Cameron could no longer raise his eyebrows, but he conveyed a certain skepticism in his voice. "Really?"
"Really." Paul du Mond chuckled and rose to his feet. He stopped at the door for a parting shot. "I've decided to take this as a personal cause, something to be the stepping-stone to great success. I promise you," he continued, in a satisfied tone as he opened the door and left, "I intend to use this as the opportunity to show you just what I'm capable of."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Rose pulled a wayward strand of hair behind her ear and took a tighter grip on her piece of soft chalk. She had never much favored the rather risque costume for women espoused by Amanda Bloomer, but she had asked Jason for permission to order one on the chance that she might need it, and it was proving invaluable today. It might be immodest and not at all modish, but she could never have drawn these chalk diagrams on the slate floor of Jason's workroom if she had been wearing any kind of skirt. She would have found it difficult to get down on her hands and knees, and the voluminous skirts and dragging hems would have been in danger of erasing much of her work.
I do wish I could do this drawing unsupervised, however. I feel like a hoyden. Casting a glance over her shoulder, she noted that Jason was not looking at her, but at the last piece of the design she had finished. At least all that he said was, "how very practical." She consoled herself with the undoubted fact that she was no more exposed than if she had been wearing a modern bathing-costume. And certainly Jason had seen far more female flesh exposed on the stage in this city, Good heavens, the minuscule dresses worn by the corps de ballet at the Opera covered less than this! And those were prim compared to the tiny costumes espoused by the dancers in music-halls.
Besides, there was more at stake here than her modesty.
My knees, for instance. How they ache! Her knees felt bruised and sore, and her back and shoulders were stiff and painful. She had been at this task for hours now, and felt a strong kinship with those poor creatures forced to scrub floors for a living.
Jason himself stood to one side, coatless, and supervised the drawing, the overall diagram in one hand. She had a copy of the same diagram with her and had it lying open beside her bundle of colored chalks, but it helped to have someone outside it to see that she hadn't somehow overlooked something. They had laid out each portion with rulers, compasses, a carpenter's chalk-lines, and string; she had worked from the inside out, circling around the center of the room like a planet in its orbit around the sun. This Working Room of Jason's was a curious place; the walls featured inset panels of slate of the same kind as the floor, in case he might need to contrive a Work that required diagrams to be made on the walls as well as the floor. There were no windows, none at all. The room itself was not large, not as large as it seemed, since it contained no furniture of any kind. Between the panels of slate on the walls were ship's lamps, the kind that magnified the light coming from them, so that when they were all lit the room was as bright as possible. At the moment, every one of them was alight, making it easy to see if there were any mistakes in the diagram.
Rose was drawing the diagram, rather than Jason, for three reasons. He had trouble bending; his joints had been oddly warped by his transformation, and a half hour of drawing on the floor left him in agony. Drawing such diagrams was rightfully the work of the Apprentice, anyway, so that the Master could supervise the construction of the whole. She was the Apprentice, and when he had proposed this Work, she had taken it for granted that she would be the one doing the drawing, and had said as much. And last of all, she'd had a suspicion, which a quick test had proved, that the transformation had rendered Jason partially color-blind. Subtle colors—the pale colors of the chalks, for instance—all looked very much alike to him. It was only when hues were saturated that he could tell them apart. Taking them into strong sunlight helped, but he had not thought to do that before she pointed his deficiency out to him. She had further confounded him by proving to him that although he could, with concentration, tell the chalks themselves apart most of the time, he literally could not tell a chalked line of green from one of blue in even the strongest artificial light—and it was not possible to take the finished diagram out into the sun.
"That may have been what went wrong the last time," she had pointed out. "If you cannot tell blue from green, or green from yellow, and you did not remember to label them, you would have been drawing symbols in the wrong colors for their Quarters. You could have gotten the whole diagram so hopelessly mixed that nothing would have sorted it out."
"I don't know if that would have made a difference or not," he had said hesitantly. "The old Masters only had white chalk available for the most part, so that was what they used."
"I suspect that plain white chalk would not make a difference, but it would seem to me that the wrong color would," she had told him firmly. "Several of your sources are very firm about the importance of color to the Elementals. It is difficult enough for a Firemaster to gain the attention of Water Elementals long enough to convince them to leave his Work alone—only think how less likely that is if he uses the wrong color! The last time you attempted a Work, you got absolutely nothing for your pains, and that might well have been because you offended all the Elementals except your own."
He had nodded, reluctantly. And that was why she was on her hands and knees chalking out the four Quarters of his diagram in the right colors—pale red for Fire and the South, blue for Air and the East, green for Water and the West, and yellow for Earth and the North. If anything went wrong tonight, it would not be because the diagrams had been mismanaged!
And from now on, if he decides he must work alone, I suspect he will take care to use plain white chalk.
Oh, but her knees and her back hurt! If this was the lot of the average Apprentice, she had some sympathy with du Mond now for his alleged laziness. This was not something she would care to endure, night after night.
She was taking particular care with this diagram because there was not a great deal else she could control in this project. This was to be a Work that Jason himself had attempted only twice in the past, both times when he was working under the supervision of his own Master, both times for purposes less urgent than this one. It was common enough that every Magician of any sort knew it, or a variation on it, but the particulars were such that few ever attempted it.
For one thing, it required the presence of a virgin, male or female. Few Magicians remained chaste long past the age of majority, and the kind of women who tended to be attracted to Magicians—and that were also willing to be part and parcel of a Work—were generally not virginal. According to Jason, Magicians were of two varieties when it came to the opposite sex: either extremely charismatic and attractive, or ascetic and forbidding of aspect.
And I can imagine which of the two Jason was before his accident.
Yet Jason claimed even those who were ascetic tended to attract women, as if the power they held made them more appealing than they would otherwise have been. Nevertheless, the kind of woman so attracted was the sort that Rose would have styled "an adventuress," for whom the forbidden was as potent an intoxicant as anything sold in China-town. Such a woman would have been willing to take part in a Work, but for this Work would likely be utterly unsuitable.
And proper ladies would be horrified at the very notion. Since this Work requires that the virgin be alert and speaking, rather than drugged or screaming in terror, I can see why it isn't attempted very often.