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

brilliant white stone. Round, twenty or thirty metres in diameter, with a gently domed ceiling, the chamber was lit by a hundred lamps standing in a ring round its perimeter; the purple flush where the lamplight struck the walls beaded or threaded the colour in a ring that put Fitz in mind of a necklace, and of coral. In the centre of the room, beneath the soft peak of the dome, the Riddler stood by a kind of table or – as Fitz studied it from this doorway – a high bed, like an altar, all of white stone. He was sorting through what looked like a tangle of leather belts. As Fitz stepped into the room, he set his lantern down by the others on the floor, hard enough to clatter, slightly, against the cave stone. The Riddler paid him no notice.

The table before which he stood was two metres long, or a little longer – the length of a man. It was obviously a kind of bed. A hard bed, Fitz thought. On the long side facing him, within a rectangular panel, the figure of a snake had been carved in relief, at one end coiled, at the other reaching with its slender head poised as if to strike. Fitz circled the room quietly, studying the table. On its end the head of a dog stood proud of the stone, its snout lifted, scenting the air. Fitz continued to round the perimeter of the room. Here, opposite the Riddler, he faced an owl, its eyes like blank orbs, each one the shield of some hero, and every feather carved like the plate of an armoured coat thick and impenetrable. It stood on a branch, one set of talons curled tightly on the wood, but the other, detached, slowly opening in a gesture of menacing, imminent attack. Behind Fitz where he paused, another door led from the chamber, down a passage into darkness. He hardly thought of it, so intent was he on the short, last side at the table’s head, where the panelled tablet showed the fat head of a toad, its lips slightly parted, and from them a swollen tongue beginning to force its way, in disgust, into the rank air of its breath.

‘Delicious are the poisons that destroy us,’ said the Riddler. Fitz startled, suddenly shaken from his reverie.

The Riddler held out one of the belts.

It was too short to be a belt.

Fitz approached the table cautiously, keeping his eyes on the leather strap the Riddler had extended, the full length of his arm, for him to inspect. It was broad, five or six centimetres wide, and at one of its ends hung a thick steel buckle, burnished and softly gleaming in the lamplight.

He knew what it was. Padge and Fingal had tried often enough to scare him with stories about the Gyves, the Manacles and the Collar – the Five Fetters of the Sensorium over which the Riddler presided. Each one, when strapped to and tightened round the appropriate place on the body, interrupted and suspended one of the senses. As he took the short strap from the Riddler, holding it by its buckle, he drew a full breath, and as he exhaled tried to steady his busy heart. He laid the strap across his left hand. Black and stiff, it had a surprising weight for a piece of material so short. Then he turned it over.

There they were: small, slender, gleaming faintly in the lamplight, two spikes sharper than thorns, riveted or embedded in the leather strap so that, when it had been properly fitted, their points would slide into his skin and, by the Riddler’s dexterity, disrupt the operation of his nerves. The sight of the little spikes, combined with the knowledge of their function, made Fitz’s skin shiver, as if a current or a ripple had passed through it. Goosebumps fleshed across his arms and thighs. He handed the strap back and held out his wrist. He wasn’t about to falter where the others hadn’t.

First lesson. Your eyes don’t need to follow your body.

The Riddler fitted the strap round Fitz’s wrist with nimble and practised speed. His eyes found Fitz’s, and when he nodded, once, the Riddler pulled the strap tight, drawing the leather against the steel of the buckle. Fitz thought he felt the tiny pricks in his skin as the thorns pierced his wrist. His whole body arched with tension, as if bracing for an explosion.

Instead, he felt almost nothing. A dead sensation pooled in his face, which at first he couldn’t describe, or make sense of. It was as if the lights had been dimmed or the temperature had changed.

But that wasn’t it.

It was only as the Riddler knelt beside him, already at work fitting the second of the Fetters to his left ankle, that Fitz was able to put a name to the sensation – or, rather, to the lack of it. His smell – the sense of the coolness, the slight dank of the basement room, its stone walls, its oil lamps, the fragrance sweet and acrid that had shaped his experience of the Sensorium – had faded and then gone out.

The Riddler drew the second strap tight, so quickly that Fitz hardly felt it coming.

Now the dead feeling spread in his face like a banner, taking in his mouth, and throat. He swallowed hard; and, where the familiar clarity ought to have settled in his palate, that awareness of the flavour of his own saliva and the fragrance of his breath, that background hum or metal of the self that he had never lacked – where that ought to have settled on him like silt in a pool disturbed, instead he tasted nothing. He tried to speak, but just at the moment when he thought to form words, they grated like straw or sand on his tongue, and he faltered, blabbing. At these infant murmurs the Riddler paused a moment, his hand firm round Fitz’s right