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

above, unadorned but for scores of stone ledges that protruded from them, spaced at regular intervals in an ascending spiral that wrapped the hall with its coil. On each of these ledges stood a bust or statue, the faces of Heresiarchs, Masters and Officers of ages past, staring into the centre of the palace’s wide void. Fitz felt the seconds spooling away from him, the moments ticking away like Navy’s steady tread up the tower stairs.

‘Boy.’

The word punctured Fitz’s resolve like a knife in flesh: sudden, painless, chilling. He searched the dim light of the vast interior space, backing towards the door.

‘Here,’ said the voice. Weak and frail though it was, it echoed against the dome. By the time he saw the Jack’s huge form, slumped to his right, his hand was already on the edge of the door.

‘Wedge the door. Then help me up.’

In only a few minutes he heard it all. The Officers had been summoned to the Heresiarchy. Some had come: the faithful, the dupes. The Jack showed him the bodies, lying close to the wall and stretched out beneath their robes: the Sweeper, his hands folded across his sagging chest; the Keeper, pale and tiny, with her long hair no longer plaited but carefully arranged around her head like a radiant fan, as if she were floating away; the Commissar, slack, but still imperious. The stench around them was so strong Fitz gagged.

‘We’ve been here for a week,’ said the Jack, as Fitz pulled him, with all his strength, to his feet. ‘A Nightwalk. The Sweeper – Adrian – was the first to go. Diabetes. He had no insulin. The others – Ludmilla, Agatha – maybe dehydration, maybe hypothermia. I did what I could.’

‘How –’ tried Fitz.

‘By drinking my own piss, boy,’ barked the Jack. His anger hardly seemed frightening now. ‘I expect the girl went through with the Black Wedding after all. I see you survived it.’

Fitz nodded.

‘Don’t hold it against Dolly and Russ. Don’t hold it against Payne. They didn’t know what they were doing. That girl will have made sure they were out of their minds on stack.’

‘But the Commissar –’

And then Fitz realized why the Commissar lay dead in the Heresiarchy.

‘She wanted her out of the way. Stack is a weapon; Ludmilla wouldn’t have given it up without a fight. Let’s just say –’ the Jack paused to catch his breath, unsteady on his feet – ‘Dina is not her father’s daughter. It was a putsch, a coup, a revolution; and she planned it perfectly.’

Almost perfectly.

‘Can you walk?’ asked Fitz.

‘I’ll be all right. Just get me out of the door.’

Fitz helped him to the entrance, which he had blocked with a shoe. The Jack hobbled through, then turned, waiting for Fitz’s arm to guide him down the steps.

‘I’m staying here,’ he said.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ growled the Jack. ‘You don’t want to end up like them.’ He nodded to the bodies.

Fitz grimaced, pointed up.

‘Be careful,’ said the big man. He was already turning away. Fitz watched him take the steps one by one. Something inside him had collapsed, and every step he took seemed a kind of descent within himself.

Fitz shoved the door closed, and heaved on it until he heard the heavy bolt shoot with a thud into place. Once it was closed, he breathed more easily. Now there was no going back.

I have to climb.

There was nothing else for it.

Fitz crossed the hall, put his hand to the grave marble face of the Heresiarch who confronted him, and pulled. The stone hit the floor with a crunch, a single fracture running along the back of its head, and lay still. Fitz leaped on to the ledge. From there it was a metre, maybe a little more, to the next, the slope just shallow enough that he could make the leap. He made it; and as his foot reached the ledge, he swept the next bust from its place with a precise, coordinated swing of his arms. It hit the floor below with a harder crash, skidded, and stopped. He was already in its place. Again he leaped, knocking the marble face from its perch. And again. He didn’t dare look down, but followed the gentle curve of the wall, the slight slope of his ascent, almost running from ledge to ledge, hurling the marbles down as he went: faces, statues, some white, others veined with blue or pink, some painted, some rough, some fine, faces bearded, some with tresses pinned or braided, whole bodies standing broad like conquerors, or hunched like sages at their desks. As he rose against the walls, gaining height against the dome, the stone images fell further, crashed and splintered with ever more spectacular and deafening noise, and Fitz knew now the floor below him was littered with fragments like the white bleached bones of the Heresy’s history, exhumed and spread beneath its temple like a carpet of sharded sorrow and loss. Again he leaped. Again he dashed the idol down. Again, again, again. All the while he circled the vast space, racing along the wall, rising from ledge to ledge towards the dome, throwing himself up and the marbles down, rising ever towards the lofty arc of the palace’s dome. Anger drove him on, and resistance, refusal, rejection. Horror.

At last he stood before the final ledge. Before him lay the last of the plinths, perhaps the first of them, on it a face so fresh and full of its sadness it might then, through the ages and the hard case of stone in which it stood, imprisoned, have shed a tear. Beyond it, above it, the ceiling of the dome rose in a shallow curve towards the little stone cupola at its centre – where, open to the skies, the Master’s albatrosses perched, restive and expectant. The roof of the dome was supported by eight massive oak beams that lifted like bent bows, like the heavy bent stems of roses towards one another, to flower