IT WAS BUT A MONTH LATER THAT EDGAR WAS SITTING WHERE HE always was, pumping at the bellows, but it was as if his dissatisfaction was pouring itself into the fire. The flame would not take; instead the coals gave out great rolls of smoke, enveloping Jacob and sending him into fits of coughing.

“More care, boy!” barked Jacob. Edgar just grinned and pushed harder.

Then there was a rap upon the door, forceful, insistent, making the walls of the forge ring. Jacob hauled it open, there was a gust of wind, and standing upon the threshold was a man: a tall, lean man, with a black cape drawn around his shoulders; he was hook nosed and his head was fringed with a crest of gray hair. The smoke feathered the edges of his gown, giving the impression of sprouting wings. He had a bunch of papers anchored under one arm. In his hand he held a cane, which he used to cut a path through the billowing clouds.

Edgar shrunk away from the bellows and crept toward the wall. He had seen such a man before, he was certain of it. His skin shivered with the memory of a hand clamped upon his skull. He burrowed into a tangle of fence posts and sat listening.

“So this is what it is,” said the man, “to be next to the heartbeat of industry.”

Jacob grunted and tipped back his mask. “Only a man who has never worked with metal would be so poetical about it.”

“Quite so, quite so.” The man smiled. “I have been discovered. I am a mere Professor of anatomy. Nothing more.”

“It is not usual for the forge to deal so directly with the men of the University.”

“Well, we live in unusual times, Master Salt. I have come to you with a riddle of creation. I do believe that you are the only man to solve it.”

The Professor unfurled his paper. It stretched the span of his arms, a white sail set across the sea of smoke.

Edgar watched as his master scanned the page.

“It is an impossible task.”

“I agree, it is quite a conundrum,” said the Professor. “But riddles are there to challenge our craft.”

“You come for the advice of a blacksmith, and I say again, sir, my advice is that what you have set upon the page is impossible.”

Edgar’s curiosity overcame his caution. He pushed out of his hiding place, and the fence posts clattered to the floor. The Professor started at the sound and peered down at him through the smoke.

“Aha!” he cried. “We are not alone.”

“This is Edgar Jones, my apprentice,” said Jacob gruffly.

“An apprentice indeed.” The Professor crouched upon his haunches, held his hand out to Edgar. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Edgar Jones, and I would be most grateful if you could cast your eye over my plans.”

“He is but three years in the craft!” snapped Jacob.

But the Professor was already spreading his paper out across the floor, weighting down the corners with lumps of rubble. “Forgive me if I seem presumptuous,” he said, “but it is my experience at the University that the untrained minds are often more agile than those who have spent their lives at study.”

Jacob shrugged. “That may be so at the University, sir, but I think you will find it goes very differently in the forge.”

Edgar looked at the paper laid out before him. There was a great globe of a pot, set upon a scaffold of wood, tied with ropes. The scale of it dwarfed the forge’s cauldron: a pebble set beside a sun. A man stood by it, no taller than the stack of firewood under the pot. Edgar looked from the man on the page to the man standing over him. Each wore the long black gown of the University. This was a man from his father’s world, come to ask him for help. He wished it were his father, not his master, who was standing beside him.

“Do you understand the challenge, child?”

Edgar thought of how the pieces of fencework were poured out spur by spur and bracketed together. He thought of how, if all that iron was rolled up into a ball, the pot in the forge would not hold it.

“It might be done in pieces,” he said.

“‘In pieces’?” echoed the Professor. “Explain.”

“Like the making of the fences, it could be done in pieces and fitted together in the courtyard.”

“Indeed?”

“The pot of the forge was made like this.” Edgar pointed to the thick lines running down the side of the cauldron, cutting it into quarters, and the rivets joining them. His measuring stick.

“Is this true, Master Salt? Is such large piecework possible?”

“It might be so,” replied Jacob tersely, “but it would be an expensive and uncertain process.”

“But what is life without uncertainty? A dull road to travel, I war-rant you. And as to the expense, the University will provide.”

Jacob scowled down the smoke at Edgar but the Professor smiled.

“Good work, Edgar Jones! You continue paying such keen attention to the world and you will be destined for great things.”

The Professor took Edgar’s soot-soiled hand in his and shook it. Then he stretched himself back up to his full height and all the conversation above Edgar’s head was about weights and measures and ratios and payments and designs. Finally there was the sway of the forge door, a clang of the metal bolt, and the Professor was gone. Down in the ashes, Edgar grinned. He had solved the Professor’s riddle! He was a better blacksmith than his master! Then he was nearly pitched into the railings with the force of the blow around his head.

“What is the second law of the forge?” barked Jacob.

“Never turn your hand to a task not permitted by your master.”

“That includes talk, boy!”

“But we have the work.”

Jacob cuffed him again. “And the third law?”

“Never question the ruling of your master.”

“Do I have to beat the words into you to make them stick?”

“No, sir. But we have the work—”

Jacob hit out again. Edgar dodged his fist and he swiped only smoke. “And what makes you think the work is welcome? It is easier with these university men to tell them that a thing is impossible than it is unwanted. Now we will have this Professor poking about our business as if he was the master of the forge.”

His ear smarted with the blow, but Edgar smiled still. He was set to have a new master, and he was destined for great things.

