Chapter 41 #2
He went past the desk on the right, around.
When he turned back toward where he’d come in, he saw the two doors.
There was the one he’d come from and one matching on the left.
Between them, where he thought there might be a fireplace ordinarily, there was a vast tapestry.
It had a map of Albion. Wales, Scotland, England, the islands.
Just a hint of the coastline of Ireland, though, enough to make the scale clear enough.
He’d been thinking, since the first day Matty had seen him duel Orion, about a description Matty had given.
How Claudio’s magic had been like weaving.
More than just a few shifts, it had been something larger and stranger.
He didn’t know much about tapestries beyond the usual range.
But he knew they could anchor a wide range of enchantments, besides the reasons about beauty or insulation or visible wealth that someone might display them.
He’d seen the set at Ytene that had been restored twenty years ago, and been able to ask questions about those.
He knew not to handle it more than was necessary.
The way it was hung, handling wasn’t required at all.
Claudio took several steps closer to it, keeping his hands behind his back to avoid the temptation to touch.
The colours were vibrant, but they also pulsed with magic.
That made him quite sure they were dyed to purpose with active materia, not simply shaded for looks. Some places were frayed or faded.
There was a patchy spot near Arundel where the colour seemed uneven and muddy, though mostly clear around it.
But the threads across Schola were bright, as if they were newly woven, a smoothness to the thread that had a reassuring implied strength.
He looked at the rest, letting his eyes and magic be drawn to various places.
Fairlight was smooth and beautiful, so was Veritas. The first places he’d look.
There was a spot up by York that had an odd off-colour to it, as did part of Manchester.
And London, well, London had spots that were darkened, like the holes still left by bombs.
That spot there must be Coventry. Down there on the coast, the damage Southampton had taken was blatant, both faded and held together by tenuous threads.
It made him look more closely at Trellech.
That had an odd mottling effect, something like pointillism done in dye.
It was an impossible task in this sort of weaving as he understood it, unless the shade were purely applied with magic.
It was not as muted or faded as spots in London, but it did not look thriving.
That made him think about some comments he’d heard at meetings, and even more from Matty, over the past weeks.
People kept going, but with a wear on their souls and their magic that didn’t ease.
Worse were the people like Matty who’d broken chips off themselves in their work, and never had a chance for them to heal properly, or even see if they could.
He was paying attention, the way Gabe had trained into him. It meant he wasn’t actually startled by the steps and sound coming from the left, where the door had led to some other space. Claudio looked up at the creak of the door and the tap of a cane. “You.” Then, a slightly dismissive. “Finally.”
Father stood there, as he had been in the last year or two of life, silver-haired, rigid, an ebony cane tipped with gold in hand.
Claudio turned to face him, acknowledged him with a nod.
He had not been sure what might happen here, but he supposed this was about the middle of his list of expectations.
Whatever else might be said by the Lady in this place and whatever went into the Challenge, she certainly had plenty of material to work with when it came to Claudio’s parents.
More than any other person in Albion in at least two centuries.
Quite a number had followed one parent into a Challenge but precious few followed two.
The question was what to say. He did not want to argue.
For one thing, arguments with his father had never gone well, and he had absolutely no expectation death would change that.
Or death and resonance, whatever that actually meant here.
For another, it would not do anyone any good.
He was old enough and cautious enough of preserving his resources to not argue for the sake of whatever shards of satisfaction he might get.
Also, Orion would mock him about his tactics and strategy later. Couldn’t have that.
“Mother is well, as are Electra and our children. Tiberius is apprenticing as a talisman maker now. Minerva is showing significant talent at music, with a focus on piano. Did you know that?” It was inane, but they were true things, and they were things that his father might in fact have wished to know.
What it produced was a gesture, dismissive. “It took you long enough.”
Claudio shrugged, shifted his weight, and felt the entirely physical reminder of all the things he’d been doing recently his father would hate. “All things in their own time, Father. I’m here now. Is there something you wished to say?”
“You should have had this long since.” His father gestured at the room and all it implied. “You failed.”
It should have hurt. It might have hurt someone else, someone who hadn’t had Claudio’s life.
Someone who hadn’t had Isembard, and all that meant.
Or Gabe and what all the Penelopes, singular and communal, meant.
Now, Claudio could just meet his father’s eyes and raise an eyebrow.
“Did I?” Well, apparently, also Alexander’s Socratic style of questioning was contagious, and that would certainly annoy Father no end.
His father made a frustrated sound deep in his chest and turned away to walk to the narrow window at the wall beyond the desk.
He turned back, making Claudio wait, but of course that didn’t work as well on Claudio as it had in 1930 either.
There had been a war since then. Father was not remotely the most terrifying thing in the world or in Claudio’s memories now.
Father’s disappointment certainly wasn’t.
“You have failed the line of the family.”
“I’m here now, as I am.” There was a moment where Claudio almost lost his grip on it. But then he remembered that image he’d spelled out for Matty, in their planning. A great ball of molten glass, expanded to translucent brilliance, unobscured, filled with fire and light and change.
“And you’re not the one who chooses, are you?
Not this form of you, at least.” He added, after a moment, in honesty, “Mother is doing well. I want to argue with her a great deal. I expect that is only going to expand. But she cares about doing the thing right. I’m certain she keeps far better notes.
” He had learned enough of his father, more than enough, to find him wanting.
No pedestals in this room, not anymore, and not for a long time.
There was a long moment, and then the image of Father popped, rather like a soap bubble, dissipating into a shimmer. The left door was still cracked open. Claudio took a good three minutes to look once more at the tapestry, pulling out the ever-present notebook he carried now.
He made notes about a dozen— two dozen— spots in the shorthand that was second nature to him now.
Then he bowed slightly to it and went through the open door.
It wound down a spiral staircase that absolutely did not exist in the physical keep until he was confronted with a solid oak door.
The handle turned smoothly, and he went through to find himself outside.
It certainly was not Dinas Emrys proper.
Claudio knew the courtyard well enough, the curtain walls that ringed the keep with storerooms and workspaces and such.
There were no walls here. A former wall, yes.
A tower, burned and singed and now weathered into a ruin, yes.
He turned to glance where he’d come from, and there was Dinas Emrys, if from an angle he’d never seen before, because it was somehow below him on a hill.
Claudio was not an expert at dating ruins— he normally preferred research to estimation in such cases— but he thought it perhaps a century.
That was interesting and suggested older roots here than Alexander, at least. There was not enough left for him to date the tower itself, how long ago it had been built.
But he would not, he felt, be surprised if someone told him it was built in the twelfth century.
That was when Dinas Emrys had been slowly rebuilt for magical use, before being turned over to the Council once it was formed.
What he thought about was poppies. He amiably blamed Gabe.
That was the reason they had spread across the battlefields of France and Belgium and all the other places torn up by trenches and fighting.
Poppies grew in disturbed ground, marking the land with something that would make it clear what had happened.
And yes, there, those were blackberries.
Or he was fairly sure they were, growing around the base of the ruin.
They liked a shallow foundation, close to the bedrock needed for such a structure.
There were signs of wildlife, though Claudio would need to consult notes about the prints.
He had the notes. He had the summary volume that Gabe had recommended he keep, tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket opposite his notebook.
But he did not think it necessary quite at the moment.
One ruined tower, reasonable flora and fauna for the time.
Nothing caught his attention by being terribly out of place.