The Master of Heathcrest Hall (10 page)

They had soon reached the office of the broadsheet, and there they met with one of the editors, whom Perren had sold impressions to in the past, and handed over the plate and the smeared print. The man discarded the print without looking at it, then took up a magnifying glass and used it to pore over the engraving plate. All the while, Eldyn had hardly been able to draw a breath.

At last the editor set down the magnifying glass. Without speaking a word, he opened a box, took out some coins, and counted three gold regals into Eldyn’s hand. Eldyn had stared at them in wonder. Just as he stared now at the image on the front page of the broadsheet. He had known the detail would be better when printed on a real printing press by men who knew their craft. But even though he had created the impression, he had had no true idea how it would really look, or how closely it would match the scene he had envisioned in his head.

As it turned out, it was nearly perfect. The spires of Assembly rose up sharply against the clouded sky. Members of the Hall of Magnates and the Hall of Citizens rushed down the steps, their robes rendered so clearly the garments almost seemed to flutter. To the right, a line of grim-faced soldiers leveled their bayonets against a throng of people who shouted and shook their fists at the men who were departing Assembly. Everything Eldyn had pictured in his mind as he held the engraving plate in Perren’s room above the Theater of Mirrors was there—the ribbing on the red plume that rose from a soldier’s helmet, and the chunk of bread one woman gripped in her hand, as if she did not know whether to eat it or throw it.

If that was all the scene was, it would have been dramatic enough, he supposed, and might still have warranted publication. Yet for all its vividness, the altercation before the steps of Assembly was the background of the image. Large in the foreground was the thing that had caught Eldyn’s eye as he walked down Marble Street that day, and which had made him want to try making an impression.

It was a dove, its eyes shut in death, lying atop the low wall that bordered the foot of the steps.

Eldyn’s eyes moved to the headline above the impression. I
S
A
LTANIA
A
LREADY AT
W
AR
? it read in large type. It was a provocative statement, no doubt formulated to sell copies of the broadsheet. And it didn’t exactly capture what Eldyn had been thinking when he envisioned the scene. The point wasn’t that people were fighting with one another. Rather, it was the notion that something beautiful had perished in plain view when no one was paying attention.

Yet despite the choice of headline, Eldyn could not really be displeased by the quality of the printing—or the jingle of the extra coins in his pocket—for it was the culmination of several months of work.

It had all begun one night when he and the other players from the theater had gone to the Red Jester following a performance. This was a very familiar (if not very reputable) tavern just off Durrow Street. As he walked from the bar with a pot of punch for him and his companions, Eldyn had passed by a bespectacled young man who sat alone at a table, looking at a picture printed on the front page of a broadsheet. It was a particularly good impression—one that depicted a riot before a candlemaker’s shop that had taken place the day before.

Eldyn had paused and leaned over to make a remark about the high quality of the impression. To his surprise the young man thanked him for this praise. A bit of polite inquiry ensued, and though the object of these questions was clearly bashful, Eldyn did not let up. Thus it was soon revealed that the other young man was in fact the originator of the impression; he had made it himself and sold the plate to the broadsheet.

Fascinated, Eldyn began to ask the other illusionist how impressions were fashioned, as he had always wondered. Only by then his companions were baying for their punch. Riethe had even conjured a dog’s nose and floppy ears for himself as he howled. Eldyn knew he could not linger.

Unexpectedly his disappointment became delight as the young man offered to meet with him the following day, if he wished, so they might continue their discussion of impressions. Elydn had
gladly accepted. Then, taking his leave, he hurried over to his friends. By then all of them had ears and noses in imitation of Riethe, and were barking like fools. After a few rounds of punch, Eldyn joined them.

The next afternoon he returned to the Red Jester, when the tavern was quieter and he was more sober. Upon entering, he saw the bespectacled young illusionist sitting at the same table as last night. Eldyn went to him at once and thanked him for coming.

“I’m Eldyn Garritt, by the way,” he said, holding out his hand. “From the Theater of the Moon.”

