Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  “What? What something?”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself,” he said. “Please bear that in mind. You’re not responsible.”

  The room was getting dark. I looked past him, and saw that the window was closed and shuttered. One of the few things I learned at the Studium was, don’t hang around in dark Rooms.

  “Goodbye,” he called out after me as I opened the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  It was a beautiful icon, though I do say so myself. Into it, someone had poured all the sins and sorrows of the world, above which the Invincible Sun rose in glory, rising from them but completely unsullied and untouched, pure triumphant innocence, His face perfectly serene, the absence of expression that includes all possible expressions, just as rivers drain into the sea. I wish I’d painted that, I said to myself, and I signed it. In passing I noticed that the window in the tower in the background (my own unique touch; my sole contribution to iconography) was closed and shuttered; also, that all the light in the picture was coming from the front.

  I waited, and nothing happened. I waited two days, two weeks, two months, still nothing. Finally I couldn’t bear it any longer, so I went to the Scriveners’ Guildhouse and asked if I could see my icon.

  They were delighted to show it to me. The great hall smelt new; drying plaster, a faint sweet smell of new wood, a hint of mustiness from the priceless antique tapestries on the walls. My icon hung in the nave, where the light of three tall, narrow stained glass windows met. The gold burned on a plain white wall. The colours rose up to meet me. “Far be it from me,” the President whispered to me, “but I really do think it’s the best thing you’ve ever done.”

  I wasn’t looking at the icon. I was examining the interior of the chapel for obvious fire risks, flaws in the masonry, architects’ miscalculations. It all looked safe and solid enough, but you can never be sure, can you?

  Three months, and it was tearing me apart. Nothing. Meanwhile, the Scriveners had been showing off their new treasure to anybody they could catch. Seventeen commissions I was offered; name your own price, money no object. They looked stunned when I refused, and offered me more money, still more money, which I declined with a nauseated look on my face, as though they were offering to pay me in worms and sheeps’ guts. I’m terribly sorry, I told them, but I’ve retired. No, really. The genius has left me, I told them; I was only ever a mere vessel for the clarity of the Invincible Sun, which He saw fit to bestow on me for a short time, and which He had now seen fit to withdraw. Not for me to argue, I told them; blessed be His name. And they looked at me, and thought of a number, and doubled it.

  So I went to the Studium. It was the first time I’d been back. The porter recognised me, hesitated, remembered that I was now respectable and famous, and gave me a polite smile. Delighted to see me, and would I just wait there while he fetched the Dean and Chapter?

  I didn’t want to see the Dean and Chapter. “Father Methodius,” I told him. “If he’s not too busy.”

  It’s the tradition that former students who don’t make the grade as adepts but who then go on to make a fortune in the mundane world express their gratitude to the Studium by way of huge cash endowments. Father Methodius wasn’t too busy. Not at all.

  “I expect you’re glad you followed my advice,” he said. He hadn’t changed at all. He was still round, circle-faced, still the thin white wreath hopelessly besieging the citadel of his tonsure. Was it possible, I wondered, as I sat down in the same chair I’d occupied for my careers interview, that no time at all had passed, and that everything I thought had happened had been an illusion or a dream? Obviously not; Father Methodius was pleased to see me. Therefore something must have happened. “We’ve been following your career with great interest,” he went on. “The foremost man in your field. We’re very proud of you.”

  I can’t read minds (lex mentis, a seventh-year Form, though in theory it’s restricted. Father Methodius was an expert in lex mentis) but I knew precisely what he was thinking. A genuine Epistemius would go very nicely in the Dawn chapel, just to the right of the big silver-gilt lectern. Naturally the Studium could afford to pay, but it hadn’t got to be offensively rich by paying for things it could get for free. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. “The fact is, I have a confession to make.”

  He wasn’t reading my mind. It’s one of those things you just don’t do, except in extreme circumstances. “Really?”

  I nodded. I’d been dreading this moment, but now it had come, I felt curiously joyful. I’ve long suspected that I’ll feel that way when I’m on the point of death, though I’m in no great hurry to prove myself right. “I don’t actually paint icons,” I said. “I make them using an illegal Form.” I waited. He just looked at me. “Talis artifex.”

  He blinked. “Talis what?”

  Now that was one possibility that simply hadn’t occurred to me; that talis artifex was so restricted, so secret, so deadly in its effects and consequences that even a Father and member of Inner Chapter hadn’t heard of it. The thought was terrifying. “I read it in a restricted book,” I told him. “I broke into the library, shortly before I left here. I found it there and I’ve been using it ever since.” I was about to add I’m sorry or something like that, but it would’ve been ridiculous to apologise for a crime of such magnitude. I waited.

  Eventually he frowned. “Talis—”

  “Artifex. It enables you to create objects; works of art, handicrafts, the very best quality. You go to fifth east and tell the man there what you want, and when you get back, there it is, real and material. It’s in the fifth volume of the Appendix to the Universal Concordat.”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids, as if he’d got dust in them. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t remember it, and I’m quite familiar with the Appendix. In fact, the current edition is mostly my work. If there was a such a Form, I’d know about it.”

  “It’s there all right,” I said.

