The Order War by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

his own copy of The Basis of Order into the pack he still carried rather than the satchel that some of the older engineers affected.
    “It is going to keep raining,” insisted Norah.
    Justen smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry, Norah. I should have paid more attention to you. You’re very talented with following the weather, and you should be pleased that you do so well.”
    “It might even rain for two days.”
    “We’ll have to see. You can already do that better than I can.”
    “I can?” Norah stood, still rubbing the worry stone.
    Justen nodded. “I’m an engineer, not an Air Wizard. I can make black iron, and rockets, and parts for engines and cannons, though.”
    “I like the clouds, especially the misty ones.” Norah bent and picked up her pack. The heavy brown canvas, battered and scuffed and stained, had been new when Justen had begun to teach her a season earlier. “What are we supposed to read?”
    “The preface again.”
    “That’s fuzzy, like the soft clouds.” Norah shouldered the pack and half-walked, half-skipped, toward the open door. There she stopped and turned. “Good-bye, Magister Justen.” Then she was gone.
    Justen shook his head. Why were all the Air Wizards so…he groped for a word, then decided that Norah’s term “fuzzy” fit as well as any. Even Gunnar was fuzzy sometimes, as if he weren’t there even when he was. Then again, who could tell where an Air Wizard really was? He snorted, closed his pack and lifted the heavy leather pillows onto the table before picking his dark-gray waterproof from the peg beside the doorway. After closing the door, he walked down the half-dozen steps and along the sunken corridor until he reached the stairs to the west wing.
    He took the steps two at a time. The smell of mutton stew oozed from the dining hall that served the older students, many of whom would have been candidates for exile in Dorrin’s time.
    Before he went outside into the rain, Justen pulled on the dark-gray waterproof but left the hood down. Stepping carefully around the puddles in the road, he walked downhill toward the engineering hall.
    The soft, warm rain had plastered his hair to his skull, and he was sweating by the time he climbed the four stone steps to the building. Stopping under the wide porch, he brushedthe water from his face with the back of his left hand. Then he stamped his boots and wiped them on the rush mats before stepping into the anteroom that contained the open closets where the engineers left their aprons, gloves, and work clothes.
    Justen pulled off his tunic and the good shirt he used for teaching and hung them on the pegs in one of the doorless and narrow closets. Then he took down his leather apron, fastened it on, and stepped through the archway into the hall and walked toward the smaller forge in the right rear corner of the hall. His apprentice, Clerve, was working on bolt blanks.
    Justen grinned. He’d hated making bolts. The cutters made threading them easy, but the bolts were still a pain—even when using the metal lathe to true the blanks. Threading the nuts had been worse…and still was.
    “How soon will you have the new evaporators worked out?” asked Warin, pushing his too-long wispy hair back off his forehead with his forearm.
    Justen grinned ruefully. “When we figure out how to keep the cooling side from corroding the system so badly. They still leak too quickly.” The idea of using seawater evaporators to get continuous fresh water had been used on only the last two black ships, and the Brothers on both ships, including Pendak, were spending more time and order-mastery on holding the evaporators together than on the rest of the power plants, including even the newer turbines.
    “Good luck.” Warin turned back to the milling table.
    “Thanks.”
    Clerve looked up from the anvil toward Justen.
    “Yes…you can stop working on the bolts for now,” Justen told him. “Lay out the plans on the board there.” He nodded toward the