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

face mesmerized him: in its proportions and movements so close to human, but furry, and at completely the wrong scale. As he crouched, watching it suck its tiny thumb, he realized that something else was bothering him about the lemur. It had Dina’s smell.

‘Listen,’ said Dina, cutting into his thoughts with a light touch to his shoulder. ‘The wedding will begin in a few minutes, and you have a pretty spectacular view of the hall through the big east window. From the tower room, I mean. I don’t have to be in my House till ten bells. I’ll race you.’

There was no contest. Even in shoes Dina would have outpaced him, but by her head start and in the fleet freedom of her naked feet, she left Fitz so far behind he might have walked. By the time he had climbed to the top of the tower stairs, utterly spent and out of breath, she had already pushed his bed over to the west-facing window, and was kneeling with her elbows on the sill, watching the hall below. In the west, the sky still showed a smudge of day, and the last of the evening’s stars glimmered faintly in the high obscurity above green-black hills. Above the lead and thatch and slated roofs of the Heresy’s many courts, bats sliced silently through the shadows in their erratic flights. The precision and purpose of their movement struck Fitz as beautiful, the more so for its unpredictability.

‘There,’ said Dina, pointing.

The Serfs had pushed the long tables to the sides of the hall. Now they were scraping heaped platters of scraps and leavings into the hole of the well at the centre of the hall. Fitz thought of the arms extended in the blackness of the shaft below. ‘Don’t worry,’ she had said.

The food won’t be wasted.

Through the clear glass panes of the large east window, Fitz and Dina watched the last preparations taking place, as Sweepers began to push long mops across the tiled floor, while Commissaries extinguished half the lanterns, lowering them by the rack and snuffing them wick by wick. Fitz’s eye went back again and again to the black hole in the middle of the hall’s long floor. It was a place of which everyone was conscious, and to which no one paid the least attention, a kind of constructive absence.

Sensing his preoccupation, Dina jarred him.

‘It was supposed to be Fingal’s wedding tonight,’ said Dina. ‘He’s been working towards it for two years, at least. That’s why he was in such a foul temper.’

‘What happened?’ asked Fitz. His eye drifted to the methodical snuffing of the lanterns; from this distance, the Commissaries seemed to swarm to their tasks like ants, so organized and orderly that they almost appeared to be the several bodies of a single, distributed consciousness.

‘He wasn’t ready.’

‘What makes a Prent ready?’

For a while they were silent. The bats were not troubled by the darkness that huddled ever closer around the buildings.

‘Let me ask you this,’ said Dina. ‘Have you ever seen anything truly beautiful?’

‘Yes, millions of things,’ said Fitz. ‘The Bellman’s Wood, at home – it’s full of gorgeous things, gigantic beech and lime trunks like –’

‘No,’ said Dina. ‘Listen more carefully. I mean something truly beautiful. Trees can be cut down. They rot. Things crawl in them. They burn. Char and ash. I mean something more substantial, something more enduring.’

Fitz wanted to say that the scene unfolding before him, as the Commissaries swirled in arcs between the dancing racks of rising lanterns, while the Sweepers traversed the floors in orderly patterns around and between them, was beautiful – in its precision, its effortless, silent symmetries.

‘Clare is beautiful,’ said Fitz. Dina turned her head to him. Her eyes seemed to punch through his own, so that he recoiled. ‘My … my mother.’ His voice cracked on the word. For a second, or more, he stalled, self-conscious, and in his determination to conceal it, revealed it. ‘She tells beautiful stories, as good as anything you might read in a book. In her voice –’

‘No,’ said Dina again. Her posture beside him at the window hadn’t changed, but her voice had; it hit the glass of the window like pebbles or grit on a road, strict and staccato. ‘I don’t mean your mother, either. Your mother may be your mother today, but tomorrow she may not be. Today she may be beautiful, but already the marks of her death lie upon her. Her stories may appear to be beautiful, but they’re not real – only fantasies. I am asking you if you have ever seen anything truly beautiful.’

‘But to me –’

‘Not to you,’ said Dina. ‘Not beautiful just to you. Something that is in itself, as a property of itself, always and forever, without compromise or loss, beautiful. Something that you can show, can point to, that is truly there, and will always be there.’

‘Can there be a thing like that?’

Would such a thing be beautiful anyway?

‘It’s hard to say,’ said Dina. ‘Your Apprenticeship has two parts. The Commissar, the Sweeper and the Rack together make up the three Houses of Disillusionment; they are the Disillusioners. That’s a mouthful, even for Navy, so for short we call them the Losers. In different ways you practise with each of them the skill of seeing through illusions, or understanding appearances of all kinds for what they really are – just appearances. The Registrar, the Keeper and the Jack are Incoherentists, and theirs are the Houses of Incoherence. We call them the Breakers. The Breakers teach a harder thing than the Losers – not just how to give up on your feelings for beauty, but how to surrender your arrogant judgements about truth. The goal of your training is to accept, with peace and resignation, that beauty and truth may not exist.’

‘And the Riddler? Is he a Loser, or a Breaker?’

‘Neither,’ said Dina. ‘And both. By the time you’ve finished your work in the Sensorium, you can’t be sure whether you,