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

his chest. He hadn’t heard a tread on the tower stairs. He hadn’t heard the door open. He hadn’t seen so much as a mote of dust shift in a sunbeam. And yet here was a girl – the taller girl from the courtyard, the confident one – standing before him. In his alarm and surprise, Fitz now noticed everything about her with flashbulb clarity: her height and slender delicateness; the brushed bronze of her skin beneath a loose cotton dress, and the folds of her long hair, brown as a knot in oak; the length of her arms, a flat tilt to her jaw, a quirk of the face like a smile that hovered always in her cheek; a fragrance like leaves in autumn; her bare feet. But he noticed above all, as he had noticed no other thing in all his life – cleaved to it with a distraction that stunned and paralysed him – the ice in her eyes, neither blue nor white, but the colour that air itself would take, were it to freeze and float in a sky of light.

‘Hello, I said,’ said the girl.

Fitz stood up.

‘You’re in my room,’ said Fitz.

The girl looked around now, appraising it, taking it in.

‘I am in the room,’ she said, as if conceding something. ‘The Master sent me to get you, to come to your Enrolment. After that it’s dinner.’

‘You haven’t got any shoes on,’ said Fitz.

‘I’m practising,’ said the girl.

‘Practising for what?’

‘Making no impression on the world.’

‘Maybe you’d be more successful if you didn’t stare at people,’ said Fitz.

‘Fair,’ she said. Fitz thought she might be blushing. He was wrong. ‘I’m Dina. You’re new.’

‘I’m Fitz,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Dina.

‘Who is the Master?’

‘Surely you know him already?’ Dina asked. Her brows furrowed with incomprehension. ‘He’s the reason you’re here.’

‘You mean Mr Ahmadi.’

‘The Master. Here, everyone is known by their role in the game – except for the Prents, of course. Apprentices. We’re still students. We don’t have offices yet.’

Fitz felt as if a light had been switched on in his head. The baffling exchange between Mr Ahmadi and that man at the gate – the Registrar – came back to him again. Mr Ahmadi had presented him as his apprentice, a student, someone without an office – yet. They had spoken of a game.

‘Hello in there,’ said Dina.

‘Hi,’ Fitz answered, his eyes focusing again to take in the girl who stood before him, her head slightly inclined, the look of idle intensity, almost cruelty, once again in her frozen eyes.

‘You looked for a moment as if you had disappeared somewhere far away,’ said Dina, ‘and right now – past now – we need to be in the Porch. So, even if you have another forty thousand questions, follow me.’

She pivoted on her toes, and disappeared through the doorway and down the stairs, as quietly as a cat. Fitz watched her go, as if from behind a window or from a great distance.

‘Now,’ she called. Her voice echoed on the circling stone of the stairwell.

There was nothing in the room to take. He shut the door behind him and raced down the stairs, taking them two and sometimes three at a time. He reached the bottom in a fluster, conscious of his heavy stomping and dizzy from the torrent of turning. Dina was standing outside in the courtyard. By the time Fitz was able to see straight, she was almost laughing.

‘Lesson one,’ she said. ‘Your eyes don’t necessarily have to follow your body. Next time, fix them on something that doesn’t turn, and you won’t lose your balance.’

It was Fitz’s turn to blush.

‘When you’re sure you’re ready, follow me,’ said Dina. She strode off with her light step, touching the hard gravel of the courtyard with only the ball of her foot. Fitz didn’t hesitate. Even through his shoes, the gravel seemed to bruise his heels.

Through an arched passage they reached another court, this one the low, timbered square with walls all of white daub. Here steep thatched eaves hung low over a one-storey hall, at the centre of which stood a wide oak door. In the middle of the door hung an iron knocker, in the shape of a large, closed fist.

Fitz, following Dina’s eyes, saw that this must be the Porch. Inside, through small, thick panes of glass that distorted everything, he could see a warm light, and the richly dyed gowns of the Officers.

‘Not yet,’ she said. She didn’t break stride.

Fitz frowned, faltering. ‘But you said we’re already late.’

The older girl walked straight on, as if he hadn’t spoken, and ducked through a low passage. Fitz hurried to catch her. After the humility of the little court they had left, he hadn’t expected what now greeted them. A sweeping stone staircase, with a narrow base but fanning wide to both sides, rose steeply at the far end of the court towards a little round building, a palace entirely faced in the softest pink marble and capped with a gleaming golden dome that – rising above the shadows of the court – caught the last of the evening’s sun. To both sides steep marbled walls rose into the evening sky, tall and magnificently carved, crowned with ornamental battlements leaved with gold. Dina was already walking up the grand stairs, taking them two at a stride.

By the time Fitz caught up with her, she had reached the top. He was out of breath, his lungs rasping with pain from the climb. Dina seemed relaxed and easy.

‘Second lesson,’ she said. ‘Keep up, newbie.’

‘What are we doing up here?’ said Fitz, between breaths. ‘What is this place?’

‘Turn round,’ she said.

He did. The entire Heresy lay unfolded at their feet. If he had had any breath in him, he’d have caught it. Instead, he looked out gasping in stupid wonder. It was like the view from his tower room, almost, but wider, grander, all in a single piece, and behind the jumbled courts and halls and towers and squares of