The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

14

The Black Wedding

‘Twice twenty curses on that stupid halfwit of a Master!’ shouted the Jack. He was pacing, then ranting, then pacing and ranting in the upper gallery of the Jackery. The Keeper slouched in a low armchair before a stifled fire, her legs splayed out before her. She had only just shuffled into the room, silent and dejected, and was still dressed in her black gown from Feeding. Fitz sat on the stool by the door, where the Jack had deposited him after carrying him up the steep staircase, slung over his shoulder.

He didn’t dare move. He didn’t want to move.

‘I still think he can succeed,’ said the Keeper. ‘The Heresy needs a new Master, and this boy already has ability.’

‘No,’ said Arwan, turning, and lunging with his eyes. ‘He can’t succeed. Even if he were to spend all night in the Sensorium rehearsing the forty temptations, even if he had mastered the Ten Modes of Agrippa, even if he had logged a thousand hours of mimesis practice, even then – he simply isn’t old enough to withstand it. The others want him to fail, and Habi let it happen. We’ll never know – he will never know – what this boy might have been.’

The Jack paced the long wooden boards of the attic. He could only stand upright in the very centre of the room, where the pitch of the roof was highest, and it was in this space that he turned and turned, shaking the rafters with every step of his hulking frame. As Fitz watched him pacing, his own heart rising and falling as the Jack and the Keeper debated his future, he wished there was somewhere in the Heresy – even just one place – where he felt he could stand up.

‘Why does it matter to you,’ said Fitz, ‘if I fail?’

The Jack wheeled on his heel, and stared at him.

‘I mean,’ said Fitz, unsure of himself, ‘what happens then? What happens to me? What happens to you? Why does it matter?’

The Jack was at a loss for words. The Keeper answered for him. ‘You picked Dina, child. She will be at the Wedding, there at the end; if you are not able to sustain yourself in the face of temptation, if you are not able to preserve yourself when confronted with doubt, if you cannot withstand the onslaughts of illusion and of paradox, then it will be a mercy for her to cut the cords.’

‘To cut the cords that bind me to the mast?’ Fitz asked.

‘To cut the cords that bind you to this world,’ answered the Keeper. ‘If you succumb to temptation, to doubt, to confusion – then you will lose your grip on your mind, and you will not regain it after. It has happened before.’

‘The Riddler?’ asked Fitz.

‘Among others.’

‘And why should it matter to you, if I fail?’ Fitz had been biting his lip so hard it bled.

‘Because we have staked everything on your success,’ said the Jack. ‘Not just our position among the Officers. As if that’s worth anything. Half the Officers think you’re some kind of messiah, a redeemer come to save the Heresy from itself, restore the Kingdom, and usher us into a new golden age. Some of the Officers are so overdosed on their own stack they actually believe that cult stuff. Some of them want you to succeed; some of them clearly want you to fail. It was all we could do to get you here alive. But Habi, Habi had a better story. Habi convinced me, gave me some of that dust he peddles, hope. Habi said maybe there was a chance, if you came here, if you worked with him, that through you we could change the Heresy. Maybe we could heal that which was broken. Maybe we could look at ourselves in the mirror again.’

Fitz looked from the Keeper to the Jack, and back again, blinking.

‘Broken?’ he asked.

‘He hasn’t told you,’ said Arwan. A new rage seemed to kindle in his thought, and his eyes burned with it.

‘Ignorance is wisdom, Arwan,’ said the Keeper. ‘Whatever we don’t tell him tonight, the Rack can’t use to torture him tomorrow.’

‘That’s the way farmers treat their lambs, Agatha,’ the Jack spat. ‘That’s abattoir talk. He has a right to know.’

A right to know what?

‘What do you think the Heresy is?’ asked the Jack. ‘What do you think we do here?’

Fitz sat up on the stool. He looked around. It seemed a trick question. Even here in the attic gallery of the Jack’s House, the room was packed with books and papers. The Jack had been using them, surely – his pen lay on the desk. Fitz had seen his writings on the wall. He was a mathematician. He was doing research, or –

‘You teach,’ Fitz said. ‘You are teachers. You are training children. The Apprentices.’

‘Yes, that’s what we tell you,’ said the Jack. ‘But think about it. What are we teaching you to do?’

‘To take your places. To become Officers. To lead the Heresy, if it comes to that.’

‘And which one of the Apprentices has become an Officer? Was I an Apprentice? Was Agatha, here, apprenticed to the Keeper, back in the day? Where are all the other Apprentices whom you suppose we trained, over the years? Where have they all gone?’

Fitz moved his mouth. He didn’t know what to say.

‘And all the Fellows who sit in the hall at breakfast, at lunch and at dinner each day – where do you suppose they work when they’re not chomping their way through First, and Second, and Third Feeding? Where do you suppose they go? What do you suppose they do? What do you suppose they are for?’

‘Arwan,’ said the Keeper, quietly. ‘You’re not helping him.’

‘No, Agatha, I’m not,’ said the Jack. ‘But I’m treating him like a person.’ He