  “It’s impossible.” He was looking straight at me. “The process you describe. It can’t be done. People have tried, over the years, but it’s a direct breach of Anastasius’ fifth law of Matter and Energy. It’s—conjuring,” he said, pulling a slight face. “The sort of thing we like people to think we can do, but of course we can’t. I’m sorry, but—”

  “Take me to the library,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  He took a great deal of convincing, but eventually we went to the library and stood where I’d been before, in the South Hall of the New building. It looked quite different in daylight, of course, with the light pouring in through the great Scylitzes window. Now that did look familiar. It took me a moment to realise why. Someone had copied it to create the triptych effect in the Scriveners’ chapel, where my latest icon was hanging.

  Father Methodius reached up onto a shelf and took down a book. “Here we are,” he said. “Now, you’re not allowed to look at this, so you’ll have to direct me to the place.”

  “Right between ducis meliora and ruat caelum,” I told him. “About a third of the way through, on the right hand side.”

  He gave me a ferocious look; I wasn’t supposed to know about ducis meliora or ruat caelum, both of which are heavy duty military Forms and horribly dangerous. “We’re going to have to do something about security in this building,” he said. “Now then, let me see.”

  He turned a few pages, found the place, looked at me. “Well?” I said.

  “There’s nothing here.” He hesitated, then spread his fingers to obscure the text. “See for yourself.”

  I looked. Under his left thumb I could see a few words of the directions for ducis meliora. Under his right thumb, the opening rubric for ruat caelum. Between them, half an inch of blank pearl-grey vellum.

  He closed the book and put it back. “You’re sure that was the place,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “There’s no such Form,” he said. “As I told you, it’s imp
ossible.”

  “But I can do it. I’ve been doing it for years. I make my living—”

  “We ought to go now,” he said. “We’re not supposed to be here.”

  Halfway down the stairs he stopped dead. “Which Room did you say?” he asked me.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Room you go to, to do this Form of yours. Which one?”

  “Fifth east,” I told him. “You know. It’s the only Room with a window in it.”

  His face was completely blank, just like the Invincible Sun in an icon. “There is no east Room on the fifth floor,” he said.

  Well, how was I to know? I was a piss-poor student. There were thousands of things I didn’t know.

  It took me quite some time to get away, to persuade Father Methodius that I wasn’t interested in coming back as a research fellow (with an honorary Deaconate, a research staff of twelve, an office on the third floor of the North tower). He wanted to tell me about the great discoveries of the past and the bunch of apparent misfits, losers and inadequates who’d made them; Phylax, who’d stumbled on lorica while chasing after the Philosopher’s Stone, or Agrigentarius, who’d spent twenty years jumping off tall buildings in the misguided belief he’d learned how to fly before isolating the root of fors partis. He made it sound like I fitted the mould exactly, and I could see his point. Furthermore, he went on, several of the giants of the past had refused to take any credit for their epoch-making discoveries, claiming that they’d been told of them by teachers who proved never to have existed, or that the Invincible Sun had appeared to them in dreams and dictated the exact words. That, he said, is part of the extraordinary mystery of creativity, as manifested in both art and the Science.

  I have my own views. I know that nine times out of ten, artistic creativity is the result of an alchemical reaction between a certain latent ability and a pressing need for money. Nor was I prepared to believe, even for a fleeting moment, that I was responsible for talis artifex. You’ve got to be a really exceptionally gifted adept to do research and come up with new Forms, and I’m hopeless, I know I am. No; I read it in a book, and that’s all there is to it.

  The Scriveners’ chapel burned down. Apparently some careless idiot of a plasterer left a charcoal brazier burning overnight, to dry out wet plaster; it toppled over and sparks caught in the priceless old tapestries I’d admired so much, and the whole thing went up like a pine-resin torch. The roof-beams burned through, bringing that supremely graceful copper-plated dome crashing down, and the walls crumbled away like cake, and seven men who’d been trying to put the fire out were killed. The only thing that survived—

  Yes. It was a miracle, they said. Everything else either burned or crushed or ruined beyond repair by smoke; but the Epistemius icon survived, completely unharmed. A clerk found it among the ashes. The frame was too hot to touch, but the icon itself was still perfect.

  So I tried an experiment. Using intermediaries sworn to silence, I bought back, for three thousand angels, a Category Four I’d painted for six hundred. I rented a brickmaker’s kiln on the outskirts of the western suburbs, and told the man to stoke it up real good. A burn of best quality bricks takes three days and uses thirteen tons of first quality charcoal. When they raked it out afterwards, there was my icon, as good as new.

  I promise you, I promise myself, if it had worked, I’d have got them back somehow—bought, stolen—and destroyed them, every last one, everything I ever painted and sold. But you can’t fight something like that. I sold the icon again, for four thousand.

  Naturally, I speculate. I have theories.

