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

took no lantern up to his room. He wanted quiet. More: after talking with Navy, he craved concealment. The Master was his teacher, and he had missed their lesson; but he was also Fitz’s protector, and when he hadn’t shown up to Feeding, Fitz had felt the floor slip a little from beneath his feet. Shifting out of his clothes, he folded them neatly and placed them as usual in a square pile on the ledge of his casement, next to the pitcher and laver. At first he climbed into bed, huddled in the corner, and drew the blankets as close about his neck as he was able. The world was closing in around him.

The game is already ended.

Fitz listened with his skin to the pulse that his heart made in it.

They will come for me. Of course they will. They will come for me.

The words knelled in his head like five bells pealing. He almost desired it. He wondered if he would hear steps on the stairs, and he felt his ears straining to discern the least creak in the door below, or the slightest of treads on the stone. All he heard was wind – not the kind involving hands that rushed along the boughs and made them sway and tremble, not the sort of breeze that ruffled gables and nooked nimbly between the tiles, but a spare wind and a steady, a low drone that threatened howling. It was the sound of emptiness sweeping across nothing but bare stone.

The hour was late, but in the voids between rushing clouds off the sea the moon was full, and silvered the far air. Fitz kicked down the covers from his bed and swung his legs to the floor. From the window he could make out the headlands that rose from the Heresy’s little valley towards the sea: a darkness that hunched before a greater darkness, an emptiness standing between them and another emptiness more vast. In the near scape of roofs and chimneys, of towers and walls, lamps and windows lighted seemed to disperse the darkness and spell out the void beyond; but it was always there, and Fitz ran his eyes along its long contours of spike and fell, crag and gully, the little peaks that sprawled low towards the cliffs beyond.

What he couldn’t see in the dark was the path that by daylight a keen eye could almost pick out from the moss and grass and loose stones, the thrift and vetch, gorse and heather and lichens abounding, the path that led from the walls of the Heresy through the meadow and up to the quiet caves where the Master had said the Heresiarchs laid themselves to rest.

He remembered a thing the Riddler had told him, one night as they sat upon their limb in the Bellman’s Wood.

When his time is ended a Heresiarch makes a choice. The choice. He puts down all that has belonged to him in this life, and without farewell takes the way out of the valley. Very often he goes at night; seldom is he seen. In a cave that leads deep into the headlands, there is a place he knows, for he has seen it once before, sometimes many years before. There he lays his body, upon a stone carved centuries past to receive it. He lays his body in its best hour upon the bed that has been prepared for it. And then he is free; and there he sleeps.

Fitz thought of the old bones of scores of Heresiarchs, crumbling to yellow dust in their common tomb beneath the cliffs. As his breath stirred mist on the panes before him, he wondered if any live thing ever entered that catacomb. Gulls, perhaps.

The clouds now scudding over the hills seemed to huddle and curdle on them. They were low, and being low, where they shadowed the land beneath they plunged it into darkness. As Fitz watched them sweep across the moonlight, almost in time, as if in a dance, a light seemed to gleam on the cliffs. Unlike the diffuse and glowing light of the moon, this beam was focused, sharply defined, and small. It shone clear and straight. Fitz scowled, and with the edge of his coat that lay folded beside him, rubbed at the mist his breath had made on the glass.

The light went out.

For a minute, then two, then five, he stared at the hillside while the clouds, ever darker, ever thicker, drove off the sea. Now the steep side of the valley lay so thickly blanketed in shadow that he wasn’t sure, any longer, where the cliffs ended and the sky began; stuttering here and there with his eye, he couldn’t even be certain he was looking in the right direction. He wanted to tear at the glass before him, tear at the air, tear up the distance between his room and that cliffside as if it were so much netting, so much gauze of a veil that lay between him and the catacombs.

And then the light gleamed again – this time, nestled like a shining pearl in the deep folds of an inaccessible fabric, the only bright thing in a world of blindness. It glimmered, and while he held his breath he thought it might go out again. It didn’t. He bore in on it, stared at it, drilled through the darkness trying to make it out; as if a pole star the earth turned like the heavens around it. The whole field of his vision swayed.

The light was moving. Fitz felt himself lurching and he grabbed the window ledge beneath him, but as he steadied himself, driving his feet like jambs into the floor below, he could see its long arcs describing distances of night between that place and this, between the cliffs and the Heresy, as through the valley by throws and volleys it swept the night and space towards him.

With eager arms, straining against the casement, Fitz twisted the iron handle until it