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

wooden frame of the bed. On his hands and knees he inspected every surface of its slats, its posts, the headboard, the footboard. He had thought for a moment that the Riddler might have left him some sort of message. But there was nothing. Sluggish with defeat, Fitz laboured the mattress back into its frame. For a minute or two, while the sun dropped in the west window, he stared into the empty space of his room without thinking a single thought.

What had the Riddler said at dinner?

Read me therefore as you might a glass, and you may thereby make much of me.

Fitz leaped to the window. He crouched there, inspecting every millimetre of every pane in turn. At that angle, lit by the orange light of the setting sun, he saw the words that had been scratched lightly across four of the little panes of the window, as easily as if they had been written on paper.

‘Come at nine bells.’

Two hours later, Fitz crept down the tower stairs and inched open the heavy door at its base. The night outside hung suspended, darkening against the wet, black stones of the Master’s court, and – after some hesitation born partly from fear and partly from prudence – he slipped out into the open. Moving with that speed and glide that he had seen in Dina and Navy, he tried to cross the gravel of the court with hardly a noise. In the passage that connected to the Heresiarchy, he kept to the wall, avoiding the pools of light cast by the lamps fixed at intervals to the vaulted ceiling. He crouched in the corner of the passage for long enough to be sure he hadn’t been seen, or followed.

Now, a few feet further on, he stood alone outside the carved stone porch of the Sensorium. The last light of the long evening was fading fast, and shadows clustered now like blotted ink, dark as old blood, in the deep-chiselled channels of the fluted grey stone. Fitz put his hand to the stone’s heavy, cut corners, taking in its mottled texture. Five squared ridges ran immediately round the frame, conferring on the dark shadow within a strong sense of their order and regularity. But beyond that frontier, the stone seemed to erupt in a writhing mass, as if it were not stone at all – so tortured, so active that Fitz wouldn’t have been surprised had the scaled torsos and feathered chests, the gripping fingers and scything teeth that thrust from and turned within the pillars and lintel suddenly given way into real motion. His eyes coursed over the bulging and unsocketed eyes, glaring in terror; the lizard tongues that flicked across the surface, here and there curling to a point in air; coarse bristles of great shagged paws, concealing in the gathering gloom curled claws embedded in the stone like flesh; and countless wings, legs, mouths, snouts, ears quivering with sense, fins, teeth, muscles, talons, jointed haunches, tails, and, everywhere, everywhere eyes that peered, burned, gazed, watched, and killed with basilisk cruelty. With indifference.

The porch stood eight or nine feet high, and about five feet wide. Within, the air lay darkly draped, as if gathered in shrouds of shadow. Alone of all the major houses of the Heresy, only the Sensorium remained to Fitz entirely an unknown. As he peered into the darkness, and down the stone steps that descended as if to a tomb, Fitz realized that he couldn’t even place it; while he knew that it lay underground, and that its entrance stood here, beneath the Master’s library, beyond that he couldn’t say a thing about it. Did it all lie underground? How far did it reach? How was it organized? What did it contain? From the others he had gathered only fragments, odd phrases that suggested its size, its mystery, something about it that set it apart from the rest of the busy and sociable halls, libraries and workshops of the Heresy, from its quiet studies and snug-eaved lofts. One evening, on their way to the hall for dinner, Padge had told him it was the oldest of the Heresy’s buildings, by centuries, a structure so ancient that the earth had silted and settled upon its walls until, today, it lay sunken in the ground like a huge buried palace. Gazing into the shadow of the staircase, his heart still resisting his eyes’ curiosity, Fitz thought it might be so – like a gouge in the earth and time, a void of night concealed in the night, black within black, it lay waiting for him.

He took a deep breath, inhaling the cold, wet night air, fortifying himself against the shadows below.

A hand took him by the shoulder. He hadn’t heard her. He never did.

‘No, little brother,’ whispered Dina. ‘I said no.’

She released his shoulder, and he turned. Her face against the shadow told him nothing. Implacable, stern and commanding, she watched him not with concern but with the indifference of a power that foreknew his every move.

‘Do you know why this place, why everything that we do here, everything that we are, is called the Heresy?’

Fitz shook his head. He need not have bothered.

Third lesson.

‘It’s an old word. All words are old, but some feel their age more than others. This one feels it the most. Thousands of years ago, when the game first was played, before all this, it meant a simple thing. Hairesis – it was just the taking of a move. That’s all it is – a choice, a decision, a single play in the game. All these towers and cellars, these halls and houses, all the people here, from the Offs and Prents to the Fells and Serfs – they’re all part of this one move, this one choice. They – we – don’t act outside it. There is no outside it. I’m First Prent. I told you that you don’t go to the Sensorium. So you don’t go.’

Dina watched him as he