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

The greater part of our lives we shall never live: the choices we do not make, the paths we do not take, the wishes that remain unfulfilled, the guilt and sorrow that we bear with us for that which we have done and is lost, and that which we never did and so never had even the fortune to lose. The painful renunciation of that which is not yet ours, or which – oh misery – we have forfeited, and shall never enjoy. All this is not ours – the things we have lost, those that we have not yet, and those that we shall never have – but we bear its absence with us all the same. It is so very, very hard to come home.’

‘And so,’ asked Fitz, ‘the Dreamsnatcher took from others what they didn’t know they were?’

‘And more,’ said the Riddler. ‘He was the greatest student ever to pass through the Sensorium. So great an adept he became that, it is said – at the least, it is suspected – he travelled to the Mountain, and was received there not as a Disillusioner, but as an Imaginer.’

‘What’s the difference?’ Fitz asked.

‘You may well ask. The purpose of your work in the Sensorium is to teach you how much of what we accept as reality is merely illusion. Even that concrete-seeming certainty, the self, is little more than a tissue of hypotheses, approximations and lies. Once you accept this, you may approach the world around you as if with new eyes, understanding it as it truly is – that is, understanding it as a pageant of appearances, like a series of pictures projected upon a wall, no more.

‘But there is another way of seeing things. As I have just described it to you, the goal of your work in the Sensorium is to understand that every sensation you will ever have – every taste, every smell or touch, every sight and sound – is no more than an illusion. But if instead of understanding every perception as an illusion, you were to understand all perceptions – even fictions, even stories, even lies and the contrivances of your imagination – as true – what then? What if you began to see dreams as not unreal, but another kind of reality? These things are not so different, perhaps. But the imaginer who believes stories are real – this belief weakens him. In his tenderness for others’ unlived lives, their dreams and hopes, their regrets and losses, he surrenders up the Kingdom. For him, the game never ends.’

‘What is the Mountain?’

‘The seat of our ancient enemies, the Honourable Society of Wraiths and Phantasms,’ answered the Riddler. ‘A benighted and disorderly assembly of charlatans and idiots, poets and fantasists. Their scouts, called Wispers, flit across the world sowing and gathering lies, but it is to the Mountain that they retreat, like dogs to a kennel, when they are whipped.’

Something stirred in Fitz’s memory – the image of slender, loping forms hastening towards him down a long tunnel, the light behind them, and the roaring wind.

‘Who was this student of yours?’ asked Fitz. ‘Where is he now?’

‘I believe at this moment he is in the Keep,’ said the Riddler. ‘He is called Habi Gablani Ahmadi, and, like his father before him, he is the Master of the Heresy.’

That night, as he stepped from the long stairs of the Sensorium, Fitz sensed something was wrong. The air was heavy, pregnant with something – lightning, maybe, or at least a heavy rain. But that wasn’t what had alarmed him; it took him a few moments, paused on the path, before he recognized that all the lamps between the Sensorium and the Master’s court had been extinguished. At first he was relieved – it would make his surreptitious dash back to his room that much easier – but then he heard the footsteps racing towards him down the passage.

So thick was the ink of night that their arms fell on him before he saw their faces; it was only after they had pulled him back against the wall that he saw it was Navy and Russ. The Master was right behind them, carrying a long, heavy staff in his hands.

He wasn’t just carrying it, either. He was brandishing it.

‘All of you with me,’ he said. ‘Russ, Navy, keep him close.’

As they ran from the Heresiarch’s into the Jack’s court, then through an archway into the gardens by the lawns, Russ and Navy explained as much as they could.

‘An attack – Wispers – we thought they had you – the Offs are all on the lawns by the river – there are hundreds of them –’

Lights moved on the dark lawns, dancing like intermittent flames here, then there, as the Officers dealt heavy knocks to the tall, slender forms that seemed to melt away before them, regroup, then attack again. The Master had drawn the children on to the lawns behind the attackers, so that as he joined the battle – swinging and beating with his oaken staff – he seemed to be fighting not only against the cloaked and shadowy Wispers, but against the other Officers, too, who were pushing towards him, shedding blows. Fitz hung back with Navy, frightened, above all by the disconcerting sense that some of the Officers – some at least – but which ones? – wouldn’t hesitate to crack their staves over his own head; and among the hooded, fleeting forms of the raiders, he seemed to see eyes, flashing, turned on him, seeking him, hunting him. Breath, arms, teeth, hands, feet planted in the muddied grass, thuds and cracks, a flash of red, eyes, swings, turns, dodges, feints, redoublings: through it all, through the roaring in his ears and the thuds of his heart against his neck, Fitz watched the hooded forms, evading them; but more, he watched for the eyes that sought him, knowing that that siege was the greater, that fight the deadlier. Zenith, he said to