Memory by K. J. Parker

I bash your head in.’
    Aciava grinned. ‘You can try,’ he said. ‘Actually, that’s just the first stage of the proof, to establish that you were once a member of the order. Now, take a look at this.’ Very slowly, he dipped his fingers into an inside pocket and fished out a scrap of paper. ‘Nothing very exciting,’ he said, ‘just a twenty-year-old class timetable. See for yourself.’
    He looked round, picked up a fairly clean piece of rag from the floor, and spread it rather ostentatiously on the anvil; then he put the paper on it and stood back.
    It was just a list of names; twenty of them, divided into four unequal groups. One of them read;
    Elaos Tanwar
Xipho Dorunoxy
Monachus Ciartan
Monachus Cordomine
Gain Aciava
Monachus Poldarn
    Poldarn took a closer look, trying to force himself to be calm, analytical. The paper could easily have been twenty years old; it was yellow and frayed across two folds, and the ink was greyish-brown. The letters – well, he could read them without thinking, but it wasn’t the same alphabet that they used in Tulice. There weren’t any names in the other groups that he recognised, though several of them started with Monachus ; he remembered what Aciava had said the previous evening, and guessed that those were names-inreligion. There were four little pinholes, one in each corner, as you’d expect on a notice put up on a door or a notice-board.
    â€˜That’s not proof,’ he said. ‘The most it could mean is that there was once a class with people with those names in it. Or this could just be something you wrote yourself, and dipped in vegetable stock to make it turn yellow.’
    â€˜Very good,’ Aciava said. ‘And if I showed you my business seal, with Gain Aciava engraved on it, you’d tell me I murdered someone with that name and took his seal before I wrote the paper. Fair enough. I said I’d show you some evidence. I didn’t say it was irrefutable. But now you’ve got to tell me why I’d go to so much trouble.’
    It was Poldarn’s turn to grin. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not without knowing who you really are, and what you’re really up to.’
    â€˜Quite.’ Aciava dipped his head to acknowledge the point. ‘As I recall, you weren’t at all bad at analytical reasoning when we did it in fifth grade. Better than me, anyhow. Mind you, I did miss a lot of classes, because of them clashing with archery practice. I was on the archery team, you see.’
    â€˜I’m impressed,’ Poldarn yawned. ‘So this is your proof, is it? Just this little bit of old paper.’
    â€˜ Allegedly old paper – you missed an opportunity. Come on, it was twenty years ago, what do you expect? I was damned lucky to have found that; I mean, who keeps old school notices?’
    â€˜Good question, who does? Why would you hang on to something like that?’
    â€˜Look on the back,’ Aciava replied. Poldarn did so. He saw a sketch: a diagram of an eight-pointed figure, drawn in charcoal, and below it a childish doodle of a vaguely heraldic-looking crow.
    â€˜The diagram,’ Aciava said, ‘is the eight principal wards. Lecture notes. The crow was just me being bored during lessons, though I probably chose to draw it because the crow was our team mascot. I was never very imaginative, even then. Innovation’s always struck me as being somehow disrespectful. Result of a religious upbringing, I suppose, the tendency to couple together the words original and sin . Anyhow, to answer your question: I kept the paper for the sketch, and it was sheer accident, coming across it the other day. I’d used it to mark the place in an old textbook. Satisfied?’
    Poldarn shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s still nothing linking that name on that bit of paper to me. If you can do that—’
    â€˜Can’t,