Although Below had never heard of him, Scarfinati was famous throughout much of the realm for possessing a limitless imagination and the ability to bring his dreams to life. His specialty was a kind of technomancy, and he dabbled in those regions where science and magic mingled. Through his wealth, acquired from work for various patrons, political, military, artistic, religious, he had been able to amass an impressive fortune. With this money, he had a palatial house built out at the tip of a spit of land that jutted into the ocean a mile south of Merithae. It was to this place he called Reparata (named for Scarfinati s own sister), he brought the young Drach-ton Below.
There were many rooms in the house, and Scarfinati hated dust. Below worked from early in the morning to late at night continually dusting books, furniture, scientific gadgetry, glass, primitive sculpture. When he finished every room, he was instructed to begin again. Scarfinati, though old, was large in stature and stern in his demeanor. During the first month ofBelow''s employment, his existence was barely recognized. He was fed well, paid a modest sum, and had a comfortable bed to sleep in. There was one day off a week, and he had access to the books in the libraries granted he returned them to their precise locations. When the snows came, he decided he had better stay until the spring.
At the end of his first week at Reparata, Below saw a girl his age cooking at the kitchen stove. He tried to speak to her, but she completely ignored him. When he realized she wasn't going to speak, he sat down and watched her work. He would have stayed there all afternoon if Scarfinati hadn't come through and warned him to get back to his dusting. As the days passed, he learned the girl's name was Anotine. He also began to see that she was not just a cook, but also a kind of student. Occasionally, Below would enter to dust a room already being shared by the old man and the girl. He would eavesdrop on their conversations. Tor the most part, she listened and he spoke, instructing her in processes that Below had no understanding of. He often found them in the basement laboratory, working together over a small fire with glass beakers and golden tongs.
Through the long winter, the mysterious nature of his employer and the huge house were enough to keep away memories of his sister and the tragedy of her death. When spring arrived, young Below
decided he would again take up his traveling now that he had saved some more money. This time he found himself fleeing not death but love. He had become completely enamored of Anotine, even though she had not said one word to him or cast -a single glance in his direction. The situation, as it was, had become sheer torture, as he planned out entire days to try to get as little as a mere glimpse of her.
One day, when the snow had all but melted, Scarfinati entered one of the libraries where Below was dusting. The young man cleared his voice and explained to his employer that he would soon be moving on. Scarfinati said he was very sorry to hear that, because he had had it in his mind all along to request that Below become one of his students. Below most likely would have declined the invitation had it not been for Anotine, but he saw the old man's offer as a way to get closer to her. He agreed to become an apprentice—of what, he wasn't exactly sure.
A week later, he retired his feather duster and rags and joined Scarfinati and Anotine in the basement laboratory for his first lesson, the production of a chemical ice that could not melt. In the beginning his ignorance was always evident, and his inability to grasp the concepts the other two discussed fluently made him physically clumsy. He broke equipment, burned himself, and dribbled a highly corrosive acid onto the toe of Scarfinati's boot. The old man had a great deal of tolerance for his ineptitude, but the girl was impatient, rolling her eyes and calling him a fool.
On a rainy afternoon in late spring, as they all sat quietly having tea in the library on the third floor, Scarfinati, by mumbling and tossing a pinch of blue powder onto the carpet, conjured for Below the spirit of his sister. The little girl walked out of thin air and up to her brother. His immediate reaction was to bolt from the room, but the old man commanded that he return and stay seated. With this, he found he couldn't move. "Is there something you wanted to say to your brother?" asked Anotine of the spirit. The little girl nodded. "Drachton, your mind is in a fist with the thought of my death. If you love me, you will relax it, so that I may travel over into the next world. Release me and open yourself to possibility." The girl vanished then, and Below broke down in tears.
From that time on, his ability to learn seemed to grow exponentially. The lessons that had seemed so obscure to him just a week earlier, mathematics and the properties of chemicals, all began to fall into place in his mind. He began to notice that with every procedure he was able to accomplish in the lab without spilling the contents of the beaker, every complex problem he was able to solve without benefit of pencil and paper, Anotine began to grow more interested in him. This extra incentive charged his newly discovered intelligence.
As the years progressed, he learned at an alarming rate all of the secrets that had made Scarfinati rich and powerful. The old man had become like a father to him, but Below saw the girl as anything but a sister. Things began between them with a conversation one day in which she instructed him in some terms that would help him to discuss that area of study where magic and science merged. From that purely innocent conversation grew a friendship, which led, after months of talk, to a kiss, and then quickly to secret rendezvous in the middle of the night while the old man slept.
Things continued in that fashion for quite a few years, until the time both Anotine and Below turned twenty. It was then that Scarfinati announced that they would no longer take their lessons from him together. He told them that Below would continue on his course of alchemy, philosophy, and mathematics, whereas Anotine would be taught the memory book. A flare of jealousy leaped to life within Below, for he knew that the memory book was the last step, the most important element in one's progress toward becoming an adept.
Both Below and Anotine had been lectured in how to understand and utilize mnemonic systems. Each had built in his own mind a kind of crude memory palace, and used it in order to store information. Scarfinati had always stressed, though, that this was only the first step, and that the ultimate achievement of the mnemonics was to turn the memory into an engine of creativity. In order to do this, he said, "You must introduce life into it. The elements of it must continue to interact, commune, intermingle, even when your attention is elsewhere. This way new ideas are forever being born, and all you need do is harvest them."
The memory book contained lists of symbols and their values. Scarfinati had told them that those symbols, for some reason, could not be stored as a list, within the memory palace itself. Whenever he tried to hide them in the mnemonic structure, they would disappear, so the physical existence of the book would always be necessary. He also revealed that in order to introduce life into a mnemonic system, one had to learn how to manipulate the symbols from the book in one's mind. The correct juxtaposition of symbols would create
an environment that was conducive to mnemonic life, and where this was achieved, imagination would surely grow. It was also a certainty that if you tried to use the symbols and did not know how, it could result in serious damage to the memory and the mind in general.