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

Fitz hadn’t climbed halfway before the man’s long strides caught him up; pushing past him, he easily fiddled the lock on a hatch at the top.

The hatch swung open in a wild whirl of wind. Fitz saw at once, saw with a lurch in his guts, that it led on to the roof: an expanse of glass panels in a heavy metal frame, lit from below, gave on to the glowing, throbbing darkness of the city sky. Beyond, as far as his eye could see, there were only roofs, buildings, and more roofs.

‘There is no time to wait, child,’ said Mr Ahmadi. Outside the door he climbed on to a ladder that ran up the wall. As Fitz followed, looking only ahead, only at the individual rungs, at the wet stone behind them, Mr Ahmadi leaned down from above and gently swung shut the door after them.

They climbed, first up the stone face of a little cupola, and then, by another ladder, across the cupola’s dome. Always the wind tore at them, knocking, wheedling, inviting, departing in a huff one instant, only to return the next with a new invitation. Fitz fixed his mind on his fists, and one by one he locked them to the rungs of the ladder. Step on step, handhold on handhold, they rose. No one followed them now; no one saw them crawling, like ants, across the sheer face of the museum’s highest, sheerest roof. It never occurred to Fitz to ask where they were going – all he knew was to move his fists, one upon the other.

When they could go no further, Fitz stopped. He looked up. Mr Ahmadi crouched on a wide ledge. From a large case sitting on the ledge he was removing pieces of equipment – Fitz could hardly see against the glare from below, and in the wind that seemed to rise in surges, like fast swells breaking on the shore, from the dome below. And then all of a sudden he knew. He had only to draw himself over the ledge.

‘Put this on. Put your arms through the loops, and buckle it round your chest. Pull the straps tight.’ Fitz did as he was instructed. In a few moments more he had been clipped to Mr Ahmadi’s harness.

‘There is one thing I know,’ Mr Ahmadi said, as he lashed himself strap by strap into the heavy frame. ‘The wind never lies. It may whip and crush you, but it serves no master but itself. It may never be your friend, but it will never be your enemy, either. The wind never breaks faith. The wind is free.’

Don’t be long.

And then Mr Ahmadi stepped off the cupola’s shallow ledge into the wind, and they flew.

THE HERESY

6

The Heresy

The room was small, but bright. His bed, hardly more than a pallet laid upon a board, stood to one side of a tight square; on the other wall a little desk had been placed beside a window. Before it stood a wooden stool, round with four legs. Against the adjacent wall, opposite the door, there was a second window, square, like the room. Otherwise, everything about the space spoke only to its emptiness. No carpet covered the bare boards of the floor; no light dangled from above; no curtains framed the windows. The walls were white, and rose high and blank to a lofty ceiling. Apart from his bed, the desk and the little stool, the only furniture in the room – the only thing – was a trapdoor in the ceiling. This was the tower room, and Fitz knew that the door opened upon nothing but the sky.

Everything was exactly as he would have wished.

Fitz sat on the edge of the neat bed and rehearsed his memories of the last day’s events. It seemed to him like a dream, or a thing that had happened to someone else.

He began with the moment Mr Ahmadi had leaped from the cupola above the museum. The wind must have been crashing hard into the dome, because it had splashed up as waves do on the shore, and the updraughts had rocketed the wing into the sky, higher and higher as Mr Ahmadi circled in a narrowing gyre. The world had become dizzy then, and coursed by as on a carousel, roof after roof, and broken, slurred lights, red and white in a dark haze, swam. At last he had become aware that they were gliding – but only after they had been gliding for some time. His stomach pushed into his ears, and when he wiggled his fingers, he was sure he felt his toes. Tense, compacted, his body ached in its harness and seemed to stagger through the heights of air. Falling, they had risen by lurches, shuddering and surging ever higher. He could remember the cold, the surprising affront of wind like ice that slipped into his clothes, then into his skin, that held his bones in unyielding hands. He could remember fighting to keep his neck straight, to push his head up, and back, to strain his eyes forward rather than allowing them to fall upon the ground – to fall upon the rushing streets, the people and cars and buses that seemed at once impossibly far, and far too near. But if the ground held terrors, so too did the sky: jolted and buffeted by gusts, Mr Ahmadi struggled to keep the wing steady, and again and again, teasing the updraughts out of the dark canvas of the night, he curled into their sickening towers and they rose, tumbling, until Fitz had thought he might scream.

Perhaps, battered by the wind into a kind of blunted sleep, he had dreamed. Maybe the elevation had undone him, or the cold, a cold that drowned every thought. Whatever the cause, he had