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

Mr Ahmadi sighed. ‘It had lost its mother, child. It wasn’t going to survive anyway. The species isn’t going to survive. There is nothing that you, or I, or any one person can do about that. Its time had come. For that poor, desperate creature, what we did to it was a merciful end. I made sure of that. I wouldn’t have allowed it otherwise.’

The game is already ended.

‘I wish you hadn’t seen that tonight. Not yet. Dina should have stopped you. But if you are to survive in the Heresy, even for a short time, you will have to make yourself ready for what is to come. You will have to learn very, very quickly.’

You have nothing left to lose, but much to learn.

Never letting Fitz out of his touch, Mr Ahmadi had rounded, and now was guiding him, by the shoulder and out of the courtyard where they had been standing. They walked in silence into the deeper quiet within one of the passages. Fitz didn’t recognize it – didn’t recognize any of it. The buildings around him were shadows, and the shadows buildings. He stepped from darkness into darkness.

Suddenly, in the deepest of the shadows – in the shadow cast by other shadows – they stopped.

‘Allow me to show you something,’ Mr Ahmadi said. His voice was no more than a whisper.

He stooped to the ground beneath them, and from the path retrieved a handful of pebbles, the sort that lay everywhere on this side of the Heresy.

‘Tonight you feel very alone. And it’s true that I can’t always be by your side. But you are not alone. Watch.’

Mr Ahmadi peered into the darkness above them. He seemed to be searching for something. What it was Fitz could hardly have guessed; he saw nothing at all, only thick, unyielding darkness. But, satisfied, Mr Ahmadi examined the stones in his left hand, picked out a handful of the largest, looked at Fitz with a smile, and then – drawing his right arm back like a catapult – launched them into the darkness of the empty sky.

Fitz waited for the stones to strike something: a window, the roof of one or another of the Heresy’s countless gables, perhaps just the paving on the far side of the court. But there was no report – only, he thought, a rush on the air like the sound of feathered diving, of swooping, the whistle of wind across the pinions of great birds in flight.

And then, like a dream, like a wish summoned, they came, one after another: six white ghosts sailing with wings outstretched through the broad black canvas of the night, each of which settled on the lawn immediately before them, a pebble gripped tightly in its beak. Mr Ahmadi stooped again, and with a gentle reverence, like kings dispensing gifts, they laid the stones in his palm.

‘Albatrosses,’ said Fitz.

‘Albatrosses,’ agreed Mr Ahmadi, simply. Fitz stood gaping, astonished at these silent creatures, and remembering their wings – only a few nights before – when they had come to the Heresy –

But something was troubling Mr Ahmadi. He turned abruptly to the boy at his side.

‘I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘that he is waiting for you.’ In Fitz’s hand he placed what was, clearly, the largest of the pebbles he had picked up, the size of a walnut, and heavy. Mr Ahmadi nodded towards the sky. ‘Hard as you can,’ he said.

With all his strength Fitz hurled the stone at the night. Now the rush of a wing on the wind was unmistakable, and from a great, dark height a white form above them plummeted into view, planed out, circled, and drew up on the grass, alighting before them. The other birds shuffled out of the way to make space for his giant wings.

‘As I thought,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘Go on, take it.’

Fitz crouched, held out his hand, and held the black eye of the enormous bird for what seemed an age, before with a simple dip of its head it dropped the stone again into his hand.

‘These are my friends,’ Mr Ahmadi said. ‘And now I think they will be yours.’ In a long and fluid lunge, he swept his extended arm in a wide arc to the ground, and the greatest of the seven albatrosses hopped to a perch on his sleeve. As he turned and turned in the quiet stillness of the courtyard, the others fanned out around him, taking flight each on its own bearing, until the last – still holding the Master’s eye – loosed his wide and delicate wings, his trembling wings, and lifted almost without effort into the night.

‘You may not always see them,’ whispered Mr Ahmadi. ‘But they have sharp eyes, and a way of knowing when you have most need of them. And so you see you are not alone, even here at the Heresy, benetted round with villains though you may be.’

It might have been the sound of one of the birds, touching down on the tiles of a roof across the court. Or it might have been something else, someone else. But at the sound of the sharp, clear crack that echoed from the walls, Mr Ahmadi’s face changed instantly. His eyes had been light with magic; now his brow set hard as iron.

‘You’re not supposed to be out at this time of the night,’ he said, taking Fitz painfully by the arm, and steering him under a near arch, ‘and I mustn’t be seen talking with you. Already some of the other Officers suspect me. They think I have brought you here for my own ends, that I wish to make myself Heresiarch, or even – who knows what they think. Maybe they will attempt to take you from me. So keep close, move quickly, and I’ll get you back to your room. Tomorrow, follow Dina to lessons. I’ll need you to do this for a while