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

crossed the court and slipped round the lights through the archway. She stood motionless, seeing him off. She had been standing guard, he knew, and would stand guard still; there was no way he would be able to slip past her down the stairs of the Sensorium – not tonight, probably not any night. It made him feel so frustrated.

Because I’m forgetting something.

What it was he had no idea. But those words, the Riddler’s words, for some reason, in a way that he couldn’t understand, had punched the breath out of him. He knew in his stomach he needed to find a way into the Sensorium.

Only, not tonight. Fitz came to the door of his tower and put his hand to the handle. The whole evening, from the moment the Riddler had stood behind him and summoned him to the Sensorium, had been a waste.

Waste.

Fitz dropped the handle, and instead of entering the tower, turned away, already walking briskly and – if anything – more silently even than before.

Waste, he said. He said waste. He said he was beyond all waste.

It was a simple thing to slip through the great oak doors at the long end of the Lantern Hall; they were never locked. Outside he had taken up two full fists of gravel; now, standing beside the well of the Sad King, he emptied them into the big pockets of his coat. The weight pulled down at him. He hoped it would be enough.

This time, when he stepped into the air, there was no great, glowing light by which to see the shaft of the well as he fell. But no sooner had he dropped through the well head, no sooner had the sickening void opened in his stomach, than the arms, hundreds of arms, broke his fall, cradling and supporting him, allowing his hunched and cowering body to tumble, gently, downward, ever downward, waved on the way as he passed through the warm salt stench of the Sad King.

When he hit the water, he didn’t struggle. He let his body straighten like a wand, and the pebbles in his coat pockets – just a little added weight, but enough – pulled him swiftly down. He blew air through his nostrils, holding his breath, and held his hands protectively around his face. Squeezed shut, his eyes had they opened would have seen only darkness, only salt, only the lightless pools of their own tears. He dropped ever down through the warm brine.

It seemed a long time that he sank through the well, and yet he had counted only eight beats of his heart by the time his feet hit the bottom. He made sure of them, made sure that he was standing, before he dared look. In his chest his lungs began to tighten.

I don’t have long.

He opened his eyes; they were full of panic and water. To his immediate left, through the murk of the water, he could make out light. He pushed towards it, down an open tunnel, swimming, pulling himself along with one hand as with the other he drew stones from his pocket and let them tumble into the water. Stroke by stroke he shifted along the close and rounded passage, shedding pebbles into the murky water, until he came to a submerged stair. Here the light was stronger. He turned his head to look up. A dazzling brightness shed through the long water above him, culminating in a gleaming pool at the top of the stairs.

He hardly needed to climb the steps, but one by one he pushed off them as he rose, increasingly desperate for breath. By the time his head broke through the surface, his lungs were already convulsing; a moment later, and he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from sucking in the warm, salty water. He would have drowned.

Instead he was standing in it, his feet still immersed. Fitz rubbed the stinging water from his eyes, gasping. A few steps further on, the staircase ended in a low, domed room of white stone.

In its centre stood the Riddler. Lighted lamps lay on the floor all around him.

‘I thought I heard you,’ said the Riddler.

‘You couldn’t have,’ Fitz wheezed. The walls around him were of brilliant white stone, of a strange translucence that seemed to blush with violet wherever the light hit it. Squinting and reluctant, Fitz let his hands drop from his eyes. ‘I haven’t made a sound.’

‘Silence sometimes tells a tale. Come in,’ said the Riddler. ‘If you can find your way in all this light.’

The long and loping man disappeared through a passage carved in the wall behind him.

On the floor of roughly quarried quartz, the water poured from Fitz and collected into shallow puddles. His body flushed with exhilaration and pain: exhilaration to think that he had been right, that the well of the Sad King was more than that, was more than a place where they dumped the waste after feeding, that it was a passage; and pain where his muscles, starved of oxygen during his long groping in the flooded tunnels, now cramped with fatigue.

I was right. Let her watch all she wants; I made my own choice.

Fitz drew deep breaths, trying to steady himself, and as far as he was able he wrung the water from his clothes. He tried to take his bearings. Around him the walls, where they caught the direct light of the lamps, glowed faintly pink as if bruised by the exposure. The floor beneath was set in huge, irregular slabs that gleamed dully in the light, like sheets of poured glass that had hardened here and there upon and within the rock. When he felt ready, calmer, Fitz stepped across the uneven surface, took up a lamp, and passed through the low arch of the door, and then a short passage.

The room he entered seemed entirely made of light. The walls here, like the floor, the ceiling – every surface – had been carved from the smooth, even,