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The past, then? Surely there we can find certainty,

because once something has happened it cannot unhappen, it cannot be said to change. There may be further discoveries which throw a new light on what has happened, but the thing itself cannot alter. It must stay fixed and sure and definite and therefore introduce some certainty into our lives.

And yet how little historians agree. Read the account of a war from one side and then from the other. Read the biography of a great man written by one who has come to despise him, then read his own account. Providence, talk to two servants about the same event that same morning in the kitchen and you may well be told two quite different tales, in which the wronged becomes the wrong-doer and what seemed obvious from one telling seems suddenly quite impossible given the other.

A friend will tell a story which involves the two of you in such a way that you know it did not happen so at all, but the way he tells it is more amusing than the reality, or reflects better on the two of you, and so you say nothing, and soon others will tell the story, altered again, and before long you may find yourself telling- it the way you know for a certainty it simply did not happen.

Those of us who keep journals occasionally find we have, with no malice or thought of tale or reputation enhancement whatsoever, remembered something quite erroneously. We may for a goodly part of our lives have been giving a perfectly plain account of some past occurrence, one that we are quite sure of and seem to remember very well indeed, only to come across our own written account of it, recorded at the time, and find that it did not happen the way we remembered it at all!

So we can never be sure of anything, perhaps.

And yet we must live. We must apply ourselves to the world. To do so we have to recall the past, attempt to foresee the future and cope with the demands of the present. And we struggle through, somehow, even if in the process — perhaps just to retain what we can of our sanity — we convince ourselves that the past, present and future are much more knowable than they really are or can ever be.

So, what happened?

I have spent the rest of a long life returning to the same few instants, without reward.

I think there is not a day when I do not think back to those few moments in the torture chamber of the palace of Efernze in the city of Haspide.

I was not unconscious, I am sure of that. The Doctor only convinced me that I was for a short while. Once she had gone, and I had recovered from my grief, I became more and more certain that precisely the amount of time which I thought had passed then, had passed. Ralinge was on the iron bed, poised to take her. His assistants were a few steps away, I cannot recall exactly where. I closed my eyes to spare myself the awful moment, and then the air filled with strange noises. A few moments — just a handful of heartbeats at the most, on that I would stake my life — and there they all were, the three of them, violently dead, and the Doctor already released from her bonds.

How? What could possibly move with such speed to do such things? Or, what trick of will or mind could be employed to make them do such things to themselves? And how was she able to appear so serene in the moments immediately thereafter? The more I think back to that interlude between the deaths of the torturers and the arrival of the guards, when we sat side by side in the small barred cell, the more sure I become that she somehow knew that we would be saved, that the King would suddenly find himself at death's door and she would be summoned to save him. But how could she have been so calmly certain?

Perhaps Adlain was right, and there was sorcery at work. Perhaps the Doctor had an invisible bodyguard who could leave egg-sized bumps on the heads of knaves and slip unnoticed behind us into the dungeon to butcher the butchers and release the Doctor from her manacles. It almost seems like the only rational answer, yet it is the most fanciful of all.

Or perhaps I did sleep, swoon, or become unconscious or whatever you like to call it. Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.

What more is there to tell? Let me see.

Duke Ulresile died, in hiding, in Brotechen province, a few months after the Doctor left us. It was a simple cut from a broken plate, they say, which led to blood poisoning. Duke Quettil died soon afterwards, too, from a wasting disease which affected all the extremities and turned them necrotic. Doctor Skelim was unable to do anything.

I became a doctor.

King Quience ruled another forty years, in exceptionally good health until the very end.

He left only daughters, so now we have a queen. I find this less troubling than I would have thought.

Lately they have taken to calling the Queen's late father Quience the Good, or sometimes Quience the Great. I dare say one or other will have been settled on by the time anybody comes to read this.

I was his personal physician for the last fifteen years, and the Doctor's training and my own discoveries made me, by all accounts, the best in the land. Perhaps, indeed, one of the best in the world, for when, partly due to the ambassadorship of gaan Kuduhn, more frequent and reliable links with the archipelagic republic of Drezen were established, we discovered that while our antipodean cousins rivalled and indeed even exceeded us in many ways, they were not quite so advanced in medicine, or indeed anything else, as the Doctor had implied.

Gaan Kuduhn came to live amongst us and became something of a father to me. Later he became a good friend and spent a decade as ambassador to Haspidus. A generous, resourceful and determined man, he confessed to me once that there was only one thing he had ever set his wits to that he had failed to accomplish, and that was trying to track down the Doctor, or indeed hunt down exactly where she had come from.

We could not ask her, for she disappeared.

One night in the sea of Osk, the Plough of the Seas was running before the wind past a line of small, uninhabited islands, bound for Cuskery. Then the glowing green apparition that mariners call chain-fire began to play about the rigging of the ship. All were at first amazed, but then they became in fear of their lives, for not only was the chainfire brighter and more intense than anything the sailors could recall seeing in the past, but the wind increased suddenly and threatened to tear the sails, bring down the masts or even turn the great galleon over entirely.

The chain-fire disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, and the wind fell back to the strong and steady force it had been before. By and by, all but those on watch returned to their cabins. One of the other passengers remarked they had not been able to wake the Doctor to come to see the display in the first place, though nobody thought much of this — the Doctor had been invited to dine with the vessel's captain that evening, but had sent a note declining the invitation, citing an indisposition due to special circumstances.

By the next morning it was realised she was gone. Her door was locked from the inside and had to be forced. The scuttles were screwed open for ventilation, but were too small for her to have squeezed through. Apparently all her belongings, or at any rate the great majority of them, were still there in the cabin. They were packed up and were supposed to be sent on to Drezen, but unsurprisingly they disappeared during the passage.

Gaan Kuduhn, hearing all this, like I, nearly a year later, became fixed upon letting her family know what had happened to her and what good she had done in Haspidus, but for all his enquiries on the island of Napthilia and in the city of Pressel, including some which he made himself on a visit there, and despite the numerous occasions when he seemed on the very brink of discovering her nearest ones, he was always frustrated, and never did find anybody who had actually met or known the woman we knew as Doctor Vosill. Still, I think that was one of the few things that irked him on his death bed, and there was, in balance, an extraordinarily influential and productive life to look back on.

The old Guard Commander Adlain suffered badly towards the end of his allotment of seasons. I think what consumed him was something like the growing disease that had taken the slaver Tunch, all those years earlier.