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

Mr Ahmadi, himself trailing the short porter, up a wide path and through an evergreen hedge. Beyond the hedge, lawns like ample skirts lay spread round a rambling sprawl of buildings, dressed in places with stone, some tall, some broad, some timbered and twisted, others soaring with geometrical precision into arch and buttress, turret, tower and spire. Each shouldered another, and in their juxtapositions the centuries, and the eye, jostled; but Fitz had found again that with every step he took towards the sandstone gatehouse, his unquiet heart settled, his straining nerves relaxed, and every taut and aching sinew in his body relaxed.

The porter had left them at the gatehouse. Inside, another man stood between them and the door to the open court beyond. He wore a heavy felt coat all in red, belted with a black sash, that dressed him to his knees. On his head was a matching round cap. With his legs planted wide, as wide as his wide shoulders, he seemed to occupy the whole of the passage. There was no getting round him. Above him, in the flat stone wall of the gatehouse was carved a huge, single eye. Unadorned and uninterpreted by any text, by its openness it seemed to Fitz to express unsleeping vigilance; but there was something strange to it, too – a kind of formlessness, an emptiness.

It has no colour, no pupil.

The eye sat directly over the man’s head as he accosted them.

‘As Registrar to the Heresy,’ he had said, ‘I require you to register your visitor.’

‘He is not a visitor,’ Mr Ahmadi had answered. ‘I present my Apprentice, Fitzroy Worth, and challenge the Heresiarch to break him.’

‘The game is already ended,’ said the Registrar. He stepped aside to let them pass.

‘The game is already ended,’ said Mr Ahmadi, with a nod of his head, inclining the tip of his tall hat. Then he had stridden through the inner door.

The strange words had swept over him like water at the shore; dumb and senseless as the sand, Fitz had felt them rush over him, cold and foreign. And yet like water, too, they drew him; where Mr Ahmadi went, as in a dream he followed.

All the rest, almost, had been a blur. They had passed from one court to another, some open and grand, others small and intimate, some arcaded, others austere, here a Gothic tower wall blanketed in ivy, there a low courtyard that might once have stabled workhorses. From path to path, through arches and doors, Fitz had tried to hold pace with Mr Ahmadi, never attempting to do more than follow him; from the deference and formality with which others treated his neighbour, he had understood his place. The man who had loaned him books, who had admired Clare – that man now appeared completely gone. This man was obviously something else entirely: someone before whom others scattered, suddenly furtive and unsure. He had swept through crowds as a wind through dry leaves.

In one court, almost the last, they had crossed a complex pattern of hexagonal paths to join a little knot of children, who were clustered round a well or some sort of fountain. Their heads bowed, they were deeply absorbed in a hushed conversation. For the first – and only – time, Mr Ahmadi had broken stride, stopping beside the oblivious children with the start of a stern look in the corners of his eyes. One of the children – a girl maybe Fitz’s own age, or a little older – had turned her head and stared at him with such idle curiosity, such relaxed intensity, that he had almost blushed as he looked away.

‘What is this?’ Mr Ahmadi had said, holding up a loose coil of something like wire, or thin cable.

From within the thick cluster of children’s faces – Fitz hadn’t seen her – another girl’s voice had answered. ‘Retractable arrows,’ she said. ‘I’ve fitted my crossbow with cabled harpoon spikes.’

Mr Ahmadi had held out his arm. The little clot of children had opened, and into his hand first the heavy iron spike itself, and then the heavy crossbow had been placed – with ceremony, with respect. For a moment he had weighed it in his palm. As he had turned it back over to outstretched hands, his face – briefly inquisitive – had again grown stern. ‘Be careful with it.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the tall girl. Her face radiated assurance and power. ‘She’s an excellent shot.’ For a second Fitz stared at her, awed by the confidence with which she spoke. But her face, like those of so many others, had, as Mr Ahmadi had turned again on his heel, striding off, instantly been lost.

‘I know,’ Mr Ahmadi had called over his shoulder. And muttered, almost to Fitz, ‘that’s exactly what worries me.’

At the foot of a tall, round tower Mr Ahmadi had left him. ‘Go to the top of the stairs,’ he had told him. ‘There you will find a room that is yours. The door is unlocked – few doors here are locked. Wait there. Wash. Sleep, if you can.’

Fitz had slept in the tower room; by the time he had reached the top of the high stairs, his legs had failed him and sleep the only thing he could do.

Judging by the position of the sun, now colliding with crags and hills on the horizon, he had slept for hours. No one had come for him. No one had seemed to want him at all, for anything. He found a basin on the window sill, full of water, and beside it a cloth. Slowly, methodically, as if the movements of his arms were the rising and falling of his chest, as if the slow circles he described on his chest, his arms, his legs were the returns of a dream, he washed himself. Then he dressed.

‘Hello,’ said a voice, stabbing through the peaceful insulation of his reveries.

Fitz felt as if his heart were not beating, but tearing a path out of