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

barn door. Within, Fitz could see only dark, from which protruded the low gleam of a highly varnished wooden bar. At its head, only inches away, was fixed a large, iron ring, engraved with a circle of wildly writhing snakes. All round the ring, too, as if the snakes cut into the metal had escaped from their iron beds, wrought serpentine forms coiled and lashed into the air. The menacing energy of their ferrified jaws and near-quivering tails struck Fitz like a bite.

By the time Clare and Ned had caught up to them, Mr Ahmadi – drawing on the iron ring – had pulled out what looked like a cross between an old-fashioned carriage and an antique wooden sleigh. He drew it directly on to the tracks, aligning its metal wheels on each side with the rails, and then – working a crank set low at the vehicle’s front – locked the wheels into the track. He ducked back into the darkness, and returned in seconds with a heavy pile of folded black cloth in one arm, and in his other hand a long wooden pole, the sort of rod you might use, Fitz thought, if you wanted to go fishing for a whale. Mr Ahmadi handed the cloth to Clare while he fixed the rod at the back of the gig, driving it into a socket and then securing it with two metal pins that stood near. Only then did Fitz notice that the pole was connected to the cloth by a myriad thin, strong cords.

Halyards.

‘Get in,’ said Mr Ahmadi, gesturing as a magician might, to a woman about to be sawn in half.

‘Where are you taking us?’ asked Clare. Her voice half demanded, half beseeched.

‘Away from them,’ said Mr Ahmadi, with his eyes on the wood at the opening of the tunnel.

Behind them, shifting shadows jostled against one another in the day’s last, grey light. A trick of perspective made them seem impossibly tall and sinuous. Fitz couldn’t count them – there were too many, it was too dark, or both. He couldn’t count them; he could hardly see them; but he could hear them.

Whispering. Hushing.

‘Who are they, and why are they chasing us?’

‘They’re called Wispers,’ answered Mr Ahmadi. He offered his hand to Clare to help her step up into the gig. ‘They’re scouts, spies. I’m not sure why they’re after you. But if we don’t move – and quickly – you’ll have to ask them yourself.’

Clare took his hand and stepped into the gig. Ned followed, leaping on to its wooden floor, then settling uneasily on its intricately carved, rolled wooden bench. As the gig shifted beneath him on the track, he grabbed an ornate knob beside him, and grimaced.

The wind was already whipping at the corners of the cloth where it lay in Clare’s arms. Fitz, perhaps alone among them, could see what was about to happen. He glanced again at the Wispers, at their silent, elongated figures loping down the track towards them. Some dread he couldn’t have explained pushed him back against the tunnel wall – until the moment Mr Ahmadi took him under the arms and lifted him into the gig to sit between Clare and Ned.

‘Don’t worry, little prince,’ he said in Fitz’s ear. ‘I have been dancing with the snakes since before you were born.’

The hard oak bench cracked against his arching shoulders, and Fitz crumpled. Mr Ahmadi hauled up on the wooden bar at the front of the gig, until it had risen, like a lever, to stand upright. As it shifted into place, the whole gig seemed to condense or go rigid, the way a cloud of bees will of a sudden swarm. The iron ring at the bar’s end now hung a few feet away, but level with Fitz’s gaze; in the eyes of its eight wrought-iron snakes, dark jewels were set that, like covered fires, seemed to smoke and promise burning.

He shuddered. Somewhere in the distance, a train whistled.

Mr Ahmadi leaped in to stand before them. He stared full into their faces, his expression a wild blank. ‘Hold on to whatever you can,’ he said. In a single fluid motion, he reached for the cloth where it sat in Clare’s lap and, hurling it like a discus as he spun forward, unfolded it into the accelerating, tumbling, hungry wind that roared down the tunnel. It soared and spread against the dim light before them, until with a barbaric snap that pierced into the very base of Fitz’s spine, the sailcloth flexed into its full figure, and the carriage lurched ahead. Mr Ahmadi gripped the iron ring, and leaned back until the top of his black hat, a sleek silk oval, hung before Fitz like a black moon.

It was at that moment that, as if a thought remembered in the nick of time, in a blur of fur and muscle Aslan – bounding beside the accelerating gig – sprang on the boards beneath Fitz’s feet. His momentum, hurtling forward, would have bowled his big front shoulders directly into Mr Ahmadi’s legs, had his hindquarters not caught on the gig’s edge and braked him. Scrabbling as the wind shot them forward, the big dog strained with every claw, tearing at the air with his bulging eyes. Fitz lunged at him with a cry, and arms, and hands, grabbing at his fur, his flesh, his legs, somehow hauling on his tail until, with a sound like a stifled howl, he was in.

The next few minutes passed in a rush. Ignorant of the commotion behind him, Mr Ahmadi drove the gig down the tracks as if before a hurricane blast, ever faster, ever wilder. The buffeting air that had smacked and pummelled them began, as the gig picked up pace, to howl in its creaking sail; through it all Mr Ahmadi, erect and unbowed, held his hat high, his only concession to the torrents of wind his unrelenting, morbid grip on the iron ring before him. Peering forward in terror