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

hung free. He pushed the heavy window out in the night air. The wind rushed against it, throwing it back. Iron groaned on iron, then clanged as the window slammed into its frame. Fitz climbed on to the ledge and hurtled at the window, throwing it open as wide as he dared; this time, the wind caught it and threw it swinging in a long and sickening crunch against the stone of the tower. The air rushed in on him, swirling leaves and dirt against his face, all the detritus that it had scoured from the courts below, from the gables and slopes of tiles and towers and miles of running gutters that surrounded him in the insane stir of this tempestuous night. This heaving darkness. And still the light, on which his eye was fixed, which he drew towards him as a fisherman his line, reeling and reeling it in, advanced. One hand to either side of the frame, kneeling before the night and the clouds and the air and the advancing sea, he waited.

The albatross shrieked like a horse on a high gale as it dropped from the clouds towards him. Ten or twelve metres from his window, descending all the time on the impossible, gliding sails of its wings, it seemed to pull up, and from beneath its feet where the crescent light trailed on its long cord, the weight of it slung forward like a shot. In a self-preserving reflex, Fitz’s arms flew to his face, and it was only thus, shielding himself with his hands almost together, collapsed almost in a gesture of prayer, that he managed to catch the heavy weight of the light when it nearly struck him, slicing through the near air into which the bird had released it. The cord lashed him in the face, and his hands, knocking against his cheek, knocking his teeth against his cheek, might have bruised it.

Fitz hardly noticed it. He hardly noticed anything but it.

He dressed quickly. He didn’t bother pulling the tower door shut behind him. Taking the long way through the Commissary and the Keep, he entered the Heresiarchy from the side, almost crawling along the narrow shadows that clung to the west wall. A simple passage led out on to the west lawns.

When one of the Officers has stood and been acclaimed as Heresiarch, he passes through the Door of Humility and on to the west lawns. It is a long walk across level ground to the walls. That is his first place of challenge, for anyone can strike him there – there, between the Door of Humility and the Gate of Resignation.

Fitz stood before the heavy oak door. So thick ran the blood through his veins that he had only intermittently been aware of his movements. He flashed before himself like moonlight through shifting clouds. It seemed as if he were being drawn by some hidden thread or by a song that only he could hear, which was plunging him head first into a deep swell of doing. He put his hand to the wicket that opened through one side of the Door of Humility. At first he thought it was locked, but its weight was only that of the wind, which gave way unwillingly as he pushed against it and stepped through.

The path wouldn’t have been visible even by moonlight, and there was none. For the first hundred feet, or less, scattered lights still shining in high windows of the Heresy picked out the blades of grass over which in long and silent strides he ran towards the Gate of Resignation. After the light failed, and darkness alone surrounded him, Fitz ran onwards only by the light of his own trust and determination. With each extension of his limbs into the nothingness that surrounded him, his blood skimmed a little the beats that it normally would have struck; but on every stride, his foot hit the earth, pressed it, and rebounded again. He ran. Into the darkness he ran. Towards the cliffs he ran. Against all sense and with no plan at all, he ran.

When he reached the gate – astonished that he should have come so far, but unconscious of his own astonishment – he didn’t bother trying the iron handle. He knew it would be locked. Instead, he tried the mortared stones of the wall to the left side. Where he pulled at the pliant vines, their stiff roots drew the mortar with them, and he found he was able to dig his fingers securely into the rock, and by their purchase, lost, to climb with ease. He ascended by heaves, kicking his throbbing toes into the stone crevices as he climbed, taking what support he could and, where he couldn’t, fumbling higher for safety. When his reaching hand found the top of the wall, he dragged himself level and swung his leg over. If it had been light, if the moon, clearing the clouds, had revealed even the least detail of the terrain that awaited him on the wall’s far side, he might have drawn breath at the top. He might have paused. He might have felt fear. But he was passing by shallow fingerholds from one shadow to the next; he rolled on to his back, sat up, and without a thought sprang for the far soil.

Fitz landed on his feet, then toppled to his hands. The ground beneath him sloped upward, and his face hit a stony earth that seemed to rear to receive it. His skull clanged, and he thought – hearing a deep crack somewhere in the confusion of that impact – that he had torn the cartilage in his nose. He felt for blood on his face, and found his hands were covered in something wet. It was only after he had climbed the ravine, after he had begun to run across the low expanse of heather and could again feel the salt wind whipping his ears, that he smelled the stench.