The other young man hesitated a moment, pushing his wire-rimmed spectacles up his nose, then reached out to clasp Eldyn’s hand. “I know. I’ve seen your performance several times. You probably haven’t seen me, though. I’m Perren Fynch, from the Theater of Mirrors.”

Eldyn could only confess he hadn’t seen the illusion play at that particular house for some time. Luckily, it didn’t seem to matter. While Perren seemed to possess a rather quiet and reserved nature, all that changed as soon as Eldyn began questioning him about the methods by which impressions were made. He was soon chattering away as Eldyn listened in fascination.

And somehow, by their second cup of punch, he had gotten Perren to agree to teach him how to make impressions.

Of course, this was all easier said over cups of punch in a tavern than it was actually put into deed. The old illusionist who had taught Perren how to make impressions had claimed that only a few Siltheri possessed the requisite skill. And of those, only a few were willing to put in the many hours of effort it took to hone the craft to any sort of usable point. Eldyn, however, was determined to give it his best.

After all, he had the time.

Gone were the days when Eldyn was attempting to juggle two vocations at once. Since leaving Graychurch, he had not sought out another clerking position. Nor were familial or fraternal duties a distraction. His sister, Sashie, was not consigned to his care anymore, having been accepted into a nunnery in County Caerdun in
the south, and his friend Rafferdy was too occupied with affairs at Assembly to have time to meet very often.

As for that most affectionate sort of relationship—there was no time lost on that account either. Not that Eldyn wouldn’t have given up all his time in the world, and gladly, just to be able to look into Dercy’s sea green eyes once again. Not a lumenal passed, no matter how brief, that he did not spend hours of it thinking about Dercy, recalling all their moments together. And not an umbral fell that did not find him awake at some point, touching the cold, empty space in the bed beside him, and wishing Dercy were there to fill it.

Throughout these last months, Eldyn had received but a single letter from Dercy, and this had contained but a few lines stating that he had arrived in the country safely and was staying at the house of his cousin, who was vicar in a small parish. That was all.

More than once, Eldyn had been tempted to buy a seat on the post and travel to the country. Only he knew he could not. After all, there was nothing he could do that might heal Dercy. In one violent, rending act, Archdeacon Lemarck had stolen more than half a lifetime of light from Dercy—afflicting him with the mordoth in the process. After those awful events, he had traveled to his cousin’s house to convalesce.

Only it wasn’t simply for the purpose of recuperation that Dercy had departed the city. Given how little light he had left, he could not ever risk crafting illusions again. Which meant he had to get away from Durrow Street, and from anything that might tempt him to make illusions.

Or from anyone. That included his friends at the Theater of the Moon. And that included Eldyn as well. It was vital that Dercy conserve his light, and being around other illusionists could only entice him to do the opposite—at least until such a time came when he had truly learned to set such temptations aside. Which meant that the only thing Eldyn could do to help Dercy was to wait for him.

And Eldyn
would
wait for him, no matter how long it took.

So it was, when he was not at the theater, there was nothing to
distract Eldyn from dedicating himself to the study of making impressions. As it turned out, it was a good thing he had such a surplus of time. Eldyn quickly realized he was going to need it. Fortunately, he had an exceedingly patient teacher in Perren.

Indeed, so generously did Perren give of his time—in exchange for nothing save the punch or whiskey, which Eldyn always bought—that Eldyn often marveled at the entire situation. When he considered it, he could only suppose Perren was passing along the kindness that had been done to him by the illusionist who taught him to craft impressions. Or perhaps it was Eldyn’s own diligence which inspired him. Besides, it was not as if they did not find amusement in their lessons, which often ended only when they were both of them too merry from drink to either teach or be taught.

During those first few lessons, Eldyn simply watched. From what he had heard before, he had believed that, when making an impression, an illusionist’s thoughts somehow directly affected the surface of the engraving plate which he held in his hands.

He was entirely mistaken.

