of which the mean is four seconds and one fifth. > > I state further, and I would ask the company to notice it, that I do not know why. I am not offering > a cause. I am offering a prediction, which is the only thing my trade has ever accepted as proof of > anything, and I am making it in advance, in writing, in another man's keeping. > > — FIZZLE.

Clank lowered the paper.

"Rod?"

"Three feet," said the man from Murkminster. "Three feet dead. I've measured it twice and I'll measure it again for anybody that wants."

"Second rod?"

"Three foot," said the other man. "Aye."

"Duration by my watch, one minute and no seconds. Sister?"

"One minute," said the Quill nun. "By mine also."

"Onset," said Clank. "Mr Pettifer."

And the under-footman stood up in front of sixty-eight members of his betters' profession with a notebook in a very bad hand and read out, in a voice that only went once:

"Casting complete at eleven past two and nine seconds, sir. Object commenced descent at eleven past two and thirteen seconds. Four seconds, sir."

Professor Clank folded the paper.

"Four seconds," he said. "Against a predicted mean of four and one fifth."

And the Great Hall of Castle Bastable, having heard the most exact public prediction ever made in the history of that profession, confirmed to the inch and to the second by four independent measurers and two watches and a boy's notebook —

— roared.

Because it was the funniest thing any of them had ever seen. That is all. It was magnificently funny; it is funny now; it will be funny in four hundred years, and the hole is still there and they have put a rug over it.

They cheered him. That is the thing. They stood up and they cheered him and they meant every bit of it, and four of them came and shook his hand, and Lord Bastable said it was the best afternoon the castle had given anybody since the Stink, and Lady Fenn said — with her whole heart, at the top of her voice, across a crowded hall, to a man standing beside a hole with a sealed paper in his hand —

"MAGISTER! DO THE LANTERN!"

He did the lantern.

He was sixty-eight people's afternoon and he had made his choice about that at twenty-six, and he lit it and the room went dark and they screamed and roared, and he did it four times, and he was extremely funny, and it went on till six.

Mr Ambrose Crale left at about half past two.

Nobody remarked on it except a footman on the door, who mentioned to Pettifer at supper that the gentleman in the good coat had gone off very quick and very pleased, and had asked, on the way out, for the name of the pottery at Drudgeford.

Magister Fizzle came up eighty-one steps that night at a quarter past eleven and did not light a lamp for a while.

Then he entered the demonstration in the ledger, in his four columns, which took him until two in the morning: the working, the result, the conditions, every measurement, every name.

And under In My Defence — for the fourth time that season, and the last time in this book — he wrote nothing at all.

Then he pulled the orb over and typed one line, which the tape still has, and which he did not send to anybody:

> I W□S RIGHT TO THE I□CH □□D THEY □RE STI□□ □□UGHI□G. > > I DO □OT K□OW WH□T E□SE I H□VE GOT.

Professor Clank took eleven weeks over it, which for a man who walked as fast as he did was an eternity, and he did not tell Fizzle he was doing it.

He re-ran four of the eighteen castings himself, in his own tower, on his own apparatus, with his own brass, using housings he had fired himself that morning so that no shelf anywhere in this castle could be blamed for anything. He had two of them witnessed by people who disliked him, which he arranged personally, and which is the single most Clank act in this book.

All four inverted.

He then did the thing nobody had done, which took him nine of the eleven weeks: he went and found thirty of the forty-one objects on Lady Fenn's sideboard, traced them to their makers, and wrote to every maker who was still alive — nineteen of them, in four regions — and asked each one the same six questions, in the same words, without telling any of them what the others had said.

Fourteen replied. Two came in person. One sent a box.

And in the eleventh week Professor Clank, of the Clock Tower and the Forge, sat down and did not publish it in his Register of Corrigible Errors, in which every entry has three columns and a moral and every defect gets mended.

He opened a new book.

