“Some of the seconds are asking if you’re trying to make third before summer and master in a year.” He laughed, but the sound was hard. “You don’t spend much time with the others, except at meals.”
What he was saying was a warning . . . of some sort. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be standoffish.” I gestured toward a bench some five yards away. “Do you have a moment?”
“More than that. I didn’t even get to see Master Ghaend this morning. They’re all upset about something.” He tilted his head, looking at me speculatively. “Master Dichartyn is the only other Maitre D’Esprit besides Master Poincaryt. Did he say anything to you . . . anything at all?”
“He never does,” I answered as we walked slowly toward the gray granite bench. “He just asks question after question. This morning, he stopped in the middle of a question and said he had a meeting with the other masters, then told me my assignment and just about threw me out.” That wasn’t quite true, but I doubted anyone could have mistaken his abruptness.
“So he was worried?”
“I think so. He’s never been quite that abrupt before.” I stopped by the bench, gesturing. “We might as well sit down.”
“Might as well. You were saying . . .?”
“I don’t talk about it much, but I was a journeyman portraiturist. I was even getting my own commissions, and I was thinking it wouldn’t be too long before I could become a master, a junior master, and open my own studio. Then I imaged a little part of a portrait, just a little part, except it was green, and one thing led to another . . . and the girl I was interested in married my brother, and, all of a sudden, I can’t be anything but an imager.”
“Green? Why green?”
“Green pigment, true green, is almost as expensive as liquid silver. They don’t let journeymen use it often, and only when a master is watching, and I wasn’t a master yet.”
“You were close to being a master portraiturist?” Johanyr’s face softened slightly, but still bore a trace of incredulity.
“Several masters said I was good enough. I’d spent five years as an apprentice, and three as a journeyman.” I shrugged. “I don’t mean to be standoffish, but the change has taken some getting used to. When I started as a prime, I was five or six years older than most of the others. We didn’t talk about the same things.”
“I can see that.” He nodded.
“I’m just trying as hard as I can just to catch up. There’s so much I still don’t know.”
“Sarcovyt says that you’re good at imaging things.”
I managed a laugh. “How would I know? I know I’m good enough to be a second, but since I made second, I’ve never seen anyone else image anything. Before that, I never saw anyone but a prime even try. Master Dichartyn says that’s for my own protection.”
“It sounds like he’s trying to get you caught up with where the rest of us are.”
What Johanyr said made sense. “That’s what I’m guessing. I really don’t mean to be unfriendly . . . it’s just been hard.” That much was certainly true.
“None of us knew,” he pointed out.
I tried to look embarrassed. “It’s not something . . .” I shrugged. “It’s my fault, but . . .”
That got a sympathetic nod . . . of sorts. “We usually get together for a while in the evening, a half glass before the eighth glass, down in the common room. You might try it.”
“I didn’t even know . . . I mean, I’ve seen the common room, but only in the day . . .”
His laugh at my confusion was genuine, and when we parted, I felt that I’d managed to avoid, for the moment, another pitfall. But I was going to have to be very careful until I could figure out how to develop protections of the sort that Master Dichartyn had mentioned.
I still also had to figure out and then write up the proof for Master Dichartyn.
When I got back to my room, it took me more than a glass, and several drafts to write what I did. At lunch I made a point of sitting across from Johanyr and Diazt and making a special effort to be friendly. I felt that they were warmer, but I didn’t know, not for certain.
After I left the table, Master Dichartyn was already in the hallway outside the dining hall.
“We’re headed to the materials section of the workshops. You’ve already figured out some aspects of substitution. Now you’ll get a chance to learn another and put it to work.” He turned and strode quickly down the corridor and out through the doors, moving as quickly as I’d ever seen him.
As we walked, he said, “The materials for the workshops come over the Bridge of Stones. That’s where the name comes from. All the workshops have outside and inside entrances, and each workroom is lead-lined. That is so that no imager can affect the work of another. That is particularly important for some . . . efforts.”
I was beginning to sweat by the time we reached the large gray structure a hundred yards north of the quadrangle. The building held the various workshops, not that I’d been in more than a handful of them. The door where we entered was on the main level on the west side of the building, beside a raised loading dock, behind which was a set of sliding warehouse doors. They were closed.
As we stepped into the workshop, a space not much larger than ten yards by fifteen, I could see that the length of the room was filled with barrels, four lines of them, stacked on top of each other three deep. Four small topless wooden crates were set on a workbench a yard or so from the nearest line of barrels. That was it-except for the older imager in somewhat dingy gray who hurried through the door at the other side of the workshop.
“Grandisyn, this is Rhennthyl. He’s the new imager second I told you about.” Master Dichartyn turned to me. “This is Grandisyn. He’s a senior imager tertius. He knows more about imaging materials than most masters. I will leave you in his hands.” With that, he hurried away.
“You’re fortunate to have him as a preceptor,” Grandisyn said. “Fortunate, but he’ll make you work and think and then some.”
“I have noticed that, sir.”
“Just Grandisyn, Rhennthyl.”
“Rhenn, please. When people use my full name, I always wonder just what I did wrong.”
He laughed. “I can see that. My papa did the same.” After a moment, he began to explain. “Your task will not be easy at first, but it is simple. All you have to do is image some of these aluminum bars.” Grandisyn lifted a bar of a silvery metal out of the wooden crate on the right end, which had three of the small ingots in it, the only crate that did, then pointed to the barrels lined up along the wall. “It should be easier if you concentrate on imaging from the barrels. They’re filled with high-grade bauxite. Master Dichartyn said you might have to work at figuring it out, but that you could do it. Take your time.” He gave me a smile, then hastened off.
I was still holding the small aluminum bar, possibly worth several hundred gold crowns, and I was supposed to image more of them? In a way, from what I’d read, it made sense. Refining it was costly, and that made it very valuable, but why weren’t we refining gold? Or platinum?
I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but I concentrated on the image of the bar, the shining light metal, right on the workbench, and tried to visualize a vague link between the barrels and the bar I was attempting to image into existence.
A series of dull clanks followed.
Not only did I have a bar, somewhat larger than the one I’d been shown, but there was a line of aluminum fragments on the stone floor running spiderweb-fashion toward the barrels.
Obviously, my vague link needed to be far less direct.
I kept trying, and by the end of the fourth glass, I was exhausted, and my head was pounding. But there was a wooden box filled with the metal ingots, some of which had been refashioned from all the loose fragments I’d created before I’d figured out how to image without creating patterns of aluminum running from the barrels. Yet, in the end, refashioning from the fragments had been far easier.
I finally just sat down on the stool that had been tucked away under the bench. I was just too tired to do more. When I’d first imaged that small part of the Factorius Masgayl’s portrait, I had had no idea how exhausting imaging would turn out to be.
Before long, Grandisyn walked in and crossed the floor to the wooden crate. He looked at the crate, and then at me. “Hmmmm. We may have to find other things for you. I’ll be talking to Master Dichartyn. You look done in. Go get some rest.”
