23rd of Spring, 512 AV
Rafters twisted, as if petrified in antediluvian pattern. Rusty nails projected from white pine, cedar glazed by tar and disrupted at regular intervals by mislaid augur holes. Beams barged leadenly, a kind of mantlet under blocks of feldspar. There were scruffs of dejected mortar, myriad chinks in crumbly plaster. Their flush had faded, leaving only smudges of umber.
Ulric grunted, shambling down the broad, rambling passage. Infused by ruthless inquiry, his inky gimlets pried over the hodgepodge, screwing over tiny details. Infinitesimal slivers, bulging knots, rudely whittled inlays of graffiti. The latter was the worst. There’d been generations of doodlers, of soothsayers, lampoonists, and clairvoyants all venturing the diffusion their messages. Inevitably, the abundance only generates discord, he grinned wryly.
Just kept walking.
Thinking that part of it, irrevocably, was the method. The graffiti of chalk, grease, and stiletto was arbitrary, lazy. Haphazardly gouging and daubing only injured pride, and maybe the aesthetic, but even under nebulous, fractured nomenclatures of art it was nuisance. Inflicted, lacking any prejudice aside from the locality. There wasn’t any intricacy, as in the tinkering of great, coppery golems for sundry vocations.
Succinctly, any fool can scribble, Ulric reflected, irritably jostling his layers of metal. That’s the rub of it, if I’m not mistaken. There’s nothing that a fool can’t imitate, but there’s nothing a fool can glean particularly well. The fringe of his lips crinkled. The fool’s ungainly tools. That should be a homily, he japed. Abruptly, looming near a lantern bereft of its typical, oily sludge, he bided for an instant. Flecks of corrosion swaddled the bracket, redly smudging the recessed ledge.
The embers were dying.
Pah, empty symbolism, Ulric jeered, unwilling to prolong the vanity of unnecessary conjecture. Before him yawned a passage, straked by rafters, beams, and motley impediments, and only a passage. Remittingly humdrum, even in its infancy, the only intrusion was his indolence.
Hastening, he passed through a pair of swinging portals, flanged by plates of tin, swept by yet another passage, lowering through a half-circular stair where finally, adjunct to a string of pillars, he shifted uneasily. This chamber, previously the refuge of a few, skewed trestles, with their sheaves of vellum that enduring the piecemeal scratching of a litany of hireling scribes, was desolate.
“Bugger,” he growled.