> THE REGISTER OF INCORRIGIBLE ERRORS > > Volume the First. Being an accounting of matters in this realm which are not defects of > workmanship, which I have tested, and which I cannot correct. > > Compiled by Professor Clank, of the Clock Tower and the Forge, who has been obliged to begin a > second book and did not wish to. > > --- > > A Foreword, Delivered Slowly. > > For six hundred afternoons I have held that every ghost is a scheduling error and every haunting a > problem of gears, and I hold it still, and I have mended a great many of them. > > This book is for what is left. > > There will not be many entries. I have set the bar where I would want it set against me: a matter > enters this register only when a competent person has attempted it correctly, and recorded it > honestly, and I have gone and tested it myself with my own brass, and failed, and can name no defect > in the work. Ignorance is not sufficient. Difficulty is not sufficient. Incorrigible means I have > been at it with instruments and it is not the workman. > > --- > > ENTRY THE FIRST · THE WORK OF MAGISTER FIZZLE, OF HOUSE FIZZLE, OF THIS CASTLE > > The Defect. None found. I have looked for thirty-one years, with malice, and latterly for eleven > weeks with instruments, and I report that there is no defect in this practitioner's method, his > materials, his record-keeping, or his hand. His workings are correct. I have cast four of them myself > and obtained his result. > > The Improvement. None available. There is nothing here to mend. I have nothing to bring to this > and I am not accustomed to writing that sentence. > > The New Defect. (This column is ordinarily where my improvements come home to roost. It is empty > for the first time in six hundred afternoons, and I find I resent the space.) > > On the eleven struck entries. The Magister struck eleven of his own results, in my presence, on my > finding of damp, and declined to reinstate them when I told him privately that damp does not invert > and that I believed his eleven were sound. I record his refusal here because it is the strongest > evidence in this file and he will not use it himself. A man who throws away a fifth of his own case > because it is contaminated is a man whose remaining four fifths you may take to the bank. > > On the nine sound workings. Nine of the Magister's workings — four of them bells on the north > range of this castle — have performed correctly and without inversion for twenty years and continue > to do so. This is not consistent with anything else in the file. It is entered in his own book, in > his own hand, unburied, where it does him the most harm, and I will not tidy it away for him. > I cannot account for the nine. Neither can he. It stands unexplained in this register and I expect > it to stand there after I am dead. > > On the question everybody will ask. I am asked, daily now, what causes it. > > I do not know, and I have not gone looking, and I am not going to. > > I am sixty-three. I built a governor once that would have corrected this whole castle, and I set it > going for one night, and the scullery door did not drop that Thursday, and I switched it off and have > left it off for nineteen years. A careful man learns the difference between a question he has not yet > answered and a question he has decided not to open. This is the second kind. I have entered what I > have tested. I am satisfied to leave it there and I would counsel any practitioner reading this to > be satisfied likewise. > > The dry moral. A trade that has only one drawer marked SLOPPY will put everything in it that > will not close any other way, and will go on calling a man careless for thirty-one years rather than > admit it needs a second drawer. I have had to build the drawer. It took me eleven weeks and it should > have taken me twenty-six years. > > — CLANK.

He had it printed at his own expense — four hundred copies, which is three hundred and sixty more than his first Register ever sold — and sent one to every practitioner in four regions and one to the Aetheric Supply & Sundries Board, who acknowledged receipt and asked him to raise a ticket.

And he sent the first copy off the press up eighty-one steps by a boy, with no letter in it, and nothing written on the flyleaf, because he was Clank.

Mr Ambrose Crale settled his account on the same day, which the household noticed, and which nobody has ever been able to make anything of, and which was very probably a coincidence.

He sent a cart, and the balance, and a great deal more than the balance, and a letter on the good paper.

