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

in which candles had not been lit. Padge and Dolly joined him on the stairs that would, by the time they climbed them, lead them to this room; just to be sure, Fingal and Payne took the others, which would issue on the opposite side.

As they ascended, around them whirled and wheeled the great House of the Jack, its innumerable flames and rising threads of candle-smoke dazzling to the bleary eye, every wing and alcove stacked high with ancient bookcases, spheres and globes, armillary curiosities and geometrical puzzles, visual paradoxes and, on papers strewn everywhere across the whole of the library, endless and complex equations. Flushed with his success with the diamond, the hero of the night’s work now set among new friends as an arrow nocked to a string, Fitz began to feel the place might actually be his – that, notwithstanding the calamity of his arrival, the anxieties of his enrolment, the terror and sorrow of the Black Wedding, like a pearl whorled from grit these halls of the Heresy might be a home for him, after all. Step after step he mounted, and his heart mounted with his steps, growing in assurance and satisfaction.

At every level they scanned the oak-panelled rooms as they passed, looking for signs of anything out of the ordinary. The Jack was never a tidy thinker, and they would have been surprised in this temple of disarray to discover neatness. Instead, in every direction they looked they saw comfortable confusion, the evidence of projects undertaken but never completed, thoughts half thought and truths only partly glimpsed, ideas and visions developed, broken and discarded, from desk to desk the signs of games in progress – games the Jack was playing with or against himself, whose winner as he left off, unsatisfied, he always was. Fitz thought as he climbed that the whole space was a monument to a mind that feared and expected nothing.

Round and round the spiral they climbed, taking the wide arcing treads of the staircase two, sometimes three at a time. The Helix had almost completed its turn, and as they cornered the last part of the highest curve, Fitz could see the end of the huge wooden structure, coming into line with the topmost of the hall’s interminable landings: their destination.

And an arm – a brawny, lifeless arm that, as it came into view, they saw lay twisted against the Jack’s massive, motionless torso. It had crumpled under him and lay extended at a sickening angle, radiating backwards from the shoulder from which it seemed completely torn. As they sprinted up the last twenty or thirty steps, they could see he must have broken a great fall by breaking his arm – comprehensively – beneath the crushing weight of his own heavy body.

The staircase slipped into its final position. Padge and Dolly flew up the steps before Fitz, and as they dropped to the Jack’s side, checking his body for signs of life, Fitz took his bearings.

He had never been so high in the House of the Jack. In one way the room here was like any other that the hall contained: in all of them, the high ceiling accommodated on three sides a heavy oak case of twelve equal shelves, on which were ranged a densely crammed collection of books of all sorts – new volumes in bright and colourful cloth or paper covers, older books in bindings of leather and parchment, manuscripts, loose notebooks stacked in piles wherever the shelves afforded space. This room was no different, though all the books were of a uniform, tanned leather. Down the centre of the room, like all the others, ran a large, rectangular trestle table, on which two lanterns – dark – lay ready for lighting. At the far end, nestled among the shelves, windows looked out upon the black night – or, Fitz noticed, upon the advent of the dawn. On the tables scattered piles of books, along with a few papers, suggested the Jack’s occasional, desultory study.

But something was wrong. Fitz knew that it was before he knew what it was. A chest – a locked trunk – stood at the near end of the table, and he knew that it didn’t belong, that it must be opened. But there was something else, and as he kneeled and began to fumble with the locks, he couldn’t take his eyes from the shelves around him, from their hundreds of volumes.

And then it hit him. It was the smell: a sweet, animal musk.

The lock with which he was fumbling popped open, then the next. From behind him he heard the Jack stir, grunt, and then moan in agonizing pain. He pushed up the lid of the trunk.

Within it lay curled Russ’s body, folded and tucked neatly away as if he were a blanket that had been stored there against the winter. His skin, white as the dawn, felt cold to the touch. Fitz stared, for how long he wasn’t sure. It was like seeing a snow scene in miniature, or the model made of a real building. It was like looking at a perfectly executed drawing, something lifelike that was not, for all its exactness, life.

A little jack-in-the-box for you.

The Jack, staggering to his feet, pushed Fitz aside. Had he cut out the lines on his face with a chisel, or etched them with acid on the plate of his cheeks, he could not have contrived a more complete mask of pain. With a terrible, bellowing roar that seemed to shake the whole of the hall, from its loftiest top, through the Helix to its core, he took up the space before the trunk and stared down at Russ’s cold and folded body.

‘Why?’ asked Fitz. ‘Why did you do this?’ The nausea in his stomach had not yet risen, anguishing, to his voice.

The Jack just stared at Russ’s body.

‘Why?’ he asked again, trembling now.

Slowly, like a balloon finding its level in the high atmosphere, the Jack’s gaze rose from its