When Edgar returned to the cottage that evening everything was just the same as it always was: his mother laying out the supper things for herself and Edgar, his father sitting by the fire, polishing his boots, all his books stacked up behind him. Edgar stared at the lettering slithering across the spines. “Pa,” he said, “what does it mean to study anatomy?”

William looked up, his cloth suspended in the air. “Anatomy? It involves the slicing up of dead creatures and examining how they were put together.”

“What kinds of creatures?”

“Anything that these so-called men of science can gain possession of.”

“Why, Pa?”

“It is entirely beyond me. If God had meant us to see our inner mechanisms, then why would He have clad our bodies in flesh?” Eleanor did not cease from setting the places for supper. The knives and forks knocked upon the wood. “Anatomy!” huffed William. “Is this what you will set your mind upon now, Edgar? Not content with a life in the furnace you must turn your hand to butchering?” He thrust his hat down upon his head, kissed his wife, and strode out of the door.

Anatomy. Edgar turned the word over in his mind. He thought of the pot stretched across the page and the tiny man set beside it. He thought of how the pots in the scullery bubbled with his mother’s soups of boiled-away meat, and the bones that rattled against the sides of them.

Eleanor pulled Edgar to her and ruffled his hair. “Oh, Edgar,” she said. “You and your father are too alike. Why can’t you just let the world be as it is and be done with it?”

Edgar frowned and said nothing. Eleanor looked over his shoulder at the map of the Empire, studded with rusting pins. Men and boys: cutting up creatures, cutting up the very world itself and for what? All for the sake of some kind of ownership. She looked at the smiling clock face and thought of the imminent arrival of Mrs. Simm.

THANKS TO THE demands of anatomy, Edgar’s life in the forge changed within a week. His work became large and magnificent. Molds were cut, huge curved molds that took the length of the workspace. When the brass was poured into them, the whole room was aflame. All the other contraptions of iron flared out of the shadows. Bridles shone bright from the rafters, pokers, pots, posts, shovels, and irons were all turned burning gold as if all that had ever been made was taken back to its liquid origins. Splints were set up in the courtyard and, one by one, the pieces of the pot were slipped into the frame. Jacob soldered the joints and Edgar fastened the rivets from tip to toe. The weeks were charted in the completing of the circle. And then it was done. The pot stood the height of a man and a half, and the width of two horses. All that was left was the polishing.

Hessian bags were brought out, weighty things, the length of Edgar’s arm, with grit and sand stuffed inside them. Edgar ran around and around the cauldron, until the courtyard spun and the golden pot was like the sun at the center of his father’s orrery, drawing all things into its orbit. The walls of the courtyard circled, the stones slipped around in elliptical circles. But Edgar was not done yet. He tied grit-bags to his back, anchored a rope, hauled his way up to the lip of the cauldron, and launched himself over the edge.

He flew down the sides, riding the wave of the belly of the brass, and came to rest laughing at the bottom. He spun inside the cauldron until all was shining. He lay on his back and stretched out his limbs. He did not touch the sides. His body lengthened and ran up the polished curves. He was the pot and the pot was him, and in the pot he had the stature of a man, multiplied. And then the pot began to sing, a long drawn-out low note, which echoed all around.

“Ho, ho, and what have we here?”

The Professor grinned down at him, tapping the side with his cane.

Then Jacob was there, scowling over the lip. “Get out of there, Edgar. The Professor’s pot is not a plaything.”

“In truth, Master Salt,” said the Professor, “it is.”

Edgar scrabbled up the sides but his feet could not find a grip. Jacob laughed as he fell on his back, on his arse, and went sliding back into the heart of it. “Looks like you will be taking Edgar along with you in your great pot, Professor!”

“I am sure I could make use of such a quick lad as Edgar. However, it would be a great disservice to the forge.”

The Professor leant over the side and held out his cane. Edgar saw that the top of it was set into the shape of a silver fist. Edgar grabbed it; the Professor gripped Edgar’s wrist and pulled him out. Back on land, Edgar braced his back against the pot and stared up at the Professor.

“Sir, what is it for?”

“You made the thing, young master. What do you suppose its purpose might be?”

Edgar thought of how the brass had cradled him.

“I think it must be a boiling pot.”

“Quite so.”

“And my pa tells me that anatomy is the study of bones, so I think you must be boiling up a monster.”

The Professor laughed. “Not a monster as such, child. But if you come to my college this Sunday, all shall be revealed.”

The Professor swept through the dust of the courtyard with the tip of his cane, drawing in the dirt the line of Cornmarket with the forge marked upon it; he sketched out the crossroads at the top and the road that sloped down from it.

“Give me your hand, my boy,” he said.

Edgar did. The Professor grabbed it—that strong grip again— pulled at Edgar’s thumb, and pressed it down into the dirt, marking the map.

“There!” he said. “My college has a tower at the entrance of exactly that dimension. My rooms face the meadows. You must go to the back gate and ask for me by name.”

“You should not favor Edgar so,” grunted Jacob. “He has enough ideas above his station as it is.”

“It is my belief that a curious mind should be encouraged, Master Salt, especially in a child.”

Edgar watched as men came and hauled the cauldron onto the back of a cart. The brass sang as it hit cobbles and wood, and each strike of the metal rang out with promise: Sun-day. Sun-day. Sun-day …