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

Then the silent forms began to swarm through the open doors, body upon body, crawling and climbing up the shaft, the holes through which they had once extended their arms, hoping for food, craning for scraps, now serving them for steps and for handholds as they tumbled up and over one another, climbing towards the light of the lanterned heavens above. Ten, then twenty, then fifty took to the walls, and then they poured out of the doors by their hundreds, moving silently, their long and emaciated limbs writhing one over the other like worms squirming beneath a flat stone lifted.

Tears were streaming from Navy’s eyes, from the Master’s, from Fitz’s own. The Professor and Ned, holding to the ropes, swore grim oaths as the lanterns still dropped, lurching and swinging dangerously from the tumult of bodies that blocked and blacked out the passage above.

‘Tear it down!’ Fitz cried, his voice cracking like glass, his voice shattering against the bodies that climbed away, and up, that erupted above him from the floor of the Lantern Hall. ‘Tear it down! Tear it down! Burn it all to the ground!’

When the lanterns touched the ground, they all leaped instinctively to the floor. The rope slacked above them, but danced wildly from side to side as above, out of sight, it was caught in the surge of bodies climbing through the well.

Let them go. Let them burn the Heresy to the ground.

‘Follow me,’ said Fitz, and he set off running down the wide tunnel through which – swimming – he had so often passed before. Light behind from the lanterns, and ahead from the Sensorium, showed the way, and they made quick time down the sandy, soggy floor of the passage. At the stairs, Fitz didn’t look up to acknowledge the Riddler, who stood above them, watching them go; he kept running, this time into darkness, holding before him the crescent lamp that Navy had brought with her from the Rack’s tower. On and on down the straight tunnel they went, Fitz first, then Navy, and behind her Clare and Ned, the Professor, the Master. Still the tunnel dropped, and the thin trickle of water at their feet, sandy and crusted with grit and sludge, began to thicken and deepen, until they were running through half an inch, then an inch, then a shallow pool of cold and stinking seawater.

‘Fitz,’ yelled Navy. ‘Stop.’

He splashed to a halt, and the others behind him. Navy took the light and held it up, over their heads.

They were passing beneath an arch in the tunnel. It was framed and adorned with beautiful white carving, in the most intricate patterns.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Fitz. ‘But down here –’

‘Those are bones,’ said Navy, and Fitz saw that she was right – bone after bone set together with geometrical regularity, creating regular geometrical patterns against the dark stone surface beneath.

‘Those are human bones,’ she said.

They advanced more slowly after that, beyond the arch and into a tunnel lined ever more thickly with the same terrifying geometries. At last, less than twenty metres on, the tunnel opened on a broad, low cave, at its centre a pool of water, but on its sloping sides, where they rose to the ceiling, dry. The walls and ceiling of the cave as far as their eyes could pierce through the gloom had been entirely covered in bones – stacks and ranks of them, here clustering in fans, there forming circles and grids and spirals, bones of every shape and size, from the neat slender arcs of ribs, and the tiny lumps of knuckles and vertebrae, to the long, thick staves of the femur and tibia, the humerus, the ulna and radius.

Clare gasped.

‘It’s disgusting,’ she said.

‘It’s the Ossarium,’ said the Master. ‘In days gone by, the Masters of the Heresy called it the Kingdom of Bones. It was built as a place of pilgrimage and meditation. I don’t think anyone has been here for centuries. Meanwhile, the sea has been washing the bones twice a day.’

‘How do we get out of here?’ asked Clare. ‘It must open on to the beach – if the tide –’

‘It does,’ called Ned, from the darkness ten metres further down the dry shore of the cave. ‘But there’s no way we can climb through that until the dawn comes.’

He pointed into the gloom where in a symphony of bleached bones the walls of the cave fluted into dark and forbidding water. There was an inlet down there somewhere, beneath the cold and swirling ebb, but it was far too dark to make it out.

‘Then we wait for the dawn to save us,’ said Professor Farzan.

‘Or for the high tide to drown us,’ said the Master.

‘Either way, we wait,’ said Navy. She climbed to the highest ledge on the cave’s near inner slope, and sat down.

THE KINGDOM

16

The Game of Kings

The Riddler’s Song

The king sat at his supper

and chewed upon a bone;

the worm sat next beside him,

dining upon his own.

The king called for his servants

to cast the vermin thence;

the worm cried, ‘Man! Attend me!

Dispatch his eminence!’

The king, in stupefaction

at so unusual terms,

demanded satisfaction

in the quarrel of Men v Worms.

Said the worm, ‘Your vermin’s dainty,

nicer than men on thrones,

for though he eat much putrid meat,

he reverences the bones.’

‘No worm,’ the king insisted,

‘beside a king is aught.’

‘And yet by supper’s end,’ he said,

mark well my words,

by supper’s end

I’ll gnaw your flesh to naught.’

In the end, the tide came in well before the dawn.

Clare and Ned set their backs to the water, where the little group cowered on the top of the innermost slope of the cave, and the others sat around them, nervous, tired.

‘Will they follow us here?’ Fitz asked.

‘We’ll know if they do, when they do,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘But there is one thing of which you can be sure. The Heresy