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

cascade of pebbles scattering down the slope outside. From far away, there was a shout, as of someone in pain.

‘We have to move,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘In.’

‘Come,’ Navy said, her voice an eager whisper. ‘I don’t need to tell you the rest, anyway. I’ll show you.’

The tunnel down which they ran, as fast as Navy’s closely caped legs would allow, was narrow, but high. It seemed to have been carved; the scalloping trace of chisels became ever more visible as they hurried downslope and the air began to lighten – and Fitz wanted to stop, to make sense of it, to run his hands along the grit of the stone ground beneath him, to feel the cool, wet surface of the walls, with their crazy veins of bright quartz gleaming. His gaze was still lingering on the tunnel walls, as they passed, when suddenly they opened into a broad cavern. He nearly crashed into Navy’s shoulder.

They stood there, breathing by the moment in fast, thick pants. Still catching his balance, Fitz tried, and failed, to take it all in. Around them slouched in gaudy luxury the most unlikely vision he had ever seen, or dreamed: a high-domed cavern, circular, gave out to the west by myriad windows cut in the cliff’s steep face on to the sea and the evening sun; but it was not the sun that irradiated and warmed its glowing air, or not the sun merely – for the cavern’s walls and ceiling were spread with beaten gold, gold that amplified and spun what little light it was given into threads and braids and sheets of spangled, scintillating fire, so that all the air seemed to hum and drone with honeyed metal. Around the cavern dim and burning ran a balustraded path cut from the stone that looked down on a pool of seawater, dimly visible but clearly audible – seething with tiny bubbles that frothed and exploded in the dark air. Fitz stared out over the darkness, but not at the water, nor at the circular stairs cut in the inner stone wall of the cavern, that circled and ascended from it, nor at the elaborate carving on the inner walls, inlaid with gold and studded with diamonds that palely glittered in the weak and failing light that was still shafting in through the western windows; but at the island at the pool’s centre, a circular platform all of basalt that writhed out of the water on the five muscular fingers of a huge, single stone hand, on which was set beneath a canopy of gold a simple, squared tomb, all of white sandstone veined with quartz and set with a border of rubies and emeralds. If the cavern had taken his breath away, by the tomb – by its strangeness, by its size – Fitz found himself wholly moved, even to tears, and as he felt them gather in his eyes and tip at intervals down his cheeks, he felt also a kind of knot twisting in the base of his throat, a compression in which was combined not only joy and relief, but sorrow.

It has been for this.

Directly in the middle of the flat sandstone cover of the tomb, set in a simple carved niche, lay the Giant’s Almanac.

Mr Ahmadi had seen it, and was already circling to the head of the steps, where a gap in the retaining wall would allow him down to the water and there, by a little skiff chained to a landing, to the island of the tomb. Without even thinking about it, Fitz ran after him.

He caught up with him just at the bottom of the steps. Navy wasn’t far behind.

‘No,’ said Fitz, setting his hand to Mr Ahmadi’s arm.

Mr Ahmadi stopped. He turned.

‘The light is falling,’ he answered. ‘There isn’t much time.’ Please, said his eyes.

Fitz realized that he was right. Even as they had stood in the chamber, the lustrous honeyed light had begun to dissipate, and the chamber to take on a pale, almost green gleam; nonetheless, Fitz stood there, his hand still on Mr Ahmadi’s arm, his face turned up in supplication, no words issuing from his heart.

‘Why?’ asked Mr Ahmadi.

‘I don’t want to know,’ said Fitz.

Their voices reverberated in the chamber, echoing from the metalled dome, the smooth and coated walls, the little rippling water.

‘I don’t want to find out that I’m not myself,’ said Fitz.

From behind him, Navy trained her arms through his, and bound them close round his chest, holding him to her, and burying her head in his shoulder. He smelled the salt on her, felt the clinging skin and bone of her beneath the cape and her shirt, sensed the blood beating in her wrists and neck. His own answered it.

You’re alive. I want to be alive.

‘All my life,’ said Mr Ahmadi, ‘the Heresy has owned me. When I was a boy, it took my childhood. When I became a man, it stole my thoughts. For the briefest time, for a blink, a breath, three beats that my heart will never forget, I escaped – to a world of dreams, to a world richer than my imagination, to a place where children weren’t despised but prized, where gold wasn’t just saved for gilding a man’s grave – it was drunk, it was spoken, we breathed it. In that freedom, what was not possible to me? What goodness did I not enjoy, like fruit on the lips, like sugar on the tongue? Child, the Heresy dragged me back. It wrecked my love, everything that was dear to me in this world. One child I lost, the other they took, and I know the Heresiarch plans to use her to hold me forever. Let me break that hold. Help me. Let me give them the Almanac. Let me buy my freedom.’

Navy’s arms had tightened round Fitz’s chest. He almost couldn’t breathe.

He doesn’t know.

‘Mr Ahmadi,’ he began. ‘Habi. There’s something –’

‘No,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘I won’t let you say it.’ He turned