  Fact; during my career as an iconographer I painted thirty-six icons. With the money I got for my stolen textbooks, I bought forty-five boards. Four I wasted when I was just starting up before I was satisfied with the results. I have five boards left. Also, my stock of paints, paint ingredients, fixatives, gesso and gold leaf is very nearly exhausted. But, apart from the experiment I’ll tell you about in a moment, I’ve never knowingly picked up a paintbrush since I started shaving. I assumed that that was how it worked; that the Form, mystical and utterly transcendental but at the same time despicably cheapskate, required me to provide all the raw materials. Some Forms do actually work like that. Bizarre, I know, but that’s the Science for you.

  Fact; after I failed to burn the icon, I took one of the five remaining boards and the leftover paints and stuff, sat down at my table and tried to paint a Category Three, myself, unaided. Actually, the result wasn’t so bad. Proportions, light and shade, use of colour, composition, all perfectly acceptable; looking at it, you’d say it was the work of a technically accomplished amateur. But lifeless, devoid of power and passion, meaningless, dead. I washed the paint off with spirits of salt and scraped the board back to bare wood with a pad of sharkskin.

  Fact; of the thirty-six Epistemius icons in existence, twenty-five have been owned by people or institutions that have come to harm in some way. The count so far stands at eighty-nine killed, sixty-seven injured. Of the other eleven, eight are in monasteries. One was stolen, and its whereabouts are unknown. Three of my icons have been involved in a series of misfortunes; in each case, after the death of the original owner, the icon was inherited by an heir who also came to grief. I haven’t included the death toll from the Antecyran plague, the Boc Bohec earthquake, the tidal wave, the Sembrai floods or the Vesani war, because the link is rather tenuous; in each case, my icon was displayed in a public building at the epicentre of the disaster, but I would like to point out that there have been any number of plagues, earthquakes, floods and wars in places where there isn’t a genuine Epistemius. Not everything is my fault.

  I no longer paint, or practise the Science in any shape or form. Father Methodius died about eighteen months ago, killed by a collapsing floor in the West Gallery of the Studium. An unconfirmed report contended that he’d been using a room off the main Gallery as a studio for painting icons, though so far no examples of his work have come to light anywhere. I invested my money in a farm, a ropewalk, a copper mine, a coaching inn on the main East road, and two ships, one of which was lost with all hands off the Auxentine coast two months ago. But it was properly insured, and my other investments are doing very nicely.

  I don’t blame myself. After all, a distinguished Father of the Studium certified that there’s no such Form as talis artifex, and that the effect I mistakenly attributed to it is impossible to achieve. Nothing can be proved or established. I’m in the clear, and all my troubles are over.

  Blue and Gold

  Well, let me see,” I said, as the innkeeper poured me a beer. “In the morning I discovered the secret of changing base metal into gold. In the afternoon, I murdered my wife.”

  The innkeeper looked at me. “That’ll be two bits,” he said.

  I dug in my sleeve for the coins. “You don’t believe me,” he said.

  “I believe everybody,” the innkeeper replied. “It’s my job. Will you be wanting dinner, or just the room?”

  Two bits from seven leaves five. “Just the room.”

  “Ah.” The barman nodded and turned away. Alchemists, murderers and other cheapskates, the back of his neck seemed to be saying. I picked up my beer and looked at it. Worse things had happened, but not for a very long time. I drank it anyway. I was thirsty.

  Saloninus the philosopher was born in Elpis towards the end of the reign of Philopoemen VI (the exact date is not recorded). He showed early promise during his time at the university, but was prevented from completing his studies by the death of his uncle, on whom he was financially dependent. The university authorities found him a job as a junior porter, and he was allowed to sit in on lectures when his duties allowed. After two years, however, he left Elpis under a cloud, and nothing is known about him until 2763 AUC, when he was arrested in Paraprosdocia on charges of highway robbery and violent assault. Condemned to the gallows, he was reprieved through the intercession of the Prince Regent, Phocas, a former classmate of his at Elpis, who employed
him (much to the consternation of the court) as a scientific adviser. It was around this time that Saloninus began the alchemical experiments that were to culminate in his greatest achievement.

  I’m Saloninus, by the way. And I tell lies, from time to time. Which goes to prove the old rule; never entirely trust a man who talks about himself in the third person.

  It’s true, by the way, about me murdering my wife. At least, I count it as murder. Drink this, I said, it’s the elixir of eternal youth. She gave me that look, but she always—well, her opinion of me as a human being was always pretty low, and justifiably so. Saloninus is not a nice man, and that’s Saloninus talking. But she never for one moment doubted that I was—am—the finest alchemist the world has ever known. Also true. But even the best of the best makes mistakes from time to time. My mistake, I have since come to appreciate, was adding a quarter drachm of sal draconis. Her second worst mistake was drinking it.

  I went up to the room. It was a room. There were four walls, a more or less level floor, and a forty-five-degree ceiling, which is what you get for sleeping right under the eaves. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t sleep alone (and, compared with some of the characters I’ve shared a bed with, the fleas were no bother. At least they didn’t keep pulling all the bedclothes off me).

  But I slept, which surprised me. I think the six scruples of vis somnis I mixed in with the dregs of my beer helped a bit; but a man who’s just watched his wife die in convulsions on the floor has no right to sleep, no matter what. Nor did I have nightmares. If you must know, I dreamt about the sea (which definitely means something, but I’ve never quite managed to figure out what).