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

He breathed. Air filled his lungs.

I’m fine.

‘Go on,’ he said.

The Riddler set the third of the Fetters in place on his right ankle. Fitz felt his skilled fingers searching out the dimples between his bones and sinews, feeling for the place where the thorns should pierce. The fingers stilled. The strap tightened.

When he next spoke, he couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice. Not even those low reverberations and deep notes that normally resonated in the diaphragm, not those underwater bells and drones of the voice in the body, the inward voice, the fingerprint of sound that was his alone – nothing. Fitz pushed his hands to his ears, clumsily covering and compressing them while he howled in painless, silent agony. His vision swam, and the lantern lights with their threaded coral shadows seemed to dance and weave before him. He was only dimly aware that the Riddler now stood before him, gripping his shoulders, holding him still.

He could feel that. He could see that, and feel it. Despite the warm circulation of air in the room, he could feel, too, somewhere hanging above his own tension and his puckering, unyielding skin the cold wrap of his clothes. He shivered once, and was glad.

A tight shock of panic had clutched at him; now that tightness started to drain away, slowly, like water subsiding in an agitated vessel. It sank through his chest, then dropped to his waist; he tightened the muscles in his hips and thighs, then loosened them, and the panic flowed into his knees, his calves, and at last sped through the floor. The Riddler still gripped him. Fitz tried to smile.

He felt he had come over a pass, taking a buffet of wind and storm at its height, and that he was now beginning to descend into the safety of the further valley. It would be dark, and quiet, but it would be safe. He had done the hard part.

Fitz looked at the Riddler’s shock of white hair, thick and bristled, where it stood on his head. He was busy at Fitz’s right wrist. Thick wiry tufts sprouted from his ears, and his neck seemed to bubble with moles and growths that might have been warts. Fitz might have laughed had that very head, that very neck, not been so intensely focused at just that moment on the process of blinding him.

The Riddler looked up. The strap of the fourth Fetter he held loose in his hand. His eyes seemed to ask permission. Fitz took a deep breath.

Yes.

He felt the pressure strap and bind on his wrist as the room went dark.

The black was blacker than anything he had known – blacker than a moonless night, blacker than the mute terror of his most sudden nightmares. Black he had known against the light – the black of lines, of voids, the black of an after-image or of char, that which was left behind after brilliance, or that which lay against the light. Soot-black, coal-black, the black of midnight: these he was familiar with. Here there was neither contrast nor story, no sense of border or definition. The black that encompassed him seemed as bright as day, a black milk, an ivory opacity that shone out with radiant beams of emptiness, and negation.

Fitz felt himself falling into it.

The Riddler caught him. His long arms encompassed him like wooden limbs, like boughs into which he slumped hard. His core, limp and slack, crumpled; even had he meant to stand, for the space of his long fall Fitz couldn’t find his bearings, and when he pushed with his feet against the floor, his toes seemed to flex wildly in air. Dull, mute, deaf and blind, the movement of his body against the air, against the Riddler’s arms, seemed like a subsiding in the earth, as if clods and stones, dirt and gravel were tumbling around and upon him. He gasped for air and reached, scrabbling, towards a dark light.

The Riddler held him, not just with his arms, but close, embracing him. Fitz couldn’t taste the air; he couldn’t hear the breath flooding in and ebbing from his spasming lungs; but as the Riddler grounded him, he felt his body settling again, felt the intermittent surge of his pulse and breath receding, until at last the Riddler laid him slowly on the stone table. Fitz felt his body uncurl against the stone from the extremities inward: first his wrists and elbows seemed to lie heavy on the platform, then his shoulder blades, then at last – as he pressed himself into the cool, ridged surface – each articulation of his spine, like a word, sounded.

Fitz pressed the back of his head hard into the stone, crushing his skin into the bone until it hurt. As he felt the last of the Fetters slide beneath his neck, he pressed ever harder, concentrating all his resolve into that one point of contact, skin on stone, summing himself up, tethering himself to the world by a single point of pain.

Hold on.

Third lesson: never forget to forget yourself.

He had seen the Collar, the longest of the Fetters, out of the corner of his eye. He had tried not to look at it, or notice its three longer spikes, those gleaming thorns that were now poised above the tender flesh of his neck, two pricking on opposite sides of his spine, the third against the Riddler’s finger, ready to thrust lightly up towards his gullet. Quick things fluttered in Fitz’s abdomen. Tremors lanced through his legs. He could still feel them.

Go ahead.

The Riddler felt his acquiescence. As the strap tightened, the numbness that had earlier stripped him of his tongue, then even of his breath, now dropped like a plummet through his neck and detonated in his chest. It rolled through him like silent thunder, rose in him as a still and obsidian dawn. For a long time – it might have been forever, or an instant, but it seemed