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

needle and tempt and distract them, we wreck their concentration; we show them visions; we addict them to everything you can imagine; and all the time we watch them, measure them, score them, then rack and poison them again. And why? Because we want to know how children work. We don’t just want to know who they are; we want to know everything it is possible to know about what they might be. We want to know what we can turn them into. And in the dark, in the cellars of the Heresy – oh, in the Hell of the Heresy, it is possible to know it all. We want to be able to control every last thing about a child, down to the least wish, the tiniest scrap of a fear, the shred of a half-dreamed dream. And we’re winning. Give us ten more years, twenty, and there will be no possibility, no eventuality in the whole freedom of a child’s life or imagination that we have not strapped, shocked, strobed, strafed, stripped and stifled. And sold. We will own the children. We will own the human race.’

Those arms. Those reaching arms in the well of the Sad King. How did I forget those arms?

‘What does any of this have to do with me?’

The Jack rounded on him, stared at him. His eyes, boiling with fury, spat fire.

‘Are you serious? Are you asking me that?’ he bellowed.

‘Arwan,’ said the Keeper, ‘please.’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Fitz. ‘I can’t save these children. I can’t save my friends. I can’t save any of you. I can’t even save my mother. Or myself.’

‘Everything depends on you. You are the Heresy’s most important experiment, its greatest test in a thousand years.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, child, we are in the business of breaking souls, crushing hearts, grinding the imagination into powder. We anaesthetize. We stupefy. We stultify. We enervate. We drain and we burn. Some children take to it very readily indeed. Try Fingal; he craves brutality, sucks it down like milk. And he’s a lovely boy, but don’t ask Russ to take a stand on a principle; he’d sooner prove a theorem than lay down his life for his friend. Other children are harder to tame, harder to break. We have to try. You think it’s been easy testing Padge? Cracking through the thick, lustrous glaze of Payne’s love for herself? Do you honestly think Dolly will ever be dead behind the eyes? That quick, indomitable, self-doubting, but ultimately dauntless girl? And don’t even get me started on Navy. These children have colossal spirits. They’re titans. They’re magnificent. The best there is.’

‘Then why – why do you bring them to the heart of – why try to train them? –’ Fitz was at a loss.

‘The taller the tree, the harder it falls.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Fitz.

‘What the Jack is trying to explain,’ said the Keeper, ‘is that often it is the noblest and most heroic spirits who, when they are broken, become the greatest villains. And if you can turn them, you can turn anyone.’

And I –

‘And you are the best of all, child.’ The Keeper was almost whispering.

‘I’m nobody,’ said Fitz. I’m not smart, or knowledgeable, quick, musical. I’m not Dolly, or Russ. I’m not Navy, or even Payne.

‘You are the heir to the Kingdom,’ said the Jack, ‘who could not be found. You, who walked into the trap, knowing it was a trap, without a second thought. At the Sad King you could have betrayed anyone, anything. Everyone – everyone – protects themselves at the Sad King. Not you. Instead you gave yourself.’

She told you that. But it’s not true. I betrayed Clare in the end. I stayed. I felt something. I felt at home.

‘You, boy, are the lamp in the night. If we break you, we have fulfilled everything. Everything.’

‘And if you don’t?’

‘Then maybe there’s hope for us after all,’ the big man answered. He laughed. It was a curt, dry laugh, with no feeling in it. ‘But we will not fail.’

Fitz sat, stunned, crowded, unable to think or to feel, unable to move.

‘I’m not telling you this to scare you,’ said the Jack.

The Keeper snorted.

‘I’m telling you this to save you.’ The loft gallery was lit by two blazing lanterns, hung from old hooks in the rafters, one to either side. Their light glowed like rich, rotten yolks against the white walls. Till now the Jack’s face, in this light, had seemed menacing, twisted tight as a rope, but now the light appeared to soften him. He had come to stand over his desk, hands tightened into fists and his broad, muscular knuckles ledged on its polished wood surface, each plane of contact a confrontation. He stared at them, breathing slowly, measuring gulps of air as he drew his lungs in, and out.

He didn’t look up. ‘Run,’ said the Jack quietly. ‘Run if you can.’

Fitz hardly got to his feet. He pivoted on the tips of his toes, and without lifting his head or straightening his back, ducked into the stairwell that led down by many turnings to the Jack’s court below. Where it thudded in his chest like the slap of surf on stone, his heart seemed at once engorged and empty, a voracious mouth biting out big chunks of air. Every cell in his body, from his marrowless bones and muscles flimsy and loose as shrunken petals, to his skin that yawned with hurt and fear, seemed to gape for substance, for some sort of certitude. He had felt more stable falling through the sky above London, more stable crashing from track to track on the hopper. Fitz ran his hand on the bannister, and squared his feet with the treads as he went down. The dark wood of the stairwell, unlit and stained with the traffic of centuries, seemed for a moment reassuring. How many had passed this way!

How many had passed this way, up and down this staircase, up and down every staircase in the Heresy, as if on