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

That night, Fitz had scarcely allowed his head to sink into his weary pillow before he felt someone shaking him by the shoulders. At first, clutching at the vanishing vision of a dream, he pulled himself into a tight ball, straining away from the rough hands that were reaching for him, pushing him, prodding him.

Stiff tips of fingers slid into the tender gristle beneath his shoulder blades, and pinched it. He writhed in a sudden, hot coil, and found himself panting in a squat. Eyes open, he was staring into Dina’s startled but bemused face, dimly lit by light that floated through the court window.

‘Wake up, little brother,’ she said. ‘We have a case.’

Fitz blinked hard, and a spasm screwed through his body from the bridge of his nose into the seat of his spine, making him shudder. For the first time in a week, he felt truly alert.

‘A case?’

He was already taking her hands. She pulled him to his feet, and he skipped light from the bed.

‘Your first.’

Fitz pulled on his long coat and stepped into his slippers while Dina explained. They were halfway down the tower stairs before the words began to make sense.

‘Sometimes you wake up in the night,’ she said. ‘And you know something’s wrong. Maybe you heard something – a footfall, one of those creaks on the stairs that isn’t just the wood shrinking, or expanding, or whatever it does. Maybe it’s that the temperature has changed. You don’t know, but you know deep in your gut, or your heart, in the way that your pulse swells in your arteries, that whatever it is, it isn’t just you. It’s a feeling that comes from outside.’

They reached the foot of the tower stairs. In the sooty darkness just before she opened the door to the court, Fitz found himself very close to Dina – so close that her finger almost brushed his face as she held it up to her lips.

She whispered, ‘It’s a feeling that does come from outside. And it means you have a case.’

She pulled the door open. Fitz scanned the courtyard: still dark, cool but dry, the moon high, the windows on every face black as rotten teeth or empty sockets in the stone face of a corpse. It was late, but the hour nothing like near morning.

Dina nodded towards the centre of the court. Fitz had missed it: a little lacquered box, about a foot square and half as high, black but in the moonlight streaked and dully gleaming. Someone had set it on the ground exactly between his door and Dina’s. Fitz started out of the tower, but Dina clamped her hand firmly in the crook of his arm, staying him.

‘Not like that,’ she said. Her voice was low and urgent. ‘I’ll get the box. You keep close to the near wall, and get to the Heresy Arch. I’ll meet you there. Be ready to run.’

Using both hands and the full force of her shoulders, Dina nearly shoved Fitz out of the door and along the wall, crushing him against the wall’s unrelenting stone. Her violence was emphatic, and he took the hint, keeping his body flat as he picked out a quiet footing to the arch that led to the Heresiarchy. He tried to avoid crunching the gravel underfoot. About halfway along the wall, he looked back. In the high, circular window of the Master’s hall, the half-moon’s reflection had slid into view, and the window showed it hanging brightly over the roof opposite.

And then, suddenly, it disappeared.

‘Dina,’ Fitz hissed. But it was too late. As she stepped from the doorway, he heard someone clamber into place on the leads of the roof just above him.

But Dina wasn’t walking. She wasn’t running. She cartwheeled: arms and legs extended, the tight plait of her hair lashing through the moonlight, she arced across the courtyard once, twice, and then – squaring her body against her direction of movement – flipped into a high somersault that laid her out, for the briefest interval, in a slide beside the lacquered box. Fitz, mesmerized, had come to a full halt against the cool and crumbling stone of the tower, now fully obscured in the moon’s protecting shadow. From above he heard the quick thumping twang of a bowstring pulse through the cool air and rebound around the court. A trio of arrows clattered to this side and that, but Dina was faster than arrows, nimbler and better feathered. She swirled through the darkness, holding the box before her in a circle of arms that dizzied the night and made the heavy mass of the court’s stone slabs seem to dance around her.

Fitz, finding his legs, scurried into the archway immediately behind her.

‘Run,’ she cried. She hadn’t broken stride.

Through three courts he sprinted, trailing her, losing ground as she accelerated. As they rounded a corner into the Keeper’s Yard, Fitz heard footsteps pounding on the hard earth behind him. Dina, too, had heard them, and changed direction abruptly, pulling up into a low alcove that led into a cellar store below the kitchens. If she hadn’t put out her arm and grabbed him by the sleeve, Fitz would have overshot it. She yanked him violently, then drew him in.

For all the sprinting, Dina was hardly even winded. With one hand over his mouth, stifling him, she drew Fitz back into the deep shadow of the stairway. They pressed themselves side by side into the darkness, trying to squeeze their bodies into nooks that didn’t exist, to wedge themselves, along with the box that Dina still clutched to her chest, into vanishing concealment. Fitz’s mouth gaped as he breathed in silent, deep draughts that seemed to pinch his ears shut. Even above the strum of his racing heart, he was all too conscious of the Jack’s slow progress through the yard outside. He was pacing it slowly, listening for them.

Hunting us. Fitz abruptly realized – as if he were only now waking from a sound sleep