> Magister, > > Our arrangement is at an end and I am closing it as I opened it, which is generously, and I would > be obliged if you did not raise the point. > > I have read Professor Clank's second register. He is a considerable man and you have got out of him > the only thing worth having from anybody, which is a change of mind in writing. > > You kept the terms. You did not ask, and I know precisely what it cost you not to, because I read > your ledger for two hours and I have thought about it since. I said at the time that the purpose was > not to your disadvantage. That was true then and it is true now, and it is all I am going to say > about it, and I am aware that it is not enough, and I have never yet found a way of putting it that > is. > > Do not build for Doon. She is the best of us and she will ask again in three years and you must > still say no. > > Yours, with respect, which I do not much use, > > A. Crale.

He did not come again. He was not at Fenn's after that season, and Lady Fenn — who knew everybody, and who made enquiries, because she was not a fool under any of it — was never able to tell anybody where he had gone or what he had been.

The Fenn Collection was sold entire nine years later, on her death, to an agent acting for a purchaser who was not named in the papers.

And a footman remembered, when asked much later, that the gentleman in the good coat had gone out of the Great Hall very quick and very pleased on the afternoon of the demonstration, and had stopped on the step to ask for the name of the pottery at Drudgeford — which he afterwards bought, the whole concern, kilns and clay-field and the dry store, for what the family at Drudgeford considered a very good price, and which he never once visited.

Nobody in this castle thought anything of it. Why would they. It is a pottery.

Magister Fizzle read the Register of Incorrigible Errors four times, at the bench, alone, and held it up to the lamp, which is a thing he does.

Then he went to the orb.

He wanted to write to his sister Hester at Nettlewick. He had it composed before he sat down; he had had it composed since about the second reading. It ran:

Dear Hester. A man I have disliked for twenty-six years has examined my work and printed, at his own expense, that there is no fault in it. I am to be in his book. He has had to start a new book to put me in. I have wanted this since 1849 and I find I do not know what to do with my hands.

He got as far as:

> DE□R HESTER. > > C□□□K H□S PRI□TED TH□T THERE IS □O F□U□T I□ MY WORK.

and then stopped.

Because the next word was vindication, which has an A and an N in it.

And the word after that would have been acknowledgement, which has both, twice.

And at last has all three.

And properly — the word he actually wanted, the word he had been waiting on since 1849, the word a gentleman in a hopping armchair had used and had not known what he was doing — properly has an L in it, and Magister Fizzle sat in his tower at eleven at night in front of a device with three dead keys and could not spell the one thing he had spent thirty-one years earning.

He tried four ways round it. He got no further.

Professor Clank came up the eighty-one steps at half past eleven, which he had done once before in twenty-six years, and did not knock, and stood in the doorway with his hat on and said:

"Well?"

"Clank."

"You have read it."

"Four times."

"You will find one error," said Clank. "Page eleven, the count of the Fenn objects is thirty and should be twenty-nine; one of them turns out to have been dropped by a maid in 1841 and is merely broken. I shall correct it in the second printing, of which there is going to have to be one." He came in. "What are you doing?"

"I am attempting," said Magister Fizzle, "to write to my sister."

Clank came and stood at the bench and read the tape over his shoulder, which no one is permitted to do, and which he did.

He read it twice.

Then Professor Clank put his hat down on the working bench of a man he had disliked since 1849, and took the pen out of the stand, and drew the tape toward him, and wrote — by hand, in ink, in his own small brass-precise letters, on the end of a line that a machine had refused to finish —

> properly.

He put the pen back.

"Your temperatures were still wrong in the second series," he said, "at the third and the ninth. I have not put it in the book. I am telling you here."

"I know," said Fizzle. "I noticed in the spring."

"Yes," said Clank. "I thought you would have."

And he took his hat and went down the eighty-one steps, and neither of them ever mentioned any of it again, and they worked in the same castle for nineteen more years, and were extremely rude to one another the whole time, and each of them kept every letter the other ever sent.

The four bells on the north range are ringing still.

Nobody has ever accounted for them.

THE END