Academic Exercises (62 page)

(Here let the record show that the Brother who did my careers interview neglected to mention one of my most significant talents, namely climbing up things in the dark. He can’t be blamed for that, since I’ve tried to keep it quiet, for various reasons. Still.)

So; on a moonless night in my second year, I made the acquaintance of
talis artifex
. Needless to say I’d never heard of it, and the book doesn’t actually tell you what it does and what it’s for; it just sets out the words and tells you what Room you need to be in and what you have to do once the words take effect. I copied it out on a scrap of waste parchment, along with a bunch of other equally illegal Forms from the same source, went back to my cell and tried to figure out what I’d just got hold of.

A problem that inevitably goes with stealing illegal Forms you don’t understand is that there’s nobody you can ask. Presumably somewhere in the Studium there was someone who knew how you made the thing work, and what you had to look out for, and all that; but it goes without saying, I couldn’t expect any help from anyone. All I could do was try it out and see if I could figure it out for myself. Not such a problem for an accomplished adept, but for someone like me, painfully aware of his own shortcomings, it was rather a daunting prospect. Still, with the likelihood of being thrown out of the Studium at any moment hanging over me and the sure and certain knowledge that I’d have a living to make and precious few assets to help me make it, I couldn’t afford to turn my back on anything that might prove useful in my near and unpromising future. If it’s banned, I argued, it must do something, and that something must be pretty big and powerful; in which case, in the right circumstances, it’s got to be worth something to somebody. It’s reasoning like that, of course, which led the Order to prohibit such things in the first place. I only wish they’d made a better job of it.

To perform
talis artifex
, you need to be in the east Room on the fifth floor. Rooms have never been a problem for me. All I have to do is close my eyes and imagine a door in the nearest wall. I open the door, and there’s a staircase. Up the staircase; there’s a first floor landing with four doors at the cardinal points, or I can carry on up to the second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth floors. Actually, I’d never ventured beyond the fifth floor, because in order to survive up there, so our lecturer told us in First year, you need to be at least competent in
mundus vergens
, which I’ve never been able to do. Still, that leaves twenty of the twenty-four Rooms that I can get to and work in, so I’ve never lost much sleep over it.

Fifth east is not one of my favourites. According to the Appendix to the Universal Concordat, it exists in the same elevation of the same plane as Absolute One; which means, in the split second during which you cross the threshold and shut the door carefully behind you, technically speaking you’re dead. Of course you come to life again the moment the door closes, which is nice, but you have to die again when you leave. In practice, you’re dead for such a short fragment of time that your heart doesn’t have a chance to stop beating, and you’re not supposed to be able to notice anything at all. But I always get a sort of choking fit, like I’m suffocating. Purely my imagination, of course, but none the less upsetting for all that. Also, there’s something about the Room itself that always gives me a splitting headache—not while I’m there, not after I leave and come back to the here and now, but forty-eight hours later, infallibly, like clockwork, every time.
Renovare dolorem
won’t shake it, and neither will willow-bark tea. I just have to lie down with the blinds drawn and keep still and quiet until about half an hour after Vespers, by which point it begins to wear off, though it leaves me weak and shaky.
You look like death
, people say to me when they see me like that, and I nod and say,
yes
, and hope they’ll go away.

But fifth east is where you have to go to do
talis artifex
, so I go there. The first time—remember, at this point I had no idea what
talis artifex
does or what was supposed to happen—I walked in and closed the door behind me, and there was this man sitting in a chair looking down at something he was resting on his knee. I couldn’t see his face or what he was up to because he had the light from the window behind him.

“Oh,” he said, looking up, “it’s you.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“About time you showed up,” he said; and that was when I realised what was wrong, or at least very unusual. It made me choose my words carefully.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but do you know me?”

That didn’t deserve a reply, apparently. “It’s all ready for you,” he said, and then I could see what he was doing. He was painting an icon. He gave it a sort of oh-well-could-be-worse sideways glance, then picked it up carefully by the edges and held it out at me. “There you go,” he said. “Careful, the gesso’s still a bit tacky.”

I didn’t take it, naturally. “Excuse me,” I said, “but what’s this for?”

He gave me a bewildered look; then he started to laugh. “Oh for crying out loud,” he said. “You don’t know, do you?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“You don’t know what it’s for.” He gave me an enormous smirky grin and put the icon back on his knee. Suddenly I wanted it more than anything in the whole world. “You don’t
know
,” he taunted me. “You clown.”

“All right.” By then I was too angry to give a damn about anything. “Let me see if I can guess.”

He shook his head. “Not in a million years.”

“
Talis artifex
,” I said (he winced), “meaning ‘such a craftsman’.”

“So what?”

And suddenly I knew. No idea how. Well, in retrospect, I have several viable hypotheses, but now of course it’s far too late. “It’s a Form for creating things,” I said. “Artefacts. Works of art.”

He raised his eyebrows. I could see him quite clearly now. He was an old man, bald, fat, many chins, liver spots on scalp and hands, pale blue eyes. “Not bad,” he said. “Not art, necessarily. Anything you like, so long as it’s made by human hands.”

“But the very best quality.”

