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

scarlet gown and wearing an outsized headpiece, the figure seemed to shuffle forward in great pain, or with great deliberation, gaining ground in little surges and casting glances to left and right as he went. When he stood before the mast, he turned, and Fitz saw the face of the mask clearly – the grossly caricatured figure of an old man, shrivelled by age and experience, and yet swollen, too, as if the very troughs in his skin had enlarged it, as if the grey pallor of his cheeks also gave them life. In the centre of the mask, immediately above his pendulous nose, was set a single, round eye, bulging, gorged and washed with milky white. It was disgusting, engrossing, disarming, enraging. Fitz gagged to see it. With faltering strength – or was it the trembling of a huge power in the summoning? – he lifted his cupped hands into the air. He was holding something. Fitz strained to make it out.

It was the baby lemur.

As if it were a signal, one of the Offs stepped forward. Judging from his height, it had to be Arwan or the Registrar. He had a long knife in his hand, and seemed to dance, swirling with it within the circle, turning round the old man, reversing and sliding behind the mast. With a single, sharp upthrust, he seemed to plunge the knife into the young man’s back.

Fitz stifled a shout; the noise sputtered out of him like the mewling terror of some innocent creature.

But the knife thrust hadn’t harmed the man. It had cut through the cords that bound his hands. Now he spread his arms and arched his neck as if in pain. He brought his hands together before him, accepting from the old man the tiny, huddled form of the animal, holding it in the air as the other had done. All eyes, including Fitz’s, were on it.

And then, as if he were opening a jar, turning his hands in contrary motion round its neck he strangled it. Hours seemed to pass until the moment when he let the lifeless body drop, almost weightless, silently to the floor. The young man had never once looked at the tiny animal; his eyes were fixed on the old man before him.

How.

How. Howl. Howl. Howl. Howl.

As if lurching on a swelling sea, as if his body were being tossed against the level, as if he were on a boat adrift in a storm and had lost all sense of orientation and proportion, Fitz began to retch. His head burned and sweat beaded on his temples, at the back of his neck. He smelled a heavy dead stink of salt.

Lurching in the darkness, without knowing where he was, shoeless, sightless, without meaning or understanding, he stumbled out of the tower room and down the stairs. His body dropped from step to step as if falling, the only imperative in his head to take that wretched and defenceless little body from the floor and hold it in his warm arms.

It was sucking its thumb.

Fitz’s eyes burned in the darkness, and tears dropped on his bare arms as he ran.

At the bottom of the staircase he tripped across the cold stone landing to the gravel courtyard. As he staggered across the stones, he felt nothing – neither the cool air on his arms, nor the jagged stones beneath the soft pads of his feet. His bleared eye was fixed on the light coming from beneath the arch ahead; when he reached it, turning right, he fixed himself on the next arch, the next lantern. On and on he drove himself, past too many arches, into too many courts, until finally he stopped, wheeling and bewildered, aware of himself and that he was lost.

A hand grasped his shoulder, hard, from behind. He might have screamed, but another covered his mouth.

‘Be still, little prince.’

It was Mr Ahmadi. Not the Master, but Mr Ahmadi.

Fitz was still.

‘Where are you?’

Fitz turned round and looked at his old neighbour, searching his face for its long and bony beak, its inhuman black pools for eyes, its cold raptor skin.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I am.’

‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ Mr Ahmadi said. His hands lay on Fitz’s shoulders. They held him in place. Fitz thought that, without them, he might break into ten thousand pieces.

‘I saw – through the window – Dina. In the tower. That old man.’ The words came halting out of him, discrete and disconnected.

Mr Ahmadi’s thumbs tightened on Fitz’s collarbone. The pain checked the tears that were starting in his boy’s eyes.

‘Who was that?’ He might have asked a question, but it passed through his throat like a shuddering expulsion. He wasn’t sure if he had asked the question, or if the question had asked itself through him. He felt he had shifted an awful mass from his chest.

‘It should have been the Heresiarch,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘The Heresiarch is the leader of the Heresy, its head and director. In the Black Wedding, the Heresiarch gives the initiate a choice. It’s a kind of trial, a test. The initiate has to renounce something, something impossibly dear. It is the fulfilment of the renunciation promised at the well of the Sad King. It’s different for everyone.’

Fitz tried to wriggle free. Mr Ahmadi loosened his tight grip, but still held him with one hand.

‘We’re in an interregnum,’ he said. ‘Which means we have no leader until a new one has been chosen, and accepted. So tonight it fell to me to break him. I wore the mask of the Heresiarch. It was only me.’

Fitz stared at him. Whoever you are.

‘But that tiny creature,’ Fitz protested. He was staring at his toes, trying not to blubber, but knowing that he still couldn’t control his own words. ‘It’s so rare. It was in danger. It was a child. It was a baby.’ Spasms tore through his ribs and his mouth emitted a kind of rasp and