Another click, the oily whirr of some hidden spindle or flywheel. Then the stentorian voice that I had known since my childhood, the voice of our companion and tutor, patient beyond words, firm when it needed to be, but also wise and deep and supremely impervious to all the pleading, blackmail, emotional coercion and insults that my sister and I had ever mustered, said:

‘Thank you.’

Paladin had said that to me dozens of times before, whenever I had opened a door, cleaned its glass or helped it back onto its wheels, but never with exactly the intonation that I now heard. The delivery had been perfunctory before, an automatic statement doled out at the appropriate times. Now it sounded sincere. As if there were genuine gratitude.

The voice was quieter, too: the same tone, but much less volume.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Why did you end up here, in pieces?’

‘I am not sure.’ Then another click and whirr. ‘But I am different. I am not as I was before. I was damaged, and something changed.’

‘You were smashed up,’ I said. ‘In Madame Granity’s. You’d come to find us, me and Adrana. The way you were meant to. But Vidin Quindar attacked you. I saw you on the floor, all smashed up. But you weren’t in pieces.’

‘I must have been dismantled.’

‘Yes, and stuffed into boxes and left here. I suppose they weren’t sure what to do with you. And maybe you’d have stayed that way if I hadn’t poked around in those boxes, looking for my books.’ Then I frowned, still not sure what I was to make of this. ‘But you were dismantled. Why would you care if you were put back together or not? You’re a machine, Paladin. Why did you want me to put your head back on?’

The robot clicked and cogitated. Things chattered and hammered somewhere inside it.

‘To help you.’

‘You already have,’ I said, giving an inward sigh, as I realised the limits of Paladin’s ambitions. ‘You helped me learn to read and write, to make up stories, to find out about the worlds. You were good to us, when we were small. But you’re just a robot, and you’ve never worked very well.’

‘They made me less than what I was. They made me forget what I had been. But now I have remembered.’

‘And what were you?’

‘A robot of the Twelfth Occupation. A machine with a mind, loyal to people but not beholden to them. But when the troubles had passed they changed me, they made me less than I was. But you spoke the words, Arafura. You asked if I remembered the Last Rains of Sestramor. And I did, although I did not know that I did. And those words were sufficient to undo the logic blockades put into me.’

I inched back from the torso and head.

‘Were you a soldier?’