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flatly dismissive. “As you just put it: run along. That will be best,whatever it does to your vanity. I am not as patient as I might once have been.”
    “Oh, really? Not like when you sculpted her?” Ned asked.
    “What?” cried Kate again.
    In that same instant there came an explosion of colour in Ned’s mind and then of movement, above and to their right: a swift, coiled blur hurtling down. The man on the roof somersaulted off the slanting tiles to land in the garden in front of them. His face was vivid with rage, bone white. He looked exactly like the sculpted head underground, Ned thought.
    “How did you know that?” the man snarled. “What did he tell you ?”
    He was of middling height, as Ned had guessed. He wasn’t as old as the bald head might suggest; could even be called handsome, but was too lean, as if he’d been stretched, pulled, and the lack of hair accentuated that, along with the hard cheekbones and the slash of his mouth. His grey-blue eyes were also hard. The long fingers, Ned saw, were flexing, as if they wanted to grab someone by the throat. Someone. Ned knew who that would be.
    But really, really oddly, he wasn’t afraid now.
    Less than an hour ago he’d walked into an empty church to kill some time with his music, bored and edgy, and frightened beyond any fully acknowledged thought for his mother. Only that last was still true. An hour ago the world had been a different place.
    “Tell me? No one told me anything!” he said. “Idon’t know how I know these things. I asked you that, remember? You just said I’m not the first.”
    “Ned,” said Kate. Her voice creaked like it needed oiling. “This sculpture was made eight hundred years ago.”
    “I know,” he said.
    The man in front of them said, “A little more than that.”
    They saw him close his eyes then open them, staring coldly at Ned. The leather jacket was slate grey, his shirt underneath was black. “You have surprised me again. It doesn’t often happen.”
    “I believe that,” Ned said.
    “This is still not for you. You have no idea of what . . . you have no role . I made a mistake, back there. If you won’t go, I will have to leave you. There is too much anger in me. I do not feel very responsible.”
    Ned knew about that kind of anger, a little. “You will not let us . . . do anything?”
    A movement of the wide mouth. “The offer is generous, but if you knew even a little you would realize how meaningless it is.” He turned away, a dark-clad figure, slender, unsettlingly graceful.
    “Last question?” Ned lifted a hand, stupidly—as if he were in class.
    The figure stopped but didn’t turn back to them. He was as they’d first seen him, from behind, but lit by the April sun in a garden.
    “Why now?” Ned asked. “Why here?”
    They could hear the traffic from outside again. Aix was a busy, modern city, and they were right in the middle of it.
    The man was silent for what seemed a long time. Ned had a sense that he was actually near to answering, but then he shook his head. He walked across the middle of the cloister and stepped between two columns and over the low barrier back to the walkway by the door that led out to the street and world.
    “Wait!”
    It was Kate this time.
    The man paused again, his back still to them. It was the girl’s voice, it seemed to Ned. He wouldn’t have stopped a second time for Ned, that was the feeling he had.
    “Do you have a name?” Kate called, something wistful in her tone.
    He did turn, after all, at that.
    He looked at Kate across the bright space between. He was too far away for them to make out his expression.
    “Not yet,” he said.
    Then he turned again and went out, opening the heavy door and closing it behind him.
    They stood where they were, looking briefly at each other, in that enclosed space separated, in so many ways, from the world.
    Ned, in the grip of emotions he didn’t even come close to understanding, walked a few steps. He felt as if he