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

they couldn’t be called friends; the way they carried themselves, the way they interacted, was hardly friendly. Fingal seemed to be shuttered in his own world, contemptuous of the others. Navy’s heart she had pinned to her sleeve, but no one seemed to have any time for it at all, apart from Fitz. Russ, shy and amiable, was absorbed in a quiet conversation with Padge about a book Padge had propped in his lap against the side of the table. They both looked to be about fifteen, Padge a little taller and stronger, and with a great deal more freckles. Dolly – whom Fitz recognized as the girl with the crossbow – was probably Fitz’s own age, and had the darkest skin he had ever seen, with dense black curls that cascaded over her back and shoulders, hiding her face from his view – except for the brief moments when she stole a glance at Dina, whom she seemed to revere, or mistrust. And then there was Payne – was that her first name, or her second name? – who was using a knife to cut her bread into minute and identical squares, and lining them up in orderly rows on her plate. These children didn’t seem like friends at all, but they had something else.

Family. They’re one another’s family.

The recognition hit Fitz like a brick. He looked around the hall in which they sat, trying to understand how this little knot of unlike hearts and ill-matched minds had come to share so much. Their table sat on a sort of raised wooden platform at the end of the long, lofty hall. It was a long table, but only covered half the platform; beyond his end stood another table at which the seven Officers were seated, each of them engaged in animated conversation with her or his neighbours. At his end of the table, not two metres from theirs, Fitz could hear a little of what Mr Ahmadi was saying, and he tried for a moment to parse it – something about research, needing to spend days in the library, something about requiring the Keeper’s aid to solve a puzzle. But servers moved between the two tables, laying down plates of food and taking others, and in their bustle Fitz lost the thread; and so his thoughts and attention shifted back to his own table, to the way Navy and Dolly – who might well be friends, on second thoughts – were pulling ridiculous faces at one another, at Dina’s unquiet silence, as she pushed through her food, her eyes ranging restlessly over the other children, picking out details and harvesting observations. Behind her, below, on the hall’s broader floor, three long tables ran the length of the room in parallel, each flanked by long wooden benches. At these benches sat hundreds of men and women of all ages – some as young, almost, as Fingal, others as old as the Rack. The same servers moved among these tables, shifting bread, platters of meat, and bowls piled with steaming vegetables, pouring water and wine, and watching the diners closely in order to anticipate their next needs.

‘Who are they?’ Fitz asked Dina, gesturing behind her to the benches crammed with diners.

‘Fellows of the Heresy,’ she answered. She was halfway through Second Feeding, as she had termed it when the plates of meat arrived. Dina had been served first, Fitz last. ‘They all work here, and live here. Each of them has an Office – like a department, working under one of the Offs – but they all eat together.’

‘Offs?’

Dina pointed at the Officers at the next table. ‘Offs,’ she said. She swivelled her finger so that it pointed, almost with disdain, at their own table. ‘Prents.’ Then she gestured behind her, vaguely. ‘Fells.’

‘And, those people, were they all students, before they were –’

‘Fells,’ said Navy. ‘No.’

‘Yes,’ said Dolly.

‘But not like us,’ Navy said. ‘Some Prents go on to be Fells, some go to do Society work somewhere else. But we’re the real Prents. We’re training to be Offs. That’s different.’

Fitz nodded as if he understood.

‘As if you’ll ever be the Registrar,’ said Fingal.

‘Like I said,’ said Navy. She put her fingers at the corner of her mouth and dragged her cheeks into the caricature of a frown, miming her derision to Fitz from down the table. ‘Moodies.’

‘And what about the –’ Fitz was staring with interest at the commotion and hubbub in the hall below them. His eyes followed particularly the graceful, almost dancelike ministrations of the black-coated servers who dodged between the tables and seemed to skip about the hall, delivering and removing platters, pouring from great jugs, and clearing plates and cutlery.

‘Servers,’ said Navy.

‘Serfs,’ corrected Dina.

‘It’s not a nice word,’ Navy protested.

‘And yet it’s what we all say,’ Dina said, while she chewed, refusing to look at the girl who looked so earnestly at her. ‘Even you.’

‘They mainly work for the Commissar,’ Navy said, ‘and the Sweeper. But every Office has its Serfs. You’ll see them all the time. They’re extraordinary.’

In among the orderly, mathematical movement of the Serfs in the lower hall, something had caught Fitz’s attention. At first he wasn’t sure what it was – a ruffle, or disturbance that he only noticed out of the corner of his eye, a kind of burr in the smooth lines of the service. For a moment his eyes searched the floor, and then like the wind moving on a water the problem disclosed itself again, this time to his notice. A tall, gaunt figure moved among the Serfs, dressed in the same felted and belted coat as the Officers, but this one of many colours and irregularly stitched to form a kind of motley. His movements were awkward, parodic, at once perfectly in line or keeping with those of the Serfs, and yet somehow extraneous to them.

‘Who is that?’ Fitz asked, of no one in particular, and therefore of all of them.

Dina turned on the bench and followed his