James, Vic - Dark Gifts 02 - Tarnished City by James Vic

Author:James, Vic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Books

15

Silyen

Was this real, or unreal? Silyen wondered, walking through Orpen’s hallway, his fingers trailing across the dark wood panelling.

To be more accurate, was he touching the bricks-and-mortar Orpen Mote that he and Aunty Terpy had Skillfully rebuilt over these past weeks – a task much more intricate than the restoration of Kyneston’s exploded East Wing? Or was he walking through memory-Orpen, where the pair of them had met during all those years his aunt had lain unconscious in her bed?

He ought to know the difference. More to the point, he ought to be disturbed that he didn’t know the difference.

But he wasn’t. The two Orpens overlaid each other almost seamlessly and Silyen walked easily in them both.

It was usually the furniture that gave it away. Restored-Orpen was still only half furnished; Mama and Jenner were locating suitable pieces from other family properties and sending them over. Memory-Orpen was crammed with and ornaments. It held everything that had filled the house during Aunty Terpy’s youth, from tapestries and suits of armour, to the books in the library – including the cedarwood chest containing the lost journals of Cadmus Parva-Jardine.

Yes, objectively, Silyen knew that only one of the two was ‘real’, in the sense of physically existing in the present moment. But the memory-Orpen he’d visited in childhood, and occasionally slipped into now, felt no less real. In certain corridors and passageways, it was still possible to mistake the two versions of this place.

But there was no mistaking the third Orpen. The one made of Skill.

It wasn’t constructed from wood and stone, nor from memories, but from power. It existed in the same bright-and-dark world he had perceived that day at Parliament. A reality composed entirely of Skill, and its absence. Everything in it was either void, or limned in light, like a sheet of black paper sketched on in gold.

This was the world he needed to see today.

Silyen was more practised than he had been at Westminster. On that day (the day of his adoption, and the conversation with Meilyr Tresco), he had glimpsed the bright world by chance. Now, he could look at it at will.

Silyen closed his eyes and opened them onto a shining outline of Orpen. Just as at Westminster, objects and spaces could only be discerned if they contained traces of Skill.

So this Orpen was no blank space, as the Skill-devoid streets of London had been. Because the entire structure had been magically rebuilt by Silyen and his aunt, the house appeared almost as solid as it did in the real world, albeit made entirely of dully shimmering gold.

Which was understandable. Quite apart from the latest rebuilding, Orpen had been riddled with magic for centuries. He looked to his left. There was a shining fissure in the soft glow of a windowpane, perhaps secretly repaired by a Parva child after a ball game mishap. High up, vivid bands of gold coiled around a chimney stack, the crumbling mortar Skillfully reinforced by some prudent lord or lady.

There was

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