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

on folds, cramming the heart. The space was dizzy with light; his thoughts, his eyes, swam. Each of the lanterns on its own chain hung slung from some far fixing in the ancient rafters, invisible above. Fitz had a sense of the hall’s height, of its length, of the black, carved wood of its walls and the high pitch of the ceiling’s ridged peak, its almost intolerable expanse and capacity. Dina relinquished his hand and he wandered alone into the gold-burnished brightness. Fitz found himself tracing a tightly defined path that wound to the right, then scythed in a long spiral anticlockwise into the centre of the hall. Faster and faster he circled in the shifting, fascinating, disorientating candlescape of the hall, driving towards the midst of all until, like his own heart high and hurling with its sense of arrival, the lights leaped on three sides in a towering, fluting convection that girded the hall’s innermost enclosure.

Dina drew up to his side where Fitz had come, abruptly, to the lanterned path’s middle end. Leaning to the floor she lifted by its handle a heavy oak door, and dragged it aside; together they stared at the hole she had exposed, paved around with rough stone and jewels of many colours. Circular, five or six feet in diameter, its maw of darkness shrouded with a rising mist that swirled and dispersed into the wide, warm hall of honeyed light, it seemed like the question to which the hall was the answer, the doubt to which the hall asserted its spectacular hymn of reply.

‘You weren’t supposed to pick me,’ said Dina. ‘You were supposed to pick him, the Master.’ She said it as a matter of fact. Her voice cut through the light and magic that surrounded them, and hunkered like the black of the hole before them, down, flat. It was as if they inhabited two different places, two different worlds, Fitz trembling at the centre of a gyring hive of illumination as encompassing and assuring as he had ever known, cocooned by its splendid brightness, while Dina, beside him, stood in an empty room with the lights on.

‘What is this place?’ Fitz asked. Still awed by the majesty of the space, his voice, hushed, barely registered over the slow hiss of ten thousand wicks alight.

‘The Lantern Hall was built over a kind of well,’ Dina answered. ‘The well we call the Sad King.’

‘Why?’

‘The king who built the Heresy, who was the first Heresiarch, had lost something that was very dear to him, something that disappeared into the earth and never returned. This – feels – like that.’

‘What is the feeling,’ Fitz murmured. His eyes closed, but the light seeped through his eyelids gold and gorgeous like butter melting through gauze.

‘All of this –’ Dina gestured around the hall – ‘grew from that. All of this can only ever grow from that.’

Fitz looked at her. She didn’t seem to feel like anything. He considered how he felt. He had been excited at first entering the Lantern Hall, eager when rounding the lit way that led him to this place. That excitement had, like a taut string bowed, and bowed, sounded in him with so much resonance and heat that he had felt he might burst. Now, here, staring into the darkness of the void in the floor, listening to Dina, it ran from him as suddenly as the yolk from a cracked egg.

‘Third lesson,’ said Dina. ‘Never forget to forget yourself.’

Fitz watched the mist spiralling in the well hole of the Sad King. The shapes changed and changed again, changed into and out of themselves.

‘Everyone who comes here, everyone who is matriculated as an Apprentice, has to come to the well of the Sad King. It’s a ritual. You’re supposed to bring the thing that you love the most in the world, and give it away. Only after you have given away what you love most, can you begin your training.’

Fitz was immediately conscious that he had only one thing with him to give. He wouldn’t.

‘What did you give?’

‘Maybe one day you’ll find out.’

Fitz remembered that icy, distant look in Dina’s eyes, and thought it unlikely that he would ever find out anything about her. Her eyes were like an empty room.

‘Did you just drop it in?’

‘Sort of.’

Within the swirl of mist rising from below – maybe two feet down, maybe less – the interior of the well went dark. That was where the water was. Fitz put his hand to Clare’s silver jay and felt the tiny metal of it cool between his thumb and forefinger.

‘What if I don’t? Give something up.’

‘Then you can’t stay in the Heresy. You have to make the choice. That’s why we’re here.’

Fitz’s eyes strayed from the swirling mist and its unknowable shapes to the hard paved edge of the well head, mortared with dark jewels like scabbed wounds. He knew what it would mean to leave the Heresy. Here at the centre of the web, maybe, he might be safe; but out there he knew what awaited him. He had seen the fires, the shadows of strange forms moving in the trees; he had heard the threats, and the whispering that moved like wind among the leafless trees. He remembered Aslan.

His fingers, almost of their own volition, began to tug at the jay.

No. This is mine.

A lump stood out in his throat and lifted involuntarily towards his mouth. Beneath it the blood in his veins seemed to dance with air, to blow and puff as it sputtered in his chest. An idea was forming just out of reach of his conscious thought; he could feel it beginning to protrude from somewhere almost hidden within him, swirling out like the mist that rose towards him. He was afraid to look at it. He forced himself.

I’ll give myself but I won’t give that.

How hard can it be?

‘I’ve made my decision,’ he said.

‘So quickly?’ Dina was smiling at him. Her eyes flicked to his hand, which still