The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

Mr Ahmadi fumbled, muttered, and then set the third of the plates upon the mater.

Fitz paused, and breathed, tensing every muscle in his chest and stomach in order to hold the breath steady. Here, last of all, most delicate of all – the final plate – the final word. He could not stumble –

‘Almanac.’ He couldn’t look. He didn’t need to look. Mr Ahmadi laid the fourth plate in the mater, the fourth plate inscribed on its snaking spiral arms with a thousand numbers and measurements, the secrets of the dimensions of the Great Loom of the Honourable Society of Wraiths and Phantasms.

‘It’s done,’ said Mr Ahmadi.

From outside the chamber – almost now in darkness save for the high, shedding glare of the Rack’s two lanterns – there came a low, ominous rumbling. They all froze. A little cloud of dust floated, high up, from the passage where they had all entered.

Clare and Ned sprinted for the passage. Almost immediately, they disappeared into a darkness both of night and dust. Everyone waited. Cracks they hadn’t noticed in the ceiling, here and there, began to widen, shooting like fracturing stars across a sky of lamp-burnished gold.

‘It’s the cliffside,’ said Clare, panting and coughing, from within the cloud of dust that still engulfed the passage. Ned came to her side. His face and body were coated in white powder. ‘The tunnel’s sealed off, and the slide – it’s picking up.’

Dina turned to Mr Ahmadi, and took the Giant’s Almanac from his hands, careful not to allow any of the plates to turn against the others. She placed it on the floor and, with the heel of the heavy knife, struck four hard blows into its beaten bronze surface, denting it. Then she seized one of the slender spiral ornaments that radiated from the centre of the first plate, and bent it back across the others. The bronze was sharp and heavy; her fingers bled. She took another arm, and again with huge effort bent it back.

‘Dina,’ said Mr Ahmadi, his voice a tangled knot of anguish, rebuke and dismay. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I don’t want it,’ she said. ‘Only he does.’ Getting to her feet, she hurled the Almanac at Phantastes; her arm was as good as his own, and he caught it with ease.

‘But the Great Hoard of the shāh? The treasure? The Joy of the Heart?’

‘How do you feel?’ Dina asked Fitz. She put out her hand, and lifted him to his feet.

Above them the ceiling shuddered, and thunderous cracks, each jarring the very body of the island’s rock, began to spread across the dome. Dina didn’t seem to notice.

The game is already ended.

‘I want to go home,’ said Fitz.

‘This is your home, little brother,’ Dina answered. ‘The Heresy is your home.’

Fitz looked at Clare, who was straining over the stone railing, twenty metres away – less. Her eyes said she was his mother.

‘Her love for you is just a story she tells herself,’ said Dina. ‘She told herself this story because it made her feel good, at a time when she had lost everything. My father told himself this story because he wanted to leave the Heresy. Hožir told himself this story because he wanted the Great Loom back. They all loved you for themselves, little brother. They used you.’

‘And you – don’t you want me for the map? For the Giant’s Almanac?’

Fitz stood before her. They were eye to eye as the ceiling began to fall, in great gold chunks, splashing into the foaming water. Mr Ahmadi leaped for the skiff, and Navy too. They called for Fitz and Dina, cried for them, stretched out their arms.

But Fitz and Dina stood on the plinth, each measuring the other.

Mr Ahmadi pushed the skiff into the water, then began to paddle with the single oar. The water, still bubbling around him, surged as chunks of stone fell into it from above. The two passengers rocked perilously.

‘Don’t you understand?’ said Dina. She was speaking very softly, but Fitz didn’t need to hear the words that he could read just as easily on her lips. They moved silently like words in a book, long written. Burden’s close. The place of kneeling. Her eyes were on him, only on him. They encompassed him, held him. ‘You are the Blank Eye itself,’ she said, ‘the diamond on which everything else turns. You are the treasure. You are the whole hoard. You are the gold. You are the emeralds and the sapphires and the rubies as big as a man. You are the myrrh and the amber, the silver, the precious tapestries and metalwork forged from falling stars, you are every rich thing stolen from a thousand kingdoms and the cost never counted, you are twenty thousand days in the saddle, the blood on the sword, you are the sea and the fire, the moon and the dust. You are the game, and you are the end of the story. It was told for you and it was told for no one else.’

The chamber had begun to collapse from the centre. Now the pieces that fell were large, each one a metre or two in length, heavy, and dangerous. Mr Ahmadi and Navy had nearly reached the other side of the water. He was reaching for the heavy iron chain. Fitz and Dina watched him.

He was reaching for the heavy iron chain. He couldn’t put his hand to it.

The water level was dropping. It was draining from the pool. As it fell, the little boat began to sink.

Clare screamed. Navy leaped for the chain, and caught it. Hand over hand she climbed, never looking back. At the top of the landing, Ned took her by the wrists and hoisted her to safety.

Mr Ahmadi still stood in the skiff. His head had already sunk below the level of the floor. It continued to sink. Somehow, as the ceiling fell in, every huge slab of it seemed to miss him, to fall here and there to every