"I wasn’t treated badly. My mother was respected, and I was a good boy. We were treated with nothing more overtly unpleasant than a kind of sympathetic sneer. I became involved with cults and criminals and heresies. But not deep, and not for long. There are two things that the quick are more adept at than the thanati. One is noise. The other is speed. I turned my back on the first, but not the second."

After it became clear that his pause had become a silence, I spoke.

"Where did you learn to fight?" I said.

"I was a child when I left High Cromlech," he said. "I didn’t think so at the time, but I was. Slipping onto the funicular railway-out, away."

He would not tell me anything more than that. Between that time and his arrival at Armada there must have been more than a decade. He would not tell me what happened then. But that, it is obvious, is when he learnt his unfathomable skills.

Doul was quieting, and I felt his willingness to talk ebb away. I did not want that. After weeks of isolation, I wanted to keep him talking. I made a clumsy attempt, something like a witticism. I must have sounded arch and flippant.

"And when you left, you fought the Ghosthead Empire and won-what do they call it?-the Mighty Blade?" I indicated his plain ceramic sword.

His face was quite impassive for a moment, and then a sudden beautiful smile illuminated him for a second. He looks like a boy when he smiles.

"That’s another chain of meaning," he said, "half of which has been lost. The Ghosthead are long gone, but there are remnants of the Empire all over Bas-Lag. And it is true that my sword is a Ghosthead artifact."

I struggled through the meanings that he might be implying. My sword is an application of Ghosthead techniques, I thought, and then, My sword is based on Ghosthead designs, but I realized to look at him that he meant exactly what he said.

I must have looked shocked. He nodded briskly.

"My sword is over three thousand years old," he said.

It is impossible. I have seen it. It is a plain, slightly weathered, and age-stained piece of clayware. If it is fifty years old I would be astonished.

"And the name…" He gave me another of those smiles. "Another misunderstanding. I found this sword after a very long search, after mastering a dead science. The men call it Might blade. Not mighty." He spoke slowly. "It might; it might not. Might not meaning potency, but potentiality. It is a bastardization of its true name. There was a time there were many weapons like this," he said. "Now, it is, I think, the only one left.

"It is a Possible Sword."