Instead, Perren would begin by heating a waxen substance—one that had particular properties—in a small pot over a flame. Then he would use a boar bristle brush to carefully apply a thin coating of the substance to the polished surface of a copper plate. It was called impression rosin, and it was this material, Perren explained, that actually responded to what the illusionist envisioned in his mind.

If done properly, it all happened very quickly. Afterward, the plate was submerged in a bath of mordant. The acidic mordant etched the copper plate anywhere the coating of rosin had been pushed aside from the surface by the force of the illusionist’s thoughts. Then the plate was rinsed and the rosin stripped away, leaving it ready to be rolled with ink and pressed against paper to make a print.

“It’s just like shaping the light with your thoughts,” Eldyn had said after that first time he watched Perren at his craft.

“It is, with one important difference,” Perren said.

“What’s that?”

“When you craft an illusion, you can conjure anything you can imagine. But you can only make an impression of something you’ve witnessed yourself. And it has to be exactly as you saw it. If you try to alter even one small detail, the whole impression will fail.”

Eldyn was astonished by this, but intrigued as well. “But why? Why can’t you just make up a scene in an impression?”

“It’s a property of the impression rosin,” Perren explained. “It will only let you tell the truth.”

Maybe that was why making impressions was so difficult, Eldyn thought. It was easy to envision a scene. But it was devilishly hard to envision it
truly
—as he discovered the first time he attempted to make an impression. He did this using a scratch plate—one that was too damaged to be used for printing—as engraving plates were costly. He shut his eyes and concentrated with all his might, seemingly to no effect. Only then, just as he was about to give up, he thought he saw the faintest glimmer of green light against his eyelids. At the same time he had the sensation of something shifting or giving way.

When he opened his eyes, he saw two things. The first was Perren’s grin, his blue eyes bright behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. The other was a small but distinct smudge in the rosin that covered the plate.

Though small, it was a beginning, and it gave him hope. After that, it was really nothing more than a matter of long hours of practice, learning to touch the rosin with his thoughts and shape it just as he had previously learned to touch and shape light. As for what the rosin exactly was, and what was contained in it, Perren could not say. In the entire city, there were only three illusionists who made impression rosin, and all of them were reluctant to share the secret of its formula.

All Eldyn knew was that when he shaped the rosin with his thoughts, he would always see a green light against his eyelids. And the better he got at shaping it, the brighter the light grew.

There was much more to it than just affecting the rosin that
coated the engraving plate, of course. Indeed, that was the simplest part. Much harder was learning to see in an entirely different way—to see the truth. Eldyn had always thought he was an observant person, but he quickly learned how wrong he had been when Perren set down a dozen playing cards face up on a table, then quickly turned them over and asked Eldyn to tell him the number of pips on each one.

That first time, Eldyn got hardly any of them right. But the more he practiced, the more he got. Soon he could recall the face value and position of a dozen cards that had been flipped over, then twenty-four, and then thirty-six. He and Perren would walk around the city, and suddenly Perren would stop him, tell him to shut his eyes, and order him to describe everything around them in minutest detail.

After two months of preparation and practice, Perren finally let him try his skills on a real engraving plate, not a scrap. After three months, they finally submitted a plate to the bath of mordant to etch it, then made a print. The result was so blurry as to be incomprehensible, but Eldyn used some of his wages from the theater to buy more plates and impression rosin (and more whiskey and punch for Perren and himself) and kept trying.

Then, just yesterday, he had at last created an impression that was good enough to have a chance at being printed in a broadsheet. Perren had known it the moment he took the plate from Eldyn, or so he said—even before they etched it in mordant and ran off that hasty print. They had left Perren’s room above the Theater of Mirrors and rushed across the Old City to the offices of
The Swift Arrow
on Coronet Street.

And now, here before him, was the result.

“Well, I am sure we will have more time later to look at Mr. Garritt’s fine work,” Master Tallyroth said. “However, there is to be a performance tonight—providing this awful lumenal ever sees fit to end. Yet I can only assume it will at some point, and I remain unconvinced that everyone fully comprehends the new staging. Let us proceed through it once more.” He thumped his cane against the stage. “Take your places, gentlemen!”