“Of course,” he replied gravely. “In all other respects I may be ethically bankrupt, but I give value for money. Ask anybody.” He held the icon out again. “You want it or not?”

I hesitated. “When I get back—”

He frowned at me. “What do you want, a user’s manual? Take it, or go away. Your choice.”

It was a Category 6, outstanding, magnificent; and when I got back, opened my eyes and found myself sitting in the chair I’d been sitting in when I closed my eyes a fraction of a second earlier, there it was, in my hands, the gesso still gleaming slightly on top of the gold leaf. I could distinctly remember having painted it; every step of its creation, the planning, the composition, the charcoal sketches, drawing the outlines, grinding and mixing the colours, the painting, the fixing, applying the gesso, gently pressing down the gold leaf, the final inking in of the names and signature with the pin-feather of a woodcock. Only I hadn’t bought my paints or sold my textbooks yet. I was still a student in good standing at the Studium, and I’d never painted an icon in my life. Didn’t know how to, in fact.

I said it was a Category 6, and it was. I’ve also talked briefly about the creative dynamic between innovation and tradition. My innovation—I distinctly remembered making the decision and executing it—was to paint a small window in the wall of the City gatehouse, just above and to the left of the First Emperor’s head.

I knew exactly what to do. I wrapped an old pillowcase round it, took it to a patch of waste ground I know out back of the Excise warehouse, drenched it in lamp-oil and set light to it. It burned with a green flame, which was weird.

Let me rephrase that slightly. I knew exactly what had to be done. I have this instinct, in fact, for knowing what has to be done—the right thing, the proper course of action, and of course its antithesis, the wrong thing, the very bad thing. Trouble is, I don’t always follow that instinct. Not, I hasten to add, because I’m particularly reckless, feckless, irresponsible or plain stupid. It’s always circumstance, bad luck, unforeseeable supervening factors, someone else’s fault. In this case, it was leaving the Studium with no useful qualifications, no money, nowhere to go. I knew exactly what had to be done and what had to be not-done. No grey areas this time. Perfect noonday clarity. But what can you do?

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Epistemius.

No it isn’t, of course. You couldn’t pronounce my name. Actually, it’s been so long since I was around native no-Vei speakers,
I
couldn’t pronounce my name. But when I joined the Studium, naturally I took a name in religion, like you do. I called myself after a twelfth-century Patriarch of Perimadeia—if you’re trying to figure out who I am, you can look up the list, but it won’t do you much good; there were thirty-six Patriarchs in the course of the twelfth century, and all of them named themselves after Fathers of the Early Temple, so go fish. Then, when I left the Studium and set up as a professional artist, naturally I chose myself a
nom de brosse
, like you do. I chose Epistemius in honour of Epistemius of Tyana, an unjustly neglected Desert school master of the early Mannerist period. Actually, I chose the name because my original idea was to forge Epistemius icons, and the law says that if you sign your actual name to a painting, even if it’s a perfect copy of someone else’s work, that’s not a crime. You see; always anxious to obey the law and do the right thing. Story of my fucking life.

The forgery thing never got off the ground. No need. Thanks to
talis artifex
, my artistic career hit the ground running. The ninth icon I painted sold for a hundred and six angels, an obscene amount of money, more than my poor old father made in a year fair-copying writs and title deeds in a law office. That was just the start. My fifteenth icon was commissioned at one thousand angels. I’ll write that again, so there’s no mistake. One thousand angels. Ridiculous.

At that point, I realised it was time to quit. I was still living in the squalid dump in the Tanneries, with three angels left out of the proceeds of selling the textbooks, plus the eighteen hundred-odd I’d made from my fifteen sales. I hadn’t spent a single trachy on anything except rent, food, paints, very occasionally a bottle of bleach-grade domestic red to help me get over the after-painting horrors I mentioned earlier. Eighteen hundred angels; I could’ve bought a farm, or a ship, or a share in an established business. All my troubles were over, and the mind-crushing dread that had been haunting me ever since I realised I wasn’t going to make the grade at the Studium had at some point evaporated and drifted away, without my even noticing it was gone. Three months of earning my own living, and I didn’t have to any more. Set up for life. Free and clear. Mission accomplished, job done, the rest of the day’s your own. Oh yes.

Time to quit, but I didn’t. Since then I’ve often asked myself why, and the answer’s stupidly simple. People kept asking me to paint icons, and offering me silly amounts of money; and I thought, all right, one more trip, just one more, and that’ll be that. But it was so hard to say no when abbots and viscounts and chairmen of companies came to call on me—
they
came to
me
, up my seven flights of stairs to my desperately-needs-painting doesn’t-quite-close-properly door in the stinking heart of the Tanneries, and they were polite, respectful, anxious, keen, desperate to get the chance to buy a genuine Epistemius, so they wouldn’t be left out. I tried to shoo them away by doubling my price; two thousand angels, or I wouldn’t lay a finger on a brush. They’d look round at the grey patches on the walls and the cobwebs on the ceiling and the blue mould on the wedge of stale cheese on the windowsill, and they’d say, two thousand, no problem, would you like me to write you a draft now? I’m far too weak to resist that kind of bullying. I gave in. I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I always know.