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

Have you seen his proofs? I see them, sometimes, when the Jack leaves them out on the desks in the afternoon. He leaves them out because he is studying them. Dolly, fine, she’s had some ups and downs, maybe she’s not Leonardo, but I doubt there are better sculptors working in clay right now, anywhere. And Payne – we all know Payne can design simulations in the Model that would make Harvard blush. And Navy, you’re a dab hand at cleaning up horse manure. So what can you do, newbie? Anything? Or are you just good at keeping your mouth shut? Is that a talent?’

Fitz wanted to cry. He wanted to tell Navy that he wanted to cry.

‘And what can you do, Fingal, if you’re so smart?’ said Navy. Her lips were set like stone. Dolly could have carved them. ‘What can you do, apart from fail your examinations?’

Fingal’s eyes hardened.

‘You know,’ he answered, cold, almost whispering, ‘there’s a reason why the rest of you don’t have lessons with the Rack. He trusts me. Me. I didn’t fail my examinations. He didn’t tell me I wasn’t ready to move on. He told me he wasn’t ready for me to move on. Whatever the rest of you are doing, it’s nothing compared to what we’re doing in the cells and in –’

‘Stop it,’ said Dina. The rebuke was sharp and final.

‘No,’ said Padge. ‘I want to know what you’re doing with the Rack, Fingal, that’s so important.’

‘Torturing bunnies, most likely,’ said Navy.

‘Why do you all look down on me?’ said Fingal. ‘I’m proud of what I do. The rest of you pretend you’re doing noble things, beautiful things. Fine. But this place wasn’t built with maths and paintings. It was built with power. With money. With force. Beautiful things won’t grow unless you spread manure on them – isn’t that right, Navy? Have a look in the Armoury. Have a look in the Commissar’s closets. The locked ones. Stack isn’t all she hides in there. She has a thousand poisons. Padge will tell you. You think she doesn’t use them? You think the Rack doesn’t use them? If it weren’t for the Rack, there wouldn’t be a Heresy.’

‘We’re done with this conversation,’ said Dina.

‘No, Fingal is done,’ said Navy. ‘With this conversation, and with everything. You should go home, Fingal,’ said Navy.

‘At least I came from a home,’ he shot back. ‘A real one. With real parents. Not some hostel cottage for foundlings with some fake do-gooder and five magic words. Right, newbie? At least I had a home to leave.’

Fitz dropped his fork. It clattered on his plate, and fell to the floor.

How –

But it was obvious. By their faces, downcast, ashamed, Fitz could see at once that they all knew everything. Navy, humiliated by her indiscretion, turned bright red, red as the Commissar’s cloak. Without pausing to think, Fitz rose and walked out of the hall, through the Porch, and into the night. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him.

He might have walked for hours. For a while he walked in circles around the gardens: the herb garden, the poison garden, and among the locked greenhouses where the Commissar grew her tropical, man-eating flowers. He walked the circuit of the walls, taking the path that ran down to the river and back up, through the Sweep, to the steps at the foot of the Heresiarchy. He hardly noticed where he was. In his mind, over and over, were Fingal’s words. It didn’t matter that he had said them in anger. They were true. Fitz had nothing to contribute. He wasn’t distinctive. He didn’t have a real mother. There was nothing in him that he could trust. There was nothing out there that he could ever go back to. He came from nowhere. He was going nowhere. And he was going there with nothing.

At last he found himself sitting at the top of the Heresiarchy steps. He wasn’t sure how long he had been there. He wasn’t sure of anything. In his thoughts and feelings, two equal forces wrestled: an irresistible urge to get out of this place, and an irrefutable conviction that he had nowhere else to go. As he looked out upon the dark courts of the Heresy, for some reason he could not name he thought of the beggar boy, from Mr Ahmadi’s book, the one they called al-Jabbar, the Giant. He thought of him at the moment that he descended for the last time into the treasury beneath the sands, out of love with the world and caught forever in the struggle between two brothers whose hatred would destroy them, and him, and everything that was beautiful. And he envied the Giant, that for him there had at last been a place to go, albeit one he had built with his own hands, anonymous and lost, a place of oblivion. He envied him that he had fashioned for himself an instrument, the Almanac, that could guide him unerringly to this place. He envied him that, even in the ruins of everything, even in the shadowy, swirling mists of the myth he had become, he had claimed a true place in someone’s heart. He’d been good for something.

‘Fitz.’

His stomach tightened. Nine bells had rung, or maybe ten – he hadn’t counted and he hardly cared – and he had thought he would be alone. After what had happened, Navy was nearly the last person he wanted to talk to.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

She had stolen silently up the steps, a black silhouette against a night-black void, and Fitz hadn’t seen her.

‘I know,’ he answered. ‘It isn’t your fault.’

‘I did tell them what you said. And I’m sorry. I really am. But the hatred – the insults – all that was a twist of Fingal’s own making.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said after a moment. ‘He’s right, anyway.’

Navy sat down next to him. Fitz’s arms were crossed against his chest. Where his left hand hung under his right